It has been a query in recent scholarship about how distinctive the political witness of the Church community is in Oliver O'Donovan's political theology.
In this paper, I argue that this ambivalence arises from O’Donovan’s insistence on the existence of two overlapping societies, civitas terrena and civitas Dei, in every political act. While most paid attention to his magnum opus, Desire and Judgment, and tend to focus primarily on discussing his understanding of the State or government and its activities, I take a different approach by starting from Entering into Rest, in which O’Donovan defines judgment as privatio, as opposed to the public communication of truth. Whereas civitas terrena is characterised by ‘judging’, civitas Dei points to an eschatological society which ‘judges not’. Hence, the political witness of the Church, as a sign of contradiction, signifies a true communication of the final judgment, which contradicts all partial and untrue communication.