Quotes about Empires

Babylon was and is a timeless trope for empires and nations and powers that systematize injustices, oppress the people of God, and suppress the truths of liberation. Babylon is no more a city of the future than it is a city of the here and now.

It is not enough for us to read this portion of the Bible and picture the Apostles Paul and Peter along with the church simply doing their best to be nice people. These letters reveal the subversive nature of God's kingdom at work among the empires of humanity. God set in motion a rebellion against the rebellions of men.

Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable conditions for humanness. In the arrangement of "lawfulness" in Jesus' time, as in the ancient empire of Pharaoh, the one unpermitted quality of relation was compassion. Empires are never built or maintained on the basis of compassion.