Satan Has No Body But Yours: The Gospels' Warning for Today about Christo-Fascism

Resisting the Spirit of Domination and Death, Part 3

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Let’s do a little time travel to the first century C.E.

Imagine what it would be like to be part of a people of faith who lived in a land that had recently transitioned from a republic to imperial rule. According to your faith, God was manifest in Love. But the cultural norm was to equate the imperial domination system with Divine Movment. As a result, your spiritual message was both subversive and dangerous to imperial rule.

What an uncomfortable situation to be in. To make matters worse, deliverance from the regime had not emerged as expected. Hope dashed against the rocks. It was becoming more difficult to remain faithful to the Way as time passed and the imperial reign continued to strengthen its position.

How, in this context, could you proclaim your subversive message that the Kingdom of God had come near? How would you claim that Jesus Christ alone was your Lord? How would you proclaim the Gospel within your community knowing that if the powers that be discovered what your message truly was they would come after you?

As long as Christians were seen as just another Jewish sect, they were relatively safe. After all, it was okay to be a Jew in the Roman Empire, provided that you were not a revolutionary. But as Christianity started to become more and more its own thing, Christians and their beliefs came under more scrutiny.

The Romans were a deeply religious people. Indeed, they believed their piety was the reason for their imperial power. Meanwhile, they saw Christians as “atheists” who threatened the well-being of the Empire on a spiritual level. Indeed, the very nature of the Gospel message that the early Christians held near and dear to their hearts could lead to their persecution and even death.

This is the setting for the writing of the Gospels.

The Gospels in context

To think that the Gospels were written to portray the life and times of Jesus is a mistake. It is a mistake born out of our contemporary understanding of what it means to write history.

Today, when we write history, we consider accuracy in one's presentation and interpretation to be incredibly important. You don't want to misrepresent what happened when writing the history of something or someone.

In the ancient world, however, they understood and wrote history differently. History was a way to teach lessons about life. It was a way to promote an ideology. It was about articulating the deeper meaning of life.

What we think of as historical accuracy wasn't even on their radar. Instead, they creatively wrote about the past in a way that spoke specifically to their present.

This, I think, is the best way to think about the Gospels. The authors are not writing about the history of Jesus. They used the oral traditions about Jesus as the basis to tell their own stories about how his Spirit was alive and well in their midst. These stories helped shape the community’s intuition, their ability to notice patterns that revealed the spirit of Christ at work.

In other words, the Gospels were written as discernment manuals for their Christian communities. As members listened to the stories in the texts that tackled the issues of their day, it helped them to sense what it meant to be faithful to Jesus Christ in their current setting.

Turning up the contrast

The Gospels intended to teach early Christian communities how to discern the spirit of Christ in everyday life in their context so they could walk in the way of Christ. Sometimes, the best way to help people understand their calling is to demonstrate what specifically is not their calling. This is where contrast comes in.

The Way of Christ had an antithesis: the Way of Rome. The typical Roman citizen could look upon the Roman Emperor and see a Savior. The Roman Emperor was referred to as their “Father”. The peace that they had acquired was the Roman peace, the Pax Romana. It was a peace through superior firepower. This Roman peace was won through violent conquest and dominance.

So, the Gospels portrayed two opposing ways of being in the world. It was the Way of Christ versus the Way of Rome. It was the Way of Light versus the Way of Darkness. It was the Way of Good versus the Way of Evil. It was the Kingdom of God versus the Kingdom of…

Satan

Yes, Satan, the personification of evil himself. The Gospel writers portrayed Satan as the real power behind Rome.

And here's the thing…

And I can't emphasize this enough…

It wasn't just about Rome. Rome just happened to be the imperial power at the time. It was about the “Way of Rome”, which was the Way of Domination.

Of course, the Roman Emperor was the epitome of this way. Emperor Augustus had turned the republic into an empire. In his divine person, he consolidated all power into himself and thus dominated the entire system. His successors continued in his footsteps. If you wanted to look for a singular expression of the satanic spirit of domination, you couldn’t find a better one in ancient Roman society.

And this is where it got tricky for the Christian communities…

It turned out the Roman authorities didn’t like it very much if you equated their way of achieving peace with Cosmic Evil. And, they had the military power to squish you like a bug if they discovered you doing so.

And this leads us to how Rome maintained dominance: the power of fear.

Fear

Too often we treat fear like it’s a bad thing. But it’s not. It serves an important purpose: It keeps us alive.

Fear is what keeps people from running out into traffic for no good reason. Fear keeps us from placing a hand on the stove’s burner while it’s hot. Fear keeps us from doing things that are generally unsafe and or even life-threatening.

Human beings are wired to survive, and a major reason we’re still here is because fear has kept us safe while we evolved.

So, did the early Christian communities fear the power of Rome? It would be silly to think otherwise. If they hadn’t been afraid, they wouldn’t have been cautious. And if they hadn’t been cautious, they wouldn’t have survived as a movement.

It’s safe to say that the real question wasn’t whether they were afraid. The question was, “How were they to deal with that fear?”

How were they going to spread the subversive Gospel message that threatened the very basis of Rome’s existence while at the same time respecting Rome’s power to squish them like a bug if they got caught?