The character of Jonah is one of the most recognizable in the whole Bible, but the prophet’s failure is not always understood as having a political dimension. Jonah’s inability to value God’s mercy at work in the political reality of Nineveh challenges the church to be “glad” in its political engagement with the world, and to take its own sin seriously as it does so. Here, I will consider the contrasting political approaches of Reinhold Niebuhr and contemporary postliberals in response to this challenge and ask, which is more susceptible to the temptation of the wayward prophet?

The fact that there is a political element to the story of Jonah is sometimes overlooked. Nineveh, after all, is a polis, and the drama of the narrative ultimately depends on the fate of this “great city” with “over a hundred and twenty thousand” inhabitants (Jonah 4:11 ESV). Whilst this drama can be understood in cultural terms–it is the people of Nineveh “from the greatest to the least” who respond to Jonah first (3:5)–it also concerns the response of the political authorities to God’s word. The king of Nineveh, upon hearing of Jonah’s message, rises from his throne, removes his robe, and sits in sackcloth and ashes, commanding the people to turn from their evil ways and “call out mightily to God” that he might relent (3:6-9). While it is the people who initially call for a fast, it is the king who calls for an end to the violence, which is a vital element in God’s recognition of their repentance (3:10). These details highlight the submission of the city’s political order as well as its cultural order to God’s word of judgment.

Yet it is rare to hear much extended reflection on Jonah as a book with political themes. Perhaps this is because of the manner in which it is presented. There is a child-like simplicity to the description of the Ninevites’ response to God’s judgment which also characterizes God’s explanation to Jonah for his compassion. Whatever the complexities of the socio-political dynamics of ancient Nineveh or the trajectory of God’s providential plan for history, in this moment we are confronted with a surprisingly straightforward picture of God’s judgment and mercy at work in the city. This simplicity would seem to preclude the extraction of any serious political-theological lessons from the story, suggesting that it is more about the attitudes of God’s people and “insiders” such as Jonah than about God’s work outside of Israel among the nations.

Indeed, an awareness of the broader place of Nineveh in the biblical story might make us cautious to draw radical conclusions from this episode. Whatever the precise character of the repentance that takes place in Jonah’s Nineveh (there is no indication that the Ninevites are actually converted to Judaism), it clearly does not have a lasting effect when we consider Nahum’s prophecy against the city some hundred years later. This fact perhaps encourages us to read the political events depicted in Nineveh as merely a foil for the internal prophetic critique of God’s people. If even Nineveh can repent in response to God’s word of judgment, then how much more ought the people of Israel?

But if this is really the sole point of the story of Jonah, it would seem a somewhat disingenuous way for the author to use the life-or-death drama of such a “great city”. For if Nineveh’s repentance is incidental to the true message of the book, then it calls into question the sincerity of God’s statement about caring for the city. Rather, for the exposure of Jonah’s hard-heartedness to be achieved, the fate of the Ninevites has to matter in some way. If God really is, as Jonah himself puts it, “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster” (4:2), then the Ninevites’ repentance and God’s merciful response must represent a real possibility and hold some real value. Whatever the longer-term fate of the Ninevites might be, therefore, and however short-lived their repentance is, there is something basically good about such an event which God affirms.

Thus, the account of the Ninevites’ repentance should not be explained away too quickly. Its simple and straightforward character might, in fact, be part of its power as a source of reflection. This simple reality could be summarized as follows: God has compassion toward “great cities”, and his mercy is at hand for those who repent and turn from their evil. Such a statement might seem obvious to the point of fatuity, but I suspect it can be easy to lose sight of its full implications. Indeed, the irony of Jonah’s final response to God, which demonstrates no lack in his professed theology, suggests that we should not always expect ourselves to find this reality easy to accept, even if we fear it to be true.

Perhaps we can sympathize with Jonah in his situation. The prophet’s response to God’s compassion is often read as merely a bloodthirsty desire for revenge, but maybe he was also skeptical of the lasting character of the Ninevites’ repentance. Knowing firsthand the horrors of which this “great city” was capable, what value could such limited repentance have? Does it not merely put off the day of reckoning for such a deeply unjust society? Yet God is not persuaded by such logic. Instead, he accepts Nineveh’s repentance at face value and challenges Jonah to do the same. Indeed, Jesus himself holds up the Ninevites as examples of repentance in Matthew 12.

The political theologian Oliver O’Donovan identifies this challenge as one of gladness. If the church as the body of Christ is called to recapitulate the Christ-event in its life in the world, then it must recapitulate it in its entirety. The tendency can be to focus on one aspect of Christ’s journey in the life of the church to the exclusion of others. In this case, the church can become so focused on its character as a suffering community that it forgets that it is also a glad community. The church rightly needs to be aware of its calling to suffer with Christ, that it should not expect to feel at home in the world that “killed the prophets and crucified our Lord,” but it needs to do so as part of the overall knowledge of Christ’s victory and his triumph:

[Gladness] is an essential qualification to the martyr-consciousness of the church. For communities that find their identity in the fact that they have been unjustly treated come to depend upon the injustice of others; they need to perpetuate the wrong and to ensure that the oppressor shall not cease to oppress, like Jonah trying to ward off the disaster of Nineveh’s conversion. What stands between the church and this pathology is the conscious joy it takes in the resurrection life. ‘The Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead’ dwells within it. From this position of strength it has no need of the oppressor’s impotent oppression, and so can offer reconciliation. Forgiveness is the sign that all rebellion against God has been defeated, so that the enemy, too, is liberated from its power. That is not to belittle the evil that may have been intended; it is open to resurrection faith to take evil and forgiveness equally seriously.^[1]

We might add that this pathology could also be understood as a prior failure in the church’s understanding of its suffering. One way in which the church is distinguished from its Lord is that its suffering is not entirely of another’s doing, and that part of its call to suffer is in dying to its own self with its idolatrous desires. Jonah’s hard-heartedness is doubly offensive because of the lack of self-awareness it shows of his own failure to follow God and his own experience of God’s mercy. Jonah is a warning in this regard to God’s people as he fails to understand his own life as a sign of God’s mercy and thus cannot recognize and value movements of God’s mercy more broadly, which extends even to the political life of a “great city” such as Nineveh.

In what ways, therefore, might the church in our day be susceptible to Jonah’s temptation and fail to be truly glad, rendering it unable to recognize God’s mercy at work in political reality?

One of the most significant developments in recent political theology in the West has been the proliferation of “postliberal” approaches. While this term could be used to describe a variety of positions (Christian and otherwise), Christian postliberals are united by a critique of liberal modernity which sees it as fundamentally incompatible with Christian discipleship and seeks either a separation from or a radical revision of the liberal order in order to safeguard faithful Christian living. Postliberals have rightly caused the church to reflect on the many challenges to discipleship inherent in liberal modernity by exposing the violence done in its name to human communities and to creation more widely. Any serious Christian political theology must engage with the true extent of the idolatrous pretensions of modern Western culture and their historical roots, which ought to make us suspicious of any easy solution to the church’s relations with liberal modernity. As Stanley Hauerwas reminds us, a healthy awareness of the church’s call to suffer is crucial to avoiding this temptation.^[2]

Postliberalism is often contrasted with the approach of the theologian and political thinker Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), whose influential defense of liberal democracy is the target of much postliberal ire.^[3] Niebuhr represents an engaged political posture which asserts the responsibility of Christians to pursue limited political justice in a manner which accounts for the persistent reality of sin. But Niebuhr is viewed by many postliberals as the prime example of a church that made its peace with modernity too easily. Niebuhr’s desire to chasten liberal politics with an appeal to original sin is seen as inadvertently buttressing the status quo by excluding appeals to “the ultimate” from political discourse, diminishing the radical implications of the Gospel in favor of a pragmatic understanding of politics which sidelines the church. Critics worry that Niebuhr’s realism threatens to relegate God’s redemptive work to the end of history and to grant sin a present hegemony that is unwarranted. Thus, he is often accused of a failure of gladness in his own way.^[4] Niebuhr was famously dismissive of “sentimental idealists” who naively suggested moralistic solutions to complex political problems, but would he have regarded the story of Jonah similarly?^[5]

While these criticisms must be taken seriously, however, there are reasons to believe that Niebuhr took on board the lesson of the wayward prophet better than some of his postliberal successors. Without denying the validity of postliberal approaches tout court, the danger is that the very strength of their critique of modernity can make political reality seem increasingly intractable to God’s redeeming work, causing the church to “wait under” a proverbial vine of its own. Like Jonah, this could perhaps be part of an over-expectation of political life that refuses to value limited moments of renewal. By contrast, Niebuhr affirmed the possibility and value of a certain experience of repentance and renewal in the lives of political communities, while also understanding the limits of such experiences in light of the constantly self-glorifying tendency of human collectives. He also posited an important role for the church as a kind of “saving remnant” within society, but understood that this required taking the church’s complicity in the evils of modernity seriously. There are thus some surprising resonances between Niebuhr’s writing and the book of Jonah, which suggests that his example ought not to be discounted so quickly by Christians of a postliberal persuasion today.

We can see these resonances in an address Niebuhr gave to the World Council of Churches in 1948 on “The Christian Witness in the Social and National Order,” in which he explored the role of the church in the West in the wake of WWII.^[6] Niebuhr begins by recognizing the inclination and responsibility of convinced Christians “to bear witness against the secular substitutes for the Christian faith which failed to anticipate, and which may have helped to create, the tragic world in which we now live.”^[7] This was one aspect of the church’s calling to be a prophetic voice to the world, and Niebuhr was certainly never shy of critiquing what he saw as prideful assumptions at the heart of his own society. In his view, WWII and the long crisis that preceded it was a moment of judgment that had come upon the West for the idolatrous pretensions of liberalism. These pretensions had created the injustices in Western society out of which the existential threats of communism and fascism had grown. Niebuhr took these injustices seriously enough that in the early 1930s he wondered if liberal civilization was not genuinely doomed to destruction.^[8]

However, Niebuhr promptly adds a warning to this recognition of the prophetic responsibility of the church that recalls Jonah. “Let us not presume to laugh with God,” Niebuhr writes, “lest we forget that His judgment is upon us, as well as upon them.”^[9] In Niebuhr’s view, the church was too implicated in the disaster of his day to permit itself more than “provisional testimony” against secular society. “The Christian Church must bear witness against every form of pride and vainglory, whether in the secular or in the Christian culture,” he affirmed, and it must be “particularly intent upon our own sins lest we make Christ the judge of the other and not of ourselves.”^[10]

Furthermore, this negative task of the church is not intended to stand alone. The word of judgment is with the purpose of redemption:

Positively our task is to present the Gospel of redemption in Christ to nations as well as individuals. According to our faith, we are always involved in sin and in death because we try too desperately to live, to preserve our pride, to maintain our prestige. Yet it is possible to live truly if we die to self, if the vainglory of man is broken by divine judgment that life may be truly reformed by divine grace. This promise of new life is for individuals. Yet who can deny its relevance for nations and empires, for civilizations and cultures also, even though these collective forms of life do not have the exact integrity of the individual soul nor do they have as direct an access to divine judgment and grace?^[11]

Despite being a self-identified realist, then, Niebuhr baldly applies the language of judgment, mercy, and repentance to his understanding of power politics. Niebuhr did so because he understood the same dynamics of sin as operative in collective as in individual life. Individuals and communities have “the same sense of the contingent and insecure character of human existence and they seek by the same pride and lust for power to hide or to overcome that insecurity.”^[12] This meant that some sort of experience of repentance was applicable to communities as well as to individuals. “It is not impossible,” Niebuhr wrote in Faith and History, “for nations and cultures, rulers and communities to interpret their vicissitudes as judgements upon their pride and thus to be reformed, rather than destroyed, by the bludgeonings of history.” Niebuhr saw these opportunities as occurring at moments of political crisis, when the injustices of a community caught up with it and led to challenges to its prideful claims to authority.^[13]

Thus, when Niebuhr saw the dramatic events of his lifetime as a judgment on the sinful pretensions of Western societies, he also saw this as an opportunity for the church to invite them to repentance and renewal. Rather than sitting back and watching the world suffer, Niebuhr called on the church as a “saving remnant” to “to mediate the divine judgment and grace that nations, classes, states and cultures, as well as individuals, may discern the divine author of their wounds, that they may also know the possibility of a new and whole life.”^[14] The liberal societies of the West had to understand how they reaped what they sowed in the twin challenges of fascism and communism, and correspondingly to repent of the sinful illusions that had fostered the injustices from which these movements drew strength. Niebuhr felt he had already seen some fruits of repentance in the social democratic turn in many Western nations, which displayed a willingness to question liberal illusions about the free-market and the concentration of economic power.^[15]

Of course, true to his “realist” moniker, political repentance was not always a straightforward possibility for Niebuhr. In perhaps his most famous work Moral Man and Immoral Society, Niebuhr argued that human egoism was compounded in social settings to make collectives incapable of the kind of moral behavior that might be possible in individuals.^[16] Niebuhr carried a similar conviction into his mature thought, arguing that political communities were unable to transcend themselves like some individuals because they “have no other life than their life in history.” There is no such thing as a “martyr nation,” and no political community would finally escape the temptations of prideful pretension that would lead to its downfall.^[17] Niebuhr thus finishes his address with a reflection on the story of Abraham bargaining with God for the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. Even though there might have been a sufficient number of righteous people in Sodom to constitute a “saving remnant,” ultimately its presence was irrelevant for the fate of the city. In the same way, the church should not set its hope on the world heeding its warnings. Western civilization was surely bound to fall one day –if not more imminently, given the invention of nuclear weapons. But, as Niebuhr concludes,

If such a day should come, we will remember that the mystery of God’s sovereignty and mercy transcends the fate of empires and civilizations. He will be exalted though they perish. However, He does not desire their perdition but rather that they turn from their evil ways and live. From us He demands that we work while it is day, since the night cometh when no man can work.^[18]

In this way, therefore, Niebuhr held a political vision that tried to take the sin of the world and of the church seriously while still affirming the proximity of God’s mercy to political reality.

Perhaps Niebuhr’s extension of his existentialist theology to power politics in this manner is somewhat clumsy. It lacks the sophisticated understanding of history and God’s salvation plan which is a strength of more recent political theology such as Oliver O’Donovan’s. Niebuhr never quite transcended the ahistorical understanding of Christian faith he inherited from his liberal forebears. There also remain questions about whether Niebuhr’s underlying theology can genuinely sustain such an assertion of God’s redemptive activity in history, given his reticence about certain key elements of Christian doctrine such as the historicity of the resurrection. In that, and in other respects, Niebuhr was a child of liberal modernity in his own way.^[19]

But at the same time, maybe there is some virtue in the straightforward trust Niebuhr exhibits in the proximity of God’s mercy to human communities which might challenge us today. Postliberals are certainly right to say that ours is increasingly a society that “does not know its right hand from its left” and which requires radical renewal, but Niebuhr might warn them not to allow this to obscure the immediate counsels of hope and repentance that our society needs to hear. For one thing, as Ross Douthat has recently pointed out, Christian postliberals are not the only postliberals around, and there is no guarantee that their vision will be the one to rise out of the ashes of a fallen liberal order.^[20] Like the man in Jesus’ parable whose demon leaves only to return with seven more terrible (Mt. 12:43-5), we might end up with something much worse than secular liberalism. This is where it is important to take the witness of figures such as Niebuhr seriously. He lived in a genuinely totalitarian time, not like the “liberal totalitarianism” which some detect in our own day. He had as much reason as anyone to be cynical about Western civilization, having lived through the Great Depression and two world wars. But through his experience of the next two decades, he thought he detected enough “fruits of repentance” in democratic liberalism that warranted its provisional support.^[21] Whether we agree with Niebuhr’s assessment or not, the reluctance of some postliberal approaches to appreciate limited examples of repentance in political life must be questioned.

Likewise, Niebuhr’s willingness to take seriously the church’s complicity–by participation and by provocation– in the ills of modernity is salutary in contrast to a certain tendency among postliberals to gloss over this fact.^[22] While we can be grateful for the reminder of the church’s call to suffer from Hauerwas and others, the distinction implied in Jonah between the church’s suffering and Christ’s suffering is one that complicates any simplistic opposition between church and world that sustains some postliberal approaches. When we observe that liberal modernity has largely rejected the church for instance, should we immediately assume that it has also rejected God? Or perhaps we should say that, in part, it has rejected the God the church presented to it. This might help us to recognise some of the ways that God’s mercy has been at work in liberal societies to this day.

Of course, these reflections do not invalidate the postliberal insight altogether. It might stop us though from being too hasty in writing off the witness of those such as Niebuhr who, for all his faults, perhaps understood something of the challenge of Jonah better than ourselves. The most important lesson of Jonah, however, is one that we can all grasp better, which ultimately concerns the character of God himself, a God who is “gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”

Hamish Stirling is a PhD student in Theology at the University of St Andrews, Scotland and a member of Cornerstone St Andrews United Free Church.

1. Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 181. ↑

2. Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001), 220. ↑

3. Niebuhr made his apology for liberal democracy most famously in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defense (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944). ↑

4. For representative critiques see William T. Cavanaugh, “A Nation with the Church’s Soul: Richard John Neuhaus and Reinhold Niebuhr on Church and Politics,” Political Theology 14, no. 3 (2013): 386-96; John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 233-51; Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 131-48. ↑

5. To my knowledge, although the Hebrew prophets were a favorite source of reflection, Niebuhr never discussed Jonah at length in his writing, ↑

6. Published in Christian Realism and Political Problems (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 102-13. ↑

7. Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems, 102. ↑

8. See for instance his Reflections on the End of an Era (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934). ↑

9. Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems, 105. ↑
10. Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems, 107. ↑
11. Nienuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems, 107-8. ↑
12. Niebuhr, Faith and History: A Comparison of Christian and Modern Views of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), 218. ↑
13. Niebuhr, Faith and History, 230. See pp. 214-234 of Faith and History for Niebuhr’s extended discussion of the possibilities for repentance in political communities. ↑

14. Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems, 108. ↑

15. Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems, 110-1. See “Augustine’s Political Realism” pp. 119-46 in the same volume for Niebuhr’s reading of the development of social democracy. ↑
16. Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), xi. ↑
17. Niebuhr, Faith and History, 230. ↑
18. Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems, 112-3. ↑

19. The debate over the extent of Niebuhr’s theological liberalism is complex. Much of the difficulty concerns the precise nature of Niebuhr’s understanding of the Bible as “true myth”. For excellent discussions see Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology, vol. 2, Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900-1950, (Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 435-83; Kevin Carnahan, “Reading Reinhold Niebuhr against Himself Again: On Theological Language and Divine Action,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 18, no. 2 (2016): 191-209; Langdon Gilkey, On Niebuhr: A Theological Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). ↑

20. Ross Douthat, “A Conversation with Ross Douthat,” interview by Peter Leithart and James Wood, The Civitas Podcast, 17/10/2023. ↑

21. Reinhold Niebuhr, “Toward a Christian Approach to International Issues,” Christianity and Crisis 6 (Dec. 9 1946): 1. ↑

22. See for instance the critique of William Cavanaugh’s understanding of secular modernity by Christopher Insole in “Discerning the Theopolitical: A Response to Cavanaugh’s Reimagining of Political Space,” Political Theology 7, no. 3 (2006): 323-35, https://doi.org/10.1558/poth.2006.7.3.323. ↑