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14 Lord of Two Cities Christological or Political Realism in Augustine’s City of God?    JANE BARTER MOULAISON MY ACQUAINTANCE with Joanne McWilliam was largely literary; we shared far more by way of letters and academic writings—and, perhaps most significantly, by reading the same authors—than we did in the few face-to-face conversations we had. The written word was, I believe, an appropriate medium of exchange for both of us, and indeed, in time it came to be the grammar of a friendship that I think we both cherished. Though I had studied Theology in Toronto, I did not have the occasion to study with her. It was not until I ventured to publish my dissertation in 2005 that Joanne befriended me. She befriended me in that classical sense that Augustine understood well—quite simply, she mentored me. She assisted me through the publication of my book with Editions SR of Wilfrid Laurier University Press, for which she served as series editor. She then supported me generously throughout my tenure review, and finally, and lastly, she contributed an article on theological education for a collection of essays I edited for the Toronto Journal of Theology. I like to think that we shared what Cicero and his reader/disciple Augustine agreed to be the “foundation for authentic friendship,” which is an “agreement on divine things.”1 Perhaps more than any other theologian, Augustine of Hippo has been marshalled to champion a broad range of causes, both theological and secular . One of the surprising areas in which Augustine has been appropriated is in political theory: his City of God is often read as a treatise on politics 229 rather than as a work of theology.2 What animates these conversations often has less to do with Augustine’s own context than with our own. Such retrievals obviously seek just war principles; but more broadly, they reflect a desire to inquire after the nature of and limits to political action in a world that tends to be alternately self-assured and cynical about its efficacy and value. However, answers to such questions are not always easily found in Augustine, whose City of God is anything but a systematic political treatise . In her anthology, Augustine: From Rhetor to Theologian, Professor McWilliam critiques the old questions that dominated studies of Augustine’s Christology as those stemming rather straightforwardly from Modernist debates within Catholic theology rather than from Augustine’s Christology proper. Her survey of twentieth-century writings on Augustine’s Christology sees in the loosening of his position as a direct authority for Western Christianity a greater measure of freedom in assessing his writings proper.3 A similar phenomenon can be traced in Protestant appropriations of Augustine . Those liberal Protestants concerned with maintaining the Church’s prominent position in the public square have found in Augustine’s City of God not only a salutary description of the vexed nature of our political striving in a fallen world, but also a justification for the abiding status of the City of God’s ministers within the earthly city. Yet a strong case for the relevance of an ecclesial voice in politics demands apologetic moves that either neglect or water down the particular status Augustine ascribes in the City of God to Christ as Lord of both cities. In this case, rather than conforming Christology to satisfy debates on the nature of Christ, we find among Augustine ’s modern Protestant readers a curious waning of Christology in the waxing of a full-fledged political theory.4 One of the most influential retrievals of Augustine for the purposes of Protestant political theory is that of Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr considered Augustine the father of Christian realism—a chastened and unidealized account of the nature of the fallen political world and Christians’ rueful yet necessary reconciliation with it. Niebuhr finds in Augustine an authority who grants Christian faith a rightful and even prominent moral place within the governance of the secular world because of its accurate account of the fallen nature of humans and because of the high ideals it upholds. In Niebuhr’s hands, Augustine helps underwrite Christian participation within liberal democracy, viewed not merely as a necessary concession within the earthly city but as a positive Christian duty. However, the profound influence of Niebuhr’s reading of Augustine has obscured several significant differences between his political theology and that of Augustine. Most significantly , in my view, a Niebuhrian reading of the City of God obscures the...

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