Report Template - Jubilee Centre

Foreword by Professor John Coffey
In the final decades of the twentieth century, the
relationship between religion and politics became a
hotly contested issue. With hindsight, two events in
1979 seem pivotal. The Islamic Revolution in Iran
coincided with the foundation of the Moral Majority in
the United States. The Ayatollah Khomeini and the
Reverend Jerry Falwell were an unlikely pairing, but
they became conflated in liberal discourse, as
intellectuals reacted with alarm to what a leading
French writer called ‘the revenge of God’. 1 Many
lamented that the secular foundations of modern
politics were being undermined. The American
Religious Right and Islamic militancy were part of a
larger phenomenon of ‘fundamentalism’ or ‘religious
nationalism’. Others suggested that these conservative
movements were reacting against the aggressive
secularism of the modern West, which posed a threat to
traditional religious values and sought to banish all
reference to God from public life. In America and
Europe, there was talk of ‘culture wars’. Globally, some
spoke of ‘the clash of civilisations’.
But the ‘return of religion’ was not confined to the
realm of politics or popular piety. The final decades of
the twentieth century also witnessed a resurgence of
serious religious thought. The Society of Christian
Philosophers spearheaded a revival of Christian
analytical philosophy. Leading Anglophone
philosophers like Alvin Plantinga, Alasdair Macintyre
and Charles Taylor subjected secular thought to
searching analysis and critique and defended the
rationality and cogency of religious belief. In the
continental tradition, Christian thinkers like Paul
Ricoeur and Jean-Luc Marion instigated a religious turn
in French philosophy. Historians of ideas were
increasingly alert to the theistic foundations and
scriptural sources of early modern thought. Among
literary scholars, there was renewed attention to the
theological concerns of canonical writers and a growing
interest in the reception history of the Bible. Biblical
scholars became attentive to the political message of the
Exodus, the Mosaic Law and the Jubilee, the Prophets,
Wisdom Literature, the Gospels, the Epistles and the
Book of Revelation. 2 There was lively debate about the
anti-imperial credentials of the New Testament. Among
theologians, the work of Jürgen Moltmann and Gustavo
1
Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam,
Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1994).
2
Richard Bauckham, The Bible in Politics: How to Read the Bible
Politically (London: SPCK, second edition 2011).
Gutierrez confirmed the emergence of political theology
as a major field of thought. Both drew creatively on
earlier thinkers – Moltmann on Calvinist resistance
theorists, Gutierrez on Bartolome Las Casas. In Britain,
the Anglican theologians, Oliver and Joan O’Donovan,
compiled A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought, with
readings ranging from Irenaeus to Grotius. 3
Gai Ferdon’s study picks up where the O’Donovans left
off, in 1625. This was the year in which Charles I
ascended to the throne. His reign would end in Civil
War and Regicide – in 1649 he was beheaded in front
of his own palace at Whitehall. What makes the period
intriguing from the viewpoint of political theology is
that this was a religious crisis. Charles’ attempt to
realign the English Church, moving it away from the
continental Reformed churches, sparked fears of a
‘counter-Reformation’. Thousands of nonconformist
Puritans migrated to new colonies in New England, and
the Scots rose up in rebellion against a ‘popish’ Prayer
Book. Charles was forced to recall the English
Parliament in 1640. The next two decades witnessed an
extraordinary intellectual ferment as contemporaries
debated fundamental issues of allegiance and resistance,
liberty and authority. In addressing these questions,
they turned to the Greco-Roman classics, the English
constitution and natural law theory. But they also
turned to the Bible, offering a series of competing
accounts of the principles of Scripture politics.
The Harvard historian, Eric Nelson, has recently argued
that this was ‘the Biblical Century’ in the history of
political thought. Christian scholars across Protestant
Europe produced an entire genre of works on the
Hebrew republic, drawing on the insights of rabbinic
scholarship. 4 Gai Ferdon confirms the importance of
the Old Testament to Protestants, but she also shows
how contemporaries appealed to New Testament
teaching on power and obedience. She introduces us to
four political groupings that represent a broad spectrum
of English political opinion in the mid-seventeenth
century: Royalists, Republicans, Fifth Monarchists and
Levellers. Her paper grows out of PhD research at the
University of Leicester, which I had the pleasure to
supervise. Presented in this format her work combines
3
Oliver and Joan O’Donovan, eds, From Irenaeus to Grotius: A
Sourcebook of Christian Political Thought, 100-1625 (Grand Rapids:
Wm Eerdmans, 1999).
4
Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the
Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2010).
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