Mr
Bill Federer and other idolaters of the American Nationalist Project love to
make comparisons between ancient Israel and the original 13 States, seeking by
such a belikening to impart an aura of divine choseness to ‘America’. Here he is quoting approvingly from Rev
Samuel Langdon of Harvard on that subject:
Instead of the twelve
tribes of ISRAEL, we may substitute the thirteen states of the American union,
and see this application plainly ...
The ISRAELITES may be
considered as a pattern to the world in all ages ... (of) government ... on
republican principles, required laws; without which it must have degenerated
immediately into ... absolute monarchy ...
Mr
Federer and his fellow-travellers are especially keen on emphasizing the
following assertion about ancient Israel’s political system to further bolster
their claim of America’s specialness:
ISRAEL was the first
well-recorded instance of an entire nation ruled without a king.
--Ibid.
Since
Israel had no king, America ought not to either. The rejection of monarchy by both is
supposedly a mark of divine blessing and great wisdom and advancement.
But
was Israel before her kings really a republic?
No, she was not. She did in fact have
a proto-monarchical government with Moses, Joshua, and the Judges as her
earthly head. Vladimir Moss elaborates:
On being
persecuted in England, the Puritans fled to America, where the
democratic
structure of their communities became the basis of the federal
structure of the
United States of America. They claimed that their theocratic
democratism
corresponded to the practice of the early Church, and especially
to the structure
of ancient Israel, with its distrust of all monarchical power.
For God had
allowed Samuel to anoint the first king, Saul, only on sufferance,
and the prophets
are full of denunciations of the evil deeds of the kings.
This claim was
supported by Lopukhin, who wrote: "On examining the
structure of the
Mosaic State, one is involuntarily struck by its similarity to the
organization of
the state structure in the United States of Northern America."
"The tribes
in their administrative independence correspond exactly to the
states, each of
which is a democratic republic." The Senate and Congress
"correspond
exactly to the two higher groups of representatives in the Mosaic
State - the 12
and 70 elders." "After settling in Palestine, the Israelites first
(in
the time of the
Judges) established a union republic, in which the
independence of
the separate tribes was carried through to the extent of
independent
states."29 In Lopukhin's opinion, the only real difference between
the Old Testament
State and the United States consisted in the latter's
possession of
presidential power.
However, the
Protestant attempts to base their democratic structures on
the Bible were
misguided. First, although ancient Israel was indeed a
theocracy, and
not a monarchy, as such it was an embryonic form, not of the
State, but of the
Church; for only the Church can be said to have God alone as
its Head. The
confusion between Church and State was possible in the case of
ancient Israel,
which represents a very early, embryonic and unrepeatable
stage in the
history of the people of God. But from the time of the Israelite
kings, through
the New Testament period and into modern times, the
difference, if
not always complete separation, between Church and State
(whether
Christian or non-Christian) is a fact that cannot be argued against.
Christ recognized
it - hence His famous words about giving to God what is
God's and to
Caesar what is Caesar's. Caesar was a king, and neither Christ
nor the Apostles
either deny or criticize that fact; for in essence they had
nothing to say
about the kingdoms of the world, as being in the hands of the
devil, "the
ruler of this world" (John 12.31) and "the god of this age" (II
Corinthians 4.4).
For all their instructions were directed towards the creation
of the Church,
the Kingdom which is not of this world and which follows
quite different
laws from those which obtain in this age.
Secondly, the
Church is any case not a democracy. It is a Kingdom, the
Kingdom of God on
earth; and even if we abstract God's Kingship from a
consideration of
its structure, the element of monarchical hierarchy is very
pronounced. For
just as the 12 and 70 elders of the Mosaic Church were not
elected by the
people, but were appointed by Moses, so the 12 and 70
Apostles of the
New Testament Church were not elected by the believers, but
were appointed by
Christ Himself. And even though the successors of the
Apostles, the
Bishops, are in principle chosen by election, it is not their
election which
makes them bishops, but their consecration by other bishops -
a function that
cannot be performed by laymen. Nor can a bishop be removed
except by other
bishops - and that not for any reasons, but only if it can be
proved that he
has broken the Law of God. Indeed, if one examines the
structure of the
Orthodox Church since apostolic times, it resembles the
federal structure
of the Presbyterians or United States only in not having a
single head on
earth; for each diocese is like a mini-kingdom, and each bishop
is like a king,
being a regent of the King of heaven. And this is God's
appointed order
for the Church in both the Old and New Testaments.
Nor do the
Biblical words about the royal priesthood of all Christians (I
Peter 2.9)
provide a sound basis for Protestant democratism. For, as Nikolai
Berdyaev writes:
"This [universal royal priesthood] by no means implies a
denial of the
significance of the hierarchical principle in history, as various
sectarians would
have it. One can come to the universal royal priesthood only
by the
hierarchical path of the Church. Indeed, the Kingdom of God itself is
hierarchical. And
the universal royal priesthood is not a denial of the
hierarchical
structure of existence."30
However, the
mistakenness of the Protestants' attempts to base their
democratic,
anti-hierarchical structures on the Bible does not mean that the
opposite
structure favoured by some Catholic and Protestant rulers - the
absolute monarchy
of, for example, Louis XIV of France - was any more
justified.
Absolute monarchy implies an independence of the Church, to the
extent of a
denial of her claims and even attempts to make her a department
of State, which
cannot be accepted by the Church. Whether the legitimacy of
the State is
considered to be the will of the people or the will of one man
("L'etat,
c'est moi," as Louis XIV said), in either the case the result is a
deification of
the State on the model of the ancient pagan monarchies that is
contrary to
Christianity. Thus when Hegel called the State "the divine idea on
earth", he
was reexpressing the Confucian conception of the State as the
reflection of the
impersonal heavenly order which rules the world and man.
For, as Alexeyev
writes, "for Confucius, as for Hegel, the State is 'the highest
form of objective
morality', than which there is nothing higher".31
The Church's
attitude towards State structures is neither democratic nor
absolutist, but
based on the following principles:-
1. The only
eternal and absolutely legitimate kingdom is the Kingdom of
God,
whose incarnation on earth is not the State, but the Church.
2. The nature of
the Church is unique and sui generis, being on the one
hand a Kingdom
whose King is Christ, and on the other an assembly of free
citizens
constituted by "the law of liberty" (James 1.25), in which everyone
is a
"royal
priest" who serves the King in liberty and love.
3. It is not the
task of earthly States to imitate the Church, which is
inimitable, but
to serve her by providing an external wall against the cruder,
external forms of
evil. The Bible does not exclude any state structure from
serving in this
role, provided it truly has the power to guard against evil,
which is why St.
Paul said, "there is no power which is not of God", while
making the
important qualification that real powers are those that "are not a
terror to good
works but to evil" (Romans 13.1,3). At the same time, there is
no doubt that,
historically speaking, the state structure which has best served
this function has
been the Orthodox autocracy. For autocracy does not seek
legitimacy from
the will of one man or the people as a whole, but rather from
God. And it does
not - in theory, at any rate - seek to subject the Church to
personal
or political ends, but rather places itself in subjection to the Church.
--Religion and Nationalism, pgs. 46-8, http://orthodoxchristianbooks.com/books/downloads.php?book_id=724
About
ancient Israel and monarchy, Dr Moss goes into more detail elsewhere:
The new,
God-pleasing kind of kingdom, which we have called autocracy,
would emerge
after a long process lasting hundreds of years. Its embryonic
beginning was
created under the leadership of Moses, of whom the Church
sings: “Thou, O
Moses, didst preserve the order of sacrifice precious to God,
and the kingdom
and the priesthood.”55 This embryonic state finally acquired
a
territorial base and stability under Kings Saul and David…
. . .
But there was no
democracy in the modern sense. Although every man in
Israel was equal
under the law of God, which was also the law of Israel, there
were no
elections, every attempt to rebel against Moses’ leadership was
fiercely punished
(Numbers 16), and there was no way in which the people
could alter the
law to suit themselves, which is surely the essence of
democracy in the
modern sense. Even when, at Jethro’s suggestion, lower level
magistrates and
leaders were appointed, they were appointed by Moses,
not
by any kind of popular vote (Deuteronomy 1).
. . .
Thus already in
the time of Moses we have the beginnings of a separation
between Church
and State, and of what the Byzantines called the "symphony"
between
the two powers, as represented by Moses and Aaron.
. . .
Nevertheless, it
was God’s plan that Israel should have a “delegated
theocracy”, a
king who would be in all things obedient to Himself. But the
fulfillment of
that plan would have to wait until the Israelites had
permanently
settled a land. For
"a king is an advantage to a land
with cultivated
fields"
(Ecclesiastes 5.8).
However, to
ensure that such a king would be a true autocrat, and not a
pagan-style
despot, the Lord laid down certain conditions to the people
through Moses:
“When thou shalt come unto the land which the Lord thy
God shall choose,
and shalt possess it, and shalt dwell therein, and shalt say,
‘I will set a
king over me, like as all the nations that are about me’, thou shalt
surely set a king
over thee whom the Lord thy God shall choose: one from
among thy
brethren shalt thou set king over thee: thou mayest not set a
stranger over
thee, which is not thy brother... And it shall be, when he sitteth
upon the throne
of his kingdom, that he shall write him a copy of this law in a
book out of that
which is before the priests, the Levites. And it shall be with
him, and he shall
read therein all the days of his life: that he may learn to fear
the Lord his God,
to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do
them: that his
heart be not lifted up above his brethren, and that he turn not
aside from the
commandment, to the right hand, or to the left: to the end that
he may prolong
his days in his kingdom, he, and his children, in the midst of
Israel” (Deuteronomy
17.14-15,18-20).
Thus God blessed
the institution of the monarchy, but stipulated three
conditions if His
blessing was to rest on it. First, the people must itself desire
to have a king
placed over it. Secondly, the king must be someone “whom the
Lord thy God
shall choose”; a true king is chosen by God, not by man. Such a
man will always
be a “brother”, that is a member of the People of God, of the
Church: if he is
not, then God has not chosen him. Thirdly, he will govern in
accordance with
the Law of God, which he will strive to fulfil in all its parts.
In the period
from Moses to Saul, the people were ruled by the Judges,
many of whom,
like Joshua, Jephtha and Gideon, were truly God-fearing,
charismatic
leaders. However, towards the end of the period, since “there was
no king in
Israel; everyone did what seemed right to him” (Judges 21.25), and
barbaric acts,
such as that which almost led to the extermination of the tribe of
Benjamin, are
recorded. In their desperation at the mounting anarchy, the
people called on
God through the Prophet Samuel to give them a king. God
fulfilled their
request, but since the people’s motivation in seeking a king was
not pure, He gave
them at first a king who brought them more harm than
good. For while
Saul was a mighty man of war and temporarily expanded the
frontiers of
Israel, he persecuted true piety, as represented by the future King
David and the
prophet Gad, and he disobeyed the Church, as represented by
the
Judge and Prophet Samuel and the high priests Abiathar and Ahimelech.
Some democrats
have argued that the Holy Scriptures do not approve of
kingship. This is
not true: kingship as such is never condemned in Holy
Scripture.
Rather, it is considered the norm of political leadership, as we see in
the following
passages: “Blessed are thou, O land, when thou hast a king from
a noble family”
(Ecclesiastes 10.17); "The heart of the king is in the hand of
God: He turns it
wherever He wills (Proverbs 21.1); "He sends kings upon
thrones, and
girds their loins with a girdle" (Job 12.18); "He appoints kings
and removes
them" (Daniel 2.21); "Thou, O king, art a king of kings, to whom
the God of heaven
has given a powerful and honourable and strong kingdom
in every place
where the children of men dwell" (Daniel 2.37-38); "Listen,
therefore, O
kings, and understand...; for your dominion was given you from
the Lord, and
your sovereignty from the Most High" (Wisdom 6.1,3).
The tragedy of
the story of the first Israelite king, Saul, did not consist in
the fact that the
Israelites sought a king for themselves - as we have seen, God
did not condemn
kingship as such. After all, the sacrament of kingly
anointing, which
was performed for the first time by the Prophet Samuel on
Saul, gave the
earthly king the grace to serve the Heavenly King as his true
Sovereign. The
tragedy consisted in the fact that the Israelites sought a king
"like [those
of] the other nations around" them (Deuteronomy 17.14), - in other
words, a
pagan-style king who would satisfy the people’s notions of kingship
rather than
God’s, - and that this desire amounted to apostasy in the eyes of
the
Lord, the only true King of Israel.
--The Mystery of Christian Power, pgs. 41, 43, 44, 47-8, http://orthodoxchristianbooks.com/books/downloads.php?book_id=739
It
is very unfortunate that the extreme individualism of many of the later
Protestant sects has led them to denounce kingship as they have; it is only
leading them back to the anarchy that afflicted ancient Israel in the time of
the Judges. May God grant them the
wisdom to repent.
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England,
South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð,
unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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