In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, many fantastic tales of survival and heroism emerged.  Most bizarre was the tale of a man who, high up in the smoldering towers, surfed down the shattered skyscrapers in the middle of the collapse on a thin piece of walling.  Variations on the myth include him curling into a ball or surfing the wind currents on rubble.  However it happened, … well, it didn’t.  It was an amazing bit of myth that infused hope into the open veins of a lamenting America.

Myth though it is, this story compels me. This picture of a horrified man careening through the cascading infernos of steel and flesh, unsure of where his freefall is taking him, is how much of humanity feels these days. Global institutions we once considered as unmovable as skyscrapers are suddenly groaning under ghastly portents of collapse.  The end — of the American Empire, of globalization, of The World as We Know It, of soul-sucking consumerism and earth-scorching militarism to support it, of big banks and mega-churches –  is here.  These towers of our captivity are falling.  And many are just hoping that this sheet of drywall they’re coasting on will bring them to a safety beyond the maw of rubble presently forming all ’round us.

The Empire is ending — and we feel tremendously unsure of what’s next.  The Empire is ending — and we don’t know what to do about it.  The Empire is ending — and we don’t even know how to talk  about it.

Many of us, not least myself, had gotten quite accustomed to a writing-style and theological flavor that delighted in sniffing out every jot + tittle of anti-imperialism in the Bible.  Books, lay and academic, have been met with great sales by drawing these themes to the forefront of our theology.  Empire was a hidden topic in evangelical scholarship and pop culture until very recently.  Who could’ve predicted the Newscorp-owned conservative megalith of Zondervan would publish the anti-empire tomes of Shane Claiborne, Greg Boyd, and Rob Bell?

It’s as if we, the old street-corner eccentrics holding a SCREW CAPITALISM sign for years, were suddenly greeted by hundreds of people with similar signs and laments.  Our pet interests, peculiar interpretations, and public invocations have suddenly become quite en vogue.  Communities like this site owe their vibrancy to this awakening by the Holy Spirit to the vagaries of Empire.  And praise God for that awakening!

But that reality is dissolving.  The Empire that has captured our churches and imaginations is falling apart faster than all the bloggers in the world can capture. Old evils of sweatshops, repressed coffee farmers, imperial militarism, corporate deception, and state oppression have slipped out of focus as new beasts have crawled out of the sea of world history.  Food shortages, prolonged unemployment, and urban strife now occupy what my prayers, theological reflection, and cultural analysis focus on.  The challenges before us isn’t how to stop these Twin Towers from running the world into the ground; it is the task, granted that the towers are in mid-collapse, of how to surf this rubble well.

One year ago an anti-imperial sermon or blog would have held the attention many young Christians.  That’s just not on the radar as much, these days.  Babylon is fallen/ing, and new beasts are on the shore.

Those 20th-century struggles still demand tremendous attention: fighting for global justice and peace and the healing of the nations will always be gospel matters.  And to be sure: capitalism, consumerism, and militarism may wither, but won’t go away.  Indeed twenty years from now, America may be a second-world country that simply can’t afford the cavalier military entanglements we’re presently caught in, but the threat of war between nations will ever exist.

So too will the church’s need to provide nonviolent witness that another way is possible.  And that’s why I continue to believe that what we talk about here on Jesus Manifesto matters so utterly, even now, at the end of all things we love to loathe.  Geopolitical forces may be presently bringing the American Empire down rather quickly.  But it’ll take years more to bring down the American church’s love affair with that Empire.  Long after it’s gone, she’ll still long for it.  So God’s work, our work, isn’t over in reclaiming the ecclesial imagination from the empire and into the kingdom of the Beloved Son.

For now, though, I’m (mostly) done sending steady potshots at consumerism, militarism, and all the other bastard ilk of Empire.  From the perspective of mid-collapse, that’s fighting yesterday’s battles.  Tomorrow’s gospel tasks are how to talk about living not just under Empire, but after it.

The Twin Towers are burning, and indeed falling.  Will we continue to frame our praxis and doxis and identity around the memories of intact towers, or in anticipation of rubble?  As we surf this rubble of the Empire into the Billowing Unknown ahead, may the grace of God keep our attention and rhetoric firmly fixed on what he might be doing for his kingdom amid this present darkness.

• What are the first steps in understanding a theology of imperial decline?
• How do we both lament the pain of the empire’s fall with the joy that it is indeed receding?
• In what ways have we allowed anti-empire rhetoric to unduly form our identity?  (i.e., being against something versus being for something else?)
• What are the gospel tasks and ecclesial priorities of the Christian Radicalism movement that need to decline along with the empire?
• Rephrased: What biblical themes should increase as the American empire decreases?

About Brandon Rhodes

Brandon Rhodes is a lifelong Oregonian who worships and serves in Springwater, a new-monastic Mennonite church plant in Portland's eclectic Brentwood-Darlington neighborhood and presently in its first year together. In his adolescence he was a part-time Christian and full-time fundamentalist crank. But when Brandon lived in a kingdom-centered intentional community while studying Environmental Studies and Political Science at the University of Oregon, he found himself steadily transformed by the gospel. God redeemed him from sneering individualism and into playful community, from shrill nationalism into the Kingdom of the Triumphant Lamb. His is a journey of being regularly startled by God's love and beauty. Since college, Brandon has continued to live in Christian community, graduated seminary, and worked as a writer and activist for several creation-care and global justice nonprofits. He enjoys vegetable gardening, reading compulsively, brewing beer, Mexican food, Romans 8, and trees.