(Photo credit: Southwest Texas Methodist Federation for Social Action)
by Nathaniel Torrey
Dr. Joerg Rieger, Wendland-Cook Endowed Professor of Constructive Theology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX , gave a talk this Monday at Wesley Theological Seminary, entitled “Christ and Empire: The Radical Christian Heritage.”
His main thesis is that empire has defined theology in such ways to protect and defend ideologies that are supportive to empire’s own way of managing power, namely a top-down approach. Dr. Rieger defines empire as something that attempts to control all aspects of life and where power is placed in the hands of the few and exerted on the many.
Dr. Rieger gives the Nicene Creed, universally recognized as an accurate exposition of the Christian faith, as an example of theology that perpetuates the top down model of imperial power. By making Christ consubstantial with the Father, the Nicene Creed defines Christ in the terms of a top down power structure. In short, it doesn’t allow Jesus to be a social revolutionary. Dr. Rieger said, “If you manage to pull Jesus into that empire God image you’ve basically won too: this is another form of doing empire theology. Now you have domesticated Jesus who is now also immutable impassable and omnipotent and also at the very top and no longer that radical from Galilee.”
However, Dr. Rieger says the consubstantiality of God the Father and Christ the Son can also be used to cut against empire theology. Instead of abstracting Christ by subsuming into the Father, you can ground God into Jesus and give metaphysical weight or divine reality to a social gospel message. It can be taken Dr. Rieger says as “a metaphysical argument that power always breaks down.”
Dr. Rieger misses the point about the doctrine of the Trinity. He thinks that consubstantiality is a simple equality, with empire theologians picking the Father and making the Son equal to him and resistance theologians picking the Son and making the Father equal to him. The Nicene Creed instead affirms that the Father and Son not only share in the same essence but they are distinct persons as well. Their relationships as persons in the Trinity are significant: it matters that Christ is the Son and not the Father. The image of a Father and Son helps us articulate the relations that the persons of the Trinity have to each other co-eternally. The empire reading and the resistance reading of the Nicene Creed that Dr. Rieger offers miss this entirely by absorbing one of the persons into the other.
The doctrine of the Trinity is simply not as modal as Dr. Rieger would have it. It is not one or the other; it is subtle and paradoxical .It is not as simple as God as Father all the time or God as Son all the time: God is both. God is universal as the Father and particular as the Son. God is “top-down” as the Father and “bottom-up” as the Son. It is a necessary tension in order to make sense of the Incarnation. If the doctrine of the Trinity is maintained, one can’t simply proclaim all top down power as inherently bad and any egalitarian effort as inherently good. Life is not that simple.
Why does Dr. Rieger miss this? He is more interested in a liberation theological agenda than practicing orthodox theology. Instead of reading the Nicene Creed as a proclamation of the Church and part of Holy Tradition, he sees the Creed as determined by economic and political realities. According to Dr. Rieger, our understanding of the divine is necessarily determined. Instead of it being revealed by the Holy Spirit at the Council of Nicaea, it is a historic creed subject to the world. Dr. Rieger does everything short of denying the divinity of Jesus by turning him into The Great Community Organizer, a revolutionary against imperial power and over turning any hierarchial institution in the name of radical economic, political and spiritual egalitarianism.
Christ, then, becomes a means to an end, namely worldly prosperity. Instead of coming “again with glory to judge the living and the dead” we’re promised economic justice in a kingdom that will certainly end. Instead of salvation, we’re granted self-actualization. Dr. Rieger and other liberation theologians essentially subscribe to a re-tooling of Karl Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach, “The theologians have only interpreted God in various ways; the point is to change Him.”
What do you think? Share your thoughts below.
Comment by Donnie on October 4, 2012 at 2:46 pm
Sounds like more fake Christianity ala Jim Wallis.
Comment by cynthia curran on October 4, 2012 at 5:46 pm
Sounds like Constantine is the big villian.
Comment by Eric Lytle on October 4, 2012 at 7:01 pm
The only problem with liberals defining any belief as “a product of its times” is that they never apply that to their own beliefs. I think you could make a good case for their own “theology” (such as it is) being a product of the Political Correctness in the mainline seminaries – so Jesus is the political radical who blesses gay marriages, escorts women to abortion clinics,calls on the government to redistribute wealth, sets up booths to get illegal immigrants on food stamps, and waves the white flag whenever a Muslim frowns. Heck, I’d take Constantine’s imperial Jesus over that, but I prefer the Jesus in the NT.