Jim Fodor

Remaining in Babylon: Oliver O'Donovan's Defense of Christendom

Western cultures. (The language of ’extinction,’ when applied to the church, is another way of saying, ’being totally assimilated into’ or ’engulfed by’ modern Western cultures.) In a sense, O’Donovan’s reclamation of a Christendom paradigm for re-imagining our present predicament is a salutary (one might even say, prophetic) gesture. It is salutary precisely to the extent that it is so unexpected. After all, who would think of defending, at such a time as this, the idea of Christendom that is, the notion that state legitimacy requires the legal privileging of Christianity? It almost borders on the absurd. In an era when theologians are trying to out-do one another at being novel, innovative, creative motivated largely by a fear of being out-of-date and thus irrelevant it is rare indeed to find someone

Book Reviews : Churchgoing and Christian Ethics, by Robin Gill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 277 pp. pb. £14.95. ISBN 0-521- 57828-1 (hb. £40.00. ISBN 0-521-57058-1)

rather than something that is truly about the worshippers offering themselves to God. ’... worship’, writes Sedgwick, ’is an idol unless it is the reenactment of faith as commendation of the human person in the covenant of hospitality’ (p. 121). The promise of Christ to those who follow him is that they may have life and have it in all its fullness (John 10:10). Such abundance of life is hard to discern in many accounts of the Christian moral life, but Sedgwick’s view of such a life, rooted in loving relationship and worked out in faithful practices, gives us many glimpses of how such lives can and do work. And it carries the seal of authenticity because, humble and unassuming as his writing is throughout, one