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{"id":17148,"date":"2015-04-02T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-04-02T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=1974"},"modified":"2015-04-02T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-04-02T00:00:00","slug":"law-and-gospel-in-public","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2015\/04\/law-and-gospel-in-public\/","title":{"rendered":"Law and Gospel in Public"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

Drawing on the work of Oliver O\u2019Donovan, Jamie Smith offers a\u00a0critique<\/a> of natural law as an adequate grounding for political theology. Positively, Smith argues that \u201che public task of the church is not just to remind the world of what it (allegedly) already knows (by \u2018natural\u2019 reason), but to proclaim what it couldn\u2019t otherwise know\u2014and to do so as a public service for the sake of the common good.\u201d<\/p>\n

The issue is not ontological but epistemological. Smith notes that \u201cO\u2019Donovan affirms the objective moral order that inheres in creation,\u201d but argues that \u201ctaking seriously humanity\u2019s fallenness (per Romans 1) undercuts the epistemic confidence on which natural theology programs depend.\u201d As O\u2019Donovan puts it, \u201cIn speaking of man\u2019s 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 \u2018life in accord with nature\u2019 without a measure of epistemological guardedness.\u201d (A certain characteristic guardedness is that formulation!)<\/p>\n

O\u2019Donovan argues that it is only in the gospel that we have confidence to know that the creation order hasn\u2019t been wholly dismantled by sin. He writes, \u201cthat man\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus for O\u2019Donovan, \u201cpolitical 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\u2019s 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 \u2018Law,\u2019 in the theological sense, rather than a \u2018Gospel.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"