This session engages the multifaceted theme of “political judgment” across the Reformed tradition, engaging its varied historical, theological, ethical, and political dimensions. It examines the covenantal reframing of political authority and judgment in the Huguenot Philippe de Mornay’s Vindiciae, contra tyrannos (1579); it explores Oliver O’Donovan’s appeal to judgment as privatio in the civitas Dei and the implications that follow for the political witness of the Church; and it argues that, given the gun’s function as a mythic instrument of final judgment within American cultural identity, Christian eschatological identity rejects the narrative coherence of guns.
Recent work in historical and political theology has recognized the complex set of questions our contemporary contexts present as well the resources present within Reformational and post-Reformational for our common life. This paper seeks to explore the role that the theological interpretation of Scripture and the motif of covenant play in Philippe de Mornay's Vindiciae, contra tyrannos's reformulation and redistribution of political judgment. In it, I argue that Vindiciae’s construal of political judgment is founded upon a series of theological readings of the Old Testament and the appropriation of resources intrinsic to Reformed theology. Together, these two resources provide the stimulus for reconceptualizing and redistributing political authority around the central motif of covenant, a move that empowers the ecclesial community to participate in the act of exercising political judgment, insofar as its members share in the validation and authorization of political authority, and provides grounds for protesting its abuses.
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.
This paper argues that within American cultural identity the gun functions as a mythic instrument of final judgment, authorizing moral and existential agency through violent force. Against this, Christian eschatological identity rejects the narrative coherence of guns. Employing narrative identity theory and narrative theology, the paper offers an applied theological assessment of firearms in American life. Part One draws on Paul Ricoeur, to show how identity-forming stories construct guns as guarantors of autonomy and justice. These narratives grant firearms an implicit eschatological status within the American imagination. Part Two turns to postliberal readings of Karl Barth and the biblical metanarrative, framed by Eden and the new creation, to argue that tools of lethal violence have no place in Christian eschatological hope. Whatever use guns have in the present is due to the conditions of sin. There is no final eschatological value for guns in the Christian story.