the people of God and the State

with the elections just around the corner, one question that christians would ask is this: 'what is the relationship between the people of God and the State?' should we support the state? the NT has something to say in Romans 12. but what about the OT? below is an excerpt from christopher wright's article that can help to explain this relationship:

excerpt from Christopher J.H. Wright, “The People of God and the State in the Old Testament,” Themelios 16.1 (Oct/Nov 1990): 4-10.

III The institutional state; the monarchy period

By the time of Samuel, the strain of living as a theocracy was proving more than the people felt able to bear in the face of external pressures. They opted for monarchy, survived Saul, served David, suffered Solomon, split in two and finally sank respectively into oblivion and exile. During this period (from Saul, or at least David, to the exile) the people of Yahweh were unmistakably an institutional state, with central leadership, boundaries, organized military defences, etc. Yet the identification of people of God with political state was never wholly comfortable. Within the OT itself there are hints of conscious distinction between the two realities, even while there is formal and apparent identity. So there is the problem of the relationship of people of God and state internally to Israel itself. This is further complicated by there being two markedly different evaluations of the monarchy, even within closely related texts: pro and anti. Then, if we see the monarchical states of Judah and Israel as at least notionally the people of God, we should look at their relationship and attitude to the external states of their day―especially the dominant empires.

The origins of monarchy in Israel are laid before us in a narrative which subtly and
intentionally interweaves two understandings of the process (1 Sa. 8-12). On the one hand the demand for it arises from a retrograde desire of the people to be like the other nations by having a king. Their reasons at first sight seem unexceptionable: leadership against their enemies and the protection of justice (8:3-5, 19f.). Samuel (and Yahweh) interpret the request as a rejection of direct theocracy. But their explicit objection to monarchy is not so much theological as practical, and fundamentally economic. Samuel predicts that if a king is accepted, it will result in the characteristic forms of royal slavery: confiscation, taxation, military and agricultural conscription (8:10-18). The portrayal of Solomon’s later reign is an
unmistakable ‘I told you so’. All very negative. So much so that Brueggemann can speak of the whole spirit, ethos and accomplishment of Solomon as a reversal of the Mosaic alternative, a return to the values and management mentality of the empire, a countering of the counterculture of Sinai.14 (fn14 In The Prophetic Imagination, ch. 2, Brueggemann lists the characteristic features of the Solomonic era as ‘an economics of affluence (1 Ki. 4:20-23), politics of oppression (1 Ki. 5:13-18, 9,15-22) and a religion of immanence and accessibility (1 Ki. 8:12-13)’.)

On the other hand, it is Yahweh himself who gives Israel a king, choosing, anointing and (for a while) blessing him. It is Yahweh who goes on to exalt David, embarrassing him with the multiplicity of victories, gift of a city, rest from his enemies, and a covenant for his posterity. ‘Solomon in all his glory’ suffered no embarrassment, but his greatness is still attributed to Yahweh’s generosity. In other words, Yahweh takes the human desire and resultant institution and makes them fit in with his own purposes. Indeed, he goes further, and tries to mould the
monarchy, for all its origins as rejection of theocracy, into a vehicle for theocracy by subsuming the reign of the king under his own reign. And so the royal theology of Jerusalem is absorbed into the transcendent rule of Yahweh and given a covenant framework which harks back to Sinai in its call for loyalty and obedience.

If the monarchy thus stands in a position of ambiguous legitimacy before God, neither totally rejected nor unconditionally sanctioned, it likewise had to struggle for legitimacy at a human level. This is how South African scholar Gunther Wittenberg interprets the texts of the Davidic-Solomonic era, seeing in them both attempts at theological legitimizing and also theological resistance to the claimed legitimacy of the Davidic house.15 (fn 15 G. H. Wittenberg, ‘King Solomon and the Theologians’, Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 63 (June 1988) (special issue on church and state and the problem of legitimacy), pp. 16-29. Brueggemann also finds implicit criticism of the golden age of Solomon in the texts themselves which catalogue it, texts which he claims conceal a social criticism designed to lead the reader to enquire exactly what kind of shalom it was under Solomon which brought the people such satiety. See ‘Vine and Fig Tree―a Case Study in Imagination and Criticism’, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 43 (1981); ‘The Bible and Mission’, Missiology 10.4 (1982), pp. 397-411; ‘Trajectories in Old Testament Literature and the Sociology of Ancient Israel’, Journal of Biblical Literature 98 (1979), pp. 161-185.) The legitimizing texts, of course, are those which related to the Davidic covenant, the temple, Zion, and the relationship of the king to God. Resistance was crystallized in the secession of the northern tribes under the leadership of Jeroboam. The presenting cause of this was the social and economic oppression which had developed during Solomon’s reign, and which Rehoboam, though offered the chance of a change of policy, deliberately chose to continue and intensify. But there are hints also of a theological refusal in principle to accept the legitimacy of the glorious Davidic ‘new thing’. The prophet Ahijah, who accosted Jeroboam to launch him on his secession from Judah, came from Shiloh. Shiloh was an ancient cultic centre of the premonarchic tribal federation, former resting place of the ark of the (Sinai) covenant and all its links with Israel’s historical, exodus traditions. Above all it was closely associated with Samuel, whose denunciation of monarchy must have echoed loudly among northern Israelites in the later years of Solomon. Furthermore, there are echoes of the cry of the Israelites in their Egyptian bondage, in the plea of the northerners to have their burdens lifted. Had Solomon become a pharaoh? Noticeably, in setting up the religious foundations of his own state, Jeroboam recalls the exodus liberation: ‘Here is your God, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt’ (aside, ‘not to mention, out of Jerusalem’) (1 Ki. 12:28).

What we have seen, then, is that the transformation of the people of God into an institutional state generated both approval and rejection, in the heat of the process itself, and also in theological and canonical assessment. It seems that the institutional state, like certain other human conditions of life which the law permits but never wholly approves, such as divorce and slavery, is a concession to human ‘hardness of heart’: permitted but transient.

The prophets reinforce the conditional and qualified nature of God’s acceptance of the monarchy as the political form of his people. One could summarize the view of the prophets towards the monarchic state of Israel (in both northern and southern forms) by saying that they accepted its God-givenness, but refused its God-surrogacy. For example, at the point of the secession of the northern tribes away from Judah, one and the same prophet, Ahijah, both acknowledged that Jeroboam’s rebellion was divinely willed as judgment on the house of Solomon, and also later severely criticized him for the idolatry into which he had led the Israelites (1 Ki. 11:29-39; 14:1-16).

That idolatry of the northern kingdom was focused on the golden calves at Bethel and Dan. But from 1 Kings 12:26ff. we see that Jeroboam did not apparently intend the worship of false gods as such. The calves represented the presence of Yahweh, who brought Israel up out of Egypt. The real thrust of Jeroboam’s idolatry lies in the motives of his action, and the additional cultic action which he initiated. His intention was clearly the political protection of his own nascent kingdom from any hankering after the splendour of Jerusalem (vv. 26f.). To make completely sure, he elaborated an alternative cultic system for the northern kingdom, designed, appointed and run by himself, to serve the interests of his state (vv. 31-33). In
effect, ‘Yahweh’ had become a figurehead for his state. The state in itself was idolatrous.

This is clear from the ironic angry words of Amaziah, the high priest at Bethel under
Jeroboam II (nearly two centuries later), against Amos: ‘Get out, you seer! ... Don’t prophesy any more at Bethel, because this is the king’s sanctuary and the temple of the kingdom’ (Am.7:12f., italics mine). Amos, however, refused to be silenced by the usurped divine authority of the political regime. God may have permitted it to come into existence, but that did not bind him to serve its self-interests. The prophets refused to allow the authority of God or his prophetic word to be hijacked to legitimize human political ambitions. Sometimes they paid the cost of that role―as must the church if it chooses to exercise a comparable prophetic
stance today.

One prophet who certainly could not be hijacked was Elijah. His ministry took place in the ninth century BC in the northern kingdom during the reign of Ahab and Jezebel, when the whole state became virtually apostate. Nevertheless there were a faithful 7,000 who had not capitulated to the palace-imposed worship of Baal (1 Ki. 19:14,18). The origins of the idea of a faithful remnant probably go back as far as this. It was not the state of Israel itself that constituted the true people of God, but a minority of ‘true believers’ within it.

We are then given two opposite responses to this dichotomy. Elijah represents the voice from outside. He denounces the king and queen for their apostasy and their socio-economic vandalism (Naboth, ch. 21), predicts divine judgment, and even arranges the anointing of the avenger, Jehu. But there was a presence on the inside of the state system also―that of Obadiah, who meets Elijah in 18:1-15. He is described as a loyal worshipper of Yahweh (his name means that, and he had managed to preserve it, even under Jezebel) from his youth. Yet he was also the top official in the palace―actually employed in the civil and political service of the apostate king and queen. Not content with surviving in such a dangerous position, he was actually using it for the protection and maintenance of a hundred of the prophets of
Yahweh, at a time when Jezebel was exterminating them. The text does not comment on
Obadiah’s stance (though Christian commentators through the centuries have both condemned and commended it). Probably, in my view, we are invited to regard both stances―Elijah’s on the outside, and Obadiah’s on the inside―as equally valid. God had room for both and used both.

In the southern kingdom of Judah, in spite of all the theological legitimization of the state and its monarchy, the prophetic voice of Yahweh could still stand out in conflict with it and challenge the moral validity of any given incumbent of the throne of David. And the criterion of assessment was the covenant law. Unequivocally the prophets subordinated Zion to Sinai.

The law in Deuteronomy which permitted (note, not commanded) monarchy laid down strict conditions for it, including the requirement that the king should know, read and obey the law. He was to be, not a super-Israelite, but a model Israelite among his brothers and equals (Dt.17:14-20). As one entrusted with the law, the king was committed to the maintenance of justice in a spirit of compassion (e.g. especially Ps. 72). Jeremiah could proclaim this strong tradition of the legal, covenantal requirement on the king, at the very gates of the palace in Jerusalem. His words are really a statement of the Davidic monarchy. Zion must conform to Sinai, or face ruin.

‘Hear the word of the Loan, O king of Judah, you who sit on David’s throne―you, your
officials and your people who come through these gates. This is what the LORD says: Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been
robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the alien, the fatherless or the widow, and do not
shed innocent blood in this place. For if you are careful to carry out these commands, then kings who sit on David’s throne will come through the gates of this palace.... But if you do not obey these commands, declares the LORD, I swear by myself that this palace will become a ruin’ (Je. 22:2-5).

On this basis, Jeremiah then goes on, on the one hand, to commend with approval the reign of Josiah, who lived by the standards of covenant law, which is what it means to know Yahweh (22:15f.), and on the other, utterly to reject Jehoiakim, whose actions and policies included forced labour without pay, personal aggrandizement, dishonesty, violence and oppression. The legitimacy or illegitimacy of the two kings is evaluated respectively on the grounds of their treatment of the poor and needy, the workers, the’innocent’―i.e. precisely the dominant concerns of the Sinai law.

Thus, even when the socio-political contours of the people of God had changed radically from the early theocracy to the institutional, royal state, the controlling paradigm was still that of the law and the covenant. This meant that royal theocracy could never be rightly regarded as ‘the divine right of kings per se. Being ‘the Loan’s anointed’ was not an unconditional guarantee. The king was subject to and correctable by the covenant law.

The same moral criterion applies in the prophetic perspective on the authority of external, secular rulers. For they too rule by Yahweh’s authority (19:15). In the eighth century Isaiah regarded Assyria and its tyrannical sovereigns as no more than a stick in the hand of Yahweh (Is. 10:5ff.). Jeremiah could announce, in a seventh-century international diplomatic conference hosted by Zedekiah in Jerusalem, that Yahweh had delegated to Nebuchadnezzar supreme, worldwide authority and power―for the foreseeable future (Je. 27:1-11, especially vv. 5-7).

Now if Israelite kings as Yahweh’s anointed were subject to evaluation by the moral
standards of Yahweh and his law, so too were the pagan ones. The clearest example of this is Nebuchadnezzar again. Daniel had clearly absorbed the point of Jeremiah’s assertion about Nebuchadnezzar, for he repeats it, almost verbatim, to his face (Dn. 2:37f.). Nevertheless, on another occasion Daniel warned Nebuchadnezzar that unless he repented of the injustice on which his boasted city had been built, by lifting the oppression of the poor and needy in his realm, he would face inevitable judgment. The boldness of Daniel’s prophetic word in Daniel 4:27 should not escape us, hidden as it is in the midst of an otherwise somewhat weird story. The one to
whom Yahweh had given all authority and power, far beyond what any Israelite king had ever wielded, is here weighed in the balance of God’s justice and found wanting (to pinch a metaphor from the following chapter).

This must have some bearing on interpretations of Paul’s view of state authority in Romans 13. The Hebrew Bible would wholly endorse the view that all human authorities exist within the framework of God’s will. It would wholly reject the view that gives them a legitimacy regardless of their conformity to God’s justice, as revealed in the covenant law.

So then, the historical experience of the people of God in actually being a state generated enormous tensions. There was never complete ease with the monarchy, even in Davidic Judah, as the continuing existence of a group like the Rechabites in the late monarchy showed (Je. 35). There was always the feeling that Israel was really meant to be something different. Nevertheless it is from the prophetic critique of the kings and institutions of this period (in both narrative and prophetic books) that we learn most in the OT concerning God’s radical demand on political authorities.

The influence of the model of Israel as an institutional royal state can probably be seen most comprehensively in the ‘Christendom’ idea, in the centuries during which Christians seem to have collectively considered that the best way to save the world was to run it. The Constantinian transformation of Christianity and its dubious effects have often been compared to Israel’s adoption of monarchy and statehood.16 (fn 16 Goldingay has some perceptive comparisons between the various stages of Israel’s development and the history of the Christian church, from its familial origins to its present ‘post-exilic’ (post-Enlightenment) tensions. See Theological Diversity, p. 83.)

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