From Shalom-Centered Polyarchy to Hegemonies of Coercive Autarchies and Back Again: Virtuous Communities of Governing Grace as Political Theory and History For God's People

Rev. Dr. Douglas Olds [5]

1 November 2024

An examination of governance, holiness, and relational wholeness as presented in both the Old and New Testaments.

 

Those who expect to reap the blessings of providence must most seriously consider the compunction of aligning with it, seeding and watering it, and being responsible to it in all things and for all people. This is the foundation of grace's deontological virtue of accountability to justice.

 

The Historical and Prophetic Books of the Old Testament narrate the implications of God’s chosen people to evade the choice and instead establish a kingdom based on their concepts of political power derived from outsider peoples—hegemons--they are meant and sent to witness to. As they do this, they leave aside the Torah model of governance, the representative qahal. That structure demonstrates that Israel’s original governance was intended to be participatory and established in moral and theological principles derived from the Shema’s (Deut. 6:4-9) metaphysical structure of human essence, reflecting the pattern of a just and equitable society.

In addition, these narratives detail how God tests the chosen people's resolve and commitment to that witness—first in the tabernacle, then in relation to their call for a monarch, and then associated with two temple establishments, the second designed by the hegemon. These people generationally turn to sacrifice their God-situated neighbors who had hitherto been collected into this holy expression of the expansionary and covenanted Logos and not a territorial hegemony. These excluded and marginalized are sacrificed and made expendable in the overweening pride and projects of hegemonic elites. Rather than gathering to deliberate how to expand the essence of inspirited humanity of all peoples, they fail even to include their own language group deposited with gift of holy expression. Absent any deliberated justification they fail to understand its Logos, they fail the most immediate test of aligning with the metaphysics of grace.

The New Testament reveals how God’s kingdom is established based on the universal Logos’ revelation of the heart’s necessary intentionality to sustain and repair estrangements actualized by forgiveness, love and golden rule deontological virtues. These serve and include others in providential resources destined for all (Matt. 5:45) without expectation of reciprocity or justifications from considerations of human acquisitive merit (e.g. wealth, purity, success at “soul winning”). Yet still political power exerts its transactional lure—its satanic temptation--to substitute this vision of the messianic NT mission by claiming determinism and the recurrence of historical forms. Anticipating these, religion resonates with and thrills to OT power dynamics where just the same old policies of hegemons are adapted BUT with pointing ritualistically to its God brings its understanding of its prospects for national success.[2] It allies with partisans to promulgate moral policies of transactionalism, proposing an errant metaphysics of self-interest that sacrifices those “unworthy” to that interest for the sake of some favored order or form rather than unmitigated and crafting caring for the whole. These partisan factions and their policies dispense with and ignore the prophets' awareness of the Kingdom’s operating feature: it’s mirroring of transgressive injustices by unredeemed human nature. Instead, they ever point fingers outward in accusation at those they deem by their continuing sin have removed God’s blessings from their nostalgic and favored social intents. Yet in Ezekiel’s new temple established by Christ, the testing and mirroring goes forward as generations come and go, and yet Christ is becoming all-in-all. The right side of that history in the new temple is teleological—repairing, sustaining and caring.[3]

The prophetic pursuit of Old Testament holiness was intended to guide ancient Israel’s withdrawal from participating and aligning with the prevailing principles of coercive and violent domination in surrounding pagan cultures. Yet rather than turning away from the idolatrous—soul deadening—patterns of neighboring monarchies (esp. the baleful patterns of Egyptian pharaohs), by the time of the prophet Samuel it instead pursued mimetic demand for an autarch as if Saul could, with God’s intervention, beat the enemy at its own coercive and violent program. 

Such followed by the precepts in the Law of the King (Deut 17:14–20 critically dated to the Josianic Reforms) that radically and unexpectedly—in its ANE context—limited the monarch’s autonomy and prerogative. These limitations fit the more general and derivative theme in the Hebrew Bible of Israel’s adaptation to vassalage (subordination of sovereignty to another monarchic power because of its sinful aspirations to formalism, hierarchy, domination, and sacrificial dispensation of the unfavored). Laying out its demerits, the prophet and judge Samuel decried the people’s demand for a king (1 Sam 8:4–20)[6]. Earlier, contextualized by Abimelech’s leading question to the people in Judg 9:2, Jotham’s tragic parable of the bramble king in Judges 9 clarifies that autocracy has less warrant for the Israelites than polyarchy.

The qahal (קָהָל) was Israel’s cultic—God-ordained and therefore morally (and theologically [Neh. 13:1]) concerned—collected assembly “of the people” (Jer 26:17; Ps 107:32; 89:6; Judg 20:2 etc.). Neither autocracy nor idealized democracy, polyarchy is any form of government in which ruling authority is invested in multiple representative agents. It is most optimal when operating under the principle of subsidiarity, with local councils instituted to keep deliberating power close to the people over whom they have purview, promoting accountability and access.  In its demotic kinesthetics hoping for a better, God-securitized and collectivized existence, representative democracy is far better at retaining wisdom inside generational transition than an autarchic strong man promoting agendas of wealth—i.e. fascism--at deliberating, modeling, and instituting new middles of consensus toward the realization of community shalom[4].

    Such wholeness participates in and is an expression of eternity and infinity so that diversity, openness, and pluralism must be primary and desired features in God’s Kingdom—where grace is spread and shared. So that representative democracy is the ideal, Holy Spirit-enabled arena for worthy governance. It reflects the Bible’s critique of monarchy, particularly in the tradition of the critique of kingship in Deuteronomic History (Ps 146:3). 

    Wholeness, holiness, and deliberative virtue is shaped in the spaciousness in time and space and consciousness of wonder that only activates tolerance. Wholeness is relational in its fullest human sense and representations. Hospitality of diversity celebrates the distinctives and particularities of God’s human creation, including of plebiscites. Racial identification and exclusion can never be wholly relational in this eternal sense of shalom.

    Policy enacted by professionals whose governing positions are situated and backed by moneyed interests ever results in disembodied representation—detached from the human virtues that foster obligation and adherence to the Golden Imperative. And detached from the experience of real human needs of a nation defined as those who share its ideals. Such policy-making instead  consistently chases after the objectives of its masters. It routinely fails to provide solutions to the root moral problems sweeping American society. 

    Inside anxiety’s lack of wholeness--its insecurity that demands a gun and a strong man protector--with its unresolved questions and social discontents lies the foundations of authoritarianism that promises to restore a favored order without the necessity of prior establishment of interior peace and the exterior-modeled virtues, especially of accountability to justice. However, by instilling the virtues from the initial ground of patience and courtesy that is tolerance, order of Golden Imperative outreach and invitation may result providentially and organically in shalom that dispels neurosis. Through mirrored virtue, we can assuage our neurotic neighbors, helping them live in an increasingly crowded and challenging society. Democracies, by assembling the gamut of citizen stakeholders, more. And the just order which follows, for:

Those who expect to reap the blessings of providence must most seriously consider the compunction of aligning with it, seeding and watering it, and being responsible to it in all things and for all people. This is the foundation of grace's deontological virtues--and most immediately and gravely of the virtue of accountability to justice.

There is NO excuse: no frustrated partisan may take up the cause of violence or lies to advance his program.

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[1] “Soothing Modernity’s Combative Anxiety: Recognizing Spirit and Enabling Neighbor in Culture and Politics”

[2] A pastor who carried a concealed gun under his robes on Sunday (and ever else) argued with me that having a gun AND God increased his security and success. He revealed himself a slave to anxiety (see below).

OT passages that emphasize the dangers and consequences of Israel’s desire for a king:

 1 Samuel 8:4-7: "Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah, and said to him, 'You are old and your sons do not follow in your ways; appoint for us, then, a king to govern us, like other nations.' But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, 'Give us a king to govern us.' Samuel prayed to the Lord, and the Lord said to Samuel, 'Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.'

 1 Samuel 8:10-18: "So Samuel reported all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. He said, 'These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots... He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers... He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers...'"

 Judges 9:7-15: "When it was told to Jotham, he went and stood on the top of Mount Gerizim and cried aloud and said to them, 'Listen to me, you lords of Shechem, so that God may listen to you. The trees once went out to anoint a king over themselves. So they said to the olive tree, "Reign over us."... But the bramble said to the trees, "If in good faith you are anointing me king over you, then come and take refuge in my shade; but if not, let fire come out of the bramble and devour the cedars of Lebanon."'

[3] The Prophet Ezekiel envisions the return of God’s accompanying presence (Parousia) not in a structure mediated by priests and rituals and furnishing but by the indwelling Spirit wherein a renewed holiness brings the virtues and message that ramifies hopefulness in all new generations for the realized eternities of unmitigated grace:

Ezekiel 40:1-4: "In the twenty-fifth year of our exile, at the beginning of the year, on the tenth day of the month, in the fourteenth year after the city was struck down, on that very day, the hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me there. He brought me, in visions of God, to the land of Israel, and set me down on a very high mountain, on which was a structure like a city to the south."

Ezekiel 43:1-5: "Then he brought me to the gate, the gate facing east. And there, the glory of the God of Israel was coming from the east; the sound was like the sound of mighty waters, and the earth shone with his glory... As the glory of the Lord entered the temple by the gate facing east, the spirit lifted me up and brought me into the inner court; and the glory of the Lord filled the temple."

Ezekiel 47:1-12: "Then he brought me back to the entrance of the temple; there, water was flowing from below the threshold of the temple toward the east... And wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish, once these waters reach there. It will become fresh; and everything will live where the river goes."

 [4] Passages that specify how the qahal was central to Israel’s communal worship and governance, reflecting a collective and inclusive pattern of governance rather than a hierarchical, autocratic structure:

Deuteronomy 9:10: "And the Lord gave me the two tablets of stone written with the finger of God; on them were all the words that the Lord had spoken to you at the mountain out of the fire on the day of the assembly."

Deuteronomy 31:30: "Then Moses recited the words of this song, to the very end, in the hearing of the whole assembly of Israel."

Judges 20:2: "The chiefs of all the people, of all the tribes of Israel, presented themselves in the assembly of the people of God, four hundred thousand foot soldiers bearing arms."

1 Kings 8:14: "Then the king turned around and blessed all the assembly of Israel, while all the assembly of Israel stood."

Jeremiah 26:17: "And some of the elders of the land arose and said to all the assembled people,"

Psalm 107:32: "Let them extol him in the congregation of the people, and praise him in the assembly of the elders."

[5] This essay is adapted from Chapter 5,“Soothing Modernity’s Combative Anxiety: Recognizing Spirit and Enabling Neighbor in Culture and Politics” of my book, Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care: Virtues as the Craft of Theology Beyond Strategic Biblicism.

[6]When God’s chosen holy people for witness beg God for a king like the other nations have, to which they are to witness, God  informs that such a king—by virtue of the position--will exploit and dominate them. They don’t understand what holy witness and choice entails. They want a king to preserve like the other nations (1 Samuel 8) when they had the God of the universe accompanying them, intimately.

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