Bishop and Statesman: a Dysfunctional Family Relation

In one of the initial moves of The Desire of the Nations (DN), Oliver O'Donovan performs a deft double kick against 1) the modern arrogance that tried to cordon politics off from theology while forgetting that all of its political concepts were dependent on a theological imaginaion and 2) a politcal theology whose suspicion of that separation is but a derivative of the modern suspicion of theology.  For there to be any move forward (from 1996), these two enemies would have to find it within themselves to see each other as fellows, friends, and even relations.

This is because the attempt to overcome the enlightened separation involves a kind of absolutizing of struggle among political arrangments for the right to claim transcendence.  Each new polis must understand itself as the fruition of a historical process that ends in each new world order.  The referees who kicked the Bishop off the field in order to render a society's coming to judgment intelligible (demythologizing or unmasking the Bishop as just another politician) can themselves be similarly unmasked:

"The Enlightenment consensus itself, with its attempt to establish a pure ethics (whether theological or rational) in light of which all political dynamisms can be seen through, can itself be seen through.  Criticism can be turned back upon the critic ad infinitum.  For criticism too is the strategy of some actor within the socio-historical polyphony, the representative speech of some historical grouping" (9).

What is needed is for Bishop and statesman, theology and politics, to reconcile in the embrace of wayward child with forgiving father (a la Luke 15).  The modern state is the creation of the church, and never is this quite as clear as when it effects schism between father and son.  The state's moral profligacy and confusion bespeak a deep forgetfulness as to the origin of the riches it possesses.  And yet the church, unlike the father in the parable, stingy with its treasures at various points in history, holding them back from the world as a way to make itself both father and son, both bestower of the kingship of God as a rule of life for the world and direct distributor of that rule.  The rebellion of the son, in this arrangement, is not entirely the son's fault, as it is in Luke 15.  When the fathers exasperate their children (Eph. 6:4), any number of wayward backlashes may occur.  The power and ruthlessness of modern states are matched only by their amnesia, and the resultant confusion as to any means of judgmental integrity is exactly what one would expect when the father gives stone instead of bread.

It was through the rebellion of Absalom that God finally crushed the pride of David.  This is a way of saying that even if O'Donovan's attempt to remind the son where his riches came from is as salutary as it seems to be, none of this assures that the father will be as generous as he ought.  In the divided polis of the contemporary age, it may seem trite to suggest that the lack of neighborhood is a fault of love for neighbor; but this is precisely what seems to me to be the case.