Ronald E. Osborn

Anarchy and Apocalypse

Essays on Faith, Violence, and Theodicy

This wide-ranging collection of essays explores the anarchist and pacifist dimensions of Christianity in response to dilemmas of power, suffering, and war. Osborn offers compelling readings of Homer’s Iliad, the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament, and explores a range of thinkers including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Noam Chomsky, and Elie Wiesel. He also analyzes the Allied bombing of civilians in World War II, the peculiar contribution of the Seventh-day Adventist apocalyptic imagination to Christian social ethics, and the role of deceptive language in the Vietnam War. This book provides an indispensible primer in the political theology of the Adventist tradition and is a valuable contribution to radical Christian thought in biblical, historical, and literary perspectives.

Praise for Anarchy and Apocalypse

“This book is a bracing read for anyone trying to make sense of Christian witness in a violent world. Osborn ranges both widely and deeply, connecting insights from theology, history, literature, and political science in startling and inventive ways. He shows how violence creates its own momentum, and offers a wide range of resources for countering that momentum. Anyone interested in living creatively in a destructive world will benefit from this book. It is the kind of book that has the power to transform lives.”—William T. Cavanaugh author of The Myth of Religious Violence

“In reading Osborn you cannot help but think, ‘He has to be kidding. He has to be putting us on to suggest there is a connection between anarchy and that form of Christianity called Adventist.’ But he is not kidding. Rather he has written a book of lively essays to remind us that a commitment to peace is a challenge to any order based on violence. It was the Adventists, in their early formations, who reminded us that a commitment to peace cannot avoid challenging orders based on violence; that peace requires a different kind of order altogether. This is a call to the church to be that community based on the order of Christ’s peace.”—Stanley Hauerwas

“The Christianity of the American Empire has not only come to accept the normalization of violence; it often celebrates it. How desperately American Christians need the keen insights regarding the demonic dynamics of power and violence that Ronald Osborn reflects in these essays!”—Greg Boyd author of The Myth of a Christian Nation