I don’t share your enthusiasm for Van Drunen and Grabill, Davey.

But more specifically, I would point to my colleague Rebecca DeYoung’s book, Glittering Vices as a Reformed engagement with virtue ethics. So perhaps the black hole is not quite as vast as it might appear.

Jamie,

Thanks for the pointer to DeYoung’s book. I’ve been meaning to get a copy.

As for VanDrunen and Grabill, I would clarify that I’m not enthusiastic about their respective projects, but I am glad they’re re-introducing the concept of natural theology. I’m hoping their proposals will provoke responses from Barthians, Kuyperians, and Augustinians alike. That’s a debate I’d relish.

As an aside, one of my good friends is writing a (very) long critique of VanDrunen right now. You might enjoy it.

I hope to engage VanDrunen and the “two kingdoms” crowd in volume 3 of my Cultural Liturgies project, but will also hope to vet some of that in an article or two in the next couple of years. This was the focus of one of my plenaries at the recent Dordt conference. Any thoughts on a good journal venue for this? Are journals beyond WTJ and CTS at all interested?

Thanks for the pointer to Littlejohn’s reviews.

I’m looking forward to reading that! As for journals — that’s a question I’m curious about myself. FWIW, Graeme Smith’s Political Theology has recently been putting out some excellent material.

Peter Leithart? James Jordan?

Not sure you can claim Oliver O’Donovan as a “Reformed” theologian or someone doing “Reformed” theology. Yes, he is sympathetic to many Calvinist concerns and his sympathies often overlap with conservative protestants, but his high anglicanism (anglo-catholic?) would probably diverge in some basic ways with the reformed mainstream, let alone more conservative reformed agendas.

Still, I think you are right that he is massively important, and I think this influence will/should grow with time. O’Donovan is one of those rare under-the-radar type figures that does not have the popular appeal of a Hauerwas or Horton (defending Christendom as a faithful political project won’t score many points these days), but has the potential to have a more significant impact on theology as a discipline in the long-term.

I agree with you on Grabill. I read parts of his book on natural law and found it interesting. Not sure I agree with the project as a whole, but natural law is one area in moral theology that is experiencing a bit of a revival and I am glad to see protestants wading into the discussion.

Daniel,
O’Donovan is hardly “Anglo-Catholic,” and I’m sure you would find quite an amusing reaction if he heard you say so (he’s my supervisor). He’s a pretty middle-of-the-road Anglican, as far as I can tell, though to be sure, that might look “high” from the perspective of very low-church American (I’m not sure what your background is). I’m not sure whether he would self-identify as Reformed, though, and answering to what extent he is depends on answering to what extent classical Anglicanism (e.g., Hooker) is Reformed.

Nor is he “under-the-radar,” I think–not in the ethics as a whole, at least, though his political theology has not always received as much attention as other aspects of his thought.

Nor, for that matter, is “defending Christendom” exactly how he would want to characterize his project (I recall, I’m not sure where precisely, reading him say that he was surprised to find that that’s how people were characterizing Desire of the Nations).

Thanks for the comment Brad.

I’ll defer to you on O’Donovan’s ecclesial self-understanding. Of course I make my comments from the American church context which is definitely low church in orientation (not my own tradition). Perhaps “Anglo-catholic” is misleading, but it seems to me that high church Anglicanism has always had a strong Catholic orientation. Maybe I’m wrong.

The crux of the issue seems to hinge on the label “Reformed” which, as of late, has received a lot of attention. I’ll speak for the American context, but it seems claiming the label “Reformed”, for theological conservatives, means specifically adhering or identifying with a specifically Calvinistic stream, as Mueller and others have argued for. My Presbyterian friends seem fairly adamant at this point. What does it mean to be Reformed? TULIP? I couldn’t really tell you.

While I sense sympathies with Reformed theology in O’Donovan’s work, as in someone like Hooker’s, I have a hard time characterizing them as Reformed, as such. Anglican, yes, Reformed, maybe lower-case?

O’Donovan works across such a wide swath of the Christian tradition – Augustine, Aquinas, Wyclif, Grotius, Barth etc. His footnotes are a veritable who’s who of church history.

I’d be interested in your characterization of his theological leanings.

Hey,
Sorry, I hadn’t noticed the follow-up. As you say, this is a dispute about what qualifies as Reformed, a dispute that Davey here would be more qualified than I to adjudicate, seeing as I have little interest anymore in identifying myself with that label (though in very many ways, I still think in very Reformed paradigms).

But historically, the narrowing of “Reformed” to “Calvinism,” especially to “TULIP” is very misleading indeed. Originally, “Reformed” was understood in opposition to Lutheran, and involved certain assumptions about the Eucharist, about Christology, and preeminently about the relationship of the Old Testament to the New, among other things. Leading figures among the Reformed were Heinrich Bullinger, Peter Martyr Vermigli, and John Calvin. The former two were the chief theological influences upon Cranmer and the original leaders of the Church of England, and it was still very much in their milieu that men like Hooker worked (though we might say he was somewhat more “high-church”). Classical Anglicanism understood itself as a branch of the Reformed, but the hyper-Reformed (largely Knoxian) Puritans sought to paint the picture otherwise, and the high-church Caroline divines happily obliged. Since then, Anglicanism has been quite schizophrenic and unable to agree on what its identity is.

So, as for O’Donovan himself, I doubt he would put much stock in the Reformed label; he would think of himself as classically Anglican, with all its ambiguities, rather than as “Reformed” per se. But as classical Anglicanism is a branch of the Reformed tradition, Davey is reasonable to characterize him as broadly Reformed. Certainly, if you understand that term in contrast to Lutheranism and Catholicism, it is an accurate label. My main point in response to you was that he was not “Anglo-Catholic.” Not that I have anything against Anglo-Catholics…some people would think of me as one, in fact.

As far as your last remark, there’s no contradiction between working from a Reformed tradition and drawing on the entire swath of the Christian tradition. At least, there shouldn’t be, though most Reformed seem to think there is.

Daniel,

I’d be surprised if O’Donovan wanted to call himself “Reformed” any more than “Anglo-Catholic.” He’s fairly evangelical, but there’s also a good dose of Radical Orthodoxy in his works, and that is, I am convinced, definitely not compatible with the Reformation. Apologies in advance to the other readers.

Hooker, on the other hand, should certainly be considered Reformed. Torrance Kirby has done the lion’s share of the work on this point, but we could also point to the inclusion of Hooker in lists from Cornel Burgess, as just one example, among the “English Doctors of the Church.” He’s right there beside men like Davenant, Perkins, and Ussher. A broader stroke than today, but the one they in fact used.

[...] across a blog entry by Davey Henreckson, an acquaintance of mine from long ago, entitled “Trajectories in Contemporary Reformed Theology.”  In it, he lists “some of the more interesting contemporary scholars” working [...]