The inattentive e-purchaser in search of this elegant and engaging essay in political theology from a distinguished Christian scholar and philosopher at Yale may need to guard against clicking instead on the former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's absorbing 2009 reflection on world politics and religion of the same title, though each author (and perhaps also the inept buyer) may find, and one would like to think has found, relevant challenge and stimulation in the thinking of the other, for their themes are by no means wholly unrelated.

Political theology grapples with the all-important – and frequently contested – way in which the state's authority relates to God's authority. How do the ‘mighty’ relate to the ‘Almighty’? The subject could hardly be more timely or relevant today. Wolterstorff writes, ‘what one says about the relation between divine and political authority determines the shape of almost everything else’ (p 4) and, later in the book, ‘We must expect that there will be ever new episodes of citizens finding that their religious convictions collide with what the state, acting within its legal and constitutional limits, orders them to do or refrain from doing’ (p 174). Recent (and often unsuccessful) litigation in English and European courts by Christian people amply illustrates what the author means.

Wolterstorff's many admirers (and I include myself among them), grateful for his recent longer, if more challenging, works (Justice: rights and wrongs (2008); Justice in Love (2012); Understanding Liberal Democracy (2012)) will welcome this excellent, clear, concise, accessible and eminently readable re-working of his 1998 Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary (the centenary of Abraham Kuyper's). Something of the lecture format makes for a lively and provocative book and lightens a complex subject. Writing elsewhere, Jonathan Chaplin of the admirable Kirby Laing Institute suggests that The Mighty and the Almighty is ‘probably the most important English-language contribution to a constructive theology of political authority since Oliver O'Donovan's The Desire of the Nations’.Footnote ⁴

Wolterstorff takes care to point out that

He does so with skill and elegance and, taking the martyrdom of Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, as his cue, he neatly introduces the collision of realities that all Christians face: ‘Polycarp was under dual authority. In his person, the authority of Christ and the authority of the emperor intersected. Given the command of Caesar's proconsul to renounce Christ, those two authorities had now collided’ (p 15). The rest of the book grapples with an understanding of these abiding dualities, that is, the tension between God's authority and human political authority, and between political authority and the Church's authority.

Wolterstorff engages briefly with a variety of positions and writers, beginning with a terse critique of John Howard Yoder's view, namely that ‘the state has no authority’, only ‘coercive power’ (p 18). Equally unsatisfactory, he reasons, is Augustine's ‘two cities’ thinking or its more modern expression in Hauerwas' ‘resident aliens’ analysis. These fail sufficiently to recognise the legitimacy of civil obligations which bind Christians. Even Calvin, in his ‘two kingdoms’ thinking, seemingly leaves too much room for unjust orders or directives which Christians are not permitted to protest or disobey.

In contrast to these various attempts to dissolve the tension between political and divine authority, Wolterstorff articulates two dualities that define the situation of the Christian as a citizen of the state. The first is that

Chapters follow on the nature of authority, governance and specific authority to govern, all laying important groundwork for the heart of the book and, to my mind, its most interesting section, namely a re-reading of the crucial text on the Christian's relationship to the state – Romans 13. By the time that he gets to Paul, Wolterstorff has carefully differentiated between two key terms on the nature of authority: ‘positional authority’ (actions one possesses the power to enact by virtue of an institutional position of authority) and ‘performance authority’ (actions that one has been given permission to undertake). While many Christian interpreters have tended to assume that Romans 13 was about the former of those, Wolterstorff argues that Paul had the latter in mind. Calvin, it is said, seems to have interpreted Romans 13:4 in the light of verse 1: governments have authority because they have been instituted by God (positional authority), whereas a reading to be preferred is to see verse 1 in the light of verse 4 (performance authority, in which political authorities have been instituted by God for a reason). And that reason? According to Wolterstorff,

Thus, he argues, ‘not only does God's authorization not extend to authorising the state itself to become a wrongdoer; God does not permit the government to issue directives or employ forms of coercion that constitute wrongdoing on the part of government’ (p 92). Further, ‘the God-given task of government is not to pressure citizens into becoming virtuous and pious; its God-given task is instead to pressure citizens into not perpetrating injustice’ (pp 98–99). ‘The authority of the state is limited by the rights of the members of the public’ (p 93) and by the legitimate authority of non-state entities, such as churches, which establish norms within their own spheres. Fine, it may be said, so far as it goes. Wolterstorff offers little, however, in the way of solid guidance as to how to handle the specific cases where the state oversteps its performance authority.

He ends his journey, somewhat surprising himself, ‘at the case for a liberal democratic state gradually emerging’ (p 5). Some of his critics have suggested, perhaps unfairly, even cynically, that that is all very convenient. But, as Wolterstorff concludes, there is an unmistakably haunting note of realism: ‘we must expect that collisions of authority, similar to that which took place on that fateful day in the stadium in Smyrna, will continue’ (p 175).