Giants can still be found in Britain. Well, just the one giant really. He is our theologian, and he is an evangelical theologian.
His name?
Oliver O’Donovan
Author of The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Politcal Theology and most recently The Ways of Judgment, O’Donovan is now Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology in the University of Edinburgh. I have excerpted from O’Donovan’s public lectures, and posted on the significance of his and John Webster’s departure from Oxford. There seem to be just two photographs of him (not much of self-publicist then). This one was taken as O’Donovan was giving the sermon at the enthronement of his colleague Tom Wright as Bishop of Durham.
It’s hard to say what a single word sums up the O’Donovan kerygma, but I’ll go for ‘patience’ in the hope that you’ll hear the passio – listening to the tradition, being discipled by the apostles, serving an apprenticeship with all the doctors of the church, learning to suffer and so become robust enough to outlast the opposition.
We need time to be formed by that whole Christian tradition and to get to know, and know how to use, those many intellectual resources the Church has acquired in the course of the many centuries of its witness to the world. We learn from our predecessors in the faith by reading large numbers of primary texts (his From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought is an introduction to these texts, not an alternative). We may not hurry away from our predecessors with glib statements of what this means for us today.
O’Donovan is scholarly, patrician, awe-inspiring. ‘Evangelical’ is the only other epithet that does not bounce straight off him. Salvation is incorporation into the good company of God, which company and fellowship God has graciously extended to man. We are redeemed from our asocial isolation, and brought into love and life together in the society of man with God. This evangelical communion ecclesiology comes from the Augustinian and in particular the Anglican theological tradition. I think we will prosper as long as we go the way he is pointing. I think we will be stuffed if we go any other way.
If O’Donovan is new to you, Wikipedia has a bibliography and you could try Gilbert Meilaender’s review of The Desire of Nations . There is more critical response to The Desire of the Nations in A Royal Priesthood? – the collection of essays edited by Craig Bartholomew, to which O’Donovan adds responses, by the Scripture and Hermeneutics seminar – though they look like kids throwing stones at a very tall house without once managing to break a window.
O’Donovan is courteous and ready to grant as much as he can to his interlocutors, and to tackle the intractable issues of sexuality and church order and unity. This is what he is doing at the moment in a series of seven web sermons for Fulcrum, the first three of which have appeared: ‘The Failure of the Liberal Paradigm’, ‘The Care of the Churches’, ‘Ethics and Agreement’. Coming up next is ‘Scripture and Obedience’.
In the following posts I will talk about O’Donovan as:
Evangelical theologian
Christian ethicist
Political theologian
Historical theologian
Anglican theologian
I will of course make O’Donovan’s thought seem much less nuanced than it is. But I will let the man speak for himself with an excerpt from The Ways of Judgment
