[Presented at the inaugural Political Philosophy and Religion Workshop at Notre Dame University.]
Abstract
In the Christian tradition, Christ is said to hold a “threefold office”: he is simultaneously priest, prophet, and king. While a considerable degree of scholarship attends to Christ’s role as priest—wherein he administers sacraments—and as prophet—wherein he teaches morality and interprets scripture—Christ’s kingly office receives insufficient attention. Perhaps deliberation on Christ’s political authority justifiably unsettles citizens of liberal democracies, who seek to insulate the public sphere from dogmatic intransigence, much less overt theocracy. Yet these concerns might be easily assuaged by considering Christ’s kingship as it is portrayed in John.
We begin not with the fourth gospel but with another text about political sovereignty it evokes: 1 Samuel 8. In that passage, the Israelites, tyrannized by neighboring empires, demand that their prophet Samuel appoint a king to rule Israel. Even as Samuel insists that monarchical rule would harm, rather than help, the Israelites, they remain unconvinced. Their desire for sovereignty—for the security and efficacy that can only be provided by an individual monarch—prevailed over their good senses. Ultimately, God tells Samuel to yield to their demand, even though the Israelites’ desire for a human king signifies their rejection of God’s heavenly rule. As this paper details, the Israelites’ desire for a human sovereign is portrayed not as mere imprudence but as a fundamental ethical and spiritual transgression. “Behold your king,” Samuel declares in 1 Sam 12:13 as he presents Saul to the Hebrews, before publicly bemoaning the evil of the Hebrews’ rejection of their God’s kingship a few verses later. Indeed, the language of the narrative suggests the Israelites’ demand constitutes a communal corollary to the fall in Genesis 3. It is irreversible. There is no way for the Hebrews to atone for the “great evil” of their demand for a king, or to return to a pre-monarchical community. After their subjection to kingship during Samuel’s tenure as prophet, the Hebrews are unable to extricate themselves from the mire of successive human rulers. Thereafter, resisting one sovereign almost always entails subjection to another.
Yet, in John 18-19, the passage in which Jesus faces Pilate, John actually portrays Jesus as the subject of a narrative that parallels very closely a Roman coronation ceremony. Thus, we are there able to see God Himself ascend to the throne, finally taking His rightful place as the king of His people: a vision of the psalmist realized. “The Lord is king; let the peoples tremble!” (Ps. 99:1) Moreover, in Jesus God does this all in the flesh. Pilate himself repeats the words of Samuel from centuries before—in the exact same words in the Greek as in the Septuagint rendering of 1 Samuel 12—“Behold your king.” Christ’s enthronement thus does not only represent the anticipated ascendancy of God over the entire world, but also the redemption of human sovereignty. Christ’s coronation as king properly fulfills the Hebrews’ desire for kingship even as it exceeds all earthly kingdoms.
What does Christ’s redemption on the cross of human sovereignty mean for politics today? John’s gospel is, as always, ambiguous, and merits further reflection and discussion. Yet I venture two preliminary proposals. First, Christ models a model of leadership—servant-kingship—that suggests that the human exercise of power must begin with an acknowledgment of its limitations and the virtuous ends toward which it ought to be ordered. Second, insofar as Christ continues, today, to sit on his cosmic throne, all human sovereigns must recognize that their power is derivative and obtains only insofar as they remain obedient to Christ. I want to suggest that a certain theological commitment to theocracy, in which we acknowledge that God alone is king, necessitates that the human exercise of power always be limited. Finally, I argue that both of these proposals are amenable to liberal political commitments, even if they appear at first blush to be much too religiously inflected to be so.