Outline of O’Donovan’s Desire of the Nations

With the current discussion of Christian nationalism, and the apparent lack of biblical exegesis in Stephen Wolfe’s book, it seemed appropriate to provide a clear model of real political theology from Oliver O’Donovan’s Desire of the Nations.

The Revelation of God’s Kingship (36-41)

Isaiah 33:22:   Yhwh is our king; Yhwh is our judge; Yhwh is our lawgiver.  He will save us.”  

Ideas are connected.  Kingship implies judgment, lawgiving, and salvation.  

Salvation

The early Hebrews saw this element in the Psalms.   While it included salvation from sin, the term is often used to show God’s victories of his people’s enemies.   

What is the purpose of these victories? (Ps. 13:5; 85:7).   They show God’s hesed, his enduring commitment to those in his covenant.  Hesed often stands in parallel to the Hebrew word for faithfulness (Psalm 98.3).  

These victories also show God’s tsedeq, righteousness.  In the Psalms God’s righteousness is a public thing.   When he shows his right hand and holy arm, the nations will know (98.2). This is an important point in later Israelite history.   You are an Israelite living in Babylon.   While you are the chosen people of God, you have been publicly shamed by a pagan power (and presumably, so has your God).  Therefore, when God acts to show his righteousness, it must be public:  Is. 45.5; 46.13;51.5-8;56.1;61.10; 62.1).

Judgment

The Hebrew root words relating to God’s righteousness often appear in connection with his shpt, judgment.  

This illustrates the problem with ancient Israel’s existence.  They were God’s chosen people yet they often worshipped idols.  If it is true that God vindicates his name among the pagans because he is a just God, how much more true will he vindicate his name among his people?  

What do we mean by the words “judgment” and “justice?”  The Hebrew word for “judgment” is mishpat.  When it is used in the Bible it is seen as a judicial performance.  When true “judgment” is present it is not a state of affairs but an activity that is carried out.  

The prophet Amos calls for mishpat to roll on like a river.  Isaiah says that the citizens of Jerusalem should seek mishpat by giving judgment in the cause of the fatherless and widow (1:17).  Isaiah even goes on to say that Zion will even be redeemed by mishpat (1:26ff).  

The judgments of Yahweh have lasting validity because all of his acts have lasting validity.  

This leads into what the Israelites believed about…

Law

If you look at the Old Testament law code, it is strange.   But maybe it shouldn’t be.   For us Westerners there is a sharp distinction between history and law.    This was not so for the Hebrew.  For Israel “history” is the telling of God’s acts to future generations.  Law was the telling of his judgments (mishpatim). 

Psalm 119 is a case in point.  There are several terms of importance.   Testimony and decree. Interestingly enough, other Psalmists use the words in connection with a word we have just seen:  judgment.  See Psalm 81:4-5.  

When the kingdom of Judah had its reforming moments, it is evident that “testimony” and “law” were in the foreground.  2 Kgs 22:8-13.  Jer. 26:1ff.  In both cases we see that “law” is simply more than a “code.”  It is attesting that God will live out his judgments in Israel’s history. 

Look at how Psalm 96:10 unfolds:  the nations are to be told that Yhwh is king, that he established the world on firm foundations, and that he will judge the peoples with equity. 

Without the consciousness of something possessed and handed on, there could never be a political theology, since it could never be clear how the judgments of God could give order and sustain a community (48ff).  

In other words, something needs to be possessed and handed down.  This traditional possession was not always identified with “The Law.”  Originally, the existence of Israel was mediated through the Land.  Possessing the land was a matter of observing the order of life which was established by Yahweh’s judgments (Psalm 37:29ff).  

Land = material cause of Yahweh’s Kingly Rule

judgments = formal cause of Yahweh’s Kingly Rule

Victories = efficient cause of Yahweh’s Kingly Rule

Mediators of Yahweh’s Rule

Yahweh’s authority is image-less, like Yahweh himself.   However, Yahweh is immediately present in conquest, judgment, and law.  Israel still had a problem in its history:  it could never consolidate.  It had land, judgment, and victories (though never absolutely), but it had no stable means of passing it down.  Even acknowledging the sacred writer’s criticism of monarchy (1 Sam. 8), it must be acknowledged that monarchy exercised a stabilizing influence when contrasted with the Judges period.  Most importantly, monarchy allowed the passing down of the tradition (Land, Judgments, Victories).  

Dual Authority

Two cities; two rules.  Israel and Babylon side by side.  

The foreign sword, exile gives Israel a chance to separate from idolatrous connections (84).

Empire is necessarily unstable

The fulfilling of time

Jesus’s words of God’s reign were confirmed by power.  The point: instruction runs parallel to authority (Mark 1:22, 27: Luke:  4:36).  

The previous duality is transformed: The Two Cities (Babylon/Jerusalem) were indicative of Israel’s alienation.  They were soon to be replaced by the Two Eras (93).  Israel previously owed its existence (30-49) through Yahweh’s victories, Judgments, and gift of Land.  This is transformed in Jesus’s ministry

1. Works of Power;  demonstration of God’s rule.  Their function was to draw attention to his preaching.   
2. Jesus proclaimed the coming judgment of Israel:  Matt 8:11; this judgment creates new situations and new conditions.
3. Jesus, Israel, and the Law:
   1. Sabbath:  The law is reinterpreted so man could fully realize God’s welfare for him.
   2. Disciples:  Forming a new community.  Authority has been refashioned on how God models his own authority.
   3. Fulfilling the law:  Law is treated as a kind of promise.  It anticipates a righteousness for which the faithful hungered.  

Triumph of the Kingdom pp. 120-157

The Representative (120)

Jesus proclaimed Kingdom; apostolic church did not.  This is no accident.  The latter proclaimed/illustrated what happens when the Kingdom came in conflict with principalities.

Progressive mediations: “God’s rule was discerned through the judicial tasks of angels and kings in all the nations; it was discerned in special covenant through the vocation of the Davidide line.   But now the last layer of the veil is drawn back”(124).

In Ezekiel we see the immediate disclosure of Yahweh’s rule in the Davidic line (Ez. 34:1-31).

OO’s critique of classic republicanism:  127.

Representation and Authority:  our life under Christ’s resurrection is service to righteousness (129).  Resurrection establishes authority of new life (NB: Note the important connection between resurrection and reigning).  

Representation of Israel → Representation of human race:  OO rejects “replacement theology” (131).  Jesus is Israel’s identity.  Servant passages in Isaiah.  Israel’s public tradition (Romans 9:1-4) is continuous.   

Moments of the Representative Act (133)

1. Advent:  Jesus mediates kingdom in his personal being.  Fulfills all God intended (Isaiah 42).
2. Passion:    judgment has two acts:  separation of innocent and guilty; and affirmation of the innocent.  Both are seen in cross/resurrection:  Christ is set in opposition to guilty Israel and vindicated before Israel.  Pilate’s irony:  “The answer to his (Pilate) question is that his own authority, which he tries to assert by threatening, is also dependent on a source.  Is that source Caesar, or is it God?  The question is left open for the moment, but the answer will come:  because it depends on Caesar, it depends on God, since Caesar is destined to fulfill the role God designed for him…(continuing 141).
3. Restoration of Christ:  judges Israel’s sin and reaffirms Israel’s new identity in Christ.
4. Exaltation:  royal imagery (Ps. 2:1).  Power put forth, judgment effected, gift of communal identity.  

Subjection of the Nations

To what extent is secular authority compatible with the Christ-mission?  

Romans 13:1ff; government’s purpose is judgment.  To this degree is secular authority compatible with the Christ-mission:  it has the role of judgment.  Mishpt.  This reflects the New Christian situation.  

Secular authorities do not mediate the rule of God (rule = judgment, victory, law); they merely mediate his judgment (151).  Their victories and such are rendered irrelevant by Christ’s victory.  

The church has no distinct social presence:  its witnesses call back to the Holy City.  Interestingly in Revelation 18ff we see a converging of Israel, the Eschatological Church, and the Antichrist Empire.

The Authorisation of the Church 

The dual authority assumes a distinct form. OO is somewhat confusing on this identity.  He says he isn’t defending Christendom, but its hard to see otherwise.  

1. OO asserts the church is a political society.  At the very least this means that the church is an independent society (161).  It is authorised by Pentecost.
   1. The church prolongs the ancient faithfulness of Israel, not replaces it. 
2. Its essential nature as a governed society is hidden, to be discerned by faith.  This helps protect us from claims that such-and-so a church government is the essence of the bride of Christ.  OO rebuts Ignatius on p. 168ff.  Ministerial orders are derived, not posited.  They are disclosed from heaven.  
3. The relation of the church to Christ is a recapitulation of the Christ-event (171).  The church’s sacraments authenticate its ministry, not the other way around.  

Moments of Recapitulation

The Christ-event is the structuring principle for all ecclesiology.  

1. In response to the Advent, the church is a gathering community.   (Some thoughts on unity form 176-177).  The unity inheres in the confession of Jesus as God’s Son.  This is only possible by the Holy Spirit (177).   [NB:  Unity is a spiritual thing, not a material or tangible thing.  Therefore, Protestants should not be embarrassed by supposed “fractures”] 
   
2. The church is a suffering community. 
   
3. It is a glad community (181).  A Delight in what God has done in Christ.
   1. Moral life of the church:  vindication of God’s rule in Christ’s resurrection.  
   2. Keeping of the Lord’s day:  Ground of all moral principles in the church (Barth).   OO tries to steer a mediating path between the Patristic denial of the Lord’s Day = Sabbath (radical newness) and the Reformation identifying the two (conservative sameness).  

4. It is a prophetic community.  The church is authorised to deploy the powers of the kingdom of God.  These powers are displayed through speech.
   1. The presence of prophecy directs us to the charism.  
   2. To prophecy: to speak a word from God to the church in the here and now.  OO denies that it is merely synonymous with preaching.

Our narrative of the church is the inner logic of the sequence of the kingdom of God (191).  

The Obedience of Rulers

Christendom: The Doctrine of the Two

OO:  society and rulers have different destinies:  the former is to be transformed, shaped in conformity to God’s purpose; the latter to disappear, renouncing their sovereignty in the face of his (193).  Nice statement, but Revelation speaks of kings being healed by the New Jerusalem.

Contrary to critics, OO is not advocating Christendom.  He is merely noting it is a historical response to Christ’s witness (195).

OO offers good reading of Constantine and the interpretations that followed.  Per Eusebius, Constantine filled the place of the Parousia (which seems to echo Moltmann’s contention that the church ceased being premillennial because it became Constantinian).  

Redefining the Boundary

Church contrasted the roles of emperor and bishop as a transition from old age to new (199). This is best exemplified in Ambrose of Milan.  

Two Rules

Gelasius deconstructed Augustine:  he translated the duality from the level of society (two loves made two cities) to the level of government (two there are by whom this world is ruled; 203).  

Problem arose: who inherited the kingly aspect of Christ’s ministry, emperor or bishop?  

Supremacy of Spiritual Authority

soul of Christendom is church.  body is king.  Soul superior to Body.   highly neo-platonic (205). 

The Authority of Word Alone

What does spiritual authority mean?  property meant power; power meant jurisdiction; jurisdiction meant authority, and authority meant a proper role for the church’s shaping society (207).  Franciscans rejected this line of thought.

Marsilius of Padua offered a good, even eschatological perspective:  since Christ’s judgment is still future, it is impossible to represent it now by any single icon of political government (208).

Restoring the Balance

Calvinism?

Mission or Coercion

The doctrine of the Two was best seen as a doctrine of two ages (211).  

State forms outer circle; church inner circle; kingdom the center.  The Church reminds the state and the state bears witness to Christ’s rule (per Barth, OO, 213).  

Antichrist: the convergence in one subject of claims to earthly political rule and heavenly soteriological mediation (214ff).  

Martyrdom is the witness of an alternative Lord. 

OO is at pains to say that a Christian state need not be a coercive state.  Logically, he is correct.   

Christendom and the Liberal Tradition

OO gently rebuts Chesterton’s Catholic neo-Medievalism.  OO notes that the sources of modernity lie within the Christendom tradition and not simply Protestantism (228).  

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The Lion of the Covenant

The Lion of the Covenant by Maurice Grant.

Even in the best of times the relationship between Church and State has always been uneasy. While the idea of a Christian state is a hoped-for goal for many, the fact remains that the State has more often than not been the enemy of the church. Even more diabolical, however, is when the ecclesiastical establishment allies with the State and it, too, becomes an enemy to the people of God. So it was in Richard Cameron’s day.

Maurice Grant does a fine job in quickly and deftly explaining the context of the Cromwellian period and afterward. Of particular note is the controversy between the Protestors and Resolutioners, the former rejecting any compromise of Jesus’ crown rights over his church. The flow of the story parallels Richard Cameron’s own life. It starts small and remains uneventful for quite some time. Grant treats his readers to the intricate details of Cameron’s own development, his turbulent ministry, and his climactic (and prophetic) death.

More importantly, however, are the issues around which Cameron fought. If the civil magistrate proclaims himself head of the church, and thus blurs the distinction between Church and State, is it logically possible to resist him only in the realm of the church but leave him be in the realm of the State? Cameron’s critics say yes. Cameron said no. The Stuart monarchs also said no.

So what should we do?

I am not uncritical of Cameron, though. On a theoretical level, I agree with his taking arms against thugs who happened to have been deputized by a foreign power. That is Lex, Rex plain and simple. Grant is correct, though, that Cameron had not thought out the issues as thoroughly as his friend Donald Cargill had. The Scottish Reformation championed the idea of armed resistance to a king. But it still saw the king as king. Disowning a king, however, runs very close to the Romanist concept of a pope deposing kings as he saw fit. Cameron could have justified his actions with far more powerful arguments by relying much more closely on Rutherford.

Should we, likewise, resist tyrannical rulers? Well, it depends. Our situation is not analagous to Cameron’s, though one suspects the we live in a secular Erastianism. Cameron saw himself fully justified in resistance because by culture, tradition, and prior law he was bound to uphold the Covenants. We can’t exactly make that claim today. So what should we do? At the moment, nothing beyond a careful reading and application of Rutherford.

In conclusion, Richard Cameron represents an interesting case-study in church-state relations. He brings almost all of the logical implications of a previous century of covenantal thought to an armed showdown. I say “almost all.” He didn’t read Rutherford as carefully as he probably thought he did.

Hobbes: Leviathan

In the beginning of his treatise Hobbes stays very close to the “Received Tradition.” He does make some troubling moves, though, and quite subtlely. He rejects the idea of a “Summum Bonum.” His definition of natural law leaves out any reference to the eternal law or the mind of God. He views liberty as a zero-sum game.

Key themes:

Anthropology: Hobbes begins with anthropology, and his politics are logical inferences from it. Hobbes defines a “Body” as that which occupies space. Substance is matter, synonymous with body. The soul is simply the body living. He specifically rejects the idea that the soul is distinct from the body (639). Hobbes has defined man in purely material terms.

Not surprisingly, Hobbes rejects free agency. Liberty and necessity are the same thing: what a man does he freely does. Yet every act of man has a desire, and so a cause. And from that another cause, all the way back to the First Cause. This appears to be Jonathan Edwards’ view as well.

Social Contract: before the institution of the commonwealth, every man had a right to everything and by any means to preserve his own (354). This means that the State can never make an unjust law.
P1: Justice is when two agree to an exchange (if you didn’t agree, you wouldn’t do the exchange).
P2: You agreed to invest the state with authority (social contract).
________________
Therefore, any law the state makes automatically has your agreement.

Zero-Sum ethics: Hobbes holds that what is mine cannot be yours; if the state has liberty, then the subject to that degree cannot. Since there is no summum bonum, there can be no sharing in the ultimate good. This, plain and simple, is the economics of Hell. Hobbes is not a pure capitalist, though. He argues elsewhere against private charity and for state welfare (387).

Religious Persecution

Hobbes argues that religious persecution is impossible, since 1) the state can’t do wrong, and 2) only martyrs can be persecuted. Further (2a) a person can only be a martyr if they have seen the risen Jesus, which rules out everyone after the Apostle John. Therefore, no one today can be a martyr. Keep in mind that thousands of Scottish Covenanters were being butchered on the basis of Hobbes’ argument. This reminds me of a time at RTS when a local Reformed pastor came in the book store and told me that he held to Hobbes’s view of the state. I kept my mouth shut because I didn’t want to end up in a FEMA camp.

Critique

My critique will follow Dabney’s (The Sensualistic Philosophy, pp. 15-20). Hobbes has to pay a high price for his materialism. If everything reduces to sensation, then whence come numbers, mind, any correspondence between my mind and the external world, all a priori judgments, logic, and abstract entities?

If everything is sensation, then what unites the sensations? (Hume’s famous line “a bundle of sensations”) Hobbes would have to answer yet another sensation. But what unites that sensation to the previous sensations? Ad infinitum. If Hobbes bites the bullet and rejects the need for a unity, then he needs to give up concepts like identity (and probably the concept of “concept” itself). This is the fatal consequence in rejecting philosophical realism. Hobbes is split between the One and the Many. His power-state collapses everything into the One, yet his nominalism reduces everything to an aggregate of an unconnected Many.

Conclusion

I give the book 1 star for its demonic content and 5 stars for its influence. Indeed, rebutting Hobbes is like casting down demonic strongholds (2 Corinthians 10). It’s fairly easy to read and there is no mistaking its influence (the “Father of Political Science”)

Review: Gillespie, Aaron’s Rod Blossoming

Argument of Book: there exists a religious tribunal distinct from that of the civil magistrate.  This tribunal has the power of excommunication. In fact, Gillespie’s overall argument is quite simple, despite the learned discussions in the book.  Erastianism is not necessarily an outward threat to the church by the state. It is simply the state’s prerogative to control church discipline.

I am not going to spend too much time reviewing the arguments that the Jewish church had an ecclesial body distinct from the civil magistrate.  That is not where the battle is being fought today.

Church and State, the Civil Magistrate

There is a distinction between magistracy and ministry; as such, there offices are also distinct (80).  Magistrates and ministers differ in their causes:

1. The efficient cause: The king of nations hath instituted civil power; the king of saints ecclesial (86).
2. Material: civil magistracy is punitive.  The magistrate has the sword, the minister the keys.
3. Formal: the power of magistracy is architectonic and despotic and is immediately subordinate to God.  The ecclesial is diakonike and subordinate to Jesus as King of the Church.
4. Final: magistracy is only for the glory of God as king of nations.  And while the magistrate ought to be a Christian, he is not participating as Christ’s sub-mediator.

Of the Twofold Kingdom

Jesus has dominion over all things as Son of God, but his special kingdom is the church, of which he is mediator. We are not separating the Person of Christ, but simply making distinctions.  Arguments proving it:

1. Does Jesus reign over devils by his mediatorial work or by his divine power?  Obviously the latter. Therefore, it is a separate kingdom.
2. His being the ‘heir of all things,’ receiving the heathen, relates to the church (94).
3. In Scripture, pagan civil governments are recognized as legitimate, even if they are not under Christ.

The Christian Magistrate

He may govern “in the church” but he may not govern the church. He governs not qua the church, but qua the commonwealth. For example, the magistrate must not have the power of church censures, but he ought to punish (some) like sins with like punishments.  But he cannot do that if he has church censures, for the heathen must be punished civilly but the believer with church discipline (115).

Christ’s Visible Kingdom

Christ’s visible kingdom, distinct from his invisible one, is proved from Matt. 26.28, which cannot refer to his coming in glory, “for all that were then hearing Christ have tasted death” (137).

Good discussion of “cutting off” (26ff).  Gillespie argues that it usually means “removal from the sanctuary/holy people.”

Sacraments not converting ordinances

Gillespie on conversion: can be distinguished between habitual conversion and subsequent works of grace. Habitual conversion is the first infusion of life and habits of grace.

(1) That which is an instituted sign is not an operating cause whereby it makes that which is signified present where it is not (236).

(2) That which necessarily supposeth conversion and faith is not that which works conversion of and faith.  Smoke presupposes fire but it does not cause fire.

(4) If an ordinance is instituted for believers only (Lord’s Supper), then it is not a converting but a sealing ordinance.

(7) Those who come to the Lord’s Wedding Feast must have a wedding garment, but the unconverted do not have this.

(10) The prohibition against eating and drinking unworthily necessarily excludes the unconverted.

Extra: how can it be a pledge of union and communion with Christ when such a one is far off from Christ?