James K. A. Smith’s book Awaiting the King interrogates the religious nature of contemporary politics and the political nature of Christian practice, and in doing so draws Augustine out of the ivory tower to which many have confined him, putting the late-antique theologian into a conversation with a host of contemporary voices.

Nicholas Wolterstorff’s The Mighty and the Almighty is an intervention in the field of Christian political theology. He argues that traditional political theology in both its premodern and contemporary forms has tended to fall into perfectionist and providentialist traps, allowing the state to claim divinely-bestowed authority where it has none. In response, his constructive project advances particular views of the relationship between divine and political authority as well as the relationship between the state, conceived as a divinely-authorized rights-limited institution, and (...) the church, conceived as a non-natural institution that is ontologically autonomous of the state. Wolterstorff suggests that Christian political theology can, and ought to, endorse a certain form of modern liberal polity. While granting many of his points, I argue that Wolterstorff’s dismissal of traditional thinkers, such as John Calvin, reveals two problematic features of his own theory: first, the way he relates the state’s moral authority to natural rights and the common good; and second, his proposal of the ontological distinction between church and state. Drawing on the conceptual resources of some of Wolterstorff’s own theological forebears—John Calvin and Johannes Althusius—I suggest that traditional Christian political theology offers a more adequate framework for recognizing the common good and responding appropriately to conditions of justice and injustice. (shrink)

In the midst of religious conflict in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a number of prominent Protestant theologians and lawyers wrote on the collective moral obligation to resist systemic injustice. My essay focuses on Johannes Althusius, who offers a theological account of the political community and its obligation to preserve the common good and resist injustice. Thinking alongside Althusius, I will consider not only the conditions that may prompt acts of resistance but also the lawful means and ends (...) of resistance. In other words, how might resistance be carried out rightly? By whom? And to what end? Finally, I argue that we have good reasons to use Althusius’s political thought to revive an account of resistance that is internal to the Christian theological tradition—an account that relies on a broader conception of divine justice, covenantal responsibility, and mutual accountability. (shrink)