Around 2 a.m. a month ago, in a smoke-filled hookah bar in Orlando, Florida, I found myself engaged in a conversation about religion and politics with a man who spent his career at the intersection between the two (I count his brief stint as a bar-tender as religious/political work in addition to his more overtly religious and political work). I asked whether there were any books he’d recommend on the intersection between the two divisive fields, and he recommended Oliver O’Donovan’s The Desire of the Nations, which I have finally gotten around to reading. It has not disappointing, so now I intend to begin reading the approximately thirty other titles that rapidly spilled out from between his moustache and goatee over about the next half-hour.
The most important contribution of the book is its thorough and sober-minded treatment of the “separation of church and state,” a notion which has undergone many permutations through the centuries, and was perhaps most thoughtfully considered by theologians of the much-maligned Middle Ages. Moses, Samuel, David, Isaiah, Paul, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Hobbes, Ellul, and even Stanley Hauerwas are among his conversation-partners in an interdisciplinary look at theology, history, philosophy, and politics. Though a 288 pages in length, the book surprises in its breadth, covering the judicial functions of the governing authorities as portrayed in Psalms and Romans, the evolution of the concept of the state, and the ambiguities involved in Christianity’s responses to the institution of slavery, state violence, and the papacy through the ages.
The greatest fault of the book lies, ironically, in O’Donovan’s too easy dismissal of Christendom. While he seriously interacts with Christendom as a past “witness” to Christian theopolitical imagination, he joins Ellul (see The New Demons) in hastily making the fashionable assumption that Christendom is dead, presumably never again to rise. For Ellul this mistake is at least consistent, for Ellul is about the task of constructing a Christian anti-politics [1]. He has a basically pessimistic about historical progress, seeing modernity as an irreversible disaster and anarchism as the only cure — for him, a return to Christendom is neither possible nor desirable, and so Christendom, for all its strengths, is merely historical. For O’Donovan, announcing the death of Christendom is an inconsistency. It marks an unconscious capitulation to late-modernity’s portrayal of religion as a tyrant to be kept out of the public square.
O’Donovan goes to great pains to take down both secular and religious (e.g. Hauerwas) conceptions of religion as disqualified from the public square. He goes to great lengths to defend the notion of the church as having the authority to morally stand in judgment against the church. He goes to great lengths to defend the notion that the church has the moral authority to stand in judgment of the state. In short, he preaches a set of ideas which, if widely accepted, would inevitably lead to some sort of Christendom, some sort of arrangement which he has decried as impossible. Is he speaking to effect change, or merely to cast down judgment on a hardened people?
In his own way, he is an Anglican counterpart to the Presbyterian Cornelius Van Til: a sort of intellectual demolitions expert, devoted to dynamiting the false edifices of modernity, but without an alternative to it. In the case of Van Til, that Calvinist demolition job left a vacuum filled by Calvinist Reconstructionists such as Greg Bahnsen, R. J. Rushdoony, Gary North, and to a lesser extent Francis Schaeffer. They followed his radical apologetics (presuppositionalism) with a radical political program (reconstructionism) based on the same foundation: biblical inerrancy.
It will be instructive to see whether any enthusiasts for the more moderate political work of O’Donovan turn is essentially negative critique of modernity to the task of crafting a positive program of action. Or is it only hard-line Calvinist post-millenialists who understand, as Gary North put it, that you can’t beat something with nothing? Are they the only ones who can craft long-term programs for Christian cultural and political action?
[1] See here for a critical look at Ellul and his anti-politics by my former sparring-partner Michael Bauman, here for Greg Boyd squeeing like a love-struck fan-girl (I say this lovingly but truthfully — he was the one who (via Brad Schrum) introduced me to Open Theism and I am thankful for it), and here for John Hobbins striving to continue the task of constructing anti-politics for today.
Related Posts:
Thoughts on O’Donovan’s “The Desire of the Nations”
Around 2 a.m. a month ago, in a smoke-filled hookah bar in Orlando, Florida, I found myself engaged in a conversation about religion and politics with a man who spent his career at the intersection between the two (I count his brief stint as a bar-tender as religious/political work in addition to his more overtly religious and political work). I asked whether there were any books he’d recommend on the intersection between the two divisive fields, and he recommended Oliver O’Donovan’s The Desire of the Nations, which I have finally gotten around to reading. It has not disappointing, so now I intend to begin reading the approximately thirty other titles that rapidly spilled out from between his moustache and goatee over about the next half-hour.
The most important contribution of the book is its thorough and sober-minded treatment of the “separation of church and state,” a notion which has undergone many permutations through the centuries, and was perhaps most thoughtfully considered by theologians of the much-maligned Middle Ages. Moses, Samuel, David, Isaiah, Paul, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Hobbes, Ellul, and even Stanley Hauerwas are among his conversation-partners in an interdisciplinary look at theology, history, philosophy, and politics. Though a 288 pages in length, the book surprises in its breadth, covering the judicial functions of the governing authorities as portrayed in Psalms and Romans, the evolution of the concept of the state, and the ambiguities involved in Christianity’s responses to the institution of slavery, state violence, and the papacy through the ages.
The greatest fault of the book lies, ironically, in O’Donovan’s too easy dismissal of Christendom. While he seriously interacts with Christendom as a past “witness” to Christian theopolitical imagination, he joins Ellul (see The New Demons) in hastily making the fashionable assumption that Christendom is dead, presumably never again to rise. For Ellul this mistake is at least consistent, for Ellul is about the task of constructing a Christian anti-politics [1]. He has a basically pessimistic about historical progress, seeing modernity as an irreversible disaster and anarchism as the only cure — for him, a return to Christendom is neither possible nor desirable, and so Christendom, for all its strengths, is merely historical. For O’Donovan, announcing the death of Christendom is an inconsistency. It marks an unconscious capitulation to late-modernity’s portrayal of religion as a tyrant to be kept out of the public square.
O’Donovan goes to great pains to take down both secular and religious (e.g. Hauerwas) conceptions of religion as disqualified from the public square. He goes to great lengths to defend the notion of the church as having the authority to morally stand in judgment against the church. He goes to great lengths to defend the notion that the church has the moral authority to stand in judgment of the state. In short, he preaches a set of ideas which, if widely accepted, would inevitably lead to some sort of Christendom, some sort of arrangement which he has decried as impossible. Is he speaking to effect change, or merely to cast down judgment on a hardened people?
In his own way, he is an Anglican counterpart to the Presbyterian Cornelius Van Til: a sort of intellectual demolitions expert, devoted to dynamiting the false edifices of modernity, but without an alternative to it. In the case of Van Til, that Calvinist demolition job left a vacuum filled by Calvinist Reconstructionists such as Greg Bahnsen, R. J. Rushdoony, Gary North, and to a lesser extent Francis Schaeffer. They followed his radical apologetics (presuppositionalism) with a radical political program (reconstructionism) based on the same foundation: biblical inerrancy.
It will be instructive to see whether any enthusiasts for the more moderate political work of O’Donovan turn is essentially negative critique of modernity to the task of crafting a positive program of action. Or is it only hard-line Calvinist post-millenialists who understand, as Gary North put it, that you can’t beat something with nothing? Are they the only ones who can craft long-term programs for Christian cultural and political action?
[1] See here for a critical look at Ellul and his anti-politics by my former sparring-partner Michael Bauman, here for Greg Boyd squeeing like a love-struck fan-girl (I say this lovingly but truthfully — he was the one who (via Brad Schrum) introduced me to Open Theism and I am thankful for it), and here for John Hobbins striving to continue the task of constructing anti-politics for today.
Related Posts: