Empire, Pathology and French Fries

From Colossians Remixed:

"If the empire encodes in the imagery of everyday life-on public arches, statures and buildings-the claim that Rome and its emperor are the beneficent provider and guarantor of all fruitfulness, then can a claim that the “gospel” is bearing fruit “in the whole world” be heard as anything less than a challenge to this imperial fruitfulness? Especially if we remember that the word gospel (euangelion) is the very same term that the empire reserves for announcements of military success and pronouncements from the emperor, doesn’t it become clear that there is something deeply subversive in what Paul is saying here/ Whose gospel is the source of a fruitfulness that will last and sustain the world-the gospel of Caesar or the gospel of Jesus?
(p 75)

We have seen that empires maintain their sovereignty not only be establishing a monopoly of markets, political structures and military might but also by monopolizing the imagination of their subjects. Indeed, vanquished peoples are not really subjects of the empire until their imagination has been taken captive. As long as they continue to have memories of life before exile, and as long as they harbor dreams of a social reality alternative to the empire, they are a threat to the empire. Their liberated imagination keeps them free even in the face of violent military repression. And until that imagination is broken, domesticated and reshaped in the image of the empire, the people are still free. (p82)

Walter Brueggemann says that “the key pathology of our time, which seduces us all, is the reduction of the imagination so that we are too numbed, satiated and co-opted to do serious imaginative work.” If this is true, then the primal responsibility of Christian proclamation is to empower the community to reimagine the world as if Christ, and not the powers, were sovereign. If he image of the emperor that is on every coin serves to ensnare the imagination of a domesticated people, then radical Christian proclamation and cultural practice will seek to demythologize the empire and devalue its currency. Such proclamation, such poetry, will always be a subversion of the dominant version of reality. (p84 )
See also Walsh's Would you like fries with that faith?

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