rial politics. Thus, the main difference between Colossians and Constantine
would finally be a matter of degree, not of kind (cf. R.A. Horsley 1998, 166).
Even if we were to restrict our discussion, quite ahistorically, to the
undisputedly authentic letters of Paul, there is still a profoundly imperial
logic at work in these writings. Take, for example, Pauline eschatology
(including soteriology and Christology). The promise that Paul makes in the
name of the kingdom of God to those who have become, through baptism
or reception of the spirit (of God, viz. Christ), co-inheritors with Christ
(viz. Israel) of God’s ultimate favour, is integration into God’s eschatolog-
ical household. Indeed, this is finally what (Gentile) salvation means for
Paul: adoption into the familiaof the divine (Jewish) world monarch. Adop-
tion means the right to enjoy all the benefits and privileges that go with
belonging to the ruling (end-time) imperial household. Not the least of
these is assured escape or probable pardon from the master’s proverbial
wrath and its destructive consequences.
While there are many things in this ancient Mediterranean under-
standing of the human situation coram deis et hominibus,which hardly imply
the sempiternity of the Roman Empire, the new creation or aeon or order
that was supposed to follow the demise of the current arrangement of
things (to schêma tou kosmou toutou,1 Cor. 7:31) yet remains, for Paul, life
under imperial rule. This is because the key problem, for Paul, is, ultimately,
how to find oneself on the winning side of the impending eschatological
contest, which is presumed to be God’s side, and not among those who con-
trariwise are destined to lose or become lost. In other words, Paul’s scenario
of salvation takes for granted the imperial makeup of the world. Apparently,
Paul could not imagine human life without empire, however much the
apostle may have been persuaded that the prevailing order was finally
untenable because inherently skewed. As the Roman Empire became less
and less specifically Roman in its complexion and more and more a “multi-
national” conglomerate, the Pauline promise of early Christian integration
through “our kyriosJesus Christ” into the next divinely ordered imperial
household thus easily provided the rationale for an ever more explicitly
Christian vision of political hegemony.
Certainly this is true for the earliest of Paul’s extant letters. In 1 Thes-
salonians 4:15–17, the prospect of Jesus’ imminent parousia—already
announced in 1:10 as due “from heaven...[to] rescue us from the com-
ing wrath”—is described as the arrival of an imperial representative at the
gates of the city. According to Koester: “It has been a general assumption
that the parousiais used as a technical term for the eschatological com-
ing of Jesus or the Son of Man. However, there is no evidence in pre-
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