Desire and Judgment (the latter described by O’Donovan as Desire’s “sequel” and the second phase in “a single extended train of thought”) in particular have elicited substantial scholarly interest and engagement.⁸ The journal Studies in Christian Ethics devoted an entire edition in 1998 to Desire, which included a response from O’Donovan.⁹ In 2001, The Scottish Journal of Theology published articles engaging Desire by Wolterstorff and William Schweiker along with a response from O’Donovan.¹⁰ In 2002, the Scripture and Hermeneutics Seminar published the results of a dialogue with O’Donovan called A Royal Priesthood? The Use of the Bible Ethically and Politically: A Dialogue with Oliver O’Donovan.¹¹ The journal Political Theology dedicated an entire edition in 2008 to Judgment, including a response from O’Donovan.¹² The latest addition to this growing body of work engaging O’Donovan’s political theology is the 2015 festschrift edited by Robert Song and Brent Waters, The Authority of the Gospel: Explorations in Moral and Political Theology in Honor of Oliver O’Donovan.¹³

O’Donovan’s political theology has also been the subject of several book-length comparative studies. These include Paul Doerksen’s Beyond Suspicion: Post-Christendom Protestant Political Theology in John Howard Yoder and Oliver O’Donovan, David McIlroy’s A Trinitarian Theology of Law: In Conversation with Jurgen Moltmann, Oliver O’Donovan and Thomas Aquinas, and Dorothea Bertschmann’s Bowing Before Christ—Nodding to the State? Reading Paul Politically with Oliver O’Donovan and John Howard Yoder.¹⁴ O’Donovan’s political theology has also been the focus of, or featured substantively in, a growing number of essays, many of which again bring him into dialogue with other scholars.¹⁵ Desire is also regularly cited in prominent works in political theology and O’Donovan’s name has appeared in introductory texts to the field.¹⁶

It is interesting to observe that, while O’Donovan has been the subject of several comparative studies, his political theology has not been the subject of a dedicated book-length study.¹⁷ It is also noteworthy that a significant proportion of the comparative studies brings O’Donovan into conversation with John Howard Yoder.¹⁸ This trend testifies to the level of interest O’Donovan’s political theology has generated amongst Mennonite scholars and/or those sympathetic to Yoder’s political theology, no doubt as a consequence of the implicit, and sometimes explicit, rebuttal of Yoder’s political theology entailed in O’Donovan’s.¹⁹

Like all significant thinkers, O’Donovan’s thought has elicited both praise and criticism, often from the same voice.²⁰ Although criticisms of O’Donovan’s political theology are substantial and widespread, they have generally tended to be tentative and somewhat inconclusive. Several reasons can be adduced for this tendency. Some respondents have probably found themselves reluctant to follow criticisms to their logical conclusions on account of their genuine respect and sympathy for O’Donovan and his project. Others might have found themselves reticent to make conclusive pronouncements on O’Donovan’s subtle and complex thought within the confines of journal articles, the main vehicle for critical responses to date.

A further possible reason is O’Donovan’s discursive style, which is liable to frustrate the best efforts to arrive at definitive judgments of his work. Desire, by way of example, contains a self-described “central thesis,” namely, that “theology, by developing its account of the reign of God, may recover the ground traditionally held by the notion of authority.”²¹ But that thesis is enmeshed in a web of sub-theses and elaborated amidst wide-ranging discussions that at times do more to obscure than clarify the book’s central thesis. Chaplin has surely spoken for many when he observed of Desire that “what the text says, with its dense prose and multiple, interlocking themes, is not obvious even after repeated readings.”²² The way that O’Donovan’s discursive mind might have frustrated attempts by interlocutors to comprehensively and conclusively evaluate his work can be illustrated by the controversy over his alleged defense of Christendom in Desire.²³ O’Donovan’s sympathetic account of Christendom—“Christendom is response to mission, and as such a sign that God has blessed it”—has been the subject of a number of critical essays.²⁴ Yet O’Donovan has expressed surprise at this critical focus on his reading of Christendom given what he describes as “its modest thesis,” even describing it as “an afterthought.”²⁵ To that end, he subsequently sought to clarify for critics that he does not, in fact, advocate a return to Christendom.²⁶ However, describing the chapter on Christendom (Chapter 6—“The Obedience of Rulers”) in a book with seven chapters as an “afterthought” is perhaps the epitome of English understatement. The final chapter, “The Redemption of Society,” deals with the transition from Christendom to liberalism, in which case it would be accurate to say that two of the seven chapters of Desire deal substantively with the meaning and legacy of Christendom. Even so, O’Donovan makes a valid point with respect to the “modest thesis” of these chapters, for they do not advance his theory of political authority. That work is completed by the end of Chapter 4 (the fifth chapter deals with the status of the church in light of the normative conception of political authority developed in the first four chapters). This is why O’Donovan can characterize Chapter 6 as an “afterthought,” given the book is, as Andrew Shanks rightly observed, “quite unambivalently focused on the political-theological issue of authority.”²⁷

Lorish and Mathewes have speculated that O’Donovan’s impact has “perhaps [been] unduly limited by the impression of rebarbative indirectness and obliqueness that marks his prose.”²⁸ Separately and more recently, Mathewes has described O’Donovan’s prose as “intricate,” “famously chewy,” “dense,” and “demanding a serious effort of decryption by the reader.”²⁹ While judgments of this nature are unavoidably subjective, they do reflect something of a consensus about the difficulty of O’Donovan’s prose. There is really no point in tip-toing around the issue; O’Donovan is “difficult,” as no less than Rowan Williams has noted.³⁰ Or, as Lorish and Mathewes wryly put it, O’Donovan has never been accused of “writing too simplistically.”³¹ In fact, O’Donovan himself has conceded that some might find his English “too involved.”³² The widely acknowledged difficulty of O’Donovan’s work might have frustrated, perhaps even deterred, some of O’Donovan’s potential interlocutors from engaging his work more systematically, or even at all. Still, the density of O’Donovan’s prose, a reflection of the density of his thought, has proved no impediment to him deservedly acquiring a reputation as one of the most important figures in contemporary Christian political theology. Moreover, as Williams, again, has rightly noted, O’Donovan’s writing is “enriching” and provides extraordinary “stimulus … for all who have engaged with it.”³³

It is no secret that O’Donovan is deeply influenced by Augustine. In the preface to his first book, The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine, O’Donovan said that “to live with [Augustine] intermittently for ten years, to think, to pray, to preach, to teach under his tutelage, has been a life-shaping experience of which, I fear, the reader of this study will gain barely an idea.”³⁴ O’Donovan has acknowledged that his account of government-as-judgment can “claim to speak from the Augustinian tradition.”³⁵ And when asked in an interview to nominate “the best article or essay a young paster could read on politics,” he suggested book XIX of City of God.³⁶

Many scholars have noted the profound influence of Augustine on O’Donovan’s political thought and his political theology is widely characterized as “Augustinian.” William Cavanaugh places O’Donovan within a “current revival of Augustine’s political thought” and Peter Leithart describes O’Donovan’s political thought as a “reviv...