Trade-offs (The End of the Empire 8)

Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts: Because you have not obeyed my words,  I am going to send for all the tribes of the north, says the Lord, even for King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, my servant, and I will bring them against this land and its inhabitants and against all these nations around; I will utterly destroy them and make them an object of horror and of hissing and an everlasting disgrace. Jeremiah 25:8-9

Utterly destroy – The Empire was collapsing.  At least that’s what many of its citizens thought when they observed fractures in what was once a common, unifying view of life.  Economic stress, exacerbated by profligate spending, a decline in military security, and a general distrust of the “system” led to clamors for a savior, or at least salvation through a new power structure.  The people were willing to submit because life as they knew it was no longer as they knew it.

“Most scholars agree that the third-century anarchy was a turning point in Graeco-Roman society and culture.  The crisis, at once military, economic, and political—perhaps even spiritual—demonstrated the fragility of order and of its guarantor, secure political authority.  They ushered in new adaptive responses, particularly in terms of the ideological formulations and representations of power, as the classical Mediterranean model of competitive parity yielded to a more overtly pyramidal and authoritarian pattern of social relationship.”[1]

“The rhetoric of concord assumed greater weight as social reality became increasingly characterized by fragmentation, conflict, and anarchy.”[2]

A thousand years earlier God gave Israel the same prognosis.  Israel experienced the same social disintegration, economic stress, and military collapse.  But unlike Rome, God revealed His hand in all that would follow.  Israel survived the Babylonian captivity, not because it turned to the Lord beforehand but because God did not abandon His people even in exile.  Israel eventually listened, and even though the great kingdoms of David and Solomon never returned, Israel returned—humbled, repentant, and observant.

Rome didn’t.  Instead of teshuvah, Rome moved toward religious despotism.  One thousand years of it.  Until the advent of the flea, the Church became the political, miliary, and spiritual tyrant of the West.  After the flea, the entire edifice collapsed—and in its place (for there is always something or someone to fill the gap) intellectual deconstruction grew until the society is once again at a turning point.  Only this time God is in exile.  There is nowhere to go except dogmatic politics—politics not based in a pursuit of truth but rather on the pursuit of power and conformity.  Just like the Church of the Dark Ages, citizens either toe the line or face the inquisition—a line determined by whatever serves the interest of the powerful.  A new Rome emerges from the ashes of social deconstruction armed with an arsenal of weapons to keep the population in line, the most important of which was fear.  “Do not fear,” a biblical injunctive, has been erased from modern language.  Religion served no purpose but to prepare us for spiritual suicide, for once we gave up God’s instructions for living we found that the will to power was the only alternative.  And only the powerful survive in that world.

Topical Index: power, collapse, exile, destroy, Jeremiah 25:8-9

[1] Richard Lim, Public Disputation, Power, and Social Order in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 1995), p. 24.

[2] Richard Lim, Public Disputation, Power, and Social Order in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 1995), p. 26.