The great irony of Christian history is that what started off as one option in counter-imperial strategies in first-century Judea became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Both the initial counter-imperialist impulse and the subsequent imperial legitimation are intrinsic to what Christianity is as a historical phenomenon. During the Bush administration, when imperial rhetoric was hardly veiled, empire became a major analytic tool in theology and biblical studies. This diary provides a sampling of some of the voices in this movement.
Rosemary Radford Ruether
Ruether has long been closely involved with Third World theological and political movements - her 1972 book Liberation Theology: Human Hope Confronts Christian History and American Power already showed evidence of this engagement. You can see a lecture she gave in 2008 on "American Empire and the War Against Evil."
Her most recent book is Christianity and Social Systems: Historical Constructions and Ethical Challenges.
John Dominic Crossan
Crossan developed his sensitivity to imperial ideology growing up in Ireland. A prominent figure in the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars devoted to reconstructing the historical Jesus behind the additions of the gospel writers, he has long contextualized the early Christian movement within the various ways in which people resisted the Roman Empire. A good summary of his views is in the book God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now. You can hear him interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air: He's laying out his views on Paul.
Walter Brueggemann
Brueggemann traces the dual trajectories of resistance and accommodation to imperial power in the Hebrew Scriptures in A Social Reading of the Old Testament: Prophetic Approaches to Israel's Communal Life. This trajectory in ancient Israel shows earlier precedent for the kinds of ambivalent relation to empire that one finds in Christian history. Brueggemann sees different kinds of violence as inherent to both the imperial and anti-imperial strategies, and faces up to the need to confront the violence of the God of the Bible, which he discusses some in the following interview.
Other books on the subject are:
Jorge Pixley, Biblical Israel: A People's History
Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire
Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, The Power of the Word: Scripture and the Rhetoric of Empire
Joerg Rieger, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times
And many more.
Of course, the interrelation of European imperialism and Christian missionary movements is another area that's been explored, but that's for another day.