116 Ecclesiology wider scheme of nature, which extends to the whole cosmos’. This cosmic context helps guard against a return to privatized notions of sacramentality that a focus on experience might unwittingly promote. Sahi’s reflections suggestively echo portions of Geoffrey Rowell’s essay concerned with materiality, and resonate with insights from Christian philosophical theology that could provide openings for future work. Just one example would be the ecumenical correspondence between Gottfried Leibniz (Lutheran) and Bartholomaeus Des Bosses (Jesuit) concerning the nature of eucharistic consecration, its study by Maurice Blondel (French Catholic), and consequent impact on the sacramental theologies of Henri de Lubac and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. DAVID GRUMETT University of Exeter [email protected]

Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, Bonds of Imperfection: Christian Politics, Past and Present (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), vi + 324 pp. Pbk. £24.99. ISBN 0–8028–4975–X.

n athlete preparing for a marathon or any other endurance sport must be attentive to two distinct tasks. She must, of course, train her body for the long and arduous challenge ahead. But that alone is not enough. In order Ato achieve her goal she must also cultivate the virtues of discipline, forbearance and self-criticism. The task of Christian theological reflection on politics (in many ways an equally demanding undertaking) may perhaps be likened to this twofold need for training and virtue. In Bonds of Imperfection, Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan continue their impressive record of providing us with the equipment for this task. They claim that modern Christian political reflection all too often lacks sufficient awareness of the rich traditions of its own past. To stretch our athletic analogy further, for the authors, without the richness of such traditions behind them, political theologians would be under-trained. Those seeking an adequate theology of political engagement would end up exhausted, red-faced and ineffectual; in putting forward their claims they would only muster a wheeze and a splutter. The remedy for this affliction in political theology was begun five years ago in the O’Donovans’ remarkable anthology of primary sources From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999). In what may usefully be regarded as a companion volume, we are now offered a diverse, if somewhat demanding, master class. In these essays Reviews 117 we find a series of invaluable considerations of the past traditions of Christian political thought, combined with a studious engagement with various issues within contemporary political theology. The O’Donovans manage to augment the resources for training in political theology and, at the same time, achieve an exemplary practice of the virtues of critical rigour, historical awareness and imaginative application. The book is divided into two equal parts: the first presents a series of ‘Moments in the Theological-Political Tradition’, while the second is comprised of reflections on ‘Contemporary Themes: Liberal Democracy, the Nation-State, Localities and Internationalism’. Throughout, the style of writing is dense and allusive. Although all the essays repay the effort it may take to fully engage them, the style is sometimes difficult, leading to moments of regrettable opacity. While some of the texts examined are likely to be familiar (e.g. the Book of Revelation, or Book 19 of Augustine’s City of God ), many others may not. In such cases the reader may benefit from a fuller engagement with the primary text prior to, or alongside, the essay itself. Even the more strictly expository essays are rich with suggestive motifs. So, for example, ‘The Theological Economics of Medieval Usury Theory’ provides us with much food for thought on a more substantially theological, and, on that basis, more robustly ethical, approach to economic theory than that furnished by contemporary consumerist notions of competition and exchange. The next essay, ‘The Christian Pedagogy and Ethics of Erasmus’ is insightful in noting a parallelism with John Milbank’s Radical Orthodoxy – especially seen in the latter’s fashionable elevation of rhetorical persuasion and the participative and poetic motifs of his Christology and ecclesiology. Given the prior publication of many of the pieces, and the long gestation of a few, it is easy to see how individual essays stand on their own merits. That said, the greatest value of the book comes in tracing strands of argument through the array of voices from both the distant and the more recent past. One such strand may be gleaned from the many occurrences (from Augustine to Karl Barth and Paul Ramsey) of themes surrounding the exercise of political power, and especially the role of judgment, in the light of Christ’s eschatological lordship. Perhaps the most pervasive strand is the critique of ‘possessive individualism’ and its attenuated vision of the common good. The object of the O’Donovans’ ire is ‘the false universalism in which the modern tradition of political freedom grounds itself: the universal self-possession of an abstract humanity’ (p. 22). In their historical analysis, a vision of non-proprietary community is traced through Christian Platonism to Franciscan accounts and on to the ecclesiology of John Wyclif. Despite being open to criticisms of Erastianism, Wycliffite ecclesiology relates the Christian community to civil society through a contrasting vision of ‘evangelical’ lordship conceived in terms of non-possessive relations. As Saint Paul puts it, ‘we are not our own but Christ’s’ (1 Cor. 6.19). This vision runs