The Fall of the Church
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
This book prepares the way for the practice of kenarchy: a humanity-loving, world-embracing, inclusive approach to life and politics. It does so by identifying two conflicting streams in Christianity: the love stream that the stories of Jesus portray and many of us desire to follow, and the sovereignty system that much of theology, church, and mission represents. Explaining how the two streams arose in early Western history, The Fall of the Church demonstrates that far from being complementary expressions of Christianity, the sovereignty stream embodies the very system that the Jesus of the gospels opposed. The fall of the church is described in terms of its embrace of the sovereignty system and the subsequent history of the West is explained as the story of the resulting partnership. If transcendence is truly like Jesus, then, rather than abandoning the empire system, God has remained within the church and empire in order to empty it out from the inside. Mitchell argues that this divine strategy has continued throughout the history of the West and is coming to a head, right now, in our contemporary Western world, and that the time is ripe for an incarnational politics of love.
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"The Fall of the Church has clearly demonstrated the
indispensability and inevitable consequences of organizing God’s
holy activities by fallen human generations. Any human attempt to
stand in the gap for the perfect God will eventually fall short of
God’s ultimate standard. . . . This is a must-read for all
third-world Pentecostal leaders who may fall or have even fallen
into this concealed trap."
--Segun Johnson, General Overseer of Liberty Church, Tottenham,
London
"This is an excellent book that examines afresh the important
subject of the church in relation to power. With forensic insight,
Mitchell excavates the roots of the tree of sovereign power and
lays his ax with historical acuity at crucial points of the
church’s development, at which, he proposes, the imperial notion of
sovereignty has tainted her witness. . . . I highly recommend
The Fall of the Church to those prepared for serious
engagement with the challenges of our time."
--Carol Kingston-Smith, lecturer of Justice, Advocacy, and
Reconciliation in Intercultural Contexts, Redcliffe College,
UK
"This is an outstanding book. It shows why and how the Christendom
church has all too often betrayed its message by failing to align
itself with the life-giving power of Jesus, and instead finding
itself trapped by imperial political assumptions, without and
within. . . . Written with scholarly wisdom, it is also a manifesto
of spiritual and political hope."
--Simon Barrow, director of Ekklesia
Product Details
- Title : The Fall of the Church
- Author: Mitchell, Roger Haydon
- Publisher: Wipf and Stock
- Publication Date: 2013
- ISBN: 9781621897699
Roger Haydon Mitchell co-directs 2MT, a charitable trust that helps manage change. He is an honorary research fellow in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion in the University of Lancaster and the external partnerships coordinator of the Richardson Institute for Peace Studies. He is a member of the Society for the Study of Theology and the author of the book Church, Gospel and Empire: How the Politics of Sovereignty Impregnated the West (2011).