What is Empire?
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Yesterday’s post explored the story of Peter cutting off the ear of the high priest’s servant in John 18:10. The title of that post is When Empire Comes to Church. My wife wisely pointed out that I neglected to explain the language of “empire,” so I’m sending a quick followup to do just that. Here are a few quotes from books that deal with the subject of empire in the Old and New Testaments that I have found helpful. These include references to key empires in redemptive history: Egypt, Babylon, and Rome. I also wrote another brief post on this topic last year titled Empire Criticism in the Gospel of John?. But even there I didn’t try to define what is meant by empire.
Andy Crouch, in Jesus Is Lord, Caesar Is Not: Evaluating Empire in New Testament Studies (pp. 12-13).
We will always have empires. By empire I suppose we mean a political and economic order that succeeds in subsuming previously disparate nations and economies under a rule that can call on both the “hard power” of military might and technological achievement and the “soft power” embedded in deep structures of ideology, philosophy and theology. Every empire worthy of the name combines visible, tangible instruments of enforcing the will of its elites with invisible, intangible systems of thought that, for those within the reach of the empire, make sense of the world. Ultimately these systems of thought are the true source of imperial power, for they not only legitimate the use of hard power but take up their dwelling in the secret places of the heart. They become taken for granted, defining the horizons of the possible and thus existing beyond the reach of ordinary challenges and change. Empire—this combination of hard and soft power extended over previously disparate territory—seems to be a recurring and near-permanent feature of human history.
Tom Thatcher, in Greater than Caeser: Christology and Empire in the Fourth Gospel, p. 51.
Many modern readers of the Bible—who tend to think of Jesus as a religious figure and to view his various conflicts with the Jewish authorities of his day as theological debates—will perhaps be struck by this conflation of civil and religious power [ie Rome’s interference in 1st century Judaism]. In the modern Western world, “religion” is often viewed as a transcendent spiritual affair, while “empire” is understood in “primarily local” and political terms. In fact, however, when we speak of “empire,” “what we are actually talking about is power and rule, a state much more than a place,” where “state” means “a way of life or mode of being.”1 In the case of ancient Rome, this “way of life” was predicated on a social system in which a tiny elite population exercised material, emotional, and ideological power over most of the Mediterranean world. Political and religious forms of imperialism were explicitly intertwined in two ways: first, through the propagation of an “imperial theology” that claimed “Rome was chosen to manifest the gods’ rule, presence, and favor throughout the world”2; second, as illustrated by the evidence from Josephus cited above, through Rome’s manipulation of local religious leaders, who functioned as liaisons between the emperor and the masses.
Walter Brueggemann, in The Prophetic Imagination, p. 7.
We will not understand the meaning of prophetic imagination unless we see the connection between the religion of static triumphalism and the politics of oppression and exploitation…The gods of Egypt are the immovable lords of order. They call for, sanction, and legitimate a society of order, which is precisely what Egypt had. In Egypt…there were no revolutions, no breaks for freedom. There were only the necessary political and economic arrangements to provide order, “naturally,” the order of Pharaoh. Thus the religion of the static gods is not and never could be disinterested, but inevitably it served the interests of the people in charge, presiding over the order and benefiting from the order. And the functioning of that society testified to the rightness of the religion because kings did prosper and bricks did get made.
Scot McKnight and Cody Matchett, in Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple, p. 47.
Babylon is a timeless trope [ie Revelation using “Babylon” to refer to Rome]. Jews knew of the original city of Babylon as a specific event from their own story [ie the Babylonian captivity]. But from that time onward they had their eyes open for the presence of the next Babylon and other Babylons to follow. Whenever they saw an oppressing nation or an enslaving power, they saw Babylon all over again. Whenever they saw their country besieged and their city (Jerusalem) attacked or exploited [ie by Rome], they remembered Babylon. Babylon was more than a one-time event—it was timeless for Jews. And because John grabbed that timeless trope in his message to the churches. . . Each century has its Babylons, each country has its Babylons, and each state and city and—yes, church institutions and churches—has the potential to release the powers of Babylon.
1 Quoting John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), p. 266
2 Quoting Warren Carter, The Roman Empire and the New Testament: An Essential Guide (Abingdon, 2006), p. 7.