Two Kingdoms & Two Cities

Mapping Theological Traditions of Church, Culture, and Civil Order

Robert C. Crouse

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781506421568
• eBook ISBN: 9781506425191
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The recent emergence of "two kingdoms" and "two cities" approaches to Christian social thinking are shown to have a key—and often unacknowledged—connection to Luther's reshaping of the Augustinian paradigm. The project works for a better understanding of Luther's own thought to help understand the convergences and divergences of Christian political theology in the twentieth century and today.

In particular, Luther's two-kingdom thinking issued forth in a strong distinction of law and gospel that was also worked out in twofold pairs of Israel and church, general and special revelation, creation and redemption, and especially the outward and inward life. The work traces this legacy through acceptance and modification by Niebuhr and Bonhoeffer, Lutheran and Catholic neoconservatives, Reformed two-kingdom proponents, Augustinian liberals, and finally Oliver O'Donovan. The conclusion reflects on both the historical narrative and its connectionto an account of modern liberalism, as well as a theological reflection on hermeneutical decisions of the "twoness" of Christian theology.

7

Oliver O’Donovan and A Doctrine of the “Two”

In chapter 5, Oliver O’Donovan was mentioned as a foil for Augustinian liberals who reject “Christendom” versions of Augustinianism. Although O’Donovan himself is in some ways an Augustinian liberal, in other ways O’Donovan’s project involves a modernized Augustinian Christendom—or, more precisely, a “dialectical Christendom II.” The present chapter demonstrates further that O’Donovan is more clearly Augustinian than many contemporaries, and it proceeds to map O’Donovan’s thought in relation to other two-cities and two-kingdom paradigms.

Law and Gospel

One clear distinction between O’Donovan’s and two-kingdom positions concerns O’Donovan’s opposition to a traditional Lutheran law/gospel dichotomy. Present throughout his work, this opposition emerges in the opening thesis of Resurrection and Moral Order (2nd ed., 1994), O’Donovan’s proposal for a distinctly evangelical ethics: “The foundations of Christian ethics must be evangelical foundations; or, to put it more simply, Christian ethics must arise from the gospel of Jesus Christ.”^[1]

The first opponents addressed by this thesis are those who argue for “the opposition of law and gospel” and “make a virtue of denying that ‘Christian ethics’ in the strict sense can exist.”^[2] The Lutheran tradition, particularly, separates the gospel from moral life:

The Lutheran tradition . . . has usually found it difficult to accept that an ordered moral demand can be, in and of itself, evangelical. The antithesis between Moses and Christ has been widened to encompass a total opposition between order and transcendence. The liberating activity of God is marked by its insusceptibility to characterization in terms of order, while order, even the order of creation, has been classed with law rather than the gospel, and so assigned a purely provisional and transitory significance.^[3]

Audaciously, O’Donovan writes that morality “is itself an integral part of the Christian gospel.”^[4] Fundamental to O’Donovan’s thinking is the idea of authority as a correlate to freedom. The gospel does not simply proclaim a promise but is an “authority” granting free action. Hence, O’Donovan sees no contradiction in speaking of an “evangelical moral law.”^[5] “We do not have to abandon evangelical proclamation when we ask about the form of the human response to the gospel.”^[6] Contra a particularly Lutheran construal of the division between justification and sanctification, “the improper divorce of sanctification from justification bequeathed Protestant churches their characteristic tension between a gospel with no concern for life in the world and a concern for life in the world which has lost touch with the gospel.”^[7]

O’Donovan’s special concern is the limitation of the gospel to one arena of creation, allowing the fallen disorder of creation to triumph in the end. Reflecting on the second edition of Resurrection and Moral Order, O’Donovan insists that he would underscore this concern even more strongly now. Appealing to John Milbank’s work, he critiques the Lutheran notion that the gospel has no “social space.” The gospel is more expansive: it is not only assurance of a completed gift but also a demand for applied action and a source for moral knowledge.

In rejecting a strict law/gospel dichotomy, O’Donovan does not suggest that law and gospel can be equated. Both make promises and command obedience, but differences remain. In defining “law,” O’Donovan appeals primarily to the Jewish Torah, not a generic idea of “command” only.^[8] Highlighting law as a species of history and not a unique type of communication allows O’Donovan to rehabilitate the law/gospel distinction as a contrast between pre-Pentecostal and post-Pentecostal experience. The law’s inadequacy is not its communication of command but its inability to save. The law, on the one hand, is “inadequate as it appeals simply to the immanent power of the subject, ‘the flesh,’ and offers no gospel of subjective participation in its good order”; it is “good news that remains firmly in the realm of the objective, apart from me.”^[9] The gospel, on the other hand, is Pentecostal, coming with the Spirit’s power. Yet the difference runs even deeper. The law was a concession to fallen creation, pointing to creation’s true order but also revealing human inability: “For Jesus Moses was an artificer of compromise.”^[10] Elsewhere, O’Donovan writes that “the trouble is not that law hopes to express some moral truth. . . . The truth of a law must also be a truth about the society in which the law will function.”^[11] Thus, the law truthfully expresses both the moral order of creation and human sinfulness. The gospel expresses the truth of created moral order and the redemption of human sinfulness—not only the original good order but also its renovation and fulfillment in Christ.^[12]

Although O’Donovan conceives of the law/gospel contrast historically, he allows for a Reformation perspective on law and gospel in the abstract, as the experience of command and promise:

The law was thus a particular historical phase of Israel’s experience of God; but the Jewish experience of history is seen to represent a universal existential situation in which an individual at any point of history may find himself before Christ has become a saving reality in his own experience. To experience moral command as “the law,” then is to encounter it as though from a point in the history of salvation at which God has not yet given the total blessing which he has promised his people. Law supposes that God’s complete saving purpose is still an object of hope.^[13]

This point becomes especially important for O’Donovan when contrasting the “law” of secular government and the “gospel” of the church. But this law/gospel contrast is a tertiary derivation from the original likeness of law and gospel, and the secondary contrast of law and gospel indicates the absence or presence of the Spirit.

Natural Law

Like his opposition to a traditional law/gospel dichotomy, O’Donovan’s opposition to forms of natural law puts him at odds with a two-kingdom paradigm. The key distinction here runs between ontology and epistemology. O’Donovan affirms natural law in its ontological sense—the reality of a created moral order—but denies its strong epistemological sense: that it is unequivocally self-evident to all people, or should be, apart from the revelation of Christ in the gospel. Because of the fall, there is an “opacity and obscurity of that order to the human mind which has rejected the knowledge of its Creator.”^[14] Since “the exercise of knowledge is tied up with the faithful performance of man’s task in the world,” moral knowledge is “inescapably compromised by the problem of fallenness.”^[15] Because God is the common good of all and cannot be subtracted out of the total picture of reality, there is no unified grasp of the shape and meaning of that reality without the revelation of God in the gospel.

But the obstacle of natural knowledge is not upended by an entirely different object of knowledge: “We must firmly reject the idea that Christian ethics is esoteric, opted into by those who so choose, irrelevant to those who do not choose.”^[16] Rather, “Christian moral judgments in principle address every man.”^[17] Ontology and epistemology must be clearly distingui...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Additional praise for Two Kingdoms & Two Cities
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Luther’s “Inward/Outward” Two Kingdoms
• Niebuhr, Bonhoeffer, and a “Dialectical” Two Kingdoms
• Lutheran and Catholic Neoconservatism and a “Paradoxical” Two Kingdoms
• Reformed Two-Kingdom Theology and a “Parallel” Two Kingdoms
• Neo-Augustinian Liberalism and an “Eschatological” Two Kingdoms
• Augustine and a “Christendom” Two Cities
• Oliver O’Donovan and A Doctrine of the “Two”
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index