The Power of Resurrection: Foucault, Discipline, and Early Christian Resistance

Table of Contents:
Chapter One: Introduction Chapter Two: Resurrection as Subversion—A Pauline Trajectory Chapter Three: Foucault and the Power of Resurrection Chapter Four: The Body and the Theological Imagination Chapter Five: The Shape of Ritual Behavior Chapter Six: Movement in the Empire Chapter Seven: Resurrection in a Hostile Environment Chapter Eight: Summary and Conclusions

About the Author :
Patrick G. Stefan is visiting lecturer in New Testament and Second Temple Judaism at Reformed Theological Seminary, Washington.

Review :
Patrick Stefan shows how the early Christians ordered their lives around the stories and symbols of the risen Jesus rather than the Roman emperor. By deploying the hermeneutics of political power, Stefan illustrates the ways that Christians in the first three centuries challenged resident notions of power and hierarchy in deeply subversive ways. He shows in effect how belief in the resurrection generated a theology of counter-imperial resistance to Roman rule. In this thoroughly readable volume, Patrick Stefan draws theoretically on the work of Michel Foucault to explain how the subversive message of the resurrection spread, not through preaching the word but by disciplining bodies and thus shaping imaginations. Stefan shows how a wide array of practices—from the spectacle of the gladiatorial arena to the routine regulation of the calendar—shaped Christian subjects, thus threatening the structure of sovereign power in the Roman Empire. Jesus said, ’No one takes my life; I have the freedom to lay it down and take it back up again.’ Ever since, those who have been united to Christ have deprived the temporal sovereigns of what they prize most: the power over life and death. Why and how did the resurrection of the body transform Western civilization? Patrick Stefan explores this theme with the aid of Foucault’s analysis and offers an illuminating account of early Christianity and Empire. This is a fascinating and very important book. Both judicious and original, Stefan's work demonstrates that resurrection was an idea that "worked" in ordering time, space, and ritual, steadily subverting the power of empire. Patrick Stefan has given us something Foucault never did but probably wished he would have: a brilliant genealogy of the techniques of subversion in the transition from sovereign to disciplinary power. Extremely well-written, argued, and researched; this is an original piece of scholarship with enormous consequences for historians and theorists alike. The last generation of scholarly work has showed how the Christian proclamation of resurrection was a radical challenge to Roman political authority. A similarly important scholarly trend has looked beyond what early Christians believed by describing the crucial role various practices, social organization, and rituals played in Christian formation. Using the work of Michel Foucault with impressive sophistication, Stefan brings these discourses together to show us how Christian practices were not just about spiritual development. They functioned as alternative mechanisms of power that enabled Christians to transform Roman political and social structures without explicitly mounting a political critique or instigating violent revolution. Stefan is unafraid to offer a big-picture, interdisciplinary analysis of how such a profound historical transformation could happen, and this not only makes an important contribution to our knowledge of early Christian history, but synthesizes much scholarship with such cogency and clarity, it will make a captivating read for anyone interested in understanding how Christianity went from a tiny Jewish sect on the margins of the Roman empire to a world-changing religion.