Back to the bookworm habit, here's what I'm in the middle of now: William Stringfellow's "An Ethic for Christians & Other Aliens in a Strange Land." This one landed on my radar as a recommendation from Greg Boyd for a book that discussed the book of Revelations as a parable of the church's existence in the Roman Empire. I was given the added note that Stringfellow went a step further in comparing the US to Babylon in this book. So to say that it provokes is to put it mildly.
I'm really liking the book, but it takes some getting used to for two reasons. The first, you'll see in the excerpt below, is his descriptive style of writing. The second has to do with the fact that the book was written in 1973. This is important for a couple of reasons.
The first is that it offers an interesting glimpse into what I suppose would have been the Religious Left of the era. Stringfellow was a friend of Daniel Berrigan for those of you who are know the reference. This was a time when the Religious Left possessed a very vocal critique of the federal government's actions as they pertained to the Vietnam War and other facets of the Nixon administration's exercise of power.
The second is that the book predates much of the more culturally conservative Christian understanding of Revelations, going so far as to describe the book as woefully understudied at the time. This would be the same year that Hal Lindsay's "The Late, Great Planet Earth" was published on the mass market and even more years before the "Left Behind" franchise of books, movies, sermon series, etc....
All this to say that Stringfellow is writing from a very different time and place than we're accustomed to today. For a starter, this ought to be enough to raise a few hackles:
(pages 50-53)
I am not implying that there is a neat parallelism in the manner in which Babylon on the one hand and Jerusalem on the other relate to the nations and institutions of tot the practical situation of any particular principality The interplay of Babylon and Jerusalem is dynamic and ironic and poignant, and it is specific as to each and every nation and power. Any description is inevitably too simplified, and analytical statement is insufficient. But, at least for now, it is enlightening to notice the paradoxical and the dialectical aspect of this interplay. The elementary truth of Babylon's apocalyptic situation is Babylon's radical confusion concerning her own identity and, in turn, her relationship to Jerusalem. The awful ambiguity of Babylon's fallenness is expressed consummately in Babylon's delusion that she is, or is becoming, Jerusalem. This is the same moral confusion which all principalities suffer in one way or another; this is the vocational crisis, really, which every nation in history endured. 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's else is determined. Babylon's profligacy has only most superficially to do with materialism, lust, or the decline of moral values, and Babylon's fall is not particularly a punishment for her greed or vice or aggrandizement, despite what some preachers allege. 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. Tee moral pretenses of Imperial Rome, the millennial clams 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 place of God in the world. In the doom of Babylon by the judgment of God this view is confounded and exposed, exhausted and extinguished. A magnificent celebration in heaven extols the triumph of God's sovereignty over principalities as well as human beings (Rev. 18:20; 19:1-2).
As every nation incarnated Babylon and imitates her idolatry, so each nation strives, vainly, to be or become Jerusalem. But, refuting and undoing that aim of nations, the reality of Jerusalem is not embodied in any nation or other power. Jerusalem is the holy nation; Jerusalem is the holy nation; Jerusalem is a separate nation. In the biblical image of Jerusalem and in the historic manifestations of Jerusalem as the priest of nation, Jerusalem lives within and outside the nations, alongside and over against the nations, coincident with but set apart from the nations. The emphatic tone in the Revelation passages in which the call "Come out [of Babylon], my people" is recited again and again points to this peculiar posture of simultaneous involvement and disassociation (Rev. 18:4-5). It is pertinent to remember the prominence of this matter elsewhere in the New Testament. It was an issue, remember, which caused grave misunderstandings between Jesus and his disciples throughout his ministry. That is evidenced in their persistent bemusement at his parables, by their misapprehension of the Palm Sunday events, by their conduct at his arrest, by their mourning after the Crucifixion, by their surprise and consternation at East. Only when Pentecost happens - where Israel is restored as a visible, viable, historic community and institution, as the holy nation - do the disciples and the others called into this new estate of humanity as society begin to comprehend the whereabouts of Jerusalem and Jerusalem's vocation among the nations (Acts 2:5-11, 36-47).
Babylon is concretely exemplified in the nations and the various other principalities - as in the Roman Empire, as in the USA - but Jerusalem is the parable for the Church of Jesus Christ, for the new or renewed Israel, for the priestly nation living both within and apart from the nations and powers of this world. Jerusalem is visibly exemplified as an embassy among the principalities - sometimes secretly, sometimes openly - or as a pioneer community - sometimes latently, sometimes notoriously - or as a prophetic society - sometimes discreetly, sometimes audaciously. And the life of Jerusalem, institutionalized in Christ's Church (which is never to be uncritically equated with ecclesiastical structures professing the name of the Church) is marvelously dynamic. Constantly changing in her appearances and forms, she is incessantly being rendered new, spontaneous, transcendent, paradoxical, improvised, radical, ecumenical, free.
In beholding some specific society or nation in history - like America - we must recognize the symbolic juxtaposition of the two biblical societies, Babylon and Jerusalem. Their contiguity signifies the convergence of confrontation or, indeed, collision of the apocalyptic and the eschatological events through which the past is consummated and the future is apprehended within the immediate scope and experience of that particular nation. It is in relation to these impending apocalyptic omens and imminent eschatological signs, in a time and in a place, that the body of the Church - and the person who is a Christian - decides and acts.
