John Walker

Classical Protestant ecclesiology sought to uphold the ordered, public authority of the church while preserving the freedom of the individual Christian. A twofold concern over illegitimately binding the conscience and usurping the believer's personal responsibility constrained the church's authority to issue specific ethical judgments. In the case of war, the results could lead one of two ways: either deferring to the judgment of political authorities or to the private judgment of the individual. In either case, the authority of the church to render a public judgment qua the church was left unsupported. In the aftermath of World War I, a number of Protestant theologians sought to reclaim the church's public authority in political affairs, especially in matters of war. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's thought signaled a turn toward concreteness within Protestant social ethics that shaped the trajectory of twentieth-century Protestant ecumenism. The American theologian Paul Ramsey came to oppose this development, arguing that Protestant church leaders had abandoned the ecclesiological vision of the Reformation. This essay explores the theological tensions and motivations underlying these diverse accounts and considers how Protestant thinking about just war is necessarily bound up with reflection on the nature of the church and its public ministry.

This article examines the relationship between the work of Anglican political theologian Joan Lockwood O’Donovan and French Catholic political philosopher Pierre Manent, focusing on their respective rights-critical narratives of modern political liberalism. While both thinkers fault the natural rights tradition for relying on a false anthropology, they draw different conclusions about the relationship of natural rights to the political. O’Donovan sees the theory of natural rights as a case of over-politicization, of subjugating natural and redeemed sociality to the alien juridical logic of postlapsarian earthly politics. Manent, by contrast, sees in the theory of natural rights a de-politicization of erstwhile political relationships and an eclipse of the human qua citizen (i.e., political animal). O’Donovan represents an Augustinian anxiety over rights, and Manent an Aristotelian one. Though evidently opposed, I consider if and how these two approaches might converge. The crux of the inquiry turns on how one specifies the nature of the political. Manent regards political action as human action at its highest pitch. O’Donovan, by contrast, sees it as essentially derivative, reactive, and concealing as much as disclosing. Where Manent centers the political act, O’Donovan centers the doxological act. The question of which has primacy represents a fundamental decision for any political theology seeking to think beyond the limits of liberalism.