American Theology - Roman Theology

Recently the pastor of a Baptist church in Tempe, AZ, gave a sermon entitle "Why I Hate Barak Obama" (you can find the sermon here, or, if you feel sick to your stomach, you can read a report of it here). Steven Anderson then mentioned, both to his parishoners and to a reporter from Fox, that he regularly prays for Obama's death (maybe God would strike him with a tumor, like Ted Kennedy!). This is obviously pretty crazy, and as far as Christian doctrine goes, heresy. The notion of praying for someone's death is rejected everywhere in Scripture. What is common is to pray for God's judgment on nations and people who are oppressive, exploit the poor, treat the alien as less than human, and who forget widows and orphans.

Of course there is violent imagery in the Bible (how could their not be? Humans are violent). Yet, over and over, God fights for Israel (Ex. 14.13; Ex. 17; Ezra 8.21ff), and punishes those Israelite Kings who presume to fight for themselves (2 Cron 16, 20). The NT is even more emphatic, from Jesus' example of a violent death at the hands of the Romans, to Paul's admonition to accept the authority of the worldly powers. Resistance, in the NT world, is always non-violent, politically marginal (although very political), and focuses on Jesus' Kingship (or Presidentship, or whatever authority figure you can think of) over the entire world, and the church's responsibility of helping to inaugurate this empire throughout the world. This categorically rejects any notion that Christians ought to pray for something like death to a particular person, because that would imply that they, not God, were somehow sovereign in God's empire, that they could somehow mete out judgment over life and death. Nowhere is this "authorized" for disciples of Jesus.

But the real question, in my mind, is this: how is it possible for a pastor like Steven Anderson to say such a thing? This isn't a question of psychological motives (like 'he's mentally deranged'), nor is it a question of argument (like, 'what's his argument?'). It's a question of: how is a thing like that possible to say in 21st century America. The fact that he said it shows that's its possible; his parishoners understood him. Put another way: it would be impossible for someone today to say "a woman's life-force resides in her hair" (a common thing to say in the ancient Greco-Roman world). No one would understand this, because the notions implied in this statement would make no sense. We could imagine what this might mean, but the statement would have lost its associated field (as Foucault calls it), a field that renders it possible to say this statement with force.

Yet Anderson said that he prayed for Barak Obama's death. His parishoners understood it. How? The answer, I think, can be seen from one of the "essays" on the Faithful Word Baptist Church's website. The title of the piece is "Correcting the King James Bible" (as in "don't - it's perfect!"). Anderson makes the absurd claim that the King James Bible is the perfect (as in "complete") word of God, and that finally, in 1611, when Paul says, "For we only know in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end" (1 Cor 13.9-10), this was fulfilled! The absurdity of that interpretation does not need to be commented upon. However, the real "meat" of his argument shows perfectly how this his statement could have been made:

In the Old Testament God chose the nation of Israel to be His tool to bring the gospel and the word of God to the world. This is why he chose to deliver the Old Testament scriptures in the Hebrew language. In the New Testament God chose the Gentiles to be his chosen vessels to carry the gospel to the world, which is why he delivered the New Testament to mankind in the Greek language. Shortly thereafter Antioch and other Syrian-speaking areas became a great hub of the gospel; therefore multitudes of copies of the Bible in the Syrian language were produced.

In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the nation God was using the most was the nation of England. Over time, the United States of America picked up the torch of the gospel and has been used by God unlike any other nation. The United States has mightily been used by God to take the gospel to the world. English has also become the universal second language of the world. In God’s foresight, he supplied the English-speaking people with a perfect preservation of his word, the King James Bible. Since then, the King James Bible has been translated directly into hundreds of languages and has been the standard for numerous other foreign language translations.

This is a perfect summary of the ground of possibility for Anderson's prayer for Obama's death. What is that ground? Instead of Imperial Theology in the Roman vein - which a very exciting field of NT studies has been documenting for the last 20 years - we have Imperial Theology in the American vein. This has been with us for a long time as Americans. Just as the Imperial Theology of Augustus and Domitian argued, the U.S. has the "torch" of the God(s) (whether Jupiter or some shadow Christian god), which with the god's "foresight" happened to provide for us (in the form of a book). This would seem strange to most people (especially those who are not Christians), but I would argue that this is actually the form of virtually every government that has ever existed - and in this particular form and content, pretty common even for "secular" Americans.

In other words (and I can't fully develop this argument here, but I will later), all powerful countries develop a theology to legitimize their existence, to develop a fantasy that protects them from their actually ethical practices, and to project a sacralized image to justify itself to others. What I mean by "theology" here is a counter-empirical claim that idolizes an abstract quality about a thing, a quality that may (or may not) inhere in the thing, but which makes such a strong claim on the empirical world that one cannot perceive the world without it. Thus, e.g., Americans have a difficult time in general conceiving how someone could be happy in a Muslim country with no democracy. The reason for this is that democracy, in our sense, is a theological claim. Every resistance - say in Iran, or other places - that citizens give toward their government is immediately cast in a western democratic way, whether the participants conceive what they are doing in this way or not (this of course is not to claim they don't want democracy - but to illustrate the point that theological claims of this sort makes one perceive the empirical world in a certain manner).

Here in the U.S., we have many theological concepts - the "American Dream," touting the president as the "leader of the free world," talk of "peace-keeping activities," etc. From the colonist in the Massachusetts Bay Colony to President Obama (and of course every President in between), as a nation we are captured by our theology. Anderson may be an extreme version of this (part of his and his parishoner's disagreement with Obama is that he is betraying our country's ideals in their view), but his heretical statements make sense only within this context.