Jesus vs. Caesar: For People Tired of Serving the Wrong God

Nathan Cost: Hi and welcome to the Office Hours podcast series here with Vanderbilt Divinity School where we interview our lifelong learning instructors and faculty members about their upcoming course and go a bit behind the scenes about where their passion comes from and what it looks like to create this kind of course. Today we are joined by Dr. Jöerg Rieger who is the distinguished professor of theology the Cal Turner Chancellor's Chair in Wesleyan Studies, and the Director of the Wendland Cooke Program in Religion and Justice. Joerg, welcome.

Joerg Rieger: Thanks for having me, Nathan. Looking forward to this.

Cost: Wonderful. Now, Joerg has a new course coming up called Jesus vs. Caesar: For People tired of Serving the Wrong God. In fact, it launches today. This is Friday, March 27. Before we get into the course, I'd to begin this series by asking a very specific question. Without using your title or the word professor, tell us what you do.

Rieger: To think me about that for a moment there. What is it that I'm doing, right? Well, the truth is I do a lot of writing, research. Probably, you know, most of my time is spent on reading and writing. You know, I publish about a book every couple of years and, you know, a dozen articles a year. So that takes a lot of my time, but it's really tied to the rest that I do, namely teaching and giving presentations because I feel like if my research is cutting edge, you know, maybe I have something to say that's of interest to people. So the other thing I do is I teach students, but I also give presentations. And so I look around what's going on and then reflect that back to all kinds of communities.

I love talking to all kinds of groups, really talk, of course, to fellow academics all the time, but also churches, social movement folk, and so on. And I do it around the world. At this point in my life, I've lectured on every continent except Antarctica. That's a plan though. I will at some point find a way there. I'm not sure if anybody wants needs to hear me there, it's also reading, writing, lecturing. But I also try to stay connected with real life. So it's not just sort of out on the cloud somewhere, but I'm interested in what's happening at the grassroots, you know, what's going on in churches, what's happening in social movements. And this is why we have the Wendland Cook program in religion and justice. It helps us to stay connected. So in a nutshell, I guess this is what I do and it takes a lot of time. You know, I don't have an eight-hour workday. I usually work a lot more.

Cost: Yeah, well, thank you for that. And I think you have such an interesting position given your work, both in academia and as director of the Wendland-Cook program, where you're really on the ground. Is that what I'm understanding about your work with Wendland-Cook?

Rieger: Yes, so so part of the task here, Wendland Cook is sort of a link between the academy and a lot of other things, certainly between academy and church. We work a lot with churches. We have these solidarity circles. We've ran about 300 churches through that. So if anybody's interested, check out the Wendland Cook program, religionandjustice.org. One word, religion and justice.

So we connect with churches, but we also connect with social movements. know, we connect with the labor movement, the cooperative movement. You know, there's all kinds of things that are happening in our days, you know, protest movements more broadly conceived. And we're usually in touch. So that's the popular education side. We connect, we feed back into it. And then we have an academic side where this kind of work then also feeds back into research, feeds back into academic books and articles and presentations, but you know ecology and the economy are the two focal points, always intersectionally. This is not it's not a loop of questions of race, gender, and so on. But by putting this together, we really are part of the relevant movements too and that's exciting because there's a lot happening and sometimes the church misses what's happening outside of its own walls. So Wendland Cook brings all of that together.

Cost: Well, Joerg, I want to ask you about your course now. Your course is titled “Jesus vs. Caesar: For People Tired of Serving the Wrong God” and that's based on your book from 2018. Is that correct?

that?

Rieger: That's correct. Yes. Yeah, that was a fun book to write, by the way. It's sort of, I think it's the first book I wrote after coming to Vanderbilt 10 years ago. So yeah, it has a special place.

Cost: Yeah, so let me ask you this question then. Jesus versus Caesar. Which Jesus and which Caesar? For those that would see that title and think, I wonder what those represent or what categories are we talking about here?

Rieger: Yeah, right right, yeah. I mean, if you look back in history, of course, right, we're talking about whoever was the emperor, you know, when Jesus was around. I mean, we know from the Gospels that Augustus was in place when Jesus was born. And then, you know, there are other kinds of changes in the empire. And so we're talking at some point, you know, about the Roman emperors and we're talking about Jesus as somebody who may have probably will never have met any of the emperors, but whose message is directly related and has an impact on the Roman Empire because there's a conflict.

I mean, there's one way to look at this and this is what I oftentimes find, you know, in conservative Christian circles. Right now, of course, this is what Christian nationalism is talking about. It's basically, you know, talking about how

You know, Jesus is an extension of empires, know, an extension of the Roman Empire. And of course, that's an old argument, you know, that Jesus and early Christianity somehow benefited from empire fit back into it. But I'm saying that's actually the opposite. So Jesus is providing not only protest. That's one thing that people often think--Jesus is protesting, speaking truth to power--but also alternative. So it's not just speaking truth to power, but also building alternative power. That's a big difference, right? And so when you think about this, you know, you have this historically, the Jesus Movement here is not just a little religious sect that doesn't care about the world, but it provides alternative ways of life that are different from the imperial ways of life. So that's looking backwards.

But I'm a theologian, so I'm always asking the question, what's happening now? And I think in our own time, it's pretty obvious that there are people that want to be the Caesars of our own time. And that's yet another problem, right? Of course, we look at politics here and we have some issues in the United States there. But you can also look at corporations, you know, how are big business being run, right? There are all kinds of emperors that want top-down control, that want to be all-powerful, as it were. And then there's Jesus who's different.

Now, I often ask my students the question, what is Jesus doing now? This is different from WWJD, right? What would Jesus do, you know, somewhere sitting on a throne in heaven? But we want to know, you know, if Jesus is risen, you know, if there's something that's at the foundation of Christianity, what's that reality doing? And probably a lot more helpful to think about Jesus walking the streets of our towns rather than hanging around the boardrooms all the time. And that goes for churches too, right? A lot of churches have this fantasy—or at least in the US had the fantasy—that we're somehow part of the dominant status quo. And that's not necessarily the case anymore. And it's probably not the way it's supposed to be either. So that's the tension between Jesus and Caesar, that you have two very different ways of life.

And of course, theologically, can say you have two very different theologies because there's the theology of Caesar, it always looks up to this guy, know, that worships dominant power, that worships control, you know, practically has all these leadership strategies. And then there's a theology of Jesus that provides some real alternatives. There's still power, but it's a different power. It’s people power rather than top-down power. It's a different sort of relationship. So so that's what I'm exploring in the book and also in the course. And I think this is what's going to be helpful for the churches because we really need to think about what are we all about because the subtitle, you know, worshipping the wrong God for people tired of worshipping the wrong God, that's what we're talking about. Too often, people of faith, Christians especially, are sucked into a worship of the wrong God, often without even knowing it.

Cost: Joerg, one of the things that I love about Lifelong Learning and continuing education is that it allows you to have conversations with folks beyond the walls of this school, right? And one question that I have for you is, as you talk about this, obviously very relevant and I would say, nuanced understanding of Jesus and empire and Caesar. What do you hope to see from your students who engage in this course or engage in this conversation with you?

Rieger: Well, one thing I'm finding, and this is not just in the US, this is really so many places I go, is that people are leaving the church, people are getting tired of the church, not because they've lost faith or interest in Jesus or the alternatives, but they don't expect much from the church anymore. And I think some of that is actually part of our reality because the church is either they've become narcissistic, you know, just looking at themselves, or, you know, if there's outreach, it's oftentimes outreach in terms of your narcissism, basically trying to imprint your image on other people. And so there is an empire theology here, in other words, that's either self-serving, you know, at best it's dangerous, at worst it's irrelevant, you know, or vice versa, right? There's something wrong here. And so what I want people taking this course to figure out is we do have some options. We have other ways of life. There's other ways to be the church. There's other ways, you know, to relate to other people. There's other ways to be in the world. And all of this is modeled by the Jesus Movement. Of course, Jesus didn't pull this out of a hat either, right? Centuries, millennia-old traditions that feed into this wisdom, popular wisdom, people's traditions, oftentimes oral traditions. And so my point is if we're starting to listen to these traditions, we might be able not only to understand something that we usually don't see, but we might be able to find different ways of living, being in the world. And to me, that's exciting. That's really what keeps me doing theology after all these years. So I'm no less excited about theology than when I started, probably more now because I think there is some real potential, but somebody has to do the work.

And if I'm really honest here, pushing here a bit, I find a certain laziness in the churches. I also found a certain laziness in my own field theology, where what we get is a lot of same old, same old, maybe, you know, with a little added technology and some better lighting and maybe some music, but nobody's really, I mean, not nobody, but few people are really digging deeper. And so that's what we're trying to do in order to then revitalize what the church is doing, what the academy is doing, and what we could do as individuals.

Cost: Yeah, well, you actually preempted one of my next question. So I'm going to say it differently. OK.

Rieger: Okay. Yeah.

Cost: What does it look like for you to learn from your students on this topic? And by students, mean, again, because you're working in the community as well. So I don't just mean Master of Divinity students or PhD students. mean, the students that come to your workshops from the community as well. What does it look like for you to learn from their voices or their experiences?

Rieger: So learning is always crucial. I mean, this is, course, you know, if you write a lot, like I do, you read a lot, you know, it's always a matter of being engaged and paying attention, but it's not just books, it's really people. And so for me, being out there, I mean, the classroom is one place where I learned, mean, talking about the Vanderbilt Divinity classroom. And we had some generations of students and we have a current one now that's really asking great questions.

But what makes these questions great is that these questions are asked under real duress. I mean, that may be unfortunate, but that's life, right? The best questions come out of places where people are under pressure. And so, you know, the current generation that's under so much pressure, you know, whether this is finding a job or just funding their studies or making ends meet, you know, or thinking about what can I do in the future? How can I make a contribution? These are all places that raise good questions and for me to pay attention to that is really priceless because, you know, I sit in an endowed chair, you know, I have all kinds of privilege. I have a distinguished professorship at an elite university. So in some ways, you know, I could be resting on my laurels. But that's my students.

But then, you know, you take this out into the communities and it gets even more intense where people are in the neighborhoods struggling, again, not only to make ends meet, but to deal with all kinds of everyday exploitation and oppression that people see. So there's, of course, the economic piece because even if people are still able to make ends meet, chances are they have less and less of a voice. So democracy is in danger, right? Political democracy is eroding. And we haven't even talked about economic democracy, namely the power that people have at work. That raises some questions and I find there's people willing to be more and more honest about that you know. 20, 30 years ago people might have, you know, papered over it and not paid attention, but now people are paying attention to this. And that of course includes questions of, you know, racism, sexism, heterosexism, you know, ethnocentrism, nationalism, all these things. These are the struggles. These are the places out of which people are now raising questions. So what we're seeing all the tensions around us, and this is a difficult time. I mean, if people haven't realized it, I think most people now are waking up to something not being right. So this is where I'm learning. Paying attention to what's going on and then always digging deeper. You know, in community organizing, there's a practice called door knocking. So you go around in your community, you knock on doors, you ask people what's making you angry. So anger here is a good thing. It's not a bad thing. You want to know what's making you angry.

But then I raised the question, and what are the real causes of it? You know, you might go door knocking and the neighborhood tells you there are too many potholes in our roads, you know, and you try to fix that. We've done something, you've learned something. But I want to know how come there so many potholes, you know, what's going on? How come, you know, this racism is never ending? How come people have trouble ends meet even though they probably work more than they ever have a day, you know, a week, hourly, you know. So, so that's where the work really has to be done.

In the Wendland Cook program, we talk about these three step: analyze, educate, organize. So analyzing is part of that listening, but then education too, because you have to, sometimes we say educate your anger, right? So don't just be angry at something, but figure out what's going on. So so that's the learning process that's behind it. And I've heard many things before, so it's not like a first time I'm waking up here. I'm always learning something.

Cost: Now, Joerg, we're having this conversation at an interesting time with Holy Week coming up. And my question to you here is, for those of us that participate in Holy Week, what does the Easter story have to say to Empire?

Rieger: Yeah, this is a really important question. You know, some of that you have to think about in terms of how cultures, you know, deal with Easter. I grew up in Germany in the South, a Pietist area, where the emphasis on Easter really was Good Friday. That was the most important day. And of course, in the country too, you know, you have Good Friday off work. It's as high a holiday, if not higher than Christmas.

And so Good Friday, people go to church wearing black suits, black ties. In Methodism, this is one of the four times that you celebrate Holy Communion. And so this is a huge day. You know, in the US, people show or don't show on Good Friday, but Easter Sunday is sort of the big thing, right? Hooray, everybody goes to church on Easter.

And there are two things here in this European German setting I was talking about. There's a certain, it's almost defeatism. This is all about sacrifice. Somebody has to die so I can go to heaven. In the US, it's more like triumphalism where people go to church, hooray, we won, sort of at the end of the football game, my team won. We don't care how it happened. And so you have sort of a bit of a schizophrenic situation here where people don't really know how to put Good Friday and Easter together, let me put it this way.

But that's the Jesus versus Caesar story, right? Where Jesus ends up victorious. The resurrection is something that changes the world. But this doesn't happen triumphalistically. This doesn't happen by sending in the military. It doesn't happen by sending in the bombers flying overhead. But it happens through hard work, struggle, suffering and even death. So power is built differently. That's the Easter story, right? The one who is resurrected is the one who was crucified. And of course, why was Jesus crucified in the first place, right? Some people think, well, somehow God needed a scapegoat and then God killed Jesus. Well, that is of course a heresy, right? So you can't really believe that. But then what happened, right? Well, what killed Jesus was an empire that did not want alternatives, that did not want critique, that did not want resistance. So it was really people ending up on the cross were not just sort of bad people that had done bad things, but those were people that were politically dangerous to the causes of the empire. And of course, that's never just politics, that's also big money. And as we know from the stories, religion was involved in it too. So what ultimately killed Jesus was dominant religion plus dominant politics, all funded by big money.

So that's a pretty interesting story, reminding us a little bit of what we're seeing today, this marriage of dominant power, dominant money, and dominant politics, doing all kinds of things that are ultimately not beneficial to the majority of humanity. So the Easter story now is about an alternative movement that at first doesn't move in an easy way, it's a hard way, but it ultimately is successful and the divine then takes a stand on that side. That's the thing about God here, right? God then stands on the side of those who struggle, the victims who ultimately are able to change the world. And of course, what you look at the history, right? 2000 years later, the Roman Empire is no more. The Jesus Movement is still around. A couple of hundred years later, some of the European empires are no more. The Jesus Movement is still around. Guess what will happen to the American empire? Guess what will happen to what some of us have been calling the capital scene? Of course, some people think it's easier for them to imagine the end of the worlds than the end of capitalism, but guess what? That too will not last forever. And so what we're celebrating on Easter then is this subversive hope. It's a resilience that basically says, you know, not only trouble don't last always—that's true, that comes from the African-American traditions—but it really envisions alternative ways of life. So that's what we're talking about. And that to me is the exciting theology that has to be developed now.

Cost: As I listen to you talk about and your experience in this area, I can't help but wonder, I can't help but ask the phenomenological question, how did you become attuned to this topic or to this field? Has this always been on, has this always been something that you've seen? Or was it something that you've grown into and has it evolved for you?

Rieger: It's certainly something I've grown into. I I'll tell you a little bit about that story in a minute. But there was something in the beginning, I think, for me. So I was raised as a Methodist in Germany, which is very strange because there are very few Methodists. But the advantage of being raised in this minority tradition in a majority world was I was never raised with this idea that Christianity is somehow part of the status quo. S early on, was clear to me Christianity is an alternative, it's a counterculture. It is not part of the dominant system, it is part of something else. So that's what I learned early on. What took me a while to figure out is what exactly are we up against and what's the alternative? So that was the struggle.

And in the old holiness Methodist traditions, we were raised not to dance, not to drink. I mean literally, this was true for my generation. Not dancing, not drinking, not smoking, not going to the movies. And then my teachers got a little fed up with that and they said, well, all this old stuff, we don't need that anymore. Let's just love each other. And say, well, that's fun too. But that lost a bit of the edge. And so in my own work, what I've done is I've reclaimed the question of what are we up against. The problem is not dancing and going to the movies, I would say, but the problem is going along with the status quo in such a way that it shapes us all the way to the core. A couple of years earlier, let me mention a project that was really crucial for me, a book titled Christ and Empire. So the current one is Jesus versus Caesar. This is the basis of the course. The earlier one, another one was titled “Christ and Empire from Paul to Post-Colonial Times.” And I looked at the story of how Christians think about Christ for 2,000 years, so there are seven chapters going through 2,000 years, starting with the apostle Paul. And what I realized was that empires shaped Christianity for 2,000 years all the way to the core. Of course, my definition of empire at the time was a conglomerate of power that wants to shape everything. So empire is not just about politics and economics, it's also about culture. And it certainly is about religion and theology. So all of a sudden, without perhaps knowing it, your Jesus looks like the emperor and God anyways, all sitting on a throne and all that stuff. And you basically forget who Jesus was and what all this thing was going on there.

And so in this book, I basically reshuffled—this was published 2007 and then translated into various language. I basically revisited my whole theological education to that point, you know, starting with Paul where, you know, the Paul that I had been taught was sort of a very, you know, otherworldly figure, you know, all about religion and all about, you know, certain traditions and so on. And I realized that actually Paul was a radical. Paul was pushing back against Caesar too, against the empire. And once you start there, everything sort of falls into place. So the book was a critique of how empire had co-opted Christianity.

But the real insight was in every chapter, I realized Christianity could never be totally controlled by empire. There was always an alternative. There was always resilience. There was always an anti-imperial move and so Paul is the first one but then he goes on you know through the creeds. I mean there's some resilience in the Nicene Creed. People don't realize that. People think that's basically a conservative statement. It doesn't have to be. You know Anselm of Canterbury, the Middle Ages, people think well this is empire theology which to some degree it is but there's some resilience. There's some pushback. You know you go through liberal theology which people don't realize is also empire theology. Friedrich Leymacher was really an empire theologian, even though Germany didn't quite have an empire yet at the time. Prussia, of course, was his place of where he lived. Germany didn't quite exist yet at the time. But you go through these movements and you say, so there's this empire challenge, even liberalism is not home free. Usually these days we get more worried about Christian nationalism. There's some work to do in liberalism, too. But once you're doing it, uou'll see that there's some real alternatives and not just ideas, not just, wouldn't it be nice, but to say, no, on the ground, there's always resistance.

That's the beauty of the US right now, that we do have some resistance. Unfortunately, it doesn't really make it into the news all the time. So if you read the New York Times, you get more of the other stuff than the resistance stuff. But you know, read the Wendland Cook website, religionandjustice.org, and you'll see a lot more of the resistance stuff. Maybe the New York Times will pick up on it at some point. But that's the story here, you know, living into this step by step, realizing that the gospel, the Christian traditions have a lot more to offer. And of course, that's then not just limited to Christianity. There are other traditions too, you know, there's religious and non-religious traditions that also have a lot of potential. But we start with Christianity because this is where our job lies and this is of course at present where so many of the problems are also located.

Cost: Yeah, I'm not gonna bite on it, but I feel like you did bait me a little bit with the Friedrich Schleiermacher illusion there, but we won't go down that rabbit trail. We'll save that one for another day. But my follow-up question to you is, the professor that actually taught me Schleiermacher would constantly make the point that thinking theologically is an open-ended project. Right? And as I listen to you talk about your scholarly journey, and it sounds like even a bit of deconstruction as you begin to read Paul the different way, and we often don't talk about—we talk about our students going through the deconstruction process, right—but we often don't talk about it as scholars, as academics. So my question to you is, where's the frontier of your research right now?

What ideas are you exploring and growing into as a scholar?

Rieger: So my most recent book that was just translated into German actually is going to be out in German translation very soon is titled Theology in the Capitalocene. And this is a term that most people haven't even heard of, you everybody knows about the Anthropocene. But my basic point is, first of all, the Anthropocene is a misnomer because it blames humanity for something that's not all of humanity's fault. In fact, Capitalocene says, you're worried about the destruction of the planet, look at what's really behind it. CO2 emissions, we know. Well, it just so happens that 71% of CO2 emissions are produced by about 100 corporations, the interests of 100 corporations. So there you have a little clue.

And of course, I'm not a politician or an economist, so I want to talk about theology. What does theology look like? How does it shape up in this Capitalocene that wants to shape not only the planet, but also religion. And if you don't believe me, just think about who is actually pulling the string in your congregation and follow the money. Pay attention, right? It's not always the theologians. Usually it's not the theologians at all. But so the question here is, you know, what is the antidote? How do we do things differently?

Currently, I'm working on constructive theology. That's a big project, right? That's sort of the magnum opus at the end of someone's career, where you put it all together. You start with the doctrine of God and Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit, the Church, sin, salvation, evil, sacraments, anthropology, and then eschatology at the end. So I'm putting it all together.

Cost: A few light topics. A few light topics.

Rieger: That's right. Because I think I've learned a few things. And as I'm writing, you know, the stuff really just comes bubbling out because I've thought about these things, of course, over a fairly long career again and again and again. But what triggers it is not just the need to put it all in one book, but what really triggers it is the misuse of all of these doctrines, you know, where the doctrine of God then gets misused to support dominant power, where Jesus Christ gets misused again to support empire and to justify suffering across of the world, where the Holy Spirit gets misused to celebrate the spiritual high that the capitalocene usually ascribed to those at the top. We want to party like Jeff Bezos, renting Venice for our wedding or some crazy stuff like that. That triggers it. And then course, understandings of the church as too narrow, too self-centered you know.

So it talks about questions like rethinking God, rethinking power, rethinking solidarity. That to me is the biggest topic right now. Solidarity meaning there is more of us than them. Empire sometimes gets blamed on the masses, you know. Fascism gets blamed on some populism. But there is usually the few that have not only the money but also the power that pull the strings and that play these games.

And so solidarity here means to make people realize that their real interests are really with all the others, with the planet, with people rather than with some dominant ideas or some dominant systems. And so the beauty here is I call this deep solidarity. We're now developing a solidarity that ties us all together without having to turn us all into the same. So sameness here is not a precondition for deep solidarity. It's the false solidarity that wants to have sameness.

Deep solidarity can actually work with diversity. Diversity makes it stronger, by the way, that those are all paradoxes we could talk about for a long time. But that's the fascinating thing, you know, of the people of God too, that we can build something not just celebrating diversity, that's a little lazy as far as I'm concerned, but really putting diversity to work for liberation. That's the exciting thing. So that's what I'm after. And it'll come out probably, I think I have another year to finish this, but look for it at some point, not too long into the future.

Cost: Well, Joerg, thank you for that. And I want to say thanks for joining us today.

Folks, we've got a Lifelong Learning course that you can enroll in, “Jesus Vs Caesar: For People Tired of Serving the Wrong God.” And check out Wendland Cook, the Wendland Cook program, and be on the lookout for some upcoming programming here between lifelong learning and Wendland Cook. Dr. Rieger, thank you for being here with us.

Rieger: Dr. Cost, thank you also. I appreciate the work that you're doing. There's some exciting stuff happening at Vanderbilt and glad to make your contribution to it and thanks for picking it up.

Cost: Yeah, absolutely.