Lexington Books / Fortress Academic
Pages: 272
Trim: 6¼ x 9¼
978-1-9787-1599-8 • Hardback • September 2024 • $120.00 • (£92.00)
978-1-9787-1600-1 • eBook • September 2024 • $50.00 • (£38.00)
Pung Ryong Kim teaches historical theology at Sudo International University in Seoul.
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations of the Works of Augustine
Introduction
Chapter 1: Augustinian Politics as Too Meek in the Evil Saeculum
Chapter 2: Hoping in Despair: The Saeculum in the Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Imagination
Chapter 3: Demonic Forces and Human Agency in the Saeculum: Demons and Imperial Collective Memory
Chapter 4: Apocalyptic Christ and the Politics of Will
Chapter 5: The Politics of the Earthly City and Pilgrim Church
Chapter 6: Interrogating Mathewes and Gregory
Conclusion
Bibliography
About the Author
The decolonial moment has underlined the importance of Western theologians hearing what non-Western readers hear in their canonical texts. Pung Ryong Kim insightfully draws out what is lost from when contemporary readers marry Augustine to democratic liberal politics, betraying the radicality of his own politics and depriving Christians of the resources needed to think beyond the tired ruts of partisan politics. This volume is essential reading for political theologians in times which the political lives of Western democracies are so starkly dysfunctional in their inability to transcend what divides them.
— Brian Brock, University of Aberdeen
Pung Ryong Kim represents a fresh take on that great writer about the earthly city and the heavenly city, love and the will, and Christ and the devil. To include Christ and the devil in that list is already to recognize the bold reinterpretation of Augustine that Kim brings to the table. Kim draws out something that many interpreters of Augustine do not: the devil and his angels mediate distorted ways of remembering and imagining political life that are healed by Christ and the church. This work represents an important contribution not only to discussions about this North African bishop living during the eclipse of the Roman Empire but also to discussions of living in an age where evil is alive.
— Robert W. Heimburger, Cardiff University