Both the Reformed and the Missional views agree on several fundamental points. First, O’Donovan has stated clearly that he appreciates much of Hauerwas’ political thought, particularly his contributions to the idea of the Church as polis—as a counterculture to the State (O’Donovan 1996: 215). Both movements are sympathetic with the Milbankish move away from the “secular,” as such. There is no such thing as a neutral (or “naked”) public square, no unaligned “public space.” O’Donovan and Cavanaugh alike believe the State is in need of a grand public humiliation. As O’Donovan puts it, liberal institutions like the State display theologically “the coming of the Antichrist” (O’Donovan 1996: 228). Both positions would call the Church to increased vigilance and an invigorated prophetic voice against the idolatry of the State. Both the Reformed and the Missional ideas leave room aplenty for martyrdom and the re-emergence of a Christian community. Both claim Augustine’s two cities metaphor as central—“the conviction that politics is truly politics only when mapped onto salvation history” (Cavanaugh 2003: 403).

The Eschatological Critique

The differences begin to emerge in the not-always-hypothetical case that the State actually begins to listen to the Church. Both Hauerwas and O’Donovan look to Constantine for a theological watershed. O’Donovan’s thesis is accurately stated by Cavanaugh: “If Christology is given its due political weight, then after the Ascension the nations could simply not refuse to acknowledge Christ…. Nevertheless, the government is not the church; the church exists to serve as a distinctive witness, to remind the government of its temporary status” (Cavanaugh 2003: 403). However, O’Donovan also argues that Christendom—in which the State humbles itself before Christ—is a natural effect of the Ascension. Cavanaugh says of O’Donovan: he is “unusual in this respect.” Cavanaugh points out that Hauerwas and O’Donovan both advance eschatological arguments against the State, but that Cavanaugh pushes his eschatological argument much farther in effect: “Hauerwas has no doubt that God’s reign will triumph, but he wants to be more reticent than O’Donovan about how in fact God’s reign is manifested on the way” (Cavanaugh 2003: 404).

At this point, regardless of your personal eschatological tendencies, it might seem as if Cavanaugh and Hauerwas at least have Augustine on their side, while O’Donovan has only Gary North and the late Mr. Rushdoony. However, it seems to me that—no matter how you dress up O’Donovan—he advances a much subtler argument than the theonomists, and one which sounds very Augustinian. For O’Donovan, the fatal weakness of the Missional view is the way in which it poses the dichotomy between the two cities. Hauerwas, he argues, takes a similar position to those of Luther, Marsilius, and countless post-medieval theorists: the Church-State divide is analogous to an inner-outer divide. The Church pertains to salvation and the soul, while the State (the secular) can only condemn and affect the body. O’Donovan posits that we should ditch the inner-outer (spatial) analogy for a temporal one:

Secular institutions have a role confined to this passing age (saeculum). They do not represent the arrival of the new age and the rule of God…. The corresponding term to “secular” is not “sacred,” nor “spiritual,” but “eternal.” Applied to political authorities, the term “secular” should tell us that they are not agents of Christ, but are marked for displacement when the rule of Christ is finally disclosed. They are Christ’s conquered enemies; yet they have an indirect testimony to give, bearing the marks of his sovereignty imposed upon them, negating their pretensions and evoking their acknowledgement. Like the surface of a planet pocked with craters by the bombardment it receives from space, the governments of the passing age show the impact of Christ’s dawning glory. This witness of the secular is the central core of Christendom (O’Donovan 1996: 211-12).

The shift is subtle. By moving the split from spatial to temporal, O’Donovan allows room for the State to serve a teleological purpose, rather like the Pauline doctrine of the law as taskmaster. (O’Donovan affirms the patristic idea that government exists for the evil doers and not the righteous, and thereby allows that we will need less and less of it as Christ progressively conquers His enemies.)

The Church then occupies the position of the eternal City of God which claims the transcendent citizenship of the Christian, but also condescends to influence the city of man:

The church does not philosophise about a future world; it demonstrates the working of the coming Kingdom within this one. Through the authorization of the Holy Spirit it squares up to civil authority and confronts it. This may lead to martyrdom, or to mutual service. The service rendered by the state to the church is to facilitate its mission…. It may facilitate it, first, simply by performing its own business responsibly and with modest pretensions (O’Donovan 1996: 217).

The Christian State is humbled—humiliated, perhaps. And, while it may be legitimized in some way, is remains in an awkward position: “The Christian emperor was, as it were, a spy in his own camp, an uncomfortable situation which the bishop could do little to make more comfortable” (O’Donovan 1996: 201).

The Incarnational Critique

This next critique follows closely from the spatial-temporal distinction that O’Donovan makes from Hauerwas’ work. If, as Hauerwas argues, the Church represents the immaterial and the State the material, the effect is that while both are political entities, the Church is “a polis without a police department,” as Cavanaugh summarizes it. In other words the Church is a counter-polis, but must not exert any threat of violence upon the body. This dichotomy is at the very least seven hundred years old, and presupposes the old views of Marsilius of Padua, who argued that the Church should stay out of material/political concerns because it would only compromise itself by doing so.

It seems that some sort of duality is inevitable, while O’Donovan still believes it is possible to maintain a healthy distance from dualism. The duality of Marsilius and Hauerwas tries to protect the Church from corruption by associating it with some sort of Platonic immateriality. It’d be counter-productive for a pastor to try and sway local politics; every minute he spends on temporal concerns is a minute he could’ve spent on matters pertaining to salvation.

I’d like to suggest that the “problem” of church-state relations floats on top of the philosophical undercurrent of the divide between the natural and the supernatural. Both realms exist, and as far as I am aware, all parties (Reformed, Missional, and otherwise) associate the State with the natural order and the Church with the supernatural order. After the 5th century pope Gelasius, the medieval Church assumed the formula: “Two there are by whom this world is ruled as princes.” However, while the Reformed view recognizes this duality, it makes a another crucial claim. The Church stands against the State as a counter-revolutionary prophet, priest, and king; but it also serves in some way to legitimize the natural order once the natural order has bowed the knee to Christ. The Missional view rejects the idea that the saeculum can be in some way redeemed. Missionalists like Hauerwas and Cavanaugh see the Church’s role as prophetic, just like O’Donovan. However, they view the State as irreversibly flawed, a temporal counter to the Church. The secular order is assumed to be ascendant and adversarial—at all times.

Random Historical Considerations

While O’Donovan does not, to my knowledge, dogmatically claim the Calvinist views he describes, he presents them as a counter to much of the prevailing dualism of the Reformation period. When he discusses John Calvin, for instance, he allows that Calvin’s distinction of the “two-fold government of man” sounds Marsilian—with its division into that which pertains to the soul and that which “regulates external conduct” (III.19.15). However, Calvin bids farewell to Marsilius in that he wants to establish a “structured church authority which was subject to the exegesis of Scripture yet possessed sufficient social objectivity to provide effective institutional government” (O’Donovan 1996: 210). In other words, the Church (which oversaw the government of the soul) was intended to guide the powers which regulated the body. This is archetype of the city-state of Geneva, which O’Donovan argues was intended to be the founding utopia of Reformed political theory. And while Calvin may have harbored some dualistic tendencies, O’Donovan sees enough divergence in Reformed thought to write about “the Calvinist reversal of the Marsilian legacy of the early Reformation” (O’Donovan 1996: 213).

O’Donovan also suggests that Calvinist polity necessarily tends toward localism. Since Calvinism divested both the pope and emperor of any universal power,

The Calvinist influence was uniquely dependent on its city-state model. Church structures deprived of both universal papacy and bishopric were arranged in local units of a size that groups of ministers and lay elders could meet in consistory to exercise the church’s authority. This created a powerful engine of shared lay-clerical decision-making at local level. The Calvinist Reforms provided a forum of local politics (O’Donovan 1996: 211).

At this point the Reformed system seems to provide a means by which some of early modern political theory can be salvaged. The Missional view seems to imply that any system spawned by Christendom or early modernity is fundamentally flawed. O’Donovan is skeptical, but not as definite in his analysis of early modernity, in which he sees traces of earlier medieval traditions (O’Donovan 1996: 226ff).

* * *

Summing it all, the distinguishing marks of the Reformed and Missional views are subtle, but still carry their proponents to different destinations. Cavanaugh summarizes the Missional goal: “The political task of the church post-Christendom is to suffer rulers as faithfully as possible, to the point of martyrdom if necessary, to wait upon the Lord and not to presume to rule in his place” (Cavanaugh 2003: 404). O’Donovan and the Reformed tradition, however, go one step more, arguing that martyrdom effects victory. The blood of the martyrs may be what built the Church, but it was the martyrs themselves who cried out for blood, as John records in his revelation. As O’Donovan poses it, the real question is whether God will answer that call for vengeance or not.

Sources and Suggested Reading

Cavanaugh, William. Torture and Eucharist. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998.

________. “Church.” In Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, eds. Peter Scott
and William Cavanaugh, 393-406. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.

Hauerwas, Stanley. The Peaceable Kingdom. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1983.

________. Against the Nations. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
1992.

Leithart, Peter. Against Christianity. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2003.

O’Donovan, Oliver. The Desire of the Nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

________. From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought.
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999.

Ullmann, Walter. Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages. London:
Methuen, 1961.