The Rise and Fall of the English Christendom

Theocracy, Christology, Order and Power

Bruce Kaye

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351394185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

English Christendom has never been a static entity. Evangelism, politics, conflict and cultural changes have constantly and consistently developed it into myriad forms across the world. However, in recent times that development has seemingly become a general decline. This book utilises the motif of Christendom to illuminate the pedigree of Anglican Christianity, allowing a vital and persistent dynamic in Christianity, namely the relationship between the sacred and the mundane, to be more fundamentally explored.

Each chapter seeks to unpack a particular historical moment in which the relations of sacred and mundane are on display. Beginning with the work of Bede, before focusing on the Anglo Norman settlement of England, the Tudor period, and the establishment of the church in the American and Australian colonies, Anglicanism is shown to consistently be a religio-political tradition. This approach opens up a different set of categories for the study of contemporary Anglicanism and its debates about the notion of the church. It also opens up fresh ways of looking at religious conflict in the modern world and within Christianity.

This is a fresh exploration of a major facet of Western religious culture. As such, it will be of significant interest to scholars working in Religious History and Anglican Studies, as well as theologians with an interest in Western Ecclesiology.

Part I

Beginnings

1 Theocracy and christendom

The venture of a radical theocracy must therefore lead to the bursting-forth of the opposition latent in every people. Those, however, who in this fight represent the case for divine rulership against that of ‘history’, experience therein the first shudder of eschatology.

(Martin Buber)¹

Martin Buber published his book on Kingship of God in 1932 as Königtum Gottes when he was a professor in Frankfurt. He wrote out of the intense political context of the rise of the Nazis which a year later prompted him to flee Europe. It is a highly political work that takes the Hebrew Scriptures account of the life of Israel to highlight the ambiguities of the political life of a nation that claims God as its sovereign. It lays out the fundamental puzzle behind any notion of a theocracy as christians were to discover since the antecedents of Christianity lie in the history of Israel and specifically in their vocation as a people called by God to realise the presence of God in the human condition. That history is a tale of a theocracy, a direct rule by God over his chosen people. Jesus took up this theme in his preaching and the early christians expressed it in relation to his death and resurrection. The story of Israel was an experiment in a theocracy and a similar trajectory can be seen in the emerging experience of earliest Christianity. That early experiment has provided the continuing theme for the subsequent history of Christianity until the present time. It is the story of how christians and their communities, who belong to Jesus’s kingdom which is not of this world, live out their lives in relation to the powers of this world.

Experiments in theocracy

Israel – national covenant

The kingship of Jehovah can be seen in the initiation of the covenant with the tribes of Israel at Mt Sinai. In the initial conversation between God and Moses the historical reality of this kingdom is asserted in terms of past events and future promises. Moses is to tell the tribes, ‘you yourselves have seen what I did in Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation’ (Exodus 194–6). The laws of this kingdom were then enumerated and the covenant ceremonially enacted. Blood from sacrificed bulls was divided into two parts. Half was spread on an earth altar made to God. Moses then read the book of the covenant to which the people assented, and sprinkled the other half of the blood over the people.

The form of this story is striking. The ten commandments are given, followed by laws about how the community is to function: Hebrew servants not to be kept permanently, personal injuries, property, social obligations, justice and its application, and Sabbath and festival laws. These are the markers in this historical situation of the social shape of the invisible kingship of God. The substance of the covenant is also striking. On the one hand, God is to be the king of this people directly. All the people are party to the enactment of the covenant and God will rule directly. Thus, this kingship means that there is no intermediary in the rule of God for this people. Charismatic figures were chosen for a specific task and had the authority of God for that purpose. That authority cannot be passed on and thus cannot be inherited. Thus, the hereditary priestly dynasty cannot be part of the political leadership. This is what the direct theocracy will look like and so at the same time it means that ‘the real counterpart of direct theocracy is the hereditary kingship.’²

Martin Buber in a striking argument interpreted the book of Judges as an attempt to bring together a set of anti-monarchy stories in the first twelve chapters with what he saw as pro-monarchy stories in chapters 17–21. He drew two important conclusions about kingship in regard to the early section of Judges:

• The opposition between Israel and the neighbouring nations is understood as one between a theocratically intended judgeship and a kingship peculiar to the heathen.
• The primitive conception of Israel in the epoch between the occupation and the installation of a king is understood in its minimum of institutions of rule and in its complete lack of assurance of continuity as, so to speak, the negative of direct theocracy.³

While his analysis of the second half of the book requires some significant assumptions, the overall point of the argument is that Judges provides an early representation of Israel’s self-understanding as a covenant people. Buber locates this material in the context of the Samuel stories where the issue of kingship is confronted directly. What had preceded that confrontation was an experiment in religio-political understanding. ‘Something has been attempted – about which the first part reports; but it has failed – as the last part shows. This ‘something’ is that which I call the primitive theocracy.’⁴ This primitive theocracy failed because it did not provide the continuity called for in the ongoing conflict with the nations around. An endemic problem was also the inadequacy of some of those called to a task. Human frailty and political necessity meant that ‘without unified and superior earthly government, the people were not able to maintain order and civilisation.⁵

The crucial confrontation between the charismatically executed theocracy and a more enduring political institution in Israel occurs when Samuel is confronted by the elders of Israel over the judging of Samuel’s sons Joel and Abijah.

Samuel understood this request to be a rejection of God as the king of Israel and was affronted by it. However, in consultation with God he was told to ‘listen to their voice and set a king over them.’ The question was not whether to have God or a king, but rather by what form of practical operation would the theocracy work. The occasionality of Judges highlighted the fact that Israel was a theocracy. A monarchy did not. Samuel did not spare the Israelites as to the consequences of having a king. He described in detail the burdens that such a king would bring to them. The first king, Saul, ruled at the behest of the call of Jehovah. In that respect he could be thought of as a kind of adjunct to the prophet. That the king’s tenure was not certain is shown by the fact that when he ceased to obey God’s instructions as delivered through the prophet he was dismissed and another set in his place. However this new king, David, was given hereditary tenure and a covenant with his household was established. This covenant was to prove to be a most ambiguous arrangement for sustaining any sense of theocratic rule. It involved a significant revolution in the way the sacred and political power was to be seen in Israel. It also introduced a deep fault zone into the life of Israel which is reflected in the later prophets. As Buber puts it, ‘The venture of a radical theocracy must therefore lead to the bursting-forth of the opposition latent in every people. Those, however, who in this fight represent the case for divine rulership against that of ‘history’, experience therein the first shudder of eschatology.’⁶

In the end Jehovah destroyed the throne and the people were taken into bondage once again. It is not just that they were back where their ancestors in Egypt had been. It was worse. They knew that the experiment in permanent tenured representatives of Jehovah in a theocracy had failed. They had become like the nations around them and had paid the penalty. The question was whether as a nation they had come to the end of their historical and theocratic significance. Were they now just another set of tribes amongst the nations of the earth and their representation of Jehovah to those nations was by that fact eclipsed? Worse than that, had the failure of the ambition to institutionalise the shape of the mundane presence of the theocracy of Jehovah brought to an end the redemptive purpose of God that was being worked out through Israel? It seemed to be so even though there was a return to the promised land and a shadow of the former kingdom and its temple was accomplished.

The reality was, however, something different. Even through the various changes in theocratic modelling in the history of Israel, there had always been a sense in which Jehovah was not putting all his bets on each new domestication of his presence in the King of Israel. Prophets persisted, history was seen in a longer eschatological light, and a small number of faithful seemed always to be present. These were conflicting visions of the nature of Israel’s polity as a theocracy.

Jesus – universal grace

It is precisely this drama that is taken up in the introduction of Jesus’s life in the gospel accounts. Simeon, Elizabeth and Mary are amongst an almost invisible representation of the faithful members of the old theocracy who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem. Jesus makes the theocracy the keystone of his preaching. He recalls people to the Kingdom of God and he claims to represent it, though he describes it in a markedly Samuel-like fashion, indirectly and discreetly.

In the context of his mission Jesus relates the theocracy to suffering and death. He casts the theocracy in a different form, a different location and within a different framework of assumptions. In John’s gospel it becomes clear that the five great pillars of second Temple Judaism are to be fulfilled and thus transformed by Jesus. So the Temple, the nation, the land, the law and the covenant are all transmogrified into ‘Christ-like shape’. W. D. Davies put it this way: ‘In sum, for the holiness of place, Christianity has fundamentally, though not consistently, substituted the holiness of the Person: it has Christified holy space.’⁷ However, that shape has within it all the old familiar tensions of the Israelite theocracy and these emerge in the earliest generations of Jesus’s followers.

The point is well made in the central section of Mark’s gospel. Here Jesus had been established by his miracles and teaching as the uncanny and ambiguous representative of God. He does not claim that openly but rather it is a secret matter to be revealed only at the time of his crucifixion when the new expression of the theocracy can be seen. That different expression was revealed in embryo in Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi. Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, though Mark notes that Peter did not know what he was saying and Jesus glosses it with similar intent. Immediately the contrast, indeed the ultimate conflict, with the new expression of the theocracy emerges. It is a conflict between Satan and God as can be seen in Jesus’s rebuke to Peter (‘get behind me Satan’) on the mount of transfiguration when Peter wanted to make booths for them. Peter’s proposal would have the effect of making the supramundane theocracy mundane. However, the picture of the new theocracy, which is really a form of the old one, is drawn out in the teaching which Jesus is reported as giving to the disciples in this central passage of Mark. Three times he tells them he is going to die and furthermore that his death will not be the end of the matter as if it were a defeat for the theocracy. He will rise again to show the divine content of his crucifixion.

This suffering and dying manifestation of the theocracy is directly tied to the ever-present seeds of corruption that were found in the experience of Israel. Ambition for social prestige and distinction and power emerge in the group of disciples, a group that had been given the most direct teaching about the form of the theocracy. In terms redolent with the exchange between Samuel and the elders of Israel Jesus tells them, ‘You know that among the nations those whom they recognise as their rulers lord it over them and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be servant of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.’ [Mk10.42–45]

This is clearly a fundamental statement about the character of the theocracy that Jesus brings. Like Israel before it, the Christian church has had the utmost difficulty in coming to terms with it. This statement lies at the heart of the various contradictions that make up every form of christendom even from the earliest times when church institutions were only beginning to emerge.

The New Testament has been examined in fine detail for the appearance of church structures. In the late twen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I Beginnings
• PART II The Anglo-Norman Christendom
• PART III The Tudor Royal Supremacy
• PART IV The dying of the English Christendom
• PART V Responding to the end of christendom
• Bibliography
• Index