MODALIDADES VENTILATORIAS (5,7,8)

O’Donovan’s exegesis ofὑπακοή(hypakoē) helps us see how he expects his evangelical realism to rule out those aspects of divine command theory which he finds unsavory.35 While there is a sense in which the concept of ‘obedience’ does apply appropriately to this biblical word in a practical sense, it is an inexact translation. After all, “obedience”,simpliciter, might conform to a voluntarist-leaning divine command perspective, which O’Donovan would like to avoid. In order to counter-balance the subjective and emotive aspects of personal

imagination and experience which might be incorporated within the concept of obedience to divine command, O’Donovan requires that obedience must be understood in a “cognitive sense”.36He thus maintains that proper exegesis requires the meaning ofὑπακοήbe “split into two distinct elements, ‘hearing’ and ’doing’”, the co-ordination of which requires

cognitive attentiveness. By this he means to emphasize the rational engagement of the moral subject with the moral order. Thus, to participate in Christ is to make a rational assent to the available evidence, and participation in Christ is therefore to be defined as a rational,

obedient response to his authority.37 Thus, sin must be defined in terms of the cognitive aspect of participation:

The disjunction of hearing and doing, or of reason and will, is sin. It is the failure of man to make the response that is appropriate to him as a free rational agent.38

34

O’Donovan finds this pernicious misconception prevalent: “Western moral thought since the Enlightenment has been predominantly ‘voluntarist’ in its assumptions”,R&MO, 16. We may presume that this widely held, yet erroneous, perception of irrelevance motivates O’Donovan’s discourse, as he begins the first page of his Preface by sharing the difficulty he has experienced as a professor of moral philosophy encountering “the blank faces of my students”, whom we might presume to be under the influence of this misconception, vii.

35

Cf. O’Donovan’s exegesis of Romans 1:5; 6:16;R&MO110. 36

R&MO, 110. He cites James 1:22 for support, since it carries the admonition “do not be deceived”. Also in support of this reading, he translates 1 Peter 1:22 as “attentiveness” to the truth, in order to convey the “cognitive content” of obedience.

37

In this way O’Donovan intends to repair the breach he discerns in Barth’s moral theology due to its emphasis on divine command. He offers this critique of Barth, with respect to a perceived lack of moral responsibility to objective reality: “All this left him with a formal account of the theological basis of ethics which, depending exclusively on the divine command – interpreted in the existentialist way as particular and unpredictable –, was far too thin to support the extensive responsibility for moral deliberation which he would claim in practice and sometimes even defend in theory”;R&MO, 87.

38

Chapter 3: O’Donovan’s Evangelical Realism 54

This cognitive aspect of obedience to moral authority has important implications for the doctrine of sin. First, it means that sin is not so much to be understood as a “lack of

knowledge”, but rather to be more precise, sin is “misknowledge”.39 O’Donovan’s point here is not that humans, as fallen creatures, have lost their ability to perceive and know the moral order; but rather, their perception isfalse—it ismis-knowledge.”40 This distinction between mis-knowledge and “lack of knowledge” (i.e. ignorance) requires some careful parsing to achieve a fine nuance—the claim that mis-knowledge does not correspond to a loss of the human capacity to perceive the moral order, would seem to imply that even in the fallen condition of sin, ignorance of the truth does not put a person into a state ofun-knowing with respect to moral truth. Thus, thecapacityto know the truth seems to remain intact, at least in some sense. We might therefore understand sin as a failure of cognition which results in a type of knowing that misses the mark.41 The failure inherent in mis-knowledge does mean, however, thattrueunderstanding of the moral order has been lost, as O’Donovan concludes:

Knowledge of the moral order is a grasp of the total shape in which, if anything is lacking, everything is lacking.42

This would seem to beg the question, if “everything is lacking” in natural access to moral knowledge, on account of the presence of sin, how could this be calledmoralknowledge? Likewise, how could it be called moralknowledge? To suggest that “everything is lacking” in this unredeemed status of moral knowledge would seem to imply that faith becomes an essential prerequisite to knowing anything at all about the moral order. In answer to this objection, O’Donovan wants to say that although “true” understanding requires divine revelation, nonetheless, mis-knowledge is still an engagement with the moral order, because “knowledge is, and always has been, man’s order of participation in the universe.”43

39

R&MO, 88. Speaking through Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard comes to a similar conclusion in defining sin as untruth, Kierkegaard and Howard V. Hong; Edna H. Hong,Philosophical Fragments(Princeton: Princeton University, 1985) 15.

40

To explain what he means by “mis-knowledge”, O’Donovan references the Barth-Brunner debate over the idea “that the image of God in man was not merely ‘defaced’ but ‘lost’”;R&MO, 89. O’Donovan maintains that the epistemological implications of this debate require greater nuance than Barth and Brunner were able to achieve. For an insightful study of Brunner’s distinction of the terms ‘defaced’ and ‘lost’, see Trevor Hart,

Regarding Karl Barth: Essays toward a Reading of His Theology(Carlisle: Paternoster, 1999) 153. 41

This interpretation compares well with the literal biblical meaning of sin (ἁμαρτία,אטח) as a “missing of the mark.

42

R&MO, 89. 43

R&MO, 89. “[R]evelation catches man out in the guilty possession of a knowledge which he has always had, but from which he has never won a true understanding. It shows him up… as a man who has ‘suppressed the truth’ in unrighteousness (Rom. 1:18)”,R&MO, 89. O’Donovan thus implies that the first chapter of Romans

By relying upon this cognitive capability as the essence of what it means to be human O’Donovan intends to avoid the risk of confusing the epistemological premises of faith with the ontological primacy of the moral order. As we have seen, O’Donovan points to

participation in Christ as the key to resolving the existential tension which lingers in his articulation of moral knowledge vs. mis-knowledge. This is why the resurrection serves as the necessary foundation for an evangelical ethic—Christ vindicates our fallen moral knowledge, and completes what is lacking therein. In Christ’s resurrection we see God vindicating the moral order, and by participation ‘in Christ’ we may gain the ability to know that order. Without the witness of the resurrection to eschatological transformation, and the bi-directional vision of the resurrection, we would have no valid reason to trust in the doctrine of ontological priority as a justification for a ‘natural’ ethic.44