A Royal Priesthood?: The Use of the Bible Ethically and Politically

A Dialogue with Oliver O'Donovan

Zondervan, Craig Bartholomew, Jonathan Chaplin, Robert Song, Al Wolters, Colin Greene, Karl Möller

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9780310144755
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Since September 11, 2001, we are intensely aware of the need for political wisdom. Can Scripture help us in this respect? Yes, but not simplistically. In an exhilarating dialogue with Oliver O’Donovan, a team of international scholars look in detail in this book at biblical interpretation as we make the journey from what God said to Abraham, as it were, to how to respond to the political challenges of today. Such exploration is essential if the church is to become “a royal priesthood” today. Craig Bartholomew Contributors include: Oliver O’Donovan (respondent to 14 chapters) Gilbert Meilaender Christopher Rowland Bernd Wannenwetsch N. T. Wright A Royal Priesthood? is the third volume from the Scripture and Hermeneutics Seminar. This annual gathering of Christian scholars from various disciplines was established in 1998 and aims to reassess the discipline of biblical studies from the foundations up and forge creative new ways for reopening the Bible in our cultures. Any attempt to open the Book in new and fresh ways for our cultures at the start of the third millennium must explore how to read the Bible ethically and politically. This volume looks at the obstacles to such a process and in dialogue with Oliver O’Donovan’s creative work in this regard, looks in detail at how to read different parts of the Bible for ethics and politics. A unique element of the book is Oliver O’Donovan’s 14 responses to individual chapters. Volume 1, Renewing Biblical Interpretation and Volume 2, After Pentecost, are also published by Paternoster Press and Zondervan.

1
The Use of Scripture in
The Desire of the Nations

R.W.L. Moberly

It was an enlarging experience for me to read The Desire of the Nations. Professor O’Donovan is a profound and incisive thinker, from whom I have learned much. In particular, he has clearly thought long and hard about the meaning of Scripture, and the whole book is an exposition and application of Scripture – in conjunction with a robust sense of tradition, to be sure, but it is nonetheless Scripture that is fundamental. Although the primary explicit engagement with Scripture is in Chapters 2 to 4, the searching critique of modern political and social arrangements in the last two chapters, where it is argued that ‘modernity can be conceived as the Antichrist, a parodic and corrupt development of Christian social order’,¹ is in substance no less scriptural than the earlier chapters, even if the mode of argument differs. For to think and argue biblically involves understanding and applying the content of Scripture, regardless of overt reference to the biblical text. In an obvious sense, therefore, a study of the use of Scripture in the book could involve an engagement with the argument as a whole.

The specific context within which this paper is being written is a project seeking a renewal of the understanding and use of Scripture within contemporary church and culture. Any such renewal of Scripture requires that one considers some of the varying forms in which Christian use of Scripture can engage with the substantive political and ethical issues of our time. DN has been chosen as representative of such engagement. We are thus not only O’Donovan’s primary audience of people engaged in political theology and political ethics, but also people coming at his book as possibly exemplary of a Christian use of Scripture. Given the range of contributions to the discussion, it is probably appropriate for this paper to take ‘use of Scripture’ in a rather conventional and restricted sense, and to focus more on questions of method than of content. This means that probably some of the discussion falls under the heading of issues on which, in relation to O’Donovan’s substantive thesis, ‘nothing need be staked’.² He can probably concede many of my suggestions without loss (though of course he may not wish to do so!). However, the concern needs to be not only retrospective but also prospective. We need to consider not only what O’Donovan has as a matter of fact done with Scripture but also how future use of Scripture in this area might learn from his work, a learning that may not solely take the form of emulation.³

Let me at the outset, however, set out one axiom which underlies the following discussion: how one uses Scripture relates to why one is using it. Since there is more than one valid concern and context of use, so there is likely to be more than one valid method of use. To recognize this should not lead to any lazy pluralism, since for particular concerns some methods may be clearly better or worse than others. What matters is to identify the nature of particular contexts of use, and to discern the methods of interpretation appropriate to them.

O’Donovan’s Scriptural Hermeneutic

In terms of approach, it will be appropriate initially to summarize the programmatic hermeneutic principles that O’Donovan himself sets out in Chapter 1. In the first place, O’Donovan sets out certain axioms that should be uncontroversial for a Christian. On the one hand there is the primacy of Scripture for the whole enterprise of political theology: ‘true political concepts … must be authorised, as any datum of theology must be, from Holy Scripture’.⁴ On the other hand, Scripture as a whole must be engaged with, not least ‘so that the moment of resurrection [the concern of his earlier Resurrection and Moral Order] does not appear like an isolated meteor from the sky but as the climax of a history of the divine rule’.⁵

Yet many hermeneutic problems instantly arise. Although ‘the excitement which accompanied the recovery of political theology in our time arose very evidently from the reading of the Bible’,⁶ it is overwhelmingly the Old Testament rather than the New to which appeal has been made. This is clear both from the fact that O’Donovan follows the above reference to ‘the Bible’ with ‘Israel’s political experience of YHWH’s rule’, and from the fact that the best-known categories of recent political theology – shālôm, the jubilee and especially the exodus⁷ – are all Old Testament categories. The problem is thus presented as one of finding and utilizing a principled and unifying hermeneutic – ‘a unifying conceptual structure … that will connect political themes with the history of salvation as a whole’, ‘an architectonic hermeneutic which would locate political reflection on the Exodus within an undertaking that had its centre of gravity in the Gospels’.⁸

How should this be done? O’Donovan first sketches an obvious problem in the history of Christian thought,⁹ to do with continuity and change between the Old and New Testaments (though O’Donovan generally prefers not to refer to discrete Testaments at all) in terms of the ‘substance of religious hope in Israel and the early church’.¹⁰ How far does the fulfilment of ‘Israel’s political hopes’ lie ‘beyond all experience of the public realm’ and how far does it point to ‘an earthly rule of Christ’ with the church playing some key role? Although tensions here run through Christian history, O’Donovan sees this ultimately as a failure of scriptural understanding: ‘Failure to attend to Israel is what left Christian political thought oscillating between idealist and realist poles.’¹¹ Indeed,

... the hermeneutic principle that governs a Christian appeal to political categories within the Hebrew Scriptures is, simply, Israel itself. Through this unique political entity God made known his purposes in the world. In relation to the crisis facing this unique entity, the church proclaimed those purposes fulfilled. Or, to express the same point differently: the governing principle is the kingly rule of God, expressed in Israel’s corporate existence and brought to final effect in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.¹²

This leads to four concluding comments about right and wrong use of the Old Testament in political theology. First, the OT must be treated ‘as history’, by which is meant ‘a disclosure which took form in a succession of political developments, each one of which has to be weighed and interpreted in the light of what preceded and followed it’. This is to rule out unprincipled or decontextualized use of a ‘disconnected image or theme’.¹³ Secondly, one must resist ‘constructing a subversive counter-history, a history beneath the surface which defies and challenges the official history of Israel’. This relates to the main theme of the first chapter, the need to move ‘beyond suspicion’. Thus, ‘a decision to take Israel with special seriousness implies a willingness to have done with perpetual unmasking’.¹⁴ Thirdly, one must not ‘rewrite Israel’s history as a “Whig” history of progressive undeception’, for by such means ‘the past is recalled solely to justify the present against it, and has no standing as a point of disclosure. This is so that the history should remain normative in its own right.¹⁵ Fourthly, Israel’s history must be seen as the context where ‘certain principles of social and political life were vindicated by the action of God in the judgement and restoration of the people’. The construal of God’s rule must be that of Israel itself. Thus it is not just the history but also the meaning of that history which must be found within the biblical text.¹⁶

This is an admirable programme, as far as it goes (though it is perhaps curious that there is no comment upon appropriate use of the New Testament). I would like in what follows to contribute to its advancement. First and foremost, I will raise three general issues of principle with regard to O’Donovan’s hermeneutic. But I will also select specific examples of textual interpretation that raise a variety of issues.¹⁷

General Issues of Scriptural Hermeneutics

Where is the history of Israel to be found?¹⁸

First, the prime challenge that O’Donovan apparently envisages to the history of Israel within the OT is the voice of suspicion, an ideologically subversive counter-history. This is indeed a major contemporary issue. Yet he says nothing about what for many students of Scripture is the more obvious problem – that is, the relationship between the history of Israel as presented by the OT itself and that constructed by modern ‘historical-critical’¹⁹ scholarship. The name of Julius Wellhausen remains the convenient shorthand for the insight, shared by all mainstream biblical scholars (however much they continue to dispute details), that the history of Israel and its religious development as perceived through the lens of modern critical historiography look very different from the picture presented by the OT itself. Does, for example, the mass of laws in Exodus to Deuteronomy derive from Moses and the origins of Israel’s history? Or is it, as most post-Wellhausen scholars suppose, a composite of different law codes from different periods, the majority of which are exilic or postexilic in date? For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the OT’s own presentation was seen by scholars as interesting chiefly as a springboard to recover something else – the ‘true’, ‘original’, ‘authentic’ course of history and religious development – and was hardly considered as significant in its own right.²⁰

Among other significant recent developments, so-called ‘canonical’²¹ approaches, for which perhaps the name of Brevard Childs may serve as convenient shorthand, have argued for reconceptualizing the way the scriptural text is handled. Here there is a concern to find positive significance in Israel’s own picture of its history without feeling any need to justify it as ‘really more or less historical after all’ (the standard ‘conservative’ approach). Rather, one may take for granted the kinds of traditio-historical and compositional developments that are commonly hypothesiz...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• The Artists
• Introduction
• 1. The Use of Scripture In The Desire of the Nations
• 2. Response to Walter Moberly
• 3. Law and Monarchy In the Old Testament
• 4. Response to Gordon McConville
• 5. A Time for War and a Time for Peace: Old Testament Wisdom, Creation and O’Donovan’s Theological Ethics
• 6. Response to Craig Bartholomew
• 7. The Power of the Future In the Present: Eschatology and Ethics In O’Donovan and Beyond
• 8. Response to Daniel Carroll R.
• 9. Power, Judgement and Possession: John’s Gospel In Political Perspective
• 10. Response to Andrew Lincoln
• 11. Paul and Caesar: A New Reading of Romans
• 12. Response to N.T. Wright
• 13. ‘Members of One Another’: Charis, Ministry and Representation: A Politico-Ecclesial Reading of Romans 12
• 14. Response to Bernd Wannenwetsch
• 15. The Function of Romans 13 In Christian Ethics
• 16. Response to Gerrit de Kruijf
• 17. The Apocalypse and Political Theology
• 18. Response to Christopher Rowland
• 19. Ethics and Exegesis: A Great Gulf?
• 20. Political Eschatology and Responsible Government: Oliver O’Donovan’s ‘Christian Liberalism’
• 21. Response to Jonathan Chaplin
• 22. Revisiting Christendom: A Crisis of Legitimization
• 23. Response to Colin Greene
• 24. ‘Return to the Vomit of “Legitimation”’?: Scriptural Interpretation and the Authority of the Poor
• 25. Response to Peter Scott
• 26. A Timely Conversation with The Desire of the Nations on Civil Society, Nation and State
• 27. Response to Joan Lockwood O’Donovan
• 28. Acting Politically In Biblical Obedience?
• 29. Response to James W. Skillen
• University of Gloucestershire, Theology and Religious Studies
• The British and Foreign Bible Society
• Baylor University
• Scripture Index
• Name Index
• Subject Index