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Hope, uncertain and unnamed

05.06.04 | 3 Comments

Curtiss at Hector Rottweiler is signing off. Curtiss was one of the first bloggers I met when I started, and his blog encouraged me that this might be a worthwhile medium after all. Curtiss, I salue you, and I look forward to your next incarnation.

In his last post, Curtiss quotes Mike at Vitia to explain his departure:

Under empire, rhetoric cannot look to the future, and can exist in the present only as hypothesis and speculation. Its most significant role is in rewriting the past to suit the whims of power — but in this, it need convince no one, because of the very fact of power. It is nothing but an ornament, a diversion, a way for personal pride to pass the time. (emphasis mine)

The early Christians found a new rhetoric, and those of us who are not Christians should not underestimate its power. (Or, rather, what its power was). In place of “Caesar is Lord” they lifted up cries of “Jesus is Lord.” They found a radical cry from a new site of power: a backwater prophet killed by the arm of Caesar. They found power not under the Empire but in the shared life (koinonia) of the ekklesia, the assembly of followers of the Anointed One.

It was not long (three centuries?) before Caesar discovered the counter to this threatening rhetoric: adopt it as his own. But it was more than a counter: now Caesar could claim he ruled not simply for Empire but for the purposes of the Nazarene. The ekklesia, founded in opposition to the logic of Empire, would now enjoy the favors of Caesar.

I have not found in Christianity any but the most isolated examples of koinonia since Caesar took up the ekklesia’s rhetoric. Mere hints, really. Or projects doomed from the outset by an ambitious utopianism that was not the Nazarene’s own. Caesar will always topple alternative Empires (if they do not topple him and become Caesars themselves). What Caesar cannot topple is unEmpire, nonEmpire. His tools don’t cut that way.

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