Christianity and Politics

Sheldon Wolin ( Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought ) lays great emphasis on the way Christianity “revitalized” political thought and life, yet he argues too that in the end the church failed to transform political ideas: “The supreme irony of this development was that it helped prepare the way for the emancipation of political theory from its servitude to theology. For although the categories of religion were becoming increasingly politicized, the reverse was not true of political theory. As the political ideas of Aquinas showed, Christian writers were largely content to point the traditional concepts of political theory towards distinctively Christian ends, but without destroying the content of the concepts themselves.”

The tradition, in short, did not do, or did very imperfectly, what Oliver O’Donovan has attempted in several books: Reformulating basic political concepts in terms of Scripture and redemptive history. Which means there’s lots left to do.