This post is part of my Anarchist Bible series - see the introduction and list of posts.

Today is the celebration of Pentecost, when the church remembers the Holy Spirit filling the gathered followers of Jesus in the early days after his Ascension, and the miraculous time when everyone gathered from many nations could hear them speaking the good news about Jesus in their own native languages.

The Anti-Empire Backstory

This story is deeply connected with chapter 11 in the book of Genesis, a tale about the so-called Tower of Babel. In this story, the powerful in Babylon come together to build a great tower to reach the skies. Babylon was the heart of empire in the ancient near east and is consistently the symbol of imperial power and centralization in the Hebrew scriptures. The towers imagined would have been the pyramidal ziggurats of Mesopotamia. Their architecture, in context, would easily be associated with hierarchical, pyramidal society topped by priest, kings, and gods.

In this story, the topic at hand is the centralizing of resources into a single place, the building up of great imperial projects, and assimilation into a domineering culture, all in opposition to God. God condemns all this and confuses the languages of the people and scatters them. I read this as God’s rejection of assimilation of all peoples into the culture of a dominant imperial power, a toppling of all-encompassing empire in favor of diversity, particularity, and autonomous local populations. I also read it as God’s rejection of ambitious grand projects that extract resources from many to build up the honor of the few elites. From that point, God begins to work in the story with a family whom he calls to leave the land of Mesopotamia and its centers of power behind, in favor of a nomadic life opposite the ways of the kings.

The Pentecost Story

You can read chapter 2 of the Book of Acts here.

What do you notice about what God is doing here? How are equality and hierarchy interacted with? Who has access to God? What seem to be God’s goals in this moment?

Undoing Hierarchy

The Pentecost story is often and rightly spoken of as the reversal of the story of the Tower of Babel. In basic ways, that is easy to see. Where languages were confused and people scattered at Babel, at Pentecost people from many nations were gathered and all could understand the words being spoken. Like at Babel, God comes down at Pentecost to the people who are gathered, but the result is very different.

At Babel, the people want to reach God by their own ambitious plans, at Pentecost, God comes down to meet people and dwell among them of God's own initiative.

As the Spirit descends, God has a project of God’s own, but a far different one than Babel’s tower. Instead of unity of all peoples through assimilation into imperial culture, a monoculture dominated by the language of the king and devoted to his projects, God’s kingdom project brings unity with diversity. Cultures are not erased, no one is marginalized. No ambitious king is on top and extracting. Instead, mere peasants and fishermen speak about what they have seen.

What had been a hierarchical culture where some priests had special status of access to God, and the Spirit occasionally overturned this structure through particular prophets filled with this Spirit is now replaced with a new way. Now, Peter says, the words of the prophet Joel are fulfilled. God’s Spirit is descending on all types of people. Regardless of age or gender or nationality, the Spirit is filling people. No pyramidic temple has to be climbed. No special status is necessary. No priest has to be consulted to reach God. God is in our midst. The Spirit dwells among us and in us, working miracles in power.

This is a kingdom project, but an alternative to Babylon - an unKingdom of God moment. Where the empires of the world want to set up pyramids, hierarchies topped by the powerful extracting wealth and monopolizing God, God flattens their plans. God creates a flattened society in the new kingdom, one where no one is dominant, where all have access to God, where all types of people see the power of God working in and through them, and where no culture is dominant. There is no “official language” of relating to this God, no prioritized culture that is more naturally in touch with the divine. No, each hears God in their own language, and that has been seen down the ages as the stories and songs have been translated and each meets God in their native tongue (in contrast to the tongue of a conquering kingdom as in Islam - where this has not been the case and language has been imposed, it is to our shame).

Again this egalitarian ethos, non-domination, and opposition to centralizing, assimilating imperial norms align well with anarchist critiques of state power and domination, giving good reason for reflection for anarchists and Christians alike.

Much more to come on what results in the days following Pentecost, as the church enacts mutual aid and consensus-based decision-making!

Historical Heroes:

I'll regularly highlight historical heroes, often in the week of their birth or death. Today is the anniversary of the death of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Gerard Manley Hopkins of England (28 July 1844-8 June 1889) was a poet and Jesuit priest. His family was full of the creative arts, and he initially worked in the visual arts. As a teenager, he began to write poetry. He studied at Oxford, and there he followed John Henry Newman from the Anglican to the Roman Catholic Church. He felt a call to ministry with the Jesuits and gave up his poetry for seven years. Later, he became convinced that his faith and his arts did not conflict with each other. He continued to write poetry and his works beautifully engage with the natural world and the difficulties of his life of faith. He was a teacher for much of his life and experienced great sadness and sickness, dying young. His poems were mostly published after his death. We pray for more poets in our midst. On this Pentecost Day, I ask that the Holy Spirit would form us to be like Jesus, with creativity and appreciation of your creation, full of artistic inspiration and encounters with God in the physical elements of the world.

God's Grandeur, Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.