Guest Post: Thom Stark Responds Regarding Marginality

[Thom, one of the more prolific writers at “Religion at the Margins” (RATM), has written a reply to my recent post on “The Bourgeois Appropriation of Marginality.” He was going to post it as a comment on my original post, but I suggested that these remarks appear as a guest post, with the hope that this will encourage us to continue to think and dialogue about these things. What follows are Thom’s words.]
I’ve had a conversation with Dan and we’ve come to a better understanding I think, and so I offer this response in good will and with humility.
Dan is right that many Christians with power in North America have a persecution complex, and it is true that the language of marginality is often appropriated by those with power to legitimate their ventures, political, theological or otherwise. This is important. It is also true that the persecution complex isn’t unique to conservative Christianity. But Dan seems to suggest that Religion at the Margins is an example of a bunch of predominantly white radical Christian people who have a persecution complex vis-à-vis conservative Christianity. Dan writes:

The particular element of this that set my wheels spinning is the way in which those who criticize Conservative American Christians for their persecution-complex, usually end up reworking that same complex to their own advantage. The obvious twist is that these people — who often come from a background of some sort of close relationship to Conservative Christianity — claim that they are the ones persecuted… by the Conservative Christians. You see this a lot in the “Christian Radical” or “new monastic” or “Emergent” circles. Essentially, you have a group of predominantly middle-class, well educated, white males claiming that they (and not the other middle-class, well educated white males) are actually the ones who can occupy the high ground.

Dan then immediately cites our website, Religion at the Margins, as an example of this:

Take, for example, the blog Religion At the Margins (NB: I have nothing against those who post there, but chose this blog as an apt example of this phenomenon). Here you have eight contributors (six white males, one white female, one non-white male, all well educated) laying claim to the discourse of marginality.

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Populism and the Miscarriage of Revolutionary Violence

On January 8, 2011, Gabrielle Giffords, an American congresswoman, was shot in the head in a mass shooting at a political meet-and-greet event. Nineteen people were shot and six have died at this point — including Arizona’s chief federal judge and a nine year old girl.
Giffords was a Democrat and has drawn negative attention from Republicans for supporting Obama’s health care bill. Thus, for example, she is listed on Sarah Palin’s target list (which, by the way, placed cross-hairs over Giffords location and employed a fair amount of gun-based rhetoric — oh, and at the same time as posting this list to her facebook, Palin tweeted, “Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!”).
Giffords’ office was also targeted last March when a glass door and window were found smashed, either by boot or by bullet. She is not alone in this regard. Four other Democrat offices had windows smashed on the same day. Around ten others received death threats. To pick a few examples: Nancy Pelosi was personally threatened on the phone by a man who said he would burn her house down; a Democrat in New York, Louise Slaughter, had the lives of her and her children threatened; another Democrat in Virginia, Tom Perriello, received death threats and a member of the Tea Party tried to post his address online and encouraged others to stop by to express their “gratitude” to him; and so on.
As of yet, nothing is known of the political position that the shooter, Jared Loughner, may or may not have held. What is apparent is that he is probably quite unwell mentally and that he may have acted with the assistance of another older male accomplice.
However, regardless of the stance(s) taken by Loughner and his possible accomplice, it is clear the the violence enacted on January 8th fits with the criteria and goals of the Tea Party and the Right of America’s Republican party. To borrow the language of Hardt and Negri, this is an example of the sort of populist violence that may occur when “the people” rise in order to reassert traditional relationships of privilege, property and power. Over against the creative resistance offered by “the multitude,” this sort of violence is not liberating but only further deepens the oppression of those who are lashing out against their perceived enemies.
Of course, it is appropriate for Americans to feel betrayed by the Obama administration and the Democratic party. Obama played off the hope of the voters (who were audacious enough to vote for him) but only continued to further the agendas of the transnational corporate power-players of global capitalism. Instead of “fixing” America, Obama made it worse (his health care reform is a good example of this — something that postures as a radical action in favour of those in need of health care, but something that actually makes very minimal changes and also furthers the interests of American capitalism — as is his ending of the “combat mission” in Iraq).
It is appropriate for the American public to be thinking about things like subversion, resistance, and revolt (although, I should stress this: I do not think that it is ever appropriate for somebody to do what Loughner did). However, it is precisely here that the violence desired (and enacted) by the Tea Party has an insidious impact upon movements of resistance. Populist (American) violence is violence that and supports an oppressive status quo, and also ends up strengthening other pro-capitalist agendas — it causes an increase in security measures and surveillance, it brings more oppressive laws into being in order to target those who pursue change (thereby altering the legal system so that social justice advocates and community organizers become defined as “terrorists”), and it causes the general public to be increasingly suspicious, fearful, and violent against any who might pursue liberating change outside of the prescribed legal, institutional or governmental avenues.
For a parallel example, think of Jim Jones and the ways in which he poisoned the perspectives of any who (even today) think about living in alternate, more intentional, forms of community that seek to explore better ways of sharing life together. When I first began to approach people about living in a more intentional kind of community, the same comments (half-serious, half-joking) were always made: “When do we drink the cool-aid?” or “I’m not going to let you sleep with my spouse.” Thus, those who want to do something that might look a bit like what Jones did — because, you know, he did create a community where people of all races where equal and were the rich shared with the poor so that everybody had enough — are also going to be looked at like they might be sociopathic killers and sex offenders.
Therefore, one of the results of Loughner’s actions will be that the public is increasingly unwilling to consider or engage in anything that looks like less-legal tactics of resistance and the Powers will be increasingly able to criminalize dissent. This, just like the deaths that occurred on January 8th, is a tragedy because life-giving change will not come through the means that are legally available to us.

Books of 2010

I was able to finish just over sixty books in 2010. It was an interesting year. I dabbled around in the horror genre for a bit, only made it halfway through Proust (when I intended to complete all of In Search of Lost Time last year) and fell just short of my goal of finishing all of McCarthy’s novels by the end of the year (I’m just now completing the Border Trilogy… which I left for last). Also, in comparison to prior years, I read a lot less theology in 2010.
In terms of my favourite reads, well, I always have trouble picking just one. In the area of biblical studies, I’ll highlight Virgil’s Aeneid. That text should be required reading for any student of the New Testament. In terms of the other non-fiction I read, I think I’m going to go with Taylor’s A Secular Age. There’s a reason why that book created so many waves (several reasons, actually). Fiction is always the hardest category to choose from but I’ll stick with McCarthy and leave it as a tie between Suttree and All the Pretty Horses.
My goals for 2011 are as follows:

continue reading one volume of Barth’s Church Dogmatics per year (I’m thinking about starting to do the same with Balthasar’s enormous trilogy);
finish up with Proust;
get into Nietzsche and Spinoza;
read at least one of the following: Being and Time, Truth and Method, and Of Grammatology (any suggestions?)
engage in a sustained amount of reading related to the current and past struggles and experiences of Canada’s indigenous peoples (anybody claiming to be inspired by Liberation Theology ought to do at least this in one’s own context).

We’ll see how that goes. Here’s the complete list of books I read (from cover to cover) in 2010:
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December Books

1. The Living Paul: An Introduction to the Apostle’s Life and Thought by Anthony C. Thiselton (Downers Grove: IVP, 2009).
Many thanks to Adrianna at IVP for this review copy!
Over the last few years, I’ve read or skimmed through a few dozen brief introductions to Paul. Given the space and content limitations imposed upon short introductory works, and given how often they appear, I have often wondered why scholars (and publishers) are keen to churn them out. I understand that developments occur in scholarship but the sort of change that really impacts an small volume geared towards lay people or first year college students does not come around all that often.
In fact, sweeping introductions to Paul often feel like college papers to me — there is some good writing, but hardly any references, and a lot of general statements that need to be supported in a lot more detail than they are in the text at hand. So, while a scholar like Thiselton may get away with writing this sort of thing, I would have a hard time imagining a publishing accepting an identical manuscript from an unknown and unaccredited person.
I’m sure the reader can tell, at this point, that I was a little bit disappointed in this book. I tried to keep in mind the limitations of the genre, but I still had higher expectations. Given the work that Thiselton has done in Pauline exegesis (see, for example, his NIGTC commentary on 1 Corinthians) and in the realm of hermeneutics (several volumes), I was hoping to see more of the strengths he exhibited in those works. However, what he ended up writings was pretty similar to most other introductions to Paul, devoting about ten pages to each of the major themes we find in Paul (biography, justification, ministry, the Church, ethics, eschatology, and so on), with a concluding chapter that relates some of Paul’s themes to the mood of postmodernism (for a lay person, or for a first year college student that chapter might be of some interest, but it was far too brief and superficial to say anything new to those who have any kind of familiarity with people like Foucault or Derrida). Thus, while I felt like this was a decent enough introduction, I also felt like it was a bit of a missed opportunity. If the reader is looking for a short readable introduction to Paul, and one that plays to the strengths of the author, I would suggest What Saint Paul Really Said by N. T. Wright or Reading Paul by Michael Gorman.
2. A Grammar of the Multitude by Paolo Virno.
I’m currently involved in a reading group that is working its way through Commonwealth by Hardt and Negri. This is my second time reading through that text and it got me thinking that I wanted to start engaging with more Italian voices and with the Italian history of resistance.
This short text is a series of lectures Virno delivered in 2001. In those lectures, he spells out his theory of “the multitude” over against the more Hobbesian notion of “the people” (a concept popularized by Hardt and Negri in second volume of their trilogy). He then looks at the ways in which the multitude has sought emancipation from the overcoding of the State and of Capital in various ways in the twentieth century. This, then, leads to his (very interesting) conclusion that post-Fordism should not be understood as a triumph of labour (as though the workers have emancipated themselves from more oppressive working conditions) but should, instead, be understood as the way in which capitalism was able to overcome the near-revolution against capitalism that occurred throughout much of the Western world in the 1960s and ’70s. Post-Fordism is thus capitalism’s way of changing it’s shape without relinquishing its original nature or goals.
I found this text to be quite interesting. I would recommend it to those who are interesting in these things.
3. Life by Keith Richards.
I’ve been going through a pretty major Stones kick for the last two years, thanks to a friend who turned me back on to them. Because of this, and because of a number of (what were to me) surprisingly good reviews, I decided to pick this book up and do a little further reading. I’ve never really done the Hollywood Star bio thing (except for a pretty good book I once read about Marilyn Monroe), but I’m glad I indulged in this one. It wasn’t just “sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” along with crazy Keith Richards rumours about getting his blood changed in Europe in order to stay alive despite his drug use. Far from it. It was like sitting down and listening to Keith ramble about his number one addiction–music. And he rambles in a really down-to-earth manner. He’s not just out to tell war stories or make himself out to be the crazy rock-god that he became in the public eye. He just wants to talk about the music, the people, the music, the places, and the music he loved and loves. After I finished, instead of thinking, “it would be wild to hang-out with Keith because that man knows how to party,” I found myself thinking, “man, I’d love to sit down somewhere quiet, have a few beers and shoot the shit with this guy.” Fun stuff.
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
I really enjoy Marquez but I find his prose to be really rich. Reading him is kind of like eating an expensive dessert. If you do it right, you take it in small doses and enjoy it piece by piece. However, sometimes it’s hard to avoid over-indulging, which means you go through a lot in a short time, but then you need to take a break for awhile afterward to recover. Plus, I think he’s best read when you have time to just immerse yourself in the story and the mood he creates and have no other worries on your plate.
That said, this book covers several generations of a family (of people who tend to all have the same name) in a small Latin American town. We go through the birth of a town, more than one revolution, the arrival of banana plantations, and the gradual downfall of the town. Along the way we meet farmers, gypsies, revolutionaries, colonizers, ghosts, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, parents and children and lovers. It really is a magical story. Recommended reading.

A Meeting with Thanatos: A Real Life Superhero in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

I. 12:20am, The Cemetery
Just after midnight on December 30th, with the temperature lingering at a few degrees below freezing, I found myself waiting for Death in one of Vancouver’s oldest cemeteries. As I finished the last drag of my cigarette, I heard the tread of boots on the pathway. A silhouette emerged from the darkness between the graves and gradually a tall, broad-shouldered man came into view. He looked like this:

Raising two fingers to the brim of his hat, he just barely tipped it and said, “Well, good evening.”
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The Bourgeois Appropriation of Marginality

The “persecution complex” maintained by Conservative Christians in North America is a widely noted and rightly criticized phenomenon. By employing this method those with power — and those who wield that power in a way that is oppressive and death-dealing — attempt to paint themselves as embattled victims or martyrs serving the cause of goodness and truth. By attempting to establish a certain framework around our sociopolitical discourse, they seek to claim the high ground and make their position unassailable.
Of course, Conservative Christians are not the only ones acting this way. Within North America, they provide but one (glaring) example of the ways in which a “culture of victimization” has spread so that everybody lays claim to the moral authority and the lack of accountability, not to mention the sympathy and assistance, that is supposedly (or supposedly supposed to be) the domain of “victims.”
It is interesting to note this feature of our culture given that we are actually the most death-dealing, violent, and oppressive gathering of people that has existed to date in history. No other culture comes close to equaling the amount of damage that we are doing not only to other human beings but to our plant and to life itself. However, people with guilty consciences have been playing the victim card in order to avoid taking responsibility for their actions since at least the beginning of the biblical stories — Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the Serpent (and God blames all three of them!) — so I guess this shouldn’t surprise us.
Be that as it may, the particular element of this that set my wheels spinning is the way in which those who criticize Conservative American Christians for their persecution-complex, usually end up reworking that same complex to their own advantage. The obvious twist is that these people — who often come from a background of some sort of close relationship to Conservative Christianity — claim that they are the ones persecuted… by the Conservative Christians. You see this a lot in the “Christian Radical” or “new monastic” or “Emergent” circles. Essentially, you have a group of predominantly middle-class, well educated, white males claiming that they (and not the other middle-class, well educated white males) are actually the ones who can occupy the high ground.
Take, for example, the blog Religion At the Margins (NB: I have nothing against those who post there, but chose this blog as an apt example of this phenomenon). Here you have eight contributors (six white males, one white female, one non-white male, all well educated) laying claim to the discourse of marginality. Thus, they define their blog in this way:

Religion at the Margins is a space dedicated to the exploration of marginalized perspectives in religion, politics, and culture. “At the margins” might refer to a class or group of people, or a heterodox theological perspective, or to those who find themselves on the margins of a faith that was once central to their lives. In any case, the theme here is marginality—however we feel like interpreting that at any given moment.

As far as I can tell, this means that we have a bunch of bourgeois writers who, despite their ongoing intimacy with privilege and power, lay claim to “the margins” because they aren’t as close as they used to be to Conservative Christian doctrines or communities (I’m open to being wrong about this, but the authors’ bios certainly suggest this conclusion).
Now, as the passage quoted above makes clear, the notion of marginality is somewhat vague. Really any person at any time and any place could lay claim to being on the margins of something. For example, I could claim to be “on the margins” of the fast-food industry (although I long ago gave up on places like McDonald’s, I still buy the occasional sub from a chain store down the street from my work), or I could claim to be “on the margins” of working with female survivors of sexual violence (since I do work with some survivors but do not work, and am not permitted to work, at the sort of female-staffed space that does the best work in this area). However, it should be apparent that, while technically true, these are pretty banal statements that don’t carry a lot of weight. Generally, people easily recognize that some spaces of marginality and some experiences of marginalization are more significant than others (in fact, it is this recognition that is at work in those who criticize the persecution complex of some Conservative Christians — while it may be true that they are more marginal than they used to be to the functioning of the American Empire, the assumption is that this relative marginality doesn’t carry any moral force). Therefore, when people do employ the language of marginality it is usually done as a discursive power-play in order to gain the benefits I mentioned above (claiming the high ground and all that).
Unfortunately — and here I’m going to make my discursive power-play — the people who genuinely suffer debilitating forms of marginalisation are the ones who end up being forgotten and neglected in all of this. When one group of bourgeois Christians lays claim to marginality over against another group of bourgeois Christians, then the significance of the death, dying and exploitation of other people groups is minimalised or completely forgotten (this despite the fact that one group of bourgeois Christians may like to read and write about those people groups). Therefore, I think that is time that we all reconsidered the ways in which we deploy the language of marginality, why we employ that language, and what the repercussions of that deployment may be.
This poster has made its rounds through the theology blogs:

But we may want to consider something like the following images.
Marginalised:

Marginalised:

Not Marginalised:

An Interview with Roland Boer (On Marxism and Theology)

[As I stated in a prior post, I recently completed reading Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology which the author, Roland Boer, very kindly sent to me as a gift. I very much enjoyed the book and have also enjoyed his blog, so I was very pleased when he consented to be interviewed for this blog. I started with a handful of questions more or less related to what he had written and then sent a number of follow-up questions to him. As you can see, things got a little out of hand and we ended up having a rather lengthy exchange but I hope that the reader will find it as interesting as I did. Thanks again, Roland, I very much appreciate your willingness to share. In what follows, my “questions” are in bold and Roland’s responses are in the regular font.]

People on both sides tend to treat Marxism and Christian theology as opposing and contradictory ideologies. I’m curious to hear about your personal journey and what has lead you to be interested in (and critically sympathetic towards) both of these areas of study. Care to share?

The connection first arose explicitly in a course I took on liberation and political theologies in about 1986 at the University of Sydney, while studying for a Bachelor of Divinity degree – which eventually led to ordination in the Presbyterian Church of Australia. One question with which I ended the course was: instead of reading these theologians on Marx, why not read Marx himself. Which I did, after an honours thesis on the riveting topic of Melchizedek in the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Nag Hammadi and Qumran. So, for my Masters degree in theology I wrote a long thesis on Marx, Hegel and theology. Ever since then, I have been interested at a scholarly level in both areas. The idea for the Criticism of Heaven and Earth series first arose in 1992, so the completion of the fifth volume of that series a year ago was the fulfillment of that idea almost two decades ago.

But that is to focus on the intellectual history and you asked about the personal side. I came from a very religious family of (Dutch) reformed persuasions and I shared those convictions, although not without a continual critical spirit that annoyed my father to no end. At high school I used to joke about how things would be far better under communism, mostly to those in authority as they desperately tried to tell me how communism was another form of totalitarianism and how good capitalist parliamentary democracy really was. Even then, I was politically convinced that the centre-left was the best option (my parents voted consistently for Christian democrat or conservative parties while [I] opted for our social democrats, the Labor Party). Since then I have become more radical, on the far left, as they call it. As that happened, it became clear to me that within Christianity there is a strong tradition of political and theological radicalism, which I continued to explore personally. Reformed or Calvinist theology did not seem to sit easily with that interest, so I spent many a long year rejecting that tradition, only to realise later that Calvin himself was torn between the radical potential of elements in the Bible and his own conservative preferences (I eventually wrote a book about it, dedicated to my father, which he was able to read weeks before he died in 2009).

It also became clear, slowly, that not all the Bible or the various theological traditions are at their core or overwhelmingly radical, since they have sat and continue to sit comfortably with some of the most oppressive forms of power. It’s that basic ambivalence that continues to fascinate me, for which Marxism provides some unique insights. Add to that the fact that Marxists since Engels have been perpetually intrigued by the Bible and theology, often writing extensively on it in a way that has profound implications for their thought.

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Book Giveaway… Or Trade

Okay, it has been awhile since I’ve done one of these and so I thought I would, once again, give away some books.
Here are the books I’m offering:
1. Christian Theology (Second Edition) by Millard J. Erickson.
2. Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart.
3. In the Ruins of the Church by R. R. Reno.
4. From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya by Ruth A. Tucker.
5. Community That is Christian by Julie A. Gorman.
However, I’m going to change the rules a bit. There is a book I want — Documents and Images for the Study of Paul by Elliott and Reasoner — so I’m going to also offer a trade. Basically, it goes like this. Anybody is eligible to receive the free books. Anybody who expresses interest gets their names put into a hat for a random draw to determine the winner.
If, however, you have a copy of the Elliott and Reasoner book that you would be willing to trade, or if you simply want to buy me the Elliott and Reasoner book in exchange for the ones I’m offering, then only those who make this offer will have their names put into the hat. If only one person makes the offer, then that person gets the books. If nobody makes the offer, than everybody goes into the draw.
The draw will be held in about a week and I will notify the winner.

November Books

Well, November was a heavy writing month, so not a lot of reading was done. Here’s what I got:
1. Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology by Roland Boer.
Roland was kind enough to send me a copy of this book after this post prompted this exchange over on his blog. He has also continued to extend that kindness and has agreed to be interviewed about this book on my blog, so hopefully that will be posted in the (near-ish) future.
In this book — the first in a series of five — Boer looks at the ways in which theological themes or biblical reflections impact the writings of eight prominent “Marxist” scholars: Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Henri Lefebvre, Antonio Gramsci, Terry Eagleton, Slavoj Zizek, and Theodor Adorno. The first two he refers to as “biblical Marxists,” the next four as “catholic Marxists” and the final two as Marxists who exhibit a “Protestant turn.”
As with any book exhibiting this kind of scope, some chapters are better or more exciting than others. With some (notably Althusser and Lefebvre) it seems as though Boer is digging pretty hard to meet the demands of his project. With others, however (notably the chapters on Bloch and Gramsci), the writing really is quite captivating. I also found the chapter on Zizek to be of quite a bit of interest. I’ve read a lot of Zizek but not a lot of what has been written about him, and so it is interesting to read what others are saying who have stepped back and taken the time to study his entire project. Boer is also quite critical, probably more so of this author than any of the others mentioned, to it is interesting to see Zizek’s praise for Boer’s work on the back cover.
All in all, quite a good read. I would like to pick up the other volumes in the series (or maybe Roland could mail them to me, along with that case of beer and carton of smokes he still owes me…), and would recommend them to others who are interested in this sort of thing.
2. All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy.
This is the first volume of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy and it is fantastic–right up there with my other McCarthy favourites (Blood Meridian, The Road and Suttree, although it feels deceptively gentler than each of those novels). It is something like a coming of age story, something like a love story, and something like Scripture. Recommended reading (if you want a detailed plot overview, see here, but I would suggest just jumping in blind).
3. The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy.
This is the second volume of the Border Trilogy. It is not as good as the first — it lags for about the first 100pp, but then it gets back up to McCarthy’s standard for story-telling (the first part of the book has been compared to Moby-Dick so that may be why I found it slow!). Oddly enough, it was in this book that I encountered one of the better possible descriptions of my own “apocalyptic” life experiences that led me to the faith I live. Here’s the quote, with some context thrown in to make sense of it:

He carried within himself a great reverence for the world, this priest. He heard the voice of the Deity in the murmur of the wind in the trees. Even the stones were sacred. He was a reasonable man and he believed that there was love in his heart.
There was not. Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear in them but only that wildness of heart that springs from such longing and they cry out to stay in his presence for they know at once that while godless men may live well enough in their exile those to whom He has spoken contemplate no life without Him but only darkness and despair.

That, I reckon, sums up a lot of my journey. Also recommended reading. (Aside: there are a lot of quotable passages in this book. As I was looking back through it to write this, I came across several that could inspire posts of their own.)
4. As I crossed a Bridge of Dreams by Lady Sarashina.
Since I was having a lot of fun reading the Norse and Icelandic sagas, I thought I would try something different and so I decided to read this book, which was written by a woman who lived in Japan during the 11th century (which means it dates to around the same time as the sagas). I have concluded that it is far, far more exciting to read about Vikings than ancient Japanese women who write poems to each other, or to trees, or who get excited to go on a trip to nowhere to do nothing. So, while this book is interested just for the glimpse it provides into a world that is dead and gone, the woman who lived in that world sure lived one helluva boring life.
5. Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) by Ann-Marie MacDonald.
I grabbed this play out of a free book bin and read it at the bar one night after I got too tipsy to read anything heavier. It is a pretty clever feminist reading of Othello and Romeo and Juliet. Lots of wordplay, lots of innuendo, mimicking the bard and all that. However, I was never a big Shakespeare fan (although I did once send my wife to a sketchy hotel to buy a $10 leather-bound complete works of Shakespeare from a big sketchy dude… sorry, wife!), and I never was really able to get into reading plays, so I feel pretty ho-hum about all this.

The New Testament and Violence. Part Two: The Nonviolence of Paul

[This is the second part of my ongoing series. For Part One, see here. I will turn to the Sectarianism of John in my next section, before offering some concluding remarks in a final post.]
The Nonviolence of Paul
You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the assembly of God and was ravaging it. I was advancing in Judaism beyond many contemporaries in my nation, being far more of a zealot for my ancestral traditions ~ Gal 1.13-14.
The turn from Jesus to Paul leads to what some may consider to be an unexpected reversal. Having noted the violence of Jesus, it is interesting to note how Paul develops the Jesus tradition in a more thoroughly nonviolent, or pacifist, manner. Just as our assumptions about “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” have been challenged, so also our assumptions about Paul, the man blamed for legitimizing the sword of the State along with a host of others evils, end up being reworked in light of what the texts actually do and do not say.
Of course, like Jesus, Paul has not entirely escaped from the ideologies of the triumphant that seek to impose “legitimate” violence upon one’s enemies. Like Jesus, Paul sometimes speaks of a coming moment of cataclysmic divine violence and judgment (cf., for example, Ro 2.5-11; 2 Cor 5.10; Gal 1.8-9; Phil 3.18-19; 1 Thess 1.9-10, 2.16). Also like Jesus, he is not beyond verbally abusing his opponents – even wishing that some of his opponents in Galatia would go ahead and castrate themselves (Gal 5.12 – Paul refers to a comparable group as “dogs” in Phil 3.2)! However, it is worth noting that in relation to both of these areas, Paul seems to exhibit more grace than Jesus. In relation to violent divine judgment, Paul focuses God’s wrath upon the here-and-now, with God’s wrath simply being God’s refusal to intervene and prevent the inevitably tragic end result of a people’s self-chosen sinful activities. When speaking of final judgment, however, Paul does not have a lot to say and, in fact, he refuses to cast any sort of judgment upon either those outside of the assemblies of Jesus (cf. 1 Cor 5.9-13) or the enemies of those assemblies (cf. Ro 12.14-21). Even when Paul does find it necessary to pronounce an exceedingly harsh judgment upon another Jesus-follower, something he describes as handing a person “over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh,” Paul still limits this judgment to the temporal realm, so that the spirit of this man “may be saved on the day of the Lord” (1 Cor 5.5; see also 1 Cor 3.12-15). Finally, not only does Paul limit his reflections upon some final divine act of violence, but he also leaves the door open for a great final act of universal salvation. Thus, he writes, “for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ” (1 Cor 15.22) and again, “just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all” (Ro 5.18 – some tantalizing results are also produced when Phil 2.10-11 is read in conjunction with Ro 10.9!).
Turning to the second parallel, having noted that Paul sometimes loses his temper and verbally abuses his opponents, it is still worth noting that Paul is much more focused upon redefining enemies as non-human structural, cosmic and spiritual Powers. Again, in this regard, it seems to me that Paul demonstrates more grace than Jesus – not only holding out the possibility of final salvation for the worst offenders and for his opponents, but also shifting the focus of one’s warfare or hatred to the non-human realm. This emphasis comes through especially strongly in the Deutero-Pauline epistles of Colossians and Ephesians (which remain much more faithful to Paul than the Pastorals), but it is already found in the non-contested Pauline letters. Thus, in Ro 13.12, Paul calls the Jesus-followers to put on armor, not of metal in order to battle other people, but of light in order to battle darkness and the vices of the flesh (a metaphor further developed in Eph 6.10-17). Thus, while some of our contemporary bourgeois pacifists may express discomfort with Paul’s usage of warfare imagery here or elsewhere, the point is that Paul has shifted the terrain of the war from the personal to the spiritual and structural realms.
Therefore, when we compare Paul’s rhetorical violence to that of Jesus, we discover a Paul who is much more gentle, meek, and mild than Jesus. This difference is only heightened when we compare Paul’s actual actions to those of Jesus. For, unlike Jesus, we are hard pressed to find any sort of violent action employed by Paul as God’s ambassador to the nations.
However, it is important to note that this refusal of violence comes after Paul’s encounter with the resurrected Christ on the road to Damascus. Prior to that apocalyptic event, both Paul and Luke claim that Paul was engaged in violent actions – arresting and imprisoning some, seizing property, and even assisting in the executions of others. Here Paul’s references to his allegiance to “Judaism” (a term coined to express opposition to “Hellenism” and highlight separation from other nations), to being a “Pharisee” (meaning a “separated one”), combined with the mention of his “zeal,” all lead to the hypothesis that Paul, before his encounter with Christ, was a member of a Pharisaic group that modeled itself after the likes of Phinehas and the other “heroes of zeal” in the Hebrew Scriptures—people whose unconditional commitment to the distinctiveness of Israel was exhibited in a willingness to use violence, even against other Judaeans. For Paul and other zealots (i.e. others who were “zealous” for Israel), zeal was “something you did with a knife” (to borrow the words of N. T. Wright).
Therefore, one of the ways in which Paul’s call produces a significant conversion in his work post-Damascus is the way in which it moves him from violent to non-violent actions. Instead of violently purging the people of God, Paul embraces non-violence in order to suffer with Christ and extend the offer of the peace of God to the members of all the nations. Paul’s zealous violence has given way to zealous love which now manifests itself, not in the willingness to kill but in the willingness to die. Of course, Paul does not completely break with his old behaviours – in Acts 13.6-12, for example, we read of Paul temporarily blinding a sorcerer named Elymas – but the transition is a very significant one.
Does this mean that Paul understands the conflict between that which is life-giving and that which is death-dealing in a different way than Jesus? Do his different tactics reflect a different agenda? I do not think so. It seems to me that Paul is just as deeply committed to the pursuit of life, and the worship of the God of Life, over against Death and the death-dealing Powers of his day. Paul’s embodied proclamation of the good news of Jesus’ lordship, still runs completely against imperial modes of domination. Thus, Paul urges economic mutuality, along with the emancipation of slaves, and the equal status of all – men and women, Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free people, within the assemblies of Jesus. Yet almost nowhere does he engage in the same sort of violence against private property exhibited by Jesus. I can only think of one example of Paul engaging in an illegal action of that nature.^¹ While in Philippi, Paul and Silas encounter a female slave who is possessed by a pythonic fortune-telling spirit. This slave, Luke tells us, made a great deal of money for her masters. However, Paul ends up casting this spirit out of her, thereby enraging the owners who end up getting Paul and Silas stripped, beaten, flogged and imprisoned by the magistrates (cf. Acts 16.16-24). By casting out the spirit, Paul has damaged the value of the slave-owners property (the female slave was legally considered a thing, not a person). Thus, he destroys “property” in the service of life. Of course, Luke frames this act as though is arose spontaneously on Paul’s part (Paul became too “annoyed” to properly control himself), but it actually fits in rather well with Paul’s entire trajectory regarding slavery, wherein slaves were to be treated as people, as equals, as siblings, as citizens of heaven, and as children and heirs of God.
This is just one area that demonstrates Paul’s desire to create alternative communities of life within central places of the Empire. For Paul, this is such a crucial and dangerous task that he tries to “fly under the radar” rather than jeopardize his mission in any other way (indeed, even without any outright actions of violence against property, Paul is still executed by the Roman imperial powers, an observation that demonstrates the degree of risk involved in his work). Therefore, what we see when we compare Jesus and Paul are different tactics employed in the pursuit of the same goal. While it is tempting to psychologize the differences between the two – perhaps by suggesting that Jesus was better equipped to ably employ violence whereas Paul needed to more wholeheartedly avoid this realm of possible actions due to the violent nature of his past – I do not wish to press that point. I simply want to observe that the tactics of both are different but legitimate options available to those who seek to follow Jesus and imitate Paul.

1There is one great act of Christian property destruction in Acts, when the sorcerers at Ephesus burn their books, which had a combined approximate value of 50,000 drachmas – however, while this fits into the general trajectory of supporting the destruction of property that is idolatrous and death-dealing, it was a voluntary action performed by the owners of the property and so no crime was committed. Cf. Acts 19.17-20.