The Church as Political Society in the Political Theologies of Stanley Hauerwas and Oliver O'Donovan

Abstract

What does it mean to identify the Church as a political society? This question, which lies at the heart of this study, is prompted by the urgent and ongoing efforts to rediscover the politicality of the Church after Christendom. The project dialogues with the ecclesial-turn - the discursive-ecclesiological context - in which the study is contextually situated. Part one sets the contextual groundwork for this study. I explore the turn toward the study of the Church in contemporary Anglo-American political theologies, establishing the discursive context that is the ecclesial-turn. Within this 'turn' I identify Oliver O'Donovan and Stanley Hauerwas as fitting conversation partners given the Christological-eschatological concerns discernible within their ecclesiological politics. Part two sets out to analytically investigate the politicality of the Church in both accounts. I demonstrate that the Church in Hauerwas' account constitutes a cruciform eschatological polity. In O'Donovan's account I demonstrate that the Church constitutes a polity under eschatological government. I turn to O'Donovan's four moments of recapitulation, in which O'Donovan identifies the Christ-event as the narrative structure and structuring principle for the Church's politicality. I demonstrate in both a preoccupation with differing junctures of the Christ-event with significant implications for the politicality of the Church. In part three, I comparatively appraise both accounts of ecclesial politics by drawing O'Donovan and Hauerwas into Christological dialogue. In Hauerwas is identified a 'politics of ascent' and in O'Donovan a 'politics of descent'. These terms are developed and elucidated to clarify and critically evaluate the interplay between the cross and the resurrection in both visions. The fruit of this dialogue leads the study, constructively, toward a shift from the cross and the resurrection to eschatology in part four. Here, I investigate their eschatologies and its influence upon their accounts of the Church as political society. O'Donovan, I argue, advances an eschatological protology and Hauerwas an apocalyptic eschatology. Through their eschatological parallels and differences, we discover the significance of a protological and an apocalyptic 'moment' relative to the Church as political society. The project concludes with a return to the ecclesial-turn. I contribute to that discussion by offering a theological account of the politicality of the Church organised by the eschatological moment that is the Christ-event and propose an eschatological-turn in contemporary ecclesiological politics.

Date of Award	16 Jan 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Peter Scott (Main Supervisor) & Scott Midson (Co Supervisor)