This portion sums up the gist of the outline which AKMA is working from, and I have heard enought to know that I defintiely want to hear and see the final presentation. All my reading in Hauerwas, Smith, Bonhoefer, and yes, even Wallis combine to give me a keen eye these days for Biblical exposition of Empire.
We profess an alternative to Empire’s claim on our lives when we live in a way that our interlocutors cannot make sense of, apart from acknowledging that which sacral America cannot abide: we owe our allegiance only to God. While divinized America can couch its prerogatives in terms of justice, of freedom, it cannot make explicit claim to godliness as a civil virtue. The practice of godliness, of making manifest a persistent allegiance to the unique, aniconic, inutile God of the Decalogue, constitutes the church as an anti-Empire.
