Vatican II on Church-State Relations

“To revisit the legacy of Vatican II as it attempted to reconstruct the relation of church and state around a theology of the laity; to honour its ambitions to escape from the straitjacket of a two-level theory of authority; to enrich it with concepts drawn from the primary missionary impulses of the apostolic church and the debates of contemporary political theology; those are the very considerable ambitions of this constantly stimulating book. It should prove rewarding to Christians in all churches, taking one major Christian achievement of the twentieth century as a starting point for an ecumenical approach to the challenges of political life in the twenty first.” —Oliver O'Donovan, Professor Emeritus, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK Should religion and politics be kept apart? What should be the relationship between the church and the state? M.Y. Ciftci answers these questions by studying the most important event in the recent history of the Catholic Church: The Second Vatican Council (1962-65). The book provides a new interpretation of the Council’s teaching on church-state relations to better appreciate its flaws and need for reform. By paying attention to the (often overlooked) importance given by the Council to the lay apostolate, it reveals how the Council did not reform, as is often thought, but retained a flawed conception of the laity’s role in politics. It then proposes a new framework for understanding church-state relations using the ressourcement method of returning to scripture and tradition, and by a critical dialogue with Oliver O’Donovan and various Protestant biblical scholars of the Powers in the New Testament. Ciftci shows how fruitful an self-consciously ecumenical approach can be for political theology. As most ressourcement theologians have overlooked political issues, and since ecumenical theology rarely touches on issues of church-state relations, this work makes an original contribution to the ressourcement project and to ecumenism. M. Y. Ciftci is Public Bioethics Fellow at the Anscombe Bioethics Centre. He was previously Etienne Gilson Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto.