You Can Kill Me but You Cannot Defeat Me

Christianity, it seems to me, begins as a response to power. The Christian story answers the question: how can the weak effectively respond to the strong. (Here we broach a fundamental misunderstanding by Nietzsche). Christianity is neither passive nor passive-aggressive. It is strategic and patient. Three moments illustrate this.

1)      Turn the other cheek

2)      Render unto Caesar

3)      Be willing to die

The New Testament Jesus is perfectly consistent in his response to power, both to the power of the Jewish hierarchy and the power of Rome. He is thus an illustration as well as a teaching regarding how the weak retain or gain power. In other words, the message of his life is how to be a revolutionary when the other side has all the weapons.

He does not give a prescription of how to survive—he does not survive. Rather he illustrates how to fight back. His silence before Pilate in this case is brilliant. You fight back by refusing to fight. You gain power through an expression of meekness. The passion narrative of the gospels begins not at the arrest of Jesus but at the very beginning, at his birth. And the storytelling is brilliant.

There is a third power as well, beyond Roman and the Jewish hierarchy, and that third power is death. It has often been noted (as a criticism) that Christianity does not condemn slavery. Paul goes so far as to tell the slave to be content with his position. He goes too far to suggest that that position was decreed by God, but the Christian logic of the admonition is not inconsistent with the faith of Jesus. It’s important to understand here that this is not a capitulation to power. This is not appeasement enforced by power to maintain itself. This is resistance. And it must be understood as resistance if it is not to become appeasement. Certainly from its inception, particularly from the moment Christianity became the sanctified religion of Rome and since the church has become a means by which cultures and governments have shorn up their control of the population, the gospel has been co-opted and perverted. Christianity has always properly condemned injustice of all kinds. Christianity does not invite the rebellion of slaves in approval of slavery but (for what turns out to be a very Nietzsche-friendly reason) in the recognition that correcting specific instances of social injustice does not materially change the fundamental facts of being (cf. Nietzsche’s interpretation of Hamlet).

We should be clear: the abolition of slavery was a good thing, and anyone who claimed to be Christian and opposed it was fundamentally confused the faith. But in light of the fundamental injustice of the world and, most importantly, the inevitability of death, it changed little. Condemning injustice and fighting for a better world are good things, and Christians should always by first among those who do so. But the Star Trek vision of the future is a fantasy. It cannot be realized. And a more fundamental orientation of the church must be on what is in the long term most effective in resisting terrestrial and metaphysical evil. Turning the other cheek is not a passive reaction. It can only be done from a position of greater strength in the victim than in the aggressor. If one is willing to be killed as an act of resistance, one has to be willing to do all that is less than dying.