God and Empire
God and Empire

Author: John Dominic Crossan

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2007-03-13

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0060843233

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At the heart of the Bible is a moral and ethical call to fight unjust superpowers, whether they are Babylon, Rome, or even America. From the divine punishment and promise found in Genesis through the revolutionary messages of Jesus and Paul, John Dominic Crossan reveals what the Bible has to say about land and economy, violence and retribution, justice and peace, and, ultimately, redemption. In contrast to the oppressive Roman military occupation of the first century, he examines the meaning of the non-violent Kingdom of God prophesized by Jesus and the equality advocated by Paul to the early Christian churches. Crossan contrasts these messages of peace with the misinterpreted apocalyptic vision from the Book of Revelation, which has been misrepresented by modern right-wing theologians and televangelists to justify U.S. military actions in the Middle East. In God and Empire Crossan surveys the Bible from Genesis to Apocalypse, or the Book of Revelation, and discovers a hopeful message that cannot be ignored in these turbulent times. The first-century Pax Romana, Crossan points out, was in fact a "peace" won through violent military action. Jesus preached a different kind of peace—a peace that surpasses all understanding—and a kingdom not of Caesar but of God. The Romans executed Jesus because he preached this Kingdom of God, a kingdom based on peace and justice, over the empire of Rome, which ruled by violence and force. For Jesus and Paul, Crossan explains, peace cannot be won the Roman way, through military victory, but only through justice and fair and equal treatment of all people.

For God Or Empire
For God Or Empire

Author: Wilson Chacko Jacob

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9781503609631

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Sayyid Fadl, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, led a unique life--one that spanned much of the nineteenth century and connected India, Arabia, and the Ottoman Empire. For God or Empire tells his story, part biography and part global history, as his life and legacy afford a singular view on historical shifts of power and sovereignty, religion and politics. Wilson Chacko Jacob recasts the genealogy of modern sovereignty through the encounter between Islam and empire-states in the Indian Ocean world. Fadl's travels in worlds seen and unseen made for a life that was both unsettled and unsettling. And through his life at least two forms of sovereignty--God and empire--become apparent in intersecting global contexts of religion and modern state formation. While these changes are typically explained in terms of secularization of the state and the birth of rational modern man, the life and afterlives of Sayyid Fadl--which take us from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Indian Ocean worlds to twenty-first century cyberspace--offer a more open-ended global history of sovereignty and a more capacious conception of life.

God, Neighbor, Empire
God, Neighbor, Empire

Author: Walter Brueggemann

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 9781481306027

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Justice, mercy, and the public good all find meaning in relationship--a relationship dependent upon fidelity, but endlessly open to the betrayals of infidelity. This paradox defines the story of God and Israel in the Old Testament. Yet the arc of this story reaches ever forward, and its trajectory confers meaning upon human relationships and communities in the present. The Old Testament still speaks. Israel, in the Old Testament, bears witness to a God who initiates and then sustains covenantal relationships. God, in mercy, does so by making promises for a just well-being and prescribing stipulations for the covenant partner's obedience. The nature of the relationship itself decisively depends upon the conduct, practice, and policy of the covenant partner, yet is radically rooted in the character and agency of God--the One who makes promises, initiates covenant, and sustains relationship. This reflexive, asymmetrical relationship, kept alive in the texts and tradition, now fires contemporary imagination. Justice becomes shaped by the practice of neighborliness, mercy reaches beyond a pervasive quid pro quo calculus, and law becomes a dynamic norming of the community. The well-being of the neighborhood, inspired by the biblical texts, makes possible--and even insists upon--an alternative to the ideology of individualism that governs our society's practice and policy. This kind of community life returns us to the arc of God's gifts--mercy, justice, and law. The covenant of God in the witness of biblical faith speaks now and demands that its interpreting community resist individualism, overcome commoditization, and thwart the rule of empire through a life of radical neighbor love.

In God's Empire
In God's Empire

Author: Owen White

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-07-31

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0199875405

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A collection of original essays by leading scholars in the field, In God's Empire examines the complex ways in which the spread of Christianity by French men and women shaped local communities, French national prowess, and global politics in the two centuries following the French Revolution. More than a story of religious proselytism, missionary activity was an essential feature of French contact and interaction with local populations. In many parts of the world, missionaries were the first French men and women to work and live among indigenous societies. For all the celebration of France's secular "civilizing mission," it was more often than not religious workers who actually fulfilled the daily tasks of running schools, hospitals, and orphanages. While their work was often tied to small villages, missionaries' interactions had geopolitical implications. Focusing on many regions - from the Ottoman Empire and North America to Indochina and the Pacific Ocean - this book explores how France used missionaries' long connections with local communities as a means of political influence and justification for colonial expansion. In God's Empire offers readers both an overview of the major historical dimensions of the French evangelical enterprise, as well as an introduction to the theoretical and methodological challenges of placing French missionary work within the context of European, imperial, religious history, and world history.

God's Empire
God's Empire

Author: Hilary M. Carey

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-01-06

Total Pages: 447

ISBN-13: 1139494090

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In God's Empire, Hilary M. Carey charts Britain's nineteenth-century transformation from Protestant nation to free Christian empire through the history of the colonial missionary movement. This wide-ranging reassessment of the religious character of the second British empire provides a clear account of the promotional strategies of the major churches and church parties which worked to plant settler Christianity in British domains. Based on extensive use of original archival and rare published sources, the author explores major debates such as the relationship between religion and colonization, church-state relations, Irish Catholics in the empire, the impact of the Scottish Disruption on colonial Presbyterianism, competition between Evangelicals and other Anglicans in the colonies, and between British and American strands of Methodism in British North America.

The Roman Empire and the New Testament
The Roman Empire and the New Testament

Author: Dr. Warren Carter

Publisher: Abingdon Press

Published: 2010-09-01

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 1426724888

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An indispensable introduction to Roman society, culture, law, politics, religion, and daily life as they relate to the study of the New Testament.The Roman Empire formed the central context in which the New Testament was written. Anyone who wishes to understand the New Testament texts must become familiar with the political, economic, societal, cultural, and religious aspects of Roman rule. Much of the New Testament deals with enabling its readers to negotiate, in an array of different manners, this pervasive imperial context. This book will help the reader see how social structures and daily practices in the Roman world illumine so much of the content of the New Testament message. For example, to grasp what Paul was saying about food offered to idols one must understand that temples in the Roman world were not “churches,” and that they functioned as political, economic, and gastronomic centers, whose religious dealings were embedded within these other functions.Brief in presentation yet broad in scope, The Roman Empire and the New Testament: An Essential Guide will introduce students to the information and ideas essential to coming to grips with the world in which early Christianity was born.

God and Empire
God and Empire

Author: John Dominic Crossan

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2009-03-17

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 006174428X

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The bestselling author and prominent New Testament scholar draws parallels between 1st–century Roman Empire and 21st–century United States, showing how the radical messages of Jesus and Paul can lead us to peace today Using the tools of expert biblical scholarship and a keen eye for current events, bestselling author John Dominic Crossan deftly presents the tensions exhibited in the Bible between political power and God’s justice. Through the revolutionary messages of Jesus and Paul, Crossan reveals what the Bible has to say about land and economy, violence and retribution, justice and peace, and ultimately, redemption. He examines the meaning of “kingdom of God” prophesized by Jesus, and the equality recommended to Paul by his churches, contrasting these messages of peace against the misinterpreted apocalyptic vision from the book of Revelations, that has been co-opted by modern right-wing theologians and televangelists to justify the United State’s military actions in the Middle East.

Empire in the New Testament
Empire in the New Testament

Author: Stanley E. Porter

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2011-01-01

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1608995992

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How does a Christian render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's? This book is the result of the Bingham Colloquium of 2007 that brought scholars from across North America to examine the New Testament's response to the empires of God and Caesar. Two chapters lay the foundation for that response in the Old Testament's concept of empire, and six others address the response to the notion of empire, both human and divine, in the various authors of the New Testament. A final chapter investigates how the church fathers regarded the matter. The essays display various methods and positions; together, however, they offer a representative sample of the current state of study of the notion of empire in the New Testament.