released 11/8/2024

This Friday Feature presents two interviews about empire from Volume 119 of the Journal. Jesus is Lord, Caesar Is Not, edited by Scot McKnight and Joseph B. Modica, is the first book to hold empire criticism up to evaluation. As one of this anthology’s contributing authors, Allan Bevere addresses this new direction in an increasingly politicized hermeneutic. Bevere agrees with empire critics who resist the spiritualizing of the gospel and maintain a historical context within which it should be understood.  However, while recognizing that there is some good writing being done regarding the dominating tendency of empire, Bevere maintains that Paul is not primarily concerned with empire in his letter to the Colossians, and concludes that empire criticism has gone too far.

Then, Peter Leithart explains that empire studies (what Bevere refers to as ‘empire criticism’) is a thread of New Testament scholarship that reads its text as consistently anti-imperial. His book Between Babel and Beast: American Empires in Biblical Perspective focuses on the extent to which empire criticism lumps together all empires as basically the same type of entity. The reality is much more complex, in that there are diverse sorts of empires. Leithart balances his criticism of empire studies, maintaining that he is suspicious of the religious right’s portrayal of America in which the American nation takes on the sacredness of the Church’s mission. The centrality of the Church is a key theme in his book, by which Leithart seeks to encourage New Testament scholars toward a thoroughly Christo-centric politics.

36 minutes

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