Mosaic politics

“It was a celebrated thesis of the Reformation,” writes Oliver O’Donovan in his Brampton Lectures, The Ways of Judgement , “that the political judgment we enact are Mosaic and not evangelical .”

Earlier Christian legal theory “from Gratian to Grotius” taught “that lex divina was available to knowledge from a variety of sources, natural and revealed, but that the capstone was lex evangelica , the ‘Gospel law,’ which both extended and interpreted what we knew of God’s judgments from the other sources” (84).

For Protestants, the notion of a lex evangelica was absurd. True, “God’s will was revealed as divine law,” but Protestants denied that “this divine law included the decisive judgment of God on which our hope for the future hands, the Paschal judgment rendered in the death and resurrection of Christ.” Confronted with that judgment, the “ultimate disclosure of judgment in condemnation and forgiveness,” we can “only tremble, and believe in our hearts.” We can in no way imitate it.

Political judgments thus must be grounded elsewhere.

“The judgments that we fashioned in the public realm . . . were founded upon natural reason, Old Testament law, or some combination of the two. This meant that they were un-evangelical.” This doesn’t mean they were harsh or inflexible, for both reason and the Old Testament testify to the “patience and forbearance of God.” But it did mean that public judgments “stood on the near side of the great Law-Gospel divide between terror and freedom.” Thus Christians cannot help but feel “a certain alienation in performing them, for they are cut off from our hope, and can tell us nothing of God’s final word of grace in Christ.” Ethics and politics were treated under the “uses of the law” rather than as an aspect of the gospel (84-5).

Luther summed up the position: “Do you want to now what your duty is as a prince or a judge or a lord or a lady, with people under you? You do not have to ask Christ about your duty” (!).

O’Donovan is aware of the reasons behind this thesis: It stresses a limit on politics that has gone unheeded in modern politics, with much anguish the result: “We cannot condemn and redeem at once . . . . There is in God’s life-giving judgment something that our own judgments cannot, and must not try, to imitate . . . . We see, then, in what sense our political judgments are ‘Mosaic’” (87).

But that comes at a high price, with “disturbing implications for the moral life as such. For if the Paschal judgment is not prescription, we cannot obey it. Ethics, too, not politics alone, must become un-evangelical.” This produces a strange apophaticism with regard to the Paschal judgment itself (85).

The problem is entwined, O’Donovan thinks, with the Western tendency to stress the cross to the exclusion of resurrection: “while the cross discriminates between God’s righteous servant and the world that rejects him . . . it is the resurrection that vindicates the pattern of humanity that Christ lived for us and commanded us to follow” (85). Without the resurrection, we’re left with a tragic sense of duty: We must follow the way of the cross, though we know there is no hope of vindication.

I wonder if what O’Donovan describes really deserves the label “Protestant” rather than “Lutheran.” But there’s enough truth in his assessment to elicit some soul-searching from all Protestants. Two specific projects came to mind: First, developing a political theology rooted in a more biblical understanding of “justice” that incorporates passages linking righteousness to salvation, generosity, protection and support of the needy; and, second, a reading of the Sermon on the Mount as a “mirror for princes.”