In Defense of Cartwright: The Kingly Office of Christ and the Visibility of the Church

Abstract

Joan Lockwood O’Donovan's English Public Theology defends the Tudor settlement as an alternative to both Catholic papal supremacy and the modern liberal rights tradition by emphasizing the publicity of the church and the evangelical—rather than legal-juridical—character of its authority. By underscoring the extrinsic and civil character of juridical judgment in the church, O’Donovan criticizes Puritan advocates of discipline for failing to appreciate the early church's distinction between the ius naturale and the ius gentium. A reconstructed Presbyterian position, however, offers a sharper contrast to Catholicism and liberalism by insisting that the church's participation in Christ's kingly office requires a public ecclesiastical discipline distinct from civil law, even if the two occasionally overlap. Such a vision affirms the papal reform movement's concern for the libertas ecclesiae in resisting the corruptions of royal supremacy, while rejecting the monarchical and often tyrannical character of papal rule. Its insistence on the public legal character of ecclesial self-governance also challenges liberalism's Erastian tendency to locate all public law in the state alone.