Abstract
The question of how religious belief and practice might translate into the public sphere of politics, economics, culture and society is both deeply perennial and profoundly contextual. Yet the discipline of public theology, while also having a history of its own, is a relative newcomer to the scene. This is partly due to its conscious creation at the end of the twentieth century as an academic discipline, which now boasts international learned societies such as the Global Network for Public Theology and prestigious journals such as Brill’s International Journal of Public Theology.
But the very existence of such a field is also premised on the particular dispensations that accompanied the emergence of modern society in the West. These included the separation of Church and State, religious tolerance, and the rise of a liberal body politic in which matters of personal conscience as much as religious edict become the final arbiters of political behaviour. The distinction between public and private and the association of religion with the latter were closely associated with the birth of liberal democracy; and while many countries maintained constitutional roles for religion, much of public theological discourse has tacitly accommodated itself to the realities of pluralism as a matter of necessity.
Joan Lockwood O’Donovan’s book chooses to step back from this very modern arrangement in order to challenge its presuppositions. She returns to the English Reformation and the emergence of English Anglicanism, its founding figures and documents, in order to paint a picture of a very different constitutional settlement. She argues that the jettisoning of its theological precepts in favour of secular natural law has severely eroded our ability to make morally coherent judgements on a range of public issues.
O’Donovan points to the thoroughly theological nature of the Reformation tradition’s understanding of the nature of the State, the rule of law and the process of government. These were rooted, as she sees it, in biblical exegesis and in a robust political theology of the Church as both a temporal and eschatological entity. It follows, then, that there can be no ontological separation of powers. This provides the basis on which O’Donovan then delivers her critique of traditions of natural law and natural rights, such as an emphasis on individualist and voluntarist accounts of moral and political agency, a legal system based on a contractual rather than covenantal model, and a reliance on humanist anthropologies of self-determination rather than divine grace, all of which she regards as deficient.
This book is an outstanding case study in the particular historical contribution of the English Reformation to the emergence of Western liberal democracy. It is the result of painstaking research: the Bibliography includes a comprehensive range of primary and secondary sources which will prove invaluable to anyone working in the fields of ecclesiastical and constitutional law. Equally, the global community of public theologians should always be mindful of the book’s warning against losing sight of the central theological and ecclesiological foundations of their discipline. Even so, in practice, the ‘public’ nature of public theology requires it not only to turn in towards the sources of its own tradition. It must look outwards as well, in order to communicate with, and contribute to, a society that is irrevocably religiously, politically and culturally pluralist.