The soul of Protestantism, part 3

In the previous two segments of this essay series, I explored the roots of Germanic Christianity’s individualistic values, arriving at an image of Christ as a barbarian warrior-king. To some, this might seem to call into question whether I believe in the divinity or the historical reality of Christ, but this was never my intent. We are communicative beings, shaped by the values and shared knowledge of our culture and language; in a real sense, the Holy Spirit has made us heirs of this image – we must take care that we do not turn that image into a golden calf, to worship in place of the living God. And there is a living God behind that image. In Scripture, there are authors – true literary giants – writing to us, albeit through the dimming polarised lenses of time and language, of the good news of the Messiah.

But what are we to look for? If we are so influenced by our culture and by our time, how are we to understand this man, this Messiah we claim to follow? I am eternally indebted to Ched Myers, whose amazing book Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus gave me, perhaps for awhile, ‘eyes to see’. Through a literary-historical analysis born of the great Liberal Protestant tradition of historical criticism, Myers turns the polarised lenses of culture and language back so that Mark shines through with all the force of broad daylight. The Christ he allows us to see, the Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospel of Mark, is neither an ascetic bringing a Manichaean message of salvation and damnation, nor the castrated (but popular) liberal ‘nice guy’ who comes preaching a message of love, peace and world understanding – but an ordinary tradesman from the most backward part of Palestine gifted with an extraordinary political vision of radical economic and social equality, under an oppressive and brutal Empire which considers his vision a threat.

I will not go in-depth into Myers’ exhaustive (though eye-opening) reading of Mark, suffice it to say that Myers treats Mark as a work of literature, aimed at a Greek-speaking, largely poor and semi-literate Palestinian audience, but nonetheless artfully structured and deeply subversive. Jesus is the primary player in this narrative, and no sooner does he appear but he begins challenging the exploitative norms and practices of the Second Temple state and the Roman Empire. He heals the lepers and the physically-disfigured (people with ‘pre-existing conditions’, we might say today), and so demolishes the debt and purity codes with which the religious authorities have kept them exploited and outcast. He also challenges Imperial rule through the political theatre of exorcism, but keeps his table fellowship open to both Jews and Gentiles. His message is utterly radical and transformative: the ‘kingdom of heaven’ is not meant to be a spiritual goal of the afterlife, but a reality of social and economic equality through a commonwealth of goods to be brought about on earth, through non-violent struggle. For this message of radical equality, he was declared an enemy of the Roman state and crucified – yet we are confronted at the end of Mark with the empty tomb. Like the women who came there and saw it, we are challenged to speak this ‘good news’, this promise of a new political order.

But how are we to respond to this, we who have before us this image of Christ shaped by the tribal-military values of our barbarian forebears? What has Mark to say to us?

There seem to be some places where we are not too far off (Mark 12:34) in how we typically conceive of the Gospel message. We Protestants influenced by the Teutonic cultures have in our history and our consciousness these peasant rebellions and protests which were the material analogues of the religious Protests (like the Bauernkrieg of 1524-5) – we have the values of sociopolitical equality and kinship writ large in our material and spiritual culture, and (as a rule) we do not struggle in the same way with issues of purity or imperial order, tending to reject both out-of-hand. The Protest also gives us this precedent of resistance to the forces of Empire, whether material or spiritual. The original Protest destroyed the debt and purity codes of Catholicism with the same zeal that Jesus took to demolishing the debt and purity codes of the Temple state. We Protestants are open to radical social equality and the leadership of women in ways that both Catholic and Orthodox leadership are not. This is something that Mark seems to value; Jesus is often shown in solidarity with the poor struggling with Empire, even those who in desperation resort to violence and banditry (though Jesus himself never supported such an option) – as Myers points out, two bandits take the right and left hand of Jesus upon the Cross.

But there are points where our endemic idolatry of the barbarian warrior-king Christ cripples us in our spiritual understanding, blinds us to the Gospel message in ways that lead us terribly astray. Most obviously is the point of the use of violence. The non-violence that features so prominently in the Gospels is not a practice or an ethic that sits easily with our heathen values; sadly, most Protestants cannot even conceive of a world in which violence will not be necessary, and are blind to the practical implications of Jesus’ message (e.g., Reinhold Niebuhr). Not many of us are so willing to put our dignity on the line the same way Jesus was – it is something we struggle with, even those of us in the peace-church tradition: we Mennonites and Brethren, we Amish and Quakers. But it is ultimately a surface objection. A Gandhian ethic of revolutionary non-violence is easy for us to read from Scripture, and by no means outside the scope of our imagination as Protestants. As I pointed out in my last essay, this style of non-violence is even compatible with a barbarian warrior’s concept of personal honour.

Likewise, many Protestants in their rampant individualism simply don’t care about community, or (one of my pet peeves) see themselves as ‘spiritual’ rather than ‘religious’. Many Protestants want for discipline and want for knowledge, having no familiarity with their history and a cursory familiarity with Scripture (at best). Others, having drunk too deeply from Locke and Smith and taken capitalist-consumerism as their religion of choice, bridle at the very idea that we have any communal responsibility to care for the poor and socially outcast or claim that human nature is simply too sinful to be rectified by any effort we might collectively make (and Nikolay Aleksandrovich Berdyaev might have a few choice words for them!). These are deep problems, but they are problems avoided to a large degree by most of the peace churches, which discipline themselves to community and practice the pursuit of social justice and economic equality.

But there are deeper ways in which the Protestant culture misses the mark by a significant margin. The barbarian warrior-king Christ shown in Dream of the Rood is a triumphant figure, a man who boldly leads the charge up to Golgotha, who strips himself and climbs up onto the Cross bravely and under his own power. This is not the Christ Mark shows us. Mark is continually trying to subvert our triumphalist expectations throughout the Gospel right up to the end – the Christ we see is beaten, crowed over, emasculated, humiliated by the Romans, abandoned and betrayed by his disciples. Everything he has worked for seems to be gone. Myers spares our egos nothing in his account of the Gospel’s ending – Mark strips us bare, just as the young man was stripped bare as he fled from the soldiers at Jesus’ arrest (Mark 14:51-52). This is not a tale of triumphal victory – the Gospel is much more ambiguous than that. Though we have the promise of the empty tomb at the end of the Gospel, we are cautioned against the kind of Romanticism of which the author of Dream of the Rood is guilty by everything that comes before and by what comes after (the women at the tomb being afraid to speak).

When it comes to Romantic triumphalism, we Anabaptists are as guilty as anyone; maybe guiltier than most. We romanticise our past horribly: always we are the true Church, the righteous victims fleeing the unjust and wicked persecution of the Roman Catholics or the magisterial Protest, the Orthodox authorities of Tsarist Russia or the Continental Army in this country’s fledgling days. We have our heroic epic in the Martyrs’ Mirror, singing paeans to our bold and fearless champions of faith, Michael Sattler and Dirk Willems (though I have to say Willems’ story is really freaking awesome). This Romanticism gives us Manichaean blinders which dim for us the story of Jesus: we have a tendency to see ourselves as islands of righteousness in a world-spanning ocean of sin. We strive after martyrdom in much the same way – in a way, we fall prey to the trap of seeking that glorious right hand of Jesus on the Cross. These tendencies come to us straight from the values writ large in Dream of the Rood, and Jesus’ reproof when we vie for his right hand (Mark 9:33-36) should not be lost on us. The discipline of humility does not come to us easily – those of us in the German and Anglo-American traditions have a tendency to be notoriously, sinfully stiff-necked, and we Anabaptists are certainly no exception.

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