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.
Tyndale Biblical Theology Lecture 1975
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?
What did you find when you went looking for the roots of political theology for your book “The Desire of the Nations,” and were you surprised at what you found?
Yes I was, though it was quite a moment of discovery, I think. I came at it from a series of moral questions about the just war, having been well taught by my ethics teacher Paul Ramsey at Princeton. In the early 80s I decided I had to get into this much more thoroughly, so I went back then to the founding texts of the just war tradition from the 17th century and found, to my amazement and delight, not just a sort of just war theory but a whole political theory, a whole elaboration of political concepts that covered a huge range of things and was deeply theological in inspiration. That helped me understand what Hobbes was doing, and when, coming out of this tradition and using this tradition, himself having a great theological interest, he set apart the political thought from the theological thought, creating, as it were, a sort of autonomous structure of political thought that lived on its own, and so I said to myself at that point, “What I’ve got to do is actually get back behind that great division and see finally what was going on.”
They went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. (Mark 16:8)
This is the last, and most extraordinary, of the silences of Saint Mark’s Gospel, which is a book full of silences. “See that you say nothing to anyone!” So Jesus warned the leper he had healed; and when he cured the deaf-mute he told all who were present to tell nobody. It was the same for those who saw Jairus’ daughter raised from the dead; and the blind man of Bethsaida was sent home with his sight restored, but not allowed so much as a courtesy call in the village he had begged in, in case he talked. Jesus silenced the demons who said they knew who he was. Only Legion was instructed to speak. He silenced Simon Peter when he said “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”; and finally, most strikingly, he was silent himself, when Caiaphas and Pilate tried to interrogate him.
“It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. …We will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.” (Acts 6:4)
So the apostles spoke, defining their own wholly important and not to be neglected ministry over against the other ministry of the church, also wholly important and not to be neglected, the ministry of the deacons. Ministry has a twofold shape, and many of us engaged in ministry are constantly aware of the fact as we experience a kind of tug-of-war on our attention. Our traditional threefold pattern, of bishops, priests and deacons grows out of this twofold pattern. The bishop, as Hooker quaintly put it, is entrusted with a “chiefty in government” among those who minister the word and sacrament. He is to guide their ministry and take responsibility for it. So it is that the ministry for which we have come to present Tom Wright to the Archbishop today is in one respect not new to him, for he has exercised it as a priest and theologian, and in another respect quite new.
Oliver O’Donovan has made substantial contributions to the field of Christian moral theology. His work, however, is not confined to the academy; indeed, it informs the church’s mission and ministry. This brief essay cannot do justice to either the breadth or depth of his work, but some of the more significant strands can be sketched by focusing on three themes: (1) nature and social ordering, (2) eschatology and moral ordering, and (3) the church and …
This note from Professor Oliver O’Donovan was made available to the House of Bishops as background material for its consideration of these matters prior to its decision to release its statement at GS Misc 960, following its meeting in May 2010. Download full note as RTF document here
