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Oliver O'Donovan's The Ways of Judgment

Introduction The book is the long-anticipated sequel to The Desire of the Nations1, a book which, as one commentator put it at the time, ‘interrupted the conversation’ about the place of faith in political life and set it off in a new direction. Whereas the earlier book was presented as a treatise in ‘political theology’, to be followed by one designated as a work of ‘political ethics’ (Desire, p. xi), the author is today more concerned to uphold the continuity and coherence between these two moments in Christian political reflection than to insist on any sharp demarcation between their respective territories. The distinction is stated straightforwardly: ‘The second [book] continues the exploration that the first began, into how theological and political concepts correspond; but it approaches the correspondence more from the political side’ (p. x). As in Desire, O’Donovan pointedly wishes to distinguish his enterprise from those forms of late twentieth-century political theology which, he charges, attempted in accommodationist spirit ‘to order our theological concepts to the service of a suitably liberal political world-view’ (p. x). Turning tables in a style reminiscent of Radical Orthodoxy, he writes: ‘The proper political orientations were taken to be well understood, the shape of our theological beliefs indefinitely negotiable. I start from diametrically opposite assumptions. The Gospel proclamation I take to be, in its essential features, luminous, the political concepts needed to interpret the social and institutional realities around us obscure and elusive’ (p. x). The proposal that the meaning of the Gospel is fundamentally perspicuous while that of contemporary politics is hopelessly befogged is an example of the (to this reviewer, refreshing) apologetic audacity we have come to expect from this author. Readers will no doubt reach different conclusions by the end of this book as to the sustainability of that stark antithesis. In any event, it is what lies behind the author’s further claim that, since citizens of modern liberal democracies no longer understand the meaning of their political institutions – modernist ‘master-narratives’ having conspicuously failed to illumine