When Jesus clears out the Temple in John 2, he presents a vision for the reformation of God’s house. As questions about guns in churches are raised once again in America, this vision is one to which we must attend.
It is the crucified Christ who sends us out to his sisters and brothers who are being crucified by the powers-that-be every day. Are we willing to do what Jesus requires and die in the process? Or will we deny Jesus in order to save ourselves?
Given the magnitude of the challenges we face the task of resistance remains a communal, provisional, necessarily (ie meaningfully) contradictory, broken labour shared between sites of theory and practice.
I do not know what political theology ideally ought to be. But I do know that, minimally, it should not be cruel.
God brings his judgment in and as the light, providing us with a pattern for human justice.
For Christians resistance must mean re-anarchizing Christianity, that is, imagining the church as a different kind of political body that transgresses national and racial and class borders in creative ways.
Sometimes effective resistance necessitates speech or decisive direct action. Yet sometimes resistance also demands a tactical silence.
One of the most striking features of Jesus’s teaching and practice was its authority, which both liberated and bound his hearers. Does the Church dare to speak with authority today?
Political Theology Must Follow Agamben’s “Double Paradigm” of Sovereignty. The following is the guest editorial for the current issue of the print journal Political Theology (Volume 19, Issue 1, February 2018).
The call of Jesus to Simon, Andrew, James, and John summons them to leave behind a way of life that supported an exploitative imperial economy and to devote their efforts to serving the kingdom of God instead.