In ages past, theologians, statesmen, and political philosophers scoured the Bible as they sought to give guidance to politics and law. As scholars came to regard the Bible as a collection of texts written by men from varying backgrounds and levels of understanding, many came to doubt that the Bible contains a single, coherent political teaching. In recent years, however, a few political theorists have shown that individual books of the Bible, such as Genesis or Matthew, contain a unified and instructive account of religion and politics. Richard Burt's In the Whirlwind: God and Humanity in Conflict goes even further, arguing that the Bible as a whole offers a powerful teaching that would be useful for secular political theorists. He argues that those who redacted both the Hebrew and Christian Testaments put together a set of books that raise consistently incisive questions about God's authority to rule absolutely. Burt discerns this theme by reading the Bible on more than one level. On the surface, he says, the Bible teaches that God is omnipotent and omniscient and that he must be worshiped absolutely. Its deeper teaching is that God's powers are limited and his claim to deserve unconditional obedience is subject to legitimate doubts.

According to Burt, both Testaments show God repeatedly demanding our unqualified obedience and love. Yet they also show that God's power is strikingly limited and that inevitable disorder throws us into great conflicts with God. Our great needs compel us to challenge God's demand for unconditional obedience and love and to insist that he keep his promises. In making this case, Burt provides a detailed and engaging account of how figures such as Adam, Cain, Abraham, Moses, and Job question the justice of God's actions. According to Burt, God and humanity try to resolve their conflicts by appealing to principles of perfect justice. But because each party has boundless needs and limited abilities to meet them, there are no principles that would satisfy them both. In the Christian Bible, God tries to reconcile with humanity by sending a son into the world who reflects God's love and who invites us to love him in return. Yet God resumes his demanding ways and also issues threats of eternal punishment should we fail to love him.

Having elaborated the fundamental conflict between God and humanity, says Burt, the Bible also points to several ways of alleviating that conflict. At times, figures such as Moses and Jesus step forward as possible mediators between the divine and the human. Yet the most promising solution lies in our willingness to talk with God and in his willingness to answer us. “Direct, continuous confrontation about the causes and possible (even temporary) solutions for these recriminations,” says Burt, “provides the most likely course by which each party can come to a more satisfying outcome than if they permanently retreat from each other” (290). Conversations between God and men such as Abraham or Job establish a forum “in which the disputants are likely to be led to acknowledge (each to himself as well as to the other) their need for each other and their consequent mutual dependency” (290). Instead of seeking out non-existent principles of perfect justice, the Bible implicitly suggests that there can be no perfect harmony between ruler and ruled and that we need God just as he needs us.

This is the insight that Burt would bring to secular political theory. According to Burt, modern theorists have tried and failed to elaborate principles of perfect justice that would bring harmony to political life (274). He devotes a chapter to showing how the Supreme Court exemplifies this trait. Were political theorists and practitioners to reflect on the lessons of the Bible, they would eschew principles of perfect justice and instead find ways to avoid injustices as “revealed in the particularities of lived experience of people's comparative ‘freedoms and capabilities’” (16).

Burt interprets the Bible in order to show that its profound teaching about authority and justice can be instructive for contemporary political theory. In order to argue that our relationship with God is a model for thinking about our relationship to other human beings, Burt must develop a very precise account of who God is and how he rules humanity. Burt begins his account of divine authority by asserting that every claim to hold authority, even God's, must be justified by appeals to some “extrinsic standard of justice or righteousness” (1). Now, it is not clear why this is important, or even possible, if, as Burt also claims, there are no universally recognizable, coherent, and compelling principles of justice that could be used to justify authority. Leaving this aside, the claim that every claim to authority must be justified by some extrinsic standard rules out the possibility that God's authority lies simply in his holiness or in some other aspect of divinity itself. Burt shows that God sometimes demonstrates that he is guided by intelligible principles of justice, such as when he deliberates with Abraham about whether it is just to punish the innocent along with guilty in Sodom. But Burt's overall argument is slightly weakened by his failure to establish a dialogue with theologians who argue that God's authority lies not only in his justice but also in other qualities, some of which might seem fundamentally mysterious to us. Similarly, Burt's claim that God manifestly errs in ruling humanity and repeatedly alters the conditions and rules under which we must live would be more persuasive had he elaborated and answered the argument that an omniscient and omnipotent God changes those conditions and rules in order to teach us why we must be ruled as we are. Because Burt does not say enough about what distinguishes God from being merely another party in a contentious “power relationship,” the reader sometimes wonders if he has captured the Bible's full teaching about who God is and what authority he holds. Despite these questions, Burt does political theory a great service by bringing our attention to the richness of the Bible's reflections on the problem of authority.