Few living theologians have shaped contemporary discussions of political authority more than Oliver O’Donovan. Jonathan Cole’s The Reign of God sets out to shake those foundations and see what still stands. It is a bold and vigorous but, in my view, flawed critique of O’Donovan that, despite missing the mark, will drive attentive readers to deeper engagement with O’Donovan’s work and, even more significantly, with the constitutive conditions of evangelical political theology.

Jonathan Cole is the director of the Centre for Religion, Ethics, and Society at Charles Sturt University in Australia. He has a background working in the Australian federal government, including stints in two of Australia’s Intelligence Agencies. The Reign of God is a reworked version of his PhD thesis. At the point of publication, Cole’s book could claim to be the only book-length critical engagement with O’Donovan’s theology of political authority (p. 2).

The book has nine chapters. The first two are largely descriptive: an outline of O’Donovan’s position within the intellectual constellation of political theology and, second, a sketch of O’Donovan’s concept of political authority as it appears in Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics (Leicester: Apollos, 1986); The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and The Ways of Judgement (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).

O’Donovan’s work is often a gateway for theological students into studying political theology, and so the first chapter is helpful in discussing O’Donovan’s evangelicalism, his sympathetic and careful reading of Roman Catholic moral theology, and his intellectual debt to Paul Ramsey. Contextualizing O’Donovan helps us appreciate (or at least speculate about) why he leans into some ideas and not others.

The deft sketches of the second chapter are an impressive achievement given the just reputation of the three books for conceptual density. Cole’s decision to start with Resurrection and Moral Order (RMO), rather than diving into the more explicitly political volumes, provides him with a wider-angle lens on the foundations of “authority” in O’Donovan’s work. This becomes significant later when Cole remodels O’Donovan’s concept of political authority on alternative foundations.

The foundations of Cole’s critical engagement are set in chapter 2. Cole extracts six “theorems” from a survey of Desire of the Nations (DoN) and Ways of Judgment (WoJ) intended to distil Israel’s experience of God’s kingship. Cole observes that the first two do the heavy lifting while the subsequent four are not repeated or referred to again. The two key theorems are: (1) “political authority arises where power, the execution of right and the perpetuation of tradition are assured together in one coordinated agency” (p. 23); and (2) “That any regime should actually come to hold authority, and should continue to hold it, is a work of divine Providence in history, not a mere accomplishment of the human task of political service” (p. 24). These theorems supply what Cole calls the “essence-of-authority” and “providence” theses that underpin the whole edifice.

Cole then sets out O’Donovan’s account of how the coming of Christ transfigures this conception of political authority. In his ascension, Christ assumes all political authority as creation’s rightful Lord. He then “re-authorises” political authority with the sole function of the “execution of right” (also referred to as “judgment”). This discussion, alongside the earlier two theses, leads Cole to three foundational claims, which he will test in later chapters: the “essence-of-authority” thesis, the “re-authorisation” thesis, and the “providence” thesis.

Readers of the first two chapters are well served with a crisp overview and introduction to O’Donovan’s political thought. These descriptive chapters are followed by a bracket of three chapters (chs. 3–5), each of which raises a critical question about O’Donovan’s core theses based on perceived hermeneutical failures and lack of exegetical warrant. These chapters are then followed by another brace of three chapters (chs. 6–8), each critiquing O’Donovan’s theses for various failures at the level of conceptual cogency. It’s an acerbic draught. Cole’s tone is unsparing.

In summary, throughout these chapters Cole builds a cumulative case against O’Donovan with the following claims.

(1) The “essence” thesis—the triad of power, right, and tradition fused in the Davidic monarchy—lacks the scriptural warrant O’Donovan’s own method demands and arbitrarily canonises a brief royal episode amid Israel’s diverse, often ambivalent, political history.

(2) The “re-authorisation” thesis is similarly not drawn from Scripture (although O’Donovan claims to draw it from Rom 13) but is imported from Paul Ramsey to rescue the already dubious triad.

(3) A salvation-history hermeneutic does not of itself require O’Donovan’s conclusions.

(4) The “providence” thesis may entail the conclusion that every regime that coheres power, right, and tradition is God-installed, such that North Korea must be credited to providence—a theodicean absurdity.

(5) O’Donovan’s framework has no sufficient explanation and offers little guidance in navigating the apparent reversal of Christ’s triumph in post-Christendom societies where secular liberalism appears to eclipse the church.

(6) There is an ontological rift between the foundations of political authority in RMO (on the one hand) and DoN/WoJ (on the other) that, in Cole’s view, undercuts O’Donovan’s whole edifice. In RMO political authority is explicitly “natural”: it arises from created authorities (might, injured-right, tradition) that constitute human action as free and intelligible. In the later works, the adjective “natural” vanishes, and political authority is relocated to the realm of providence. Cole argues the two accounts cannot both be right: if authority is purely providential it can no longer evoke free, intelligible, collective human action and thus cannot explain stable political orders.

(7) Finally, it is unreasonable to suppose that Scripture can function as a criterion for judging the truth of the concept “political,” given that Scripture never defines the term and that it is inherently contestable and definitionally variable. In practice, he suggests, O’Donovan’s conception of “political” is derived from outside Scripture and is theologically arbitrary. He concludes that “this might be a source, perhaps the source, of the problems that undermine the tenability of his foundational theses regarding the theology of political authority. In light of the untenability of these theses, as I have argued is the case, one is entitled to ask whether O’Donovan’s core problem is that he is simply looking for something in Scripture that is not there: a theory of political authority” (p. 121, emphasis original).

In this final point, we have Cole’s fundamental beef with O’Donovan: the methodological commitment that true political concepts must be derived from and authorised by Scripture.

This short review is not the place to engage in a point-by-point debate with Cole. However, while he throws a lot of punches in this book, in my judgment few of them truly land. An instructive example, albeit relatively minor, is his discussion of O’Donovan’s salvation-historical hermeneutics. Cole proposes that we view G. E. Wright’s conception of “recital” as a parallel with O’Donovan’s conception of salvation-history as “proclamation” (pp. 72–73). To a significant degree, Cole’s critique in chapter 5 rests heavily on his assumption of this functional hermeneutical equivalence. But in reality the two are miles apart. Wright treats Scripture as a pluri-vocal human witness to God’s action, whereas O’Donovan’s more evangelical conviction is that Scripture is God’s normative speech (through human agents).

The failure to appreciate this difference is instructive because many of the faults Cole alleges in O’Donovan’s work seem to flow from unacknowledged or unrecognized differences of hermeneutical intuition. When it comes to political authority, Cole and O’Donovan hold differing convictions about the relation of both Scripture and political authority to God. Thus, toward the end of the book, Cole acknowledges that he does not see the need for scriptural warrant for true political concepts, nor anything more than a natural foundation for political authority (pp. 120–30). What is unacknowledged is that this difference may be shaping the evaluative standards by which Cole critiques O’Donovan’s work throughout. He claims merely to be holding O’Donovan to account for his own convictions. But frequently, Cole seems to be measuring O’Donovan against his own.

In chapter 9, Cole provides an attempt to rescue O’Donovan’s theology of political authority by grounding it in creation, seeing it as redeemed in Christ, and viewing Christian liberalism as its providential outworking in history. This, he claims, preserves O’Donovan’s biblical instincts while curing the “essence,” “re-authorisation,” and “providence” problems diagnosed in earlier chapters.

Cole’s key move is to suggest that power, tradition, and injured-right are natural authorities embedded in the world; what providence does is conjoin them, contingently, into a single form of agency we call political authority. This enables him to redraw the ontology of political authority: its esse is the conjunction of that natural triad; its bene esse is the triad redeemed by Christ and channelled toward freedom, merciful judgment, natural right, and open speech (witnessed in Christendom); its male esse (disordered or corrupt condition) is the same structure perverted by sin (e.g., North Korea).

This distinction, he believes, gives O’Donovan a theodicy-safe way to explain wicked regimes without making God their author. Cole then proposes revising the “re-authorisation” by viewing Christ’s rule as redeeming humanity’s capacity for the full conjunction of the natural authorities that constitute political authority in creation. Similarly, Cole proposes reframing the “providence” thesis by linking God’s providence not to the bare fact of government but to the historical flowering of a specifically “Christian liberalism” (freedom, merciful judgment, etc.) that appeared in late-medieval Christendom. Those liberal goods are the bene esse made visible in history. With these refinements, and a number of other suggestions (which he describes as re-modelling O’Donovan’s foundations), Cole believes that O’Donovan can keep his triadic account of political authority as a gift of creation, read Romans 13 as describing a more expansive vision of government, and assign providence to the rise of Christian-liberal goods in history rather than to every existing regime.

Cole’s reconstruction is clean and clever, but it inhabits a different theological universe to that of O’Donovan. It requires surrendering O’Donovan’s convictions about Scripture’s normativity and Christ’s active kingship as regards political authority. Scripture becomes witness rather than norm, and Christ’s role is more perfecter and redeemer than ruler. Consequently, it is hard to avoid feeling that this amounts to a loss of those things that made O’Donovan’s original project distinctive.

None of this renders Cole’s work unhelpful; he is a sharp interlocutor who forces readers to see where O’Donovan’s argument really bites and where it needs further elaboration. Readers sympathetic to O’Donovan will find the book a rigorous stress-test rather than a replacement blueprint. And if that shaking sends us back to confront questions and elaborate answers that bear on the essential viability of an evangelical political theology, Cole will have rendered us a bracing—indeed invaluable—service.