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The thesis examines a particular application of Christianity to social and political theory in the thought of R.H. Tawney and the distinction between the Christian foundation of his thought, and the pragmatic or humanist expression of his argument. It considers a variety of criticisms of egalitarianism in so far as it casts a light on or challenges Tawney's arguments. It considers, too, the nature of his recommendations for a common culture as the basis for contemporary democratic socialism.

This thesis analyses religion's place within the public order of the European Union. It argues that the Union's approach to religion is characterised by the pursuit of balance between Europe's mainly Christian religious tradition and its strong humanist traditions which place limitations on religious influence over law and politics. Balance between these traditions is sought by treating religion as a form of individual and collective identity. Such an approach protects individual religious identity rights while enabling Member States, on grounds of cultural autonomy, to pursue their own relationships to religion, including the maintenance of institutional and cultural links to individual faiths and the promotion religious morality as part of the legal protection of a broader public morality. However, such facilitation of religious identities is limited by the Union's identification of the autonomy of the public sphere from religious domination and the protection of individual autonomy from the promotion of collective morality as key elements of its public order and prerequisites of EU membership. Religions seen as unable to reconcile themselves to such limitations are regarded as contrary to the Union's public order. Linking religious influence over law to religion's cultural role enables religions which are culturally entrenched at national level to exercise greater influence than outsider religions whose attempts to influence law can be seen as political rather than cultural and therefore as threatening to the principle of balance. The thesis therefore shows that the EU's public order is influenced by a Christian-humanist tradition which facilitates religion's cultural role but restricts its political influence. This distinction between religion's cultural and political roles, though complex and problematic in terms of equal treatment of insider and outsider faiths, represents an attempt to ensure respect for the Union's cultural and legal pluralism while constructing a distinctive public order with identifiable fundamental norms.

In focusing on the theology of God’s power, this dissertation neither presents an exhaustive historical biography of political theology nor exalts its career in the Western history of ideas. Rather, it attempts to determine the degree to which the modern fate of this field depended on the dialectic of the distinction between two separate types of God’s power. To this end, I explore employments and embodiments of this power over a number of centuries. The mediaeval investigation into God’s attributes was originally concerned with the problem of divine almightiness, but underwent a slow but steady displacement from the territory of theology to the freshly emerging proceedings of legal analysis. Here, based on the distinction between potentia Dei absoluta and ordinata (God’s absolute and ordered power), late-mediaeval lawyers worked out a new terminology to define the extent of the power-holder’s authority. This effort would give rise, during the early modern era, to the gradual establishment of the legal-political framework represented by the concepts of the prince and sovereignty. In covering the time from Peter Damian (†1072) to Alberico Gentili (†1608), I demarcate the limits of this evolution as well as its thematic direction. Damian illustrates how mediaeval theologians’ introduction of the distinction potentia Dei absoluta/ordinata extended the horizon of what is feasible for God, while Gentili confronts us by placing the most spectacular consequences of the emerging question in the normative realms of law and politics. I conclude that the question of potentia Dei finally emerges as the Archimedean point from which the account of the history of the European legal tradition is supplemented with its structuring twofoldness—through, for example, such binomial conceptual tensions as centralism/authonomy, legislative/judicial authority, and written/unwritten law.

Twenty-six Anglican bishops and archbishops – the ‘Lords Spiritual’ – are members of the House of Lords by right of their position within the established Church of England. They retain a place of symbolic and practical significance in parliament despite the widespread ‘secularisation’ of British (especially English) society and the ‘institutional marginalisation’ of the Church from the state during the twentieth century. How has the Church of England’s direct influence in parliament survived, and what purpose has it served? In answering these questions, new perspectives are given on the reciprocal influence of political and religious debates, the role of the House of Lords, the dynamics of ‘secularisation’, and the function of the religious establishment. Study of the Lords Spiritual acts as an ‘institutional’ corrective to the ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ approaches which, since the late 1950s, have come to characterise studies of the relationship between church and state. Between c. 1903 and 1974, the role of the Lords Spiritual changed significantly. While once they claimed a role in the balance of constitutional ‘estates’, they came to place themselves within the chamber’s balance of expertise. Though at times the bishops attained temporary political importance, their conduct responded to ecclesiastical influences – chiefly, the perception of the Church’s and Christianity’s declining place in national life. In their efforts to influence parliamentary debates, they were constrained by the need to relate to the prevailing political and parliamentary discourses. This entailed compromises which became greater as the identities of Church and state diverged, and as social practices departed from traditional Christian standards.

In the early modern period the Holy See refused to mediate between Catholic and Protestant sovereign powers by formal diplomatic peace missions. As a consequence, scholarly research on the early modern papacy as a peacemaking force tends to concentrate on peace negotiations between Catholic powers. This doctoral thesis, in contrast, analyses the attitude of the Holy See towards political reconciliation across confessional boundaries in a case study of Pope Clement VIII Aldobrandini (r. 1592–1605). It places papal politics and diplomacy at the centre of three conflicts which had a confessional dimension: the war of the Catholic Spanish Habsburgs with Protestant England, the Spanish attempts to suppress the rebellion of the predominantly Calvinist United Provinces in the Low Countries and the power struggle between the Catholic king of Sweden and his Lutheran uncle, Duke Charles of Södermanland. This doctoral research analyses the role which Clement VIII's contemporaries expected the pontiff to fulfil in transconfessional peace processes and how far Clement VIII complied with such expectations. It sheds new light on the pope's interpretation of his traditional duties as the spiritual head of the respublica christiana to protect Christendom against those whom the papacy regarded as 'heretics', 'schismatics' and 'infidels'. This study will argue that Clement VIII followed a flexible religious policy and that, if necessary, the Aldobrandini pontiff was willing to promote the idea of a reconciliation between Catholic and Protestant powers. The transnational approach of this thesis will demonstrate that the response of the Holy See to regional and confessional conflicts needs to be understood as part of a wider strategy of the papacy which aimed at retaining the Catholic religion in the short-term and at restoring it throughout Christendom in the long-term.

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In this thesis I have provided a critique of the stream of contractarian liberalism which finds its source in the work of John Locke, tracing its influence through the French Revolution and into our own era in the work of the contemporary liberal theorist John Rawls. I have drawn particular attention to the substantive and methodological assumptions which unify these three instantiations of the contractarian tradition. I have challenged this stream of liberalism by offering an exposition of the thought of Edmund Burke. During the course of the thesis I have looked at the central themes which characterised Burke's thought, drawing particular attention to Burke's understanding of the British constitution, common law and his regard for the institutional church. Secondly, I have analysed the theological content of Burke's political thought, demonstrating that Burke's political thought emerged from his Christian faith and his concomitant belief in the natural law. I have argued that, as a result, there is a profound consonance between the central principles of the Christian faith and the conservative tradition which followed Burke. In the course of this argument I have defended the natural law school of Burkean scholarship and presented a clear link between Burke and the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Thirdly, I have unearthed some of the theological convictions which were historically resident in the British legal tradition that informed Burke's thought and I have shown how these assumptions run counter to the central ideas of the contractarian tradition. I have concluded by arguing that there are specifiable aspects of contractarian liberalism which should be treated with suspicion by Christians.

This thesis defends the position that the Eastern Orthodoxy has the potential to develop, on the basis of its core concepts and doctrines, a new political theology that is participatory, personalist and universalist. This participatory political theology, as I name it, endorses modern democracy and the values of civic engagement. It enhances the process of democracy-building and consolidation in the SEE countries through cultivating the ethos of participation and concern with the common good among and the recognition of the dignity and freedom of the person. This political-theological model is developed while analyzing critically the traditional models of church-state relations (the symphonia model corresponding to the medieval empire and the Christian nation model corresponding to the nation-state) as being instrumentalized to serve the political goals of non-democratic regimes. The participatory political-theological model is seen as corresponding to the conditions of the constitutional democratic state. The research is justified by the fact the Eastern Orthodoxy has been a dominant religiouscultural force in the European South East for centuries, thus playing a significant role in the process of creation of the medieval and modern statehood of the SEE countries. The analysis employs comparative constitutional perspectives on democratic transition and consolidation in the SEE region with the theoretical approaches of political theology and Eastern Orthodox theology. The conceptual basis for the political-theological synthesis is found in the concept and doctrines of the Eastern Orthodoxy (theosis and synergy, ecclesia and Eucharist, conciliarity and catholicity, economy and eschatology) which emphasize the participatory, personalist and communal dimensions of the Orthodox faith and practice. The paradigms of revealing the political-theological potential of these concepts are the Eucharistic ecclesiology and the concept of divine-human communion as defining the body of Orthodox theology. The thesis argues that with its ethos of openness and engagement the participatory political theology presupposes political systems that are democratic, inclusive, and participatory, respecting the rights and the dignity of the person. The political theology developed here calls for a transformation and change of democratic systems towards better realization of their personalist and participatory commitments. In the context of the SEE countries the participatory political theology addresses the challenges posed by alternative authoritarian political theologies practiced in neighboring regions.

This thesis contributes to the ethnographic corpus by charting the contested place of ‘public’ Christianity in contemporary England, which I explore through the rise of conservative Christian political activism and Christian interest litigation in the English courts. Based on twenty-two months of dual-sited fieldwork split between a Christian lobby group and a conservative evangelical church, it is unique in putting the experiences of religious activists at the legal coalface in direct conversation with (one subsection of) the conservative Christian community they appeal to for spiritual and financial support. I attend to the values, desires and goals of those seeking to live out their faith in a context they paint as hostile to its manifestation. I argue that, despite the apparently innovative legal forms through which these values and desires are articulated, the primary motivations of those involved are far from novel. Rather, they reflect historic and abiding concerns within evangelical Christianity: an abhorrence of sin; Christ’s offer of freedom from it; and the duty to tell others of this possibility. Equally longstanding, however, are tensions over how best to discharge these missionary obligations. Thus, this work is also an exploration of the evangelistic anxieties experienced by the members of one church community in their efforts to do so, and of their creativenavigation of the competing moral commitments around which their lives are structured. I argue that their theoretical value monism – in which the many goals they seek to achieve can be subsumed under the ideal of submission to God’s Word – takes on particular contours as it is challenged by the value pluralism dominant in twenty-first century London. While Christian activists view high-profile legal cases as vehicles through which to (re)evangelise the nation, I show that evangelicals on the ground are deeply ambivalent about the impact of this ‘legal theology’.