Empire Baptized: How the Church Embraced What Jesus Rejected (Second–Fifth Centuries) by Wes Howard-Brook

Abstract

Reviewed by: Empire Baptized: How the Church Embraced What Jesus Rejected (Second–Fifth Centuries) by Wes Howard-Brook Susan (Elli) Elliott wes howard-brook, Empire Baptized: How the Church Embraced What Jesus Rejected (Second–Fifth Centuries) (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2016). Pp. xxv + 342. Paper $35. In this volume, Wes Howard-Brook describes the early centuries of Christian history using the contrast of a "religion of empire" and a "religion of creation" described in his previous work, "Come Out, My People!": God's Call out of Empire in the Bible and Beyond (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010). Some readers may find his dualistic construction oversimplified and may question his positive valuation of apocalyptic views. Yet H.-B. uses his dichotomy to raise an important set of questions for understanding the development of Christianity in its formative centuries, and his contextualized reading is far from simplistic. After an introduction that reviews the schema of his previous work, H.-B. provides, in the first chapter, an overview of some religious aspects of the Roman imperial context, [End Page 135] followed by a second chapter that explains his choice of Alexandria and Carthage for the place-based exposition that will follow and offers a contextual overview of each location. In the third chapter, H.-B. provides a cogent discussion of how choices of approach to the interpretation of Scriptures laid the foundations for imperial Christianity. Subsequent chapters unfold the development of Christianity as a "religion of empire" chronologically at each of the two focal locations. H.-B. notes the complex role that responses to persecution played in these developments. Howard-Brook's place-based approach allows him not only to examine the trajectory of ideas but also to reveal how key figures' thought was integrally related to social, political, and economic factors and events in their specific locations. His account reveals how these influential church "fathers" articulated ideas about Scripture and theology in ways that served their elite interests both in internal ecclesial power struggles and in larger political and societal affairs. The picture that emerges is not the "imperialization of Christianity" in the abstract but the concrete story of how elite male classes gained control of church structures and framed "orthodox" Christian identity according to their privileged assumptions both as church leaders and as theologians. Even as H.-B. traces the trajectory of orthodoxy as it moves toward the Christian empire, he is careful not to reinforce the notion of the "church fathers" defending an orthodoxy traceable to Jesus and his disciples against multiple threats of heresy. Instead, at many turns, he points to contradictions between teachings of Jesus and those of later thinkers who became identified as orthodox. Overall he views these later thinkers' perspectives as betraying the teachings of Jesus. He frequently identifies this betrayal as a turn to an individualist religion with an emphasis on the ascendance of the individual soul to heaven, an emphasis that proved to be consistent with an imperial church. As one example, he shows how Clement's allegorical interpretation of Scripture denied the plain meaning of Jesus's teachings on the redistribution of wealth in favor of a Stoic view of wealth as a tool for the development of the (wealthy person's) soul, a view well adapted to the ideological needs of imperial elites. This question of economics is one of the issues H.-B. brings to his examination of each of the "church fathers" he discusses. He questions the views of each thinker about such topics as economics and wealth; views of the "others" (women, pagans, Jews, "heretics"); sexuality and the body; violence and war; and earth and creation. These questions are rooted in his commitment to the "religion of creation" as he defines it. His use of this yardstick reveals not only the trajectory of the development of Christianity as a "religion of empire" but also some glimpses of alternatives. In these discussions, he integrates views of women, the body, and sexuality with other political and theological perspectives. While his dichotomy proposes two alternatives, his exposition reveals variants among a few of the Christian groups whose views are mostly lost in the historical record. Readers will not find a full treatment of these...