If Christ's resurrection informed early Christian resistance to imperial power, how did it do so? Patrick S. Stefan proposes an answer here. One can summarize his proposal, and its significance, by rehearsing the story it tells. Jesus's earthly career raised the specter that Christ's authority surpassed even that of the Roman Empire. When the imperium crucified Jesus for this threat, it squashed him and the idea that his authority surpasses all, revealing both the extent of the empire's reach and its willingness to deploy violence when necessary. In fact, the empire's power is nothing other than its ability to exercise control as it sees fit, which comes most clearly in its ability to kill those who oppose it. Jesus's very public execution puts this on display for all to see. That was the point, the crucifixion as a display of imperial power.

Yet, Jesus's resurrection from the dead countermands that authority, inverting the specter by confirming Christ's authority above all others. In refusing its death-dealing power, God in Christ overturned the empire's sovereign rule—i.e., its ability to dole out death—confirming for all to see the idea that Christ answers to no one. The resurrection also expands the idea's application, now applicable not only to everyone Jesus encountered during his life but also everyone his resurrection touches. The resurrection's political claim—that the empire could not shut Jesus down—maps onto a metaphysical claim: that neither can space-time contain him. Before the resurrection, Jesus's authority was limited to his person. After the resurrection, it was everywhere. The idea that everyone answers to God in Christ now really did apply to everyone. No wonder the empire sought to squash the idea at its inception.

Stefan uses Foucault to tell this story, mainly by tracing how the idea of Christ's authority materially takes shape. Stefan does so with two moves. First, he takes a basic distinction Foucault makes between sovereign and disciplinary power, where sovereign power involves state power over bodies, specifically the power of execution, and disciplinary power involves power over the soul which confounds the powers of the state. Whereas the state, in its sovereign power as ruler, can take my life, it cannot make me love it. Strange as it sounds, the state's power is limited to its ability to kill. It controls whether I live or die, but not how I live and for what I die. Its power is limited to only one thing—as daunting as that one thing is. Disciplinary power goes far beyond this, accomplishing the much larger task of determining what I live and die for. This kind of power exceeds the empire's fixation on questions of representation and obedience. Plastering images of Caesar throughout the empire or stationing imperial guards at street corners might have the effect of scaring people, but it is limited to those effects and the fixed images and specific street corners meant to effectuate them.

This first move sets up Stefan's second move of explaining how the idea of Christ's resurrection gets conventionalized in Christian resistance to empire. Namely, resurrection becomes an idea that seeps into people's lives and changes their relationship to the imperial order. This second move requires a deeper Foucauldian insight about the complicated relationship between concepts and conventionalization. Stefan wisely begins by presuming the relationship between ideas and practical realities to be a complicated one: ideas do not of themselves produce practical states of affairs. Rather, they must be conventionalized through social practices. This is where the second move makes good on the first regarding the distinction between sovereign and disciplinary power. Sovereign power operates on the body's surface—again, through the power to take life. Disciplinary power, on the other hand, works below the surface—at the level of the soul—and shapes desire, determining not simply what I do, but how and why I do it. It is precisely early Christianity's ability to take hold of the soul—to discipline bodies in ways sovereign power leaves untouched—that enables its authority to surpass imperial authority. Unbound by space-time, Christ goes everywhere the empire cannot; his resurrected presence was now manifest anywhere his authority commands allegiances—which is to say, everywhere. Stefan does the hard historical work of delineating the material processes that operationalized these ideas through ordinary conventions related to church calendars, congregational liturgies, built environments, Christological debates, and so on. With the resurrection then comes both the idea that Christ's authority surpasses Roman authority (as epitomized in the very idea of the resurrection) and the ubiquitous conventionalization of that idea (again, as epitomized by the very idea of the resurrection). Stefan closes the loop on the Foucauldian insight by reminding us that disciplinary practices both presume the Christian notion of the soul (gesturing again to the complicated relationship between concepts and conventions) as well as create it.

It should be clear that this book is a deployment of Foucault rather than an exegesis of Foucault. The same can be said about the ample church history materials Stefan draws on (how well, I am less able to judge) to make his larger argument about what claims about the resurrection do. Foucault was not as systematic as Stefan presents him, nor was Foucault interested in articulating disciplinary power in such programmatic ways. I do not mean any of this as a critique of Stefan's book but only of the attempt to place its various moves and contributions. The book itself is well organized, excellently resourced, sharply but not at all ideologically argued, and remarkably well written. Stefan's proposal (laid out in the first chapters and then evidenced in the remaining) moves well, committing to the requisite close readings without ever getting bogged down. This book will prove interesting to Foucault scholars, church historians, and constructive theologians looking for innovative proposals at the intersection of politics and religion.