Category: Online Resources
Outline for ethics: a response to Oliver O’Donovan
Stephen N. Williams review article of O’Donovan’s “Resurrection and Moral Order”
“Judge not” and “Judge for yourselves” (O’Donovan, 2013)
The presenting question about the category of judgment is its ambivalence: why is it an activity that we are sometimes warned against, sometimes encouraged to undertake? To begin with, we must make some
cursory observations on the scope of the term.
The Language of Rights and Conceptual History (O’Donovan, 2009)
In the Journal of Religious Ethics in 2009 O’Donovan offered a critical reading of Nicholas Wolterstorff on rights
Abstract
The historical problem about the origins of the language of rights derives its importance from the conceptual problem: of “two fundamentally different ways of thinking about justice,” which is basic? Is justice unitary or plural? This in turn opens up a problem about the moral status of human nature. A narrative of the origins of “rights” is an account of how and when a plural concept of justice comes to the fore, and will be based on the occurrence of definite speech-forms—the occurrence of the plural noun in the sense of “legal properties.” The history of this development is currently held to begin with the twelfth-century canonists. Later significant thresholds may be found in the fourteenth, sixteenth, and eighteenth centuries. Wolterstorff’s attempt to find the implicit recognition of rights in the Scriptures depends very heavily on what he takes to be implied rather than on what is stated, and at best can establish a pre-history of rights-language.
[embeddoc url="http://enlight.lib.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-AN/an178770.pdf" download="all" viewer="google"]
Wolterstorff’s reponse to him and others appeared in the same issue
[embeddoc url="http://enlight.lib.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-AN/an178777.pdf" download="all" viewer="google"]There Are No Just Wars: David Rodin and Oliver O’Donovan’s Divergent Critiques of a Tradition by David A. Hoekema (2008)
Abstract
Two recent monographs re-examine the central elements of the just war tradition and its contemporary applications. David Rodin’s War and Self-Defense analyzes, and rejects, the common doctrine that just war is an instance of national self-defense, in parallel with the right of individuals to protect themselves against violent attack. This derivation fails, and it cannot justify resort to war. In contrast, Oliver O’Donovan’s The Just War Revisited dismisses the notion that there are rules for just war and calls instead for careful and deliberate practical reasoning in particular contexts. Indeed, there can be no just wars, only specific acts that pass the
tests of theological, historical, and practical scrutiny.
The Right Reason for Caesar to Confess Christ as Lord: Oliver O’Donovan and arguments for the Christian State by David McIlroy (2008)
The power of O’Donovan’s arguments is not just his own. What gives O’Donovan’s arguments their weight is the fact that he writes as an Augustinian theologian, and his writings have rightly been described as a contemporary version of The City of God.
Towards an Interpretation of Biblical Ethics (O’Donovan, 1975)
Tyndale Biblical Theology Lecture 1975
The Savior Enters In – A Sermon (O’Donovan, 2004)
Rejoice greatly, daughter of Zion; shout aloud, daughter of Jerusalem. See, your king comes to you, his cause won, his victory gained, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt the foal of a donkey. (Zechariah 9:9)
And as it was written in the prophecy of Zechariah, so it occurred. The king came to Jerusalem, and the crowds that accompanied him shouted and sang with joy. Here was a ruler whose mount was not the military charger but the domestic pack-animal, a ruler with a popular bearing with whom they could identify, a ruler with a pacific programme, whose authority conferred by God would put an end to conflict and free their life from fear. And so they did identify with him, and so they did become fearless, strewing branches in his path and running confidently alongside. But then came a turn to this happy scene not written in the prophecy of Zechariah, the turn that disconcerts us today and every Palm Sunday. “Behold, your king comes!” declared the prophet, and “This is the king of the Jews!” was written over his cross a week later. How could the triumph of divine authority give place in so short a time to its defeat?