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A Political History of Early Christianity (Paperback, New)
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A Political History of Early Christianity (Paperback, New)
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Brent focuses on the reformation of republican religion and the
exercise of political authority in Augustan society. Augustus'
revolution involved a reformation also of republican religion that
provided legitimation for the exercise of political authority. The
iconography of the Ara Pacis, for example, shows that Augustus as
augur was making a metaphysical claim, namely to have secured the
peace of the gods not simply throughout the civil organization of
the empire but also in nature itself. What republican religion had
failed to do, his reformed religion had succeeded in doing. Thus
Augustan society had reached a formally similar position to the
world of the late twentieth century with its own version of the
'end of history' (Fukuama) in which not simply all other practical
political alternatives seem to have been excluded but ideological
(or metaphysical) ones as well. How was Christianity, if it were to
achieve transformation of contemporary society, to respond to such
an apparently unassailable position? How indeed was it to develop
both the aim and the strategy for so doing? It needed to shed its
original apocalyptic solution in which the certainty of the
imminence of the second advent meant that there was no need for
actions with political implications in this world. Such a process
bears comparison with the way in which Marxists active in Western
democracies refused involvement in normal political processes
whilst they awaited the 'inevitable' collapse of 'capitalism.' It
needed to turn from a perspective of inner soul-culture that had no
interest in the transformation of wider society (Gnosticism). Such
is paralleled by a kind of charismatic fundamentalism in the
present. It needed to produce a 'project' that would be effective
in transforming its values into a form that bore convincing
parallels to the values of the dominant culture that its was
endeavoring to influence in order to secure wide support for its
access to power.
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