A Key Difference Between Biblical Subjects and Modern Citizens
Transcript
Rick Barry: In a recent video, I made the case that democracy is an extra-biblical concept. Egypt by the time of the biblical era, Babylon, Persia, Rome, after the second triumvirate, these were all essentially autocracies and monarchies. The authority, the identity, the agency of the state resided in or derived from, or was mediated by the head of state, the monarch.
Monarchs
Israel and Judah after the period of the judges and before the Babylonian conquest are described in the Bible as essentially theocratic monarchies, where the authority of the state was derived from the dominant religious structures while the agency of the state was mediated through the monarch.
And when we're talking about biblical era monarchs, we're talking about figures like Pharaoh, Saul, David, Solomon, Xerxes, Darius, Caesar.
The Monarch could generally issue domestic policy unilaterally by declaring what we would call a fiat. But they didn't do that very often, in part because they had to be careful to not give contradictory orders. And they didn't have to just worry about not contradicting themselves. They usually had to also worry about not even contradicting fiats from monarchs that came before them. This is a big driver of the plot of the book of Esther. Xerxes wants to do something that might contradict an earlier fiat. We also see this tension playing out later on in the book of Daniel.
Appointed Officials
So instead of operating by fiat, monarchs would usually just set the broad direction for domestic policy. They were usually more hands on with foreign policy and military policy, but for domestic policy, they'd set the broad direction and then hire this vast network of appointed officials who would have to take that broad direction and turn it into specific programs, and then have those programs get implemented by the appointed officials below them.
When it comes to these appointed officials, think about people like Joseph and Daniel and Nehemiah in the Old Testament, even Mordecai and Haman. And then in the New Testament, you've got people like the various council members and centurions and governors and tax collectors that pop in and out of the gospel stories and the book of Acts.
These people the Monarch hired would compete with each other for influence, and they would enter into this kind of back and forth dialogue with the monarch to try to get the monarch to give them the instructions that they themselves wanted to implement. I keep coming back to Daniel and Esther for examples here, because they're pitched as behind the scenes stories about how the king's palace operates. And in Esther, the plot is all about Mordecai and Esther trying to politically out-maneuver Haman, who's spending all of his time and energy and social capital trying to make sure that Xerxes keeps giving him the kinds of instructions he really wants to get.
The higher up an appointed official was the more closely the monarch could review their performance and the bigger the penalties for going off-script. That's why tax collectors in the New Testament had such a bad reputation. They were low enough on the totem pole that they could get away with taking a lot of liberties with their job descriptions. And it's why the stakes seemed to be so high for Haman and for Daniel. If the monarch didn't like what they had to say or what they did, they could be killed. In Daniel's case, literally fired.
Subjects
If you weren't a monarch and you weren't hired as an appointed official, then you were by default a subject. In some ways this was actually kind of easy. You didn't have to worry about staying informed or following issues or anything like that, but that wasn't really a huge consolation because the downside of being a subject was a lot of vulnerability.
Subjects needed a monarch and a critical mass of appointed officials who were both competent and benevolent at the same time, which was a real tough bunch of bulls eyes to hit all at once. If subjects didn't get that, then they were stuck. Things were gonna go really badly for them in ways that were just completely beyond their control.
We, The People
Compare that to the major relationships we can have to the government in the US today. Here, the authority, the identity, and the legitimacy of the state rests on we the people, government of the people, by the people for the people government by consent of the governed.
In this place today, those three things don't rest in the smallest part of the governmental org chart. They rest in the biggest one, which is an enormous reversal from how the biblical authors experienced government.
Citizens do, in the various American states, have the ability to issue domestic laws unilaterally. We have ballot measures, we have state and federal constitutional amendments. But we don't do that very often. Not because of any kind of logic trap that we put ourselves into, but because there's so many of us and we have such a well-developed political media ecosystem working to persuade us and organize us into camps and galvanize us on both sides of almost every issue that it's hard to get enough of us to agree on anything in large enough numbers to get one of those kinds of fiats passed.
Elected Officials
When it comes to domestic policy, the citizens set the broad direction and elected officials translate that broad direction into specific policies, and they do the day-to-day work of governance.
Those people we hire, those elected officials that we hire, are in a constant back and forth dialogue with us to get us to give them the broad direction that they want, just like the appointed officials and the monarchs in Babylon and Persia.
But unlike in the biblical eras, the people who shoulder the authority, identity, and legitimacy of the state are almost completely uninvolved in foreign policy.
Access to Government
And unlike in the biblical eras, the vast majority of people have access to government. We have an ability to speak into the process, and we have the freedom and agency to exercise direct influence over our neighborhoods that the biblical authors just did not have a framework for.
A public square like this, a government that distributes agency and responsibility like this, is not something that the biblical authors ever had to figure out how to navigate. To them, we're living on a 300 million person Pharaoh committee.
When (Not) In Rome…
And over and over again, I've seen well-meaning Christians try to figure out how to relate to government in the US by looking at the New Testament and just assuming the same posture toward our government that Jesus' followers seem to have had toward Rome. And at the risk of being hyperbolic, the results of doing that are always going to be a persecution complex. It's always going to be envisioning the government as something outside of ourselves and actively opposed to us, when the truth is closer to the idea that God has deliberately placed us in a country where the government proceeds from us. From us, and hundreds of millions of our neighbors. Here, the government is something we are implicated in, but not the sole custodians of.
This isn't the way our communications ecosystem encourages us to think, though. Our campaigns, our parties, our pundits and commentators and influencers, they usually try to get us to think of politics as an expression of identity, as a battle for the soul or for the identity of America. And then they try to get us to, for lack of a better word, to identify with their particular brand identity.
They try to encourage what Eitan Hersh describes as “political hobbyism,” engaging with politics to satisfy our own emotional needs, our need for validation, or our need for feelings of power and authority or a sense of security, or the feeling that we are right or good instead of seeking to influence our communities or countries for the common good or for the love of others.
Our challenge as Christians is going to be to take politics more seriously and more respectfully than the culture around us wants us to. To recognize that government and the life of the many have a deeper significance than just partisan competition or power dynamics.
None of us are perfect at this, but I think that together as a body, we can all get better at it.