I’m reading “In the Shadow of Empire” edited by Richard Horsley. I love the subtext to the title: “Reclaiming the Bible as a History of Faithful Resistance.” Basically, this book points us back to the realization that most of the text of Scripture is written with the subtext that the early believers were functioning under the strong arm of the Roman Empire. In light of the current struggle of the western church as we live within an American empire I thought these comments were compelling:

…the church, as a community that stands apart from and over against empire, must recover its public voice that attests to an alternative rule in the world. Such a recovery is not an easy one, but it is to be undertaken loudly and concretely in the most mundane utterance and practice of the church. That recovery of utterance may be lined out from the prophetic tradition. For the prophets characteristically were not moralizers or explainers, or even advocates for any program. They were poets! Their work was to open the world to alternative practice by inviting their listeners out beyond “the given.” As poets they tell the truth, even in the face of empire, the truth that exploitation will not work, that brutality offends the Holy One, that imperial power is limited and called to account. As poets they tell the hope, even in the face of the empire, the hope that war will cease, that the earth will be protected, that the particularity of neighborliness will prevail against the ambitions of horse and chariot…

This chapter’s title, “Faith in Empire,” is deliberately ambiguous. The preposition”in” can be taken in two ways. It can be read as committed to the empire, acceptance of the empire’s totalizing narrative. Or it can be read as amid, in but not of, with the nurture of an alternative identity. Faith is always amid empire. It is not always committed to empire. -Walter Brueggemann p. 39-40