PART II For God so Loved the Empire?

The empire never really left. It just found new robes to wear.

The Acts of the Apostles, the fifth book of the New Testament, recounts the story of the earliest Christian communities—those who followed Jesus’ teachings even before there was a New Testament to quote. Before there were creeds to recite, doctrines to defend, or hierarchies to enforce.

Their faith wasn’t a system; it was a way of life. A way marked by Jesus’ own example: radical welcome, enemy love, and a refusal to play by the rules of empire. They didn’t organize around abstract theories of atonement or metaphysical formulas. They organized around shared meals, communal prayer, care for the poor, and the radical practice of holding possessions in common.

They bore witness to a God who chose a cross, not a throne—and to a Spirit that wasn’t confined to temple courts or church cathedrals, but poured out at Pentecost, flooding the streets and spilling across boundaries of language, culture, and nation.

These values were not welcomed by everyone—certainly not by those tasked with maintaining Caesar’s order. The early Christians refused to worship the emperor. They wouldn’t bow to oppression. They wouldn’t offer sacrifices to the gods of empire. Instead, they broke bread, prayed and sang together, and shared what they had with the wider community.

And for that, they were crucified. They were torn apart, thrown to lions for public sport, dipped in tar and burned as human torches to light the games of Rome.

But their resistance carried power. It bore fruit. Their witness ignited a movement so resilient that it eventually made converts in the very halls of power it had once defied—including Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine.

With Constantine’s rise to power, Christianity was suddenly relieved of the persecutions that had persisted for generations. It was now legal—eventually to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. No longer a threat to imperial power, it became part of it. The once-persecuted faith of the margins was absorbed into the machinery of the state. Baptism became less a radical commitment and more a rite of passage into a Christianized society. Bishops gained political clout. Church councils were no longer convened in dusty upper rooms, but in imperial halls—under the watchful eye of the emperor.

Theology, once shaped by the poor and sharpened by the witness of martyrs, began to mirror the values of empire: order, hierarchy, obedience, control. This marriage between church and empire didn’t just shift Christianity’s political status. It transformed its theology.

The two most iconic architects of this period were Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas—towering thinkers, devout men, and faithful products of their time. But the time itself was not neutral.

Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo—Why Did God Become Human?—didn’t emerge in a vacuum. He lived in a world where justice was defined not by equity, but by feudal honor. In that system, when someone sinned, they didn’t break a rule—they offended a lord. And the only way to restore order was to repay the debt, to satisfy the offended honor of the higher power.

So when Anselm imagined salvation, it naturally followed that logic: God’s honor had been violated by human sin. A debt had to be paid. But humanity couldn’t pay it—so God sent His Son to suffer in our place. It was not the theology of a Galilean carpenter under Roman occupation. It was the theology of a courtier under a Christianized crown.

Given the assumptions of its time and place, this theology made sense. But it would have been foreign—perhaps even offensive—to the early church, who gave their lives resisting the very systems of power this framework came to reflect.

Aquinas refined and expanded this further in his Summa Theologiae—The Sum of All Theology. Drawing deeply from Aristotle, he embedded Christian theology into an orderly moral universe that echoed the structure of his feudal world: built on hierarchy, shaped by virtue, and oriented toward a divinely ordained end. God became a cosmic lawgiver. Grace became a structured system. Salvation, increasingly, took the form of a transaction.

But the Bible?

The Bible offers resistance to this system at almost every turn. The story of Scripture does not begin in a courtroom—it begins in the darkness and depth of creation, with the words, “Let there be light.”

It begins in the innocence of a garden. It begins with a covenant. It begins in captivity.

From the very first pages, the Bible does not uphold empire—it exposes it. Egypt, Babylon, Rome: each is remembered not for their glory, but for their domination. These empires enslaved, displaced, and exploited—and God stands against them all.

The defining narrative for Israel was never debt and repayment. It was deliverance. Liberation. God hears the cry of the oppressed, confronts the powers of Pharaoh, and leads a people into freedom—not because they proved their worth, but because God is, by nature, a liberator.

The Exodus isn’t about satisfying divine honor. It’s about breaking chains. It’s about saying no to Pharaoh. And yes to the freedom of God’s Kingdom.

And when Jesus steps into the story, he doesn’t arrive as a feudal lord or imperial judge—quite the opposite. Emptying himself of divine power he born out of wedlock as a poor, brown-skinned Jew living under Roman occupation. His ministry doesn’t follow the logic of hierarchy and repayment—it disrupts it.

He heals without requiring purity.

Feeds without demanding worthiness or repayment.

Forgives before anyone confesses.

Blesses the poor and confronts the powerful.

Jesus doesn’t mirror empire. He unmasks it.

Which is why the theology that emerged after the church aligned itself with empire feels so alien to the Gospels. Jesus didn’t die to balance a cosmic ledger. He died because the powers of domination—political, economic, religious—always crucify love when it threatens their control.

So if you’re hearing the drums of empire in the air again— If you’re watching power consolidate at the top, hearing politicians wrap their ambitions in religious language, seeing churches defend nationalism over neighbor-love, or witnessing the return of punitive theology, militant faith, and exclusion dressed up as orthodoxy— you’re not imagining things.

The empire never really left. It just found new robes to wear.

And this is why theology matters. Because whether you consider yourself religious or not, make no mistake: You live in a world shaped by theology. And what we say about God today ends up as policy tomorrow.

Our legal systems, our economic frameworks, our politics—they all reflect a theology. And far too often, that theology imagines a God who demands payment before blessing, who withholds love until a debt is paid, who requires violence to restore relationship, who has no concern for the poor, the broken, the marginalized. That kind of God always ends up looking a lot like Caesar.

You see this theology written into our prisons. Into our immigration policies. Into our healthcare systems. It shapes how we think about justice, success, punishment, and worth.

But here’s the good news: there is another way. Jesus didn’t die to balance a cosmic ledger. He didn’t come to reinforce empire’s logic of debt and retribution.

He came to expose it.

He confronted systems of domination, stood in solidarity with the crucified, and revealed a God whose love is not withheld, not negotiated, not earned—but given.

Freely. Fully. For all.

The Bible doesn’t just offer us doctrines to believe—it offers us a path to walk. Not by miracle or magic, but by practice. By feeding, forgiving, healing, gathering, disrupting, and building. By forming communities where grace is not a commodity, justice is not delayed, and every person is treated as beloved.

This is what the early church understood. And it’s what we are called to remember.

What kind of fruit does your theology bear?

Because in the end, Jesus didn’t say, “They’ll know you by your creeds.”

He said, “You will know them by their fruits.” (Matthew 7:16)

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