Joerg Rieger

There have been many books about America as an Empire and how the Church can be the Church within it. This new book is an interdisciplinary approach to Christianity as it relates to Empire. Beginning with Jesus and Paul, Joerg Rieger demonstrates the ways in which Christian faith is embedded in culture and how words like "Lord" and "Prophet, Priest, King" are pregnant with meaning that must be reframed and understood as a critique of their Empirical context. Rieger uses theology, social show more theory, liberation theology and history from below to lay out new ways of understanding Christ and Empire. The first chapter on Jesus and Paul and the fifth on Schliermacher's time period alone make the book worthy of your attention. I'm less impressed that he chose Matthew Fox's work as the subject of the last chapter. Because of its interdisciplinary approach and hundreds of endnotes the book is not easy to read, but the subject matter is prescient and it is exciting to see the Church finally paying close attention to this subject. show less

Needed, yes-- but the book amounts to an a new packaging of the same assertions that have been circulating for a while now re: "updating" theology/Christianity.