Without Empire: The Invitation of Pacifism and the ‘End’ of History

Introduction

Evaluating the propositional and ethical content of pacifism in a direct positivist manner—considering its various current theological permutations in order to arrive at a quick and conclusive ‘yes’ or ‘no’—is a false short-cut. We have to take a longer, slower way by situating pacifism in the context of a much wider network of practices, reading strategies, narrative arcs and political identities, each of which is open to contestation, that emerge out of the lived experiences of experimenting with being the people of God. Seeking to come to an understanding of pacifism for today—enquiring whether it ought to be evaluated as a command, a regulative ideal or an impossibility—raises the more complicated and less clear questions of whether and how a network of practices, reading strategies, narrative arcs and identities that function to inform and animate pacifism can genuinely be taken up and embodied by a people today given the realities of our world. What can be said at the outset, however, is that evaluating pacifism is not a question of whether any human being can possibly live a ‘perfectly’ peaceful existence given certain real or imaginary situations; that question is a distraction. A more relevant question is whether the current socio-political landscape is capable of being mapped by pacifism’s theological language. Does that have a credible grip on our world and is it a live option to navigate our world using its set of references and practices? To a large extent, its justification will depend on its explication.

Before I launch into the investigation, I want to acknowledge my own situation and life story. I grew up in Copenhagen, Denmark. My schooling was in Skt. Petri, which is the oldest German school outside Germany—die älteste deutsche Auslandsschule—and as such I became acutely aware at an early age of the complexities of the Second World War. Alongside stories of workers’ strikes and public gatherings characterized by nonviolent resistance, I heard stories of allied bombings of German cities that my teachers had grown up in. ¹ Adding to that felt complexity, my grandfather on my mother’s side, Carl Mommer, had been a soldier in the Wehrmacht on the Russian front. He deserted the army after having been ordered to shoot to kill instead of intentionally aiming high of the target. I never met my grandfather since he moved to Australia before I was born, and died of alcoholism there.

From reading the poems and the histories of the German occupation of Denmark, it was understood from the very beginning that the occupation would not last. The pressing task was not how to throw the German forces out, it was how to survive during the occupation and how to imagine the possibilities for Danish identity afterwards. It was not until I started reading political philosophy and political theology that I realized that the questions that were asked by Danes, and indeed it seems by occupied people everywhere, are very much the same. What is the best strategy for survival: collaboration or resistance? What will our identity then be on the other side of occupation, if we survive it? So I come to the question of pacifism with a history of my own that inevitably shapes my point of view.

What is Theological Pacifism?

By pacifism, I mean a principled rejection of violence as a means of social change or resistance. Pacifism rejects a war-oriented way of social being-in-the-world, not just the act of war itself. To support that way of life, pacifism offers (at the cognitive level) an analysis of the human social and political predicament—it is a philosophy of history, a theoretical intervention into the perception of history as an always-already succession of powers—and (at the visceral register) an affective dispositional cultivation of hope without naiveté.

Theological pacifism, then, is a theoretical understanding of the drama of human socio-political reality in relation to God and God’s desires for human sociability. For this article, I will concern myself with the socio-political shape of the biblical texts as they inform the understanding of the human drama. I should confess that I come to the biblical texts—the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament—not as a biblical scholar but as a philosopher interested in the political and epistemological moves that are being made by a people under certain on-the-ground political conditions. I have discussed elsewhere the epistemological consequences of pacifism, arguing that it provides resources that help us think between and beyond the broad epistemological strategies of foundationalism and relativism. ² In this article, I will concern myself with the theo-political resources to resist the way of life structured by what I will call Empire.

In the Gospels, Jesus of Nazareth advocates for a way of being the people of God that does not buckle or crumble under the considerable economic, religious and political weight of the force of Rome—a renewed Israel. ³ Jesus, on this reading, is a prophetic, non-violent social revolutionary set on overturning the established power hierarchy through the embodied message of the kingdom of a loving God (thus the announcement of the good news to the poor in Luke 4). Enemy- and neighbor-love are central to the new Rule of God. Here ‘love’ is understood neither as a romantic feeling nor as a loyalty to family and tribe, but as embodied in concrete social acts of justice and mercy, which break down the barriers that alienate human existence. Such love is political. Its leading edge is nonviolent resistance to the established power-dynamics and fragmenting hierarchies of the current social fabric. According to this understanding, the politics of love entail pacifism.

Against Empire

On this political reading, the biblical narrative tells a story of a people of God making its way in a world of power that is supported, funded and administered by a wealthy elite. Power is a network of social influences and leverages that shape and guide human existence. In the ancient world, power was largely directed through the new political-religious-economic technology of cities along with their palaces and temples and markets. Our current realities may seem very different, but as Michael Mann has argued at length, our world is (surprisingly) like the ancient world with respect to the realities of power and the function of power in our lives—power has not gone away, it has just found new ways of asserting and inserting itself. ⁴

I use the collective term ‘Empire’ for a dominant network of power, the way that an elite concentrates and maintains power over time, and the bio-political way in which that network of power writes itself into human bodies and desires by setting constraints, evoking desires and prescribing goals for human existence. ⁵ I use this term because I want to link up with the political readings and critiques of Empire that have recently emerged in biblical studies. ⁶ Later in the article I will turn to the analysis of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to make the point that, even though this world can be described as post-imperial, Empire is alive and well in our day.

The message of Empire is consistently the same throughout human experience: to have influence one must have power, and the one with the most power is in the desirable position to define reality and to set the rules of life for others. All who depend on Empire find themselves, to a greater or lesser extent, living their lives in the service of it. That service becomes most apparent when they are called upon to give their lives as a sacrifice to Empire as if to a god. From the perspective of Empire, god is always-already on its side and supports its ruling elite.

The counter claim of the biblical narrative is that the message of Empire is false. It is a truth that is hard-won as it most often arises from below, out of the lived experience of the weak and the poor. It is not the truth of palaces and official scribes and historians; it is the truth of peasants, migrants and the exiled. It is subversive of official truth and its articulation often hides in plain sight—in songs, oracles and stories—but if you read for the ‘hidden scripts,’ as James C. Scott calls them, then you can find it. ⁷ The counter message is coherent, intelligible and provocative: there will come a day—there always comes a day—when the world of Empire will end because only God is Lord. The all-mightiness of God is not demonstrated in the perpetuation of Empire; it is demonstrated in the end of Empire. ⁸ Biblical truth, then, is first and foremost an eschatologically inflected, politically prophetic counter-truth.

The biblical voice is a voice of contestation and of protest—even when it is seemingly perfectly aligned with power as, for example, in the dedication of the temple by Solomon. Consequently, biblical truth can be surprisingly elusive. Walter Brueggemann has argued that the biblical voice is ‘deeply and cunningly ironic’. ⁹ If we read the text innocently or flatly—that is to say, without awareness of the social topography that power creates and without sensitivity to hidden scripts—we are likely to miss the protest that it articulates against the arrangement of power in the world. What lies beneath the surface sometimes contradicts a plain reading of the text. When we read beneath the surface, however, we can see that the claim of Empire—that the current vertical hierarchy and organization of power is supported by God—is undermined and exposed. Sometimes reading beneath the text may even require hearing an unspoken voice of protest, a text that is (strictly speaking) not in the text, because it has been revealed that God is not in the business of supporting empire.

Exodus-to-Exile: A Tragic Narrative

The two most important textual events in the Hebrew Bible that initiate and sustain the ironic distance are the boundary markers of the Exodus-to-Exile narrative arc. Initially, Yahweh through Moses liberates the Hebrews from Egypt and subsequently establishes the foundations of a sense of peoplehood around the tribal identity of Israel. The textual narrative conjures a typological politics of identity that runs throughout the biblical texts in which Israel is called to be ‘not Egypt’. This identity is codified in the giving of the Ten Commandments, which have as their intent to establish a way of life for Israel that would safeguard against a de facto return to the ways of Egypt.

The tragedy of the experiment of Israel-not-Egypt is that as the people enter the promised land, engage in holy warfare with their neighbors, secure their borders by finally eliminating the Philistine threat, choose a king, decide on a location for its capital, and build a temple for their God, Israel gradually transforms itself into a smaller—and initially successful—version of Egypt despite repeated warnings along the way. This becomes Israel’s downfall as Samaria and Jerusalem are sacked, Solomon’s temple is destroyed, and the people are forced into exile. This tragic Exodus-to-Exile narrative arc constitutes a crucial resource for theological pacifism. Without it, theological pacifism is vulnerable to being seen as a fantasy grounded in the human capacity for goodness when in fact it is grounded in the acknowledgment of human brutality under Empire.

As tragic as that history is, what emerges constructively in the experience of Exodus-to-Exile has direct consequences for pacifism: a non-territorial, non-sacrificial religious consciousness. Walter Brueggemann distinguishes broadly between a priestly and a prophetic voice in the Hebrew Bible. Put very briefly, the priestly tradition is concerned with holiness and the prophetic tradition is concerned with justice. He says:

[The holiness and justice] trajectories of command serve very different sensibilities and live in profound tension with each other. The tradition of justice concerns the political-economic life of the community and urges drastic transformative and rehabilitative activity. The tradition of holiness focuses on the cultic life of the community and seeks a restoration of a lost holiness, whereby the presence of God can again be counted on and enjoyed. ¹⁰

I highlight this tension between the priestly and the prophetic traditions because it goes to the core of the issues that surround pacifism (the sacrificial justification for killing).

The prophetic tradition, with its concern for justice, insisted that God was rejecting the religious feasts and assemblies and burnt offerings (Amos 5) and that God did not want his people to bring rivers of oil and ten thousand rams or a first-born (Micah 6). God desired mercy, not sacrifice. In the prophetic tradition, the practice of sacrifice is governed by repentance and a change in the way of life of a people—a living sacrifice. By contrast, in the priestly tradition, the grammar that governs sacrifice is that something must pay the price of restoring the lost holiness with its life by dying. It is precisely this ‘priestly’ sacrificial theology—that blood must be shed in the salvation from evil—that often inspires or underwrites the logic of war as soldiers are called upon to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of salvation from the threat of evil. The battlefield, in the priestly vision of a holy war, becomes an altar.

Richard Beck has argued that the tension between sacrifice and mercy, or holiness and justice, is no historical accident. ¹¹ It is due to incompatible psychological factors at work in human beings with respect to boundary maintenance: one seeks to get rid of that which is dirty and to erect boundaries to safeguard the holy, whereas the other seeks to embrace that which is on the other side and to break boundaries down in an act of vulnerability and friendship. These are incompatible human psychological motivations.

Beck notes, additionally, that the intimacy of love is a form of barrier breaking or inclusion. Love, then, is inherently experienced as a boundary issue. ¹² Love recognizes a backdrop of boundaries between in-group and out-group, but instead of reifying those boundaries it intentionally folds that which was outside inside. Without collapsing differences, love is able to say: ‘I am you and you are me’. Thus Jesus’s command to love one’s neighbor and one’s enemy is a command to practice a radical form of inclusion and mercy, one that is diametrically opposed to the logic of purity and sacrifice. On this view, love is the non-violent revolutionary social act that breaks down boundaries between people—creating what the psychologist Arthur Aron calls the concrete and measurable intimacy of ‘other in self and self in other’. ¹³

It follows from the breaking down of boundaries between self-and-other that love is inherently non-territorial—or, perhaps better, it overcomes territoriality. If one takes up this understanding of love, as I read Jesus doing, it means precisely that one does not have to cast Romans out of Palestine militarily in order to ‘leave Empire’. The geographical territory that is Israel does not need to be purified by expelling the foreigner. Jesus was a descendent of David—Matthew, Luke and John are all in agreement on that point—and he is represented as a Moses-like figure in Mark, Luke and Matthew. The Gospels make it clear that the Messianic expectations on Jesus were set with respect to the Romans. But unlike David, he did not secure the boundaries of Israel by casting out the Romans (his contemporary Philistines), and unlike Moses, he preached entering the kingdom of God without leaving.

This non-territorial point of his message was, perhaps predictably, a constant source of confusion among Jesus’ disciples (then and now). To understand the non-violent, non-territorial prophetic politics of love as central to his project of inaugurating the kingdom of God is arguably the only way to make sense of what Jesus is doing politically in the Gospels. Theologically speaking, it is the foolishness of the cross and the victory of the resurrection: seen from one point of view, the story of Jesus is the failure of a revolution, but seen from another point of view, it is a victory of a very different revolution.

Having seen a broader network of practices and convictions in which pacifism belongs—the distinction between Egypt and Israel, the ironic reading strategy, the identification of the message of Empire and the counter-message of God, the tension between priestly and prophetic grammars of sacrifice, and the non-violent and non-territorial political action of love—the question then turns on whether it makes any sense to embody those practices today. Is there something like the powers that can be said to occupy our world, and is our world a world in which there are wars and opportunities for revolutionary social action—in short, is there something like Empire today and is it possible to resist it?

Hardt and Negri Against Empire Today

In their trilogy Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that sovereignty has taken a new, global form in our day. ¹⁴ Empire has transcended its national moorings and it has become a composition of both national and supranational organisms. Being composed also of supranational organisms, Empire has become decentered and de-territorialized.

Imperialism was the territorial extension of the sovereignty of the nation-state beyond its own borders. The imperial vision was to parcel up all the countries according to sovereignty—English, French, Portuguese, Dutch and so on—and perhaps, eventually, this would be their end game, to be the single sovereign of the entire world. But the world of today is far from that trajectory as corporations such as Apple, Nestlé, Walmart, British Petroleum and Lego span national boundaries and disturb easy divisions between nation states such as the United States, Switzerland, China, Saudi Arabia and Denmark. The result is that no nation state can form the center of an imperialist project, not even the United States though it continues to occupy a prominent place due to its military strength. The point of Hardt and Negri’s trilogy is that while imperialism may be dead and gone, Empire is very much alive and well—more so than ever as the technologies of biopower (the ability of Empire to inscribe itself into our very bodies and desires) are more effective than ever before, but more significantly, Empire has itself overcome the problem of territory by transcending imperialism.

How do Hardt and Negri imagine resisting Empire? Here, famously, they posit the multitude. Within the multitude, they identify a heroic sub-identity of the multitude: the militant. The militant is the one who best expresses the life of the multitude in his or her resistance to Empire. In the past, the militant was the ‘fundamental actor of the “long march” of the emancipation of labor from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries’. ¹⁵ Militancy is a positive and constructive activity; it resists Empire in a creative way such that rebellion becomes a project of love. The theological resonances here are striking: the multitude is like the people of God, and the militant is like the saving messiah. Hardt and Negri even imagine a coming materialist ‘City of God’. Inspired by Saint Francis of Assisi, the militant identifies in the condition of the multitude, and discovers there the power of a new society: positing the joy of being against the misery of power.

At this point their attention turns to war. On their analysis, Empire is interested in maintaining a constant threat of violence because it effectively suspends democracy, and democracy is essential to the revolutionary decision-making of multitude. War and the threat of war, then, are mechanisms of containment and suspension of democracy. Non-democratic power uses and needs war to maintain its own existence, which effectively reverses the relationship between politics and war. ‘War is no longer an instrument at the disposal of political powers to be used in limited instances, but rather war itself tends to define the foundation of the political system.’ ¹⁶ War—including civil war using the rhetoric of police action—supports the political system.

Eschatology and the ‘End’ of History

I need, finally, to clarify this ‘end of history’ and the way in which it cannot be deconstructed and folded back into Empire. The announcement of the ‘end of history’ takes the discussion into the thorny brambles of eschatology and to what John Howard Yoder calls the ‘War of the Lamb’. ²⁴

Yoder points out that the logic advanced by Marxists in his day, and by Hardt and Negri in our day, is no different from the logic of so many other socio-political movements: once we know the right cause of history—and where history should be going—we should be willing to sacrifice everything for it. We should be willing to sacrifice the value of our own lives, but especially the value of our enemy’s lives—all the while, of course, proclaiming that we value human life ultimately. This is the stance embodied by the militant. Yoder says: ‘the achievement of the good cause, the implementation in history of the changes we have determined to be desirable, creates a new autonomous ethical value … in the name of which evil may be done’. ²⁵ The right and good cause of history becomes more valuable than life, and achieving its end justifies the means of sacrificial killing. This is the seed of Empire.

From this tension between the value of the cause and the value of human life, Yoder distinguishes between two kinds of pacifism: a ‘pragmatic’ pacifism that argues it can achieve what war seeks to achieve, but much better without violence, and a Christian pacifism that follows the logic of cross and resurrection instead of pragmatic efficiency. As Yoder says, ‘the triumph of God comes through resurrection and not through effective sovereignty or assured survival’. ²⁶ This clarifying distinction of two kinds of pacifisms can help us to see that the ‘roots of the crusading mentality … constitute a deformation of biblical faith’. ²⁷ For Yoder, the church bears responsibility for having contributed to the mentality in which nations make war. The Christian church has seen itself as guardians of the goal of history making the cross into a sign of conquest—and we continue to do so.

Yoder is surely right about the fundamentally Christian logic of cross-and-resurrection. But I wonder whether, in his desire to distance himself from anything that can be captured by a pragmatic logic in order to avoid having to argue over war on a case-by-case basis, he has not misidentified the actual cause of what contributes to making the cross into a sign of conquest and Empire instead of a sign of its resistance. I suspect that the seed of Empire is not to be found in an ethical shift towards efficiency, but in abandoning the theological resources of the network of practices, ironic reading strategies, narrative arcs and political identities that I have discussed in this article. After Emperor Theodosius, Christians no longer understood themselves at the end of the failed Exodus-to-Exile narrative arc. Rather, they saw themselves with King David and Solomon and the possibility of creating a new Israel story, one that (this time) would not fail. Christians took up a territorial and sacrificial grammar—sacrifice, once again, entailed the willingness to shed blood and kill. This is the seed of Empire in Christianity. The real issue is not with pragmatic pacifism, but with the theological tradition of Empire, which is currently the dominant theological tradition (Catholics and Protestants are together in this).

There are two benefits to setting things up this way. First, Yoder’s ‘end’—and note that ‘end’ here carries the Greek double meaning of final destination and final rationality—as cross-and-resurrection set over against pragmatic efficiency leaves him without a crucial resource to articulate an ‘end’ that resists deconstruction into Empire. Yoder’s eschatology is one in which the victory of the Lamb entails that ‘every knee shall bow’. What is this, if not a final God-governed Empire? Once cross-and-resurrection is set over against Empire, however, we can note that history so far has been the histories of the (seemingly) never-ending Empires. But if, with Jesus, we leave Empire behind, participating in Jesus’ cross-and-resurrection narrative, then we also leave that history behind. This ‘end’ cannot be deconstructed because it does not depend on the ultimate conversion of the kingdoms of this world.

Second, it would allow theological pacifism to move conversationally much closer to pragmatic pacifism and thereby benefit from the rich resources of that non-theological tradition. The case-study literature on the pragmatic effectiveness of non-violent resistance, social change and conflict resolution has been accumulating to the point of being much closer to shifting the burden of proof to the ‘warist’ side (or at least that taking up a warist position is now just as ideological as taking up a pacifist position—it no longer enjoys the status of unquestioned assumption). This does not mean that the differences between the two pacifisms are negligible; Yoder’s legitimate concern regarding pragmatic pacifism is that the pragmatic pacifist will be tempted to abandon the pacifist position when non-violent engagement seems to fail. Here, the theological pacifist can continue to stand on the resources of Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom of God. ²⁸

Conclusion

There is a question that must come before we ask whether we should be pacifist or what theological resources might be available for us if we decide to take up the pacifist stance. That question is fundamentally theological: Is God to be identified as being on the side of Empire or not? If we identify the purposes of God with the purposes of Empire, then the theological resources to take up pacifism will slowly but inevitably erode. ‘Christ is Lord’ will begin to mean something very different and can now be uttered by a crusading knight without anyone sensing that something has gone profoundly wrong. ²⁹

I have argued that to evaluate pacifism, we need to place pacifism into a much broader context of reading strategies, contrasting religious and political identities between Egypt and Israel, convictions concerning the loving God and God’s liberating acts, and narratives of cross and resurrection. At the center stands a non-sacrificial, non-territorial love ethic of Jesus of Nazareth breaking down barriers between rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, male and female, friend and enemy. It is the alternative that names the Kingdom of God, and to enter it fully is to take up a way of being in the world that does not carry the seeds of Empire within it. It is to enter the ‘end’ of history, an end that does not depend on the ultimate conversion of the kingdoms of this world. Pacifism has a grip on our world, and it lands, neither as a command nor as an ideal, but as an invitation to leave Empire behind and to come follow Jesus of Nazareth, who is Christ.