Christian politics

The Ways of Judgment. By Oliver O'Donovan. Eerdmans, 356 pp., $35.00.

NO ONE should accuse Oliver O'Donovan of tackling easy topics. In The Desire of the Nations (Cambridge University Press, 1999) he defended an idea most of us thought was dead and buried: Christendom. The dominant liberal attitudes of our time celebrate pluralism, including religious pluralism; we wouldn't want to go back to the narrow old days when Christianity dominated society. Stanley Hauerwas and his friends rejoice that as a supposedly embattled minority, Christians can now stand up for what they believe much more easily than they could when they carried the burden of theirs being the whole culture's more or less official religion. Until O'Donovan, professor of moral and pastoral theology at Oxford, everyone seemed to agree that Christendom--the idea that Christian faith should shape the secular order--was a bad idea.

But Christians, O'Donovan argued, ought to engage in mission--in trying to convince the world of the truth and value of the gospel. Suppose we managed to convince our political leaders and a majority of our fellow citizens. Should we be embarrassed by our success and hasten to insist that we didn't really want people to listen to us? Or should we rejoice that Christian ideas would now help to shape our political culture? (O'Donovan wasn't talking about a "Christian America" run by Pat Robertson, but about a nation guided by real Christian values.)

Old-fashioned liberals from Milton to Mill, O'Donovan pointed out, valued intellectual diversity because it helps us find the truth. The combat among different ideas helps lead us to the right answer. He worried, however, that nowadays people celebrate diversify for its own sake, as if actually finding truth or even finding agreement would be some kind of tragedy. But suppose we did agree on how society ought to be organized, and suppose that agreement rested on Christian principles. Should Christians find that so terrible?

Hauerwas would reply that Christianity would then sell its birthright, compromising its principles for power. Well, maybe, O'Donovan would answer, but are Christians so obviously independent-minded now in our non-Christendom culture, or do we sell out just as quickly to "the commonplaces of the stock exchange, the law courts, and the public schools"? Pluralists would worry about the oppression of non-Christian minorities. But a truly Christian polity would, on Christian grounds, not oppress. Indeed, it would be willing to let itself be supplanted, recognizing that political entities come and go, while only the church endures.

O'Donovan's new book, a sequel to The Desire of the Nations, has no similarly surprising central thesis, but in its own way it is at least as bold. Desire was a work of theology, exploring what Christian theology has to say about politics. The Ways of Judgment is a work of political theory, systematically addressing from a Christian perspective the kinds of questions political theorists tackle. It is an application to political theory of what H. Richard Niebuhr called "Christ the transformer of culture." O'Donovan protests that too much recent "political theology" (liberation theology would be one example) assumes that we know the right answers about polities and should use them to resolve the ambiguities of Christian theology. On the contrary, he contends, it is contemporary political reflection that is an incoherent mess, and it is the gospel that offers some clear answers that could really help.

In rich dialogue with both political thinkers and the Christian tradition, O'Donovan addresses many of the traditional topics of a course in political theory: justice, equality, authority, legitimacy and so on. What governments do, he says in part 1, is judge. Every government action, from making laws to waging war to setting up schools, is an act of moral discrimination that makes a judgment about the right and wrong of what we have done and what we ought to do next. Making such judgments requires political institutions--the topic of part 2--and Christians have to think about the relation of those institutions to the church, as discussed in part 3.

At every stage O'Donovan offers challenging conclusions. Writing about judgment, for instance, he reflects on how punishment, in principle, has three possible beneficiaries: the victim, the offender and the society. Victims get revenge; offenders get rehabilitation; society gets protection from future crimes as one criminal is locked up and others are deterred. "In Christian thought, however, the victim's benefit was removed from consideration." Revenge is simply not an appropriate goal for Christians, and therefore rehabilitation and the future protection of society are the only acceptable goals when we punish. The fact that today we set up ways for victims or their families to watch executions and testify in favor of more severe sentencing is "a measure of the deep de-Christianization of our times."