Power and its abuses have received no shortage of discussion. Unfortunately, for all the conversation, we have missed the problem almost entirely. For the last three decades within Christian circles, “empire” has been the metaphor of choice, with the Kingdom of God and the empires of Rome, Babylon, and Egypt as the counterpoints to the way of Jesus. In this discourse, “empire” serves as a top-down kind of force, an imposing and overt mechanism by which people are constrained. What it obscures is that, the vast majority of the time, humans are not organized by overt force, but by bureaucracy.
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