Political Engagement as Biblical Mandate. Paul D. Hanson
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in the case of biblical paradigms arising from episodes in public realms such as the judicial system, business practices, and international policy, however, the David/Bathsheba story does not provide a proof-text that can be applied mechanically to any contemporary event. The contribution it makes is more subtle, for one must remember that the biblical narrative goes on to describe how God continued to use David for his purposes. On the other hand, the warning against mechanical proof-texting is not an invitation to use the ambiguities that are a part of the fabric of biblical narrative to dismiss the personal realm as of no political significance. In the personal as in the wider public domain, human actions carry consequences. And it is for that reason that the community of faith studies the Bible using all of the methods at its disposal as well as the collective wisdom of the ages as it searches for the balance between judgment and pastoral concern for its leaders in their moments of moral failure.
To summarize our discussion of the issue of biblical authority in relation to politics, we can draw the following thoughts from recent U.S. history: Those who have been most explicit in enlisting the Bible in public discourse have tended to incorporate a hermeneutic that is absolutist and theocratic in nature, with the Bible functioning as a source of warrants for positions against abortion and gay marriage and in defense of assertive American foreign policy and a traditional definition of sexuality. The more muted hermeneutic characteristic of much, though not all, of the Democratic Party revolves around a strict application of the First Amendment to minimize the use of religious language in political debate.
The question arising out of this dichotomy is a challenging one: Is there a more adequate hermeneutic, one that will be faithful to the biblical heritage while yet remaining sensitive to the legal and cultural norms of a society characterized by religious and philosophical diversity? Before turning to this question, we need to examine the realm of politics in the Bible to discern the manner in which faith was applied to social and economic issues by our spiritual ancestors.
Politics in the Bible
While every endeavor to direct modern questions to ancient writings runs the risk of producing anachronisms, the basic fact remains that ancient Israel and the early Christian communities struggled with political, economic, and social issues not dissimilar to ones faced today, in relation to which they sought to find answers under the guidance of their scriptural traditions. What is less obvious, or ignored, by many students of the Bible is this: In contrast to the dominant cultures around them, the ancient Israelites did not view the divine realm as the source of a timeless design of government that was transmitted in the form of a state myth to temple officials. Indeed, the founding events of the Israelite community revolved around the repudiation of the myth of the Pharaoh inspired by encounter with a God embracing the cause of peasants and slaves. As a running account of Israel’s relationship with the God who accompanied them and—when they allowed—directed them through the changing conditions of their historical existence, Israel’s sacred writings took the form of an epic, elaborated with laws, psalms, laments, and proverbs. This dynamic, historical perspective of the people of Israel accounts for there being not one timeless political model in the Bible, but six, arising each in turn as Israel sought to tease out the political implications of God’s rule for her national existence.
The first political model to emerge in Israel was theocratic in nature. It arose out of the question: How do we organize our life so as to reflect our origin in the act of a God who freed slaves and gave them a land and a future? In response to the continued efforts of Canaanite kings like Sisera to re-impose absolute monarchy upon them, they organized as a loose confederation of tribes and insisted that their only king was Yahweh. They expressed their cultic and political unity only in annual pilgrimages and in defensive battles, and even there the rallying point was Yahweh’s reign over them. They devised laws and economic structures that expressed the equality of all citizens under the one divine Ruler, laws forbidding usury and its tendency to lead to debt slavery, the levirate marriage custom that secured for the widow economic security, and a structure of land tenure that divided use of the land equally among extended families and acted as a counter force to the accumulation of property by the wealthy at the expense of the poor by insisting that there was only one legitimate title holder, the very God who allotted the land equally to the clans in the first place!
The theocratic phase of Israel’s history was remarkable in many ways. It introduced a new worldview in which the deity was viewed not as an absolute authority securing humans in a timeless social pyramid enforced by an earthly surrogate, the divine king or pharaoh, but as a guide present with humans in their earthly experiences. The nature of their God as liberator of slaves intensified the profound moral insight tracing back to Hammurabi and beyond, namely, the Chief Justice of the universe was the guardian and protector of the rights of the weak and vulnerable. This in turn set the standard upon which human governments were to be measured. The heart of God’s people was to be fashioned out of justice and compassion that extended memory of the past to her daily life in the present. Though its idealistic notion of there being only one even-handed Ruler, Yahweh, shattered in practice on the ledges of a turbulent world, it lived on in principles that would be upheld as the basis for judging all of the forms of government to follow, principles of evenhanded justice, equal distribution of wealth, and care for the poor and infirm. Of specific interest are two concepts, for though they were compromised in the course of subsequent biblical history almost beyond recognition by resurgent elitism and corruption, they continue to convict unjust governments to this day.
One is the concept of hlxn (nahialah), the division of the use of the land equally among the clans and the insistence that because God alone held title, those who accumulated land through exploitation of the common farmer were guilty of a crime against heaven! Given similarly communal notions of land usage in pre-colonial tribes and clans in the Americas, in Africa, and in Southeast Asia, it is wise to ponder what potential contributions a particular culture’s pre-modern history might contain for future reforms. It is interesting to observe, for example, the inspiration that the custom of open discourse in the pre-Christian tribal counsels of South Africa imparted to Nelson Mandela’s revolutionary concept of Truth and Reconciliation. When we come to the fourth biblical political model, the sapiential, we shall see how a biblically based politics can be open to such contributions from spheres beyond the traditional belief system.
The other concept worth noting from the period of ancient Israel’s theocracy is the Jubilee. Besides the forgiveness of debt and the release of slaves in the seventh year, in the fiftieth year observance of the Jubilee stipulated return of lost properties to their rightful owners as an essential part of the land’s being restored to its original divinely ordained state. We see the tenacity of that concept in the Jubilee 2000 debt relief movement promoted by British political economist Martin Dent and supported by the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, who later became England’s Prime Minister. For those grown cynical to the possibility of an ancient Scripture contributing towards the breaking of the chains of debt enslavement in the modern world, the Jubilee 2000 movement, though still having achieved only partial success, offers an opportunity to reflect and reconsider!
If ancient Israel had simply adopted the theocratic model in place of the monarchical one without simultaneously radically altering her understanding of the metaphysical basis for human government, the historical developments that made it impossible for the loose confederation of tribes to defend itself against the centralized government and professional armies of the Philistines would have erased Israel from the annals of history. But at this point a remarkable irony enters the picture: The second political model adopted by Israel was the all too familiar one of monarchy! The irony unfolds in the narrative of 1 Samuel.
The theocratically organized tribal league has come on hard times. The priesthood has fallen into disrepute through the moral turpitude of Eli’s sons, the office of judge has been tainted through the corruption of Samuel’s sons, and the military has suffered a stinging defeat resulting in the enemy capture of the central symbol of divine presence, the ark of the covenant. Out of these adversities arises the request of the elders: “Give us a king, that we may be like the other nations” (1 Samuel 8:5). Yahweh’s consent is not without an accompanying warning: Their king will conscript the young into his court and army, he will levy taxes to support the royal building projects, and finally the warning culminates with the blunt assertion, “you will be his slaves” (8:17).