The Mouth That Marches

When Paul wrote "if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord," he was not handing us a password to whisper at heaven's gate. He was lighting a fuse. In first-century Rome, there was only one lord — Caesar. To declare Jesus as Lord was to stand in the public square and announce that the empire's violence, its economics of exploitation, its theology of domination, did not get the final word.…