O’Donovan on Bible Reading in Church

O’Donovan’s lecture on The Reading Church is superb. Here are some highlights from his reflections on the significance and need for good public Bible Reading in our churches.

All authority arises from mediation of reality. The free imagination and ranging purposes of the human mind are brought to heel by an interruption of something that simply and unnegotiably is the case. And the authority of Scripture is the moment at which the attested reality of God’s acts disturb the ideal constructions and zealous projections of human piety. Those who are anxious about the church’s weakening attachment to Scripture do not anticipate a loss of piety, but a rank growth of it; they fear the promiscuous multiplication of religious images in which history and fantasy are blended in equal measure, in which Star-Trek and Jesus are equally apt for our devotion. Attending the Eucharist as a visitor at a strange church on Palm Sunday, I was surprised to find the reading of the Gospel dispensed with altogether, and in its place a devotion in which members of the congregation stood up one by one and imagined the biographies and experiences of various objects that figure in the passion story: the tree from which the wood of the cross was made, the nails used to fasten the victim to the cross, etc. The fact that this exercise was embarrassingly insipid is, of course, neither here nor there; religious imagination has had more than its fair share of insipidity in the past, and recovered. The important point was why the Scriptural narrative was displaced from its customary place of honour in Eucharistic worship: it was to free up the religious imagination, to ensure space for the mind to wander freely through the gallery of images without being inconveniently summoned back to what has actually been told us of those events.

The condition, “respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading”, must apply, then, as well to public and liturgical as to private reading. This contrast is not meant to put public and private reading into competition. It is simply that without a proper value assigned to the corporate exercise of public reading of Scripture, private reading must look like an eccentric hobby. No collective spiritual exercise, no sacrament, no act of praise or prayer is so primary to the catholic identity of the church gathered as the reading and recitation of Scripture. It is the nuclear core. When Paul instructed his letters to be passed from church to church and read, it was the badge of the local church’s catholic identity. This is not to devalue preaching, praise, prayer, let alone sacramental act; these all find their authorisation in reading.

There is another requisite for the public reading of Scripture beside the lectionary, seemingly even less attended to, and that is a public reader. A task once confined to the clergy has now largely been made over to lay members of the congregation, but far from dignifying lay ministry, this has, on the whole, merely marginalised a task on which a great deal in the act of worship depends. I confess that I know of no church that trains its readers; its reading readers, that is, for when we call people “readers” and say we train them, we have something different in mind, which is itself eloquent! When I hear a lesson read with careful thought, with pace, articulation, pause and pitch all placed at the service of the sense of the passage, I make a point of thanking the reader, since the effort made will not have been asked for and probably not appreciated.Yet many a church may stay alive by the ministry of its readers which would otherwise die by the ministry of its preachers.

Oliver O’Donovan on Scripture

Here is Oliver O’Donovan discussing the “Jerusalem Declaration” of GAFCON. Great stuff.

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Saint Mark, violence, and the discipline of reading — A sermon by Oliver O’Donovan

They went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. (Mark 16:8)

This is the last, and most extraordinary, of the silences of Saint Mark’s Gospel, which is a book full of silences. “See that you say nothing to anyone!” So Jesus warned the leper he had healed; and when he cured the deaf-mute he told all who were present to tell nobody. It was the same for those who saw Jairus’ daughter raised from the dead; and the blind man of Bethsaida was sent home with his sight restored, but not allowed so much as a courtesy call in the village he had begged in, in case he talked. Jesus silenced the demons who said they knew who he was. Only Legion was instructed to speak. He silenced Simon Peter when he said “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”; and finally, most strikingly, he was silent himself, when Caiaphas and Pilate tried to interrogate him.

The curious thing, though, about so many of those imposed silences is that they had no effect. The more Jesus insisted, the more persistently he was ignored, and it became known so widely what he did that he couldn’t even enter a village openly. Human speech is an unruly power. It is out of control before the wonder of the divine, running away with itself in excitement, heedless of its obligations. But on this last occasion the silence was complete, and the witnesses really did hold their tongues. Yet this was the only other occasion when (at last!) speech was actually required of them. Human garrulousness proved inadequate in the end for the task God had for it. When called on, it was overwhelmed by fear.

This last, most extraordinary silence of the Gospel is also the last and most extraordinary sentence of the Gospel – in the form that we have it, at any rate. “They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” At that point the evangelist himself falls silent. The words that follow, recounting how the women told the disciples everything, are the first of two quite early attempts to round off a narrative that ancient readers thought incomplete. Ever since this was realised, scholars have wondered whether the gospel really is incomplete, or whether the astonishing silence was in fact Mark’s last word. Its effect is so dramatic it seems almost a shame it should be an accident! Must the evangelist not have meant to make a point with it? Now, nothing anyone says on such a question can be more than an opinion; so I will tell you my opinion, and you will ignore it if you have a better one. I don’t think ancient writers made points in that kind of way. Mark did not intend to leave us with the silence and the fear. There must have been an ending, including a meeting of the Lord with Mary Magdalene. Still, that does not mean that the silence and the fear were unimportant to Mark. The reader was certainly meant to notice them, and to understand something of why this Gospel was written, why, that is, Saint Mark himself was an evangelist.

Tuesday was Saint Mark’s Day, which happily always falls in the Easter season. So let us take the opportunity to look at him – as far as we can with such an elusive personality. We can piece together scattered and inconclusive moments from the New Testament: in this Gospel a young man in the Garden of Gethsemane escapes arrest by leaving his garment in the soldier’s hands; in Acts one Ioannes Markos lives in Jerusalem in his mother’s house, where the early church would sometimes meet. (What a fascinating combination of Jewish and Roman names! That surely tells you something about the family politics!) Ioannes Markos accompanies Paul and Barnabas on an expedition, disgraces himself by pulling out in the middle, and later works with Barnabas. In the epistles there are passing mentions of one or more Markoses – one is Barnabas’s cousin, another is useful to Paul. Are these all the same person? And did that person write the second Gospel? Later tradition answered yes to both questions, and added a period in Peter’s company, accounting for the Petrine angle in some of the Gospel stories. But in the end what we know about the author of the second Gospel is more or less what his book reveals. That is the cloak he leaves behind in our hands when we try to grasp him.

Think of those repeated silences as the background to the work of the evangelist. In this book, he tells us, is the speech that has broken into those silences. Here the reticence that surrounded Jesus’s deeds, prevailing even on the resurrection morning, has been swept away. But not by more unruly, undisciplined speech, more speech run out of control. That speech could hardly tell a fraction of the story. What, after all, had the healed leper to talk about? What could the family of Jairus tell the world? They could tell their own stories, their private tales of grief and liberation. “Come and hear,” as the Psalmist said, “all ye that fear God, and I will declare what he hath done for my soul.” That was not nothing. There are, and ought to be, stories of what God has done for “my soul”. Legion was allowed to tell his, because, perhaps, his sanity, the very heart of what God had done for him, could never keep itself a secret. But it was on the whole that kind of speech that was suppressed by Jesus, that kind of speech that was reduced to silence at the empty tomb. For the resurrection of Jesus was not part of anyone’s personal story. It was the reconstruction of the world. The Marys did not find the missing piece in their lives at the empty tomb. They may have come seeking it, for they came for the time-honoured reconciliations and comforts of mourning. What they found was an empty space, an interruption, a dislocation, a breach in the secure order of things. They were afraid.

The evangelist’s speech was not like a personal testimony. Nor was it like the less subjective, but hostile acknowledgment of the demons. God’s work of world-remaking could not be proclaimed by beings that could find nothing but defeat in it. But it was like the confession of Peter. Jesus had silenced Peter at the time because “the Son of Man must suffer…and after three days rise again.” But now the time had come for Peter’s words to be heard and understood. Mark took them as his own, when he wrote down the title of his book: “the Good News of Jesus the Christ”. And it was, of course, like the message of Jesus himself in the one utterance by which he broke silence in the course of his trial: “You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power.” That right hand of power was to figure in the evangelist’s own speech. He was to tell the story of Jesus from the beginning in the light of its powerful conclusion.

When we read Saint Mark we get a shock, or a series of them. Traditionally he is portrayed as the lion among the evangelists, and it is as though a lion jumped on us and landed us a staggering blow. Successive events burst upon us like exploding shells: “straightway…straightway…straightway…” His language is charged with excitement and force. “Straightway the Spirit throws him out into the desert.” “They were out of their minds with his teaching.” “Jesus shut him up and said, ‘Stuff it! Get out!’ – and the unclean spirit jerked, and yelled.” And most shocking of all, when the leper runs up and falls on his knees, Jesus “struck out in rage and grabbed him.” “Shall a lion roar in the forest when he has no prey?” asked the prophet. Saint Mark is no elegant stone lion, like those you see all over Venice. His prey is his readers, and as he seizes us, he roars. There is divine violence in Mark. He does not think that we can meet God without our thigh being thrown out of joint. But where does the violence take its source? From the empty tomb. It is the violence of divine life, hurling off the graveclothes, rolling back the complacent predictability of the grave.

There are other forms of religious violence, that do not have their source in the empty tomb but in a bloated self-consciousness fed on a diet of what God has done for “my soul”. Religious people are liable to a characteristically religious mistake. They try to draw their power from within themselves, from the feeling of unity between the soul and God. The religious self-consciousness may swell to the point where it swallows the world up in a vortex of religious subjectivity. In this there is a kind of covenant with death, a collusion with destruction in which the soul sucks the world into its own inner space. Every encounter with the world becomes a form of violence, a way of hurling this divinised self at a world now drained of meaning.

Take warning, you who are to be ordained ministers of religion: there is a temptation here to which our kind is very obviously prone. If you want to know where the dynamic power of a church comes from, go to a communion service and watch carefully what happens at the exchange of the peace. Does the priest storm up and down the aisle, like an American politician pumping flesh, as though all will be unblessed who haven’t felt the grip of his clammy hand? Or watch the back of the church when the service is over. Are the clergy throwing their arms round members of the congregation, or are the congregation throwing their arms round the clergy? There is a world of difference! There are many worse examples of inflated religious consciousness than our petty clerical version, but this one lies near at hand to us. Just watch the collapse of a barnstorming cleric when retirement comes, and then you will see why Jesus restrained the speech of private testimony! In the view of Nietzsche Christianity as a whole was simply a more timid version of this religious sensationalism. “Surprised and stupefied…by the beam of divine mercy…man gave vent to a cry of rapture and for a moment believed that he bore all heaven within him. It is upon this pathological excess of feeling that all the psychological sensations of Christianity operate; it desired to destroy, shatter, stupefy, intoxicate.”

What Nietzsche did not recognise was another quite different power of God, the empty tomb. The empty tomb secures the fullness of the world. It annulled the covenant of the world with death. Addressing a public all too susceptible to certain kinds of religious appeal, the evangelists proclaimed “Jesus and the resurrection”, a power of God at work where we cannot swallow it up in the loud utterances of religious fullness, where we can at best be tongue-tied onlookers. And out of the silence imposed on us by the empty tomb there will arise a quite new kind of speech, the speech of the evangelist.

How do we hear this evangelical speech, which tells of what God has done to the world in Christ? And how do we learn to speak after it, echoing its authentic tones? What are the practices that safeguard that speech within the catholic church? How does the worship and ministry in which we engage respect its obligations and place that speech at its centre? The answer to those questions comprises the whole sphere of what is called “pastoral theology”. Well, there is a discipline learned in the church which perfectly responds to this evangelical speech, this Gospel. No other spiritual discipline, not even, dare I say it? prayer itself, is so important to it. It is the discipline of reading.

Reading is the act which opens us to the voice of Jesus’s witnesses, and so to history, to the world, and to the empty tomb at the world’s centre. Reading should be the core moment in all our liturgy, the heartbeat that gives life to the sacraments, the preaching and the prayers. Reading should be at the focal point of our church buildings, so that what we see first is not an altar, not a pulpit, but a lectern. Reading should be the lifeblood of our preaching, so that every new sermon we compose springs from a study of the Scripture that is for us as though for the first time, new, vital, surprising. Reading must be the rhythm of our life, the daily beat of the Gospel which gives order to the flurry of undertakings all around it. Reading schools us in self-denial and flexibility, emptying out the imaginations of self-generated visions and filling us with the thoughts of others. Reading accepts the divine violence upon the world that has given us life, but offers no violence back to the messengers through whom the news of that life comes to us.

We have our bibles, but do we read them? I think of pictures of preachers, bible spread out evenly on upraised palm, eyes staring fiercely out to capture the audience, finger vertical and rigid on the page. You can prophesy like that, you can assert authority like that, but you cannot read like that. Reading requires that we bend our eyes down and stoop in attention. Christianity has its moments of prophesying, and so, I trust, shall we. But the feast of the lion-evangelist should drive us back to our bibles, to see whether we have forgotten how to read them, bringing all our intelligence, all our imagination to the task. When we have read, then we, too, may speak. Then we may say, “The lion has roared; who will not fear? The Lord God has spoken; who will not prophesy?”

The Rev. Oliver O’Donovan was Regius Professor of Moral & Pastoral Theology and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford between 1982 and 2006. He is now Professor Christian Ethics and Practical Theology at the University of Edinburgh.
This sermon was preached on April 23rd 2006 for Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, at St. Andrew’s Church, North Oxford, .

Many thanks to Professor O’Donovan for permission to publish this sermon. A collection of Oliver O’Donovan’s sermons, “The Word in Small Boats”, will be published by William B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, in the Spring of 2009.

O’Donovan on the law and community adherence

Following on from our discussion in the last post, I thought I’d post a great quote from Oliver O’Donovan on the Law. It’s from Resurrection and Moral Order, pages 151–156 of which are, I think, a stunning treatment of this whole issue. Here, O’Donovan is describing Israel’s experience of being under the law—which he claims has universal relevance. What I think is particularly interesting is the way he sees being under law leading to a special emphasis on the outward signs of community adherence, a link which could be very relevant to various contemporary discussions:)

In speaking of ‘the Law’… the Reformers rightly believed they had found a category for understanding the burdensomeness of morality as such, which is to say, of any socio-moral order which bore down oppressively upon the moral agent because of its arbitrary relation to his plight… When the apostle contrasted ‘the law’ and ‘the gospel’, he was pointing to the dialectical tension in Israel’s history between the experience of God through promise and the experience of God through command. The law represented a phase in God’s dealings with his people in which their primary character as blessing, first made evident in the promises to Abraham, was provisionally obscured through the Mosaic order, in which they are seen as ambiguously open either to become blessing or to become curse. 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 had promised his people. Law supposes that God’s complete saving purpose is still an object of hope. But the promise of completion is conditional, and depends upon the faithful performance of the command. Command, therefore, becomes a hurdle which one must overcome in order to experience blessing. Law is command as reciprocal bargain, the breach of which promises disaster. In these circumstances command evokes anxiety, but not anxiety for the future of the community so much as for the individual. The divine promise assures us that Abraham’s seed will be preserved for salvation through a faithful remnant; but that offers no ground of confidence to the individual, for whom the question ‘Am I to be among the chosen?’ is not answered either in promise or in law. Thus the anxiety which the command promotes isolates the individual, with his unresolved destiny, from the community which is to inherit God’s promises. Inescapably, then, the law confronts the individual supremely as a demand for community adherence. Its content is dominated by ritual observance, that aspect of public righteousness by which the individual is claimed by his conformity for membership of the community. (Resurrection and Moral Order, 151–2).

O’Donovan on evangelical ethics

Michael has posted part of the programmatic opening to Oliver O’Donovan’s Resurrection and Moral Order, where he says, “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. Otherwise it could not be Christian ethics.” This theme is further articulated at the end of the book, and I thought I’d post a quote.

“If we have understood why love, the form of the moral life, is grouped, not with the spiritual gifts, which have their own intelligibility, but with faith and hope which depend for their intelligibility upon the end of history, then we have grasped how morality is related to salvation, how it is that Christian ethics is evangelical. The moral life of mankind is a moment in God’s dealing with the created order which he has restored in Christ. Only as that restored order is fully disclosed can the meaning of human morality be comprehended. Various aspects of the church’s activity can be abstracted from the totality of the church’s life and discussed in terms of their imminent value: Christian thought and education, Christian missionary enterprise, Christian art, Christian politics, Christian family life can all be appreciated, criticized, and perhaps improved upon from this point of view. But if we add to this list something called ‘the Christian ethic’, then we are not merely abstracting, we are misrepresenting. The true moral life of the Christian community is its love, and its love is unintelligible except as a participation in the life of the one who reveals himself to us as Love, except, that is, as the entry of mankind and of the restored creation upon its supernatural end.” (Resurrection and Moral Order, 246).

A lot of people stop with the first couple of chapters of this book; but I think the most interesting and profound section is actually the last one – and this is an example. For O’Donovan, Christian ethics are evangelical because Christian morality is human participation in God’s redemption of the world; it is our being in Christ, through whose life God has rescued and renewed creation.

O’Donovan on character

Following on from the discussion about works, I thought I’d post this fascinating passage from Resurrection and Moral Order, in which O’Donovan is discussing the function of an ethic of character:

 

Assessments of character remind us, in the first place, what moral deliberation is about. They place it in its soteriological context, as a matter not merely of ‘doing the right thing’ but of ’saving one’s soul’. The names of the virtues and vices represent to us different aspects of the salvation and damnation of the soul. Courage, wisdom and loyalty are forms of well-being in the moral agent, while cowardice, ignorance and selfishness are forms of corruption. In observing such well-being and corruption we see what ‘doing the right thing’ and ‘doing the wrong thing’ actually do to us… An ethic of character, therefore, raises the soteriological question in relation to morality; that is why the Catholic tradition of moral theology has been right to retain it. But it does not answer that question sufficiently; that is why the Protestant tradition has been right to suspect its possible pretensions. We shall not learn how to save our souls by talking about the formation of virtuous characters. Nevertheless, such talk may teach us better than anything else what it is for a soul to be lost or saved, and so teach us to care about it for ourselves and for others. (p.224)

Jesus and Government 6(b): Christian Political Action

Helping Governments be Good (2): Bearing witness to government

The second way we help governments be good is different, but crucial: we help our governments stay on the right track by holding fast to the true Gospel and so bearing witness in our society.

The great danger that confronts the church is that it will sell out to government, that it will stop preaching the true Gospel and start preaching a Gospel that fits better with our society, that’s a little less challenging. Because the Gospel never sits very comfortably with those in authority: it is the message that Jesus Christ is Lord and no one else, that the Kingdom of God matters more than any other kingdom, and that no earthly society is ultimate. This is always going to be a confronting message, especially for those in authority. Yet it is a message that desperately needs to be heard; because the alternative is something truly terrible: the demonic social order we see in Revelation 13. A government that fails to realise that there is a higher authority will end up becoming an idol. In Australia, I think we run little risk of making individual politicians into idols (thankfully). But I do think we run a risk of making “Australia” into a kind of idol. Just think about the rioting that happened at Cronulla a couple of years ago, with people waving flags and talking about defending our country and the Australian way of life, and most awfully, “Christian values”. This was, I believe, an example of a kind of nationalism which is actually idolatry. When we start treating people badly in the name of “Australia” (or any other community), we know we’ve got a big problem. The church must help our society and our governments stay on the right track by holding fast to the true Gospel, by keeping on preaching that Jesus alone is King, that our citizenship is in heaven, and that therefore “Australia” can never be the Kingdom of God.

We who belong to Jesus know that human society is destined to be united in the heavenly city, where all tribes and nations will join in praise to Jesus. That is where true justice lives, that’s where we’ll find peace, that’s where we belong. This is a wonderful message; but also one that cuts right across many things that human society tends to hold dear. Therefore, our most important task, our first political responsibility, is to hold fast to this gospel, and to live it out in the fellowship of God’s people that obeys Jesus when he says, “Judge not!”

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Thanks for staying with me if you’ve been following this series. For those who are interested, there’s now an outline of the series with links to all the posts at the series introduction here. I’ve tried to sketch an outline of a Christian view of government and political action, which I hope has been helpful; but I am well aware that there is a lot more that could be said. I hope you will continue to interact with me over this issue. I’m certainly willing to do further thinking. 

Jesus and Government 6(a): Christian Political Action

Well, having looked, at length, at what a Christian understanding of government might involve, let’s finally think about the most important question: what does all this mean for us? What should we be doing? I believe the basic answer is, we should do what we can to help our governments be good. This unfolds in two directions: (1) we should engage with politics, as good subjects, in the interest of the common good; and (2) we should bear witness to government by holding fast to the Gospel that Jesus Christ is King.

Helping Governments be Good (1): Engaging with politics for the common good
It is our responsibility as Christians, I believe, to engage with politics in the interest of the common good.

(i) This means firstly participating. Disinterest is not good. We have a unique opportunity, because of our political system, to actually have an impact, if only a small one, on what our governments are like. So we should take our participation seriously. At the least this means thinking about our votes, but it can of course mean much more. The important point is that we have a responsibility to participate.

The aim of participation, of course, is good government: we want to do what we can to help our governments make good judgments. This means that whether or not a particular politician is a Christian or not is not the important issue. Our aim is not Christians in Parliament but good government. The fact that a politician is a Christian might well help them govern well; but it might not. So we must be canny and not just be convinced by catch-phrases like “Christian Democrats” or “Family First”. Instead, we should aim to be people who think about a wider range of issues. Especially, we should consider the things we have talked about making for good government: does this party’s policy tell the truth about this issue? Does this party have too high a view of itself? How does this party treat the less well-off, such as (in Australia) the homeless, the Aboriginal population, and the mentally ill.

At present, I believe Christians should be particularly concerned about the priority given by government to economic management. Market-economics has become a kind of law that governments have to obey. Both major parties would sign off on the principle that “whatever’s good for the economy is right.” But Christians cannot sign off on this because we believe government is responsible for upholding divine law, and that that law is not identical with any other principle. Christians must advocate to stop our governments being ruled by the logic of economics. That cannot lead to good government in the end.

(ii) Secondly, we engage with government as good subjects. In the face of legitimate political authority, our attitude is fundamentally one of respect and submission, for “there is no authority except from God.” This means obedience to the law, and especially, paying our taxes honestly and fully. Christians should be good citizens. But as we’ve seen, we do this not just because we want to avoid punishment, but because we realise that it is good and right – for the sake of conscience.

(iii) Thirdly, engaging with government means praying. We are called to this explicitly in 1 Timothy 2. We pray that God would enable our governments to be good, to govern in accordance with the truth, to maintain order in society, and to recognise that they are not God. This prayer is “right and acceptable in God’s sight”, and it serves the proclamation of the gospel.

Of course, there is much more we could say; but these three things – participation, submission, and prayer – describe the basic shape of our engagement with government. This is the first way we help our governments be good.

Jesus and Government 5: The Shape of Good Government

We’ve seen that Government can and does go bad and that the Bible has ways of interpreting this theologically, as the expression of Satanic opposition to Christ’s triumph. But let us return to the positive possibility sketched by Paul and Peter: what might good government look like? What would it look like for a government to properly fulfil the role given to it in this age, the role of giving judgment? Books have been written on this subject, some good, many bad. But for now, I want to say just four things.

(i) First, good government will make true judgments; that is, its laws and actions will align with what God says about what is right and wrong – it’s law will correspond to divine law. This introduces the problematic idea of the separation of church and state. Those who came up with this idea meant simply that government shouldn’t tell the church what to do. It was originally a way of defending the church’s freedom. What it was never intended to mean was the separation of Christianity from the political realm, so that decisions about policy or legislation cannot be influenced by religious faith and values. Christians cannot embrace this approach; because there is real right and wrong and we know them from God. Good government will be government that judges in accordance with the truth. This does not, however, mean that politicians have to be Christians: it is simply a recognition that good judgments will be true judgments, that is, corresponding to the truth as God has revealed it.

(ii) Second, good government will see that it has limited authority. There are some things that it is simply beyond the authority of government to judge. In particular, this includes religious faith. How a man or a woman stands before God is something a state is simply not competent to decide on, and to attempt to do so would surely be to set itself up as a potential contender for this loyalty. So good government will maintain freedom of religious belief, understanding that there is a higher authority that it, and each of its subjects, will have to answer to.

(iii) Third, good government will be modest about its capacities. Good judgments, as O’Donovan points out (Ways of Judgment), have to be both true and effective; and there are some things a government simply can’t know the truth about and some things it simply can’t effectively achieve. For example, imagine a government trying to make laws against anger, or greed, or lust. It would be impossible for such laws to be just, because political authority cannot tell the truth about these wrongs. Likewise, this helps us understand why laws can change, and can be different depending on the nature of society. Imagine a modern Western government attempting to make adultery illegal. Though for Christians there is no doubt about the wrong-ness of this act, for a government to attempt to judge it in this culture of promiscuity and marriage breakdown would be deeply problematic. We can see, I think, that there are always issues that a government is simply not competent to judge. Good government will be modest about its abilities.

(iv) Fourth, and finally, I believe the Bible gives us reasons to emphasize the responsibility of government to defend the poor and vulnerable in society. We see this especially in the Old Testament’s teaching about what good kingship looked like.

“A ruler who oppresses the poor is a beating rain that leaves no food.” (Prov. 28:3)

“If a king judges the poor with equity, his throne will be established for ever.” (29:14)

“Speak out for those who cannot speak, for the rights of all the destitute. Speak out, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy.” (31:8-9)

“God has taken his place in the divine council;
in the midst of the gods he holds judgement:
‘How long will you judge unjustly
and show partiality to the wicked?
Give justice to the weak and the orphan;
maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute.
Rescue the weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.’” (Psalm 82:1-4)

Likewise, when the prophets criticise Israel, they often do so for her failure to do justice, especially in relation to the poor.

Good government will judge truthfully, it will recognise its limited authority, it will be modest about its capacities, and it will defend those in need. These four things, I think, give us a kind of outline of what good government involves.

Jesus and Government 4(b): What role is left for Government?

“Secular” Authority
Government under Christ’s Lordship is pushed back, called to humbly perform the task of judgment until Jesus returns and human society finds its perfection. Significantly, the apostle Paul links this role to the Church’s mission:

I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone—for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. (1 Timothy 2:1-4)

Paul urges that prayers be offered for government so that social order may be maintained – “so that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness”; but this is not the end in itself. This maintaining order serves a more important purpose: enabling “people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.” Good government ensures the social space for the church’s mission.

This role of defending the common good by condemning wrong and upholding right, which also serves the spread of the gospel, is the Bible’s idea of secular government. The word “secular” has come to mean “non-religious”; but it was never meant to mean that. “Secular” comes from the Latin word saeculum, which means “age.” So “secular government” means “government in this age”. The opposite of “secular” is not “sacred” but “eternal”. As Oliver O’Donovan helpfully expresses:

The most truly Christian state understands itself most thoroughly as “secular”. It makes the confession of Christ’s victory and accepts the relegation of its own authority… The essential element in the conversion of the ruling power is the change in its self-understanding and its manner of government to suit the dawning age of Christ’s own rule. (Desire of the Nations, 219)

Good government recognises that it is “secular”, that it has a limited role to play in this age only, until Jesus returns and the Kingdom of God is made visible to all.

Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2 describe the place given to government in this age; but their authors well knew that rulers could reject this role and seek to be more than the simple task that was given to them. So elsewhere in the Bible we see that there is another possibility for government in this age: instead of recognising that Jesus is Lord, government can fight back. This possibility may underlie the description (quite possibly of the Roman Emperor) of the “Man of Lawlessness” in 2 Thessalonians 2, and is certainly described by John in the book of Revelation. The beast of chapter 13, which the dragon calls out of the sea, and which in turn calls a beast out of the earth is a totalitarian political government, like the Roman Empire, which controls military and economic power and forces people to worship it. The book of Revelation, shows quite profoundly how government can go horribly wrong and become deeply evil, and one can only wonder how the twentieth century might have been different if we had been more sensitive to John’s warnings about the dangers of governments that demand our allegiance?

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For more on this last idea, see Oliver O’Donovan’s essay, “The political thought of the Book of Revelation” now published in Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, Bonds of Imperfection: Christian Politics Past and Present, as “History and Politics in the Book of Revelation”, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004, 25-47. I have found this essay deeply interesting and challenging. Reading Revelation with political eyes is very illuminating.