Reddit reviews God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now

I never read a study Bible, I've always read the Bible by myself and drew on material that was written about it like The Tribes of Yahweh or God and Empire

I'll give you my answers, since they're definitely going to be considerably different, at the very least, from the ones you'll get from anyone else around here.

>Mainly, I'm interested in hearing the Protestant criticisms of Catholicism, and Catholic criticism of Protestantism.

I can't really speak to this one, as I'm not really either of those. There are Catholics that I would deem to be "true Christians" (e.g. Gustavo Gutiérrez, Óscar Romero, John Dominic Crossan) and there are Protestants that I'd refer to as the same (e.g. Jürgen Moltmann, Reinhold Neibhur, Martin Luther King, Jr.). Heck, I'd even call people who don't profess to follow Jesus yet act in a Christlike manner to be "true Christians" (e.g. Mohandas Gandhi, Ernst Bloch, Slavoj Žižek). I'm much less concerned about one's theology than I am about one's praxis.

>How do you view the "lukewarm" Christians mentioned in the Bible?

You're talking about the ekklesia in Laodicea in Revelation 3:15-16, right?:

>I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.

These are Christians that refuse to take a side. James Cone has a good quote that I tend to go back to for those "Christians" that refuse to take a side:
>"Either God is identified with the oppressed to the point that their experience becomes God's experience, or God is a God of racism."

One could substitute any form of hierarchy for Cone's "racism" in that quote; race for him is an ontological symbol of oppression. For God to be a god of liberation (as Jesus' God was/ is) He/She must have an alignment with the oppressed. He cannot be neutral, for neutrality to injustices privileges the status quo. And just as God must take a side, so must Her/His followers. That's what the lukewarm Christians in Laodicea were doing - refusing to take a side. They were unwilling, perhaps afraid to be "hot," and thus were no better than the "cold" rest of the world. Revelation's God is saddened by Her/His followers refusing to take a stand - lukewarm is equivalent to cold, neutrality is equivalent to oppression, but it is much easier to judge active agents of oppression than its passive agents.

> How do you feel about the divide on social and scientific issues - where it seems Catholics are generally more progressive, and Protestants are generally more conservative?

I don't really have a great answer for the science one. If you believe in a Creator (I don't ), and you believe that that Creator is "good," then you should believe that everything that that Creator endowed you with, including the ability to reason, is likewise "good." Thus, denying scientific discoveries and theories because they go against a literal reading of a 2500+ year-old book is spitting on your Creator's gifts to you.

As far as "social issues" go, it should be noted that the metanarrative of the Bible is inherently a political story, one of liberation. Whether God is guaranteeing a "promised land" to slaves in Egypt or guaranteeing that He/She will bring Her/His people home from exile, the authors are making statements against empires. When Mark opens his Gospel with "The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God," he's making a direct statement against Caesar Augustus, who was said to be the bringer of evangelion ("good news") and whose full imperial name included the phrase Divi Filius ("Son of the Divine/ Son of God.") The anointed (Christos) son of god that brings the good news was not the Emperor of the known world, but a Jewish peasant bastard from rebellious Galilee. He went on a mission preaching a "Kingdom of God" (as opposed to an "Empire of Rome?") where "the last will be first and the first will be last." He attacked the center of social/political/religious/economic power of Judea, the Temple of Jerusalem, and was promptly executed by Rome with a method saved for political radicals. But then, the scandal! He was resurrected, denying the ultimacy of Rome's power and Rome's ideology, ensuring via promise that the "Kingdom of God" was something that can be achieved.

Liberation is the heart of Jesus' evangelion. Thus, as far as social (and economic. Especially economic!) issues are concerned, the God that Jesus professed will always be on the side of the oppressed, not that of the oppressors, for that would be the demesne of the God that named Caesar "Augustus." I hesitate to even affirm "progressivism" as the Christian God's ideology de jure; it's more radical than that. Jesus completely subverts what the Romans considered to be "reality" by presenting a Kingdom of God free of death (oppression). He revealed society's constructed nature, denied the invalid claims to ultimacy (because nothing man-made can truly be "ultimate"), and presented an alternative. Whereas Empire causes oh so many to fall into non-being, Jesus instilled his followers with the courage to be.
>And lastly, why do you think you've found the most correct version of Christianity?

Most correct? I hesitate to ever claim superlatives, but I am confident that my understanding of Christianity is much closer to Jesus' religious beliefs than the abomination of "mainstream" Christianity is. Why, though? Because I make every effort to read the Gospel with the eyes of a first-century Jewish peasant - Jesus' original followers and original audience. Or, failing that, I read it through the eyes of oppressed classes, after all, they certainly have a hermeneutical privilege. I read the Bible unpolluted by Plato's doctrine of the eternal soul or by the obscenity that is Constantine's in hoc signo vinces. I divorce myself from the assumptions of "nature" that our society makes, just as Jesus himself did. I reject the inherently flawed assumptions about a "just world" and those that affirm the powers-that-be as infallible.

What does that leave me with? Hope. Energization against an unjust world because Christ's gospel screams that there shall be a real, just world that we can bring about. Not just can, but must, for
>"Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.".

So, am I confident that I've "found the most correct version of Christianity?" No, and I don't think that that's possible. But I have been to the mountaintop, I have seen the Promised Land, and I know the Kingdom of God. Exegesis, coupled with the hermeneutic of the oppressed, offers no reasonable alternative "Christianity" to the gospel of liberation. Sadly, instead of this "bottom-up" model, Christianity has long been co-opted by "top-downers" more interested in either explicitly imposing their will further upon the downtrodden or simply pushing their legitimate grievances aside in favor of otherworldliness. But again, God cannot be neutral, and what use is a God on the side of the powerful? Why let them continue to stack the deck, to stack their team? The only God worth believing in is the God who evens the score, who stands on the side of true (distributive, not retributive) justice, the God who killed all oppression and bought us liberation at Calvary.

>And presumably you have a least some piece of evidence to back up the idea that the Jews understood the Sumerian creation myth as fiction. Can I see it?

Are you asking me if I personally have evidence of this? No, I don't. My information is second hand from books like this or this. From my understanding all of the cultures in the Middle East retold the myths around them in the context of their own culture. Essentially that these shared myths shaped the elements of their religions from their ceremonies to their ethics.

>Do you think the Romans didn't actually believe in their Gods

you can believe in gods without believing those stories are literal truth. It's not an either/or situation.

>since they were retellings of the Greek myths in the context of the Roman people?

You do realize that the Romans appropriated the religions of the people they conquered? Greece wasn't special in this regard. Also Roman religion was tied to the functions of the Roman government.

>Explain the "function" of a nauseating and detailed genealogy if it is not an actual genealogy.

It establishes the divine right of the Israel kings. It also establishes the origins of the Jewish people through connections with their mythological father.

Personally, I think you're trying too hard. Only for the most deluded fundies, religion does not function as a literal truth. Religion is a lot more than what it says about how the world works. They are often systems of ethics, ceremony, and culture as well and it does a disservice to treat creation myths as the same as a science textbook. It's far more comparable to a parable philosophical text thingermajig.

> No authorized translation suggests that Adam listened to the serpent because every authorized translation says that Adam was punished for listening to his wife.

Authorized by who? and for what purpose were most of these translations authorized? Usually because the earlier translations did not conform to the teachings of the church, so they got someone else to translate it. The hebrew and aramaic texts the old testament is translated from are not vowelated, so the words can have multiple meanings.

> Would you care to explain why the Christian god would be OK with Adam listening to the serpent while punishing Eve for listening to the serpent?

Again, I don't think that this literally happened... It could have, but it makes more sense to treat these stories as creation myths. Have you ever studied mythology? It makes more sense to discuss the symbols they used and to put it into the context of the world in which the story was popularized. It could have been said that women were punished with pains in childbearing because of their consent to mate with angels in the book of enoch and create giants. Enoch however was not canonized and therefore does not hold the same authority that we give to genesis.

> However, if you want to admit that the Bible contains contradictions I am OK with that too.

I feel like I've said this before but the bible is not meant to be taken literally. It is a human interpretation of divine word that contains myths and metaphors meant to allow us to experience the divine. IT IS NOT MEANT TO BE TAKEN LITERALLY Genesis 1 and genesis 2 contain different accounts of creation. Read them again and tell me what cam first, humans or cows?

> So you are retracting your argument that we should disregard 1 Timothy because it was not written by Paul.

I realize now that I did not fully flesh out my argument, my apologies. I meant to point out that there are 3 different voices attributed to Paul through the epistles. It becomes apparent when you group them into different categories that they were written in response to different factors as a way of preserving the christian church in that area. The quote from 1st timothy about women should not teach or hold authority over man comes in response to churches having to compete with other religions that allow women to hold authority over man. It allows the church to point to this text and preserve its traditions. Historical context of the texts is always important to consider when quoting verses to prove your point. Try this book if you want some further reading on the background of the book of the bible.