We, Titus

I’m not a historian, so I’ll defer to someone who is — Mark Humphries — when it comes to shredding Niall Ferguson’s latest “eye-wateringly simplistic distortion” of history:

In his op-ed, he argues that modern Europe, like the Roman empire in the 5th century AD, stands on the brink of collapse before insuperable external forces – but the 21st Europeans are too complacent to spot the obvious analogy. Where Rome faced barbarians, modern Europe faces Daesh. He quotes fromEdward Gibbon’s lurid description of the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410, offering it as an obvious parallel to Friday’s massacre in Paris. Ferguson wants to push the parallel further: fifth century Rome was complacent about its frontier defenses; so too, he argues on the basis of the recent influx of refugees, is modern Europe. The link he posits is causal: “Poor, poor Paris,” he concludes. “Killed by complacency.”

Ferguson admits he “do[es] not know enough about the fifth century” to trace what he would see as ancient parallels to the supine responses of modern European leaders to current threats. But I do know about the fifth century: it is my historical stomping ground, and I, along with others in the field (to judge by social media), have read Ferguson’s op-ed with dismay mounting to anger. He seriously misrepresents the historical experiences of the fifth century, which matters when a Harvard history professor purports to be presenting the past to a general audience.

It goes on, and on, and on. Humphries does not hold back. He thoroughly rebuts the substance of Ferguson’s argument, crushes the rubble of it to dust, then salts the earth. This is not a polite, academic dispute, but the fierce defense of history by an honest, serious scholar responding to the claims of a dishonest and unserious man.

Again, I am not a historian. I studied theology, not history. But students of theology have also got a stake in this argument. The history of the Roman Empire is kind of important to anybody interested in the history of Christianity and Judaism. And from that perspective, the problem with Ferguson’s historical analogies isn’t just that he gets his facts wrong, twisting and torturing them to fit his neocon narrative in support of his bomb-all-the-brown-people agenda.

From a theological perspective, the problem is that Ferguson thinks we should think of ourselves as Imperial Rome. He assumes that’s a self-evidently Good Thing and that it makes us the heroes of the story.

And, from the theological perspective of the New Testament and of all the early church writers up to and through Augustine, that is upside-down and backwards and perverse in every way. This isn’t just the “Constantinian” thinking that Empire-criticism theologians constantly rail against. It’s worse than that. It doesn’t just suggest that this Constantinian capitulation was legitimate, but that it was the only thing that legitimized Christianity. Ferguson’s premise isn’t just that imperial Christendom is a legitimate expression of the gospel of Jesus Christ, but that this gospel is valuable only to the extent that it enables imperial Christendom.

And that is, quite simply, bonkers. Or, in more biblical terms, it’s beastly.

For a sense of what this beastly anti-theology of Let’s Be Rome entails on a more popular level, shorn of Ferguson’s pretentious pseudo-scholarly posturing, consider this proposal from WorldNetDaily columnist Burt Prelutsky:

My own politically incorrect suggestion is that we remove ISIS from the face of the earth, hopefully as a joint effort with every other nation it has threatened or attacked, and that we then bomb Mecca off the face of the earth, not concerning ourselves in the least with collateral damage, letting the Muslims know once and for all that our God is far more powerful and, yes, vengeful than their own puny deity.

Granted, Prelutsky is not an influential household name. He’s just some hateful, fearful, stupid guy desperately grasping for attention in the fever-swamps of WorldNetDaily. So you may think of this as nut-picking. But he’s not saying anything there that most of haven’t also heard from local cranks on barstools or in break rooms at work or even at family holiday gatherings.

This garbage should be condemned in the strongest possible language for its racism, for its brute stupidity, and for the moral monstrosity of advocating war crimes. But it also needs to be condemned for its staggeringly anti-Christ theology.

For Prelutsky, “our God” is a bomb. Bombs and military might are, explicitly, divine objects of worship — the focus of our prayers, the author of our morality, the creator, sustainer and redeemer that give meaning to our lives. That’s as stark a form of idolatry as anything you’ll find in any of the Christian or Jewish scriptures. And it makes the cult of Molech seem reasonable by comparison.

But it’s even worse than that. The Roman model here is not that of Constantine, but of Titus, the soon-to-be-emperor who, as an imperial general, oversaw the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. This was, as described by Josephus, precisely the action that Prelutsky advocates, carried out for precisely the same reason.

People sometimes describe the book of Revelation as an impenetrable mess of opaque symbolism, but it’s really not that hard to understand. Read Ferguson and Prelutsky. Then read this:

They worshiped the dragon, for he had given his authority to the beast, and they worshiped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?”

I think that’s clear enough.