I have friends who preach Paul in a way that makes me want nothing to do with him.
I’m not proud of that. But I grew up Baptist in North Carolina, with church-planting parents and the kind of congregation that eventually got shown the door when the takeover came, and the Paul I was handed was a chaplain to the arrangement. Quiet women. Obedient slaves. Salvation as an exit visa. A man with strong opinions about your body and no opinions whatsoever about Caesar.
So for a long stretch I did the respectable progressive thing and let Paul be somebody else’s problem.
Joerg Rieger’s lecture is the CliffsNotes of what ended that for me in about eleven minutes.
His move is to stop asking whether Paul was a conservative or a liberal and start asking what Paul was writing against. Not the abstract flesh. Not the abstract law. Rome. Joerg defines empire as any conglomerate of power that seeks to control all of life, not just politics and economics, but culture, religion, psychology, all the way down into your most intimate relationships. Empire hard, when the control is obvious and cruel. Empire soft, when it’s just the water.
Christianity was born inside one. It has never once been free of one.
Which is the question the whole seminar hangs on.
If empire has been reaching for Jesus for two thousand years, how has it never managed to keep him?
Joerg’s answer has a name. He calls it the Christological surplus — whatever it is in Christ that empire cannot control, cannot domesticate, cannot get all the way into the box. (I’ve been calling it the semiotic surplus of the Jesus story for years, but this is much catchier)
And the best three minutes of the lecture are about German.
When Christ and Empire was translated, the translators had to choose a word for surplus, and German offers two. Überschuss: abundance, the good stuff that shows up while you sleep, manna, the surplus that falls from the sky. Mehrwert: surplus value, the thing produced by working people and then siphoned off by the bosses.
He wants the second one. Every time.
Sit with that, because the entire seminar is hiding in one word choice. The surplus empire can’t hold is not a spiritual bonus dropped from above onto a passive church. It gets made! From underneath, by people with nothing, at cost. Whitehead said the church handed God the attributes that belonged exclusively to Caesar, and that whatever survived that handoff flickered through the centuries uncertainly. He was right about the flickering. He was wrong if he meant fragile. It flickers because somebody keeps relighting it, and it’s almost always somebody the empire had already written off.
Then Joerg gets to Paul.
His Paul is one of the earliest anti-imperial theologians we have, working in the belly of the beast, in and out of prison, executed at the end, not because Rome misunderstood him but because Rome understood him fine. And nearly every word we have spiritualized belonged to Caesar first. Lord. Savior. Salvation. Justice. Faith — pistis — which meant something a lot closer to pledge of allegiance than to believing six impossible things before breakfast. Even the cross, the empire’s method for executing people it considered genuinely dangerous, which Paul flips into a badge of honor.
If Paul wanted to duck the fight, he had a hundred safer titles on the shelf. Prince of Peace. Lamb of God. Lover of Souls. He took the emperor’s vocabulary on purpose.
And when he gets to the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12, he is not running a unity retreat. The conservative reading gives you organic hierarchy — the head sits above the feet, but be nice to the feet. The liberal reading gives you organic harmony. You know, we all need each other, so let’s take the boss to lunch. Paul says the members that seem weaker are indispensable, which is not a gentler seating chart. It is the same body upside down. Joerg calls them what all of us called them in 2020 and quit calling them by 2021: essential workers.
Here is where I have to put myself in the piece.
My tradition has spent enormous energy explaining why the surplus is spiritual, why the kingdom is interior, why “render unto Caesar” means religion should stay in its lane. That was never persecution. That was a deal. We built crosses instead of bearing them, and we called it prudence.
Two thousand years of that, and the surplus still hasn’t been contained.
That’s not optimism. That’s the historical record, and Joerg is about to walk us through the whole thing, not as trivia. He says it himself in the lecture: this is not the History Channel. We go back because the present is unintelligible without it, and because the good news does not land on anyone who hasn’t had the guts to sit with the bad news first.
Next session we take the Nicene Creed. Seventeen hundred years old, convened and organized by an emperor, and read it against the grain. Which, for a Baptist raised on no creed but Christ, is going to be a genuinely good time. Baptist ethicist James Dunn used to say that when the church and the state get in bed together, they both go home with something. Joerg’s wager is that there’s a surplus hiding in that bed anyway.
Session one is right here. Watch it. Argue with it. Send it to the person in your small group who keeps insisting none of this is political.
Then come get the rest of it with us at homebrewedclasses.com — every session, plus the live gatherings where you bring Joerg your own questions.
Bring the ones you were told not to ask.
Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it’s some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn’t — it’s a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn’t Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You’ll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together.
It’s free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com.
Theology Beer Camp is less than 2 months away and if you’re not coming to Kansas City, I get it. Flights are expensive, the world is ending, your dog has opinions about being boarded.
And get this – the online experience has been upgraded!
We built a whole live podcast stage this year, which means you now get TWO live feeds to bounce between all weekend. Hop between the Main Stage with all our keynoters and the live God-pod stage, which surprisingly offers nonstop podcast excitement. Watch one, watch the other, get FOMO about both simultaneously. It’s a very spiritual experience.
Oh, and it’s all recorded and available for replay, along with the recordings from the three stages.
30 scholars. 30 God-pods. October 8-10. (One month before the election, which we did not plan and are choosing to interpret as prophecy.)
What you’ll need to supply yourself: the beer, the snacks, and a plausible reason for why you’re crying (or shouting) at a podcast recording on a Saturday morning. Everything else is handled.
Sorry we cannot livestream you a hug from a stranger in a Battlestar Galactica shirt, but we’ll see you on the frequency,
Tripp
P.S. The in-person ticket may get you Kansas City, but the online ticket gets you the same great content and your sweatpants. We’ll let you do the math.
Available for iOS and Android
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