It took a lot for me to learn to love Paul.
He was a persecutor of Jesus followers before his conversion, even participating the extrajudicial execution of Stephen, the first Christian martyr. He became a dynamic apostle. The texts traditionally attributed to him often contradict themselves. In his letters, he is abrasive, passive-aggressive at times, and not-so-passively at others. His ego seems to have been easily bruised. He never knew the living Jesus, and in many places he seems to miss the point entirely, placing too much emphasis on the cross as a sin sacrifice, ignoring the actual hands-on ministry and social teachings of Jesus that we find in the gospels. It is easy to see him as a poor lens distorting the pure light of Christ.
But as I studied Paul, first for my honors thesis and then more fully in Divinity School, I learned that many of the most contradictory and difficult texts were not actually written by Paul, were either pseudo-graphic works like 1st Timothy or later scribal insertions, like the infamous line where Paul, proponent of equality, the “no Jew nor Greek, no male nor female in Christ†guy, suddenly and inexplicably declares that women should just shut up, sit down, and put on a hat. The more I learned about Paul, especially the Paul found in the authentic texts, the more I could see the good and the bad, understand the man in his context, which is important, for without him there would be no Christian church.
I came to understand the important and creative role he played in allowing the Way of Jesus to bridge the cultural chasm between Hebrew monotheism and the dynamic, cosmopolitan polytheists of the Roman Mediterranean. He could do this because he himself crossed boundaries. A strictly-observant Jew of the Diaspora, a Pharisee, he was also a Roman citizen. This was a big deal. Citizenship, even in the age of the Caesars, was at the core of Roman identity, and it was a great honor for a non-Roman, especially one in remote and colonized lands, to be granted its rights and protections. This is why Paul has two names, the one we use, which is Latin, and his Hebrew name, Saul, something common among those with dual-status.
While his Roman citizenship, his familiarity with the languages, cultures and concepts of the empire, allowed Christianity to spread, while he gave us some amazing and memorable texts and theology, he also planted a seed that would bear its most poisonous fruit nineteen centuries later. For Paul, trusting in Roman justice, wrote to the churches in Rome, urging those who would follow Jesus to obey earthly rulers. He seems to have forgotten that Jesus was a community organizer and protester involved in acts of civil disobedience, that it was Roman justice that unjustly executed the rabbi from Galilee in brutal and public fashion. Jesus was anything but a man of the system. He was at the margins, among the oppressed, helping those the system had left behind.
Tradition tells us that Paul’s faith in Roman justice was misplaced, that he too would be executed for the crime of challenging the status quo.
The Way of Jesus would be co-opted by those with civil power. From the moment Constantine had a dream, Christianity would become conflated with the state, would place the agenda of the state above the agenda of Jesus. At times the church would itself become a state. And all too often, it was Paul that was quoted when a Christian was asked to place the command of the state above the commands of the gospel. Like Paul, Martin Luther, one of the two great 16th century reformers, used princely power and civic status to his advantage, tightened the binding of Romans 13 on the heart of German Christianity. Then, in 1933, Adolph Hitler rose to power.
Hitler found strong support among a group that was called German Christians. To us, this term simply means Christians who happened to be German, but in the context of that time, it was a pressure group, the Moral Majority or Religious Right of the Weimar Republic, they were the Falwells and Robertsons of the age. They were nationalists, idolizing the nation and its symbols. They glorified and romanticized the past, part of a wider “folkish†movement. They de-emphasized the Hebrew Scriptures and the entire context of the teaching and healing ministry of Jesus. They emphasized the duty of Christians to obey the state, citing Romans 13.
Jewish thinker Hannah Arendt would, decades later, coin the phrase “the banality of evil†to describe how the Germans, including the German Christians, fell in line, one small step at a time, with the Nazi program, the boring everyday nature of unspeakable horrors done with German efficiency, but not all Christians went along. A small minority resisted. These resistors, these members of what called itself the Confessing Church, would face persecution. Among their number was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, revered by many today as a great saint of the church, who would be executed just days before the war ended, and Karl Barth, who would go on to become the greatest Protestant theologian of the 20th Century. Barth, a professor at the University of Bonn, would lose his job for refusing to swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler, and would eventually flee to his native German-speaking canton in Switzerland. But first he would serve as the primary author of the Barmen Declaration, a statement that condemned the willingness of so-called christians to align themselves with the hateful rhetoric and goals of the Nazi party.
The Barmen Declaration is included as an insert in your Order of Service, and I ask that you take it home this week, read it, pray with it, for it has much to say to us in our current situation.
The first point is simply this, that Jesus is the Word of God, and that his ministry and teaching, as attested to scripture, are the sole source of the church’s proclamation. This sentiment was shared by the Christian Church, a diverse unity movement that originated in early 19th century America. That movement had six principles, the first being “The Lord Jesus Christ is the only head of the church,†the third that “The Holy Bible is a sufficient rule of faith and practice.†We will speak of this American movement again in a few weeks, for one branch joined what would become our United Church of Christ, while others would become the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), our closest ecumenical partners.
Barmen speaks to a particular situation, makes clear that the church’s proclamation should not be subject to the political or ideological whims of the day, that it cannot place itself under the authority of an earthly leader or fuhrer, and that it cannot itself take on the role of the state.
It was a bold act of defiance against bullies and thugs. We know how this ends, first with the slaughter of more than 70,000 disabled individuals under Operation T4 starting in 1939, then on to the ghettoes and death camps, homosexuals, Roma and Jews slaughtered in the millions. But none of that was yet taking place in 1934, when the Barmen Declaration was written. Hate speech and scapegoating are not harmless, have never been harmless, for even if those who use violent speech do not use violent action, their followers will, the dog whistle effect so discussed in America today, the dog whistle that led to a Jewish Congresswoman being shot in the head near Tuscon, the dog whistle that lead to a Jewish healer hanging on a cross on Golgotha, that fueled pogroms, that lead from the Beer Hall Putsch to gas chambers of Auschwitz.
Our Congregationalist ancestors gave up on the idea that the church and the state should be one a very long time ago, for while we bring our faith into the public arena with us, as Barmen declares we must, history has taught us the dangers of religious warfare, of theocracies like Cromwell’s protectorate, the Islamic State, and the brutal dictatorship in Saudi Arabia.
Barmen says simply that while we are whole people, citizens and disciples, that the church must not take over the state and the state must not take over the church. Yet, Barth and the signatories at Barmen are bold enough to declare that we are called to be moral and faithful into the public sphere. You cannot say “Oh, that’s politics. My faith has no bearing there,†then vote for horrific and barbaric policies. And, in an age where so many worship the false idols of a nation and its sacred symbols, in an age of dystopian individualism, it bears stating that one cannot separate one’s faith from one’s business life either.
Barmen, or maybe Buddhism, for it is the Buddhists who, in the Noble Eightfold Path, demand “right speech, right action, right livelihood.†And we might add, right voting.
The Confessing Church saw the warning signs, resisted, risked careers and lives, in 1934!
And here we stand, in a nation where hateful rhetoric, scapegoating and racism have become normative, acceptable. Where political rallies are violent and dangerous, where the weak are further victimized, where a state underwater diverts disaster funds to defend discriminatory legislation.
We are alarmed and informed by Barmen, by the courage, by the theology that wrestled with the role of the disciple in the political sphere. We are terrified by the German Christian movement that was willing to pervert the gospel, to turn God into an idol that hated who they hated, for we see it all too often today.
The Barmen Declaration insists that we be prophetic, that we proclaim the gospel even when to do so is scary, just as Congregationalists have done, just as the United Church of Christ has done, since our ancestors first dared speak out against slavery, to our becoming the first Christian denomination to call for marriage equality, to 2015, when we repudiated the doctrine of discovery, the pernicious lie that claimed Europeans discovered the Americas, as if the civilizations of the First People never existed.
The genocide of First Peoples. Slavery. Stolen land and stolen labor. The New Jim Crow. Mass Incarceration. Demagoguery.
We can do better than this. Paul was wrong when he said those who follow Jesus must always also follow the state. Like Jeremiah, we must confront the state when it is wrong. We must construct new theologies that move us closer to the proclamation, the one Word of God who is Jesus, protestor, healer, teacher, activist, victim of state violence, victor over state violence, our savior and messiah. While the herd follows the Pied Pipers of fear and hatred, we must take confidence in a God who is with us, must know that love wins, every single time. We can stand up and speak out, even if that task is sometimes lonely, as good Christians, as faithful Congregationalists, as the courageous United Church of Christ has always done.
The first principle of Barmen:
Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death.
We reject the false doctrine that the Church could and should recognize as a source of its proclamation, beyond and besides this one Word of God, yet other events, powers, historic figures and truths as God’s revelation.
May it ever be so. Amen.