Amos versus Amaziah

Week of Monday, July 12, 2004

Lectionary Readings

           Amos 7: 7–17
           Psalm 82
           Deuteronomy 30:9–14
           Psalms 25:1–10
           Colossians 1:1–14
           Luke 10:25–37

           A while back I interviewed for a job at at Wheaton College, part of which involved a grilling by the Faculty Personnel Committee, a group of 10–12 tenured faculty from disciplines across the college. Professor Alvaro Nieves, a sociologist who was chairing the meeting and sitting immediately to my right, opened the session and fired the first question: “You know, most kids who come to Wheaton come from conservative evangelical churches and think that GOP stands for God’s Own Party. How do you get these kids to see and think about a bigger world and world view?”

           Bingo. Christians are fairly predictable in this regard: conservatives tend to be Republican while more progressive believers tend to be Democrats, even though there are flagrant contradictions in aligning faith so simply to either party. For example, conservatives tend to endorse the death penalty and hawkish military positions but oppose abortion. Democrats are no more consistent. They support abortion rights but oppose the death penalty and aggressive military measures. But surely all three issues are pro-life in some deeper sense? Why is it okay to kill people one way but not another? Why do believers tend to use their faith to baptize the state powers and political ideologies?

           That is the matter at hand in the text from Amos 7:7–17 this week, where the three primary centers of power among the Hebrew people collide—prophet, priest and king. Amos the farmer-turned-prophet had three visions of national destruction and judgment—locusts that stripped the land clean, a drought that parched the earth, and a carpenter’s plumb line that showed how far from center Israel had drifted. The thankless duty of the prophet was to deliver this anti-government message, so apparently unpatriotic, to the powerful king. But Amaziah the priest intervened to defend, protect and promote the interests of King Jeroboam. Religion to the rescue to prevent truth being spoken to power: “Get out, you seer! Go back to the land of Judah. Earn your bread there and do your prophesying there. Don’t prophesy anymore at Bethel, because this is the king’s sanctuary and the temple of the kingdom” (Amos 7:12–13, NIV). But Amos, disparaged as an uneducated hayseed way out of his league among the political power elite, stood tall. In due course history vindicated his prediction of national disaster.

            With the 4th of July just past, and in the middle of an election year, Amos reminds us of the temptation and dangers of aligning Christian faith to any political power or party. In a “strong” version of this mistake, believers bless a specific candidate or party as somehow “more Christian.” In a “softer” version, there is a general, uncritical acquiescence among believers to state and government powers. After all, are we not to submit to them, obey them, and pray for them (Romans 13:1–7)?

            In his provocative little book Anarchy and Christianity (1988) the French sociologist Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) warns against the alliance between throne and altar. I will leave the New Testament material for another time, but what do we learn from the face off between Amos and Amaziah, and the larger message of the Hebrew Old Testament about faith’s relationship to politics and the state?¹

            Long after its liberation from Egypt, Israel had a succession of organizational forms, none of which involved government power in its simple sense. They existed as a loose federation of tribes and clans. Later they had occasional leaders known as judges who rescued the nation from various defeats and setbacks, and Judges 21:25 especially notes that the nation had no king. Beginning in 1 Samuel 8 and the story of Samuel we have the emergence of Israel’s centralized, royal power. The people wanted a king “like the other nations.” Samuel objected to their whims, went to God in prayer, and was rebuffed by the people’s insistence. In longing for a king, Israel was not so much rejecting Samuel as rejecting God Himself. Samuel ceded to their request but warned them of the harsh consequences they would reap—the government would conscript their children for wars and make them his domestic slaves, confiscate their land, and impose exorbitant taxes. Israel’s first king, Saul, did all this and more.

            Other kings followed in similar fashion. Israel’s best king, David, is presented warts and all—civil wars continued, he slaughtered his rivals, then murdered one of his loyal soldiers so he could take his wife. Solomon succeeded David, and with him magnificent government palaces, outrageous taxes, religious syncretism, and a royal harem that numbered 1,000 wives and concubines. His son Rehoboam bragged how oppressive his own government would be: “My father made your yoke heavy, but I will make it still heavier; my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions” (1 Kings 12:14).

           Ellul makes two observations. First, state or government power is systematically presented in a negative light in these Old Testament Scriptures.

The astounding thing to me is that the [Biblical] texts were edited, published, and authorized by rabbis and representatives of the people at a time when the kings in question were reigning. There must have been censorship and controls, and yet these did not prevent the writings from being circulated. Furthermore, the accounts were not merely preserved but were also regarded as divinely inspired. They were treated as a revelation of the God of Israel, who is thus presented as himself an enemy of royal power and the state. They were sacred texts. They were included in the body of inspired texts. They were read in the synagogues (even though they must have seemed like antiroyalist propaganda to rulers like Ahab). They were commented upon as the Word of God in the presence of all the people.²

           Israel’s sacred text were very negative about political power.

           Second, and this brings us back to Amos, Ellul notes that for every king there was a corresponding prophet. These prophets were almost always scathing in their denunciations of the government, and consequently the royal powers hounded and humiliated them—witness Amaziah’s ultimatum to Amos, or Jeremiah who was imprisoned and thrown down a well. Here again is an irony—the sacred texts of these prophets, so consistently critical of their own rulers, were preserved and elevated as revelations of the heart of God. “As I see it,” writes Ellul, “these facts manifest in an astounding way the constancy of an antiroyalist if not an anti-statist sentiment.”³

           When Amos, a former shepherd from backwater Tekoa (Amos 1:1) stared down the power elite of Amaziah the priest and Jeroboam the king, he reminded us that while Christian faith must somehow relate to political power, the interests of the two are not consonant or contiguous.

¹ What follows is a brief summary of Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), pages 46–55. For a longer treatment from a similar perspective see Vernard Eller, Christian Anarchy; Jesus’ Primacy Over the Powers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987).
² Ellul, pp. 50–51.
³ Ibid., p. 52.