Third Quarter, 2003

What is there to rethink? Government is of the people, by the people, and for the people, right? Aristocrats and royalty may once have thought that God authorizes government, but that no longer makes sense to people living in democracies. God may rule some people's hearts--even the hearts of presidents and prime ministers--but the people rule the real political world today, don't they?

This perspective on political life may be shared by most Americans today, but it is not biblical. Humans certainly bear governmental responsibility, but Christianity requires a very different interpretation of politics and governmental authority than is allowed by the main stream of political thought in most western democracies today.

The conviction that government's calling needs to be reexamined from a Christian point of view is the reason why Craig Bartholomew, with encouragement from the British Bible Society, organized a conference of biblical and political scholars in Cheltenham, England in June of 2001. The product of that conference is the book, A Royal Priesthood? The Use of the Bible Ethically and Politically (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), edited by Bartholomew, Jonathan Chaplin, Robert Song, and Al Wolters.

A primary point of departure for both the conference and the book was an earlier book published by Oliver O'Donovan in 1996, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge University Press). O'Donovan was invited to respond to each of the conference presentations in 2001, and those responses are included along with the 15 essays published in A Royal Priesthood? The essays in this volume range from Old and New Testament studies of law, monarchy, war, wisdom, and eschatology to critical evaluations of modern liberalism, ethics, and political practice. Center for Public Justice president, James Skillen, is the author of the book's final essay, "Acting Politically in Biblical Obedience?" which represents a critical interaction with O'Donovan's interpretation of religious freedom, church and state, and Romans 12-13.

Jonathan Chaplin, professor of political thought at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, has a superb essay on O'Donovan's interpretation of political liberalism, which is essential reading for contemporary political scientists. Chaplin challenges O'Donovan's idea that government's calling comes only from God's providential and salvific intervention after the fall of humans into sinful disobedience. According to Chaplin, "Christ calls government to what it has always been called to--if indeed with renewed eschatological urgency...namely, the establishment of justice in the public realm of society .... I submit that this calling is not in itself occasioned by the presence of sin, but that it arises from the need for authoritative public determinations of the requirements of just interrelations, distributions or allocations inherent to any human community. The Creator's call to do justice precedes our sinful violations of it--indeed it defines them: without that call ringing in the ears of our conscience, without some intuitive sense of justice implanted in our created nature (however obscured or twisted by sin), we would not be able to recognize something as an injustice at all."

One of the best biblical studies in the book is by N.T. Wright, whose newest major work, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003; vol. 3 in Wright's series "Christian Origins and the Question of God") has just been published. Wright's essay, "Paul and Caesar: A New Reading of Romans," argues that Paul's address to the Romans is, in part, a challenge to the Caesar cult in which Caesar was worshipped as divine. On multiple levels, Paul is showing that the Kingdom of God of which Jesus Christ is the divine-human Lord will not allow Ceasar's pretentious claims to stand. Paul thus wants the Christians in Rome to see that their citizenship is not ultimately in Rome but in God's Kingdom ruled by Jesus Christ. Consequently, in response to the question, "Where are we?" Christians should respond, "We are in God's good creation--citizens now not of a particular country so much as of the world that God is going to make, where we shall share the rule of the Lord Jesus. We are living, as it were, in a house that is being rebuilt around us, though there is yet to come a final moment of rebuilding on a scale hitherto unimaginable. We are part of the Jewish movement designed by God to spread to the ends of the earth. Our location is defined not by Caesar's empire but by God's creation and covenant."

Knowing that we live in God's creation according to the terms of God's covenant leads to the recognition of divine sovereignty over all human governments. This is where the Bible's wisdom literature proves so important, as Batholomew shows in his essay on Proverbs in this volume.

A Royal Priesthood? is highly recommended for biblical scholars and those concerned to understand contemporary politics and government from a biblical point of view.