The Politics Of The Crucified

Jesus died, not peacefully in bed, but on the cross, the instrument of execution used by the Romans to keep potential disturbers of the established political order in their place. Until the pioneering work of Jürgen Moltmann, the cross has been the “elephant in the room” in Christian political theology. This book explores the difference Jesus’s crucifixion makes (or should make) to Christian political theology, by examining the crucifixion in the theologies of the Mennonite John Howard Yoder and the liberation theologians Leonardo Boff and Jon Sobrino. In the light of the cross and of the kenotic God revealed by the cross, questions of political power are explored, and a kenotic political ethic outlined. In conclusion, suggestions are made as to how the contemporary church can live out a cruciform, or cross–shaped, political spirituality and ecclesiology.

The Purple Crown exhibits how Christianity’s ultimate act of witnessing, martyrdom, is an inherently political act. York argues that the path of Christianity leads to a confrontation with the same powers that crucified Jesus. Tripp York goes outside of the normal understandings of public theology and points to the most powerful persuaders within Christian history: the martyrs. The martyrs remind us of the moment in which all the world was simultaneously exposed as fallen and redeemed, of Christ’s death and resurrection. In York’s telling, just as the martyrs’ deaths reveals Christ, so too their lives bear witness to the City of God, exposing those powers and principalities that crucified Jesus and continue to crucify him through his followers. He includes the biography of the El Salvador priest Oscar Romero.

The Politics of the Crucifixion is not a religious book in any way. I do know something about the dynamics of politics, however, and it was the political motivations of both supporters and opponents of Jesus that led me to author The Politics of the Crucifixion. Let me note one thing before going on. Here in the United States, we equate politics with popular elections. However, politics is just as prevalent in those nations that do not practice free elections as it is in those that do. In fact, it is often more prevalent. In those lands without popular elections, politicians are just as likely react to public pressures as are elected politicians elsewhere. Therefore, even though voters did not elect Roman Governors or Judean Kings, those rulers were not immune to politics. On the contrary, Roman and Judean rulers allowed ordinary citizens to sway them at every turn. The political pressures bearing down on Herod and Pilate made the execution of Jesus impossible to avoid. Herod feared that making Jesus a martyr and Pilate loathed executing an innocent man. Yet, the enemies of Jesus, and the mob they gathered around them, refused to allow these powerful men to leave Jesus alive. Politics infected those that followed Jesus as well. The Gospels illustrate the political motivations of the Apostles. The motivations the Apostles (often as petty and ugly as those of the opponents of Jesus) were in some ways just as much a cause of the crucifixion as were the motivations of the Judeans and the Romans. While I understand that writing about Jesus and the crucifixion in political terms may offend some Christians, I do not believe that the truth should ever offend anyone.

To help Christians apply the person and work of the incarnate Christ as they think about the nature of politics or engage in political activity.

Forget what the history textbooks told you about martyrdom being a thing of the past. Christians are being persecuted and slaughtered today. Raymond Ibrahim unveils the shocking truth about Christians in the Muslim world. Believers in Jesus Christ suffer oppression and are massacred at the hands of radicals for worshipping and spreading the gospel of the Lord. Discover the true-life stories that the media won't report in Ibrahim's Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians.

This book examines the nexus between religion and politics, considered in one of its most controversial aspects. The starting point is the 2001 attack on the United States, which a Canadian commentator ingeniously described as the 'passion of America'. This designation suggested an interesting inquiry into other so-called national passions: the notion of the Christ-nation crucified by evil powers because of its higher virtue. This motif is explored by analysing five modern nationalisms that have employed Christian symbolism in this manner: Poland, France, Germany, Ireland and Palestine. The author investigates the way in which fundamental Christian concepts are distorted and corrupted in the process, and points to the inherent dangers of this form of political self-glorification. Poets, philosophers, novelists and preachers have all played a major part in promoting the idea of the Christ-nation at certain times, mostly in the nineteenth century but also today. Famous examples are Adam Mickiewicz in Poland, Victor Hugo in France, the patriotic Lutherans during the First World War in Germany, Patrick Pearse in Ireland and certain Palestinian nationalist poets today. The clash of cultures, religions, nationalism and civilisations in the world today is ever more strident. The passion narratives of the five nations are interwoven with historical circumstance in order to cast light on the endurance and power of the narratives, to arrive at a final critique and 'tract for the times'.

From its English publication in 1973, Jrgen Moltmanns The Crucified God garnered much attention, and it has become one of the seminal texts of twentieth-century theology. Following up on his groundbreaking Theology of Hope, The Crucified God established the cross as the foundation for Christian hope. Moltmanns dramatic innovation was to see the cross not as a problem of theodicy but instead as an act of ultimate solidarity between God and humanity. In this, he drew on liberation theology, and he was among the first to bring third-world theologies into a first-world context. Moltmann proposes that suffering is not a problem to be solved but instead that suffering is an aspect of Gods very being: God is love, and love invariably involves suffering. In this view, the crucifixion of Jesus is an event that affects the entirety of the Trinity, showing that The Crucified God is more than an arresting titleit is a theological breakthrough.

Here V. George Shillington seeks to understand both James and Paul as Jews engaged in different but complementary missions and concludes that the tension between those missions indicates a conflict between different politics of identity.--Provided by publisher