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211 pages

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This groundbreaking collection considers empire from a global perspective, exploring the role of evangelicals in political, social, and economic engagement at a time when empire is alternately denounced and embraced. It brings noted thinkers from a range of evangelical perspectives together to engage the most explosive and discussed theorists of empire in the first decade of the twenty-first century--Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Using their work as a springboard, the contributors grapple with the concept of empire and how evangelicalism should operate in the world of empire.

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Philosophie et théologie

Christianity

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Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 octobre 2008
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441201898
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0922€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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E VANGELICALS and E MPIRE
E VANGELICALS and E MPIRE
Christian Alternatives to the Political Status Quo
E DITED BY
Bruce Ellis Benson and Peter Goodwin Heltzel
2008 by Bruce Ellis Benson and Peter Goodwin Heltzel
Published by Brazos Press a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.brazospress.com
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means-for example, electronic, photocopy, recording-without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Evangelicals and empire : Christian alternatives to the political status quo / edited by Bruce Ellis Benson and Peter Goodwin Heltzel. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1- 58743-235-4 (pbk.) 1. Evangelicalism-United States. 2. Christianity and politics-United States. 3. Christianity and international affairs. 4. United States-Foreign relations. 5. Imperialism. 6. Negri, Antonio, 1933- I. Benson, Bruce Ellis, 1960- II. Heltzer, Peter Goodwin, 1970- III. Title. BR1642.U5E897 2008 261.70973-dc22 2008030574
Scripture is taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Contents
Foreword - Nicholas Wolterstorff
Introduction - Bruce Ellis Benson and Peter Goodwin Heltzel
Section I: Present
1. Dangerous Religion: George W. Bush s Theology of Empire - Jim Wallis
2. The Contested Church: Multiple Others of Evangelical Multitude - Helene Slessarev-Jamir and Bruce Ellis Benson
3. Acting in Common: How the Flesh of Multitude Can Become Incarnate Words against Empire - M. Gail Hamner
4. Betrayed by a Kiss: Evangelicals and U.S. Empire - Charles W. Amjad- Ali and Lester Edwin J. Ruiz
5. Empire-Building or Democracy-at-Work? The Growing Influence of White U.S. Evangelical NGO Lobbying at the United Nations and in Washington, DC - Jennifer Butler and Glenn Zuber
6. The Gospel of Freedom, or Another Gospel? Theology, Empire, and American Foreign Policy - James K. A. Smith
7. Liberality vs. Liberalism - John Milbank
Section II: Past
8. Historians and the Past Tense: Evangelium and Imperium as Genealogies of the Concept of Sovereignty - Patrick Provost- Smith
9. Empire s Future Religion: The Hidden Competition between Postmillennial American Expansionism and Premillennial Evangelical Christianity - S bastien Fath
10. Political Complexities and Rivalries of Pneuma and Imperia - Kurt Anders Richardson
11. Stepchildren of the Empire: The Formation of a Latino Evang lico Identity - Juan F. Mart nez
12. Empire, Race, and the Evangelical Multitude: Jesse Jackson, Jim Wallis, and Evangelical Coalitions for Justice - Eleanor Moody- Shepherd and Peter Goodwin Heltzel
13. Where Are the Pentecostals in an Age of Empire? - Elaine Padilla and Dale T. Irvin
14. Intermezzo: A Discussion between Donald W. Dayton and Christian T. Collins Winn about Empire and Evangelicals
Section III: Future
15. Empire and Transcendence: Hardt and Negri s Challenge to Theology and Ethics - Mark Lewis Taylor
16. Empire and the Ethics of Opacity: The End of Theology and the Beginning(s) of Theological Thinking - Corey D. B. Walker
17. What Empire, Which Multitude? Pentecostalism and Social Liberation in North America and Sub-Saharan Africa - Amos Yong and Samuel Zalanga
18. In Praise of Profanity: A Theological Defense of the Secular - Michael Horton
19. The Future of Evangelical Theology in an Age of Empire: Postfoundational and Postcolonial - Mabiala Kenzo and John R. Franke
20. Evangelicalism and/as New Constantinianism: Globalization, Secularity, and the Heart of the Gospel - Paul Lim
21. Love in Times of Empire: Theopolitics Today - Mario Costa, Catherine Keller, and Anna Mercedes
Afterword - Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
List of Contributors
Foreword N ICHOLAS W OLTERSTORFF
Until recently, only those who wished to criticize America s role in the world described it as an empire. Those who applauded the U.S. role invariably resisted the charge. We Americans achieved our independence by breaking free from the grip of the British empire. We know first hand what s bad about empires. We will not be guilty of creating our own.
Times have changed. The neoconservatives who provided the ideology for the foreign policy of the administration of President George W. Bush, and thereby for much of its domestic policy as well, concede that America is an empire and boldly declare that that s a good thing. It would be even more of a good thing if we stopped telling ourselves that we are not an empire, acknowledged that we are, and unapologetically got on with the business of empire.
Most if not all previous empires were bad. Their goal was to subject other peoples to the control of the imperial center. The American empire is different, say the neoconservatives. Americans are good people; they have no interest in subjecting other people to their control. The goal of the American empire is to spread freedom around the world. Everybody wants to be free, politically and economically; God made human beings with the desire to be free. Tyrants and central planners inhibit this desire. Unfortunately, hortatory talks do not unseat tyrants and central planners; only the barrel of a gun works. So as the only superpower, America must use its military force to remove tyrants and central planners, hold at bay the terrorists who do not like freedom, and forestall the emergence of any power that might seriously contest this role of America in the world. Some say God has assigned America this role; others apparently think that morality requires it, given the historical emergence of this unique blend of supreme power and unparalleled goodness in America.
Hardt and Negri, in their two well-known books, Empire and Multitude , argue that political empires, such as America presently is and such as the neoconservatives want it to be, are becoming things of the past. What is now emerging is a global capitalist economy that eludes the attempts of states to control it, including the attempts of the United States. The United States may or may not be able to control Iraq; we don t yet know how the story ends. It certainly cannot control the dynamics of the global capitalist economy. When Hardt and Negri speak of empire, it is the imperial reach and control of the global capitalist economy that they have in mind.
Unlike the neoconservatives, Hardt and Negri think that all empires, whether this emerging economic empire or the prior political empires, are bad. When they say what s bad about empire, however, one notices a curious convergence between the anthropology and morality they assume and that of the neoconservatives. What s bad about empire, whatever its form, is that it constitutes domination . Always in empire there is somebody or something telling people how to think and what to do, somebody or something exercising authority over people. What we need is a liberatory politics that will bring about a social order free from all such transcendence. This is what human beings want, this is their desire, to be free from being told how to think and what to do. Thus it is that authority is inherently domination. One of the main innovations in the thought of Hardt and Negri is their claim that as electronic means of communication become more and more prominent in the global economy, it becomes just as impossible for business figures to control the lives of people as for political figures to control their lives. The dynamics of the new empire will lead to its destruction. Freedom and equality are at hand.
Hardt and Negri say next to nothing about the role of religion in the emergence of the new empire and in its projected demise. Obviously freedom as they understand it is incompatible with any acknowledgment of God as having authority over us. But evidently either they assume the truth of the secularization thesis, that under conditions of modernization religion will disappear, or they assume the truth of the epiphenomen thesis, that religion can be explained but cannot itself explain.
Evangelicals and Empire significantly advances the discussion by considering the role of evangelicals in empire, not only American evangelicals but evangelicals generally, and their role both in the American empire and in the newly emerging economic empire. That latter role proves both important and contradictory. On the one hand, evangelicalism, at least in its nondenominational forms, is almost a paradigmatic example of the sort of liberation that Hardt and Negri anticipate. When the evangelical who feels no denominational loyalty finds that his present church is trying to exert an authority over him that he doesn t like, he simply leaves and shops around for one in which what he is told to think and do meshes with what he was already thinking and doing. On the other hand, the great bulk of American evangelicals appear both to support the current American empire and to participate without qualms in the emerging global capitalist empire.
This support and this participation are strange. The Lord whom the evangelical professes to serve did not say, according to the scriptures that the evangelical holds as authoritative, that he came to bring freedom. He said he was anointed to inaugurate God s realm of justice. The person who has absorbed the scriptural understanding of what it is to be human, and the scriptural understanding of who Jesus was, will say both to the neoconservatives and to Hardt and Negri that liberation cannot be the fundamental social good. Justice within shalom is that. For liberty in the absence of justice is liberty f