Posted by Helen on: 02.12.2007 /
I don’t read many Christian books these days. However, I have been reading The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the question for political power is destroying the church by Gregory Boyd, because Jim asked me what I thought of it.
The premise of the book is fairly simple. The author defines all kingdoms of this world as ‘power over’ kingdoms. In a ‘power over’ kingdom those in power control human behavior by their ability to inflict pain on those who defy their authority. He then says Jesus came to establish a different kind of kingdom: a ‘power under’ kingdom in which greatness is defined by serving and sacrificing for others.
From page 39:
Jesus didn’t come to give us the Christian answer to the world’s many sociopolitical quandaries, and he didn’t come to usher in a new and improved version of the kingdom of the world. His agenda was far more radical, for he came to redeem the world and ultimately overthrow the kingdom of the world by ushering in an alternative kingdom. He came not to give solutions, tweak external regulations and enforce better behavior. He rather came to transform lives from the inside out by winning people over to the reign of God’s sovereign love, thereby rendering the ‘power over tactics of the kingdom of the world unnecessary.
Gregory Boyd says that Constantine took the church from being a ‘power under’ kingdom to a ‘power over’ kingdom. I wonder if it happened that simply and decisively. I expect Constantine was the first ruler to combine the name ‘Christian’ with a ‘power over’ kingdom. But if Christians easily went along with this change then that implies to me they were not committed to ‘power under’ and were probably already exercising ‘power over’ in small ways, whenever the opportunity presented itself. It means the church was ready to go back to the ‘power over’ way of the world as soon as a ruler decided that he was ‘a Christian’.
Throughout the book, the author makes excellent points and asks great questions. On page 83, he brings out the focus of the church throughout history and questions it:
One wonders why no one in church history has ever been considered a heretic for being unloving. People were anathematized and often tortured and killed for disagreeing on matters of doctrine or on the authority of the church. But no one on record has ever been so much as rebuked for not loving as Christ loved.
[...]how is it that possessing Christlike love has never been considered the central test of orthodoxy? How is it that those who tortured and burned heretics were not themselves considered heretics for doing so? Was this not heresy of the worst sort? How is it that those who perpetrated such things were not only not deemd heretics but often were (and yet are) held us ad ‘heroes of the faith’?
On page 104:
The question that wins the world is not, how can we get our ‘morally superior’ way enforced in the world? The question that wins the world, and the questions that must define the individual and collective life of kindgom-of-God citizens is, how do we take up the cross for the world? How do we best communicate to others their unsurpassable worth before God? How do we serve and wash the feet of the oppressed and despised?
On page 116:
What if our concern was to bridge the ungodly racial gap in our country by developing friendships and collaborating in endavors with people whose ethnicity is different than our own? What if instead of trying to defend our religious rights, Christians concerned themselves with siding with others whose rights are routinely trampled? What if instead of trying to legally make life more difficult for gays, we worried only about how we could affirm their unsurpassable worth in service to them?
I like how Gregory Boyd makes short work of the theory that America was founded as a Christian nation and that’s what we need to get back to. On pages 100-101 he writes:
The European conquering of America was simply another all-too-typical version of the kingdom-of-the-world behavior. From the kingdom-of-God perspective, the fact that Christ happened to be the national warrior deity invoked to carry out whites’ ‘manifest destiny — inspiring them to kill, cheat, marginalize and enslave native Americans and Arficans (as well as other nonwhite groups) — simply means that this particular kingdom-of-the-world episode was more damanging to the cause of the kingdom of God than others.
[...] it is also helpful to remember that most of the violence and dishonesty carried out against the native Americans occurred after America was founded as a nation ‘under God’. Likewise, the Supreme Court’s decision that blacks were only three-fifths human came long after Amreican was purportedly established as a Christian nation.
Gregory points out the problems with the church setting itself up as ‘moral guardian’. From pages 128, 134-5, 139-141:
We should find it signifcant that Jesus never assumed the position of moral guardian over any indiviual, let alone over the culture at large.
[...]
If contemporary people don’t see in us what ancient people saw in Christ, it can only be because the love that was present in Christ isn’t present in us. And if they seen in us what they saw in ancient Pharisees, it can only be because the self-righteousness found itn the Pharisees is found in us.
Our comical insistence that we are loving, despite our reputation, is a bit like a man insisting he’s a perfectly loving husband when his wife, kids, and all who know him insist he’s an unloving self-righteous jerk. If he persists in his self-serving opinion of himself, insisting that his wife, kids, and all who know him don’t understand what ‘true love’ is, it simply confirms the perspective these others have of him. This, I submit, is precisely the position much of the evangelical church of America is in.
[...]
Not only have we not earned the right to be heard by consistently coming under others in love, but the arbitrary way many evangelicals seem to decide what needs addressing and what doesn’t undermines our credibility as moral spokespeople.
[...]
Issues related to sex get massive amoutns of attention [from the evangelical church] while issues related to corporate greed, societal greed, homelessness, poverty, racism, the environment, racial injustice, genocide, war, and the treatment of animals (the original divine mandate given to huans in Gen 1:28) typically get little attention.
I did find this one comment in the book disappointing. On page 96 the author writes:
The unchallenged assumption is that society’s problems can be solved by getting the right version of the kindgom of the world–the right aristocrats–in power at the top of the society and that if only the right people acquire the power to lead society in the right direction, then all will be well.
[...]
It is understandable that secularists would accept this assumption, for they can conceive of no other solution to society’s problems, but kingdom-of-God citizens are empowered to have keener vision
Rather than dismissing ’secularists’ as those who don’t get it, wouldn’t it be better not to prejudge them and to be ready to join hands with anyone who understands the value of ‘power under’, regardless of whether they believe in anything supernatural or not?
I read a critique by someone else who raised the question: “Don’t we need to fight back sometimes? How would being nice to people have got rid of slavery, for example?” I think that’s a great question and I wouldn’t want to rule out taking a stronger stand and/or fighting back, when the occasion seems to require it.
Overall I greatly appreciated this book. I found it reassuring that at least one US Christian leader is willing to be so direct about how the way US evangelical Christians often get involved in politics is contrary to everything Jesus stood for. As Gregory Boyd mentions at the beginning of the book, such directness has consequences. About 1,000 people left his church when he preached on this. I’m glad that didn’t discourage him from turning it into a book that will have a wider audience than his church.
Comment by: Laura M.
1 02/12/07 10:58 AM | Comment Link |It seems like this relates to what you wrote on your blog about God giving his power away to the powerless in order to ‘balance the equation’.
I’ve always thought of it as ‘maintaining the balance’. It seems to me the idea of balance has widespread applications.
Comment by: Laura M.
2 02/12/07 11:02 AM | Comment Link |I also think it’s neat that a Chrisitian leader in our country is finally writing about this. A shame, but very telling that he lost so many members of his church.
Comment by: jim henderson
3 02/12/07 11:51 PM | Comment Link |Sorry for the unsolicted commercial but we just got our first review of the yet to be but soon to be released book - Jim and Casper Go to Church written by a baptist preacher and I thought you would get a kick out of it
Comment by: Helen
4 02/13/07 4:23 AM | Comment Link |Thanks for mentioning this, Jim. I hope people will go read Matt Casper’s response to the review which you posted over on Church Rater.
Comment by: Rachel
5 02/13/07 8:53 AM | Comment Link |According to the NY Times, Boyd lost about 20% of his existing members but he also gained some new members.
In the end, those who left tended to be white, middle-class suburbanites, church staff members said. In their place, the church has added more members who live in the surrounding community — African-Americans, Hispanics and Hmong immigrants from Laos.
This suits Mr. Boyd. His vision for his church is an ethnically and economically diverse congregation that exemplifies Jesus’ teachings by its members’ actions. He, his wife and three other families from the church moved from the suburbs three years ago to a predominantly black neighborhood in St. Paul.
Mr. Boyd now says of the upheaval: “I don’t regret any aspect of it at all. It was a defining moment for us. We let go of something we were never called to be. We just didn’t know the price we were going to pay for doing it.”
Comment by: Rachel
6 02/13/07 9:26 AM | Comment Link |In my understanding of early church history, I would say that it really was a sudden and dramatic change. For the first 300 years of the church, followers of The Way were distinguished by their pacifism and economic sharing. They were persecuted by the Roman Empire in the most grotesque ways for refusing to swear allegiance to the Emperor or to Rome, refusing to participate in the Roman legal system and refusing to serve in the Roman Army.
All that changed when Constantine came to power in AD 312. I agree with viewpoint that Constantine’s conversion was a brilliantly staged political move designed to enlist the support of the growing Christian population. Here is an excerpt from Senator Mark Hatfield’s 1976 book “Between a Rock and a Hard Place”:
The circumstances surrounding Constantine’s so-called conversion have been widely discussed by historians. It is hard to escape the conclusion that a good measure of opportunism was involved; the support of Christians was essential to the coalition of political support devised by Constantine…
Such measures were designed not simply as favors from a sympathetic ruler, but as a means for gaining a measure of control over the Church, and for redirecting the loyalty of its members to the Empire. Constantine knew that the loyalty and support of Christians could only be gained by acknowledging their faith. A unified empire, internally at peace, was possible only if the troublesome resistance of the Christians to Roman authority and power could be overcome…
One can set forth the rationalizations which led the Church Fathers into an almost blinding embracing of the Empire. After all, years of harsh persecution had suddenly been halted, and the Emperor had declared his belief in the God of Christianity. Was this not the work of God? Might it not signify, in some measure, a new age, even as pretold by Scripture? Did not the Pax Romana which reigned through the “civilized world” serve as a further sign that the Empire was not ordained and sanctified by God?
Comment by: Helen
7 02/13/07 9:34 AM | Comment Link |Thanks for the link Rachel.
Maybe it was - I’m just suspicious these days of whatever ‘historical’ knowledge I acquired from conservative Christians - and this was one thing I first heard from them (I didn’t first come across it in this book).
If what they told me about history is like many of the other things they’ve told me, that would make it rather biased and oversimplified.
Comment by: Rachel
8 02/13/07 10:48 AM | Comment Link |I hear you on that one! I feel the same way.
It surprises me that conservative Christians would even be discussing the conversion of Constantine. That would mean acknowledging the radical beliefs of the early church and the dramatic transformation that resulted from their alliance with Rome. IMHO, any honest examination of the Constantinian period would result in a searing indictment of just about everything the Religious Right stands for.
Comment by: Helen
9 02/13/07 11:00 AM | Comment Link |Rachel, I think it came up when the pastor who was raised Jewish talked about how Constantine changed the church. He was emphasizing that it became much more anti-semitic from then on.
Comment by: NCxian
10 02/13/07 12:37 PM | Comment Link |I understand that there is a book called Constantine’s Sword that talks about the church and anti-Semitism. A few years ago, groups of Christians and Jews came together to study that book together. I put it on my reading list. So many books, so little time!
Comment by: SezMe
11 02/15/07 2:39 AM | Comment Link |Based just on this thread, I am inclined to think that Gregory has set up a false dichotomy with his “under/over” concept.
And, as Helen noted, his view of secularists as manifested by the one quote in the OP suggests that he is woefully uninformed regarding “secularists.”
Comment by: Helen
12 02/15/07 3:54 AM | Comment Link |Thanks for your comment, SezMe.
Yes, maybe he does make too ‘all or nothing’. And it would be more typical than not of the pastors I know anything about for him to not be well-informed about ’secularists’.
Even so, I really appreciated how strongly he denounced what has bothered me since I moved here - i.e. the way for some Christians, politics is a way to ‘get things to be the way I want in this country’. They say it’s for God but I think it’s for them and it’s rather selfish. And selfishness goes against everything good the Bible seems to be about - imo.
Comment by: jim henderson
13 02/15/07 11:49 AM | Comment Link |I agree with Helens critique on this point. Having had the opportunity to work more closely with “secularsist” over the past year I don’t like seeing someone as thougthful as boyd resort to what will certainly be perceived as name calling by people who feel no compelling need for a belief in a diety.
I doubt that Boyd is personally this certain of how secularists believe or don’t believe. Frankly the reason I asked Helen to read this book over others was because I found so little of this kind of this us/them rhetoric (although I missed or overlooked this comment)
I find it fascinating how each of us “sees” things when we feel like outsiders. I certainly see and read things very closely whenever I read Dawkins material and am always able to find us/them rhetoric in his writings while some of my atheist colleagues find nothing offensive about his statements at all and like me with Boyd say something like - ” I was more amazed at his restraint”
Tom Friedman said “People with power never think about it , people without power think about it all the time”
On to Constantine- I agree with Rachel - It was THE blunder of the Jesus movement to get in bed with him. It placed our movement firmly in the religion business and we have been living with it ever since.
Off The Map is dedicated to rescuing Jesus from Religion and exposing all religions for what they are - at best insitutions for public improvement at worst- centers of hypocrisy
Jesus never intended for the religion we call Christianity to represent his movement
His movement was hijacked by religio-politicians like Constantine and Augustine and sent careening into history.
Of course it has done a lot of good (I am not kidding about that) but it is not what Jesus meant it to be.
The latest iteration being the ascendance(?)of evangelicalism to the status of Americas civil religion.
That’s bad enough to make one seriously consider atheism :-)
Comment by: Helen
14 02/15/07 12:14 PM | Comment Link |Thanks Jim. To be fair, that secularist comment was uncharacteristic of the book.
I’m sure no ’secularist’ reviewed the book before it went to print, or they would have probably noticed what I did.
Imagine if book authors gave their manuscripts to ‘outsiders’ for the purpose of checking whether comments in the book about outsiders are especially uninformed/inaccurate? And then the authors made edits to make what they say about outsiders more accurate? That would be neat.
I remember Hemant’s comment in an interview about how he was sent lots of Christian books because of the eBay atheist publicity. But as soon as he started reading them he found they mischaracterized atheists terribly. At which point I expect his reaction was “If they are getting what I know about so wrong, why would I trust the rest of what they say?”
This should matter even to authors who are writing for insiders, not outsiders. Because their integrity is at stake if they can be shown to be spreading misinformation.
But in this book I only noticed the one isolated comment. Which is very good compared to many other Christian books I’ve read, which happily assert all kinds of untrue things about atheists.
Then your next book with Matt Casper will be “Two atheists visit every single church in America“!
Comment by: Helen
15 02/15/07 12:15 PM | Comment Link |Thanks Jim. That secularist comment was uncharacteristic of the book.
I’m sure no ’secularist’ reviewed the book before it went to print, or they would have probably noticed what I did.
Imagine if book authors gave their manuscripts to ‘outsiders’ for the purpose of checking whether comments in the book about outsiders are especially uninformed/inaccurate? And then the authors made edits to make what they say about outsiders more accurate? That would be neat.
I remember Hemant’s comment in an interview about how he was sent lots of Christian books because of the eBay atheist publicity. But as soon as he started reading them he found they mischaracterized atheists terribly. At which point I expect his reaction was “If they are getting what I know about so wrong, why would I trust the rest of what they say?”
This should matter even to authors who are writing for insiders, not outsiders. Because their integrity is at stake if they can be shown to be spreading misinformation.
But in this book I only noticed the one isolated comment. Which is very good compared to many other Christian books I’ve read, which happily assert all kinds of untrue things about atheists.
Then your next book with Matt Casper will be “Two atheists visit every single church in America“!
Comment by: guilherme
16 08/26/07 6:17 PM | Comment Link |I’m from Brasil and we kind of have our own “version” of pr. Boyd. Many of the powerful leaders of the evangelical church raised against him with a scary hatred. That reveals a lot. You don’t mess with power. You guys here will hear much more news about this “bro” from St. Paul, MN. God bless him.