"Jesus is Lord": a public stand against sovereignty
Theocracy, eschatology, and the balanced constitution
When political theorists talk about sovereignty, they're not usually referring to a nation's right to defend itself against other nations. Instead, they're usually referring to the claim of one person, a few people, or many people to rule over everyone else.
When, for instance, Hannah Arendt says, "If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce," she manifestly refers to this latter definition of sovereignty, a person's or persons' claim to rule.1
Paul makes a similar renunciation of sovereignty to Arendt's in Romans 10:9, a central verse in many of the Chick tracts that, in my youth, I gave to people to save them. Consider the words "profess" and "Lord" in ". . . if you profess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved."2
I want to explore how much these two statements, one by a political theorist and one by that theorist's favorite apostle,3 might overlap. Is professing that Jesus is Lord a renunciation of other sovereigns? Does the salvation that Paul speaks of include the freedom that Arendt speaks of?
If the answer to both of these questions is yes, politics for Jesus's followers would become a lived experience. Someone professing that "Jesus is Lord," in other words, would forswear allegiance to any other sovereign and participate more fully in God's kingdom come to earth.
Both sides: sovereignty (by any other name) is on the ballot
According to many partisans, sovereignty—though they almost never use the term—is on America's ballot this year. Supporters of both major party presidential candidates seem to agree at least on one thing: the other side's candidate has attempted to politicize the U.S. Department of Justice to punish his political opponents. If the other side's candidate is elected, many partisans say, the U.S. Constitution's balance of powers will end, and the president will become a sovereign. The United States would no longer be a republic, a nation under law. Instead, a sovereign president's own will would, in effect, be the nation's law. Both sides, then, claim to renounce sovereignty.
The ancients: sovereignty leads to corruption and oppression
Before addressing Romans 10:9, it's worth going a bit more deeply into what sovereignty does to a polity.
The ancients believed that sovereignty could corrupt all kinds of governments. Plato, Aristotle, and the Greek historian Polybius categorized constitutions by who is sovereign—the one (e.g., a monarch), the few (e.g., an aristocracy), or the many (e.g., a democracy). Aristotle and Polybius believed that each of these three types of constitutions has a good variant and a bad variant. Both of these ancient Greeks believed, for instance, that a monarchy can devolve into a tyranny. In all cases, the movement from a constitution's good variant to its bad variant is due to the corruption inherent in sovereignty. Mogens Herman Hansen summarizes Aristotle's observations:
In the positive variant, government is in accordance with the laws and for the common good; in the negative variant the wielders of power are above the law, and power is exercised solely in the interest of the rulers.4
Because sovereignty by definition involves someone or some group ruling over others, sovereignty leads to the ruler's or rulers' disregard for the law when it's in their personal or class interest to disregard it.
While many Americans express alarm over what they perceive as the authoritarian threat of one presidential candidate or the other, many other Americans may have what seems like a practical response to these threats and to the ancients: what's the big deal if the rule of law has one exception? What's so bad about having one person (or a few or many people) above the law? Isn't that one exception a small price to pay for permitting a sovereign to get things done?
For the ancients, however, the ruler's disregard for the law wasn't the one "exception that proves the rule" of law. They seemed to agree with political theorist Francis Fukuyama’s equation of the rule of law with its lack of exceptions:
I define [the rule of law] as a set of rules of behavior, reflecting a broad consensus within the society, that is binding on even the most powerful political actors in the society, whether kings, presidents, or prime ministers.5
This lack of exceptions is important: the ancients believed that the ruler's status as being above the law invariably leads to oppression.
Jesus on sovereignty ("if you profess with your mouth")
Like the ancient Greeks, Jesus linked sovereignty to oppression when he rejected the notion of sovereignty in the kingdom of God:
“You know that the rulers of the Gentiles domineer over them, and those in high position exercise authority over them. It is not this way among you, but whoever wants to become prominent among you shall be your servant, and whoever desires to be first among you shall be your slave . . ."6
Of course, many Western Christians don't take Jesus’s political theory seriously. Our commonly accepted view of religion as being (at least ideally) apolitical tends to neuter Jesus's statements about sovereignty. Because we think Jesus came to start a new religion, we relegate Jesus's fierce rejection of sovereignty—slaves running the show!—to aspirational guidelines for "church government." But Jesus didn't contrast the kingdom of God's government with the Gentiles' temple management practices. He contrasted the kingdom of God's government with the Gentiles' sovereign governments.
Jesus saw himself not as a religious founder but as Israel's Messiah, a political as well as religious term meaning "king."7 Jesus spoke about this messianic kingdom in present as well as future terms.8 He expected his followers, after he went to be with the Father, to model the kingdom in communities that would provide alternative polities for those suffering under "the rulers of the Gentiles." Theologian Richard Horsley points out that Paul's churches constituted a "network of social-economic communities that embodied an alternative to the Roman imperial order in the cities of the eastern Roman empire."9
While speaking with such a community's prototype, Jesus tied his own lordship, and thus the kingdom of God, to this cornerstone of his political theory. Jesus's washing of others' feet echos his purest statement against sovereignty: "whoever wants to become prominent among you shall be your servant." Jesus spoke of his action in connection with his status as king:
“Do you know what I have done for you? You call Me 'Teacher' and ‘Lord’; and you are correct, for so I am. So if I, the Lord and the Teacher, washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet."10
According to John's Gospel, then, when we profess that Jesus is Lord, we renounce anyone else's sovereignty. The kingdom of heaven puts sovereignty out of the reach of anyone but Jesus because, through Jesus, as theologian N. T. Wright puts it, "Israel's God was indeed becoming king."11
Just as Jesus spoke and acted as if God is the earth's sole sovereign, so also we speak and act as if God, by resurrecting Jesus, has appointed Israel's Messiah as his heir and as the earth's sole sovereign:
And if we're children, we are also heirs: heirs of God, and fellow heirs with the Messiah, as long as we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.12
Jesus’s suffering on the cross came from his nonviolent modeling of God’s new age, an age of justice and inclusion. Jesus coupled this vision of public life with declarations of God’s sovereignty. By definition, human sovereigns assert a monopoly on public space, and living out an alternative to sovereignty can involve suffering.
The early church on sovereignty ("if you profess with your mouth")
Jesus's anti-sovereign position was also the early church's position. Paul professed the Lord Jesus everywhere he went. Paul and his friends weren't accused of turning "the world upside down" because some new religion was spreading. They were accused of it because their alternative communities demonstrated the sovereignty of Jesus as an implicit challenge to Caesar, as the text in Acts coining the "world upside down" phrase makes clear:
These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also; whom Jason hath received: and these all do contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, one Jesus.13
This accusation isn't Luke's idea of comic relief. The accusers of Paul's company had it right: Jesus's kingship isn't a political metaphor for a religious concept. Jesus's kingship is real, and it's a threat to every other sovereign.
But Paul never went after Caesar. Instead, he ignored him as best he could. Wright points out, though, that Paul clearly and implicitly criticized Caesar in two epistles.14 Three good reasons have been advanced (well, four if you count my own reason, the last one here) for why Paul's critique of Caesar is implicit instead of explicit. First, in asserting Jesus's sovereignty, Paul would not wish to dignify Caesar with a direct reference.15 Second, Paul, like other writers living in oppressive regimes, used what James C. Scott calls "hidden transcripts," indirect wording that might help to keep him out of trouble.16 Third, while Paul was critical of the Roman Empire, he was confident that his assemblies’ struggle with the powers that be was not supposed to be against the empire itself but against the dark forces operating through the empire.17 Fourth, Paul was modeling "anticipatory democracy," the strategy Solidarity learned to use under Poland's Communist regime to operate as a fully functioning polity without any direct critique of the regime.18
The Gospels, like Paul, generally don't confront Rome directly. While many theologians have recently discovered “hidden transcripts” critiquing the Roman Empire in the Gospels’ accounts,19 the Gospels mostly go about their business claiming that Jesus is king. But from an historical standpoint, the Gospels deliberately stole Caesar's thunder. The Gospels' terminology for Jesus showed up after Rome used the same terms about the various Caesars: “god Augustus, son of god, Caesar, emperor of the earth and sea, benefactor and savior of the entire world," to quote just one inscription.20 The Gospels put Caesar's and God's claims to sovereignty in implicit tension.
While the early church, like most Jews of the period, recognized that Caesar had a certain amount of authority from God, they phrased this acknowledgement in a way that would have insulted the Romans.21 Nero would have found Romans 13:1-7 objectionable because it claims that Rome's authority to rule, such as it is, comes from the Hebrew God. The Roman emperors believed that their sovereignty extended from their own gods and from their own status as gods. Paul's claim in Romans 13, by contrast, is much like Jesus's claim before Pilate: "“You would have no authority over Me at all, if it had not been given to you from above . . ."22
One sees parallels also between Jesus's claim before Pilate and Daniel's assertion of God's sovereignty before King Nebuchadnezzar preceding the king's madness and Daniel's same assertion before King Belchazzar immediately preceding that king's slaying.23 For his own purposes, God sometimes countenances earthly sovereigns, but he'll judge them in the end.
Jesus's crucifixion passes sentence on sovereignty ("and believe in your heart")
For Paul, though, that end is now. Timing is one major difference between Paul's position and the general, contemporaneous Jewish position on sovereignty. Wright summarizes how Jesus's crucifixion advances the Jewish timetable for judging human sovereigns:
Like other Jews, [Paul] believed that the one God would hold such authorities to account. Unlike most other Jews, he believed that this holding-to-account had already happened, and that Israel's Messiah was already installed as the true ruler of the world.24
Because of this advanced timeline, the early church treated Rome's claims to sovereignty as dangerous and irrelevant. Danger and irrelevance seem incongruous until one considers certain of Paul's claims and their contexts. Paul claimed, for instance, that Jesus on his cross "disarmed the rulers and authorities," figures that include, as Wright points out, Caesar and his agents along with the dark, spiritual forces behind them.25 Wright says that this verse "is framed within a larger discourse in which the new world has come to pass and the old one is to be regarded as irrelevant."26
However, Paul made that claim about Rome's irrelevance while chained in a Roman prison. Consequently, as Wright puts it, "Paul was in no danger of an over-realized eschatology, of imagining that the rulers and authorities had been rendered actually harmless."27 The Roman Empire remained quite dangerous.
Jesus's resurrection is God's declaration of Jesus’s sovereignty ("and believe in your heart")
This baffling image of Paul, writing in chains from Caesar's prison about how Jesus by means of his crucifixion disarmed Caesar and the dark forces supporting him, can best be explained by considering the political meanings of resurrection, of the messiah, and of Jesus's resurrection.
First, what does resurrection in general mean politically? The first-century Jews who believed in resurrection (the bodily return to earth of God's elect who had died) saw resurrection "as part of the larger package in which Israel's God would create a new state of affairs within the space-time world, bringing about justice and peace, overthrowing oppression and wickedness . . ."28
Second, what does messiah mean politically? Israel's messiah is a king (a lord), Wright says, "the focal point of [Israel's] long history, the one through whom Israel's God would at last deal with its exile and sin and bring about its longed-for redemption . . ."29
Third, what does Jesus's resurrection mean politically? Raising Jesus from the dead is God's way of professing that Jesus is Lord. Paul starts the book of Romans with what God professes by his raising Jesus from the dead: Jesus "was declared the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness by the resurrection from the dead."30 Wright points out that "the meaning of the resurrection must begin with the validation of Jesus as Messiah, as Paul says in Romans 1.4."31
What does Jesus's resurrection mean chronologically? Believing that God raised Israel's Messiah from the dead bifurcated the resurrection of the dead that many first-century Jews hoped for. The claim meant that the age to come had, in a real but incomplete sense, come. Followers of Jesus were to live in two ages at once—the "present evil age"32 and the age to come, Wright points out:
". . . the early Christians really did believe that they were living in the "age to come" for which Israel had longed, the time of forgiveness of sins, the gift of the Spirit, when the Gentiles would be brought in to worship the one God of Israel. The "present age" was still continuing, but the "age to come" had been inaugurated."33
Our belief that God raised Jesus from the dead is, among other things, our belief that God, having watched Jesus humble himself by accepting his death at the hands of an earthly sovereign, has now made Jesus the sole sovereign of heaven and earth.34 Because the age to come has come, we, like Paul from his jail cell, act in faith that Jesus is now the world's only legitimate sovereign.
The compromised church on sovereignty
This realized eschatology was lost, however, during the fourth century. Constantine and subsequent emperors, as earthly sovereigns, made the church their lapdog and helped to make the "lord" in "Lord Jesus" merely an honorific and a religious metaphor. By the end of the following century, Pope Gelasius I summarized a new understanding of sovereignty with Emporer Anastasius I:
Two are the things by which the world is chiefly ruled: the sacred authority of the Popes and the royal power.35
From the fourth century forward, church leaders no longer recognized their own “lord” Jesus as the earth's sole sovereign. Instead, the Pope and the emperor divided sovereignty between them, each ruling a specific "realm" of life without checks and balances. This power-sharing arrangement evolved into the "two swords" doctrine in the Middle Ages. With the Enlightenment, the "two swords" became the "two kingdoms" doctrine, "which separated the kingdom of religion/faith and the kingdom of the state," according to Wright.36 In modern times and consistent with that doctrine, we tend to relegate Jesus to being sovereign in heaven and to view our country's executive (if we like him or her) as something approaching our country's God-mandated sovereign on earth.
When, on Easter morning, we sing "Now above the sky He's king, Alleluia! / Where the angels ever sing, Alleluia!" we sing good news so incomplete as to be inaccurate. As a practical matter, these verses counter one major ramification of Jesus's resurrection: heaven has finally come to earth. Thanks to God raising Jesus from the dead, Jesus is king of both heaven and earth. Jesus didn't mince words about the extent of his sovereignty after he rose from the dead, telling his disciples that "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me."37 The old hymn's message of Jesus's sovereignty limited to "above the sky" leaves Rome's sovereignty—and every subsequent human assertion of sovereignty on earth—undisturbed.
If Paul had believed these lines from "Jesus Christ Is Risen Today," he could have saved himself a world of arrests, whippings, and imprisonments. But he wouldn't have done as much as he did to advance God's sovereignty on earth.
The predominant Western Christian perspective on sovereignty is, therefore, more Roman and imperial—more "Gentile," Jesus might have said—than Jewish or Christian.
"Theocracy" first denoted a government without sovereignty
To help the Roman sovereigns understand the Jewish perspective on sovereignty, Flavius Josephus coined the term "theocracy."
A few decades after Jesus's remarks against sovereignty, Josephus, a Jewish military commander taken prisoner by the Roman Empire, defected to the Roman side and wished to explain to them the Torah's system of government. In one of his twenty books about the Jewish people, Josephus used Rome's familiarity with sovereignty by the one, the few, and the many as his explanation’s starting point:
". . . some people have entrusted the supreme political power to monarchies, others to oligarchies, yet others to the masses. Our lawgiver [Moses], however, was attracted by none of these forms of polity, but gave to his constitution the form of what—if a forced expression be permitted—may be termed a "theocracy," placing all sovereignty and authority in the hands of God. To him he persuaded all to look, as the author of all blessings, both those which are common to all mankind, and those which they had won for themselves by prayer in the crises of their history."38
The word "theocracy," then, was coined not to designate a sovereign (and therefore oppressive) class of priests or other religious officials. Instead, "theocracy" was first used to describe a government balanced so that no person or group ruled over anyone else. "Theocracy" originally meant a constitution without human sovereignty.
Josephus's insertion of the Torah into the ancient debate about forms of sovereignty was "revolutionary," according to Harvard government professor Eric Nelson.39 During the Hebrew Revival of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Nelson says, Josephus's concept of "theocracy" helped many political theorists, starting with John Milton, argue that a republican form of government was the only form of government sanctioned by the Bible.40
“Theocracy,” though, doesn’t designate a particular form of government. Instead, it designates government without human sovereignty. Theocracy can serve as a guardrail for republics to stay on the road toward their ideal—a public world. This original sense of the word "theocracy" is what Jesus enjoined his disciples to adopt in their alternative communities.
Deuteronomy, the world's first balanced constitution, shuns sovereignty
In tutoring his Roman audience, Josephus described Deuteronomy as "the constitution that Moses left."41 In Deuteronomy, which Jewish studies professor and law professor Bernard M. Levinson suggests is the world's first balanced constitution,42 the king’s power is balanced against the powers of the judges, the priests, and the prophets.43 This balance among the three domains (ketarim), with the judges and kings sharing one of the three domains, would persist in various forms throughout the Bible's four constitutional epochs that political science professor Daniel J. Elazar outlines.44
In Deuteronomy, for instance, an Israelite king would serve under law. Levinson summarizes Deuteronomy's vision of monarchy:
After the introductory insistence that the king not be a foreigner, five prohibitions specify what the king should not do. The conception of the king in this unit serves far more to hamstring him than to permit the exercise of any meaningful authority whatsoever. In addition to his normal judicial role, other duties conventionally regarded as essential to the exercise of royal power are similarly either passed over in complete silence or severely truncated. In the end, there remains for the king but a single positive duty, to "read each day of his life"—while sitting demurely on his throne—from the very Torah scroll that daily circumscribes his powers.45
Elazar supports Lewinson's point: the Bible "clearly provides for the constitutional limitations on the king, who is never the sovereign."46
While this balance of powers among king, priests, prophets, and judges was at work at the regional and national level in ancient Israel, elders of clans experienced a daily public life in local counsels called the Gates of the City. At the clan and tribal level in what Elazar describes as townships, assemblies involving all males and sometimes all people also met as decisions arose or covenants were cut:
Final human authority for each tribe and clan was located in an assembly of all males for ordinary decisions and all—men, women, and children—for major constitutional decisions such as covenanting.47
This local political life carried on from the time of Moses receiving the law until Israel's exile.48 (Paul, of course, would later go further, involving women and slaves politically in his alternative communities.49)
In all, this federal (local and trans-local) pattern mixed with the balance of powers at the national level constituted an Israelite political tradition without sovereignty. Levinson summarizes the political theory of Deuteronomy:
. . . Deuteronomy presents a utopian model of community governance that anticipates the modern conception of a "constitution" in two interesting aspects: the separation of powers among distinct branches of government; and the rule of law over all political actors—including the monarch.50
Although the U.S. Constitution doesn't involve a large number of its people in daily politics as ancient Israel did, the U.S. Constitution does contain Deuteronomy's separation of powers and its rule of law over all political actors. The Constitution’s separation of powers comes from the French political theorist Montesquieu, who outlined it earlier in the eighteenth century in his influential Spirit of the Laws.51 However, the Constitution's strategy for avoiding sovereignty—like Montesquieu’s thought—is more like Deuteronomy's strategy than like Aristotles's plan to avoid sovereignty, which involved a mixed constitution of both oligarchic and democratic forms.52
The law and the prophets seek God's Holy Commonwealth
How was Deuteronomy's separation of powers and rule of law "utopian," as Levinson puts it? Most scholars believe Deuteronomy was written in the seventh century BCE53 as a way to curb any future abuses by Israel's prophets, priests, and kings, such as the abuses that Israel to that point had suffered.54 Some scholars place the creation of Deuteronomy in its final form even somewhat later, during Israel's exile.55 Having experienced the ill effects of sovereignty, Levinson says, the authors of Deuteronomy seek "to provide a blueprint for the transformation of society and to create a new polity . . ."56
In addition to Deuteronomy and its balance of powers, Elazar argues that the books of Joshua, Ezekiel, and Isaiah foresee "the restoration of the covenental polity in its full multi-tribal form." All of these accounts in the law and the prophets, Elazar says, "are federal and republican in character, with the federation of tribes at their base . . ." They all involve "the separation of the three ketarim." This vision of politics isn't one of benefitting a particular person or class. Instead, Elazar says,
Politics becomes a means for achieving and maintaining the Holy Commonwealth. God is sovereign and exercises his sovereignty more or less directly, mediated only through His servants who act as national leaders and the traditional institutions of the people.57
The Jewish messianic vision: all nations in covenantal relationships with only God as sovereign
God's sole sovereignty is a big part of this forward-looking politics. Political science professor Stuart A. Cohen emphasizes how Israel's political traditions, begun in the Hebrew Bible, further the Jewish desire to bring God's kingdom from heaven to earth:
Jewish political traditions . . . embody Judaism's commitment to the establishment of the perfect polity. As implemented through the process of covenant (brit), and as buttressed by the attribute of loving-kindness (hesed), political traditions in effect comprise the vehicles whereby the Congregation of Israel attempts to transpose the kingdom of heaven (malkhut shamayim — "the good commonwealth") to earth.58
For his part, Elazar explains how this messianic vision of the kingdom of heaven moves in Jewish thought not only from heaven to earth but also from Israel to all nations:
. . . the biblical vision for the "end of days"—the messianic era—sees not only a restoration of Israel's tribal system but what is, for all intents and purposes, a world confederation or league of nations, each preserving its own integrity while accepting a common Divine covenant and constitutional order. This order will establish appropriate covenantal relationships for the entire world.59
The Hebrew Bible's vision for the "end of days," like the New Testament's, is practical. What we do now matters. If we believe that Jesus rose from the dead, thereby ushering in the "end of days," then our sense of agency should be even more acute. And our rejection of human sovereignty, which by definition dominates public life, should be even more entire.
Salvation includes participation in God’s sovereignty ("you will be saved")
Biblical salvation involves our freedom in participating in God's present and coming kingdom. I like theologian Andy Johnson's definition of salvation:
Salvation means that humans, by being incorporated into Christ’s corporate body, forgiven, and conformed to the image of the cruciform, resurrected, truly Human One—Israel’s messianic king—are restored to their rightful missional place as God’s vice-regents, thereby sharing in/inheriting God’s reign over a renewed creation permeated with the life-giving Spirit and filled with God’s justice (δικαιοσύνη) and shalom (εἰρήνη).60
The Bible’s salvation is not about escaping to heaven. Biblical salvation is about participating in the new creation, starting in this life.
Political freedom and salvation ("you will be saved")
The Jewish messianic vision of political freedom at the local, national, and international level continually struggles to come to the surface in the Bible's pages against the forces of human sovereignty.61 The vision, perhaps, begins with Abraham and God's promise, through Abraham and Sarah's progeny, to bless all the earth's nations.
The vision continues in Exodus, Israel's great story of national salvation. In Exodus, God's salvation is political freedom: God saves his people from slavery in Egypt. The political aspect of salvation never leaves scripture, so that the political salvation in Exodus never becomes fully and merely a metaphor for a "spiritual" salvation in Jesus. In the age to come, our political freedom—our participation in Jesus's sovereignty—will lead to the freedom of all nations and all creation. Wright ties creation’s final salvation (completed ecological justice) described in Romans 8 to Jesus's sovereignty:
Creation will enjoy the freedom which comes when God’s children are glorified—in other words, the liberation which will result from the sovereign rule, under the overlordship of Jesus the Messiah, of all those who are given new, resurrection life by the Spirit.62
We are even "predestined" to this political salvation. Still focusing on Romans 8, Wright says as much: predestination is "the creator’s provision of image-bearing humans to bring to his creation order, justice, renewal and above all freedom from the slavery of decay."63
Paul's "you will be saved," then, includes Arendt's "if men wish to be free."
Order, justice, renewal, and freedom don't come from human sovereignty but from God's. Our work is not to look for political salvation in the guise of human sovereigns, whether as the one, the few, or the many. This freedom from human sovereignty is Peter's point of Acts 4:12:
"There is no salvation through anyone else; in all the world no other name has been granted to mankind by which we can be saved."64
If we insist on our concept of a religion-only Jesus, this verse either embarrasses us or supports our claims to have cornered the religious market. But Peter in Acts 4 isn't dismissing other religions but other other messiahs and sovereigns, including Rome, which promised as much salvation as any messiah.65
Peter calls us to accept God's salvation only through Israel's Messiah, who denied even his own sovereignty on earth so he could demonstrate God's sovereignty through acts of political faith. Our work is like Jesus's on earth: to deny the temptation of sovereignty—our own or others' sovereignty, as Jesus denied it when tempted in the wilderness66—so that we can participate in God's sovereignty now and in the rest of the age to come.
Photo by Daria Strategy on Unspash. The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.
Arendt, Between Past and Future, 163.
Romans 10:9, Wright, Kingdom New Testament, 327.
Arendt wrote about the political and philosophical ramifications of Paul’s thought. Arendt, Life of the Mind, Two/Willing, 63-73.
Mogens Herman Hansen, “The Mixed Constitution Versus the Separation of Powers: Monarchical and Aristocratic Aspects of Modern Democracy,” History of Political Thought 31, no. 3 (2010): 509–31, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26224146, 517.
Fukuyama, Francis. Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy. New York Times Bestseller. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, 23-24.
Matthew 20:25-27 NNAS.
Wright, N. T. “The Mission and Message of Jesus.” In The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, by Marcus J. Borg and N. T. Wright, 31–52. New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins, 2009, 49.
Wright, 37.
Horsley, You Shall Not Bow, 26.
John 13:13-14 NNAS.
Wright, 36-37.
Romans 8:17, Wright, Kingdom New Testament, 323.
Acts 17:6-7 KJV.
Colossians 2:14-15 and 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5. See Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness (Parts 3 & 4), 1284-85 and 1289-90.
Wright, 1291, 1310.
Scott, Domination and the Arts, 136-82.
Ephesians 6:12.
Ost, Solidarity, 67-70.
See, e.g., Carter, “Matthew and Empire”; Horsley, Jesus and Empire.
Porter, Stanley E. “Paul Confronts Caesar with the Good News.” In Empire in the New Testament, edited by Stanley E. Porter and Cynthia Long Westfall, 164–96. McMaster New Testament Studies Series 10. Eugene, Or: Pickwick Publications, 2011, 172.
N. T. Wright, “Letter to the Romans,” quoted in Keesmaat and Walsh, Romans Disarmed, 291.
John 19:11 NNAS.
Daniel 4 and 5.
Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness (Parts 3 & 4), 1283 (italics in the original).
Colossians 2:15 NNAS. On references to "rulers and authorities" constituting both people and spiritual forces, see gen. Wright, 1284-85.
Wright, 1284.
Wright, 1284.
Wright, N. T. “The Transforming Reality of the Bodily Resurrection.” In The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, by Marcus J. Borg and N. T. Wright, 111–27. New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins, 2009, 112.
Wright, N. T. “The Crux of Faith.” In The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, by Marcus J. Borg and N. T. Wright, 93–107. New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins, 2009, 107.
Romans 1:4 NNAS.
Wright, “Transforming Reality,” 125.
Galatians 1:4 NNAS.
Wright, 117.
Philippians 2:5-11.
Quoted in Arendt, Between Past and Future, 126.
Wright, N. T. How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels. 1st. ed. New York: HarperOne, 2012, 161.
Matthew 28:18 NNAS.
Quoted in Nelson, Hebrew Republic, 89-90.
Nelson, 89.
Nelson, 30, 37-46. Josephus also had written another statement, consistent with his notion of theocracy, that influenced the century-long debate between monarchy and republicanism: in demanding a king of the prophet Samuel (in 1 Samuel 8), Israel "deposed God from his kingly office." Nelson, 30.
Levinson, “First Constitution,” 1859.
Levinson, 1857-58.
Levinson, 1857.
Elazar, Covenant & Polity, 205-208, 356-58. See also Cohen, “Concept of the Three Ketarim.”
Levinson, 1881.
Elazar, 357.
Elazar, 349-50.
Elazar, 356.
See Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “The Praxis of Coequal Discipleship,” in Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society, ed. Richard A. Horsley (Harrisburg, Pa: Trinity Press International, 1997), 224–41.
Levinson, 1857.
Hansen, 512.
Hansen, 520.
Alter, Hebrew Bible, vol. 1, 609-610; Fox, Five Books of Moses, 843.
Levinson, 1859n18.
Levinson, 1885. See also 1885n147.
Levinson, 1885.
Elazar, 357-58.
Cohen, 27.
Elazar, '“Althusius' Grand Design,” xxxvii.
Johnson, “Past, Present, and Future,” 306.
See gen. Brueggemann, God, Neighbor, Empire.
Wright, N. T. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Nachdr. Vol. 3. Christian Origins and the Question of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008, 258.
Wright, 259.
Acts 4:12 REB.
Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness (Parts 3 & 4), 1295.
Matthew 4:8-11.