Law and Gospel in Public

Law and Gospel in Public April 2, 2015

Drawing on the work of Oliver O’Donovan, Jamie Smith offers a critique of natural law as an adequate grounding for political theology. Positively, Smith argues that “he public task of the church is not just to remind the world of what it (allegedly) already knows (by ‘natural’ reason), but to proclaim what it couldn’t otherwise know—and to do so as a public service for the sake of the common good.”

The issue is not ontological but epistemological. Smith notes that “O’Donovan affirms the objective moral order that inheres in creation,” but argues that “taking seriously humanity’s fallenness (per Romans 1) undercuts the epistemic confidence on which natural theology programs depend.” As O’Donovan puts it, “In speaking of man’s fallenness, we point not only to his persistent rejection of the created order, but also to an inescapable confusion in his perceptions of it. This does not permit us to follow the Stoic recipe for ‘life in accord with nature’ without a measure of epistemological guardedness.” (A certain characteristic guardedness is that formulation!)

O’Donovan argues that it is only in the gospel that we have confidence to know that the creation order hasn’t been wholly dismantled by sin. He writes, “that man’s rebellion has not succeeded in destroying the natural order to which he belongs; but that is something which we could not say with theological authority except on the basis of God’s revelation in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We say that this, that or the other cultural demand or prohibition . . . reflects the created order faithfully, but that too is something which we can known only by taking our place within the revelation of that order afforded us in Christ. It is not, as the skeptics and relativists remind us, self-evident what is nature and what is convention.”

Thus for O’Donovan, “political theology must go beyond such general conceptions, and take on the character of a proclamatory history, attesting the claim that Yhwh reigns. Its subject is God’s rule demonstrated and vindicated, the salvation that he has wrought in Israel and the nations. Unless it speaks in that way it can only advance a theological type of political theory, not an evangelical political theology, a ‘Law,’ in the theological sense, rather than a ‘Gospel.’”


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