Since the eighteenth century, we have spoken about nation-states as analogous to human persons. They act with their own understanding and will, and they stand in relation to one another as persons in the condition of original nature. Laws – and even more basically, behaviour – between states, as with persons, function through voluntary association and self-imposed restraints conditioned by material interest. Typically viewed as structural realist theory, this worldview recognizes the absence of any immanent rational framework binding nations to act otherwise. Apart from vague notions of secularization, how do we explain the apparent loss of a framework of common moral obligation within the context of international action? In part, Bain wants to say, through the increasing assumption of the world as a haphazard assembly of disparate units with no inherent connection. It is the task of this book to expose the theological roots of this assumption. Indeed, the hidden red thread of modern international theory is a certain ‘nominalist’ exegetical tradition of the book of Genesis.

A work of genealogy, the core of Political Theology of International Order is an exploration of how thirteenth-century debates regarding the will of God and the state of nature impacted the thought of Luther (ch. 4), Grotius (ch. 5), and Hobbes (ch. 6). These chapters are insulated on either side by highly mature reflections on the problems inherent in theorizing order in the first place (ch. 1), Bain’s choice in viewing the genealogy through two paradigms of order (Immanent and Imposed, ch. 2), and the relative importance of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the misleading landmark often hastily referenced as the inception of the modern international order (ch. 3; cf. also Wight’s insistence on the Council of Constance in 1415 as a predecessor, pp. 78-79). Chapters 7–9 assess contemporary international theory more directly, exposing how secular alternatives to natural law or divine immanence have not escaped the basic dilemma of nominalist theology, namely the reconciliation of freedom (imposed order) with substantive goods (immanent order).

With Bain, Luther supposed that despite creating the world through ‘the Word’, God can act against its order. In his Lectures on Genesis delivered at the University of Wittenberg towards the end of his career, for instance, Luther developed the idea that nature as such exists through the constant governance of God’s will, and not according to a pattern governed by reason (pp. 96-97). The link to nominalism is in the explication of God’s speech acts (‘Let it be …’) in shaping the natural world. Famously, William of Ockham, in the thirteenth century, argued that the first principle of nature is God’s force of will, not immanent reason (p. 46). Miracles – exceptions – in nominalist thought express the absolute contingency of creation. The goodness of acts depends upon conformity to God’s supreme will. In turn, political community is the result of an aggregation of its members’ individual wills. Luther is not often regarded as a theorist of international law, but he is often linked to the intellectual origins of modernity, and his conceptual affinity to nominalist thinkers has been noted. In this regard, Bain’s project is highly stimulating, as it encourages both theologians and international behavioural theorists to come to terms. But it risks blurring the line between a general genealogy of modernity’s intellectual features with that of international order specifically.

This risk is addressed by ch. 5 on Grotius. Bain has to wrest Grotius away from the modern perception of this thinker as a far-sighted theorist of secular international order, whose doctrine of ‘common use’ or ‘common consent’ appears to be separable from the divine. He is no forerunner to Thomas Hobbes. Bain probes Grotius instead as a Christian humanist attempting to provide a biblical account for the relationship between human order and divine order: ‘what is revealed in nature is revealed in Scripture’ (p. 118). Bain restores Grotius’s view of ‘the common’ as a reflection of God’s reason and harmonious order, whose truth is fully expressed in Christianity. Unlike what we find in the nominalist view of creation, God endows each thing with a nature that pertains to the good of the ‘thing in itself’, and the good of the whole (pp. 123-26). While Grotius might pose as Bain’s theorist of immanent order, this book is not concerned with resurrecting Grotius for implementation on the international scene. The chapter on Grotius serves rather to show how the analogies afforded by political theology illuminate the inherent contradictions of a framework of international order upheld through independent contractual speech-acts with nothing to guarantee said order (cf. pp. 208-209).

From a different angle Bain re-theologizes Hobbes, who opts for one theological heritage at the expense of another. Critical of ‘the schoolmen’ for separating temporal and spiritual power, Hobbes aimed to recover a notion of sovereignty that effectively secured peace without ambiguity. With the book of Genesis in the background, Bain suggests that Hobbes’s analogy between the production of creation via fiat and the governance of society via sovereign pronouncement derives from nominalist understandings (p. 136). This analogy has been belaboured by Carl Schmitt at several points. Yet Hobbes as exegete is an important category that Bain rightly manipulates for his argument. More work could be done on this point. Hobbes’s biblical hermeneutics reflect the naturalism of his contemporaries like Spinoza and La Peyrère, resulting in literalist-nominalist readings which sometimes magnify to disturbing lengths the sheer contingency of creation and human moral order on divine will (see the example of his exegesis of David’s killing of Uriah on pp. 144-45). It raises poignantly the question of the relationship between international theory and biblical hermeneutics. Along with demythologizing the cosmos, with replacing the gods of the heavens with purely naturalistic phenomena, a framework of insularity and anarchy emerges.

What would it take to repopulate the ‘empty sky’ of contemporary international order with the images required to compose an immanentism that guided the discovery of commonly held obligations for achieving the goods of national communities? Bain’s work offers an important contribution to answering this question: reconceive our concept of the state of nature according to a pattern by which all things, including political communities, subsist in mutual ecology.