The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology

Political theology as we know it today reacts against the attempt to insulate theology from political theory which has generally characterised the modern era. But its own intellectual parentage in the idealist historicism of the nineteenth century has left it still entrammelled in the suspicions and inhibitions from which it has wanted to break free. Oliver O'Donovan contends that to pass beyond suspicion and totalised criticism of politics and to achieve a positive reconstruction of political thought, theology must reach back behind the modern tradition, achieving a fuller, less selective reading of the Scriptures and learning from an older politico-theological discourse which flourished in the patristic, medieval and Reformation periods. Central to that discourse was a series of questions about authority, generated by Jesus' proclamation of the Kingdom of God. This book, now published in paperback, makes an important contribution to contemporary political theology and Christian ethics.

Oliver O'Donovan is Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, University of Oxford, and Canon of Christ Church. He is the author of The Problem of Self-Love in Saint Augustine (1981), Begotten or Made? (1984), On the Thirty-Nine Articles (1986) and Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline of Evangelical Ethics (1993).