Streett, R. Alan | Subversive Meals

Subversive Meals: An Analysis of the Lord’s Supper under Roman Dominationduring the First Century
R. Alan Streett

Paperback: Pickwick Publications, 2013, 327pp.

Introduction

Although written in an academic style and for a scholarly audience, Alan Streett’s book Subversive Meals is a helpful guide to understanding the practice of the Lord’s Supper in the first century. Streett’s thesis is simple; he identifies it in the very first sentences of the book: “[The] Lord’s Supper of the first century CE was an anti-imperial praxis. Whenever early Christians met for a communal meal, they saw themselves participating in subversive non-violent acts against the Roman Empire” (1).

The first four chapters of the book, comprising almost half of the book’s content, set the context for the development of his thesis. The first chapter is an introduction, the second chapter an overview of banquet meals in Roman culture, the third an examination of the anti-imperial nature of the Jewish Passover, and the fourth is an overview of the Jesus movement in the first century. Although these chapters are illuminating and do prepare the reader for Streett’s primary thesis, this summary will focus on the latter half of the book, in which the author makes his case for the Lord’s Supper as an anti-imperial practice. 

The components with which Streett build his argument in the latter half of the book (devoting a chapter to each of these topics) are the anti-imperial nature of Jesus’s meals in Luke’s gospel, “the last supper as an anti-imperial banquet,” the anti-imperial nature of Christian meals in the first century, and prophecy as one anti-imperial activity that unfolded at the early Christian meals. 

In our present age of Christian nationalism (and its broader context of Constantinian cordiality between church and state), Streett’s careful historical work on the first century churches, is a powerful – albeit countercultural – jolt to our imagination of what a church can and should be. As such, Subversive Meals is particularly helpful for envisioning what it might look like for our congregations to live the Word in the twenty-first century.

Table Worship-Fellowship

Undoubtedly, the primary practice that Street explores in this book is that of table fellowship. Specifically, his focus is on the Lord’s Supper as a full meal – in the tradition of Roman banquets – not merely in the elemental form of the bread and the cup. The first century Christian practice of table fellowship, he argues, was rooted not only in Roman banquets, but also in the Jewish Passover and the meals that Jesus shared with his disciples and others, including the last supper. First century Christians saw themselves primarily as citizens of God’s kingdom, not earthly kingdoms, and the meals they shared together, Streett maintains, offered a taste of life in this new, in-breaking kingdom. “If anyone wanted to know what the kingdom of God was like,” he writes, “all they had to do was attend a Christian communal banquet” (202). 

As a meal in honor of the lordship of Jesus, these banquets were a subversive threat to the Roman emperors who saw themselves as sovereign over all facets of life in their empire. “The resurrection was a sign to the disciples,” Streett writes, “that God and not the earthly powers controlled the affairs of humankind. The empire’s most powerful weapon – death – could not deter God’s plan. Jesus rose victorious over the grave. He was given ultimate authority over creation” (125). 

Radical Kinship

Part of what was so subversive about the Christian meals of the first century, as Streett depicts them, was the profoundly egalitarian nature of how they were practiced. The early Christians followed the example of Jesus, Streett maintains, who reclined at the table with those culturally perceived as saints (e.g., Pharisees) and those culturally perceived as sinners (e.g., Levi, the tax collector and his friends). In the early Christian meals, women and slaves were given a seat at the table (or more specifically, they reclined at the table) in ways that they were unable to do at traditional Roman banquets. A visitor to one of these meals “would encounter an alternative way of life, where all people regardless of the status assigned to them by Rome, participated fully as equals in the meal. Around the meal table believers forged a new social identity as being ‘in Christ.’ As such, they were now being fashioned into a new body politic, which represented the kingdom of God” (202). Streett acknowledges the struggles that first century ekklesia faced in practicing this radically egalitarian kinship, but insists that the nature of the kingdom that Jesus proclaimed was undoubtedly egalitarian, and despite their struggles to do so, the early Christians did bear witness in often imperfect ways to the radical kinship that God desires.

Participatory Worship

Given two key facets of Streett’s thesis described above – that the early Christian meals were focused on celebrating Jesus, not Caesar, as Lord and worshipping him, and that these meals strove to be egalitarian in their form – it’s not difficult to see that this practice of worship was one in which all were invited to participate. In reflecting on the role of prophecy in the early Christian meals as described in I Corinthians 14, Streett notes that: “All members are free to exercise their gifts, as long as they are Spirit-prompted and seek to build up the church. The meeting can include singing (a hymn), exposition (a lesson), a mystery (a revelation), prayer and praise (a tongue, an interpretation), and exhortation (a prophecy)” (261). Worship in these first century churches, Streett maintains, took the form of a shared meal. Food and drink were shared, but conversation that encouraged and built up the community was also shared. All members participated in this gathering for worship.