John Dominic Crossan’s The Birth of Christianity

 

John Dominic Crossan’s The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus (1998) presents a bold and wide-ranging reconstruction of the earliest Christian movement, arguing that the true origins of Christianity lie not in a miraculous resurrection or doctrinal system but in the radical social practices and egalitarian vision of Jesus’ followers. Crossan, a leading figure in historical Jesus research and a co-founder of the Jesus Seminar, uses interdisciplinary tools—including archaeology, sociology, anthropology, and textual analysis—to challenge traditional narratives and offer a non-supernaturalist, historically grounded account of how Christianity arose from the grassroots activities of a marginalized Jewish community in the Roman Empire.

Crossan’s central argument is that Christianity began not with creeds or church structures but with communities of disciples who carried on Jesus’ message of justice, healing, and nonviolence after his execution by Roman authorities. He views Jesus not as a divine being who came to die for humanity’s sins but as a Jewish peasant and social revolutionary who sought to embody and inaugurate the Kingdom of God through a radical program of inclusion, table fellowship, healing, and resistance to systemic injustice. The execution of Jesus did not end the movement but catalyzed its transformation, as his followers continued to live out his vision in communal life. The early Christian movement, according to Crossan, was a kind of socio-political experiment—a countercultural community that challenged the dominant order of empire, hierarchy, and patriarchy.

One of the unique features of The Birth of Christianity is its focus on the “missing years” of Christian history—the period between the death of Jesus (around 30 CE) and the writing of the first canonical gospel (Mark, ca. 70 CE). Crossan argues that these decades are crucial for understanding how the memory of Jesus was preserved and reinterpreted by various groups, especially through oral traditions, non-canonical texts, and communal practices. He emphasizes that the earliest Christians were not united in doctrine but were diverse in their expressions of faith, creating different Jesus movements with varying theological emphases and social structures.

To explore these formative years, Crossan places particular emphasis on sources often marginalized in traditional scholarship, including the hypothetical Q document (a lost sayings gospel that may have been used by Matthew and Luke), the Gospel of Thomas (a non-canonical sayings gospel discovered at Nag Hammadi), and other early Christian texts like the Didache and the Gospel of Peter. He sees these texts as windows into the oral and textual traditions that circulated independently of the canonical gospels. The Q source, in particular, is central to his reconstruction. Crossan argues that Q represents a community focused on the wisdom teachings of Jesus rather than on his death and resurrection, and that this community envisioned the Kingdom of God as a present social reality realized through ethical living and shared meals rather than future apocalyptic deliverance.

Crossan develops the idea that early Christianity was deeply shaped by Jesus’ practice of open commensality—sharing meals with outcasts, the poor, and those considered ritually impure. This table fellowship was not merely symbolic but functioned as a radical political act in a stratified society. It broke down boundaries between classes, genders, and ethnicities, and modeled a vision of divine justice rooted in equality. For Crossan, the Eucharist, as later developed by the institutional church, represents a domesticated version of this more disruptive practice. What began as a revolutionary act of solidarity among equals was gradually ritualized and hierarchized as Christianity aligned more closely with imperial structures.

Another key theme in Crossan’s work is the rejection of redemptive violence and the emphasis on nonviolent resistance. Jesus, in his view, preached and practiced a form of resistance that confronted injustice without mirroring the violence of the oppressor. This ethic continued in the early communities, which emphasized healing, reconciliation, and economic sharing as alternatives to domination and exploitation. Crossan critiques later Christian theology for abandoning this nonviolent ethic in favor of sacrificial atonement doctrines that valorized suffering and obedience. He is especially critical of the view that Jesus died because God required a blood sacrifice, arguing instead that Jesus was executed by the empire as a political threat, and that the early Christians interpreted his death not as divine punishment but as a sign of God’s solidarity with the oppressed.

The role of Paul in Crossan’s account is complex. While acknowledging Paul’s influence on the spread of Christianity, Crossan is cautious about Pauline theology. He views Paul as someone who sought to merge the Jesus tradition with Hellenistic concepts and apocalyptic expectations, which led to the institutionalization of doctrine and the subordination of Jesus’ original social teachings. Paul’s emphasis on justification by faith, spiritual gifts, and the imminent return of Christ introduced new theological trajectories that would later dominate Christian orthodoxy. Yet Crossan also recognizes Paul’s contributions to the inclusion of Gentiles and his vision of a universal community, even if this vision came at the cost of suppressing the diversity of earlier Jesus movements.

A significant part of The Birth of Christianity is devoted to the relationship between the Jesus movement and Judaism. Crossan strongly resists anti-Jewish interpretations of Christian origins and insists that Jesus and his followers were firmly rooted in the Jewish tradition. He situates Jesus within the prophetic stream of Israelite religion, drawing on texts like Isaiah and Amos to show how the early movement continued themes of justice, covenantal ethics, and critique of corrupt religious authority. Crossan emphasizes that the so-called “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity was a much later development and that the early Jesus movement should be understood as a Jewish reform effort rather than a new religion.

Crossan’s use of historical and anthropological models also distinguishes his work. He draws on studies of Mediterranean peasant societies, patron-client systems, and honor-shame cultures to situate the Jesus movement within its socio-economic context. He highlights the widespread poverty, oppression, and political instability in Roman Palestine as the background against which Jesus’ message gained its urgency and appeal. The early Christian communities, in this framework, can be seen as alternative economic and social networks, offering mutual support and dignity to those marginalized by imperial and temple systems.

In terms of methodology, Crossan insists on a distinction between history and faith. He argues that historical Jesus research cannot begin with theological assumptions or supernatural explanations. Instead, it must reconstruct the past using the tools of critical scholarship. At the same time, he does not see history and faith as mutually exclusive; rather, he believes that a historically grounded understanding of Christian origins can enrich and challenge contemporary faith. His goal is not to debunk Christianity but to recover its original radicalism and relevance for today’s world.

Crossan’s historical Jesus is a figure of nonviolent resistance, committed to systemic transformation through radical love and social inclusion. The early Christian communities, following his example, developed patterns of communal life that anticipated the values of the Kingdom: economic justice, gender equality, and solidarity with the marginalized. Over time, however, Crossan argues, these radical beginnings were co-opted by hierarchical structures, doctrinal disputes, and accommodation to empire. The birth of Christianity, then, is not a story of divine intervention or theological inevitability but of human agency, social experimentation, and contested memory.

 

Friedrich Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith

 

Friedrich Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith (originally Der christliche Glaube, 1821/1830) stands as a foundational work in modern Protestant theology, bridging Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic expressivism with a renewed vision of Christian doctrine grounded not in metaphysics or ecclesiastical authority but in the lived experience of faith. Schleiermacher's central concern is to articulate a theology that is credible in a modern intellectual climate, especially in the face of challenges posed by historical criticism, scientific rationalism, and secular moral philosophy. Rather than defending Christianity through dogmatic assertions or apologetic arguments, Schleiermacher seeks to reinterpret its core tenets as expressions of the religious self-consciousness—an inward awareness of absolute dependence on God.

At the heart of Schleiermacher’s system is the notion that religion is not primarily about doctrinal propositions or ethical systems but about the feeling of absolute dependence (Gefühl der schlechthinnigen Abhängigkeit). This feeling is not a vague emotionalism but a deep, pre-reflective intuition that human existence is fundamentally contingent and that the ultimate ground of our being lies beyond ourselves. For Schleiermacher, this feeling constitutes the essence of religious consciousness and serves as the basis for all genuine theology. God, in this view, is not a speculative postulate or external object but the living reality in which we participate and from which we derive our existence.

From this starting point, Schleiermacher constructs his dogmatics not as a collection of metaphysical claims but as a systematic reflection on the experience of Christian faith as it manifests in the community of believers. Dogmatic theology, therefore, is the articulation of how the Christian religious self-consciousness interprets reality, history, and salvation. This shift allows Schleiermacher to redefine doctrine not as revealed truths imposed from outside, but as expressions of the community’s experience of redemption through Christ. Doctrine is thus dynamic and historically conditioned, evolving alongside the growth of human understanding and religious consciousness.

One of the most important implications of Schleiermacher’s approach is his Christology. He insists that Jesus Christ is not merely a divine being clothed in human form, as classical Christology often emphasized, but the unique individual in whom the God-consciousness achieved perfect expression. Christ is the Redeemer because he is the one in whom the feeling of absolute dependence is fully realized without interruption. It is this perfect God-consciousness that makes him both the model and the source of the redeemed life. Through the presence and influence of Christ, the God-consciousness is communicated to others, and the Christian community becomes the sphere where redemption unfolds historically.

The concept of sin in Schleiermacher’s theology is likewise reinterpreted in experiential terms. Sin is understood as the disturbance of the God-consciousness—a disruption of the proper orientation of the self toward God. It is not simply disobedience to divine law, but a condition in which the self asserts independence from the source of its being. Redemption, then, is not legal acquittal but the restoration of the God-consciousness through Christ. This restoration is mediated through the life of the Church, which serves as the living continuation of Christ’s redemptive activity and the context in which the individual comes to share in Christ’s relationship with God.

Schleiermacher’s understanding of the Trinity, often criticized or misunderstood, reflects his emphasis on religious experience and community. Rather than offering a metaphysical doctrine of divine persons, Schleiermacher presents the Trinity as a symbol of the relational structure of Christian experience. God the Father is the eternal source of existence; the Son is the historical manifestation of perfect God-consciousness; and the Spirit represents the ongoing life of the Christian community in which the God-consciousness is realized. The Trinity, then, is not an abstract metaphysical claim but a theological description of the way in which God is experienced in Christian life.

The doctrine of revelation in The Christian Faith further demonstrates Schleiermacher’s experiential emphasis. Revelation is not the transmission of supernatural information but the self-disclosure of God within human consciousness, particularly as it occurred uniquely in Christ. This understanding enables Schleiermacher to navigate the challenges posed by Enlightenment critiques of miracle and prophecy, since revelation does not depend on extraordinary events but on the transformation of consciousness through divine presence. Scripture is important, not as an infallible record of revealed propositions, but as the normative witness to the original Christian experience of God in Christ.

In ecclesiology, Schleiermacher sees the Church not as an institution ordained by God to mediate grace, but as the communal embodiment of the redeemed consciousness. The Church is the fellowship of those who share in the God-consciousness awakened by Christ, and it serves as the vehicle through which this consciousness is nurtured and transmitted. The sacraments, accordingly, are not means of grace in a mechanical sense but symbolic acts that express and reinforce the shared consciousness of the divine. Baptism marks entry into the Christian community; the Eucharist renews and deepens the unity of believers with Christ and one another.

Faith, for Schleiermacher, is not belief in specific doctrines but the inner conviction and trust that arise from the God-consciousness. It is a spiritual orientation rather than an intellectual assent. Theological statements, then, are second-order expressions of this faith; they interpret and give language to what is first experienced in the depths of human existence. This distinction allows Schleiermacher to maintain the importance of doctrine while resisting dogmatism. Theology is always a reflective, communal activity aimed at clarifying the content of Christian experience in each historical epoch.

Schleiermacher’s theological method is guided by the principle of correlation. He attempts to correlate the content of faith with the conditions of modern consciousness, ensuring that theology remains both faithful to its sources and intelligible to contemporary minds. This hermeneutic sensitivity makes his theology dialogical: it engages philosophy, culture, and science without capitulating to them. For Schleiermacher, theology must speak meaningfully to its age while remaining grounded in the distinctive experience of Christian redemption.

One of Schleiermacher’s most enduring contributions is his refusal to separate religious truth from subjectivity. Against the objectivism of some scholastic traditions and the moralism of Enlightenment rational religion, he insists that faith is neither speculative nor ethical alone, but existential. This move anticipates existentialist theology and has influenced a wide range of thinkers, including Paul Tillich, Karl Barth (albeit in opposition), Rudolf Otto, and the liberal Protestant tradition broadly. His emphasis on inwardness, community, and historical consciousness helped shape the trajectory of twentieth-century theology.

However, Schleiermacher’s approach has also drawn significant criticism. Some argue that he reduces Christianity to a form of human consciousness, subordinating divine revelation to psychological experience. Others claim that his Christology is too anthropological, his doctrine of God too immanent, and his emphasis on feeling insufficiently robust for a confessional theology. Yet these critiques often overlook his insistence that religious feeling is not merely subjective emotion but a metaphysical orientation grounded in the divine. For Schleiermacher, theology begins and ends in a relation to the Infinite—it is shaped by the encounter with God as the absolute ground of being.

 

Saint Augustine’s Confessions

 

Saint Augustine’s Confessions reads as both a prayer and a rigorous self-examination; it is a sustained, intimate address to God that also functions as a philosophical and theological probe into memory, time, desire, and the nature of sin and grace. Written in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, the work unfolds as an extended act of acknowledgement—Augustine confessing his past misdeeds, spiritual wanderings, intellectual errors, and the slow, tumultuous process of conversion—yet it refuses simple autobiography. Instead the narrative continually moves from particular events to universal questions: What is the self? How does one come to know God? What is the role of divine grace in human freedom? The text’s power comes from Augustine’s ability to make his inner life the site of larger metaphysical inquiry: the confessional voice is also a philosopher’s voice.

Augustine frames his life as a pilgrimage toward God. He recounts a sequence of stages—childhood, youthful excesses, career ambitions, immersion in Manichaeism, immersion in secular learning and rhetorical success, his moral perplexities, and finally his encounter with Christian truth through figures such as his mother Monica and the bishop Ambrose. Yet the narrative is not merely chronological reportage. The accounts of stealing pears as a boy, his sexual entanglements, his intellectual pride, and his anguish at sin serve as exempla that let Augustine scrutinize motive and will. He is especially concerned to show that his transgressions are not mere lapses but reveal deeper disorders of the will: actions taken for the pleasure of the will itself, the love of acting against God, or the love of created goods in place of the Creator. Sin, for Augustine, is fundamentally disordered love.

Interwoven with these moral reflections is a sustained engagement with philosophical tradition. Augustine’s early allegiance to Manichaeism—an elaborate dualistic cosmology that promised rational answers to the problem of evil—falters under his scrutiny, particularly for its inability to account for the nature of truth and the inner life. His turn away from the Manichaeans toward Neoplatonic thought supplies the intellectual scaffolding for a Christianized metaphysics: evil is reinterpreted not as an independent substance but as privation, a lack of being, and thus morally intelligible without positing a rival principle to God. Augustine’s reading of Plato and Plotinus enriches his account of God as immutable and incorporeal and informs his notion of the ascent of the soul toward intelligible realities.

Memory plays an especially large role in Augustine’s method. He treats memory not only as a storage of past events but as an inner space where images, sensations, and knowledge mingle; the self is essentially “memoir” in the sense that identity is shaped by recollection. Memory becomes a theological locus because it contains both sinful pasts and the traces of God’s imprint. Augustine famously explores how God can be found within the innermost self: the soul turns inward to discover God present in memory and in the operations of the mind. This inward turn is also epistemological: Augustine argues that certain kinds of knowledge—self-knowledge, moral recognition, the intuition of God—are accessed from within rather than through external sensory routes alone.

Closely related is Augustine’s probing of time. In a celebrated philosophical passage, he dissects the paradox of time: we speak of past, present, and future, yet only the present seems to exist. He resolves the puzzle by locating time in human consciousness: the past exists as memory, the future as expectation, and the present as attention or perception. Time, then, is not a cosmic container but a modality of the soul’s experience. This insight serves Augustine’s theology because it enables a conception of God as standing beyond time—eternal—without being temporal. God’s relation to creation is thus squarely metaphysical and salvific: God’s eternity does not erode God’s active involvement with historical life, which includes conversion and redemption.

Central to the book’s drama is the theme of conversion, which is portrayed as an agonizing inner struggle rather than a single triumphant moment. Augustine’s conversion is drawn out over years: he describes how intellectual conviction, moral disgust, the interventions of others (especially Monica and Ambrose), and an interior crisis culminate in his surrender to grace. The famous garden scene—Augustine tormented by desire and will, hearing a childlike voice saying “take up and read”—symbolizes the collapse of false self-reliance and the yielding to God’s initiative. Augustine emphasizes that conversion is not merely a change of opinion but a reorientation of love; it is a restoration of the order of loves whereby God occupies the rightful primacy. Grace is thus indispensable: human will, while genuine and responsible, is insufficient to secure ultimate transformation without God’s gratuitous aid.

Augustine’s reflections on prayer and Scripture are similarly formative. The Confessions is itself structured as a long prayer, and Augustine frequently reads the Scriptures not only as doctrinal statements but as instruments that shape desire and intellect. He praises the transformative power of the Psalms, for instance, as a means by which the soul learns to express its longing and to be remade. Augustine’s exegetical sensibility—literal and allegorical readings fused—anticipates his later theological work: Scripture provides both the narrative of salvation and the vocabulary for interior renewal.

The problem of evil and suffering recurs throughout, but Augustine reframes it within God’s providential economy. Rather than vindicating suffering, he consistently seeks a theodicy that preserves God’s goodness and omnipotence without trivializing human pain. Evil is explained as a consequence of freedom and the misordering of love; suffering can be remedial or mysterious, but it never overturns the fundamental goodness of creation. This position allows Augustine to maintain a robust optimism about human destiny: despite the pervasiveness of sin, God’s grace can effect healing and conversion.

Augustine’s literary art must be noted. The Confessions blends rhetorical flair with philosophical precision; Augustine’s use of metaphor, dialogical apostrophe, and reflective irony make the text compellingly immediate. He dramatizes his own weaknesses while often anticipating objections and engaging interlocutors in the mind of the reader. His style is at once self-revealing and self-analytical, creating an effect of authenticity: we feel the conflict, the hesitation, the final peace because Augustine does not merely tell us what happened—he makes us live through it.

 

Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming

 

Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming is a groundbreaking work of constructive theology that reimagines the doctrine of creation through the lens of biblical exegesis, process theology, feminist thought, poststructuralist philosophy, and ecological awareness. The book takes as its central text the opening verses of Genesis—particularly the enigmatic image of the tehom, the deep, watery chaos that precedes God’s creative act. Rather than interpreting the creation story as a linear narrative of divine imposition of order over a hostile chaos, Keller engages the text in its poetic and multivalent complexity, revealing the deep as a site of divine creativity, relationality, and ongoing becoming. She seeks to unsettle the theological tradition that has often portrayed creation in terms of ex nihilo, or creation out of nothing, preferring instead a vision that affirms creation as emerging from a fecund depth that is neither nothingness nor evil, but a generative source.

Keller begins by situating her project within the broader history of Christian theology and its treatment of Genesis 1:2. She notes that the traditional interpretation—solidified in early church theology and classical metaphysics—frames tehom as an inert or threatening formlessness that must be subdued by divine fiat. This reading, she argues, aligns with patriarchal and imperial logics that prize control, domination, and hierarchical order over relational dynamism. By recovering the Hebrew text and exploring its resonances with ancient Near Eastern myths of primordial waters, Keller reopens the possibility of reading the deep not as an adversary but as a partner in creation. She emphasizes that tehom is not personified in Genesis, unlike the combat myths of Babylonian or Canaanite traditions, suggesting a more intimate, cooperative relationship between God and the deep.

Central to Keller’s argument is the reconfiguration of creation as creatio ex profundis—creation out of the deep—rather than creatio ex nihilo. This shift allows her to envision God’s creative act not as a one-time event that eradicates chaos, but as an ongoing process of ordering and reordering in relationship with the depths of potentiality. This interpretation is deeply informed by process theology, particularly the thought of Alfred North Whitehead, for whom reality is constituted by events of becoming, each shaped by the interplay of novelty and order. Keller adapts this metaphysical vision to the biblical context, portraying God not as an omnipotent sovereign imposing fixed order but as the lure toward relational complexity, beauty, and justice.

Keller’s reading is also shaped by feminist theology, which challenges the association of formlessness and fluidity with disorder, weakness, or femininity. She points out how Western metaphysics has often constructed a binary opposition between the stable, rational, masculine principle and the chaotic, bodily, feminine other. In revaluing the deep, Keller resists this dichotomy, affirming fluidity and openness as integral to the creative process. Her theological poetics embraces ambiguity, multiplicity, and interdependence, refusing the impulse to foreclose meaning in favor of rigid systematic closure. This makes her work not only a reimagining of creation theology but also a critique of the epistemological and political structures that have supported exclusionary forms of order.

Interweaving biblical scholarship with literary and philosophical resources, Keller draws from figures like Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Luce Irigaray to deepen her engagement with the themes of difference, relationality, and becoming. Derrida’s deconstruction informs her resistance to totalizing accounts of creation that erase the traces of the deep; Deleuze’s philosophy of difference and becoming resonates with her portrayal of creation as an open-ended process; Irigaray’s work on sexual difference and the fluid metaphors of feminine subjectivity help Keller reclaim water as a theological symbol beyond domination. These interlocutors allow her to craft a theology that is dialogical and porous, attentive to the limits of human language and the mystery that exceeds conceptual grasp.

The image of the deep also becomes, for Keller, a way to address ecological concerns. She reads tehom as a reminder of the Earth’s watery origins and the interconnectedness of all life. This ecological dimension critiques anthropocentric theologies that view creation solely in terms of human dominion and control. Instead, Keller’s theology invites a posture of humility and reciprocity toward the nonhuman world, recognizing that creation’s flourishing depends on honoring its relational depth. The deep is thus both a cosmic and ecological symbol, encompassing the generative matrix of life and the mystery of its ongoing transformation.

Keller’s approach to Genesis resists the temptation to read the text as a simple blueprint of the universe’s origins. Instead, she treats it as a theological-poetic narrative that speaks to the patterns of God’s relation to the world across time. This hermeneutic opens space for thinking about creation not as a completed past event but as a present and future reality. The Spirit hovering over the deep becomes a figure for God’s continual engagement with the possibilities latent in the world’s depths. This image encourages an eschatology that is not escapist or triumphalist but grounded in the ongoing transformation of the world toward greater justice and beauty.

A significant theological move in Face of the Deep is Keller’s rethinking of divine omnipotence. She challenges the model of God as a unilateral cause who determines all outcomes, instead emphasizing God’s persuasive power. This relational power works through attraction, invitation, and response rather than coercion. Such a vision reframes the problem of evil: if creation is an open process involving real freedom and novelty, then chaos and suffering are not simply defects to be eliminated but conditions of possibility for genuine becoming. God’s role is to draw creation toward its fullest potential, not to override the autonomy of creatures or the generative unpredictability of the deep.

Keller also engages the mystical tradition, particularly the apophatic strand that speaks of God as the ungraspable mystery beyond all names. In this light, the deep becomes a metaphor for the divine unknowability that underlies and sustains all reality. This mystical dimension resonates with her poststructuralist influences, where meaning is never exhausted and reality always exceeds the conceptual frameworks we impose. The interplay of light and darkness in the creation narrative becomes, for Keller, a symbol of the tension between the revealed and the hidden in God’s relation to the world.

Throughout the work, Keller’s style is marked by a poetic and allusive quality that mirrors her subject matter. She refuses to resolve tensions prematurely, instead inviting readers into a contemplative engagement with the text and its theological implications. Her theology is performative as much as propositional, modeling a way of thinking that is itself fluid, relational, and responsive to the deep. This style embodies her conviction that theology must be attentive to the multiplicity and complexity of reality, resisting the impulse to reduce it to a singular, closed system.

Augustine’s The City of God

 

Augustine’s The City of God is one of the most influential works in Christian theology, philosophy, and political thought, written between 413 and 426 CE in response to the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410. The event had deeply shaken the Roman world, leading many to blame Christianity for the empire’s decline, claiming that abandonment of the traditional pagan gods had weakened the state. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, composed this massive twenty-two-book treatise to refute these accusations, defend the Christian faith, and articulate a profound vision of history, politics, and the destiny of humankind. His work is both apologetic and philosophical, addressing immediate controversies and advancing a comprehensive theological worldview.

The first part of the work (Books I–X) responds to pagan critics and dismantles the theological and moral claims of Roman religion. Augustine begins by contrasting the transience of earthly glory with the eternal security offered by God. He rebukes those who claim that the pagan gods protected Rome, pointing out that disasters, wars, and moral corruption existed long before Christianity emerged. He exposes the moral failings of Roman mythology, noting that the gods themselves, as depicted in literature and cult, were often immoral and unworthy of worship. For Augustine, the worship of false gods not only fails to bring temporal prosperity but also corrupts the soul. He draws on philosophical traditions, especially Platonism, to argue that the true God is the immutable source of being, and only the worship of this God leads to human flourishing. In Book X, Augustine affirms that the Christian God alone provides the way to ultimate happiness through Christ, who is the mediator between God and humanity.

The second part (Books XI–XXII) develops Augustine’s theology of history through the central metaphor of two cities: the City of God and the City of Man. The City of God is composed of those who live according to God’s will, guided by love of God and oriented toward eternal life. The City of Man, in contrast, is composed of those who live according to self-love, pride, and earthly ambition, seeking power, wealth, and temporal glory. These two cities are not geographical or political entities but rather symbolic communities defined by the orientation of their loves. The City of God is eternal, invisible, and destined for everlasting peace, while the City of Man is temporal, flawed, and destined for eventual destruction. Augustine traces the origins of these two cities back to the fall of the angels and the disobedience of Adam, showing how human history is marked by the interplay and conflict between these two orientations.

Augustine presents history as a linear progression with a divine purpose, in contrast to the cyclical view held by many ancient thinkers. For him, history is the unfolding of God’s providential plan, leading toward the final judgment. He interprets events in the Hebrew Scriptures, the life of Christ, and the growth of the Church as milestones in this redemptive history. The rise and fall of earthly empires, including Rome, are not ultimate tragedies or triumphs but parts of God’s mysterious governance. Rome’s power, like that of Babylon or other ancient empires, was permitted by God for specific purposes, but no earthly city can claim permanence or divine favor. This vision relativizes political power and glory, placing them within a larger eschatological framework.

A central theme is Augustine’s analysis of peace. He distinguishes between the imperfect, fragile peace of earthly societies—based on compromise, coercion, and mutual interest—and the perfect peace of the City of God, which is the ordered harmony of beings in obedience to God. Earthly peace is valuable and should be pursued, but it remains provisional and cannot be the ultimate good. This distinction shapes Augustine’s political philosophy: Christians can and should participate in earthly political life, seeking justice and order, but their ultimate loyalty is to the City of God. This dual citizenship means that while Christians respect and obey legitimate authorities, they do not place their hope in political systems or military power.

In discussing the virtues, Augustine critiques the Roman ideal of civic virtue, showing how even the so-called virtues of the Romans were often rooted in pride and the desire for domination. Courage, justice, temperance, and prudence, when severed from the love of God, are incomplete and distorted. True virtue is rightly ordered love—ordo amoris—where God is loved above all and all other things are loved in proper relation to Him. This redefinition of virtue challenges both pagan moral philosophy and worldly political ideals, redirecting moral evaluation toward the eternal end of the human person.

The eschatological vision in the final books culminates in Augustine’s depiction of the ultimate destinies of the two cities. The City of God will enjoy eternal communion with God, perfect peace, and joy beyond measure. The City of Man will face eternal separation from God, which is the essence of damnation. Augustine rejects the notion of cyclical rebirth or reincarnation, affirming a single life followed by judgment. He also refutes millenarian interpretations that expected a literal thousand-year reign of Christ on earth before the end; for Augustine, the reign of Christ is already a present reality in the life of the Church. The resurrection of the body, the renewal of creation, and the vision of God form the climax of his hope for the redeemed.

Augustine’s work is also an exercise in biblical interpretation, weaving together passages from the Old and New Testaments to construct a coherent narrative of God’s purposes in history. He reads Scripture typologically, seeing events and figures in the Old Testament as foreshadowing Christ and the Church. His theological anthropology, rooted in the doctrine of original sin, undergirds his explanation of human society’s flaws and the necessity of divine grace. Without grace, the will is enslaved to sin; with grace, the will is freed to love God and neighbor rightly.

The City of God also engages deeply with Greco-Roman philosophy, particularly Platonism, Stoicism, and skepticism, integrating what is true in them while rejecting what conflicts with Christian revelation. Augustine adopts the Platonic emphasis on the immaterial and eternal as superior to the material and temporal, yet insists on the goodness of creation and the reality of the incarnation. His dialogue with classical philosophy shows his conviction that reason and revelation are not opposed but that reason finds its fulfillment in faith.

 

Joerg Rieger, "Christ and Empire"

 

Joerg Rieger’s Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times is a theological and historical exploration of how Christian understandings of Christ have been shaped by imperial power across different periods, and how those understandings have simultaneously carried seeds of resistance against empire. Rieger’s central thesis is twofold: first, that images of Christ have often been co-opted by the logic of empire, whether Roman, feudal, colonial, or modern; and second, that the figure of Christ always contains a “surplus” of meaning that escapes imperial control and continues to inspire movements of liberation and solidarity with the oppressed. Throughout the book, Rieger reads key moments in Christian history through what he calls a lens of “ambivalence,” showing that theological formulations often both support and subvert empire at the same time. His project is both historical and constructive, aiming to uncover ways Christology can be reframed to resist the powers of domination that pervade past and present.

The narrative begins with the earliest Christian communities shaped by Paul’s proclamation of Jesus as Lord. In the Roman imperial context, calling Christ “Kyrios” was inherently political, implicitly challenging Caesar’s claim to lordship. Yet the very language of lordship also reflects imperial hierarchies, showing the ambivalence of early Christian confession. While imperial ideology threatened to absorb or neutralize the radical message of Jesus, the Pauline communities retained a surplus of resistance in their solidarity with the poor and marginalized. This surplus is seen in the egalitarian impulses of the early church, which envisioned a community not based on the stratifications of Rome but on the transformative power of the crucified and risen Christ. Here, Rieger establishes his framework: empire seeks to shape Christology in its image, but Christology always carries elements that can undermine empire from within.

As the church moved into the era of Constantine and the ecumenical councils, Christological formulations became intertwined with imperial ambitions. The Nicene and Chalcedonian definitions, which articulated Christ as fully divine and fully human, were developed in contexts where theological unity often paralleled the political desire for imperial unity. Constantine’s sponsorship of church councils illustrates how empire sought to harness Christian doctrine to stabilize its authority. Nevertheless, Rieger identifies a surplus in the mystery of the incarnation itself. The union of divine and human in Christ, despite being framed in imperial language, cannot be fully contained by empire because it implies God’s profound identification with human vulnerability. This theological surplus creates space for resistance, as the incarnation affirms the dignity of those the empire devalues and points toward a divine solidarity that undermines oppressive hierarchies.

Rieger next turns to the medieval period and the theology of Anselm of Canterbury. In Cur Deus Homo, Anselm develops his satisfaction theory of atonement, emphasizing that humanity’s sin offends the honor of God, which must be satisfied. Rieger situates this theology in the context of the feudal system, where relationships were structured by honor, obligation, and hierarchical restoration. Satisfaction theology mirrored this feudal logic, presenting God as a kind of feudal lord whose honor had to be repaid, which lent itself to imperial and hierarchical interpretations of salvation. Yet even here, Rieger uncovers a surplus of meaning that resists empire. Anselm’s focus on the relational aspect of atonement—God choosing to restore humanity through the self-offering of Christ—points toward a divine initiative grounded in love and mutuality rather than coercive power. This relational surplus contains seeds of resistance to the very hierarchical order his theology reflects.

In the early modern period, Rieger examines the work of Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Spanish missionary and advocate for the rights of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. Las Casas provides a vivid example of theological ambivalence in the context of colonial empire. On one hand, he courageously opposed the brutality of Spanish conquest and insisted on the full humanity of Indigenous peoples. His Christology emphasized a humble, suffering Christ who sided with the oppressed, offering a vision of spiritual authority that critiqued the violent practices of empire. On the other hand, Las Casas remained committed to the broader project of evangelization and imagined an alternative empire of faith, still rooted in European authority. His theology carried the imperial assumption that Indigenous peoples needed to be converted to European Christianity. Even so, his witness represents a significant surplus of resistance, as his advocacy and his Christology of humility challenged the prevailing colonial logic of domination.

Rieger then explores the nineteenth-century liberal theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, which he interprets as participating in a subtler form of imperial imagination. Schleiermacher’s emphasis on the feeling of absolute dependence and the ideal of becoming Christlike reflected the self-confidence of European culture and the logic of colonial progress. His vision of spiritual maturation paralleled Europe’s sense of itself as culturally and morally advanced, suggesting that other peoples might be “elevated” through European influence. This reflects a colonial fantasy in which Christ becomes a model for the expansion of Western modernity. Yet within Schleiermacher’s theology there is also a surplus of resistance: his focus on individual conscience and subjective faith offers a potential resource for challenging authoritarianism and resisting rigid dogmatic control. This dimension of his Christology could inspire movements that prioritize inner transformation over imperial domination.

The discussion moves into the twentieth century with Gustav Aulén and his Christus Victor model of atonement, which reimagines Christ as victorious over the cosmic powers of sin, death, and evil. Rieger situates this theology in a world shaped by global conflicts and shifting power structures. Christus Victor has an ambivalent relationship with empire. Its language of victory can be co-opted by triumphalist, nationalistic, or militaristic impulses that echo imperial power. At the same time, the model contains a surplus that powerfully resists empire. By depicting Christ as liberator from oppressive forces, Aulén’s theology provides a foundation for social critique and for solidarity with those oppressed by systemic powers, whether political, economic, or spiritual. This surplus allows Christus Victor to become a theological resource for liberation movements rather than imperial ideology.

In his final analysis, Rieger turns to contemporary images of the cosmic Christ in a global and postcolonial context. The idea of a Christ who embraces the entire cosmos resonates in an age of globalization, ecological awareness, and neoliberal economic power. This Christology, like its predecessors, carries ambivalence. It can be appropriated by dominant systems as a vague, spiritualized vision that comforts the privileged without challenging systemic injustice. Yet the surplus in the cosmic Christ is profound: it affirms the interconnectedness of all creation, calls for solidarity with the marginalized, and provides theological grounding for resistance against global forms of empire, including economic exploitation and ecological destruction. The cosmic Christ opens possibilities for a holistic liberation that transcends national and cultural boundaries.

Rieger’s overarching argument is that Christology is never neutral. Across history, Christian understandings of Christ have reflected the influence of imperial structures, whether Roman, feudal, colonial, or global. Yet in every period, the figure of Christ contains dimensions that cannot be fully captured by empire. These dimensions—the surplus—invite resistance, solidarity, and transformation. By tracing this pattern from Paul to the postcolonial age, Rieger calls contemporary theology to self-examination. He urges Christians to ask how their own images of Christ may serve empire today, and how they can be reframed to stand with the oppressed and challenge systemic injustice. Christ and Empire is thus not only a historical study but also a constructive theological proposal, reminding readers that the Christ who was crucified by empire continues to inspire movements that resist domination and seek liberation in every age.