Oliver O'Donovan for Mere Mortals 1: Why O'Donovan?

Some of you may be wondering why I would choose to write a series of posts about Oliver O'Donovan. Many of you probably have never heard of him. Those of you who have may be questioning my sanity. Oliver O'Donovan is not an easy man to understand--at least the works of his that I've read are not easy to understand. In fact, I'm making my way through Resurrection and Moral Order again, and it's only now starting to click. I'm thinking that this may be a book I read once a year so that I can hope to grasp more of it (I'd like to do the same thing to Thomas Torrance's The Christian Doctrine of God and Colin Gunton's The One, the Three, and the Many).

I was introduced to O'Donovan the first semester of my Ph.D. work, and it opened my mind to a new way of thinking about … well ... everything. I was so impacted by his work that I believed for a while that O'Donovan would figure heavily into my dissertation. Well, that didn't happen, and so I had to put his works on the back burner for a while.

During my coursework, I had never really thought about O'Donovan's work outside of purely theoretical ethics. While I knew that there were some great applications to take away, it had never occurred to me how far-reaching O'Donovan's system of thoght really was. I remember David Nelson mentioning how O'Donovan's work helped shape how he understood the Christian's relation to culture (coincidentally, he also introduced me to The One, the Three, and the Many). Doug Baker mentioned O'Donovan's thought in connection with the Christian and government. While I had reviewed The Ways of Judgment (another O'Donovan book), I did not grasp that it was built upon the framework O'Donovan had set up in Resurrection and Moral Order.

I work in public policy, and one of the big questions I keep thinking about is how the Christian should approach the public square. How should the Christian relate to government in terms of involvement in government or in government related groups like the one I work in. I would eventually like to design a college or masters (or both) course on the subject. Toward that end, I submitted a paper proposal to ETS (the Evangelical Theological Society) to present at their annual meeting. The tentative title is "God, the Christian, and Government: Toward of Theology of Christian Involvement in the Public Square." Praise God, my proposal was accepted, and I'll present that paper later this year. All I have to do now is write it.

So, unlike my dissertation, O'Donovan will play heavily in this (as will Christopher Wright's big books, I think). This series is my hope to really dig into O'Donovan's work and understand it well enough to explain it and apply it to the subject matter of my paper. It is also my hope that this work will introduce some of you to O'Donovan's work or, if you already have read it, to engage in discussion. I in no way have the market cornered on his thought, but it intrigues me. Hopefully, it will intrigue you, too.