William Placher reviews Anglican theologian Oliver O’Donovan’s latest book, The Ways of Judgment, in the Christian Century. O’Donovan is (in)famous for his defense of the idea of “Christendom.” The notion that Christendom was a disaster may be the one thing that unites liberal and “postliberal” theologians these days, but O’Donovan has argued that 1. it’s natural and right for Christians to seek to “make disciples of all nations” and 2. if they’re successful at doing that (and they should want to be!) it’s only natural that people’s faith will then shape and influence the ordering of the political sphere.
However, as Placher points out, O’Donovan’s notion of Christendom is a lot different from that of, say, Pat Robertson. For starters, it would be committed to a robust notion of social justice, and it would refrain from the oppression of non-Christian minorities because it’s Christian, not out of a liberal commitment to “neutrality” or secularism. O’Donovan thinks that the liberal notion of forever seeking the truth and never finding it robs us of one of our essential freedoms as human beings.
Old-fashioned liberals from Milton to Mill, O’Donovan pointed out, valued intellectual diversity because it helps us find the truth. The combat among different ideas helps lead us to the right answer. He worried, however, that nowadays people celebrate diversity for its own sake, as if actually finding truth or even finding agreement would be some kind of tragedy. But suppose we did agree on how society ought to be organized, and suppose that agreement rested on Christian principles. Should Christians find that so terrible?
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O’Donovan has little patience with liberals like John Rawls who define justice as no more than the compromises that enable us to live in peace by giving us the freedom to pursue our various visions of the good without interfering too much with one another: “There could undoubtedly be worse tyrannies than that of the regnant liberal secularism, so sensitively averse to overt physical suffering. That much must always be said in its favor. But what cannot be said for it is that it fosters freedom. For in attempting to dictate what is true on the basis of what is convenient, it shuts down the human calling to the knowledge of the truth.” When Rawls and others encourage us to tolerate each other’s differing goods, they simply give up on the quest for the good. O’Donovan thinks human beings are driven to look for a true good and to try to convince everyone else when we find it, and we are deprived of an important freedom if we are told we can’t do that.
Placher, however, is skittish about the idea that Christendom could avoid the temptations to corruption and abuse of power that have marked much of its history. He’s not convinced that, in practice, it wouldn’t involve compromising Christian principles in order to be “effective.”
O’Donovan is hard to classify with the usual political categories. Like Pope John Paul II, he is committed to social justice in ways more liberal than almost any current American politician, but he also notes as an example of unjust laws “those that permit unborn children to be unnecessarily killed by their mothers with the assistance of gynecologists.” Though he never mentions the name, O’Donovan puts me in mind of F. D. Maurice, that 19th-century British advocate of both church tradition and the poor who was H. Richard Niebuhr’s favored example for his concept of “Christ the transformer of culture.”
I am relieved to encounter an eloquent account of “Christian values” that doesn’t call for hating gays and assassinating the president of Venezuela. But does O’Donovan face the sad history of “Christendom” rigorously enough? So often when Christians have dominated the political realm, we have persecuted Jews, denigrated women and started crusades. Those who have the greatest political success just now while waving a Christian banner would seem unlikely to do much better if they had more power. I do see O’Donovan’s point: as we share the gospel with the world, it’s absurd to worry that we will persuade too many people. But shouldn’t we worry about what would happen if we succeeded?
Partly this is a question of whose version of “Christian values” would prevail in the public sphere. A liberal like Christopher Insole would say that precisely because we can only partly discern the divine order of things, we need a liberal polity that refrains from making certain values – “Christian” or otherwise – publicly authoritative. Still, I don’t see how O’Donovan’s question can be avoided – don’t we want people to believe the Gospel? And if so, won’t that affect how they think about politics, how they vote, etc.?
A Thinking Reed 
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