Review: Saving Christianity from Empire
The interplay between church and state has long been one of history’s many conundrums. This is particularly true of the monotheistic religions whose truth-claims are objective, public, and historically based. The origins of Christianity, for example, begin with a historical figure and his twelve men he sent to proclaim in the public square an objective truth regarding God’s action in history. Christianity’s rejection of epistemic subjectivism, moral relativism, and religion as myth placed it at odds with the secular powers whose own public claims disagreed with the basic tenants of the objective Christian faith. It should not surprise us that Christianity found itself persecuted as much by twenty-first century China as first century Rome.
In present-day American politics, however, religion is often sidelined. Modern philosophy and Protestant theology succeeded in relegating religious truth-claims to the sphere of subjective, private beliefs rather than objective, public truths. The Founding Fathers, and even the Puritans before them, wisely made a clear distinction between church and state – but the modern conception of liberty as self-fulfillment and self-actualization has worked to place God, in addition to religion, in the closet altogether. And while the majority of religious Americans identify themselves as conservatives, politicians on the left and the right have largely abandoned the religious language used by statesmen – and even average Americans – prior to the twentieth century. More still, politicians who do use religious language are often accused of religious pandering – an accusation often proven true by the subsequent actions and policies of these “God-fearing” politicians once they are elected.
The political left in particular has seemingly distanced itself from religious language in general and Christian language in particular. Gone are the days of Martin Luther King, Jr., who not only rooted the Civil Rights Movement in Biblical language, but also compared his mission to Moses, saying:
"I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!"
Catering itself more and more to America’s intelligentsia, often composed of the dogmatically skeptical agnostics and atheists teaching in our universities and reporting on the evening news, “God talk” among liberals has become surprisingly scarce. As the Civil Rights Movement continued after King’s assassination, it was recast as a defender of feminism and homosexuality and then later as a movement representing any group which felt marginalized by a white-Christian-male America. Very rarely today do we find a book by a liberal author meant to seriously address Christianity and its relationship to the nation in a positive light. Rarer still is such a book written for a mass audience of average Christians unfamiliar with the many complex and abstract concepts of theology.
But this is exactly what the theologian and politician Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer has attempted to do in his book Saving Christianity from Empire. Pallmeyer is a professor at the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul, MN), teaching both theology and justice and peace studies. While Pallmeyer may be best known for his run against Al Franken for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 U.S. Senate election, he is one of the few liberal politicians to be as equally committed to faith as to politics. A lifelong Lutheran, Pallmeyer earned his bachelor’s degree from the Lutheran St. Olaf College and then a Masters of Divinity from the Union Theological Seminary before becoming a St. Thomas professor where he has taught for fifteen years.
Examining the book itself, what is first striking is that Pallmeyer devotes roughly two-thirds of his text to judiciously indicting the United States as an empire – meaning:
"…that on a global scale the United States has and seeks to sustain sufficient power over the political and economic priorities of other nations and the international system as a whole so as to serve the interests of powerful sectors within the United States" (Pallmeyer 7).
Now for most American’s, Pallmeyer’s argument needs some convincing – and often times the best way to convince someone is by telling them a story. Like every good story, we could say that Saving Christianity from Empire examines the United States, as well as Christianity, in the following way: the story is setup, upset, and reset. The setup represents the protagonist’s original upright beginnings while the upset refers to that which becomes an obstacle for the protagonist to overcome. Of course, no story is complete without a reset, that is, either a return to the original good or to the protagonist’s eventual doom. Every good story has either a happy ending or a sad ending. No good story has a non-ending.
Pallmeyer tells his story as one of optimism for the United States and Christianity, but he casts both of their modern-day versions as their own worst enemies. In his narrative, the United States is a good republic turned empire and Christianity is a good religion subverted by empire into a caesaropapist puppet of injustice. The narrative’s hopeful reset, however, relies on a revitalized Christianity which is able to resist and by doing so restore the evil empire to its former status as a good republic. In this way Pallmeyer’s thesis rests squarely on his theology, not on his indictments of American economic or foreign policy. In other words, Pallmeyer is offering Christians a hopeful means of social and political change precisely by way of their faith and not merely through a sociopolitical process devoid of faith. Could this be a postmodernist return to the power of religion which enlivened movements led by great men like Martin Luther King, Jr.?
Let us examine Pallmeyer’s theology to find out.
Christianity, according to Pallmeyer, is first and foremost a religion of non-violence, an underground movement to end social injustice. Looking at his narrative, we learn that the setup of Christianity was originally good, but the “strong, nonviolent, anti-imperial [Christianity] ended in 313 with Emperor Constantine’s edict of toleration… the church sold its soul in exchange for a seat at the table with the powerful” (Pallmeyer 128). In other words, the upset comes with Constantine, who ended the persecutions of Christianity, convoked the first ecumenical gathering of male-only clergy at Nicaea in 325, subverted Christianity to serve his empire’s ambitions, and was only baptized on his deathbed in 337.
Beyond stating that Christianity turned violent after 313, Pallmeyer does not address the history of Christianity in any specifics. His interest is not in describing the facts that chronologically connect Constantine’s increasingly Christian empire to America’s birth in 1776. Instead, he ties together the twin narratives of the United States and Christianity through the assertion that, given the United States is an empire (which he attempts to prove in the first two-thirds of the book), then Christianity must return to its historic roots of standing against empire and against violence as it did against Rome, thus restoring itself, the American republic, and the world with it. However, one may critique Pallmeyer’s hopes by asking: if Christianity faltered in 313 and never fully recovered, how can it be restored to its pre-313 non-violent, anti-imperial stance?
Enter the Jesus Seminar.
Co-Founded in 1985 by John Dominic Crossan, the Jesus Seminar is a group of modern Biblical scholars who reject the historicity of Jesus as found in the Bible. Crossan and his Jesus Seminar are quoted regularly by Pallmeyer to the effect that Jesus’ teaching was one of subverting empire and “commanding absolute nonviolence” (Pallmeyer 145). Pallmeyer and the Jesus Seminar, however, were not the first to attempt their own recovery of Jesus’ teachings. Reforming the faith to a pre-313 Christianity was also the self-proclaimed goal of Protestantism in the sixteenth century – but the Jesus Seminar would assert that the Protestant effort in this regard was doomed before it began. Why? Because the Protestants, like the Catholics, believed the Bible the word of God; that for John Dominic Crossan, the Jesus Seminar, and Pallmeyer, the Bible simply cannot be the word of God because it justifies violence.
Their belief is thus that the Apostles and the men they appointed as bishops, are not to be trusted. In fact, every Bible writer had his own agenda and often times wrote only his own opinion, twisting facts, and adding lies along the way in order to justify his viewpoint. The goal of the Jesus Seminar was to finish what the Protestants began: to uncover and proclaim the true teachings of the historical Jesus. Pallmeyer bluntly tells us that we should not believe in his theology because it is “more Biblical or more faithful to the Gospel writers, but because it is faithful to [the historical] Jesus,” whose, “radical nonviolence challenges many of the core assumptions of the biblical writers and perhaps our own” (Pallmeyer 160, 140). In other words:
“Religiously justified violence generally… is not primarily the product of misinterpreting or distorting ‘sacred’ texts. It is rather a problem rooted in the actual violence at the heart of these texts that can be reasonably cited to justify their recourse to violence.” (Pallmeyer 105, emphasis in original).
But in allying himself with the Jesus Seminar in favor of a supposedly historical Jesus who was anti-imperial and anti-war, Pallmeyer must not only reject historic Catholicism and Protestantism, but he must also the reject Christianity as it existed from 33-313 AD. Why? Because he argues that the original men Jesus appointed, along with their successors, radically corrupted the original teaching of Jesus, a teaching regained through the historical-critical method of Biblical interpretation. Every Christian from the first century on (and the Jews before that) understood that scripture is the word of God, though it is written through human beings in human modes of expression. Because the Bible simply does not match their ideology, Pallmeyer and the Jesus Seminar simply throw out anything in the Bible that doesn’t agree with their ideology, but in doing so have emptied the Bible of its authority.
Christianity is of course larger than the Bible. Pallmeyer, a Lutheran, probably targeted a Protestant audience, seeking to challenge Biblical fundamentalists while giving armament to members of the mainstream, liberal Protestant denominations who have now given up on Biblical truth-claims for the open waters of relativism. Pallmeyer’s theology perfectly exemplifies what Chesterton said almost a century ago: “Protestantism has not been merely the abandonment of Catholic doctrines. Protestantism has been the abandonment of Protestant doctrine.”
If Pallmeyer addresses Catholics, it may be when he quotes the Church Father Terullian as an example of a pre-313 pacifism in Christianity. While it is true that modern scholarship has tended to agree that the early Christians were somehow pacifists, recent scholarship reveals that this is not quite the case. In fact, if one were to read the entire passage of Tertullian’s de Corona quoted by Pallmeyer on page 128, he would see Tertullian was concerned that soldiering in the Roman Empire would lead a Christian to offering mandatory sacrifices to the Roman gods – an act of idolatry. In other words, soldiering and killing were themselves not sinful; it was the required acts of idolatry that were. And even if Christian soldiers were not found in great numbers, they nevertheless did serve in the Roman army and, if necessary, allowed themselves to be martyred when they refused to commit idolatry. Moreover, Christian bishops and clergy prior to Constantine often prayed openly and officially for the emperor and for the empire’s success on the fields of battle. They even called their sacred rites sacraments – a term derived from the Latin word referring to the oath sworn by Roman men entering the army. In short, pacifism in early Christianity cannot be justified by resort to scripture or tradition.
Thus the anti-imperial, non-violent Christianity based on a “historical Jesus” is, simply put, an invention of modern day pacifists who seek to deceive honest Christians into a belief which lacks any grounding in history or theology.
Sadly average American Christians know little about history or theology. For many the idea of peace is more important than the truth. Indeed, some Christians are willing to give up on historical and theological continuity in order to embrace absolute non-violence – and thus arises the million dollar question: what must a Christian really give up in order to believe in the “historical” Jesus of Pallmeyer and the Jesus Seminar? The most telling answer to this question comes from Pallmeyer’s following assertion:
“God’s power… can’t punish us or others for being unjust” (Pallmeyer 149).
Pallmeyer forgets that before the creation of the material universe, the seraph Lucifer committed a grave injustice against his creator and God’s power was unleashed to punish him through the avenging angels led by St. Michael. The creation of the universe itself was an act of violence, as the cosmos-creating singularity which ruptured in the Big Bang was moments before the state of harmony between the four fundamental forces of the universe. Entropy ensued, for the material world was given over to the dominion of Lucifer, now the fallen demon Satan. Why? Because the violent judgment of God would not only be manifested by angels, but by material-spiritual creatures elected out of matter itself. In other words, even lowly matter would rise up to punish the unjust action of the Devil. Man was made to seek the just punishment of Lucifer in a truly just war on evil.
The failure of Adam meant precisely man’s rejection to punish with God’s power, submitting instead to Satan’s lordship over this world.
Pallmeyer’s non-violence naturally rejects the notion of a hell where the powers arrayed to dishonor God are violently punished in eternity. There is no second coming of Christ, no final judgment, no hell to punish the unjust. Indeed, if God’s power cannot punish the unjust, then neither can ours. Even the sacrifice of Christ on the cross is rejected, for it is a violent action accepted by God for our sins. Sacrifice is violent – but it is a violence necessary for to free us from the death grip of Satan’s dominion of this world and restore us to order as the sons of God, called to join St. Michael and his angels to cast Satan and his demons into hell where they belong. For Catholics, accepting radical non-violence means rejecting the Sacrifice of the Mass. Or as Pallmeyer says:
“We must counter and transform… Christian theologies that ignore the radical nonviolence of Jesus and that reinforce violent expectations of history… [creating] alternative worship, liturgies, and music that reflect the nonviolent spirit of Jesus…” (Pallmeyer 168).
In the book Worship in the Spirit of Jesus (co-authored with Bret Hesla), Pallmeyer’s conception of liturgy omitted seven essential parts of Christian worship because they violate the dogma of non-violence. These seven elements are: repentance, the Kyrie, readings from scripture alone, the Bible as the Word of God, Creeds, prayers of petition, and any sense of sacrifice. The seventh and final point means “not using images such as ‘Lamb,’ ‘blood shed for you,’ ‘died for your sins,’ and ‘personal savior.’” (Pallmeyer-Hesla 97-98). Liturgy is chiefly the worship of God, but it is also a teacher of the faith. To accept a theology of radical non-violence means rejecting the key tenants of the Christian faith expressed and taught through the liturgy. More importantly, the non-violent liturgy fails to shape the kinds of personsalities which are faithful to God and eager to do his will. The faithful Christian soldiers of Rome who risked their lives in battle and in martyrdom are the kinds of men our liturgy ought to produce.
Channeling his inner Luther, Pallmeyer commits himself to his seven-point renunciation of authentic Christian worship as if they were the new Ninety-Five Theses, using a faulty definition of liturgy to argue that: “If liturgies are ‘works of the people,’ they can be ‘reworked’ by the people” (Pallmeyer-Hesla 98).
Non-violence is ultimately what Pallmeyer worships. His theology is a renunciation of Christian history, Christian theology, Christian scripture, and Christian liturgy. It downplays the real evil that must be punished because it espouses the dangerous notion that “God’s power… can’t punish us or others for being unjust.” Beliefs such as this lead to a desperately flattened faith, devoid of beauty and destiny. It was said at the beginning that Pallmeyer’s vision of Christianity was one of hope, that a reset was needed to restore it to its goodness – but this is not true because Pallmeyer’s setup is ultimately fictitious, the upset identical with the historical Christianity actually exists, and the reset is illusory and in effect, a non-ending.
Pallmeyer’s narrative is a non-story. It does not reflect the language of King or the reality of the Christianity it seeks to empty and subvert to radical non-violence. Let us end with a note of warning regarding this subversion:
“Christian theology today… is the art of choosing between incompatible and irreconcilable Biblical portraits of God without acknowledging that is what we are doing. This sleight of hand is necessary because most Christians… are unwilling to challenge the authority of the Bible even though it is dominated by violent images of God and violent expectations of history” (Pallmeyer 159, emphasis in original).
St. John ends his first epistle as Jesus ended his life, with seven last words. For John, these words are “Children, be on your guard against idols” (1 John 5:21). The radical non-violence of Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer's Saving Christian from Empire is indeed one of these idols.
Works Cited:
Nelson-Pallmeyer, Jack. Saving Christianity from Empire. New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2005. Print.
Worship in the Spirit of Jesus can be read in full online at: http://www.ucc.org/the-pilgrim-press/pdfs/wsj.pdf
In present-day American politics, however, religion is often sidelined. Modern philosophy and Protestant theology succeeded in relegating religious truth-claims to the sphere of subjective, private beliefs rather than objective, public truths. The Founding Fathers, and even the Puritans before them, wisely made a clear distinction between church and state – but the modern conception of liberty as self-fulfillment and self-actualization has worked to place God, in addition to religion, in the closet altogether. And while the majority of religious Americans identify themselves as conservatives, politicians on the left and the right have largely abandoned the religious language used by statesmen – and even average Americans – prior to the twentieth century. More still, politicians who do use religious language are often accused of religious pandering – an accusation often proven true by the subsequent actions and policies of these “God-fearing” politicians once they are elected.
The political left in particular has seemingly distanced itself from religious language in general and Christian language in particular. Gone are the days of Martin Luther King, Jr., who not only rooted the Civil Rights Movement in Biblical language, but also compared his mission to Moses, saying:
"I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!"
Catering itself more and more to America’s intelligentsia, often composed of the dogmatically skeptical agnostics and atheists teaching in our universities and reporting on the evening news, “God talk” among liberals has become surprisingly scarce. As the Civil Rights Movement continued after King’s assassination, it was recast as a defender of feminism and homosexuality and then later as a movement representing any group which felt marginalized by a white-Christian-male America. Very rarely today do we find a book by a liberal author meant to seriously address Christianity and its relationship to the nation in a positive light. Rarer still is such a book written for a mass audience of average Christians unfamiliar with the many complex and abstract concepts of theology.
But this is exactly what the theologian and politician Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer has attempted to do in his book Saving Christianity from Empire. Pallmeyer is a professor at the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul, MN), teaching both theology and justice and peace studies. While Pallmeyer may be best known for his run against Al Franken for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 U.S. Senate election, he is one of the few liberal politicians to be as equally committed to faith as to politics. A lifelong Lutheran, Pallmeyer earned his bachelor’s degree from the Lutheran St. Olaf College and then a Masters of Divinity from the Union Theological Seminary before becoming a St. Thomas professor where he has taught for fifteen years.
Examining the book itself, what is first striking is that Pallmeyer devotes roughly two-thirds of his text to judiciously indicting the United States as an empire – meaning:
"…that on a global scale the United States has and seeks to sustain sufficient power over the political and economic priorities of other nations and the international system as a whole so as to serve the interests of powerful sectors within the United States" (Pallmeyer 7).
Now for most American’s, Pallmeyer’s argument needs some convincing – and often times the best way to convince someone is by telling them a story. Like every good story, we could say that Saving Christianity from Empire examines the United States, as well as Christianity, in the following way: the story is setup, upset, and reset. The setup represents the protagonist’s original upright beginnings while the upset refers to that which becomes an obstacle for the protagonist to overcome. Of course, no story is complete without a reset, that is, either a return to the original good or to the protagonist’s eventual doom. Every good story has either a happy ending or a sad ending. No good story has a non-ending.
Pallmeyer tells his story as one of optimism for the United States and Christianity, but he casts both of their modern-day versions as their own worst enemies. In his narrative, the United States is a good republic turned empire and Christianity is a good religion subverted by empire into a caesaropapist puppet of injustice. The narrative’s hopeful reset, however, relies on a revitalized Christianity which is able to resist and by doing so restore the evil empire to its former status as a good republic. In this way Pallmeyer’s thesis rests squarely on his theology, not on his indictments of American economic or foreign policy. In other words, Pallmeyer is offering Christians a hopeful means of social and political change precisely by way of their faith and not merely through a sociopolitical process devoid of faith. Could this be a postmodernist return to the power of religion which enlivened movements led by great men like Martin Luther King, Jr.?
Let us examine Pallmeyer’s theology to find out.
Christianity, according to Pallmeyer, is first and foremost a religion of non-violence, an underground movement to end social injustice. Looking at his narrative, we learn that the setup of Christianity was originally good, but the “strong, nonviolent, anti-imperial [Christianity] ended in 313 with Emperor Constantine’s edict of toleration… the church sold its soul in exchange for a seat at the table with the powerful” (Pallmeyer 128). In other words, the upset comes with Constantine, who ended the persecutions of Christianity, convoked the first ecumenical gathering of male-only clergy at Nicaea in 325, subverted Christianity to serve his empire’s ambitions, and was only baptized on his deathbed in 337.
Beyond stating that Christianity turned violent after 313, Pallmeyer does not address the history of Christianity in any specifics. His interest is not in describing the facts that chronologically connect Constantine’s increasingly Christian empire to America’s birth in 1776. Instead, he ties together the twin narratives of the United States and Christianity through the assertion that, given the United States is an empire (which he attempts to prove in the first two-thirds of the book), then Christianity must return to its historic roots of standing against empire and against violence as it did against Rome, thus restoring itself, the American republic, and the world with it. However, one may critique Pallmeyer’s hopes by asking: if Christianity faltered in 313 and never fully recovered, how can it be restored to its pre-313 non-violent, anti-imperial stance?
Enter the Jesus Seminar.
Co-Founded in 1985 by John Dominic Crossan, the Jesus Seminar is a group of modern Biblical scholars who reject the historicity of Jesus as found in the Bible. Crossan and his Jesus Seminar are quoted regularly by Pallmeyer to the effect that Jesus’ teaching was one of subverting empire and “commanding absolute nonviolence” (Pallmeyer 145). Pallmeyer and the Jesus Seminar, however, were not the first to attempt their own recovery of Jesus’ teachings. Reforming the faith to a pre-313 Christianity was also the self-proclaimed goal of Protestantism in the sixteenth century – but the Jesus Seminar would assert that the Protestant effort in this regard was doomed before it began. Why? Because the Protestants, like the Catholics, believed the Bible the word of God; that for John Dominic Crossan, the Jesus Seminar, and Pallmeyer, the Bible simply cannot be the word of God because it justifies violence.
Their belief is thus that the Apostles and the men they appointed as bishops, are not to be trusted. In fact, every Bible writer had his own agenda and often times wrote only his own opinion, twisting facts, and adding lies along the way in order to justify his viewpoint. The goal of the Jesus Seminar was to finish what the Protestants began: to uncover and proclaim the true teachings of the historical Jesus. Pallmeyer bluntly tells us that we should not believe in his theology because it is “more Biblical or more faithful to the Gospel writers, but because it is faithful to [the historical] Jesus,” whose, “radical nonviolence challenges many of the core assumptions of the biblical writers and perhaps our own” (Pallmeyer 160, 140). In other words:
“Religiously justified violence generally… is not primarily the product of misinterpreting or distorting ‘sacred’ texts. It is rather a problem rooted in the actual violence at the heart of these texts that can be reasonably cited to justify their recourse to violence.” (Pallmeyer 105, emphasis in original).
But in allying himself with the Jesus Seminar in favor of a supposedly historical Jesus who was anti-imperial and anti-war, Pallmeyer must not only reject historic Catholicism and Protestantism, but he must also the reject Christianity as it existed from 33-313 AD. Why? Because he argues that the original men Jesus appointed, along with their successors, radically corrupted the original teaching of Jesus, a teaching regained through the historical-critical method of Biblical interpretation. Every Christian from the first century on (and the Jews before that) understood that scripture is the word of God, though it is written through human beings in human modes of expression. Because the Bible simply does not match their ideology, Pallmeyer and the Jesus Seminar simply throw out anything in the Bible that doesn’t agree with their ideology, but in doing so have emptied the Bible of its authority.
Christianity is of course larger than the Bible. Pallmeyer, a Lutheran, probably targeted a Protestant audience, seeking to challenge Biblical fundamentalists while giving armament to members of the mainstream, liberal Protestant denominations who have now given up on Biblical truth-claims for the open waters of relativism. Pallmeyer’s theology perfectly exemplifies what Chesterton said almost a century ago: “Protestantism has not been merely the abandonment of Catholic doctrines. Protestantism has been the abandonment of Protestant doctrine.”
If Pallmeyer addresses Catholics, it may be when he quotes the Church Father Terullian as an example of a pre-313 pacifism in Christianity. While it is true that modern scholarship has tended to agree that the early Christians were somehow pacifists, recent scholarship reveals that this is not quite the case. In fact, if one were to read the entire passage of Tertullian’s de Corona quoted by Pallmeyer on page 128, he would see Tertullian was concerned that soldiering in the Roman Empire would lead a Christian to offering mandatory sacrifices to the Roman gods – an act of idolatry. In other words, soldiering and killing were themselves not sinful; it was the required acts of idolatry that were. And even if Christian soldiers were not found in great numbers, they nevertheless did serve in the Roman army and, if necessary, allowed themselves to be martyred when they refused to commit idolatry. Moreover, Christian bishops and clergy prior to Constantine often prayed openly and officially for the emperor and for the empire’s success on the fields of battle. They even called their sacred rites sacraments – a term derived from the Latin word referring to the oath sworn by Roman men entering the army. In short, pacifism in early Christianity cannot be justified by resort to scripture or tradition.
Thus the anti-imperial, non-violent Christianity based on a “historical Jesus” is, simply put, an invention of modern day pacifists who seek to deceive honest Christians into a belief which lacks any grounding in history or theology.
Sadly average American Christians know little about history or theology. For many the idea of peace is more important than the truth. Indeed, some Christians are willing to give up on historical and theological continuity in order to embrace absolute non-violence – and thus arises the million dollar question: what must a Christian really give up in order to believe in the “historical” Jesus of Pallmeyer and the Jesus Seminar? The most telling answer to this question comes from Pallmeyer’s following assertion:
“God’s power… can’t punish us or others for being unjust” (Pallmeyer 149).
Pallmeyer forgets that before the creation of the material universe, the seraph Lucifer committed a grave injustice against his creator and God’s power was unleashed to punish him through the avenging angels led by St. Michael. The creation of the universe itself was an act of violence, as the cosmos-creating singularity which ruptured in the Big Bang was moments before the state of harmony between the four fundamental forces of the universe. Entropy ensued, for the material world was given over to the dominion of Lucifer, now the fallen demon Satan. Why? Because the violent judgment of God would not only be manifested by angels, but by material-spiritual creatures elected out of matter itself. In other words, even lowly matter would rise up to punish the unjust action of the Devil. Man was made to seek the just punishment of Lucifer in a truly just war on evil.
The failure of Adam meant precisely man’s rejection to punish with God’s power, submitting instead to Satan’s lordship over this world.
Pallmeyer’s non-violence naturally rejects the notion of a hell where the powers arrayed to dishonor God are violently punished in eternity. There is no second coming of Christ, no final judgment, no hell to punish the unjust. Indeed, if God’s power cannot punish the unjust, then neither can ours. Even the sacrifice of Christ on the cross is rejected, for it is a violent action accepted by God for our sins. Sacrifice is violent – but it is a violence necessary for to free us from the death grip of Satan’s dominion of this world and restore us to order as the sons of God, called to join St. Michael and his angels to cast Satan and his demons into hell where they belong. For Catholics, accepting radical non-violence means rejecting the Sacrifice of the Mass. Or as Pallmeyer says:
“We must counter and transform… Christian theologies that ignore the radical nonviolence of Jesus and that reinforce violent expectations of history… [creating] alternative worship, liturgies, and music that reflect the nonviolent spirit of Jesus…” (Pallmeyer 168).
In the book Worship in the Spirit of Jesus (co-authored with Bret Hesla), Pallmeyer’s conception of liturgy omitted seven essential parts of Christian worship because they violate the dogma of non-violence. These seven elements are: repentance, the Kyrie, readings from scripture alone, the Bible as the Word of God, Creeds, prayers of petition, and any sense of sacrifice. The seventh and final point means “not using images such as ‘Lamb,’ ‘blood shed for you,’ ‘died for your sins,’ and ‘personal savior.’” (Pallmeyer-Hesla 97-98). Liturgy is chiefly the worship of God, but it is also a teacher of the faith. To accept a theology of radical non-violence means rejecting the key tenants of the Christian faith expressed and taught through the liturgy. More importantly, the non-violent liturgy fails to shape the kinds of personsalities which are faithful to God and eager to do his will. The faithful Christian soldiers of Rome who risked their lives in battle and in martyrdom are the kinds of men our liturgy ought to produce.
Channeling his inner Luther, Pallmeyer commits himself to his seven-point renunciation of authentic Christian worship as if they were the new Ninety-Five Theses, using a faulty definition of liturgy to argue that: “If liturgies are ‘works of the people,’ they can be ‘reworked’ by the people” (Pallmeyer-Hesla 98).
Non-violence is ultimately what Pallmeyer worships. His theology is a renunciation of Christian history, Christian theology, Christian scripture, and Christian liturgy. It downplays the real evil that must be punished because it espouses the dangerous notion that “God’s power… can’t punish us or others for being unjust.” Beliefs such as this lead to a desperately flattened faith, devoid of beauty and destiny. It was said at the beginning that Pallmeyer’s vision of Christianity was one of hope, that a reset was needed to restore it to its goodness – but this is not true because Pallmeyer’s setup is ultimately fictitious, the upset identical with the historical Christianity actually exists, and the reset is illusory and in effect, a non-ending.
Pallmeyer’s narrative is a non-story. It does not reflect the language of King or the reality of the Christianity it seeks to empty and subvert to radical non-violence. Let us end with a note of warning regarding this subversion:
“Christian theology today… is the art of choosing between incompatible and irreconcilable Biblical portraits of God without acknowledging that is what we are doing. This sleight of hand is necessary because most Christians… are unwilling to challenge the authority of the Bible even though it is dominated by violent images of God and violent expectations of history” (Pallmeyer 159, emphasis in original).
St. John ends his first epistle as Jesus ended his life, with seven last words. For John, these words are “Children, be on your guard against idols” (1 John 5:21). The radical non-violence of Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer's Saving Christian from Empire is indeed one of these idols.
Works Cited:
Nelson-Pallmeyer, Jack. Saving Christianity from Empire. New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2005. Print.
Worship in the Spirit of Jesus can be read in full online at: http://www.ucc.org/the-pilgrim-press/pdfs/wsj.pdf