What should we return (render) to Caesar?

The gospel reading this week was Matthew 22: 15-22 on the much quoted, but much misrepresented passage on "rendering to Caesar".  The comment by Jesus on paying imperial taxation "give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar - and to God what belongs to God" has been frequently used to underwrite a political quietist stance in which a line is drawn between political activity and "religion".

Well, this approach just won't wash for a number of reasons starting from the fact that the distinction between a private sphere of "religion" and a public sphere of politics would have been incomprehensible at the time. To read such a distinction back into the text is anachronistic. We need to read the incident within its historical context. As a Jew, speaking to Jews, Jesus would have been understood to have been reminding his interlocutors of the prior and total claim of God over their lives. The books of Moses and the Prophets, whose authority he held in common with his interlocutors, were devoted to spelling this profound claim out in redundant detail covering the whole of life, from agriculture to food to economics in an arc whose trajectory pushed increasingly to emphasise the central character of the claims of justice and and mercy in walking humbly before God.

So what is going on here?

James Scott in Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts I think helps us get a handle on at least part of what is happening with his study of conflicts between the powerful and the oppressed, and his account of the difference between the onstage, public, and the off-stage roles and the differing accounts offered by both groups. What makes this passage so rare and so interesting is that Matthew offers us in the story an account of what the powerful, though still subordinate groups (remembering that the Romans are in overall charge),  the Herodians and the Pharisees are saying off-stage as opposed to their on-stage performance.

In this on-stage moment, they offer Jesus an opportunity to say in public what they suspect he might be saying as a member of the discontented oppressed class off-stage. What his reply offers is an account of a politics that is theologically unassailable, from their point of view, but is nevertheless quietly subversive of his interlocutors and the stance they have taken in their practice of engagement with the Roman empire.

Jesus' answer while apparently deferring to Caesar, is subversive in that it places people in a position in which they are invited, by implication to consider what it means to "give back to Caesar what is his" as against "giving back to God what is his". It does so by inviting, implicitly, a consideration of the question "what is Caesar's?", a question that, in Caesar's terms, should not even be asked. Such a question brings the possibility of a political and socially critical  discipleship into view. What we owe to Caesar, or the liberal democratic nation-state of Australia, itself aligned to an imperial power, is always, and must always, be open to question against the prior claim to return to God what is God's.

What should we return to Caesar? Not an easy question, but one that should be struggled with continually and communally. We can start our reflection on this question from Jesus' the point that the prior claim is to return to God what belongs to God, a practice which acknowledges that the baseline of the human is filled out for us paradigmatically in the life and teaching, the death and resurrection of Jesus. We learn from him what it looks like to return to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to return to God what is God's.

An anarchist history of upland southest Asia - a way of rereading the history of Israel

I have just finished a great read - James C Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009).

Here Scott offers a history of the estimated 100 million people who live in a vast hill and mountain zone that runs across southwest China, northeast India, and parts of five Southeast Asian countries. Contrary to the usual account that sees these people as the original inhabitant who have been left behind by history, he provides an account that turns the usual assumptions upside down.

These populations fled into the hills over the course of two millennia, he argues, to avoid the imposition of slavery, indentured labor, and taxes by expanding states. they have developed their community, economic and religious life as an active effort at state evasion and state resistance

That is, they evolved languages, economies, and ways of life that were designed to keep the state at bay, or to be engaged with on their own terms. He draws attention to some examples of this process outside of Asia, as well. Scott often returns to the complex example of Myanmar (also called Burma) to explain how states mapped terrain, classified populations, and acquired resources as they expanded -- and to show how the Kachins, the Hmong, and others resisted. often successfully this process.

Beyond the relevance of this work for studies of the region, this work raises tantalising questions about the role of the state in history and enables us to deconstruct the assumed, taken for granted account that the state is all important and acts of resistance to the state are marginal. We have here a framework for questioning the taken for granted character of this narrative.

Beyond that it also occurred to me that this account of resistance to the state might be of interest to Old Testament scholars in thinking about the emergence of Israel and helping to reread that history through the pentateuch and especially during the time of the Judges. I'm not an Old Testament scholar but it seems to me that there might be a PhD thesis of two in exploring the relevance of Scott's model for our understanding of the dynamics of the formation of Israel.

For example:

• the hills as a region of refuge or escape from the state making projects of the valleys (pp.22-3)
• pp122-3 to leave state space is to become characterised as a "barbarian" or a "tribal"
• "State expansion when it involves forms of force labour fosters (geographical conditions permitting) extrastate zones of flight and refuge. The inhabitants of such zones often constitute a composite of runaways and earlier-established peoples. (p.133) 
• the hill population were those without kings, operating with non-hierarchical patterns of limited local authority,
• the religious commitments of the hills were resistant to religious uniformity of the valley states - the hills are the source of prophetic movements.

 Scott's account of the development of tribal identity as not being driven by long lasting ethnicities but by the development of identity by all those fleeing to the hills to escape the valley states centralising authority.

The history of Israel has coded within it a resistance to centralising authority, in the escape from Egypt, the initial tribal form of non-hierarchical authority and the limited power of the judges. Even under the kings there was always ready to emerge the strain of prophetic critique and resistance to that authority.

Anarchist history - getting away from the state in Southeast asia

James C Scott's latest work The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009) is fascinating for the way it opens up the possibility of a fresh take on political theory as well as providing an analysis of the history of upland Southeast Asia.

For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, a self consciously “anarchist history,” examines the huge literature on state-making in a frame of mind that questions the accounts offered by the states themselves.

The author evaluates why people would deliberately remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states.

James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” 

This is an engaging read and offers fresh perspectives for all those who are suspicious of the self agrandising and claims to self evidence offered by theorists of the emergence of the state.