Jesus,
knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force,
withdrew again to a mountain by himself.
-John
6:151
One
of the two central arguments of the Christian Anarchist case is that
the Bible advocates anarchism. With few exceptions, Christian
Anarchism begins when individuals of Christian faith or background
discover the political element to the scriptures that they had
previously been unaware of. As they begin to apply this to their own
situation,
they develop a personal politics which is non-governmental or
anti-governmental. Rarely, if ever, has the Christian Anarchists'
biblical thesis been brought under methodological scrutiny. It
usually relies on wider scholarship, drawing anarchist conclusions
from biblical theologies of non-violence or alternative community. In
recent years this has tended to mean John Howard Yoder, Stanley
Hauerwas and Walter Wink2.
Liberation Theology seems and obvious resource for developing
Christian Anarchist readings of scripture, but it is as yet untapped.
An
Interpretive Centre
In
making their case, the Christian Anarchist writers have tended to
focus on the gospels, with some small asides to the political
language of the rest of the New Testament. Without exception, the
Sermon on the Mount forms the interpretive centre of any Christian
Anarchist hermeneutic – even more specifically, it is Matthew 5:
33-48. This is the key text for Christian non-violence of all kinds
as it includes the supersession of
lex talionis
as divine law and the command to love enemies. It is from this
'doctrine of non-resistance to evil by force' that Tolstoy
extrapolates his influential anarchist political theology.
Of
the Christian Anarchists, Tolstoy moves the furthest away from an
orthodox understanding of scripture. He saw
following the moral and ethical teachings of Jesus as the only true
Christianity, rejecting the doctrine of salvation and the recording
of miracles as arising from primitive misunderstandings of the truth
that Jesus spoke.3
He even went so far as to produce his own version of the gospels,
free from what he judged to be fanciful additions.
Even
the most theologically centrist of the Christian Anarchists put their
main emphasis on the Sermon on the Mount. While
this is by no means a bad thing it can miss the richness that a
political reading of the whole Bible could bring to the Christian
Anarchist hermeneutic. Claiborne and Haw's overview of scripture in
Jesus
for President
demonstrates what a full biblical theology of Christian Anarchism
could look like. It presents a coherent over-arching narrative of
God's plan for the world, from Genesis to Revelation, continually
calling people out from the midst of empires in order to embody an
alternative. It also shows that God's total opposition to political
power is a theme that resonates through all of scripture. In the
past, the argument that Christianity should be inherently anarchist
has depended on something of a proof-texting approach. In the future,
Christian Anarchist scholarship would benefit from understanding
scripture as a literary unity.
1(NIV)
2Their
influence is prevalent throughout the works of Tripp York, Shane
Claiborne and Chris Haw, Dave Andrews and Jonathan Bartley.
3Leo
Tolstoy. The
Kingdom of God is Within You.
Translated by Constance Garnet. Kansas: Digireads, 2005. Pg. 32
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