Monday, May 19, 2014

Satan: Lifting the Veil - Part 25: Conclusions?

Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today

Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System

Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?


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Conclusions?
And so this series comes to a close.  There is so much information that I wish I could have included somehow within this series - so many ideas and connections I would have liked to have explored.  And after all the research I've done, I only feel like I have more to explore - my hope is that for my readers, they have found this exploration to be an experience which opened them up to living a truly human life.  And perhaps some of my readers will have decided to do a little research into spiritual matters on their own - this would be a great accomplishment, in my opinion.

I want to give a few concluding thoughts before I end, however.  If it is not clear at this point what my position on the matter of "the Satan" is, I will state it clearly at this point: I believe that what I'd call the satanic or the demonic is a reality, in that it is an actual phenomenon that people across all walks of life have experienced.  But I do not believe Satan is a distinct personality.  Satan is an experience, but not an entity, in my view.

Face your fears....

In "Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination", Walter Wink writes:

[T]he New Testament insists that demons can have no effect unless they are able to embody themselves in people (Mark 1:21-28 par.; Matt. 12:43-45//Luke 11:24-26), or pigs (Mark 5:1-20 par.), or political systems (Revelation 12-13).
The Satanic is a reality that is expressed in the shaming and fear-ridden voices within, as well as through the collective aggression of a society that has affirmed and cultivated these voices. 

Satan teaches us that evil can be deceptive - it is often disguised as good.  But the flipside of this is that even those who have evil also have good in them.  And the irony of the "search for Satan" - as I sincerely hope I have communicated through this series - is that as soon as we mark someone else as belonging to Satan, we have taken on the role of the Accuser.  And so in order to truly fight this nature, we must find ways to fight for the truth without accusation and scapegoating.





To do this, I believe that the church needs to truly embrace dialogue.  First of all, this involves opening dialogue between denominations, and secondly I believe we must learn to dialogue with people of other faiths (or lack thereof).  There is so much we can learn from each other if we would do this.  And we must be clear - dialogue is not the same thing as arguing.  Arguing is really two opposing monologues - two tribal thought models that butt heads.  When we argue, we protect the thought model that has been constructed by the tribe, and defend that model at all costs from the "hostile outside tribes" without ever really considering whether or not their point of view has any merits.  Outsiders are seen as enemies - and so we become Accusers.

But dialogue is about respect.  When I dialogue with you, I don’t necessarily have to end up agreeing with you - I just want to understand why you think the way you do.  Dialogue - rather than assuming you're wrong, evil and stupid - assumes that everyone has reasons for believing the things they believe and wishes to understand these reasons.  We can hope to earn the right to critique these views after we've listened - but dialogue does not enter into the discussion with this agenda.

In “The Emergent Christ”, Ilia Delio writes:

The word dialogue means two interacting logoi, a crossing over from one world into another for the sake of sharing experience, mutual understanding, and mutual trust; a meeting of horizons, enabling return to one's own world with a deepened horizon of meaning.  Dialogue is a form of wisdom when knowledge gained through conversation leads to conversion, a deepening in love, and thus a new way of being in the world. Dialogue that is not self-expansive is self-limiting, and self-limiting dialogue is basically a monologue; essentially, we wind up talking to ourselves.
I think that the apostle Paul gave a good model for dialogue in I Thessalonians 5:19-22:
Do not quench the Spirit.  Do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all; hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil.
There is wisdom in the Yin Yang
Think about that first phrase - “do not quench the Spirit.”  It is implied that if we immediately reject anything that comes our way which does not agree with the thought model we have already constructed, then we are quenching the Spirit.  But conversely, if we accept everything without testing it, we may be subjecting ourselves to evil.  So we carefully, thoughtfully, lovingly test what comes our way - hold on to the good, reject the evil.

In order to dialogue, we have to see the good in our "enemies" - rather than finding the "devil" in them.

And we need to see dialogue as more than a way to spread the message of the church - dialogue is good for us, too.  During the Bill Nye / Ken Ham debate, at one point Nye brought up the scientific mystery of sex - scientists would ask why sex had developed through evolution: wouldn't it be more efficient for a species to reproduce asexually?  And the mystery began to unravel as they studied a certain species of minnow where some of their colonies produced sexually, and others asexually.  And the scientists discovered that the asexual minnows were more susceptible to bacterial infections.  It seems that sex was a biological communication system - a way for a species to pass on the "knowledge" its immune system had gained within the colony.  I think this is a powerful metaphor for what is happening to the church today - because the church has isolated itself, it has become more susceptible to ideological "infections".  But if we can dialogue with outsiders, we can learn from them, and our "immune systems" will be stronger.

The Parable of the Long Spoons
There is an old legend that tells of Rabbi Haim's visit in a vision to the realms of Heaven and Hell.  The legend tells that the Rabbi was given permission to request anything he wanted by his angel guide, and he asked permission to see both Heaven and Hell.  His guide took him first through the gates of Hell, which he was surprised to find were made with ornately worked gold and were quite beautiful.  Through the gates, he entered a large dining hall, and the smell of the food within was mouthwatering.  Rows of tables were piled with exquisite food.  But the people sitting around each table were pale and emaciated - moaning with hunger.  As the Rabbi looked closer, he noticed that each person was holding a long spoon, but that both of their arms were splinted with wooden slats so that they could not bend either elbow to bring the food to their mouths.

"I understand", the Rabbi says - his angel guide replies "but do you?"  At this point the Rabbi is taken to Heaven.  Strangely enough, he notices the gates look quite similar to the gates of Hell.  And upon entering, he finds the same beautiful scene - rows and rows of tables piled high with sumptuous food.  But in this dining hall, each person sitting around the tables looked healthy and well fed.  But strangely enough, the Rabbi noticed that they also had their arms splinted in the same manner, and were holding the same long spoons.

And then he sees it - as the people talked pleasantly, one person would take his spoon, dip it into the food, and lean across the table to feed his neighbor!

The Rabbi pleaded with his angel guide to take him back to Hell so that he could tell them the answer to their plight.  The angel complies, and the Rabbi dashes into the room and shouts to the first starving man he sees: "you do not have to go hungry!  Use your spoon to feed your neighbor, and he will surely return the favor and feed you!"  The man leaps up in anger and shouts in reply: "You expect me to feed the detestable man sitting across the table?!  I would rather starve than give him the pleasure of eating!" 

And then the Rabbi understood fully - Heaven and Hell offer the same circumstances and conditions. The only difference is in the way that people treat each other.

Forgiving the "Devil"

In order to defeat the Accuser, we must see Jesus' teaching of the love of enemies (Mt. 5:43-48, Lk. 6:32-36) as a key doctrine and mission of the church.  And to do this, we must learn to "forgive the devil".  We can no longer see anyone as pure evil, or irredeemable, or even as enemy.  We must see every person as precious. 

St. Jerome once said:

I know that most persons understand by the story of Nineveh and its king, the ultimate forgiveness of the devil and all rational creatures.
Likewise, Thich Nhat Hanh writes:
Unless you know how to love your neighbor, you cannot love God.  Before laying an offering on the altar of God, you have to reconcile with your neighbor, because reconciling with your neighbor is to reconcile with God.  You can only touch God through his creatures; you will not understand what is true love, the love of God, unless you practice the love of humanity.
We need to learn how to see the devil within, and then use this not as a tool for shame, but as a way to open up empathy towards our so-called enemies - so that they might become our brothers. 

In "The Birth of Satan: Tracing the Devil's Biblical Roots", authors T. J. Wray and Gregory Mobley write about the idea of Satan as our half-sibling:

Another virtue of the story of Satan is that it provides a parallel narrative to orthodoxy. Satan fell, and so did Adam. Satan abused his moral freedom by rebelling against the divine will; such rebellions are humanity’s favorite leisure activity. In the Watchers myth, it was the desire for illicit love, the angels’ amorous interest in the forbidden fruit of mortal women, that led to their fall from grace. Similarly, religious traditions urge their congregants to marry within the tribe. In the Lucifer myth, it was the vaunting pride of the rebel angels that led to their fall; as John Milton had Satan say, “Better to reign in hell than serve in heav’n” (Paradise Lost 1:264). Similarly, as the author of Proverbs warned, “Pride goeth before a fall” (Prov 16:18). Thus, Satan is a useful teaching tool, the ultimate bad example in religious instruction; living proof, if indeed he can be said to “live,” of what happens when freedom is not wedded to responsibility. It is as if Satan is an allegorical representative of the human race. Perhaps this is another reason why Satan remains such an attractive figure in Western culture and why his story matters to us. As strange as it may sound, we might actually feel a degree of kinship with the Devil. Indeed, this truth is buried deep within the lore of Satan, in the core tradition of the Watchers myth. For all his horrific personas, Satan is, in many respects, our half-sibling. As the Watchers myth tells it, Satan’s father may have been one of the rebel angels, but his mother was one of the daughters of men. Satan may be our evil older brother, but he is our brother nonetheless. And, through the ingenious machinations of his temptations and traps, we recognize that Satan knows us better than we know ourselves.

A Final Closing Thought
The battle against the Accuser within, and the Accuser without (expressed through the corporate spirit of the Domination Systems of our society) may seem daunting.  But we cannot lose hope - we must learn to see that our faith can move mountains, as Jesus says in Matthew 17:20.  Jesus expressly stated that if we have faith like this, "nothing will be impossible for you."  Jesus was not a superhero who swooped in and took care of all our problems - rather, he was showing us the Way.


In "Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination", Walter Wink outlines a brilliant set of statements that must never be separated.  To do so perverts the truth and functions as a danger to ourselves and others.  The three statements are:

  1. The Powers are good (Rom. 13:1-6).
  2. The Powers are fallen (uh...see Jesus' entire story, and the book of Revelation...for starters).
  3. The Powers must and will be redeemed (Col. 1:20, Phil. 3:21).
If we accept number 1 without the others, we pervert the truth because we end up supporting systems which dehumanize and destroy.  If we accept number 2 without the others, we become agents of chaos who rebel against any and all forms of organization.  But if we keep sight of these three truths, and never lose the hope in the third, I believe that we can change the world.  I will close with one final quote from "Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination":

How remarkable, that despite its sober exposes of the Domination System, the New Testament is so free of gloom or quailing before the Powers! From beginning to end, there is only the note of victory - a victory in the unknown and open future, for the whole human race and the universe, and victory even now, in the midst of struggle. There is an absolute and unshakable confidence that the System of Domination has an end. A new world of partnership, of compassion, of human community, of conscious awareness of the limits of power, awaits us. We are to struggle with all our might and courage for its coming, yet we cannot make it come. The conditions of its arrival are beyond our control, yet we have a fairly clear idea what they are; and as a sufficient number of people are attracted to God's domination-free order, and commit their lives and fortunes to bringing it about, it will happen, because it has been happening, and it is happening now.



Sunday, May 18, 2014

Satan: Lifting the Veil - Part 24: The Advocate

Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today
Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System
Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?

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The Advocate
Throughout this series, we've seen how "the Satan" works as the accusing voices within each man, and within society itself.  And we've seen how Jesus accomplished a total defeat of these voices when he refused to fight by the same methods.

But even more than this, Jesus presents the face of God as the antithesis of the Accuser - the AdvocateI John 2:1-2 tells us that Jesus is "an Advocate with the Father".  The word that is translated as “advocate” is parakletos, and the meaning is along the lines of “defense attorney” - the opposite of the "prosecuting attorney" that "the Accuser" represents. 

Now, those who believe in Penal Substitution often try to turn the situation into Jesus vs. the Father - the Father (who is an angry judge) wishes to condemn us, but Jesus the Advocate stands in the way.  But the problem with this is that Jesus has made many statements along the lines of John 10:30, where he tells us that he and the Father are one (or of one essence, as the footnote says).  So why would we think the Father has a judgmental, angry personality if Jesus is the complete opposite?

Also, it’s interesting to note that the word parakletos is also used for the Holy Spirit in John 14:15-17 and John 15:26-27.  And Jesus identifies this spirit of defending others as the "Spirit of Truth" - so Jesus is saying that ultimate truth is not found in accusing, but in defending!

Jesus changes our image of God from an angry judge to a defense attorney.  In fact, the Bible implies that Jesus is the judge (see Mt. 25:31-46 and Rom. 2:16 for a couple examples)  - and thus the judge is the Advocate!  And how could you lose that case?  In fact, Jesus is the judge who does not judge!  (See John 8:15)


In John 8:1-11, we see Jesus acting both in the role of judge and of defense attorney when an adulterous woman is brought to him.  In refusing to let anyone else stone or condemn this woman, Jesus has taken on the role of the defense attorney.  Jesus does judge her in the way an Advocate would when he tells her “Go now and leave your life of sin.”  He has pointed out her destructive behavior and commanded her to turn from it – because God loves this woman!  Love does not condemn when we disobey – love is saddened because it knows the natural consequences we will face for this destructive behavior.  But rather than condemn her, Jesus is standing on her side as a person, and the people he seems most angry with are the stone throwers.

Later on, in Acts 9:1-22, Jesus is also Paul’s defense attorney.  It is hard to imagine a more hard-hearted person than one who would travel around stoning Christians simply for being Christians.  Paul was full of rage and addicted to control.  But Jesus showed love to him, even in his unrepentant state, and softened his heart.  Jesus loved and healed Paul – and what did Paul do to deserve this?  Nothing.


The good news of the Gospel of Jesus is not that God loves repentant sinners, but that God loves unrepentant sinners.


Perhaps the most dramatic statement of Jesus as defense attorney rather than prosecuting attorney is Jesus’ final words on the cross.  The cross shows us a juxtaposition of two realities: the depth of destruction caused by unloving behavior, and the even greater depth of love in God’s response.  Rather than condemning those who subjected him to such a violent, cruel, senseless death, Jesus says in Luke 23:34:

Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.
Jesus, in his wisdom, knew that you can’t solve the hurt caused by the Accuser by piling on more guilt and fear.  This is why you rarely see Jesus confronting sin - in fact, usually the only sin he points out is the pride of the legalistic pharisees!  In other words, the sin that Jesus is always going on about is the Accusing nature itself!

The Accuser only serves to entrap people within their harmful, damaging lifestyle - I always say that you can't break a habit, you can only replace it.  This is why you will often see smokers gaining weight after quitting - they are merely replacing the bad habit of smoking with a dependency on food to solve their cravings.  So rather than accusing the sinner, Jesus the Advocate comes alongside of them and shows them what makes them special - he gives them a purpose, and replaces their bad habits with good ones.

But the picture of God that Jesus shows us is of a merciful Being.  After commanding his disciples to love their enemies in Luke 6:35, Jesus states that "
you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked."  Not only does Jesus imply here that mercy and love of enemies is a prerequisite for being "children of the Most High", but Jesus tells us that this is how God is.  Jesus follows this statement up by stating this explicitly in verse 36:
Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
Jesus follows this statement up by defining just what this mercy looks like (verses 37-38):
Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.
I am reminded of one of the most powerful scenes in movie history - in "Good Will Hunting", we are introduced to a troubled young man named Will Hunting, who is discovered to be a Math genius.  In one of the final scenes of the movie, Will has a breakthrough with his psychologist.  All throughout the movie, he has been distant and protective of himself.  But as he is talking with his psychologist - Sean (played by Robin Williams) - about the abuse his father put him through, Sean picks up Will's file and says: "Will, you see this, all this shit?  It's not your fault."  Will says, softly and in a non-committal voice "I know."  Sean repeats: "No you don't. It's not your fault."  Will repeats his statement: "I know."  But Sean is relentless - and in a dramatic act of prophecy, he comes alongside Sean and repeats "it's not your fault" while Will breaks down in tears, and you can see all the hurt he's bottled up inside for years being poured out. 


Before we can pour out the unconditional love of God, we must defeat shame.  In "Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead", shame and vulnerability researcher Brene Brown writes:
Shame is highly correlated with addiction, violence, aggression, depression, eating disorders, and bullying. Researchers don’t find shame correlated with positive outcomes at all - there are no data to support that shame is a helpful compass for good behavior. In fact, shame is much more likely to be the cause of destructive and hurtful behaviors than it is to be the solution.

Shame works like termites in a house. It’s hidden in the dark behind the walls and constantly eating away at our infrastructure, until one day the stairs suddenly crumble.
Elsewhere in the book, Brown illustrates how shame is a function of the Domination System - she tells a story of a session she had with a group of college students where a young man told her about "the box":
“Let me show you the box.” I knew he was a tall guy, but when he stood up, it was clear that he was at least six foot four. He said, “Imagine living like this,” as he crouched down and pretended that he was stuffed inside a small box. Still hunched over, he said, “You really only have three choices. You spend your life fighting to get out, throwing punches at the side of the box and hoping it will break. You always feel angry and you’re always swinging. Or you just give up. You don’t give a shit about anything.” At that point he slumped over on the ground. You could have heard a pin drop in the room.
"The Box" is the Accuser's assault on individuality.  The Accuser cannot stand when others are different - unique is not allowed. I think that some people manage to get out of that box, but then everyone else starts smacking them with baseball bats and trying to stuff them back in!  Society hates it when there is a person who doesn’t conform!  That’s the Accuser at work!  But I believe that Jesus, as Advocate, prizes what makes people unique!  God the Advocate boasts of our unique gifts: "look at how special my child is!" 

Those who do not accept the all-inclusive nature of God, revealed through the doctrine of Biblical Universalism, will be ill-equipped, I fear, to adopt Jesus’ non-violent way and speak the voice of the Advocate.  They will have difficulty accepting that violence does not redeem.  Jesus pointed to a different way of understanding judgment - judgment was not the end, but a beginning.  The fire of judgment does not consume, but purifies - as in the oft-used Biblical metaphor of the refiner’s fire (see Mal. 3:3, Heb. 12:29, I Pet. 1:7 for a few examples).  Divine judgment is not intended to destroy, but to awaken through the act of removing impurities.  God’s judgment is more often expressed through passive judgment - allowing the wicked to face the destructive traps that they themselves constructed through their exclusive structures of domination.  Through this understanding, we find that judgment is not the last word, but often the first Word which initiates New Creation.  Jesus’ entire ministry expressed this truth, as he sat at the same table as the “sinners” of his time: those who had been cast out by the political and religious systems.


Jesus the Advocate says “your sins have been forgiven, now go and sin no more” (see John 8:11) - forgiveness comes first and frees the sinner to enter into the kingdom of God, leaving behind their destructive way of life.  But to enter this new Way, we must also be willing to forgive our enemies - we must reject the very mechanism of “enemy” that scapegoats others.  We must cease to identify people by their sins, but see the image of God in them. 

In the Harry Potter series, there is a conversation between Harry and Sirius Black where Harry is worried that he might be bad because he has dark feelings and is often angry.  And Sirius says:

You’re not a bad person. You’re a very good person who bad things have happened to. Besides, the world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters. We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.
Often, in order to love our "enemy", we must see the enemy within - thus Jesus' teaching on projection with the illustration of a log in our own eye (Mt. 7:1-5, Lk. 6:41-42).  Loving the enemy within enables us to extend this love outward to love the "enemy" without - accepting God’s forgiveness and extending it in response.  But if we insist - after being forgiven - that God hates those we hate and refuses to forgive them, we inevitably insert a psychological time-bomb.  Our own hypocrisy, while we may successfully deny and hide from it for a time, will come back to haunt us in the end.  Unconsciously we know that a deity who is hostile towards certain types of people is potentially hostile to ourselves as well.  So we will be locked in a constant battle, and will find no peace.  This battle will ultimately descend into a perfectionism which results in the condemnation of all - the devil’s universalism.


What if "the enemy" represents our own projections?

So we must learn to see our enemies as a mirror - so often, those we have the most difficulty with are displaying characteristics that are very much a part of us.  And this can function as a useful mirror, and show us our own weaknesses which our friends ignore out of love.  Our friends rarely tell us about our faults - this is usually what makes them a friend in the first place: that they are willing to overlook our faults and let them be.  But our enemies can reveal them to us, and this can transform our enemy from a hurdle into a gift.  This becomes a very humbling experience, as we realize that before we can transform our enemies, we must first transform ourselves, and that our enemy has helped us in this task.  Then we can look at our enemies and say: “forgive them, for they know not what they do” - because we understand how the same was true of us.  We can now understand how our enemy has been deluded by the same rulers, authorities, cosmic powers of this present darkness, and spiritual forces spoken of in Ephesians 6:12.

It's time for another break - and next time, I will present some concluding thoughts.

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Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today
Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System
Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Satan: Lifting the Veil - Part 23: Death

Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today

Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System

Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?


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The Death of the Domination System
In the last post, we explored how Jesus' answer to the question of resisting the Domination System was through a complete rejection of its methods of violence - through non-violent resistance.


But to truly understand how we can even be capable of resisting this System, we must understand that Jesus' ultimate answer on how to resist the Domination System was to die to it.  Paul understood this, and wrote in Colossians 2:20 that we must die "with Christ to the elementary principles of the world" and cease to live by its decrees.  And Jesus said we must deny ourselves and take up our cross to follow Him (Mt. 16:24, Lk. 9:23), as well as losing our life for His sake in order to find it (Mt. 16:25, Lk. 9:24).  In the second verse of these passages, when Jesus says that those who seek to save their life will lose it, the original language uses the Greek word peripoiein to speak of making secure.  This literally refers to setting out a boundary or property lines.  And Jesus is saying that by creating walls around ourselves for protection, we are actually shutting ourselves off from life!

By dying to the power of the Domination System, we refuse to give it any hold in our lives - the System loses its power when it ceases to have anything to offer us.  Until we do this, no matter what state we are in - whether it be plenty or want - we will continue to be under the power of the Domination System.  If we have much wealth, our wealth will dominate us as we seek to protect it.  And if we have little wealth, our longing for wealth will dominate us.  Walter Wink illustrates this in "Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination":

Those born to privilege and wealth may miss life by having been installed at the center of a universe revolving around their own desires. Others, born to merciless poverty and the contempt of the ruling class, may miss life by never feeling really human at all. If the advantaged must die to their egocentricity, the underprivileged must die to their hopelessness, fatalism, and acquiescence in their own despoiling.  Rationalists may need to die to idolatry of the mind; dominating personalities to their power; proud achievers to their accomplishments.
By taking up the cross freely, Jesus and his followers deny the power behind empire’s most potent threat, turning it from an instrument of domination into an instrument of liberation.  Only by facing this great fear does one overcome all terror.

The death we must experience is a total death - both of our grasping desires, and of the illegitimate authority the Domination System claims over us.  The first could be called a death of the privatized ego, and the second a death of the superego.  Without a death of the superego, the death of the privatized ego may simply mask the fact that we are a cog in the wheel of the Domination System - the false self that is imposed on us by the Powers.

In Galatians 2:19-20, Paul actually uses the word translated to the Latin "ego" for "I" throughout the passage, so that it could be translated like so:

For through the Law my ego died to the Law, so that I might live to God.  My ego has been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer my ego who lives, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.
This shows that in order to live in Christ, we must no longer identify ourselves through ego of any form, but must identify ourselves through the self-emptying True Self that is Christ - the outward focus of unconditional love which empties itself as a servant (Phil. 2:7).

Philippians 2:6-8 shows us that subjugation to Jesus the king means the end of all subjugation - all forms of domination must go!  Christ does not make all things subject to himself through coercion, but through service, and when they fall under his dominion they enter into this same mode of service.



We must even be freed from the superego of religiosity - for so often the outward focus of legalism hides our own insistence on my will (rather than thy will), which only results in a subconscious condemnation.  And legalism distorts the goodness of God's creation.

But the wisdom of God which was made flesh in Jesus must even be made known to the church and the authorities of the heavenly realms (see Eph. 3:10).  As Jesus shows us in Matthew 21:31, sometimes the sinners enter the kingdom before the piously religious.


This shows us that to understand grace, we must actually face our own evil - so much religious thought holds that the true religious experience involves being identified as good by virtue of belonging to the right side.  But this ends up feeding into the scapegoating mechanism as we then find ourselves in need of an outlet for our repressed feelings of fear, anger, greed, lust, and hatred.  But by experiencing the release that comes from knowing we are sinners but are still accepted by God’s unconditional love, we are freed to pour out this same love and acceptance into the world without fear.

The ego which must die is so beautifully explained by Thomas Merton's concept of "False Self", which appears in "New Seeds of Contemplation".  Merton describes the False Self as that which occurs when we turn everything inward in service to ourselves. We make an idol out of ourselves, and then we believe we can find fulfillment through things - creating an idol out of the good things God has created. This does not render them evil - they are still good because God created them that way. But in our misuse of the good gifts God has given us, we pervert them. We also have a tendency - when we do this - to identify ourselves through those idols. We define ourselves by what we wear, what we listen to, or a set of opinions (such as a political identity). We are not those things, though we pretend that we are for a time. That is why Merton calls it a "False Self" - it is nothing, but we treat it like it's something.  Merton describes this concept a bit more in these passages:


My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love— outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.


Detachment from things does not mean setting up a contradiction between "things" and "God" as if God were another "thing" and as if His creatures were His rivals. We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God. This is an entirely new perspective which many sincerely moral and ascetic minds fail utterly to see. There is no evil in anything created by God, nor can anything of His become an obstacle to our union with Him. The obstacle is in our "self", that is to say in the tenacious need to maintain our separate, external, egotistic will. It is when we refer all things to this outward and false "self" that we alienate ourselves from reality and from God. It is then the false self that is our god, and we love everything for the sake of this self. We use all things, so to speak, for the worship of this idol which is our imaginary self. In so doing we pervert and corrupt things, or rather we turn our relationship to them into a corrupt and sinful relationship. We do not thereby make them evil, but we use them to increase our attachment to our illusory self.
Later on, Merton writes about the contrasting "True Self".  The "True Self" is what God always intended us to be - we were created in His image, and He is a giver and a creator. This is what unconditional love is - it's an outward focus, rather than an inward focus. And when we focus the gifts God has given us outward, then we will be engaging our "True Self".  Merton writes:

To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love.

Love is my true identity.  Selflessness is my true self.  Love is my true character.  Love is my name.

If, therefore, I do anything or think anything of say anything or know anything that is not purely for the love of God, it cannot give me peace, or rest, or fulfillment, or joy.
If we die to this False Self, the promise of the Gospel of Jesus is that we will be resurrected into new life - and this very event mocks the Domination System itself!  The point of Jesus' resurrection was not merely that a miracle happened - it was that it symbolized the complete defeat of the Domination System in a way that invalidated its power!  Brian McLaren writes in "Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?: Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World":

The scandal of Easter was not simply that a supernatural event occurred. Minds in the ancient world weren't divided by the rigid natural-supernatural dualism that forms modern minds. In those days miracles were notable not for defying the laws of nature (a concept that was unknown until recent centuries), but for conveying an unexpected meaning or message through an unusual or unexplainable medium. What was the scandalous meaning conveyed by the resurrection of Jesus?

It was not simply that a dead man was raised. It was who the raised man was. Someone rejected, mocked, condemned, and executed by both the political and religious establishments was raised. A convicted outlaw, troublemaker, and rabble rouser was raised. A condemned blasphemer and lawbreaker was raised. A nonviolent nonconformist who included the outcasts - and therefore became an outcast - was raised. What does that mean about the authoritative institutions that condemned him? What does that mean about his nonconformist message and nonviolent ways?
Belief in the resurrection is a complete denial of the only power the Domination System ever had - and this is the way to overcome all fear, and thus free us to love our enemies without ceasing.

It's time for another break, and in the next post we will explore the antithesis to the Accuser - the Advocate.


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Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today

Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System

Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Satan: Lifting the Veil - Part 22: Violence

Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today

Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System

Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?


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Jesus and the Violence of the Domination System

Two hundred years before Jesus, Judas Maccabees rode into Jerusalem after conquering the "heathens" and purifying the temple (2 Macc. 10:2-3).  And as he rode into the city triumphantly, he was welcomed by a crowd waving palm branches (2 Macc. 10:7).  This was the start of a dynasty that lasted 100 years.

The parallels to this story and Jesus' entry into Jerusalem (Mk. 11:1-10, Lk. 19:28-38) could not be clearer - the message being sent by the Jews of that day was that a new king was in town.  Except that Jesus did not fight in the way these people expected.

When Matthew tells the story (Mt. 21:1-11), a reference is made to Zechariah 9:9.  All three of these stories have Jesus riding a colt - the foal of a donkey.  But only Matthew explicitly points out the parallel to Zechariah.  Often the point of this colt is misunderstood - it has nothing to do with humility, as donkeys were royal beasts (see 1 Kg. 1:33).  But rather, the clue as to the message Jesus was sending can be found in Zechariah 9:10 - which mentions cutting off the chariots and warhorses, breaking the bow, and speaking peace to the nations.  Jesus is making a triumphal entry and conquering...with peace.  King Jesus declares peace before the conquering even starts!

Jesus knew that the way to fight the violence of the Domination System was not through resorting to the same violent methods - this would only result in a violent kingdom that eventually destroyed itself, just as the Maccabean kingdom had done.

The idea of a violent kingdom undermining itself can be illustrated in many ways through America's own politics.  For example - indefinite detention of suspected terrorists without a trial violates Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution.  But after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America gave in to fear, and have been holding suspects without a trial ever since.  And the interrogation techniques adopted in the wake of the so-called “Patriot Act” include acts that even the U.S. has deemed torture - we once had even executed Japanese prisoners of war who were found guilty of waterboarding, and now we've become the very monster we fought!  In the wake of the Patriot Act, more than 100 detainees have died, with 25 being ruled by the CIA as homicide.  Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, read a prepared testimony on June 18, 2008, which read in part:

As I compiled my dossier for Secretary Powell, and as I did further research, and as my views grew firmer and firmer, I needed frequently to reread that memo; that is to say, the memorandum of February 7, 2002. I need to balance in my own mind the overwhelming evidence that my own government has sanctioned abuse and torture, which, at its worst, has led to the murder of 25 detainees and a total of at least 100 detainee deaths. We had murdered 25 or more people in detention.
By fighting violence with violence, we become the monster we hate.  Lewis Thomas, a medical researcher, compared this to how the body often does more damage in its response to a disease than the disease itself:
All of this seems unnecessary, panic-driven.... It is, basically, a response to propaganda...we tear ourselves to pieces because of symbols, and we are more vulnerable to this than to any host of predators. We are, in effect, at the mercy of our own Pentagons, most of the time.
Acts of barbarity that we would have condemned before entering into war are now seen as necessary.  Likewise, our prison system does not rehabilitate - but rather, it makes people more criminal than they ever were.  Prison fools people into thinking their criminal self is their true nature, and so, in identifying with this persona, they become more and more a criminal.  And so prison functions more as a school for crime than a hospital for the mentally ill.  And this school of crime does not merely do harm to the students: it turns the teachers of that school - the guards and superintendents - into barbarians as well.  In "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil", Dr. Philip Zimbardo writes about how he noticed parallels between the Abu Ghraib prison incident and his Stamford Prison Experiment:
I came across something that froze me. Unbelievable images were flashing across the screen from CBS’s program 60 Minutes II.2 Naked men were stacked high in a pyramid, and American soldiers stood grinning over their prisoner pile. A female soldier was leading a naked prisoner around by a dog leash tied around his neck. Other prisoners looked horrified as they seemed on the verge of being attacked by vicious-looking German shepherd dogs. On and on they went, like a pornographic slide show: naked prisoners were made to masturbate in front of a cigarette-smoking female soldier who stood giving a high-five approval salute; prisoners were made to simulate fellatio.

It seemed inconceivable that American soldiers were tormenting, humiliating, and torturing their captives by forcing homoerotic poses upon them. Yet here they were. Still other unbelievable images buzzed by: prisoners standing or bent over in stress positions with green hoods or women’s pink panties covering their heads. Were these the fine young men and women sent overseas by the Pentagon on the glorious mission of bringing democracy and freedom to an Iraq recently liberated from the tyrant/torturer Saddam Hussein?
René Girard expresses the nature of this problem well in "The One by Whom Scandal Comes":
To escape responsibility for violence we imagine it is enough to pledge never to be the first to do violence. But no one ever sees himself as casting the first stone. Even the most violent persons believe that they are always reacting to a violence committed in the first instance by someone else.
But Jesus did not fight violence with violence.  No, the way Jesus fought was through non-violent resistance

To give a little context, the historian Josephus writes an account in The Wars of the Jews 2:175-203 of an event that had occurred during Jesus' lifetime - in 26 AD:

As procurator of Judaea Tiberius sent Pilate, who during the night, secretly and under cover, conveyed to Jerusalem the images of Caesar known as standards. When day dawned this caused great excitement among the Jews; for those who were near were amazed at the sight, which meant that their laws had been trampled on — they do not permit any graven image to be set up in the City — and the angry City mob was joined by a huge influx of people from the country. They rushed off to Pilate in Caesarea, and begged him to remove the standards from Jerusalem and to respect their ancient customs. When Pilate refused, they fell prone all round his house and remained motionless for five days and nights.

The next day Pilate took his seat on the tribunal in the great stadium and summoned the mob on the pretext that he was ready to give them an answer. Instead he gave a pre-arranged signal to the soldiers to surround the Jews in full armour, and the troops formed a ring three deep. The Jews were dumbfounded at the unexpected sight, but Pilate, declaring that he would cut them to pieces unless they accepted the images of Caesar, nodded to the soldiers to bare their swords. At this the Jews as though by agreement fell to the ground in a body and bent their necks, shouting that they were ready to be killed rather than transgress the Law. Amazed at the intensity of their religious fervour, Pilate ordered the standards to be removed from Jerusalem forthwith.
Without harming a single human being, the Jews had conquered.  This may be the first recorded incident of non-violent resistance.

Jesus and Non-Violent Resistance
Jesus creatively teaches on similar methods in Matthew 5:38-41.  When he says "do not resist an evil person" (verse 39), the term he uses is antistenai.  This term literally refers to violent resistance and is a military term that refers to counteractive aggression, so this is not a teaching about cowardice.  Rather, Jesus is teaching his audience how to resist without violence.

It is important to note that if we are to interpret
verse 39 as meaning that Jesus' followers are to be doormats, then we have an issue with Ephesians 6:13, which instructs us to resist.  No, I do not believe this was a message of passive acceptance towards the dehumanizing Domination System, but rather was teaching how to resist without violence.

When Jesus says (
verse 39) "whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also", he leaves us a clue when he specifies the right cheek.  Think about how this would work - how can you slap a person on the right cheek?  There are only two ways - one would involve using the open palm of the left hand.  One problem - in this ancient culture, which did not have such amenities as...ah...toilet paper...the left hand was reserved for unseemly uses.  So in this culture, to slap someone with the left hand would have been considered barbaric - it would be seen as a distasteful and vulgar act and you would be seen as morally questionable as a result.

So there was only one other way to slap someone on the right cheek - with a backhand blow.


See?  Right cheek, right hand.
This type of blow indicated an authority structure in that culture - a master would strike his slave that way.  You didn't hit an equal with an awkward backhand blow like that - it was specifically meant to humiliate the person being struck.  So when Jesus tells his audience to turn the other cheek, he's actually teaching them a creative method of non-violent resistance.  Jesus is telling his audience to force your assailant to treat you as an equal.  By turning the other cheek, the assailant would have to switch to overhand blows, which would indicate that he was no longer treating you as a subordinate.  So this verse is not meant to be taken as an admonition for abused wives to take their beating in silence, but is rather a creative non-violent resistance technique.
 

The next two verses also present non-violent resistance techniques.  Jesus says in verse 40: "if anyone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak also."  To properly understand what's going on here, we need to understand a little bit more about this period in history, as well as a bit more about Jewish culture.  According to the law of that time, if someone failed to pay a debt, the creditor could sue the debtor for their coat - this would assure that the man would pay you back, in order to have you return his garment.  If you were poor, your coat also served as a blanket at night.  Confiscating a poor man's coat was essentially taking away his only method of warmth, and was an act of cruelty. 

Jewish law prohibits the keeping of a cloak as a pledge past sundown (see Ex. 22:25-27, Deut. 24:10-13), but in the time of Rome this was not applied very faithfully, as the surrounding Gentiles did not follow this rule.  Also, the Jews were never to take the pledge from a widow (Deut. 24:17) - which is most likely more a representation of a poor person who has no means to better his or her situation.  Amos 2:7-8 presents a picture of profanity which includes sleeping on pledge garments to show how callous Israel had become.
  And the picture of righteousness that Ezekiel 18:5-9 presents includes the restoration of pledges.

In Genesis 9:20-27, Noah pronounces a curse on Canaan, because Ham (who is the patriarch of Canaan) saw Noah naked.  Isaiah uses the act of stripping naked as a prophecy of a judgement against Egypt and Cush in Isaiah 20:1-6.  For the poor in this desert culture, typically the only other garment they would wear besides their tunic was their cloak - so by removing it (as Jesus instructs in
verse 40) they would have been stripping naked, as Isaiah had done.  So what Jesus is telling his audience to do is nothing new to them - they would have seen this as a creative way for them to pronounce judgement upon their cruel creditors.  He's essentially telling them to pronounce the curse of Canaan upon them.  Also, in this culture nakedness would have been a shame to witnessIt should also be considered what condition the body of a poor person would be in underneath his/her clothing - it would not be a pleasing sight.  So what Jesus is saying is: if someone cruelly demands your only method of warmth, publicly shame them by stripping naked in front of them and revealing what the unjust system is doing to you.

This becomes an unmasking of the unjust system which has rendered an entire people landless, destitute, degraded, and humiliated.  But it is also a refusal, on the part of the one who strips, to be humiliated - it is a form of pride that says “though I have been rendered naked by your injustice, I am still a human being, and you cannot take that from me.”  It is a refusal to be intimidated by the power of the creditor.

When Jesus instructs his audience to walk an extra mile with someone who has forced you to go one (verse 41), there is also a very rich history behind this commandment.  Roman law allowed soldiers to command people from the cultures they had conquered to carry their packs for a mile - this was called angaria / angareia.  This was a way for Roman soldiers to assert their dominance over the conquered people - to put them in their place.  And the practice was infamous for being onerous to the people - “angareia is like death” complained one source.  And you have to consider how much time a
mile would take out of your day in this society - time that is precious to those who work in manual labor that pays by your amount of productivity and to those who are burdened by debts they have to pay.
 

But because this law had been abused too often, the law also strictly prohibited the soldiers from requiring any more than a mile as it had become a point of contention. 

So when Jesus tells his audience to go an extra mile, he's actually
telling his audience to put these soldiers into an uncomfortable situation.  You can imagine the soldier thinking: “what is he up to?  Is he trying to get me in trouble for seeming to break the rules?  Is he insulting my strength and trying to provoke me?  Will this civilian file a complaint against me or cause trouble after this?”  If you come to the end of your mile, and you keep walking, the soldier has a choice between risking getting into big trouble, or scuffling with you in an attempt to wrestle back his gear!  And this struggle would have caused enough of a fuss to call attention to the situation!  Jesus is giving his audience a way to protest this practice and recover their humanity - to neutralize the power it had over them.

Jesus taught his followers to flip the system on its head, and to resist evil with good (see Rom. 12:21).  Non-violent resistance is not “flight”, nor is it “fight” - it is a third way.  Non-violent resistance is not cowardice - as the non-violent resistance expert Gandhi says:

I do believe that, where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.... But I believe that nonviolence is infinitely superior to violence.
Gandhi also said:
At every meeting I repeated the warning that unless they felt that in non-violence they had come into possession of a force infinitely superior to the one they had and in the use of which they were adept, they should have nothing to do with non-violence and resume the arms they possessed before.
If we try to suppress our anger over injustice, it will plant a seed inside of us which will grow into a violent hatred that will either destroy us, or will erupt in acts of even worse violence - and this dehumanizes us.  Jesus understood that we must resist evil regimes like the empire of Rome.  But he instructed his followers to do so in a way that did not also dehumanize the resistor.  Non-violent resistance seeks to turn our inner warrior into a new kind of warrior - a spiritual warrior - and so utilizes our strength and determination.

Could this be the true meaning of "holy war"?  With non-violent resistance, it is not us fighting on God’s behalf, but God fighting on ours - when we engage in non-violence, it is God alone who fights (see Hos. 1:7, Zech. 4:6). 

Non-violent resistance seeks to unveil the truth about a Domination System at work.  Walter Wink provided a few examples of how this works:

South African archbishop Desmond Tutu walked by a construction site on a temporary sidewalk the width of one person. A white man appeared at the other end, recognized Tutu, and said, "I don't make way for gorillas." At which Tutu stepped aside, made a deep sweeping gesture, and said, "Ah, yes, but I do."

During the struggle of Solidarity in Poland, one group dressed in Santa Claus outfits and distributed scarce sanitary napkins to women as a way of dramatizing the difficulty of obtaining essentials. When these Santas were arrested, other Santas showed up at jail insisting that the others were frauds, that they were the real Santas.

Chinese students, forbidden to demonstrate against government policy, donned masks of the Communist leadership and carried signs reading: "Support Martial Law," "Support Dictatorship," "Support Inflation." (I especially like this one. It has such suggestive possibilities. How about, for example, "Give tax breaks to the rich." Or, "Collateral damage ain't nothin'.")
In order to fight the Domination System, we need to reveal it for what it is.  I recall a scene from "The Butler", where the main character has just walked into the Oval Office to serve President Kennedy, and found him watching news of the Civil Rights Movement and seeing the violent acts of racism against the demonstrators.  It should be noted that President Kennedy was no racist, and yet he tells Cecil in this scene that he never knew what African Americans went through.  The true evil of racism had to be unveiled for him to understand.  It did not seem real to him until this happened.


There is a connection here to the sword of truth in Hebrews 4:12.  The sword is double-edged, which might be referring to the way that truth cuts both ways: both for and against God’s people when it convicts them.   And this double-edged sword makes an appearance in Revelation (1:16, and 19:15) - and here it is coming out of Jesus’ mouth.  Jesus’ non-violent resistance is a “militant pacifism” - it is aggressive in that he relentlessly attacks with the truth (and only the truth).  He forces his accusers to either face and accept the truth or silence him.  When we understand this, we can see how the scene in John 18:22-23 is actually a form of “turning the other cheek” - when a priest strikes him, Jesus takes the offensive for truth and declares: "If I have spoken wrongly, testify of the wrong; but if rightly, why do you strike Me?"

It is very sad that schools largely avoid teaching the rich history of non-violent resistance.  It was only very recently that I became aware of how many non-violent resistance movements there have been, and their successes.  Walter Wink lists a number of them in "Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination":

Then came 1989-1990, years of unprecedented political change, years of miracles, surpassing any such concentration of political transformations in human history, even the Exodus. In 1989 alone, thirteen nations comprising 1,695,100,000 people, over 32 percent of humanity, experienced nonviolent revolutions that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations in every case but China, and were completely nonviolent (on the part of the participants) in every case but Romania and parts of the southern U.S.S.R. The nations involved were Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Yugoslavia, Mongolia, the Soviet Union, Brazil, Chile, and China. Since then Nepal, Palau, and Madagascar have undergone nonviolent struggles, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia have achieved independence nonviolently, the Soviet Union has dissolved into a commonwealth of republics, and more than a dozen countries have moved toward multiparty democracy, including Mongolia, Gabon, Bangladesh, Benin, and Algeria. If we add all the countries touched by major nonviolent actions just since 1986 (the Philippines, South Korea, South Africa, Israel, Burma, New Caledonia, and New Zealand), and the other nonviolent struggles of our century-the independence movements of India and Ghana, the overthrow of the Shah in Iran, the struggle against authoritarian governments and landowners in Argentina and Mexico, and the civil rights, United Farm Worker, anti-Vietnam and antinuclear movements in the United States-the figure reaches 3,337,400,000: a staggering 64 percent of humanity!

At this point, it is time for another break.  In my next post, I will explore the death of the Domination System within.

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Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today

Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System

Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?