This is the third live Q&A for The Christ Empire Couldn’t Keep, and this week we did everyone’s favorite theologian: Anselm. Here’s the setup for those who’ve carried atonement baggage since youth group. The angry God demanding a victim is not Anselm. That caricature is a later invention, and Joerg asks why contemporary conservative theology needs a version of the tradition that the tradition never actually taught. His answer: because empire reshapes God’s image in the image of the powerful, to celebrate the top and keep the bottom in check. And here’s the surprise — Anselm’s God cannot just forgive and forget, and that’s not cruelty; it’s the opposite. The tyrant can forgive and forget because the tyrant answers to nothing. Anselm’s God is bound by the order of creation. A God who follows the rule of law. (Imagine.) So the satisfaction theory becomes an argument against the Norman practice of bloody revenge, written by a man who watched William the Conqueror’s troops cut off the right hand and right foot of every male inhabitant of a village that gave offense. We also got into the feminist divine-child-abuse critique, whether reason is a gentler instrument of empire or just a more effective one, Brecht on banks, techno-feudalism, and a closing riff on economic democracy that got Joerg going and ran out of clock. Next week: Bartolomé de las Casas.
Highlights from the conversation
- This is not the God you were handed. Trevor’s question about the caricature. Technically there are versions of the angry-God theory in the tradition, but they’re nowhere near as prominent as people assume — and the satisfaction theory specifically doesn’t need an angry God at all. So why does contemporary conservative theology need this version? Because empire seeks to control all of life, down to the most intricate theological debates. God images get reshaped in the image of the powerful, so the top gets celebrated and everyone else gets the short end.
- A God who has to follow the rule of law. Omar’s question. The tyrant can single-handedly fix anything, which is exactly why the tyrant’s forgiveness means nothing. Anselm’s God operates inside a structure with laws and boundaries. Joerg’s push beyond Anselm: this means images of omnipotence have to be rethought, and worship has to change — away from adoring the God of power and might, toward collaboration and cooperation. And this is much older than modern theology. Process theology did not invent the critique of classical omnipotence. In the Hebrew Bible God regularly shows up as a craftsperson doing menial labor — washing, baking, cooking, cleaning, metalwork, pottery, gardening. Much of it labor relegated to women. And then Jesus grows up a construction day laborer.
- “You have not yet considered the weight of sin.” Beatrix’s question, and Joerg’s favorite Latin sentence: Nondum considerasti quanti ponderis sit peccatum. The book is a dialogue between Anselm and his student Boso (not the clown), who asks why God can’t just forgive if he repents. The answer is that the damage to the order of creation is too big for that. Joerg’s application: conservatives trivialize sin with the sinner’s prayer, liberals prefer to skip it, and both end up with the same problem. Well-meaning activism that doesn’t account for the weight of sin gets nowhere; fatalism gets nowhere either. This is what Theology in the Capitalocene is naming — not a few bad apples or billionaires, but a structural system that destroys people and planet.
- Christ as agent, not victim — and the feminist critique. Jamal’s question, and then Miriam’s on the divine-child-abuse reading. Joerg’s answer on both: in Anselm’s logic God does not nail Christ to the cross. God can’t single-handedly fix the problem, and Christ acts freely. So Anselm avoids the traps of the violent God and the abusive God that conservative theology falls into. The real problem isn’t the character of God in Anselm — it’s the imperial worldview underneath the whole structure. Which means the critique has to extend to ours. And what changes for us if Christ is an agent: being Christian stops being about rote obedience to God, pastor, elders, and becomes about agency — asking what’s wrong with the world and then doing what can be done. Russell’s chat follow-up pushes it further: extend satisfaction beyond the cross to the whole of Jesus’s life, and you get the ministry back in the picture, which the creeds never gave us.
- Reason as the more effective empire. Patty’s question, quoting the judgment that Anselm achieved by argument what the Crusades sought by fire and sword. Important background: Anselm opposed the Crusades. He isn’t arguing for bloody revenge or punishment. He simply thought logic was superior and would carry the day. Joerg’s answer: yes, reason is gentler than the sword, and it is also more effective — because it’s more hidden. Under the Normans, whether by sword or by logic, you still knew who the emperor was. Get to modernity, get to capitalism, and the master disappears. Which is why so many people today can imagine the end of the world but not the end of capitalism — a belief Thatcher and Reagan installed forty years ago that we now experience as the natural order.
- Brecht, guilt, and the alternative to guilt-pimping. Sandra asked how congregations learn to name structures when every sermon is aimed at individuals. Joerg’s Brecht: What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank? And its companion, what is the murder of a man compared to the hiring of a man? His answer to the problem is, of all things, take the Bible more seriously — Jesus is not talking about a few bad apples. First and last. Caesar. Mammon. Two masters. And on guilt (Rosario’s question): Joerg was raised German, felt guilty about 1933–1945 before he was alive, and watched how easily that guilt got manipulated into reparations that never addressed the core problem. His alternative: stop peddling guilt, keep the clear sense of structural sin, and then you can actually ask what needs repair and how to do it. The conclusion of his Capitalocene book is about reparations for enslavement in the US on exactly these grounds.
- The question that ran out the clock: economic democracy. Greg asked about the church’s role in revolutionary politics and whether it functions like a party formation. Joerg’s warning: don’t equate politics with party politics. Even more parties wouldn’t solve it, because we’d still only be talking about political democracy, which for most people collapses into voting for representatives. Voting matters — go vote — but treating it as the horizon of our political, economic, and religious imagination is the theological mistake. Why are we never talking about economic democracy? The power people have at work, during the bulk of their waking hours, shaping them deeply. The absence of economic democracy feeds the absence of political democracy, which feeds the absence of religious democracy in the churches. And on party loyalty: the point is not to root for your team. If you’re a Republican watching this, your job is to hold whoever’s in the White House to your stated principles, not to cheer.
About our guest
Dr. Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology and the Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt University and founding director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice. For three decades, he has worked to bring together theology and the struggles for justice and liberation that mark our age. His work addresses relations of theology and public life, reflecting on the misuse of power in religion, politics, and economics. His interest is in movements that bring about change and in the positive contributions of religion and theology. His constructive work in theology draws on a wide range of historical and contemporary traditions, with a concern for manifestations of the divine in the pressures of everyday life. Several of his 24 authored and edited books address the topics of this course, including No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics, and the Future; Unified We Are a Force: How Faith and Labor Can Overcome America’s Inequalities (with Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger); and Faith, Class, and Labor: Intersectional Approaches in a Global Context (with Jin Young Choi). www.joergrieger.com
Previous Episodes w/ Joerg
- Who Owns the Creed? Joerg Rieger on the Conservative Gimmick and the Surplus They Missed
- Empire Goes All the Way Down: Joerg Rieger on What “Christian Nationalism” Misses
- Why Religion Matters Now
- Theology in the Capitalocene
- Divine Justice & our Ultimate Concern
- the End of Religion & Business as Usual
- Joerg Rieger: Jesus vs Caesar
- Different Gods, Different Religions?
- Wild Goose Theology Happy Hour with Joerg Rieger and Emilie Townes
- The Economy, Election, Ayn Rand-Ryan-Romney, Occupy, & More
- Occupy the Church! Rita Nakashima Brock, Joerg Rieger, & Christophe Ringer
- Economics, Theology, and Discipleship
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