1 Why Hauerwas and Cavanaugh Are Not Sectarians

Before beginning the constructive work of Part II, I need to explain why Hauerwas and Cavanaugh will not be my interlocutors in the chapters to come. While they serve well as tools of critique, the limitations and problems of their political theology become apparent when they develop their alternative models of how church and state should be interrelated. Although their thought is typical of ecclesial ethicists, I do not claim that every ecclesial ethicist is vulnerable to the criticisms I shall make of Hauerwas and Cavanaugh. A judgement of ecclesial ethics as a whole, if such a judgement could be made without losing sight of the shades of differences between them, would need to cover (at least) James McClendon, Michael Baxter, D. Stephen Long, and John Howard Yoder. However, a comprehensive critique of ecclesial ethics would be too far from the purpose of this book and would take me beyond its limited space, so my attention will be confined to examining Hauerwas and Cavanaugh. My discussion of the problematic aspects of their thought in this chapter will serve the constructive work of Part II by identifying the problems my framework of church-state relations will need to avoid, in addition to the problems already identified in Vatican II’s teachings.

My critique can be divided into two sections. The first section criticises how they understand the modern state and political authority in general, and the second criticises their ecclesiology. These divisions should not distract attention, however, from the continuous train of thought linking each section together. My aim throughout this chapter is to identify the theological mistakes that prevent Hauerwas and Cavanaugh from giving sound assistance to the practical reasoning of Christian public officials.

It is important to note before going any further that I am not making the argument (or rather indictment) made by many before to dismiss ecclesial ethicists. As Biggar writes:

The standard charge levelled against Hauerwas, and the most common reason for dismissing what he has to say, is that he is ‘sectarian’. By ‘sectarianism’ what is usually meant is a retreat into the private world of the church and into personal spirituality, and what is assumed to be a correlative disengagement from public concerns and debate. (Biggar 2000, p. 141)

James Gustafson was one of many critics unimpressed by Hauerwas’ rhetorical ‘battle against liberalism’ (Stackhouse 1995, p. 962, as cited in Hauerwas and Willimon 1996, p. 11). Gustafson warned his fellow ethicists from following Hauerwas by succumbing to the ‘sectarian temptation’ (Gustafson 1985, p. 90). Without using the term ‘sectarian’ Charles Mathewes directed a similar criticism at Cavanaugh for being one of ‘many recent theological accounts of politics [that] rely on a … pessimism to legitimate a fundamentally renunciatory [sic] and escapist attitude towards public life’ (Mathewes 2007, p. 223). Similar criticisms are made by liberal Catholics, such as Richard McBrien, against sectarianism for being ‘diametrically opposed to Catholicism’ (McBrien 1995, p. 1180, as cited in Cavanaugh 2020, p. 504), despite emerging ‘in portions of the Catholic peace movement and in some younger Catholic moral theologians influenced by Protestant sectarian ethicists [e.g. Baxter]’ (ibid).

There are, however, two problems with accusations of sectarianism against Hauerwas and Cavanaugh. The first is that the argument relies on the assumption that we know how to distinguish what is sectarian from what is not. From Gustafson’s use of the term, he is clearly not intending to use the term primarily in the theological sense of a group that enters into schism by cutting itself off from communion with the universal church and declaring itself the only true ecclesial community. He uses ‘sectarian’ according to the sociologist Ernst Troeltsch’s usage of that term, which had been popularised by the writings of Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr (Yoder 1994, pp. 105, 187).Footnote 1 Gustafson’s ‘criticism is therefore not that he [i.e. Hauerwas] is sectarian in relation to the catholic church, but in relation to the ‘world’, that is, the cultures and societies in which the church lives’ (Rasmusson 1995, p. 233).

This criticism fails most obviously because Hauerwas’ position does not entail a total withdrawal from ‘participating in the cultural, intellectual, and political of society’ (Hauerwas 1988, p. 11), but rather ‘a sense of selective service and the ability to set priorities’ (ibid, p. 15).Footnote 2 He has concentrated on the ecclesial context of ethics because ‘insofar as the church can reclaim its integrity as a community of virtue, it can be of great service in liberal societies’ (ibid, p. 7). Christians need only withdraw their support when a ‘government and society resorts to violence in order to maintain internal order and external security’ (ibid, p. 15). Yet by their non-violent lives, Christians help make their ‘societies less prone to resort to violence’ (ibid), for example ‘by using the law as a means to settle disagreements’ (ibid). Similarly for Cavanaugh ‘there can be no question of a withdrawal of the church from the world’ (2004, p. 405). The church ought ‘to live like the Jews of the diaspora, “to seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile” (Jer. 29:7), even if that city is Babylon’ (ibid). ‘The church is not a separate enclave’ (Cavanaugh 2011, p. 66) and ‘is not a human institution with well-defined boundaries … but a set of practices or performances’ (ibid) and ‘it joins with others to perform the city of God’ (ibid). Therefore, ‘Christians should cooperate with non-Christians in creating alternative economic and political spaces’ (Cavanaugh 2009, p. 618), even though doing so ‘leaves the boundaries between what is church and what is not church permeable and even ambiguous’ (Cavanaugh 2011, p. 66). Two of the three practices of the Chilean Catholic Church discussed in Torture and Eucharist, namely the creation of ‘an entire network of parish-based social programs’ (Cavanaugh 1998, p. 264), and performance of non-violent protests and street theatre (ibid, p. 275), had Christians and non-Christians among their participants and beneficiaries.

There is a second problem to the accusation of sectarianism. It seems to assume, rather than argue for, an alternative, non-sectarian mode of Christian engagement with culture and a non-sectarian way of relating Christian belief and practice, which sectarianism is castigated for rejecting, and in comparison to which sectarians appear to prefer withdrawal. But it fails to reckon with the way that Hauerwas and other ecclesial ethicists are seeking to question the church-sect dichotomy. They want to question the ideas and concepts that guide how and why Christians participate in social and political life, not in order to halt such participation, but to make it more faithful to what the church is called to do in the world. Hauerwas writes: ‘the church can provide the interpretative categories to help Christians better understand the positive and negative aspects of their societies and guide their subsequent selective participation’ (Hauerwas 1988, p. 11). To ignore his questioning of the church-sect typology by simply reasserting it against him begs the question. A critic would need to present an argument to defend the sociological typology of church and sect, rebutting arguments against it made by ecclesial ethicists. Only then should the argument be made to demonstrate that Hauerwas and Cavanaugh are sectarians.

Since I join Cavanaugh and Hauerwas in rejecting Troeltsch’s church-sect typology, I will not repeat the charge of sectarianism against them. Troeltsch thought ‘that the message of Jesus, as well as of early Christianity, was purely religious and therefore lacking any social ethic’ (Rasmusson 1995, p. 237). Therefore, he reasoned, Christians could either turn away from the world in small sectarian communities or, according to the church-type, they could participate in society and politics, seeking to transform them from within. In the latter case, their ‘purely religious message must consequently be complemented by a natural law account, otherwise it will remain socially irrelevant’ (ibid). One could easily fit Vatican II’s teaching on church-state relations into Troeltsch’s scheme as an example of the church-type because the Council documents seem to operate using very similar assumptions. The extensive appeal to natural law in, for example, GS’s chapter on political life (GS 1966b, pp. 75–80, nn. 73–76) is not balanced by adverting to connections between political authority and divine rule or Christ’s kingship (Austin 2006, pp. 210–211; cf. Austin 2007). One can reasonably infer from this that Vatican II is presuming there to be little that is directly relevant to politics in the Gospel, beyond what can be known by reason alone, or that the Gospel needs a mediating discourse (such as natural law theory) to be relevant to political life. As I have criticised the documents for making these moves in previous chapters, it would be contradictory for me to adopt that point of view under a Troeltschian guise in order to join those accusing Hauerwas and Cavanaugh of sectarianism.

2 The Modern State as an Irredeemable Foe

Hauerwas and Cavanaugh have repeatedly presented the modern state as being ultimately demonic and the supreme manifestation of the Earthly City, which Christians in the best of circumstances should tolerate from a distance and at worst resist to the point of martyrdom. In doing so, they fail to attend to the complexity of what scripture teaches about political authority, and instead rely on secular social science and political philosophy to paint a bleak picture of the modern state. Or alternatively it seems the teaching of scripture and the tradition of pre-modern Christian political thought arising from it are not dismissed but made redundant by the significant differences between the modern state and pre-modern forms of political authority. As a consequence, ‘the theatricalized rhetoric of opposing the demonic nation-state in which such theologies indulge simply camouflages their unwillingness to think seriously about how their adherents’ various political activities can be made properly intelligible’ (Mathewes 2007, p. 162).

Emphasising what distinguishes the modern state has been particularly prominent in Cavanaugh’s work. He has deftly drawn on sociologists, early-modern historians, and political theorists to chart the emergence of the distinctive, modern form of political authority that we call the state from the fragmentation of mediaeval Christendom. Drawing especially on Ernst Kantorowicz, Anthony Giddens, Charles Tilly, Robert Nisbet, John Milbank, and the English Pluralists, Cavanaugh seeks to challenge the ‘ahistorical and idealized assumptions’ (Cavanaugh 2011, p. 8) that lead many Catholic thinkers into ‘seeing the state as the promoter and protector of the common good’ (ibid, p. 9).

He cites Charles Curran’s discussion of the state as an example of the ahistoricism that can affect Catholic social thinkers, because in Curran’s work ‘all historical forms of political community are conflated into the term “state”’ (ibid, p. 7). Cavanaugh instead argues that, far from being something natural that has always been with us, the state is in fact ‘a rather recent and artificial innovation’ (ibid), ‘originating in Europe between 1450 and 1650’ (Porter 1994, p. 6, as cited in Cavanaugh 2011, p. 9). In contrast to mediaeval Europe’s multiple, often-overlapping loyalties ‘based not necessarily on territoriality, but on feudal ties, kinship, religious or tribal affiliation’ (Cavanaugh 2011, p. 9), the state refers to ‘a supreme authority that no lesser authorities within a recognized set of geographical borders may legitimately oppose’ (ibid). The term ‘state’ or status (and its cognates in various Romance languages) was originally used to refer to ‘the state of the ruler himself (status principis or status regalis) or to the current condition of the realm (status regni)’ (ibid, p. 10). Its usage gradually shifted and by the ‘mid-sixteenth century’ (ibid) it had come to be used mainly ‘to indicate an abstract apparatus above prince and people’ (ibid). A further development of the modern state is indicated by the term ‘nation-state’ that ‘first arises in the eighteenth-century, and becomes prevalent in the nineteenth century and following’ (ibid, p. 11). According to this notion, a unitary sovereign authority is united to a single nation, either because the state is understood as creating or as representing the nation located within that state’s territory (ibid). In these ways, Cavanaugh argues, the ‘state’ refers to something new, something that is the product of a gradual process of eliminating or marginalising all social bodies, except the sovereign state, from exercising unchallenged coercive power in a delimited area.

Hauerwas’ assertions about the state do not tend to be demonstrated by reference to as many different sources. Yet they both emphasise the particular features of the modern state, and the role of war and violence in creating the state, to draw attention to the discrepancies between the empirical reality of how states were constructed, and the idealized assumptions that would see the state (in its liberal, democratic form) as an agent of society for protecting individual rights and promoting the common good. They both draw on Anthony Giddens’ The Nation-State and Violence to highlight ‘the unique role of war and armies for the development of the modern nation state’ (Hauerwas and Willimon 1989, p. 35), claiming it was the need to wage war effectively that led to the creation of a political apparatus ‘whose administrative purview corresponds exactly to its territorial delimitation’ (Giddens 1985, p. 172, as cited in Hauerwas 1999, p. 49; cf. Cavanaugh 2011, pp. 10, 18, 30).

Building a state depended on the ability of state-making elites to make war, and the ability to make war in turn depended on the ability to extract resources from the population, which in turn depended on an effective state bureaucracy to secure those resources from a recalcitrant population … The state was largely an unintended byproduct of these elites’ pursuit of their own ends. (Cavanaugh 2011, p. 15)

The discrepancy between the ahistorical and idealized assumptions of social theorists and the empirical reality of how states came to be may seem like no more than an intellectual mistake among certain academics. But closely related to it, for Hauerwas and Cavanaugh, are the ‘two prima facie incompatible ways’ (MacIntyre 2006, p. 163) in which the state must present itself:

on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about to, but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and on the other as a repository of sacred values, which from time to time invites one to lay down one’s life on its behalf. (MacIntyre 1994, p. 303, as cited in Cavanaugh 2011, p. 265; cf. Hauerwas and Willimon 1989, pp. 34–35)

Thus the modern state paradoxically presents itself as ‘an institutionalized set of devices whereby individuals may more or less effectively pursue their own goals’ (MacIntyre 2006, p. 163). And yet,

at the same time it claims, and cannot but claim, the kind of allegiance claimed by those traditional political communities – the best type of Greek polis or of medieval commune – membership in which provided their citizens with a meaningful identity, so that caring for the common good, even to the point of being willing to die for it, was no other than caring for what was good about oneself. (ibid)

The conclusion MacIntyre draws (followed by Hauerwas and Cavanaugh) is that the ‘modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous and unmanageable institution’ (MacIntyre 1994, p. 303). For whenever it wears the second mask and demands self-sacrifice as the defender of the citizens’ common good, it deceives by what it conceals, namely that there is no community unified by a common good for the state to promote or defend. Citizens in a modern, pluralistic state are not united by a shared view of life’s ends but are instead divided by holding incommensurable worldviews, and lack even a shared ‘rational basis on which to argue about ends’ (Cavanaugh 2006, p. 306).

[T]he public discourse of the nation-state not only does not but cannot be conducted on the basis of common norms of rational inquiry in the Aristotelian–Thomist sense, in part because of the sheer size of the modern nation-state. Decisions are based on money and power, not reason, so conflict—especially between classes—is endemic. (ibid, pp. 306–307)

Yet these problems besetting the nation-state actually work in its favour.

The nation-state is made stronger by the absence of shared ends, and the absence indeed of any rational basis on which to argue about ends. In the absence of shared ends, devotion to the nation-state as the end in itself becomes ever more urgent. The nation-state needs the constant crisis of pluralism in order to enact the unum. Indeed the constant threat of disorder is crucial to any state that defines its indispensability in terms of the security it offers. (ibid, p. 306)

Consequently, according to Hauerwas and Cavanaugh, Christians are repeatedly co-opted by the state into supporting its violence because they fail to grasp that, since ‘the nation-state is not and cannot be the locus of community’ (MacIntyre 1994, p. 303), ‘modern nation-states which masquerade as embodiments of community are always to be resisted’ (ibid). Their failure prevents the ecclesial community from being the community of peaceable virtue it is called to be. If the church were ‘to be a ‘contrast model’ for all polities that know not God’ (Hauerwas 1981, p. 84), then it would show to the world that its ‘hallmark … unlike the power of the nation-state, is its refusal to resort to violence to secure its own existence or to insure internal obedience’ (ibid, p. 85).

Hauerwas and Cavanaugh ought to be commended for drawing attention to the failures of ahistorical, idealized Aristotelian-Thomistic accounts of the common good and political authority to notice how the state arose in modernity, and how states continue to be shaped by the violence of their past. They are right to be concerned about ‘a shift from “complex space”—varied communal contexts with overlapping jurisdictions and levels of authority—to a “simple space” characterized by a duality of individual and state’ (Cavanaugh 2011, p. 19).Footnote 3 Cavanaugh’s study of the use of torture by the Pinochet regime to loosen the ability of social groups and communities to resist the state’s expanding power over individuals is convincing (Cavanaugh 1998, pp. 38, 47). It is independently confirmed by James C. Scott whose study of ‘state-initiated social engineering’ (Scott 1998, p. 4) argues that the most disastrous instances of it rely on ‘a pernicious combination of four elements’ (ibid), one of which is ‘a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans’ (ibid, p. 5). Of course, not all states have launched such a direct assault on social groups. Nevertheless, Cavanaugh is right to argue that the prominence of the state in a society’s collective imagination causes ‘local social groupings … [to be] recast as “intermediate associations” between state and individual, and such institutions have played an important role in mediating the state project’ (Cavanaugh 1999, p. 183). Ecclesial ethicists have undeniably aided us by uncovering the persistence of narrowly state-centred assumptions about politics, which can cause the church to become ensconced in the role of enabling the expansion of the state’s power. Hence, Hauerwas and Cavanaugh have criticised particularly the patterns of thought that led Christians to imagine the terms of political action to be defined by a single public sphere, centred around the modern state; for such a conception positions the church among other intermediate ‘associations as conflicting competitors for influence over the state, which remains a neutral and unitary staging ground’ (Cavanaugh 2011, p. 32).

None of this, however, justifies Hauerwas and Cavanaugh in preferring to rely so heavily on social science and political philosophy that they fail to consider at any length what can be found in scripture about political authority. This is one of the major weaknesses of their political theology. Consequently, despite their criticisms against conceptual distinctions that threaten to privatise or depoliticise the Christian faith, their own one-sided focus on ecclesiology means they reproduce the same division of thought. They confine themselves to reflection on the church because they do not believe political theology’s native resources have much to say about the state, except to protest against it. Alternatively, one may surmise that, according to them, whatever scripture and tradition can teach us about political authority has become obsolete by the vast difference between the modern nation-state, and the far more decentralised, homogenous political communities that existed before modernity.

To give an example of how Hauerwas avoids engaging with scripture, he asserts: ‘The gospel simply does not contain a theory of society and/or legitimate government. All we know as Christians is that government will exist—not what form it will or must take’ (Hauerwas 1988, pp. 11–12). No argument is given to support these claims, but Hauerwas’ frequent deference to Yoder’s biblical theology could lead us to suppose he is here accepting Yoder’s interpretation of Romans 13. Yoder argued that Paul’s intention was not to claim God had ‘established or instituted the state’ (Yoder 1997, p. 75).

Paul was simply arguing that the Christians in Rome should not rebel even against a government which threatened to mistreat them. They could be confident that God was using the powers in and behind the state within His providential purpose. The state is not instituted, i.e. established, but rather accepted in its empirical reality, as something that God can overrule toward his ends. Paul therefore does not mean that in the divine acceptance of the state there is implied any ratification of its moral standards or political purposes, or any theory of the proper state. (ibid)

In other words, ‘God does not take the responsibility [sic] for the existence of the rebellious “powers that be” or for their shape or identity; they already are’ (Yoder 1994, p. 201) and God ‘providentially and permissively lines them up with divine purposes’ (ibid, p. 202). In imitation of Christ’s willingness to suffer at the hands of rebellious powers (ibid, p. 209), Paul is calling for ‘a nonresistant attitude towards a tyrannical government’ (ibid, p. 202). Yoder does not accept the traditional Protestant interpretation that would contrast Romans 13 with Revelation 13’s ‘vision of the diabolical beast from the abyss’ (Yoder 1997, p. 76) and then take the two texts as representing the two forms that political authority can take: either ‘a sober and righteous instrument of order in society’ (ibid), in which case obedience to it is due; or, like the beast in Revelation 13, a rebellious tyrant against which Christians must rebel. Yoder argues this approach lacks ‘biblical warrant’ (ibid) and that the texts

represent the two dimensions of the life of any state. ... The wielding of the sword is always an expression of a degree of unbelief, and the church that blesses this undertaking is always marked by a measure of apostasy. ... No state can be so low on the scale of relative justice that the duty of the Christian is no longer to be subject; no state can rise so high on that scale that Christians are not called to some sort of suffering because of their refusal to agree with its self-glorification. (ibid, p. 77)

Thus, Yoder’s exegesis radically undermines the possibility of drawing out from scripture some guidelines about how to govern well or how to recognise a government that deserves obedience. Deference to Yoder’s interpretation of Romans 13 could be why Hauerwas can criticise the state and yet admit:

I have no alternative theory of society or state to propose. For me the problem is not the absence of an alternative, but rather to discern how Christians must learn to negotiate the false universalism the modern state represents. (Hauerwas 1999, p. 12)

That is to say, for Hauerwas there is no ‘metaphysic or ontology of the state’ (Yoder 1997, p. 75) to be found in scripture for him to propose or discover; instead the priority is to know how to imitate Christ in the present by non-violent resistance of the state.

Cavanaugh has admitted he ‘knows little to nothing of the Anabaptist tradition—or even of John Howard Yoder’ (Cavanaugh 2020, p. 501) and there are indeed only a few references to Yoder in his work. Cavanaugh’s own lack of scriptural engagement could reflect his reliance on MacIntyre, whose ‘radical rejection of liberal social culture does not extend to advocating for a specific alternative to liberal political institutions’ (Pinkoski 2019, p. 545). Instead, MacIntyre calls for the creation and preservation of ‘relatively small-scale and local … practice-based forms of Aristotelian community’ (MacIntyre 1994, p. 302) that can withstand the influence of liberalism’s twin progeny, ‘the ethics-of-the-state and the ethics-of-the-market’ (MacIntyre 2016, p. 124). Similarly, Cavanaugh’s criticisms of the liberal state are never accompanied with a constructive proposal of how we ought to reform or re-conceive political authority. His aim is rather to argue that ‘the church needs to take seriously its task of promoting spaces where participation in the common good of God’s life can flourish’ (Cavanaugh 2011, p. 45), i.e. local communities of mutual service and solidarity ‘beyond the binary of state and market’ (Cavanaugh 2016, p. 121).

Whatever their reasons may be, Cavanaugh’s and Hauerwas’ ‘disinclination to grapple closely with the biblical text’ (Biggar 2013, p. 17) on this issue reveals an unwillingness to demonstrate the consonance between the claims they make about political authority, and what can be reasonably inferred from scripture. Consequently, neither can give principled, theological reasons, supported by a careful exegesis of scripture, for why Christians should not merely tolerate, but support the state that rules them by paying taxes ‘not only because of wrath but also because of conscience’ (Romans 13:5; NRSV), or why Christians ought to prefer one government or regime over another. It hardly needs to be pointed out that ‘Pinochet’s Chile could hardly be considered representative of all modern states’ (Shadle 2010, pp. 250–251).Footnote 4 Many, if not most, states have not deteriorated to such depths of violent authoritarianism. While the vocation of martyrdom may always appear, in many contexts it does not, but remains the final point of Christian witness ‘to God’s faithfulness when there is nothing left to do’ (O’Donovan 2003, p. 10). If we have not reached that point, however, and our governing regime has not become a tyranny, then Cavanaugh and Hauerwas can offer few theological (as opposed to purely pragmatic) reasons for Christians to obey the authority of the state and its enacted laws or to contribute to their country’s good governance.

One cannot deny, of course, that they do sometimes qualify their criticisms of the state by making some concessions:

This is not necessarily to say that the nation-state cannot and does not promote and protect some goods, or that any nation-state is entirely devoid of civic virtue, or that some forms of ad hoc co-operation with the government cannot be useful. (Cavanaugh 2011, p. 41)

But Cavanaugh does not specify what that civic virtue might be or what forms of ad hoc co-operation between church and nation-state may be useful. He seems at times to claim that government for Augustine is ‘part of the earthly city’ (Cavanaugh 2011, p. 62) and to equate the Roman imperium with the civitas terrena (Cavanaugh 2002, pp. 83–84). But elsewhere he recognises that ‘[t]he earthly city likewise is not simply identified with the state as institution’ (Cavanaugh 2011, p. 66), conceding thus ‘that not all functions performed by the state should be understood as part of the civitas terrena’ (Shadle 2010, p. 256). ‘At its best, the nation-state may provide goods and services that contribute to a certain limited order—mail delivery is a positive good’ (Cavanaugh 2011, p. 42) and ‘the idea of Christian mail carriers is by no means contradictory!’ (ibid, p. 66). Hauerwas can also concede that he and fellow Methodist co-author William Willimon ‘do not want to call Methodists out of Congress; we just want them to be there as Methodists’ (Hauerwas 1995, p. 60). He is ‘not opposed to our trying to harness the resources of state power to alleviate the needs of people’ (Hauerwas 1987, p. 90). When the state ‘resorts to violence in order to maintain internal order and external security’ (Hauerwas 1988, p. 15) then and at ‘that point alone Christians must withhold their involvement with the state’ (ibid). He claims such a ‘position does not commit me to believing we live socially and politically in a night when all cats are grey’ (ibid).

Despite these concessions, the pacifism of Hauerwas and Cavanaugh means that they are caught in a dilemma. If they approve of the state’s use of coercive force to achieve certain goods, then they could accept that Christians can also be involved in exercising such force. But if that were the case, they would seem to be negligent for not giving theological attention to, for example, the duties of Christian lawmakers, police officers, and soldiers. Or (the more likely option) Hauerwas and Cavanaugh might deny that Christians can be involved in the state’s use of force, while also holding that the use of force (by non-Christians) is necessary to ensure ‘the nationstate may provide goods and services that contribute to a certain limited order’ (Cavanaugh 2011, p. 42). If they choose the former option, then they would no longer be pacifists in any strict or consistent sense. If they opt for the latter option, they seem guilty of hypocrisy by wanting to avoid contributing to the effective governance of their country to keep their hands clean, whilst also benefitting from the public goods provided by others through the state. To this argument they could respond that it depends on the Constantinian assumption that Christians must live by a moral standard that could potentially be shared by everyone. In fact, they might argue, the enduring division between the church and World means Christians must live now by the Gospel’s eschatological ethic of non-violence and leave those of the World to serve the state. I would argue, however, that if the church-World division cannot be eliminated in the saeculum by the church replacing political institutions, then the persistence of coercive political institutions in the providential plan of a loving God lacks explanation. If the ‘state is not instituted, i.e. established, but rather accepted in its empirical reality, as something that God can overrule toward his ends’ (Yoder 1997, p. 75), how does that overruling manifest itself before the eschaton? It is hard to say what answer to that question could be drawn out of Hauerwas’ and Cavanaugh’s work.

Finally, I return to a concern mentioned earlier in the third section of Chap. 3. The discovery of clerical sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, as well as the sexual abuse perpetrated by Yoder, have shown us even more clearly the need for the church to recognise the need for political authority. They also brought into relief what can happen when the church’s members treat themselves as being exempt from the political authority’s jurisdiction in upholding law and order. Long argues that what makes the case of Yoder ‘so troubling is not that his predation may have been inconsistent with his theology, but that it can be understood as consistent’ (Long 2018, p. 105). Yoder’s church-world dichotomy

allowed him to use the binding and loosing internal to the church to his own advantage without interrogation from worldly institutions. The world was the ‘old aeon’ that has its own way of organizing society, and one from which the Christian has been liberated. ... He was ... suspicious of many institutions that constitute the nation-state and global market. For this reason, the church/world distinction relativized nonecclesial accountability. ... His suspicion of the police and judicial functions of modern nation-state served his interests; binding and loosing gave him cover in a way that the secular judicial functions might not have. (ibid, p. 107)

Long rightly argues that the record of Yoder’s behaviour does not require the summary rejection of key elements of his theology, such as the emphasis on ‘apocalypticism, the church/world distinction, theological critiques of the police and judicial systems, binding and loosing’ (ibid, p. 108). However, we should pay ‘attention to how these teachings can provide cover for faithless, immoral, and illegal patriarchal actions’ (ibid). It is difficult, of course, to see any certain or even probable causal connections between ideas and actions, and it is hard to conceive of any ideas that cannot be twisted by a guilty conscience into serving as a justification for terrible actions. Nonetheless, we should be highly suspicious of ideas (such as the kind of church-World distinction that denigrates political authority) that would be particularly useful to an abuser in the church seeking to avoid accountability to the criminal law. Cristián Precht, a Chilean priest in charge of the Vicariate of Solidarity created by the Archbishop of Santiago, which was ‘the foundation of moral and legal and resistance to the military dictatorship’ (Loveman 1989, p. 432 as cited in Cavanaugh 1998, p. 103) through its ‘network of parish-based social programs’ (Cavanaugh 1998, p. 264; cf. 272), was in 2018 ‘expelled from the priesthood by Pope Francis after being found guilty of sexual abuse’ (Esteves 2018). A more adequate political theology would need to account not only for how the church ought to resist dictatorships. It would also need to take into account the interpenetration of church and World, as seen by the continuing presence of sin among members of the church such as Cristián Precht, and why God therefore continues to provide political authority in the saeculum. We need political authority to establish and oversee judicial institutions that can effectively condemn wrongdoing and deter further wrong from being done. Unfortunately, Hauerwas and Cavanaugh cannot offer a theological rationale for God’s provision of political authority to secure these goods.

The problems with Hauerwas’ and Cavanaugh’s notion of political authority have now been discussed at sufficient length to demonstrate the need to shift to different interlocutors in the subsequent chapters. It should also be clear that my constructive proposal will need to avoid making the same mistake of a one-sided focus on ecclesiology that neglects to propose a truly theological account, based on scripture, of political authority and of the state.

3 The Church as a Contrast Society

The problems created by their pacifist vision of Christians’ role in society should tell us that the inadequacies identified in the previous section are closely connected with the ecclesiology that Hauerwas and Cavanaugh employ. Their understanding of the nature and purpose of the church, especially by referring to the church-World division, affects their discussions of the church’s stance towards political authority. My main criticism in this section is directed to their misplaced emphasis on the church being a contrast society, which mistakes theological and ethical integrity with distinctiveness from surrounding society. Looking more closely at Cavanaugh, I also want to observe the various ways in which crucial elements of a sound ecclesiology become sidelined or overlooked in his ecclesiology under the pressure of his almost exclusive focus on a single sacrament: the Eucharist.

My assessment of their ecclesiology follows a path already taken by Bernd Wannenwetsch, who wrote:

The impatient insistence that the church should relate to the public, all too hastily ignores the critical dimension of the church’s life in the sense of a countersociety; but, similarly, the contrast motif is in danger of overlooking the constructive dimension in this counter-society. (Wannenwetsch 2004, p. 246)

As the first half of that quotation indicates, Wannenwetsch rightly accepts Hauerwas’ and Cavanaugh’s concerns about how the church in the past has interacted with the public sphere. To be clear, Hauerwas and Cavanaugh are not criticising such interaction itself; if they were, then the sectarian charge would be true. Instead, as Biggar has written, Hauerwas is indeed ‘interested in having the church shape society-at-large—albeit in a fashion that is true to its own norms’ (Biggar 2000, pp. 143–144; emphasis added). Hauerwas and Cavanaugh offer us powerful reasons for the church to ‘concentrate on thinking and living its own story, instead of squandering itself in merely repeating in religious tones the moral platitudes that the world already takes quite for granted’ (ibid, p. 143), because thinking and living its own story is the best way for the church to contribute to public life. Hauerwas and Cavanaugh were right also to criticise Niebuhr and Thomistic natural law theory because the methodology in both can have the result ‘that theological convictions about Jesus are not [considered] directly relevant to concrete ethical analysis’ (Hauerwas 1983, p. 55), which in turn marginalises the direct political significance or relevance of the church. Therefore, I am mostly in agreement with the criticism Hauerwas and Cavanaugh direct towards political theologies that distract the church from being ‘a communal enactment of an alternative ‘politics’ within history’ (Cavanaugh 1998, p. 8).

However, their arguments frequently move beyond a call for theological integrity by demanding that the church’s political practices and activities be distinctive from the surrounding society. In fact, at times the integrity of the church seems to be conflated with its distinctiveness. For example, Hauerwas writes:

the church first serves the world by helping the world to know what it means to be the world. For without a ‘contrast model’ the world has no way to know or feel the oddness of its dependence on power for survival. (Hauerwas 1981, p. 50)

The language of a ‘contrast model’ anticipates the biblical scholar Gerhard Lohfink’s influential argument that in the writings of the early Christians and ‘[i]n the Bible the people of God is always understood as a contrast-society’ (Lohfink 1985, p. 122). Curiously, Hauerwas rarely cites Lohfink despite how congenial the ideas of the latter would be to Hauerwas’ project. In Rasmusson’s study of Hauerwas’ corpus, there is only one instance mentioned in which Hauerwas refers to Lohfink (Rasmusson 1995, p. 305). Hauerwas’ motif of the church not having but rather being a social ethic (Hauerwas 1983, p. 99), by existing as a society contrasting with the World, is more likely to be drawn from Yoder’s thought on the church existing as a distinctive society (Yoder 1997, p. 17). Cavanaugh, by contrast, directly cites Lohfink several times (Cavanaugh 1998, p. 245; 2004, pp. 394–395) and endorses Lohfink’s claim that the ‘church of the martyrs saw itself as a “contrast-society”’ (Cavanaugh 1998, p. 62; cf. Lohfink 1985, pp. 122–132, 157–163). According to Cavanaugh, the recovery of the Chilean Catholic Church’s integrity in relation to the Pinochet regime relied on the church learning that ‘the Eucharist is the church’s ‘counter-politics’ to the politics of torture’ (Cavanaugh 1998, p. 205). More recently he has described his vision of a church ‘refusing to accept “the political system” or “the economy” as is’ (Cavanaugh 2016, p. 4), which instead ‘gathers people below the level of the state in a performance of communion and solidarity’ (ibid, p. 117). Just as in his earlier work, Cavanaugh still imagines the church’s political role being one which counters, or contrasts with, the political practices of the surrounding society.

The problem with these claims is that it is unclear if the political witness Hauerwas and Cavanaugh want the church to display should always be different from the World or from the extant political system, or if that difference is merely dependent on context. In other words, does the integrity of the church’s political witness always demand the church to stand apart from the World or from its surrounding society? If the World is considered as all those who in an ultimate, eschatological sense are predestined to be outside of the church, then it would be trivially true to say that the church refers to a different and distinctive community of people. In that sense, one could hardly deny that the church must always be different from the World. But Christian communities sometimes find themselves in a situation in which ‘their cultural environment has either borne their imprint or seen universal moral reality straight’ (Biggar 2011, p. 9). Would the call for ecclesial distinctiveness be softened in such a situation? One could agree by replying that since Hauerwas and Cavanaugh are explicitly responding to particular contexts, such as contemporary America or Chile under Pinochet, then their focus on ecclesial distinctiveness must also be context dependent. As Biggar notes (2000, p. 142), Hauerwas makes a revealing admission of the difference his American context makes to his thought when remarking on how O’Donovan’s work may be misunderstood by Americans:

If heard in places like Britain or Europe (or even Canada or Australia), where Christianity is more or less perceived by many as a curious but largely antiquated cultural oddity, … in such contexts a hopeful reminder [by O’Donovan’s work] of God’s ultimate conquest of ungodly powers is salutary. ... But for Christians in America, who see themselves very much in control … what is most helpful, indeed necessary, is [instead] a reminder that they too, even in America, continue to live in exile. (Hauerwas and Fodor 1998, p. 50)Footnote 5

One could therefore argue that Hauerwas and Cavanaugh shape their thought as Americans to respond to ‘a society where it is blithely assumed that the dominant moral and political norms are Christian, in spite of the fact that these are understood in rigorously secularist terms’ (Biggar 2000, p. 144). Yet it is far from clear that Cavanaugh intends for his work to be about just an American or Chilean context. The Pinochet regime’s use of torture seems to him to disclose a truth about all modern states:

torture is homologous with the modern state’s project of usurping powers and responsibilities which formerly resided in the diffuse local bodies of medieval society and establishing a direct relationship between the state and the individual. (Cavanaugh 1998, p. 3)

Seeing all states through the prism of Pinochet, even if his regime were being presented as the most extreme manifestation of what all modern states could potentially become, seems to imply that the church should always stand apart and against the (modern?) state, no matter what state it may be. This leaves Cavanaugh unable to offer counsel for those (necessarily) ad hoc contexts in which the surrounding society is not completely hostile or inimical to the Christian communities because ‘their cultural environment has either borne their imprint or seen universal moral reality straight’ (Biggar 2011, p. 9). It is undeniable that such contexts do exist. There are degrees of vice and disorder in any society and, while there will always be reasonable disagreement over how one evaluates a society overall, surely Christians should be grateful if they find a degree of overlap between the moral norms of their faith and the consensus of wider society? Would Christians not prefer to live in a society in which there is as great a degree of overlap between the two as possible? And yet, Hauerwas and Cavanaugh can give us little advice on how to seize the missional opportunities given by such moments of overlap, whether they be the result of Christian evangelisation in previous centuries or from another cause. In other words, their pursuit of ecclesial distinctiveness makes it difficult for them to say how the church should maintain its integrity when it does not find itself to be a solitary voice of protest, but rather part of a chorus of voices.

More importantly, their attention to the church’s need to distinguish itself from the World has meant they are inattentive to how the integrity of the church influences wider society after the initial moment of confrontation. If the church’s voice can contribute to society, what should Christians do once people start listening? Wannenwetsch writes:

the contrast motif is in danger of overlooking the constructive dimension in this counter-society. Important though the critically illuminative effect of this contrast may be for society, by allowing it to perceive the limits and deformations of its public, the church’s ministry to the public of state and society must not be restricted to this. If talk about the counter-society is confined simply to holding up the picture of the church’s societas to the secular society, this reduction would limit the church’s existence to the criticism which makes people aware of something, criticism which is merely able to show the world what it can never become. ... But must seeking the good of the city not also include the question of how the counter-mode can be perceived as a mode of encounter too? (Wannenwetsch 2004, p. 246; original emphasis)

Hauerwas and Cavanaugh do not attend to the fact that the church ‘should not stop at the point of contrasting its own vision with real existing political life, but enter it practically’ (Wannenwetsch 1996, p. 277), not to engage in a power-play, but rather to enter ‘a struggle for the sake of politics, for the sake of the true form of the political … [i.e.] by joining the game “and playing according to other rules”‘ (ibid; original emphasis). They might reply that it is not the duty of the church to ensure that its witness is influential; in fact, concerning itself about the effectiveness of its witness has often distorted the church’s priorities. Further, they may argue, the demand for effectiveness or influence does not correspond to Christ’s example: ‘Jesus was so faithful to the enemy-love of God that it cost him all his effectiveness; he gave up every handle on history’ (Yoder 1994, p. 233). From the Book of Revelation we must learn that ‘the key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness but their patience’ (ibid, p. 232). While I agree that Christian faithfulness depends on our exercise of patience and trust in providence, and not on gaining influence or on an easily discernible measure of effectiveness, this does not preclude the possibility of situations arising in which the faithful obedience of Christians in a missional context succeeds in making disciples. In brief, then, the problem with Cavanaugh and Hauerwas is that their emphasis on the church’s distinctiveness means that they can offer little guidance on what the church ought to do in contexts where the integrity of its mission and witness receives a sympathetic and attentive response from the surrounding society.

As for the rest of my criticisms, I shall concentrate on Cavanaugh alone. Since it is undeniable that ecclesiology is an area where the differences between Catholic and Protestant become particularly stark, it would hardly be fair of me to criticise Hauerwas, a Methodist (or more recently perhaps an Episcopalian) theologian, for not conforming to a Roman Catholic ecclesiology. But Cavanaugh’s Catholicism makes it appropriate to consider whether his writings about the church reflect what would be considered an orthodox ecclesiology according to his own tradition. My argument will be that crucial elements of a sound ecclesiology become sidelined or overlooked by his focus on the Eucharist. I do not mean to make an argument from silence by claiming that he does not deem important what he does not choose to mention. Rather my argument is to identify the limitations of an ecclesiology that concentrates on one of the sacraments in almost complete isolation from the others. This further serves the purpose of this chapter, which is to explain not only why I will be leaving Hauerwas and Cavanaugh behind, but also to identify the mistakes I must avoid making in the constructive work of Part II.

Cavanaugh’s ecclesiology is heavily informed by de Lubac’s studies in historical and systematic theology. By studying Patristic and early mediaeval writings about the Eucharist, de Lubac found that

drawing on the Pauline images of the body of Christ, [the writers from these periods] spoke of a threefold distinction of Christ’s body: (1) the historical body, meaning the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth, (2) the sacramental body, or Christ as present in the Eucharistic elements, and (3) the ecclesial body, that is, the church. The corpus mysticum was identified with the sacramental body, and the corpus verum with the church. However, around the twelfth century, as Henri de Lubac’s important study Corpus Mysticum shows, there is an inversion of meaning. In subsequent centuries, the altar would be the site of Christ’s corpus verum, his true and knowable body, and the church would be his corpus mysticum. (Cavanaugh 1998, p. 212)

The consequence of the inversion is a greater concentration on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, at the cost of giving less attention to the church being built up by the visible and ‘communal performance of the sacrament’ (ibid, p. 213), leaving the church instead ‘relegated to the “mystical,” the hidden, that which will only be realized outside time’ (ibid). De Lubac’s concern about this inversion in Latin theology was specifically regarding ‘its tendency to reduce the Eucharist to a mere spectacle for the laity’ (ibid), a miraculous thing to be seen rather than an action by which one is incorporated into a new community (Pickstock 1998, p. 159).

As sacramental presence was emphasized, eucharistic devotion became more individualized, and the process of binding people one to another was left to the state, the new form of social integration that would eventually mark the passage from the medieval to the modern (Cavanaugh 2016, pp. 116–117).

According to Cavanaugh, de Lubac

thought that the inability of many Catholics to resist the fascism of the Vichy regime was based on the individualism of their sacramental piety and the separation of the natural from the supernatural that was encouraged by neoscholasticism but has its roots in the medieval separation of the mystical from the real. (ibid, p. 117)

‘Although de Lubac never worked it out in a systematic way’ (ibid), Cavanaugh argues there are ‘important implications for political theology’ (Cavanaugh 2014, p. 398) that can be developed by building on de Lubac’s retrieval of the older understanding of the Eucharist as an action creating a social body. How Cavanaugh does this has already been described earlier: if the Eucharist makes the church, then the Eucharist creates ‘a type of social action that both finds its transcendent source above the state and gathers people below the level of the state in a performance of communion and solidarity’ (Cavanaugh 2016, p. 117).

Cavanaugh’s partial reliance on de Lubac, however, exposes certain weaknesses in Cavanaugh’s ecclesiology. ‘Unlike some commentators, de Lubac did not regard this development [in the language of Latin theology] as sinister’ (Nichols 2013, p. 103) and he ‘believed the doctrines involved to have remained stable under the—nonetheless striking—mutation of vocabulary’ (ibid). Cavanugh does concede that ‘[i]n documenting this historical inversion, de Lubac by no means sought to cast doubt on the real presence of Christ in the elements or the doctrine of transubstantiation’ (Cavanaugh 1998, p. 213). Yet Nichols goes further to distance de Lubac from his readers:

His is not a systematically Eucharistic ecclesiology: he does not claim that the total shape of the church can be read off from the Eucharistic celebration. Not everything that is true in ecclesiology can be inferred from the sacrament of the Eucharist. Though he liked and used the formula ‘The Eucharist makes the church’, he did not think the field of application of this maxim unbounded. ... the church comes to a focus in the Holy Eucharist—but not only there. The church is also focussed in the saint. (Nichols 2013, p. 105; cf. De Lubac 1969, p. 5)

More specifically, ‘when de Lubac turned to deal with the apostolicity of the church as found in a succession of ministers, he did not regard the episcopate ... as deriving from her Eucharistic life’ (Nichols 2013, p. 106). While the ministerial priesthood of some exists to serve the royal priesthood of all the baptised (De Lubac 1956, pp. 93–98), de Lubac denies that the former ‘is a sort of emanation from the community of the faithful; for it is a power received from Christ’ (ibid, p. 98). At the Eucharist ‘the celebrant speaks in the name of the whole Christian community … to use the compact formulas of St. Thomas—he prays and offers “in persona omnium” but consecrates “in persona Christi”’ (ibid, p. 100). Hence the ministerial priesthood ‘enjoys a certain priority vis-à-vis the Eucharistic community’ (Nichols 2013, p. 106) without which there could be no Eucharist, and in virtue of which de Lubac can reverse his maxim and write that ‘the church produces the Eucharist’ (De Lubac 1956, p. 92).

Cavanaugh, by contrast, concentrates on the Eucharist’s creation of a community that is truly united, through communion with Christ, and truly catholic or universal because it ‘transgresses national boundaries and redefines who our fellow-citizens are’ (Cavanaugh 2002, p. 50) by giving a foretaste of ‘the eschatological divisions between Jew and Greek—and all other natural and social divisions’ (ibid, pp. 50–51). Yet in his work there is a total neglect of the church’s apostolicity, and comparatively little can be found about the indispensable action of the ministry derived from the apostles in the Eucharistic action. A rare exception is his discussion of excommunication as an exercise of Eucharistic discipline by the one who presides over it, i.e. the bishop. While he is correct to point out that, according to Vatican II (LG 1975, pp. 360–361, n. 10), ‘the laity participate in the offering of the Eucharist’ (Cavanaugh 1998, p. 249), he omits to mention that LG also teaches that the celebrant and laity participate in its offering in different ways. Only the ministerial priest ‘forms and rules the priestly people; in the person of Christ he effects the eucharistic sacrifice and offers it to God in the name of all the people’ (LG 1975, p. 361, n. 10). A potential response might be as follows: given that Cavanaugh wants to address a broad audience of ‘all Christians’ (Cavanaugh 1998, p. 14), and given the more limited focus of his book (which does not require presenting a complete ecclesiology), he has no need to dwell on the role of the presiding presbyter or bishop. I would accept this response, but argue that it raises questions about what other areas of ecclesiology he has left out by an exclusive focus on the Eucharist. Do those neglected areas not merit consideration in political theology? My argument in subsequent chapters will be that a broader consideration of the sacraments in the Catholic tradition is needed for a more complete account of how the church builds the eschatological society.

Cavanaugh has himself argued (again drawing on de Lubac) that because ‘we live in the between time, straining forward to what lies ahead’ (Cavanaugh 2020, p. 520) we need the sacraments as ‘anticipations of eternity in the material reality of temporal existence’ (ibid). Since the church is made by the performance of the Eucharist, the church can be understood in temporal, rather than spatial, terms; it is ‘an anticipation of the reconciliation of the world, but not complete until the tension between the two times is resolved’ (ibid, p. 521). Since at least the Second Council of Lyons in 1274 the Roman Catholic tradition has recognised seven sacraments (Neusner and Dupuis 1982, p. 19). So why does Cavanaugh not consider six out of the seven? Why does Cavanaugh never consider baptism, one of the few sacraments practised and valued in nearly all Christian traditions, in his political theology? My earlier remarks have already clarified that the purpose and importance of the sacrament of ordination do not feature in Cavanaugh’s work. Confirmation is, according to Aquinas, the sacrament in which each Christian receives the fulness of the Spirit’s strength, so that he or she has ‘the power of publicly confessing in words his [sic] faith in Christ’ (Hamer 1964, p. 137). A contemporary moral theologian, Germain Grisez, also presents as uncontroversial the doctrine that ‘confirmation consecrates the Christian for living and speaking as a witness to Jesus’ (Grisez 1983, p. 753). The times and places in which lay people should profess their faith before others surely merit consideration by political theologians. In contrast to Cavanaugh’s silence on marriage, Hauerwas has written in several places about why ‘marriage (as well as the family) stands as one of the central institutions of the political reality of the church’ (Hauerwas 1981, p. 191) and how ‘practices such as singleness and marriage cannot help being subversive to the politics of liberalism and the correlative state powers’ (Hauerwas 1999, p. 118). Meanwhile both theologians have underappreciated the role of the sacraments of auricular confession and anointing of the sick in the church’s participation, by repentance and patience, in Christ’s triumph over sickness and sin.

I see several possible reasons for Cavanaugh’s exclusive focus on the Eucharist. The first is that it is the sacrament most easily conceivable according to Hauerwas’ Aristotelian-MacIntyrean notion of virtuous-habit-forming ‘practices that constitute the church as a community across time’ (Hauerwas 1995, p. 58). The kind of habituation that reinforces a virtue demands repetition. In contrast, marriage, confirmation, baptism, and ordination cannot be repeated but only conferred once. The Eucharist is the only sacrament that ought to be repeated every day; hence it is the only sacrament that Cavanaugh can construe as one of the church’s ‘body/soul disciplines meant to produce actions, practices, habits that are visible in the world’ (Cavanaugh 1998, p. 197). This may tell us why O’Donovan questioned using the term practices too loosely by ‘conflating the Aristotelian theory of the virtues with such distinctly ecclesiastical ceremonies as the celebration of the sacraments’ (O’Donovan 2005, p. 266).

Cavanaugh’s focus on the Eucharist is also caused by his desire to delineate the church by its bodily practices and disciplines. There is much that is true in this instinct. The sacraments give visible and corporate form to the community created at Pentecost. Without them, we would fall into the mistake of imagining the church to be in essence an invisible, interior, or ‘mystical’ bond between its members. Yet sacraments by themselves are unintelligible without preaching and the verbal proclamation of the Gospel, the kerygma. Proclamation ensures that the sacraments are distinguishable from the rites of passage that exist in many different cultures and from rituals of magic or theurgy, pace John Milbank (2009, p. 78). Sacraments need proclamation because the bodily response they call for needs to be made with faith, by which the Christian believes the Spirit is acting through the words and actions of the sacramental rite to conform the recipient to Christ. Faith is a necessary condition for bodily participation to lead to ‘the personal encounter with Christ and the decision for Christ that take place in every sacrament’ (Balthasar 2009, p. 563).

Indeed, the absence of any consideration of preaching in Cavanaugh’s work means that the uninformed reader of his work may be forgiven for getting the impression that the Eucharist is nothing other than receiving communion, without any preceding confession of sins, profession of faith, or hearing of scripture and preaching. However, in the Catholic tradition, the sacraments and the proclamation of the Word, by reading and preaching scripture, are inseparable. ‘The word of God is always somehow sacramental, for it symbolically makes God present, and the sacrament, which is the symbol of God’s real presence in the assembly, never comes to pass without the word of proclamation’ (Dulles 1987, p. 172). Or, as another Catholic theologian put it, ‘every sacrament is a verbum visible, a word made visible, and every sacrament also essentially implies verba sacramentalia, the sacred words which give to the sacred action itself not only its meaning but its own inner reality’ (Bouyer 1956, p. 29).Footnote 6 Therefore, although Cavanaugh is right to see the Eucharist as ‘an action that organizes individual bodies into a body that is both “social” and “political”’ (Cavanaugh 2020, p. 523), yet that social body is also gathered by the proclamation and preaching of the Word. This reflects the origins of the term ekklesia. Although ekklesia bears the connotations of its use by contemporaries to refer to local political assemblies (De la Soujeole 2014, p. 352; van Kooten 2012, pp. 535–539), the New Testament’s authors could not have been ignorant of the Septuagint’s use of ekklesia to translate the Hebrew term qâhâl (קֵָהֵל). Used to describe the assemblies convoked before entering the Promised Land (e.g. Dt 4:10; 31:30), at ‘the dedication of the Temple by Solomon (1 Kg 8) and at the time of the restoration of the Temple after the exile (Neh 8; Ezr 3)’ (De la Soujeole 2014, p. 350), qâhâl meant the gathering of God’s people by the convocation of his Word for the purpose of hearing the Word, ending with the conclusion or renewal of a covenant by sacrifice (De la Soujeole 2014, pp. 350–351; Bouyer 1956, pp. 23–25).

Neglecting the central role of the Word also leads Cavanaugh to neglect the authority of those with the ministry of preaching. By this I mean, in addition to a neglect of apostolicity and the sacrament of ordination as mentioned above, the more general question of why there needs to be authority exercised within the church.

Hauerwas is frequently found pointing to the importance of authority; but when a general account of it is called for, which would imply some rendering of the authority of the state, he shies away from the task. (O’Donovan 1994, p. xix)

Cavanaugh, by contrast, has nothing to compare even with Hauerwas’ brief discussions (drawing on Yves Simon) of the authority of scripture and of God in the church (Hauerwas 1981, pp. 60–64, 83–86) because Cavanaugh never explores the notion of authority at all. Therefore, O’Donovan’s criticism of Hauerwas is even more applicable to Cavanaugh: the failure to give an account of ecclesial authority is tied to his failure to give a positive, theological account of political authority and of what authority is for in general. This criticism can be connected with the one from the previous paragraph. Neglecting ecclesial authority and the Word means Cavanaugh also neglects the need for the church to reveal its unity not only by sacramental communion but also by confessing a common creed, which calls for obedience towards those whose ministry it is to ‘teach what is consistent with sound doctrine’ (Titus 2:1; NRSV). It is essential for the church, as a sui generis political society, to confess a common faith and to be able to define its creed authoritatively and without interference, or so I will argue in Part II.

4 Conclusion

Chapter 6 has enumerated a number of problems with the conception of political authority and ecclesiology in the political theology of Hauerwas and Cavanaugh for two purposes: firstly, to explain why they will be replaced by other major interlocutors in Part II; secondly, to present problems and mistakes that I will need to avoid (in addition to the problems identified in the Council’s documents) when proposing my own framework of church-state relations in the following chapters.

In the second section of this chapter, I criticised Hauerwas and Cavanaugh for an unwillingness to demonstrate the compatibility between the claims they make about political authority from what can reasonably be inferred from scripture. Moreover, their exaggerated claims about the evils of the modern state, combined with a commitment to pacifism, mean that they want little to do with the state. Consequently, they seem guilty of hypocrisy by wanting to avoid contributing to the effective governance of their country to keep their hands clean, whilst also benefitting from the public goods provided by others through the state.

In section three, I criticised them for conflating the need for the church to maintain theological integrity with a desire for the church’s belief and practices to be distinctive from the World or wider society. I claimed that this conflation prevents them from discussing how to seize the missional opportunities that come from contexts in which Christians and non-Christians share common political values or concerns. It also prevents them from giving an account of what the church ought to do when it is faced with a society that is not hostile, but rather one that is sympathetic and attentive. I criticised Cavanaugh more specifically for an exclusive focus on the Eucharist in his ecclesiology because it prevents him from considering the other six sacraments practised by the Catholic Church in his ecclesiology. Moreover, his focus on the Eucharist is not balanced by a recognition that the church needs authoritative teaching and preaching of scripture, and unity in confessing the same faith, in order for the church to be the eschatological society called and gathered together by God’s Word.