Wednesday, September 03, 2003
To criticize liberals
Tonight in my "History of Christian Thought" class, we engaged in a rather frustrating discussion of martyrdom in the early church. Someone threw out the idea that the early Christian martyrs wanted to be "right" and wanted to be part of an elite, and that was why they were martyred. This was interesting in the context of a class in which we were told that we had to understand the broader context of the surrounding culture in order to understand Christianity's development. Here are some things that could have been said, but weren't (largely because I'm not very aggressive in situations where I have to raise my hand, because I think that's stupid).
First, it is worth noting that the common thread of most non-Christian religions at the time was that they didn't shake things up. Judaism was potentially subversive, but the leaders made a gentlemen's agreement with the governing authority that granted the Jewish leaders some limited autonomy and gave them the privelege of opting out of the emperor's cult. This gentlemen's agreement had the effect of making Judaism ultimately about the cultic, ritual side of the religion, with very little emphasis on social justice, as in the pagan mystery religions that proliferated around the same time. Christians were much more openly subversive, following the example of Christ. Already, Jesus had shaken up the complacency of the Jewish ruling class, who followed the shameful example of all too many leaders of oppressed groups by further oppressing their own people, in this case with an overzealous application of the Mosaic law on the common people that went far beyond the obvious intention of that law. Jesus' attack on the money changers in the temple was a very direct attack on the fragile balance of power in Palestine, and as such, he was eliminated (although if the law of unintended consequences ever applied, it was here).
Naturally, although the early Christians considered themselves to be Jews to a large extent, the "real" Jews didn't want to be associated with such rabble-rousers. As Christianity and Judaism became more distinct, the Christians' refusal to worship the emperor became more problematic -- whereas the Jews had a specific exclusion, the Christians (as a new, distinct group) did not. In order to follow the Christian ideal to the utmost, the Christian had to refuse, even to the point of death, to worship the emperor, and those who showed such superhuman endurance were (rightly, in my opinion) placed on a pedestal as examples. Perhaps there were some opportunistic martyrs, but it seems ridiculous to assume that was always the case. To assume that the martyrs simply wanted to appear to be more "right" than others also ignores the ways in which the gospel radically re-imagined human life, as well as to ignore the concrete political reality of the time.
To worship the emperor was essentially to worship a war machine. It was to worship a government that routinely used crucifixion and other means that we could only describe as terroristic to preserve its own power. It was to worship a system that exalted one man to a position in which he could do literally whatever the hell he wanted, until he was (probably) assassinated, at which point another man would be installed who could do literally whatever the hell he wanted. It was a thoroughly unjust and oppressive situation for the vast majority of Roman subjects, and worshipping the leader of that system was worshipping a system of raw power, arbitrary injustice, and death. It is no mistake that John the Revelator uses Nero's number as the number of the Beast (and as a sidenote, think how much more dangerous Christianity would become if Christians took seriously what it meant for Revelation to label a political leader as the Beast and the enemy of God). Is it really the case that dying to "prove a point" against this system is somehow bad or self-assertive? The real question is how anyone who took seriously the teachings of Jesus could do otherwise -- not because of some kind of formal prohibition against idolatry, but because of what the emperor really stood for. The early Christians were a radical, subversive group who wanted nothing more than a complete overhall of society. The Romans were really smart, first in trying to kill them off, then later domesticating them.
So yeah, martyrdom was all about stubborn insistence on being right. It's a good thing that we've stopped worrying about that kind of thing, so that Christianity could become the rather unfunny joke that it all too often is in our day.