In 166 B.C, two hundred years before the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, there was a rebellion in Judea that overthrew the Hellenist (Greko-Roman or “gentile”) Seleucid empire that continued in the colonising tradition of Alexander the Great, that is it imposed Greek social structure, economy and religion onto Judea at the same time as outlawing indigenous Hebrew culture, especially the Jubilee year of restoration (Leviticus 25), Sabbath laws and the land covenant of circumcision. Idols of Zeus were placed in Solomons temple in Jerusalem.

The indigenous Hebrews launched a guerilla war against the colonising Greek army and economy as well as Hellinised (civilised) Hebrews collaborating with the Greek regime. The gentiles were expelled from Judea and indigenous self-rule was instituted in Judea, Galilee, Samaria and other regions of Abraham and Joshua’s covenants, in the form of a priestly dynasty – the Hasmoneans. The old testament books of Maccabees tell the story. The festival of Hanukkah or “the festival of light” is a celebration of the rededication of Solomon’s temple after its defilement by the colonising Greeks. Jesus attended this festival and declared himself the messiah at it (John 10: 22 – 30).

Rome invaded the Holy land in 63 BC, after a hundred years of indigenous self-rule. However Rome did not outlaw Hebrew culture and law as the Greeks had done, instead it ruled in collaboration with the Hasmonean priests. The priests accepted Rome’s money to refurbish and expand Solomon’s temple. The temple itself became the centre of Roman tax collection and the priests compromised indigenous law, especially the Jubilee, in order to maintain peace with the Roman colonisers. This arrangement is the religious and political status-quo of the new testament.

Thirty years or so after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, in the 60s AD, indigenous Hebrews again launched a guerrilla war of independence, in this case against Roman domination. The Romans were evicted, self rule was instituted in Judea, Galilee and Samaria, based in the religious authorities in Jerusalem. Revolutionary Hebrew coins (“freedom coins”) were minted to replace the Roman economy and land and wealth redistribution occurred in line with tribal Jubilee law, as documented in the book of Acts.

In 70 AD Rome re-invaded and smashed the Jerusalem temple but Hebrew guerilla resistance continued for a hundred years.

The new testament was written during and/or after the revolution of the 60s and the whole new testament was written in the time of guerilla resistance and Rome’s persecution of the Hebrews as a result. That is, the events of the revolution and ongoing guerilla war would be well known by the bible writers and those to whom they wrote, it was the social context of the new testament. Domination by and liberation from the colonial empires of Egypt, Babylon, Greece and Rome is the social and historical context of the whole bible.

What can be solidly argued from the biblical texts is Jesus identification with the old testament prophetic tradition of resistance to empire.

What can also be solidly argued from the biblical texts is Jesus’ direct engagement with the issues and debates of his own time regarding the attempted fusion of God’s law and Caesar’s law by the priests (Pharisees and Sadducees). For example – there was a popular Babylonian born (Hellenised) Pharisee named Hillel at the time of Herod the Great, that is at the time of Jesus’ birth. Hillel was instrumental in abandoning the Jubilee law, the restoration of land to traditional owners and the extinguishment of debt. Such an arrangement is of course not compatible with the Roman colonial economy and was a direct threat to Rome’s capacity to extract wealth, which is why the Greeks outlawed it. Jesus proclamation of the Jubilee in his first announcement of his ministry was a direct engagement in the social debate of indigenous self rule and colonial domination. His constant attack on the pharisees must be understood in the context of the Hasmonean collaboration with Rome.

But unfortunately Christendom has established a tradition of interpreting the bible through the lens of Hellenic imperial Rome and as such betrayed the tribal indigenous perspective of the bible writers.

Even radical biblical archaeologists like John Domonic Crossan, whose work I would still recommend to anyone, interpret the new testament through the lens of Roman history, culture and debates within the Hellenic empire rather than the sociopolitical realities of Africa and the Middle East upon which the bible stories are founded.

The second thing to understand is that the Christian church since the fourth century has been the state religion of the Roman empire and Holy Roman empire. The church itself was created as an agency of the imperial state and at times has itself been the imperial state.

So the bible we have today is a tribal indigenous story of the land of the covenant of Abraham that has been interpreted through the cultural and religious consciousness of the empire of Rome. It began as an indigenous oral tradition, in the Old Testament as song and poetry and the New Testament as the oral stories of Jesus that were unwritten until decades after his crucifixion. From the oral tradition it has been written in various languages including ancient Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek and then into modern languages of Europe which have then been translated into many languages.

By the time “the word” reaches our ears it has been reconstructed by the culture of European empire into something very different from its original tribal meaning.

The basic challenge for the modern bible reader is to distinguish between the essential meaning of the story and the cultural baggage of empire.

These two perspectives – tribal indigenous and imperial – cause the bible to be perceived in two different ways which can provide very different interpretations. The imperial mode assumes the bible is personal instruction for citizens of empire. The tribal indigenous mode assumes the bible is a manifesto for liberation from empire, be it Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece or Rome.

Lets’ take Jesus’ teachings on divorce in the Sermon on the mount as an example of differing perspectives leading to different meanings.

Matthew 5: 31″It has been said, ‘Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.’ 32But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.

Within the English language and western cultural assumption this passage appears pretty clear cut. The church has used this verse as a basic teaching on personal morality and enforced notions of marriage based on it.

The Sermon on the mount is full of references to the Old Testament books of Jeremiah and Lamentations, the narrative of the Hebrews being taken into captivity as a result of their pursuit of foreign gods and cultures and turning their back on the one true god.

Consider Jeremiah’s statements about divorce.

Jeremiah 3:1 “If a man divorces his wife 
       and she leaves him and marries another man, 
       should he return to her again? 
       Would not the land be completely defiled? 
       But you have lived as a prostitute with many lovers— 
       would you now return to me?” 
       declares the LORD.

Jeremiah 31:31 “The time is coming,” declares the LORD, 
       “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand  to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them ” declares the LORD.”

Jeremiah is talking about the adultery of the Hebrew people in breaking the covenants of Abraham and Moses by adopting the cultures of empire, this is clear and specific in Jeremiah’s prophecy.

In reading Jesus words on divorce we have to ask ourselves whether he is speaking about the same thing as Jeremiah in the tradition of the prophets or was he talking about personal relationships between men and women?

This of course opens up all sorts of questions about what “adultery” might mean throughout the bible, questions that I wont canvas here but I encourage readers to explore along with words such as “fornication” and “homosexual”. In each case these words can be understood in the context of personal sexual instruction or as instruction not to participate in the gods and culture of the gentiles – two very different meanings.

The church of empire has not approached the bible from the perspective of captivity and liberation from empire. It established a basic framework by which to understand not only the bible but also God and Jesus in the Nicene creed at the council of Nicaea, a council created and facilitated by the emperor of Rome himself.

The dominant church mode of biblical exegesis has been to begin with the assumptions of Nicaea as a lens through which to look at the new testament. This perception of the new testament is then similarly used as the lens to look at the old testament. The theology of the Emperor of Rome has been retrospectively applied to the whole bible. This has been the basic methodological flaw of christian theology since Constantine.

In stark contrast to this imperial reconstructionism is the words of Jesus in locating and describing himself in the context of the old law and prophets.

Matthew 5: 17″Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”

Luke 4: 20Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, 21and he began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

We cannot understand the life, mission, death and resurrection of “Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1) without understanding the Old Testament. The Old Testament is the proper lens through which to look at the new testament.

Similarly we cannot understand Jesus without understanding his contemporary historical circumstance. In the context of the Old Testament history of oppression by Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian and Greek empires, Jesus lives in a time of imperial occupation, this time by Rome.

About two hundred years before Jesus the Hebrew people drove out the Greek armies and colonists from greater Israel – The Maccabees revolt. The Hanukkah or Festival of light, where Jesus declared himself to the Temple authorities to be the Messiah (John 10), is a celebration of the rededication of the Jerusalem temple after it being defiled by the Greek invaders.

The Pharisees and Saducees so often mentioned in the new testament were political factions within the Sanhedrin, the council of politician-priests who governed greater Israel after the Macabees revolt.

About 100 years before Jesus, Rome invaded greater Israel. Instead of outlawing Sabbath and circumcision laws, the basis of Hebrew land rights, as the Greek invaders had done, Rome ruled in collaboration with the Sanhedrin. As a result the Jerusalem temple was restored and extended to palatial proportion with Rome’s money but it also meant the Sanhedrin, including the Pharisees and Saducees were representing Caesar’s authority in Israel rather than the covenants of Abraham and Moses. This arrangement allowed for Herod the Great to rule as King by way of Rome’s support despite his dubious connection to the priestly dynasty. The rule of of this fake King of the Jews and the corruption of the politician priest class that enforced foreign domination of the land of Abraham is the context of the birth of Jesus.

About three decades after Jesus’ death the Hebrews rose up, evicted the Roman invaders and re-instituted indigenous self government. As a result of this the Romans re-invaded in 70 AD, smashed the Jerusalem temple, genocided the resistance fighters and exiled the surviving Hebrew remnant to all corners of the empire.

This time of indigenous self government and imperial invasion is the time of writing of the New Testament. The struggles of the Hebrew people against foreign domination is as relevant to the New Testament as it was to the Old Testament prophets in their struggle with Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Rome.

The God of the bible does not support the Hebrew people simply because they are indigenous by way of the covenant of Abraham. God abandons the indigenous Hebrews when they abandon God and pursue the consciousness, political structure and economy of the various empires. The bible is written from the perspective of the prophets, those on the fringes of and often persecuted by mainstream indigenous society, calling them away from the consciousness of empire and back to God. Constant amongst all the prophets is the perspective that the sins of the descendants of Abraham are the causes of their own oppression, so it does not romanticise indigenous nationalism.

So, to understand Jesus we need to have some basic understanding of 1/ The history of foreign imperialism in the Old Testament 2/ The History of foreign imperialism in the New Testament and 3/ The perspective and attitudes of the prophets to foreign imperialism.

These three elements are the proper lens by which to look at the bible rather than the illusory theological templates of the Roman empire such as the Nicene creed.

The next question to be asked, once we have a basic understanding of the context of the bible, is what relevance do the stories of Hebrew captivity by and liberation from empire have to do with us here and now, what is the bible’s relevance to our lives?

The covenants of Abraham and Moses, the law that Jesus fulfilled, are not for the whole world but for a specific piece of real estate defined by Abraham’s covenant as the land between the Euphrates, Nile and Jordan rivers and the Mediterranean sea. This piece of real estate was subdivided into tribal territories in the covenant of Moses.

When Jesus proclaimed the Jubilee year (Luke 4) in fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophesy and Moses’ calendar , he was proclaiming the restoration of indigenous self government under the sovereignty of God, just like in the times of Abraham, Joshua and David. The Jubilee is the restoration of the specific land rights of the covenant of Moses and not simply a generalised proclamation of generosity and forgiveness, although these elements are very important to the covenant land rights.

It is the one true God that is universal, not the land covenants which are very specific in terms of people and land.

Acts 17:26 From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. 27God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.

The Apostle Paul was called the Apostle to the gentiles, a position conferred on him (after he had appointed himself) by the Jerusalem apostles.

He says in Galatians 3:8 The Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: “All nations will be blessed through you.” 9So those who have faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.

Jesus is quoted in John 10:16 I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd.

Clearly the covenants of Abraham and Jesus are relevant to the “gentiles”. The word “gentile” comes from the Greek word “Hellen” which means of Greek culture or somehow connected to Greece. Both the Greek and Roman invasions were by Hellenistic culture. The “gentiles” are the invaders, yet Jesus says of a Roman centurion in Matthew 8:10 “I tell you the truth, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith.”

Within the Hellenic mythology there were many Christs or “Christos” which is the Greek word meaning anointed one. However Abraham’s blessing, Jesus’ shepherding, and Paul’s evangelism to the gentiles has to be understood in the context of the Old Testament notion of messiah, this is how it is presented in the bible. The Messiah is the liberator of the poor and oppressed from imperial domination.

Jesus spoke in depth about the liberation of the poor and oppressed as did the Old Testament prophets. The law of Moses, as long as it is adhered to, eliminates poverty and oppression. Whatever relevance Abraham, Moses and Jesus have to “all the nations” is, the cosmic and universal christ is the entity that liberates the poor from imperial domination in whatever apportioned section of the globe that imperial oppression exists.

The universal Christ is not about anointing universal empires and their religious institutions to rule in the place of God’s sovereignty.

To understand what is going on in the bible we must understand that, unless we live in the Middle East, it is not talking about us or the land we live on. The specific details of the covenants of Abraham and Moses, even if fulfilled by Jesus of Nazareth, are not guidebooks for our own land, nation, family and individual selves.

The bible is only relevant to here and now if we can identify the nature of the relationship between God, the people and the land as represented in the biblical covenants and look for parallels in our own context. On the land that we live on – what is the nature of the ancient and eternal covenant of God on that land? Who are the people of that covenant? Who are the foreign invaders that defile or extinguish that covenant? Who and where are the poor and oppressed? If we ask these kind of questions about our own cultural, political and economic circumstance then the biblical “model” is of enormous relevance and the connections are not particularly complicated or obscure. The parallels are obvious.

This essay has not covered issues of personal spirituality and healing which are as much a part of the bible story as the collective and political issues. These are issues for other essays. In no way do I suggest that there is a schism between the personal and the political. In the old and new testaments there is a clear holistic reality that incorporates both. However, to replace the tribal indigenous resistance to empire with obedience and conformity to the Roman empire as the contextual platform to understand the bible will necessarily lead to a different holistic fusion of personal and political. This imperial paradigm is a different thing altogether and antithetical to the holism of biblical paradigms. Unfortunately this is the legacy of imperial Christendom that we must wash from our eyes in order to see the real glory of the risen Lord.

John Tracey

Rev. Graham Paulson, a respected elder, pastor and theologian, has written an essay entitled “Towards an Aboriginal Theology” that urges Aboriginal Christians to approach the bible from the perspective of their own culture and spirituality instead of the perspective of the European missionaries. Apart from a traditional protestant approach to biblical authority, Rev. Paulsen argues, the European missionaries’ context of Pacific colonialism needs to be taken into account when understanding the theology of the white Australian church.

Rev. Paulson’s essay uncritically accepts European Christianity to be appropriate and proper for European Christians and he focuses on the agenda of Aboriginal Christianity.

However in this essay I challenge the appropriateness and properness of the historical forms of the European Church, especially in Australia, as an agency to manifest the mission of Jesus. I propose a different framework for mission.

The point at which the church betrayed the mission of Jesus was the point at which the tribal indigenous spirituality of the bible was turned into the official universal religion of the Empire of Rome. This is a fascinating history that I will not deal with now except to identify it as a historical landmark in the development of European Christianity.

What is the mission of Jesus? The best answer I can give to this is the words attributed to Jesus in the Gospels.

Luke 4:  16He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. 17The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
18″The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
19to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Apart from identifying a clear and explicit social agenda of poverty, freedom, blindness and oppression, this proclamation of Jesus clearly locates him in the Old Testament tradition of Isaiah’s prophecy of liberation from foreign domination and Moses’ cyclical restorative jubilee law. The Jubilee year of Leviticus 25 is the festival of the returning of land to original tribal traditional owners and the elimination of all debt and bondage. The Jubilee has to be understood in the broader Sabath laws which were the framework of indigenous self government in the land of Abraham’s covenant.

I suggest, when the bible is read from the perspective of poverty, ill-health, oppression and foreign domination, especially within a tribal indigenous framework, then its meaning will be radically different from the perspective of the top of the hierarchy of economic and military empire.

I ask two questions, 1/ What perspective of the bible dominates the Australian Church today – indigenous poverty and oppression or the religion of empire and mainstream privilege? and 2/ What was the perspective of the bible writers, in particular their representation of the mission of Jesus?

I have drawn my conclusions which are that Jesus brings good news for the poor but the historical church, including in Australia, has not. It has brought some other kind of news.

Today, the church seems to have two notions of mission, sometimes but not always connected. That is evangelical proselytising and welfare/charity.

I am a big supporter of proselytising. There is a clear biblical mandate for such mission and the reality is without it the church will die (is dying). My concern however is the church’s evangelism has been predominantly the “some other kind of news” previously mentioned. Good news for the poor does not seem to be preached but the happy news of relief from personal guilt and anxiety is.

The church’s welfare and charity functions are the closest thing to good news for the poor on its agenda and this is what I want to explore in a bit more depth.

There is an opinion that the modern church is separate from the state. In many instances of the church’s life this is the case – a positive separation from the history of alignment of church and empire. However in the area of mission the church has sycophantically conformed to the welfare templates of the state. In most cases the church operates as an outsourced management structure to administer state funding for state programs designed within state policy frameworks. Churches sometimes provide supplementary resources in the form of minimal donations or significant volunteer support but all within mainstream state constructed welfare paradigms.

The church’s service to the rich in the form of private hospitals and schools is similarly constructed totally within state frameworks including funding.

In general, the congregations have absolutely nothing to do with church welfare programs. The staff of the welfare programs, being employed for their job skills alone, have nothing to do with the congregations. Mission has been reduced to an agenda item of church management and delegated up the right channels of state rather than an active process of social engagement into which congregations and individuals are called.

The welfare paradigm shared by church and state is just a bandaid methodology that entrenches people into lifestyles of poverty. It is a process of administering the poor and has nothing to do with liberation, nothing to do with personal or structural change. It is just the provision of the resources necessary to prolong the problem until tomorrow when the process starts again.

The welfare paradigm is a clear power hierarchy where the social worker and their employers are totally in control of the process. They designed it, they manage it and they make all the decisions about it. The very definition of what the problem is that the welfare agency is responding to, is a construction of the welfare agency itself. The poor are powerless recipients of what the social worker chooses to offer them. Beyond nutrients to survive until tomorrow, the poor are not empowered, liberated or healed through engagement with welfare programs. Nothing changes.

So what is the alternative?

The tradition of liberation theology that emerged in South America and the Philipines in the 1970s and 80s – and abruptly repressed by the artist formerly known as Ratzinger, offers an alternative paradigm to welfare. Apart from the centrality of liberation for the oppressed, Liberation theology emphasised the importance of the poor being the agents of their own liberation. The middle class and wider church had an important support role to play but the leadership and authority of the movements for social change must lay with the poor themselves and not with self appointed advocates within the rich world. The modus operandi of liberation theology was the base christian community movement whereby house-churches amongst poor communities not only met for prayer and worship but also to deal with the political issues of the community including defence from and resistance to oppression. The church directly empowered the poor, it was their own agency.

Susan Wilkinson-Maposa, a researcher on African aid issues, along with others produced a report in 2005 into aid paradigms entitled “The poor philanthropist: How and why the poor help each other”. The report identifies a notion of “horizontal philanthropy”.

Horizontal philanthropy recognises that mutual aid is a common characteristic of poor communities. Although they have little resources to distribute they have existing natural and organic systems of distributing resources. They are the point of greatest understandings of problems and opportunities on the ground.

The report identifies the problem of “vertical philanthropy”, that is traditional aid structures based on foreign or extra-community intervention, can tend to undermine and obstruct natural and organic local processes and in some cases operate in contradiction to their objectives.

The report calls for a systematic intersection of vertical and horizontal modes that can facilitate both the generosity of external philanthropy as well as the empowerment and resourcing of local philanthropy.

This intersection of vertical and horizontal philanthropy is, in my opinion, the nub of constructing new modes of church mission.

This nub (I love that word) is not the intersection of state funding and grass roots poor agendas, although the church can certainly provide innovative leadership to state policy in this regard, but it is the intersection of the church itself and the agendas of the poor, independent from the state and its policy frameworks.

While it is true that the church’s financial capacity to tackle the needs of the poor is dimensionally less than the state, this is no excuse for the church to abandon the biblical principles of economic redistribution inherent in the jubilee tradition and the story of Jesus telling the rich young man that he must sell all he has and give it to the poor. Economic redistribution is a central element of Jesus’ good news for the poor and it cannot be avoided by rich christians and their church.

What this redistributive principle means in the lives of individual christians is not my business or the church’s. This is a private matter with God. The church can and should facilitate and promote options for individual christians – and others – to redistribute wealth. This need not be simply donating money but could also include partnering in economic development projects that benefit the poor.

On the other hand, what the church does with the common wealth of the body of christ, the assets held by the church, is a matter that should not only be open to public discussion but, ideally , would be a light on the hill providing direction for others.

Perhaps the real estate presently used to provide private hospitals and schools for the rich could be put to some other use. Perhaps church investment strategies can be designed to utilise capital assets, such as housing the homeless or investing in economic development in Aboriginal communities, rather than invest them in the stock market or property development for minimal (and recently negative) cash flows to pay staff to cater to the needs of the middle class church.

If the church wont invest in the poor, what integrity do the various church social justice agencies have in calling for the government to do so?

But even if the church, or some collective within it, decided to dedicate resources to the poor but simply replicated the hierarchical disempowering modes of welfare, then nothing has changed. Unless principles in accord with liberation theology and horizontal philanthropy are the platform from which good news to the poor is delivered then the church, however innovative, will still be the privileged, self appointed advocate of the poor rather than an agency of the poor.

There are two aspects of Jesus’ mission that are absent from church mission paradigms and are not able to be addressed by state welfare paradigms, that is prophecy and eschatology.

A church that designs its mission in accordance with state funding guidelines and is dependent on state funding for its existence is in no position to engage in prophetic ministry, of calling the people and authorities back to God. This mode is not capable of any innovation beyond tinkering around the edges of the status-quo and is certainly not capable of incarnating an alternative vision – they would be defunded immediately. They cannot criticise government policy as that would be biting the hand that feeds it. The church needs to step outside of the state welfare machine and, with whatever limited resources it can muster, both build alternative modes of mission and prophetically call governments to engage in different modes to the illusory and dysfunctional status-quo.

Jesus mission was undertaken with the urgency of the imminence of “the end times”. While the church seems to think that this is yet to come, Jesus explicitly said it would occur in the life of the new testament witnesses – and it did! In 70 AD the Roman military genocide Israel and smashed the temple. Acts and the epistles clearly document the persecution that Jesus spoke of. Jesus’ eschatology involved imminent catastrophe in real, material, historical terms.

The “end times” came to Australia in the genocide of the nineteenth century and incarceration in reserves in the twentieth century and the associated destruction of sacred places. A whole culture, lifestyle, law and consciousness came to an end – just like what happened to the Jews during the time of the writing of the new testament. For many communities in Africa, drought and disease has meant the end times as starvation, illness or refugee migration wipes out entire cultures. For hundreds of thousands of people in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Maralinga, the end times came half a century ago.

The ecological crisis, in particular climate change has made the rich world aware of the imminence of global catastrophe. But the rich are always the last to realise there is a problem. Climate change is already the end times through drought in Africa, floods in Pakistan and the flooding of small Island nations.

The rich are horrified about the recent oil spill of the coast of the U.S. but are barely aware of the pollution in the Amazon and Indonesia by oil drilling or pipelines resulting in the end times for communities dependent on clean waterways. The hypothetical future crisis that the rich have just discovered has been genociding the poor for a long time already.

The church can and needs to, but doesn’t, address mission with an eschatological urgency that reflects the perspective of the poor who are being genocide by the rich. Instead the status-quo seems to reflect the perspective of comfortably numb affluence and a boiling frog gradualist approach such as household water and energy conservation, drinking fair trade coffee and participation in band aid welfare programs, things that mainly resolve the anxiety or religious obligation of the rich but offer little good news for the poor or the fragile global ecology in real terms.

John Tracey

“Making common cause with the poor” – the Liberation Theology of Leonardo Boff and Clodovis Boff

Building Community Philanthropy
Interview with Susan Wilkinson-Maposa, co-author of “The Poor Philanthropist”.

Building Community Philanthropy (Full report)

“Towards an Aboriginal theology” by Rev. Graham Paulson

However, in the 1990s I had the privilege of working and being a friend with the Late Mr. Norman Mitchell, a traditional Aboriginal man and a devout Christian. Uncle Norman was born in Cape York before the Roman calendar arrived and was not aware of dates until they arrived along with the police raids into the Cape. Uncle Norman did not see a white person until he was an adolescent. He had no idea how old he was but the family’s best guess was he was over 100 years old when I met him. Uncle Norman was a member of the secret council of chiefs of Cape York, a traditional authority structure on the Cape. He was also the founder of the Mareeba Community Church, which he built when he was probably in his 60s or 70s through street preaching in Mareeba and on regular tours around Cape York communities. Uncle Norman was a senior man in both the Cape York Church as well as Cape York customary law.

Uncle Norman insisted “wybala” (whitefella) cannot understand Bama (Aboriginal people) unless the wybala becomes a Christian. The wybala needs the book but Bama has it in our wawu (heart)” he said, over and over again.

For some reason Uncle Norman enjoyed my company and considered me a Christian and I dare not suggest otherwise. The truth was however, that I dismissed his statement at first, feeling a sadness that he was so brainwashed by the white religion.

But it seems that it was I who was brainwashed by the white religion as to my assumptions of what the bible was.

As I spent more time with Uncle Norman and listened to his stories of Aboriginal culture, the Cape York history of the last 100 years and his recounting of the stories of the bible – all within one conceptual whole, I began to understand what was behind his Christianity.

Uncle Norman saw Aboriginal culture and reality when he read the bible. He understood the deep connection to place that was at the centre of the bible stories, he identified with the enslavement and persecution of the Jews for he himself had been taken from his homeland and sent to Palm Island. Uncle Norman also remembered holy war, the guerrilla war of resistance to the invaders, which was still raging in Cape York in his youth. Uncle Norman understood, through his traditional culture, what the ceremonial sacrifices were all about, what circumcision was all about, what the holy wars were about, what colonial desecration of holy places meant, he recognised his own story in the stories of the bible. The tribal life of the Hebrews was no mystery to him.

Uncle Norman’s understandings of the bible were completely new and fascinating to me, a perspective I had never considered before and would never have discovered from my own world experience.

For Uncle Norman, the good news of Jesus to the dispossessed Jews and controversy of the gentiles (wybala) was immediately applicable to his own history and contemporary circumstance. He needed no biblical scholar to interpret the cross-cultural nuance of the bible story; it was plain and obvious to him.

The first black skinned person who I ever had a conversation with was the Late Reverend Doctor William Augustus Jones Junior – an African American Baptist preacher and theological scholar. Dr. Jones passed away a couple of years ago. He was an associate of Martin Luther King and a key leader of the Christian civil rights movement. Dr. Jones was in Australia on a speaking tour in 1978 when I was in my last year of high school. I was a member of the House of Freedom Christian community at the time who organised the Brisbane section of his speaking tour so I was privileged to have a lot of contact with him informally during his time in Brisbane.

One night Dr. Jones was relaxing and sharing a meal with a group of us and he played a tape of a woman singing in his church. “Can you feel the spirit?” he asked us all, to which various comments such as “ooh! aah!” and “isn’t it beautiful” came from people in the room. Then Dr. Jones said directly to me “John” (pronounced Jaaahn in a thick American accent) “Can you feel the spirit?” “No” I said, “I cannot feel the spirit in that song”. Dr. Jones’ face lit up with delight, which confused me greatly, then he said, “Jaaaahn, you haven’t suffered enough yet to have felt the spirit”. He told me privately later that he appreciated my honesty and he suspected the others didn’t feel the spirit either. He was frustrated by the radical white Christians of Australia having little knowledge of or contact with the black struggle in Australia despite their fascination with Martin Luther King and the black struggle in America.

Dr. Jones gave a lecture in Brisbane that had a profound affect on my understanding of what the church is. His lecture was called “Racistic Religion” and the part of this lecture that I remember was his question (words to the effect) …If there is one God, and God is universal, then the God that the ancestors of the slaves in Africa worshipped must be the same God as their descendants, the modern African American Baptists were worshipping. What other God could there be? Who are the exclusively white churches in America worshipping? What God would allow segregation, would harbour members of the KKK in its congregations, would justify white prive ledge in America? It certainly wasn’t the same God that the African-American worshippers were worshipping. The white American church must be worshipping demons, Dr. Jones asserted.

In Latin, the word Ab-origine means from the original or pertaining to the original. In Mathew and Luke’s genealogies of Jesus we learn that he is an Aborigine to the land on which he was born and died. Mathew tells us that Jesus is from Abraham, the father of the nation of Israel. Luke’s genealogy tells us that Jesus is from Adam, the father of humanity.

Acts 17 says…26From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. 27God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.

Despite the connecting relationship of all humanity to each other, we all have our own land given to us by God. This traditional ownership is itself, according to verse 27, is a mechanism of relationship with God.

The diversity of land, culture and language as Gods preferred option is also illustrated in the story of the Tower of Babel. The scattering of the people and the multitudes of languages that came from the destruction of the tower of Babel was not Gods curse on them but his blessing, the institution of the order of the nations, as God wanted it.

Joshua 11
23 So Joshua took the entire land, just as the LORD had directed Moses, and he gave it as an inheritance to Israel according to their tribal divisions. 
 Then the land had rest from war.

The church since the conversion of the emperor Constantine has abandoned this place based theology and developed a Christianity that mirrors the philosophy and ideology of roman centralisation and imperialism. The stories of the old and New Testament were written by and for the descendants of Abraham regarding the dreaming of the land that God gave to Abraham. Yet the imperial, church has generalized and misconstrued the Middle East dreaming, remodeling its local specifics as a global or “catholic” template to be applied to all places and all times. I can find no justification for this universalisation in the bible yet I can find much argument against it. The bible seems to suggest the opposite as God’s particular plan for the nations. There is only one God and the God is the God of all the nations. The same God gives land to and makes covenants with all the nations of the world just as in the land between the Euphrates and the River of Egypt – the surveyed real estate specified in the terms and conditions of the Covenant between God and Abraham.

It is God that is universal, not the governments and churches.

God was in Australia and in relationship with the people of Australia before the bible and the missionaries arrived.

Paul indicates in Romans 1 that nobody anywhere has an excuse for not seeing the revealed God.

18The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

As I hope this essay suggests, I am no fan of the religions of Rome. However I must pay tribute to a remarkable speech given by Pope John Paul II to the Aboriginal people of Australia in Alice Springs in 1986. In that speech he said……

“At the beginning of time, as God’s Spirit moved over the waters, he began to communicate something of his goodness and beauty to all creation. When God then created man and woman, he gave them the good things of the earth for their use and benefit; and he put into their hearts abilities and powers, which were his gifts. And to all human beings throughout the ages God has given a desire for himself, a desire which different cultures have tried to express in their own ways.

As the human family spread over the face of the earth, your people settled and lived in this big country that stood apart from all the others. Other people did not even know this land was here; they only knew that somewhere in the southern oceans of the world there was “The Great South Land of the Holy Spirit”.

But for thousands of years you have lived in this land and fashioned a culture that endures to this day. And during all this time, the Spirit of God has been with you. Your “Dreaming”, which influences your lives so strongly that, no matter what happens, you remain for ever people of your culture, is your only way of touching the mystery of God’s Spirit in you and in creation. You must keep your striving for God and hold on to it in your lives.”

We cannot understand the story of Jesus unless we understand the historical context of his mission. The first historical point we need to come to terms with is that Jesus was not a Christian, he was a Jew. The form and structure of the Christian religion that we have in Australia is a construction of the Roman Empire and its state church, not the religious and cultural tradition of Jesus.

Not only do we have confusion in translating the bible from the oral tradition to Aramaic to Greek to Latin to English, and then for frontline missionaries into indigenous language but the interpreting and editing has been done from a gentile perspective, an imperial and colonial perspective. Our theology has been mostly constructed by the Roman empire after the reign of Emperor Constantine who incorporated Christianity into the empire and Emperor Theodosius who, at the end of the fourth century made it illegal in Roman imperial law not to be a Christian. Previously, Between Nero and Constantine it had been illegal to be a follower of Jesus and the epicentre of the Christian world was Jerusalem, post-Constantine Christianity was institutionalised with its epicentre in Rome. The dominant theology that lives in our own culture is the theology of Rome, not the story of Jesus and his disciples and his country and his times.

What we today call “holy scripture” is a perspective on God and Jesus from a global position of power and authority. The theology of sin and redemption, in particular the personal obedience to authority often inherent in theology is a construction of the Roman Empire, not the Jesus movement.

The story of Jesus must be understand in the context of the old law, the covenant of circumcision marking the relationship between Abraham, God and the land promised to the descendents of Abraham. The law of Moses must also be understood, not just the ten commandments but the whole of the law given to the descendants of Abraham as the basis of how to live in the land that God had given them. The old law is as much a matter of national sovereignty and land rights as it is a moral code.

The old law included the Jubilee festival, the origin of the notion of redemption where land, debts and slaves were freed every fifty years. All land that had changed hands between festivals was returned to the traditional owner families at the Jubilee.

Leviticus 25
10 Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each one of you is to return to his family property and each to his own clan.

The land that God gave to Abraham had been under foreign occupation for hundreds of years before Jesus. The Abrahamic covenant and the Temple of Solomon had been defiled by the Assyrian, Greek and Roman empires, claiming not only the land and economy but also demanding that the Abrahamic people worship the Gods and participate in the culture of the colonial occupying authorities – that they become assimilated into the foreign culture in their own land or worse, be taken as slaves from their own country.

Less that 200 years before the mission of Jesus, those Jews in Judea who refused to bow down before the foreign idols and continued the banned practice of circumcision and Sabbath law, marking their allegiance to God and their own indigenous right to their land, left the cities and villages and lived in the “wilderness” where they were relatively free to practice their religion in and on the holy land. However the Greek armies soon enough began to go into the desert and mountains to demand loyalty from the Hebrews. To cut a long story short, a story that can be found in the apocryphal book of Maccabees, the devout Jews formed armies in the wilderness and massacred or chased away the foreign armies and reclaimed the holy land under Gods sovereignty and the Law of Abraham and Moses. They also killed all those Jews who were collaborating with the foreign invaders.

When Rome invaded and occupied the holy land it was fearful of a similar Jewish uprising and therefore tolerated circumcision and Sabbath Law and recognised the authority of the Sadducees and Pharisees who compromised with and accommodated the foreign law to the point of collecting Roman tax and displaying Roman idols in the temple.

There were those Jews who stood firm in the tradition of the Maccabeean revolt, the Zealots including the armed revolutionaries, the people of the knife “Sicarii” where the name Iscariot comes from.

Within these power groups – 1/ the Roman state, 2/ the Pharisees /Sadducees/Scribes and 3/ the Zealots, Jesus is clearly located with the Zealots, who were represented amongst the disciples, through his rejection of imperialism and religious collaboration although he rejects the modus operandi of the Zealots and proposes a new (or perhaps old) way forward for the faithful.

Jesus did not call his disciples to engage in random acts of kindness or to administer welfare programs to the poor. Jesus charged the disciples with the task of building an indigenous revolution against Rome, a revolution built on the manifestation of the law of God, not the idolatrous state apparatus at the centre of Gentile sociology. The proclamation of the Kingdom of God was not an ethereal reference to pie in the sky when we die or to intellectual escapism where the kingdom exists in our minds. Jesus’ Kingdom was that which was promised to Abraham’s descendants and honoured by the faithful through continued rite of circumcision and observance of Sabbath laws.

Mathew 5 17″Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them. 18I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.

Mathew 10
5These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. 6Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel. 7As you go, preach this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven is near.’ 8Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons.

The conservative and radical church alike have embraced the call to heal and preach the message of Heaven but have not come to terms with Jesus priority for his own tribe and country of Judah. There were poor amongst the Samaritans and there were probably some poor amongst the gentiles, but Jesus mission was not about charity to the disadvantaged but about rebuilding the connection and covenant between God, the people and the land, the Kingdom of God.

The point of difference, I suggest, between the history of Aboriginal Australia and the bible stories is a matter of the history of sin. According to Genesis, the perfect state of Gods creation manifested as Adam and Eve living naked in the garden, hunting and gathering from the abundant garden that provided all their needs. Upon eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the evidence of sin came in two phases, first in Adam and Eve’s personal sense of shame for their own nakedness and then secondly in God’s wrath which manifested in difficulties in childbirth and the land itself becoming a burden to toil over rather than freely providing prosperity.

I choose not to explore childbirth here because it involves Aboriginal women’s’ business which I am not authorised to speak of and have a limited knowledge which may well be way off the mark. However, within my own understandings as a man plus the voluminous representation of men’s business in the bible, I feel safe commenting on Adam’s curse. In short, it is the transition from hunter and gatherer to agriculturalist hoarder.

Ched Meyers describes this curse much better than I can.

“It is interesting that the symbol of the fall in Genesis 3 is the human being’s expulsion from the Garden, his alienation from the earth, and his condemnation to a life of toil as an agriculturalist. This was indeed the story of the late Neolithic. Moreover, the first act outside the Garden is fratricide, in which the pastoralist Abel, symbolizing the remnants of the older, not-yet-fully-domesticated lifeways of the nomad forager, is murdered by the farmer Cain. This metaphorical vignette represents the opening battle of subsequent history’s longest war between aggressive, expansionist agriculturally based societies and their insatiable appetite for land on one hand, and ever-retreating traditional foragers on the other.”
Cultural/Linguistic Diversity and deep Social Ecology (Genesis 11;1-9) by Ched Meyers

The obvious problem in understanding sin in Australia from this perspective is that, before the British invasion, Aboriginal people lived naked in the garden that that provided all of their needs, the land did not manifest or Adam’s curse of toiling on the land.

Why was there no evidence of the curse of Adam in Australia? Even people in the most arid desert are provided all their needs through hunting and gathering.

I can offer two suggestions to tackle this dilemma. 1/ The Aboriginal people are not descended from Adam but were born of the dust on this continent and therefore have not inherited original sin or 2/ At some stage in the past, Aboriginal people were offered the salvation of the spiritual Jesus, the Aboriginal Malchezedek, and they accepted that salvation, unlike the Jews of Judea, and returned to the kingdom of god in the garden – until the arrival of the outpost of Babylon in 1788.

Either way, we can safely say that God and the people of this continent had met each other before the missionaries arrived.

What other phrase could better describe the message of the early Australian church and its mission to the Aborigines than preaching “the knowledge of good and evil”?

Aborigines did not feel shame for their nakedness until the missionaries told them they were shameful. Naked Aborigines were not allowed into the churches and missions, they had to put on the clothes of the white missionaries to do this. Shame of nakedness did not come to this country through the manipulations of the snake, as in Genesis, but through the manipulations of the Christian church.

Whether Aborigines were forever sinless in the garden or at some stage had repented and been redeemed, contemporary sin in Australia has its roots in the arrival of the first fleet and the social, economic, cultural and spiritual domination of foreign force and Gods, just like in the time of Jesus in his own country.

Sin has manifested to the point that Aboriginal Australia has been integrated, either forcefully or by choice, into the gentile culture and polity. Beyond shame for nakedness, the curse of Adam, the point at which the Earth itself fights against man, is surely upon this continent today including in the hearts and minds of Aboriginal people as they have become sucked more and more into the consciousness of Babylon and are forgetting the ancient heritage and God Given birthright that they have been denied for 200 years.

The biblical principle inherent in the history of the people of Abraham is that when the people are sinless or have had their sins dealt with they prosper but when they turn from God they are smashed by history, then what explains the genocide? Why did God abandon the people of his covenant with this land?

Exactly the same reason that on so many occasions the people of God in the bible lost wars against invaders.

In the bible, faithfulness to God did not mean that conflict and war could be avoided, it just meant that the faithful won the wars because god was on there side. The fact that the Australian holy land came under attack from gentile forces does not of itself indicate prior disloyalty to God. The outbreak of war confronted Aboriginal Australia with a dilemma it had never had to face before, what to do to respond to such an unprecedented war? Previous wars between tribal nations were contained as local affairs and had social mechanisms to mediate and regulate disputes. This new war was something altogether different. The Hebrew people of the bible were confronted with foreign culture and war over and over and over again and the wisdom of the bible grew and developed from such history. However in 1788 Aboriginal people were confronted with imperial power and culture for the first time, they were suddenly confronted with exactly the same dilemma as the tribes of the bible – to resist the foreign gods and culture and sovereignty or to accommodate them? In Australia some people resisted and fought a 150 year holy war while others helped the white society, guiding them through the country, teaching them about the country and the most disturbing of all, some joined the native police and tracked and slaughtered fellow Aboriginal people under the orders of the white police.

Whether we look at this situation from a biblical perspective or from a Machiavellian analysis of power, the truth is clear; a house divided will fall – and the British occupied the Great Southern Land of the Holy Spirit partly with the collaboration of some Aboriginal people.

The biblical challenge to Aboriginal people is to return to their law, culture and land; to heal and reconstitute the covenant between God, the people and the land and by doing so, to again be blessed by God. Their challenge is to resist the culture and religions of the Gentiles, to reject the sovereignty of Caesar and Pharaoh just as the Jesus movement did. Just as God lead the Israelites out of slavery and back to the land of their own birthright, God will return faithful Aborigines to their ancestral estates.

Such a perspective can also be described non-biblically. Land rights will provide the capacity for a prosperous Aboriginal economic base again, elders and customary law can better deal with Aboriginal crime than Caesar’s courts, cultural engagement provides healing for addiction and mental ill-health. The bible law makes an awful lot of sense even in secular language. The remote outstations of the Utopia community in the Northern Territory has the best health statistics in Aboriginal Australia and I believe they are better than the mainstream statistics in things such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer etc. because their traditional lifestyle on their own land provides them with exercise, good nutrition and a great sense of well being. They are cut off from the evils of gentile society such as fast food, alcohol and tobacco.

What is the good news for Aborigines in Australia? I have heard many sermons preached by Aboriginal ministers that refer to the Exodus story, the freeing of the slaves from Egypt. This is a story that Aboriginal Christians have identified with and see as a story of their own hope and liberation.

But what did liberation from slavery mean to the Hebrews? It was not a negotiated better deal with Pharaoh. It was not a charter of human rights and increased welfare spending in Egypt; it was not a Hebrew consultative committee. Liberation from Egypt meant returning to their own land and law, that given by God to Abraham. It was the redemption of the covenant marking the eternal connection between God, the people and their land.

This is what the good news to the Aborigines is too.

Just as the Pharaohs and Caesars, those who imposed their own religions and social orders onto the land and bodies of the Hebrews, are defied and defeated in the Bible stories, so too is the invader Australian regime subject to the final judgment of and eventual destruction by the God of all nations, this is the good news to the Aborigines.

My thesis, if you can call it that, is that the church in Australia today, including its many radical and community offshoots of all different persuasions, has inherited a diluted, misrepresented, politicized and Europeanised version of the dreaming stories of the Middle East.

We have proudly and faithfully proclaimed this spirituality as being the salvation of the world, our proclamations based mainly on our own English speaking understanding of Aramaic and Greek language and cultural representations of the oral traditions of non-literate tribal Hebrew societies.

I hope it is not too heretical to suggest that something may have been lost in the translation.

The Romanised church has reduced the washing away of sins in the flowing river of Jordan in the wilderness or healing in the flowing spring at the pool of Siloam, to a dunking in any old trough or a sprinkle of water or the running of medical and welfare agencies.

The church has taken the month long Passover festival that Jesus commanded the disciples to maintain and turned it into a little ceremony as an agenda item of the church’s weekly meeting.

The Garden of Eden, The Noah covenant, the Abraham covenant, the liberation from Egypt and the law given to Moses, the message of the prophets, the return from exile, and the life, death and resurrection of Jesus are all basically and intrinsically connected to land, specific and identified land, the land held in covenant with Abraham and his descendants. The unity of the bible is it’s interweaving of the three elements of God, humanity and the land and the complex relationships, good bad and ugly, between these three elements.

What is often referred to as “civilization” is the historical product of the culture of the Greek and Roman empires, and because of the emperor Constantine’s appropriation of the religion of the Christians in the 4th century, the Romanised Christianity has become a central element of the development of “civilization”.

Philosophically, the notion of dualism, the separation of the spirit world from the material world, or the soul from the body, has been another pillar of civilized consciousness, represented in the modern church especially in the notion of personalized faith and salvation.

The great Greek philosophers Aristotle, Socrates and Plato, and before them the Persian, Zaruthrustra, set in place a dualistic philosophical template hundreds of years before the new testament was written that is still well reflected in modern Australian church’s understanding of the nature of spirituality and its interpretation of the bible story.

But the uncivilized world, such as the Hebrew people of the bible and Jesus himself represented in the Greek language translations of the bible stories, do not necessarily share this philosophical point as to the nature of the mind and of spirit.

I might go one step further and suggest the spiritual philosophy of the Hellenic empires, the culture of Babylon and the Gentiles, the philosophy of Caesar and Rome was well understood and rejected by the uncivilized Jesus and his notions of the Kingdom of God on Earth.

Jesus’ blurring of the line between heaven and earth, and his fulfilment of ancestors prophecy, I suggest, is not dissimilar to the blurring of spirit and matter and the singularity of infinite time inherent in Aboriginal notions of dreaming and history,

I offer a very rough caricature of the dreaming which must be understood as a reflection of my own understandings and not an accurate reflection of Aboriginal consciousness, is that all history from beginning to end is happening all at the same time, the ancestors of the past are here right now just as today’s beings were with the ancestors, and the cross-generational bridge is of course the bloodline on one hand and the earth itself from which each generation is returned, the cycle of life, death and rebirth in an eternal cycle occurring at the one moment – now.
Or something like that.

Roman culture and religion dismisses the notion of supernatural intervention in the world or human intervention into heaven except for highly regulated and church authorised miracles. The possibility of such supernatural communion as an ever-present existential spirituality was dismissed for the rational scheme of science and order inherent in the Hellenic mind.

The Roman European consciousness has reduced God and the super-natural to the extra-ordinary and other-worldly rather than the existential total unified reality – the Kingdom on Earth as it is in Heaven. The consciousness of the Hellenic rational religious mind has made invisible the existential nature of Gods creation, a mystical, metaphysical and material entity.

Baptism in the River Jordan is not simply a symbolic re-enactment of Noah’s flood or escape from Egypt nor was it simply the ritual cleansing of sin as was administered in the temple that Herod built. John’s Jordan river baptisms were a deep communion with the sacred river itself, being totally emersed in Gods creation as well as catalysing a new consciousness evidenced by Jesus’ vision upon rising from the water, a moment in time when Jesus was both fully in heaven and fully on Earth, a consciousness perhaps similar to that of the high coroboree or of shamanic doctors.

In this essay I have drawn a comparison between the people of Abraham and the Aboriginal people of Australia to suggest that the bible story is much more a story of Aboriginal people than it is of white Australians. Slavery, dispossession of land, the wars to defend land, foreign domination and colonisation are shared characteristics of the Jesus story as with the Aboriginal story.

The clash between Aboriginal law and Queen Elizabeth’s law is the same clash as the Law of Moses and Caesar’s law in occupied Judea. A clash between a stateless theocracy – the Kingdom of God and a state structure that assumes the power, right and land of God.

The people of Abraham’s land was between “the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates” in self governing autonomous tribal groups with specific territories having their own tribal territory – same with Aboriginal Australia.

The occupying nations of the Assyrians, Greeks and Romans insisted upon a centralised state over all the territories, a centralised economy, centralised culture especially language. This is why so much of the Bible is written in Greek not Aramaic, because the old language was dying and being replaced by the Language of Imperial Europe. Today Aboriginal languages are dying as the English language dominates all power relationships in Australia.

If we, as non-Aboriginal Australians, look for ourselves in the Bible story, we are the gentiles – the unclean, uncultured foreign sinners that Jesus spoke so strongly against – yet still invited into his kingdom. We are not the Jewish Christians who wrote the New Testament or the Jewish Christians for whom the gospels were written.

If we look for Jesus today in Australia we will not find him amongst the Roman church or any of its protestant offshoots, amongst the welfare industry, amongst the politicians or amongst average Australians.

We find Jesus, just like in the bible, amongst the traditional owners, those who by birthright inherit the ancient covenant between God, the people and the land.

While God’s chosen people in this country have been almost totally genocided, it is in the surviving and growing remnant that we find Jesus. All else, all religions and political and community programs that exist without a firm basis in God’s people of this land are just the hollow gong of Babylon and nothing to do with the revolutionary spirituality of Jesus.

John Tracey

Romans 12:2 Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Further reading

Cultural/Linguistic Diversity and deep Social Ecology (Genesis 11;1-9) by Ched Meyers

“Led by the Spirit into the wilderness…”
Reflections on Lent, Jesus’ Temptations and Indigeneity by Ched Meyers

The Roman world of Jesus

The Jewish world of Jesus

Address of John Paul II to the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Blatherskite Park
Alice Springs (Australia), 29 November 1986

This acknowledgement has not come easily and it is not a unanimous position even today but in general the church has been able to face up to the facts of history of the last 200 years.

A question that does not seem to have been raised, and I hope to do so with this essay, is why did the Church in Australia behave as it did, what are the causal reasons for our blind conformity to the colonial agenda in this country?

Many churches have apologised for various misdeeds but have not yet taken a serious look at why these things happened or more importantly, asked how can we make sure these things don’t happen again and how do we know we are not doing the same thing right now?

Tradition is very important in the Christian church. It deliberately and consciously replicates the paradigms of the past as a matter of faith. Some of this tradition is based in the bible such as baptism and the Lord’s Supper. However most of the tradition of the church, in particular how it manifests in the world through ceremony, organisational structure and mission, is based on the tradition of the Roman Church and western civilisation. Even the modern church’s notions of God are defined primarily by the fourth century Nicene Creed which still today is held as the template to divide correct doctrine from heresy and the lens through which to correctly interpret the bible.

The church’s complicity in imperialism and colonisation did not begin when the European missionaries arrived on this continent. The missionaries arrived with pre-conceived notions from their own history and tradition that had been well established long before 1788. This tradition goes back to the fourth century when a “universal” church was brought into being by the emperor of Rome. The history of the church and imperial power has been synonymous since that time until only recently.

The Australian church’s complicity in the colonial agenda is not a historical anomaly but a faithful replication of the tradition of the church.

The history of the people who proclaim the name of Jesus underwent a major shift in cultural paradigm after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 AD, the ongoing war of indigenous Hebrews against Rome until late in the middle of the second century, the continuing massacres of nationalist Hebrews resisting Rome and the exile of the Hebrew people from their homeland to all over the empire where they and their gentile converts to the law of Moses were persecuted.

By the end of the second century, the original Jesus movement of tribal indigenous Hebrews had been totally wiped out.

Those who took up the Jesus story in the second half of the second century were citizens of empire of many and mixed ethnicities and traditions united by a common Hellenist culture language and consciousness, The universality of empire provided the cultural matrix of the new religion rather than the previous specificity of indigenous tribalism and the connection of land, god and people by way of the ancient covenant of Abraham in the bible.

The Hellenistic culture gave rise to theological debates that are not anywhere represented in the Hebrew bible, such as the trinity, but were based on god archetypes and philosophy from Greece, Persia and Egypt. However these Hellenized Christians still proclaimed Jesus as Lord and since this excluded loyalty to Caesar as Lord they were persecuted as intensely as the Hebrews were for exactly the same reason.

In the fourth century, Caesar Constantine legalized and institutionalized Christianity as one of many official religions of the empire. He created a centralized institutional church that no longer denied the lordship of Caesar and the first task of this institution was to fashion an understanding of God and Jesus that was universal for the whole empire. This was the mission of the council of Nicaea in producing the Nicene Creed, which still today is the foundation document of Christian institutional churches.

Before, during and after the Council of Nicea significant sections of those proclaiming Jesus were persecuted because of a particular perspective they had in a theological dispute about the nature of Jesus. What this theology was is not properly known, as the only record of it is the allegations against it. All their writings were burnt, many were imprisoned or exiled and many who refused to renounce their heresy were killed.

Today the church religiously recites most of the Nicean Creed, affirming it as God inspired and correct. For some reason however the church has chosen to omit the last part of the Creed in its promotion of it, yet the omitted clause gives meaning and purpose to the theological pronouncements of the rest of the creed.

“And whosoever shall say that there was a time when the Son of God was not, or that before he was begotten he was not, or that he was made of things that were not, or that he is of a different substance or essence [from the Father] or that he is a creature, or subject to change or conversion — all that so say, the Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematizes them.”

The Nicene Creed identifies the correct doctrine, identifies the incorrect doctrine and authorizes the persecution of those who adhere to incorrect doctrine. This modus operandi had nothing to do with the New Testament narrative of reconciliation and restoration or its instruction for dealing with disputes in the church. Rather, the Nicea process was itself a manifestation of the agenda and process of the empire. The institution of church that was created by the emperor operated not only within the frameworks of Hellenistic culture as the new Christian movement did but also within the frameworks of the Roman state itself, a role that would later be expanded to the exclusive religion of the empire and on to the church itself becoming the imperial state.

From the fourth century onwards the church has a clear history and tradition of collaboration, symbiosis and union with Roman, Holy Roman and European imperialism. I do not intend to explore all of that here except to repeat my earlier point that there are no surprises in the Australian church’s racist and colonial history when considered in the broader context.

The churches entire history and tradition as an agent of imperialism and colonization begins with, and can be explained by, Caesar’s project at Nicea. No longer was the biblical narrative about oppression by empires such as Egypt, Babylon and the empire that crucified the Messiah – Rome. No longer did the messiah provide hope of liberation from the oppression of empire. No longer was the radical sovereignty of Jesus and the God of Israel a threat to Caesar, as in the biblical narrative. Now Jesus authorized the sovereignty of Caesar and enforced conformity to the official religion of imperial Rome.

Matthew 4: 8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour. 9″All this I will give you,” he said, “If you will bow down and worship me.”

Mark 10: 42Jesus called them together and said, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. 43Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 44and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.

If we were to hold the history and tradition of the church, from the council of Nicea onwards, up to the light of biblical teaching we can only conclude that the imperial agenda of the church has both worshipped Satan and adopted the form of the gentile rulers.

When faced with the truth the church’s history, many respond along the lines of “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of god” or “god works in the most unlikely circumstances”. While both propositions are true, in the context of understanding church history they represent an avoidance and denial of the truth rather than an explanation of it. Furthermore they provide a justification of the continued acceptance of the history of the imperial church as legitimate and still authoritative despite its acute contradictions and evil brutality.

We can just as easily say, as many do, that the colonial mode of church in this country has caused suffering and dispossession but in the bigger picture, despite the sins and flaws of the missionaries, this colonisation was still gods will in ways we can’t understand.

However in the case of the recent or ancient history of the church I believe we have to repent of our colonial and imperial history rather than glorifying and replicating it. The truth has to be acknowledged on its own terms rather than through some sugar coated retrospective justification. If we cannot face up to the truth of our own history and the reasons why and how the Australian Church – and wider society – has been an ignorant agent of racism, colonisation and genocide, then there is nothing stopping us from continuing the process into the future. Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

John Tracey