Discipleship in a 4D World Session 3: Decentralization—Judges

               So, first a confession, when I tried to teach this session, I went way overtime… which I should have known would happen, I tried to teach the whole book of Judges, and some of the book of Joshua, in under an hour.

 

The Book of Joshua—A Map of the Tribes

              I love reading Fantasy, and one of my favorite features of the genre are the cool maps in the front of the book. That is a good way to take the book of Joshua, a type of map of an idealized version of the conquest.

 

Joshua 4:1-7—Just feast on this imagery a bit, 12 tribes traveling together before the ark. This is the Utopia the author hopes for, a decentralized theocracy; the ideal that turns into a dystopia once the rubber hits the road, as the book of Judges demonstrates. But ideally—12 tribes, upholding God’s roving presence, founded and forged in crossing out of slavery. That’s some compelling stuff!

Joshua 12:7-24—Here is an idealized account of the 12 tribe’s conquest, almost a completed to-do list, Kings from Ba’al-gad to Mt. Halak.

 

Judges—A Tribal Confederation breaks down ever generation

              If Joshua is akin to Thomas More’s Utopia, then Judges is George Miller’s Mad Max. Any semblance of an ideal society is quickly scraped away, as the faults of a decentralized theocracy are on full display.

 

Judges 2:6-10—Joshua is buried and stability with it

6-The tribes are dispersed to go do their own thing.

10-As is the refrain from Judges to Kings to Ecclesiastes, from one generation to the next everything is lost. Inheritances never pass cleanly from one generation to the next.

Judges 2:11-15—Idolatry

11-Ba’al—Canaanite deity, “Lord” in some Canaanite languages, so Ba’al Peor would be the Lord of Peor, etc.

12-Astartes—a goddess—the local manifestation of Ishtar/Aphrodite.

14-The conquest doesn’t go so well, there are counter-attacks. The indigenous people didn’t much like having their kings killed and put on a list like groceries. These defeats are seen as reproof from God for the Tribes going over to other gods, forgetting the liberation from Egypt.

 

Judges 2:16-23—Judges restrain the people’s unfaithfulness

Just as God provided clothing for Adam and Eve when they were expelled from Eden, called Noah to build an ark to save his family from the flood, and provided the Passover as protection for the people’s first born down in Egypt, so too the people are given a way to continue on even in the face of their own ruptured relationships with their God. God provides charismatic leaders to guide them through challenges in the land.

16-Judges—Shophet, Charismatic Chief of Chiefs, unites the tribes and deals with trouble.

17-It is worth considering that when the people are dispersed throughout the land as they are, decentralized, it is harder for them to hold onto the ways of the previous generation. Traditions warp and break more easily without a center.

18-In some ways we have a replay of Egypt, the people are oppressed, they groan for help, and God sends a Moses figure.

 

A Chart of Judges:

Here is where my Bible Study went off the rails, I tried to review every judge, so I would suggest instead to review my chart here, and simply note that it doesn’t all go well, at best Judges are ambiguous figures. Often times, people read Samson as particularly heroic (the ancients explicitly paralleled him with Hercules), but my reading is that he is intentionally an example of how degraded Judgeship has become. The book of Judges isn’t a story of ongoing faithfulness, but instead the breaking down of decentralized theocracy, it isn’t a working way of governing people!

Judge	Disobedience	Consequence	Outcome
Othniel	Serve Ba’als & Asherahs.	Captured by King Cushan of Aram for 8 years	War, Tribes prevail, 40 years of peace
Ehud	“Evil in the sight of God”	Conquered by Moab, Amon, and Amalekites. 18 years under King Eglon of Moab	Ehud assassinates Eglon in his restroom, Moab crushed in the confusion, 80 years of peace.
Shamgar			Kill 600 Philistines, the Tribes are delivered
Deborah—both Prophet and Judge (Ja’el & Barak assisting)	“Did evil in the sight of God”	King Jabin of Canaan and General Sisera of The Gentile Fortress (raiding club) invade with massive chariots	The chariots caught in the mud, Sisera tent pegged, 40 years of rest.
Gideon (Reluctant Judge, his father worshipped Ba’al, he is also named Jeru-ba’al)	Did what is evil in the sight of the Lord	Midian and Amalekite raids on farms.	Destruction of Ba’als and Asherahs, Tribal infighting, killing generals, a campaign, he creates an idol out of plunder. No time of peace. His son, Abimelek, tries to create a Kingdom.
Tola	Abimelek’s bad reign		Judged 23 years
Jair			Judged 22 years
Jephthah (outsider, born out of wedlock, chased out of the country, makes a vow that leads to his daughter’s death)	Served Ba’als and Astartes and a plethora of other gods.  Ceased worshipping God!	Ammonites and Philistines control them for 18 years, subdue them out tribe by tribe… God tells them to ask their new gods for help!	Ammonites subdued. Jephtha rules as Judge for 6 years. Intertribal slaughter, 40,000 dead in “civil war”.
Ibzan (makes intertribal alliances using his 30 sons)	(after the slaughter)		Judged 7 years
Elon			Judged 10 years
Abdon (like Ibzan had many sons and donkeys to make alliances)			Judged 8 years
Samson (Special Child, Nazarite, Pursues Philistine Wife, sleeps with prostitutes, falls in lust with Delilah, etc.)	Did evil in the Lord’s sight, given into the hands of Philistines for 40 years	Samson bumbles into fighting Philistines, torches fields.	Blinded and shaven, still destroys temple of Dagon, Judges for 20 years.

 

The Rest of the Book:

New Idolatry and Tribal Dispute, much can be traced back to Gideon’s idol and his son Abimelek. Massive slaughter of Benjaminites.

 

Other Judges:

Eli (and almost his sons) and Samuel (and his sons).

 

My working definition of Decentralization—The Distribution of functions, power, and authority.

 

What’s Judges have to do with Decentralization?

-During this time period Israelite society was dispersed and governed on a tribal level.

-One of the consequences of decentralization is that truth and tradition are harder to pass along without a centralized authority.

-Theoretically this distribution of authority allows for God to be the sole authority. Hypothetically one of the ways a theocracy can work is that there simply are no earthly rulers, or they are so weak that no one pays them any mind.

 

3 Stories to think about Decentralization:

Walter Cronkite

              I hear tell there was a time when authority about current events was centralized. Everyone turned on the TV and listened to Walter Cronkite, and that settled matters. Not so now, now interpretation of current events and even what constitutes news, is diffuse, broken into pieces by 24 hour cable news, algorithms and media silos.

St. Paul and the Werewolf

              One Sunday a visitor to the congregation I was serving came up to me after worship and let me know he was an ex-Roman Catholic, because they were hiding things. After a few conversations over a couple of weeks, I found out he had “discovered,” from some amalgamation of the “History” Channel and chat rooms on the internet, that the difference between Protestants and Catholics was that Protestants acknowledged that the Apostle Paul was a werewolf (that was the thorn in his flesh).

When we got into extended conversation about this idea, and the actual historic divisions between Protestants and Catholics, he didn’t let go of this idea; instead he decided I, an ordained Protestant Pastor, didn’t really know the difference between Protestants and Catholics. For him, I was instead an authority figure hiding the truth.

Part of our decentralized, hyper-democratic society is that anything that looks like a centralized authority is automatically suspect. The slogan “Question Authority” becomes a highest ideal, even as it can at times be exercised without common sense.

 Flash mobs and Terrorist Cells

              Up until now my examples of Decentralization have been fairly negative, but the act of democratizing function, power, and authority can also be transformative, it can do big things—that is the central premise of The Starfish and the Spider. Two examples:

-Flash mobs are an amazing feat. By decentralizing the whole process of putting on a concert, a small group of people are able to give a whole performance without ever practicing together.

-Similarly, terrorist cells are small groups delegated all the function, power, and authority of making war, and they can do damage like you wouldn’t believe. Even if one branch of a terrorist organization is caught, it rarely does long term damage to the organization, because everyone has been empowered to make war.

 

The Elephant in the Room—The Internet:

              Probably the biggest example of decentralization we experienced on the day to day, is the internet. It has flattened the whole world, everything is interconnected, function, power, and authority can be spread out not just among a small group, but among millions, even billions, of people.

 

Challenges:

              I’m sure you can intuit some of the challenges decentralization brings to the church, but here are a few:

-As the Israelites found within one generation of entering the promised land, passing on the faith in a way that doesn’t get confused and involve werewolves is hard without centralized authority figures, leaders, or meeting place.

-In so far as the faith involves claims made by a religious authority, be that authority based on charismatic experience or theological education or lines of tradition, they are all suspect in a decentralized world. The watchword of most people that think about this is that any respect for the pastoral office, any religious sway that can be mustered, comes from pastoral authenticity, not pastoral authority. So, if you notice pastors in skinny jeans who say things like “I’m just being real with you” that’s the move from Pastoral Authority to Pastoral Authenticity.

-Cyberspace, the internet, social media, all of that—poses a grave challenge to the Christian faith, in so far as we are a faith that believes that material stuff matters, that Christianity is an embodied tradition, that God took on a body, took on flesh and blood—matter matters! As we all unfortunately found during the Covid years, a disembodied faith, a cyber faith, is quite malformed. There were neat things we got to try, virtual services, home Holy Week packets, Bible Studies on zoom, meetings on zoom, continuing education on zoom, zoom zoom zoom. But, even the Gnostics among us who notoriously denigrate bodily life, got tired of that disembodied form of decentralized church.

 

Possibilities:

-One of the founding stories of the Christian faith is that a small group of disciples shook the Roman Empire and beyond by dispersing and using the new technology of a codex (a bound book) to spread the Gospel. This is like a flash mob or a terrorist cell, decentralization having a transformative power. Why not again? Why isn’t there a space for a small group of Christians to use technology in a dispersed way to: re-evangelize our world, humble the Powers and Principalities of our era, and re-tune the Church to the Spirit’s calling today?

-Now, for decades we’ve bought into the church growth model of ministry, ultimately Church is about becoming bigger and bigger. There have been instances of pushback of course, the Slow Church movement, the Emergent Church, etc, but by and large those movements have been snatched up and misused to achieve the same goal as Church Growth—bigger is better. But there is a case to be made that small is attractive, that the drive for growth ultimately sours people to these churches (there is evidence that for every person entering Saddleback during its heyday there was another person leaving). In short, what if we’re supposed to be small, salt and light, not every ingredient of the soup, not the sun itself?

-What if the Church is the antithesis of Cyber-Gnosticism? As everything in our society pushes toward the anonymous and depersonalized (or the frighteningly hyper-personalization of AI), the Church as an awkward and weird third place. A place where people are authentically who they are, where you can only be so anonymous for so long, if you sit among a small group of people and worship for more than a week or two, they’re going to get to know you. Maybe that’s what we need in this world?

 

So, even as decentralization has its challenges, maybe we can hope that nimble small churches can navigate those challenges and tame some of those dynamics in order to proclaim the Gospel.