My last post tried to lay out my notion that America is Revelation's Babylon. For Dr King -- and for me -- any adequate biblical understanding of America must take seriously that America is a political incarnation of the New Testament's "principalities and powers". If want to further that argument by offering its biblical contrast. As America is Babylon, I want to articulate Dr King's "Dream" -- an incarnational theology that centers on Jesus and is expressed in a sacramental ethic.
Let me be clear from the start: I'm a biblical realist. There's no other place actually known to human beings, except this world as it is -- the place where life is at once being lived; there are no other places for which to search or yearn or hope -- no utopia, no paradise, no otherworldly afterlife; and no limbo either. What Dr King expressed wasn't some "pie in the sky" pipe dream. Dr King was a preacher. And his criticism of America came in the tradition of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, Jesus, and Paul. In real history -- in our time and place -- Eden and the Fall are both real stories, our stories. Babylon and Jerusalem are real.
The Bible deals with the sanctification of the actual history of nations and of human beings in his world as it is while that history is being lived. Biblical living is living wrestling with history as it happening right here and right now. Any other temporal focus is un-biblical. If we push justice and righteousness to some other time and place, we're not being true to the Bible. We're not being true to Jesus.
And, as I laid out in that last post, what we struggle with is Babylon.
But, that's only half the story. While Revelation 17-20 may focus on Babylonian power to seduce us to idolatry, God's final word is Revelation 21-22: Jerusalem.
Babylon in Revelation is a disclosure and description of an estate or condition which corresponds to the empirical reality of each and every city -- of all societies -- in history. The Babylon of Revelation is archetypical of all nations. This Babylon is allegorical of the condition of death reigning in each and every nation or similar principality. In contrast to Babylon is Jerusalem.
But we shouldn't think of these two as places so much as events -- as things we do. What Babylon means theologically and, hence, existentially for all nations or other principalities in the dimensions of fallenness, doom, and death, Jerusalem means to each nation or power in the terms of holiness, redemption, and life. Babylon describes the apocalyptic while Jerusalem embodies the eschatological as these two realities become recognizable in the present, common history of the world.
And this contrast is essential to understanding Revelation's political critique. It's essential for understanding Dr King's critique of America. And it's a centerpiece of my political theology.
At root, Babylon is the location where death currently reigns and Jerusalem is the location where life and resurrection is experienced.
We become enslaved to death when be buy into the idolatry of Babylon. The great sin of Babylon isn't hedonic excess or lasciviousness. The great sin of Babylon is idolatry, and our use of the principality and power as a means for moral justification and significance.
That's John's point in Revelation 18.2-10. It's Dr King's point in his "I Have a Dream". It was my point in last Sunday's sermon ("Servants of Restoration") from Isaiah 49.1-6. The awful Babylonian ambiguity -- and the American temptation -- is to think that Babylon is becoming Jerusalem.
This is the same moral confusion which all principalities suffer in one way or another. This is the vanity of every principality -- and notably for a nation -- that the principality is sovereign in history; which is to say, that it presumes it is the power in relation to which the moral significance of everything and everyone is determined. Babylon's fall is not particularly a punishment for her greed or vice or aggrandizement, despite what some preachers think. Babylon's futility is her idolatry -- her boast of justifying significance or moral ultimacy in her destiny, her reputation, her capabilities, her authority, her glory as a nation. The moral pretenses of Imperial Rome, the millennial claims of Nazism, the arrogance of Marxist dogma, the anxious insistence that America be "number one" among nations are all versions of Babylon's idolatry. All share in this grandiose view of the nation by which the principality assumes the image of God.
John rightly connects that idolatry with death (Revelation 18.21-24). Dr King rightly criticized the American joint idolatries of capitalism, militarism, and racism.
And, they both rightly contrasted Babylon with Jerusalem.
Jerusalem lives within and outside the nations, alongside and over against the nations, coincident with but set apart from the nations. Jerusalem is in the peculiar posture of simultaneous involvement and disassociation with the principalities and powers. Jerusalem is an eschatological pioneer community -- "the beloved community" with the "strength to love" -- existing in the midst of the Fall.
So where do we find Jerusalem?
This is why I insist that both Babylon and Jerusalem are events more than locations.
Jerusalem -- the experience of a reconciled humanity -- is fragile and transitory in nature. Jerusalem exists in time rather than in space.
Jerusalem means the emancipation of human life in society from the rule of death and breaks through time, transcends time, anticipates within time the abolition of time. Thus the integrity or authenticity of the Jerusalem event in common history is always beheld as if it were a singular or momentary or unique happening. To be more concrete about it, if a congregation somewhere comes to life as Jerusalem at some hour, that carries no necessary implications for either the past or the future of that congregation. The Jerusalem occurrence is sufficient unto itself. There is -- then and there -- a transfiguration in which the momentary coincides with the eternal, the innocuous becomes momentous and the great is recognized as trivial, the end of history is revealed as the fulfillment of life here and now, and the whole of creation is beheld as sanctified.
Jerusalem is experienced in those elusive, fleeting but very real moments when we experience the Kingdom of God "on earth as it is in heaven". Think back over your life when you've thought, "Right here and right now, I wish the whole world could be just like this." That's the experience of Jerusalem in the midst of Babylon.
How do we live Jerusalem in the midst of Babylon?
It requires what I call a "sacramental ethic".
Christian living is always "incarnational" -- being Jesus' body in a specific time and place. So whatever being Jerusalem means, it can't mean being eternal or having an unchanging set of moral rules.
This is Bonhoeffer's point in his Ethics about the "knowledge of good and evil" as fallen knowledge. Being Christian isn't to aspire to eternal and unchanging standards. Ethical action isn't about discerning a timeless "right versus wrong". Consequently, the human assessment of God's judgments concerning "right versus wrong" cannot be the guide for Christian ethical action. Human ethical action -- being bound to time and place -- will always be provisional and situational. Christian ethical action has to do with becoming and being human like Jesus and not with guessing or imitating God's will.
Biblical ethics has no room for divining specific, unambiguous, narrow, or ordained solutions for any social issue. Biblical theology does not deduce "the will of God" for political involvement or social action. The Bible -- if it's esteemed for its own genius -- doesn't yield "right" or "good" or "true" or "ultimate" answers. The Bible doesn't do that in seemingly private or personal matters; much, much less in politics or institutional life.
Dr King understood that a biblical ethic isn't worried with the social or political will of God; biblical politics don't try to implement "right" or "ultimate" answers. In this world, the judgment of God remains God's own secret. No creatures are privy to it, and the task of social ethics is not to second guess the judgment of God.
Whenever we play God -- when we see things in clear, stark "black and white" terms -- we dehumanize others.
We've all seen it happen. Christians assume that the ethical task is to sort out God's timeless and eternal judgment on any particular issue and then to use that as a weapon to dehumanize others. But the claim to know God's judgments is inherently idolatrous. It's being Babylon. Not Jerusalem.
We're humans. None of us know what God thinks until he shares that vision through prophets. Prophets like Isaiah and Dr King. And finally -- once for all -- in Jesus. Adjudicating right and wrong outside that stream of prophetic listening and speaking is idolatry.
So what do we Christians do?
Biblically speaking, the singular, straightforward issue of ethics -- and therefore the first topic of politics -- is how to live humanly during the Fall. Any viable human ethic -- which is to say, any ethics worthy of human attention and practice, any ethics which manifest and verify hope -- is both individual and social. It must deal with human decision and action in relation to the other creatures, notably the principalities and powers in the very midst of the conflict, distortion, alienation, disorientation, chaos, decadence of the Fall. (That's Aristotle's Ethics and Politics in a nutshell.)
So for the Bible, the first ethical question is: Who are we humans? And the second question is: How can we be human here and now?
That's the question at the heart of the Christian moral vision. How can I act humanly now? How can I act humanly in the midst of the conflict, distortion, alienation, disorientation, chaos, and decadence of the Fall?
It's not just an individual question, either. It's the Church's question. This question also guides the community of faith. The experience of Jerusalem is the cultivation, experience and protection of humanity in the midst of the Fall.
Dr King taught us that this ethical question juxtaposes the witness of the holy nation -- Jerusalem -- to the other principalities, institutions and the other nations -- as to which Babylon is the parable. It asks: How can the Church of Jesus Christ celebrate human life in society now?
That's the question for Jerusalem.