The Mighty and the Almighty forms part of a remarkable quartet on the foundations of our moral and political orders written during Nicholas Wolterstorff's so-called retirement. It joins: Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Justice in Love (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011); and Understanding Liberal Democracy, ed. Terence Cuneo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

This is a Christian defence of liberal democracy. Recent work in political theology has been hostile to the liberal democratic state, or has focused not on the virtues (or otherwise) of the state, but on the virtues of citizens. In The Mighty and the Almighty, however, Wolterstorff commends the state, at least where it is limited and rights-protecting, and frames the central task of political theology – a ‘species of political theory’ – as providing ‘a theological account of the state’ (p. 112).

As Wolterstorff conceives it, political theology must make sense of two ‘dualities’: first, that political authority is a mediation of – and also limited and judged by – divine authority; and second, that a Christian, as both a citizen of the state and a member of the church, must answer to both.

Wolterstorff clears the ground for his proposal by rejecting three prominent positions which eschew his dualities. First, for followers of John Howard Yoder, the state does not possess authority, but merely coercive power that Christians (following Jesus) must ‘oppose[] and conquer[]’ (p. 33). For Wolterstorff, however, Yoder's identification of the state with Paul's ‘fallen powers’ is doubly problematic: not only is it exegetically and theologically erroneous, but it wrongly prohibits Christians from critically engaging the state on a practical level.

Second, for certain Augustinians, citizenship in the City of God and the City of Man is mutually exclusive. The Christian is a citizen of the former, but merely a resident alien in the latter. Wolterstorff argues instead for (at least partially) overlapping citizenship, for does not the government repair roads for Christians as much as others? While a strict distinction between the Cities made sense to Augustine when paganism suffused the government, it does not sensibly apply to subsequent centuries of Christendom, nor to contemporary realities in the West.

Third, for most Western Christians – Wolterstorff here discusses Calvin – the state should inculcate virtue in its citizenry. For Wolterstorff, however, such perfectionism depends on an erroneous reading of Romans 13 – ‘the locus classicus for Christian views of the state’ (p. 69) – one which understands the relationship of Christians to their government as a matter of passive and unconditional obedience. The error, says Wolterstorff, is a conflation of two concepts of authority: ‘having the authority to do something’, and ‘being in a position of authority’ (p. 78), that is, having the authority to do anything. Wolterstorff's limited state possesses only the former, and its something does not include inculcating virtue.

What should we make of Wolterstorff's treatment of these three positions? Certainly, he is upfront in prioritising conceptual clarity over historical nuance, and paradigmatic figures over contemporary contributors. We might worry, however, about judging a Yoderian position on The Politics of Jesus alone, or a bare reading of Augustine with no interpreters. And if – as Wolterstorff recognises – the ‘first generation’ of Calvinists ably developed sophisticated accounts of natural rights to resist the excesses of the state (p. 142), we might wonder if Calvin's starting point is as irredeemable as Wolterstorff supposes.

Turning to his own account of political theology, Wolterstorff returns to Paul and Romans 13. Here he finds a presentation of the state as protectionist not perfectionist. The state is a ‘servant of God’, delegated a particular ‘God-assigned task to perform’: to ‘govern[] . . . the public for the purpose of executing wrath or anger on wrongdoers, thereby indicating its support of doing good’ (p. 88). Wolterstorff suggests that we can then move quickly and straightforwardly from the state as punisher of wrongdoing, to the state as the curber of wrongdoing (deterring and protecting, as well as directly punishing), and ultimately to the state as the honourer of rights (for the wrongdoing the state curbs is the deprivation of someone else's right to something, such as life or liberty). And we can call a state which does these things rights-limited, for it acts only for its divinely authorised task.

Now, some will be suspicious of the ease by which these moves are made. And while Wolterstorff's language is appealingly precise here, as throughout, we might worry that others will be less careful in limiting their understanding of the rights-honouring state to that which is strictly entailed by the state as the punisher of wrongdoing.

Wolterstorff next turns to his second duality – Christians under the authority of both church and state – seeking to fill Paul's ‘silence on the relation of [one to the other]’ (p. 118). The church for Wolterstorff is ontologically distinctive, more than just its collected members. It is formed not by natural affinity (shared interests or background), but by the Spirit and a common declaration of Christ's sovereignty. It does not seek to replace the state. Yet it is a ‘foreign body in every nation’, thereby disrupting the ‘religio-ethical unity’ idealised by ancient philosophers and contemporary Americans who lament society's lack of shared (Christian) convictions and practices (pp. 121, 123). (Here we might ask Wolterstorff – as we would any writer on the church – whether he properly attends to the church's failures to match the principles he outlines as flowing from its true identity.)

Regardless, the authority of the church necessarily limits that of the state. We should value the liberal democratic state, then, for in its limited bounds the church is rightly free to follow Christ, as is the Christian.

Wolterstorff offers a final check. If we are nervous about the aggrandising dangers of understanding the state as divinely appointed, we should remember that it is limited not only by the scope of its authorised task and by the nature of the church, but also by the rights of individuals and institutions. Individual rights might be well-known to us, but Wolterstorff here pays particular tribute to Abraham Kuyper by speaking of institutions – ‘the family, the business, art, and so forth’ – with authority formed by our inherent and divinely bestowed ‘natural right’, rather than by the state (p. 161).

The Mighty and the Almighty offers a refreshingly clear defence of liberal democracy against its Christian despisers. As Wolterstorff acknowledges, readers may be disappointed at his neglect of contemporary interlocutors. (A mutual focus on authority begs engagement of the work of Oliver O’Donovan whose book, The Desire of the Nations, Wolterstorff has previously reviewed in the pages of this journal.Footnote ¹) Given the quality and importance of this book, however, students of political theology will want to make such connections themselves.