Empire Goes All the Way Down: Joerg Rieger on What "Christian Nationalism" Misses

This is the first live Q&A for the new class, and Joerg Rieger came ready. Christ and Empire came out during my last year of div school, and that's why I was so excited to try to study with him, until Joerg promptly went on sabbatical. So this whole class is, in a sense, twenty years of making that up. The argument is not that empire won. It's that across two thousand years, empire could never take over. There was always resistance, always alternatives, always a surplus that couldn't be contained. This hour ran through what "empire" lets us see that "Christian nationalism" alone misses, why the German translation of one word cracked open the whole project, why Paul is neither conservative nor liberal, what happens to the middle when the right keeps moving right, and what a confessing moment would actually look like here and now. Next week we go to Nicaea. Those of you who are creedally allergic have been warned — and Joerg says there's a surplus in Constantine's creed next week too.

The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep is running now. Sign up at homebrewedclasses.com — you don't have to donate anything. You'll get access to all the lectures, you can send in questions by replying to any class email (that's where every question in this Q&A came from), and you'll be connected to the online community working through the material together. 

You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube

Dr. Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology and the Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt University and founding director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice. For three decades, he has worked to bring together theology and the struggles for justice and liberation that mark our age. His work addresses relations of theology and public life, reflecting on the misuse of power in religion, politics, and economics. His interest is in movements that bring about change and in the positive contributions of religion and theology. His constructive work in theology draws on a wide range of historical and contemporary traditions, with a concern for manifestations of the divine in the pressures of everyday life. Several of his 24 authored and edited books address the topics of this course, including No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics, and the Future; Unified We Are a Force: How Faith and Labor Can Overcome America’s Inequalities (with Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger); and Faith, Class, and Labor: Intersectional Approaches in a Global Context (with Jin Young Choi). www.joergrieger.com

Previous Episodes w/ Joerg

Why Religion Matters Now

Theology in the Capitalocene

Divine Justice & our Ultimate Concern

 the End of Religion & Business as Usual

Joerg Rieger: Jesus vs Caesar 

Different Gods, Different Religions?

Wild Goose Theology Happy Hour with Joerg Rieger and Emilie Townes