Acts of Empire: The Acts of the Apostles and Imperial Ideology (Sino-Christian Studies: Supplement)

This book is at once the advancement of an argument on the relation between Acts and Empire, as well as an exploration of the role of biblical texts in the production of Western thinking. Through the work of critical theorists such as Michel Foucault, Christina von Braun, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, Christine Petterson discusses writing and self, mastery and gender, class, ideology, grammar, and abstraction. These discussions all serve to analyse the New Testament as a product of empire. The implications of such a shift are significant for our approaches to the texts and what we perceive as theological challenges, because Christianity can never be set outside discourses of exploitation, and hierarchies, but must always be set within them.