bluntandsubtle's Journal

"Subversive" is the LAST word I'd expect most people to associate with Christianity.  Religion--especially Christianity--in our modern mindset is about "telling people what to do."  It's about "not letting people be themselves."  The problem is compounded in America with the association of Christianity with the Republican party.  The common stereotype is that the democrats are for "change" (see Barack Obama) while the Republicans are for the "status quo."  Critics of religion see this "attempt to control others" as the essence of religion.  Atheists talk about "liberating" believers from power hungry priests who take advantage of them.  Marx derided religion as "the opiate of the masses" and thought it was one of the greatest obstacles to creating a better world here in this life.  After all, if you get the mass of people focused on the world to come, won't that take away their energy from making this world a better place?

So how can I seriously maintain that Christianity is subversive?  Easy.  The whole Bible is subversive.  The Bible isn't a rulebook.  Contrary to what people think, very little of it is written in the style of the Ten Commandments.  The whole of the Bible is the story of God intervening to rescue a broken fallen world.  The absolutely fascinating thing is HOW God goes about interacting with the world.  Time and time again throughout the Bible, God rejects the world's values--the world's power structures--and points to greater values.

Unfortunately for us, much of the Bible was written by cultures whose norms are alien to us.  So when we read the Bible, we miss how subversively God is acting.  Let me give an example.  In ancient cultures, the eldest son in the family was the inheritor of the family's wealth.  So the eldest son controlled everything after the father.  A good example of this is how kings pass on their crown.  The eldest son is the first in line for the throne.  He gets to own everything. 

Yet, in the Bible time and time again, the eldest son is not the one that God chooses to work through.  God works through Abraham's younger son Isaac instead of Ishmael.  God works through Isaac's younger son Jacob instead of Esau.  When the prophet Samuel is looking for the true King of Israel, God leads him to Jesse's house, and Jesse brings out his seven oldest sons for Samuel to choose from.  When Samuel sees Jesse's oldest son and sees how big and strong he is, Samuel thinks "Surely the Lord's annointed stands here."  But God answers Samuel by saying "Do not consider his appearance or his height . . .The Lord does not look at the things man looks at.  Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart."  Then God tells Samuel that the one God has chosen to be King of Israel is not any of the oldest  seven sons but the "runt of the litter" who is in the field tending the sheep.  In other words, the one God chose didn't even seem worthy by society's standards to be a candidate for consideration.  

I don't want to give the impression that it's only with men that God interacts in subversive ways.  If societies throughout the ages have too often valued a man's worth only by his physical strength and material acquisitions, societies have also too often reduced a woman's value to her physical beauty.  Yet, just as God subverts the world's values in so many other ways, He does so again when it comes to society viewing women as nothing more than their looks.   There is a great story early on in the Bible where Jacob sees a beautiful woman named Rachel and immediately falls in love with her.  He is so stricken with her beauty that he agrees to work for Rachel's father for seven years to earn her hand in marriage.  But Rachel's father plays a trick on Jacob after the seven years.  He gives his other daughter Leah--who is described as physically unattractive--to Jacob instead.  Yet, Jacob is so smitten with Rachel that he agrees to work another seven years to win Rachel's hand.  All this time Leah is miserable.  She feels ugly and is desperate to be loved by Jacob.  All this is important because Jacob is later renamed Israel, and the whole of Israel are the tribes that are descended from each of his  twelve sons.  The fascinating end of this story is that all the greatest hereos of Israel come from Leah.  King David is one of her descendents.  Jesus is another one.  Leah was the unattractive girl that nobody wanted, and yet it was through her line that God would bring the messiah into the world to save humanity.  God chose her even if the world (and her husband) did not. 

Even the selection of Israel itself as God's chosen people is subversive.  The tribes of Israel were nobodies.  If it wasn't for the Bible we would scarcely know they existed.  They never had massive lands or empires like their neighbors in Egypt or Persia or Babylon or Assyria.  In terms of worldly power, they were the geopolitical runt of the litter.  And yet--and this is a cause for such wonder!--now the majority of religious believers around the world take their faith from this tiny, seemingly insignificant set of tribes.  Christianity and Islam are both Abrahamic traditions that accept the God of Israel.  Christianity believes that Jesus was the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures.  Islam believes that the Koran is the perfect word of God that corrects the errors in the Jewish and Christian Bibles.  Islam accepts the Hebrew prophets but think that Mohammad provided God's final and true revelation.  So I ask all atheists, all agnostics, all skeptics:  How is this possible?  How could the idea of God that one small people who never conquered more than a fraction of the world's territory come to conquer the religious beliefs of the rest of the world?  Today both Islam and Christianity are spreading  like wildfire  throughout the world:  africa, asia, south america, you name it.  Many people believe that in a matter of decades China will become the world's largest Christian country.  God could have picked a people with the earthly domaince that the world values and respects to bring His word into the world.  Instead, God was subversive; he chose tiny Israel. 

God's subersiveness to the world's values does not stop at the Old Testament.  The story of Jesus and the New Testament is even more subversive.  Christians believe that God became flesh in Jesus.  That means that when God chose to be born as a human, He deliberately chose not to be born in a majestic palace, but in a dirty manger, in a place where animals would eat.  God did not come into the world as a warrior-hero, but as a lowly carpenter.  But most importantly, in Christianity, God did not triumph by anything the world would recognize as victory.  Instead, Jesus is killed by crucifixation, a punishment reserved for the lowest of the low.  A few decades ago an edgy and anti-Christian comedian named Lenny Bruce liked to rile up audiences by saying, "If Jesus had died today, Christians would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks."  Lenny Bruce was trying to show his listeners that Christianity isn't the nice respectable religion that good middle class people like to think it is.  The irony is that he was absolutely right that Christianity isn't some pleasant respectable middle class religion.  It's something much greater and more wondrous  than that.  The opening lines of a book on church history I recently read put it well:  "Christianity is the only major world religion that begins with the humiliation of its god." This is subversion of the world's values on the highest level.

Lastly, in order to understand how subversive Christianity truly is, one must step outside of our own time and look at the context in which Christianity emerged.  This was a time when Rome ruled most of the known world, when the emperor--or "Caesar"--of Rome was  for all practical purposes the ruler of the world.  Christians deliberately applied to Jesus the language the Roman emperor used to describe himself.  The Roman emperor called himself the greek word "kurios" meaning "Lord."  The early Christians took that same word and applied it to Jesus.  What they were saying to the Roman emperor was that he isn't the real Lord; instead, this man who died as a lowly criminal is the real Lord of the world.  And untold numbers of early Christians went to their deaths at the hands of the worlds' powers because they believed so strongly in that fact.

Forget what you have heard.  Forget what you think you know.  Real Christianity is as subversive as it gets.