The Politics of Transcendence: the "Miracle of Law"

Have you ever wondered where law comes from? Law truly is a miracle.

64. The Politics of Transcendence: the "Miracle of Law"

There is much talk these days about the Christian renewal of society, of a politics of transcendence, or the cultivation of virtue among the people. But what is meant by this? What should be meant by this? In our western context this notion of a Christian society can mean wildly different things to different people. I am not even thinking really about the hysterical “handmaid’s tale” scenarios which come from the left, but rather, what do well meaning and well intentioned people acting in good faith understand in regards to virtue and faith playing an important role in shaping the public life of our society? How should we be thinking about this?

This question was raised for me recently in listening to the

Auron MacIntyre

interview of John Burtka IV, the president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the author of a recent piece in American Mind titled “American Statesman”, raising the issue of “A Politics of Transcendence.” I read the piece and listened to the interview somewhat expectantly — as my readers know, this is a topic close to my heart — but came away from it disappointed. It did raise a number of questions for me and got my wheels turning. What is meant by a “politics of transcendence?” What should be meant by this? This is an issue when it comes to the public expressions of civil religion. How should our public polity be shaped by faith, specifically the Christian faith?

It is not as easy a question to answer as one might think. Much of how you frame this answer publicly and politically will flow out of how you understand our relationship with God privately. How do we interact with God? How do we receive divine guidance? How do we apply this to our lives both personally and politically? There are some deep, divisive theological questions at play here as well. If we as Christians desire a more robust presence in the common public life of the nation as Christians, we would be well served to be thinking about these issues even if we don’t necessarily have all of the answers to these questions.

Burtka is a self-professed Christian who seems unafraid to be identified as a Christian doing politics in the public realm. But when he talked about a “transcendent” politics, the picture he painted was one of a statesmen who “transcends” the ordinary daily muck of politics to pursue loftier goals which could unite the people across political lines, giving them a vision which, again, “transcends” the concerns of the parties. This is not a bad thing to want. But it is a very different thing from what I was expecting when tuning in to hear about a “transcendent” vision for politics. My expectation was that we would try to address the question of how God — the God we as Christians worship and profess to be the living God, the God of gods, the Saviour of the world — should shape the public, civic, common life of a people. It occurred to me that we need to address this notion of “the transcendent,” because how we answer this question greatly shapes how we understand what public politics should be in a post-western, post-liberal, political landscape.

Without giving too lengthy an intellectual history lesson, we do need to sketch out for ourselves some of the changes that have occurred in this notion of “the transcendent” over time in the west. As our history moved out of the pagan era and into the Christian, there was a shift away from a cyclical view of the move of time. In this earlier, pre-Christian understanding, “the gods” were generally much more immediate and their presence was intertwined with a symbolic understanding of the world. This is the world of archetypes and the Forms. There is a real structure in the world around us saturated with meaning. This meaning reveals itself through signs and omens. It shows itself through encounters with the supernatural. And this meaning is unfolded for us in stories and songs, which themselves open up this deeper symbolic world. The world could be read in part because the stories and symbols would repeat themselves. You became who you were by living into the stories and submitting yourselves to the signs, omens and spirits. Today, we look at this relationship with the world as superstitious. Up until the emergence of modernity, this was quite normal, even for Christians.

Overlaid on top of this was the Christian understanding of time. It is often said that the Bible gave us a linear view of time and history. This is both true and not true. Properly conceived, the Christian way of thinking about “history” is that of a static superstructure within which the events of the world unfold. There is a beginning, the creation and the fall into sin. Then God sends his Son as Saviour. Finally, the Saviour will return and bring about the end of God’s plan for his creation, ushering in the emergence of a new heaven and a new earth. The decisive thing to understand in this is that human beings are not the primary actors. That role belongs to God. God brings us along in his story and we are involved in it, but we are not the primary figure. Christ is at the centre of history. Knowledge of God’s action and plan in Christ gives us consolation in a sinful world. It is not up to us to save the world from its problems. They are endured. The problem of sin belongs to God. We must have faith that he will return and make all things right again. In the mean time we do the best we can and we focus on our hope of the return of Christ.

During the Renaissance, a shift occurred. I have heard it argued, the source now a distant memory unfortunately, that the unfulfilled millenarian expectations that Christ would come again in the year 1000, created a kind mass psychic break, one that might have been instrumental in giving birth to many of the changes which came about because of the rise of Western culture beginning in this period. We many never fully know. But what we do know is that during the Renaissance a new idea emerged, that of “humanism,” which asserted man as the primary actor in human events. God was there, but increasingly it was seen that God’s plans would happen because human beings took it upon themselves to make them happen. Thus, our actions as human beings would hasten the arrival of Christ, or better still, would establish heaven here on earth. This transformation took hundreds of years to take shape, but humanism gives birth eventually to modern ideological utopianism.

With this transformation comes two major shifts important to us for our purposes here in this piece. The first change was the gradual break from the world of the Forms and from metaphysics which began more or less with William of Ockham and was more or less completed with Kant. This was the shift from “realism” to “nominalism.” On the one side of the divide, the world around us is filled with meaning and structure in which we participated. The world was rich with archetypes, symbols, stories, morality and more. The world gave you meaning. The world gave you your place in society, your role in the hierarchy of being, and you found fulfillment in fitting yourself into the role you were given.

With nominalism, that relationship was severed. The problem with relating to the world of Forms, symbols, archetypes, stories and even the embedded wisdom of God in creation is that it was all very squishy and intuitive. You felt things. You saw things. You trusted it, but it wasn’t easily rationalized. What the philosophy of nominalism ended up arguing is that this connection you feel with the world around you and all the symbols and meaning that you see there may or may not be real, but there is no way to prove it rationally, or, as we would say today, scientifically. It cannot be observed. It cannot be measured. It cannot even be argued rationally from propositions, in terms of abstract theory. You just assert that this is what is there a priori. What this means functionally is that it is not the world which gives us meaning, it is we who give the world meaning. This gives rise to the materialist understanding of the world as mere dead matter. If it has no inherent meaning, how can it be anything else? Also, it spells the end of any idea of natural law. The language of natural law held on for a long time, but in a nominalist world, there can be no such thing as a “self-evident” truth.

Mircea Eliade argued that this transformation has placed a tremendous weight upon us. By putting ourselves at the centre of events in the flow of linear time, making ourselves the primary actors in history, as well as making us the only meaning givers, what he calls “the burden of history” falls upon us. On the surface this would seem tremendously liberating. We can be whatever we want to be, if we have the courage and the will to make it happen. We can shape the world and give it meaning. We are the “superman.” But at the same time, we might wish to ask, other than a handful of great men, are we up to the task? Now it is up to us to “find ourselves.” What if you can’t find meaning for your life or the world around you? Will despair set in? What if the world really is dead and lifeless and you can see no meaning in it? Well, you might as well indulge yourself in pleasures, particularly those of the flesh. Why not mutilate your body in the quest to give yourself an identity?

Concurrent with this transformation is another in terms of how we conceive of the work of God. If the ties to the metaphysical and the archetypal have been severed and the world really is empty of meaning other than that which we give it, would it not make sense that God works through us to realize his plans for the world? There is a shift from us being the witnesses and ambassadors to and for the work of God, where we, as Jesus says in John 5:19, watch what the Father is doing and we join him in his work, to one in which we as human beings are the means through which God’s kingdom is established. Just as with nominalism, with this new understanding of history with man at its centre as the primary actor, we are the ones who make the Kingdom of God happen. The term for this is “immanentism.” We claim God’s nearness, that he is working through the mechanism of history, but in practice we become the primary actors making history, and thus we make the kingdom of God happen. In this sense, God is always on the right side of history. It makes the gospel amenable to the notion of “human progress.” Thus, the coming of the Kingdom of God is identical with the unfolding of history and the move of human progress. The history of the West is thus conceived of as the unfolding of the history of salvation.

You might think that this idea of the immanence of God would engender a sense of nearness to God. But in reality, what we see is that the opposite happens. God becomes increasingly remote, looked upon more like a force. There would be talking about “Providence” or “The World Spirit” but in practice the real presence of God in people’s lives became increasingly abstract. God was still there and believed in by many, but increasingly with the rise of scientific and historical thinking, he was seen as more remote. God is the great watchmaker who builds the watch and sets everything in motion, but then steps back to let us do our thing as human beings as the drivers of history. Occasionally, he intervenes and miracles happen. But, for the most part, God leaves us to it. Deism is the formal name of this way of thinking and interacting with God. For the most part, most of us are practical Deists or even practical materialists. God is there, but does not involve himself in the day-to-day of our lives. Our relation to him is entirely abstract. God is concept rather than a real Being who is encountered all around you. He is perhaps a force which we see at work in human progress. In a sense, God is present to us when we align ourselves with and work towards human progress. We are the vehicle by which God’s presence is revealed in the world.

What does all of this have to do with a politics of transcendence? A lot actually. If God is receding from the lives of people and is increasingly looked upon as a force that is operative in history, how do we connect and relate with God? How do we know what God wants us to do? As we discussed, in the pre-modern, pre-renaissance understanding of our interactions with God, we remember, the world was generally understood as a place saturated with meaning. We met God in signs, symbols, archetypes and theophanies. Even when the word of God was recorded, the old stories, laws, poetry, prophecies and so forth the brimmed with meaning for them similar to the way in which they experienced the world. The scriptures were one form of revelation. An important form, perhaps the most important form, but not the only form. They lived with the expectation that God would speak to them through the seers, the prophets and the other men of wisdom. They also took seriously the promises of the prophet Joel:

“I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
your old men will dream dreams,
your young men will see visions.”

As well as the words of Jesus:

 ^“But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will receive from me what he will make known to you.”

There was this expectation that God would speak. And they read the scriptures in the same way. They saw the historical meaning of the text as the lowest form of interpretation. The idea that you would try to sort out the historical context, the language and idioms and so forth was merely the beginning of interpreting the scriptures. To this they would add the moral meaning of the text, what we might call the process of applying the text to today. Additionally, they also added the spiritual interpretation, which was typological, allegorical and mystical. And then on top of this they also added the anagogical interpretation, which was how each text applied prophetically to end times. This seems strange to us, but in the debate over whether to include the Song of Songs among the scriptures, it was only on the basis of its mystical interpretation that it was added to the scriptures. Looked at historically, it was seen as a “profane” book. But if seen spiritually as a love metaphor for Christ and the church, attaining its proper spiritual understanding, it was deemed worthy for edification as the word of God.

Understanding this matters because we relate to all these issues from this side of modernity. Prior to modernity, the scriptures were part of a living web of signs, symbols and experiences. It was very much a both/and kind of thing. God would speak through the scriptures. He would also be giving signs that could be read. He was also speaking through authorities like priests and the church. For many, if not most, they did not read the words of scripture. They listened to these words in readings during the liturgy of the Mass. Their relation to the word of God was aural. It was part of a continuum of meaning that was present to them in the clergy and the hierarchy, the rituals and sacraments, the churches themselves, as well as the broader world around them: rich with signs, symbols and meanings.

This became a problem in the lead up to, during and after the Reformation. The church, its hierarchy and priests became deeply corrupt. Many priests were functionally illiterate themselves, knowing just enough Latin to recite the liturgy by rote memory, often not even knowing the meaning of what they were doing. Simony, the selling of church offices, was rampant. The selling of indulgences, buying salvation for yourself and your dead loved ones — if not outright salvation, then a shorter stay in Purgatory — was prevalent. The bishops, archbishops and popes were often as much if not more political players than they were men of God. Pressure grew for reform, and it came. And when it came, it brought about sweeping changes in how the faith was understood. There were positives. There were also negative effects as well.

The Reformation was made possible by the Renaissance and the new forms of learning it offered. It built on the foundation laid by the Scholastics, even when reacting against them. It was fueled by the discovery of old manuscripts. Men of the merchant classes were learning Greek and Latin, some even Hebrew. They were reading Aristotle and Greek classics. All of this was aided by the introduction of the printing press which made available not just the scriptures, but a whole range of other writings to a much wider audience. The printing press also allowed the easy dissemination of dissenting viewpoints. This was more than just an information revolution, the first “mass media.” It was also bringing about a fundamental change in the way people thought. Thinking was no longer aural, grounded in memory, sight and the felt structures of the metaphysical world all around us; rather, the way we thought was becoming increasingly influenced by text. Linear. Rational. Abstract. Language based, as opposed to that which is seen or felt. Less intuitive, more reasoned and more scientific.

It was only natural for the Reformation to lean into these changes. It emphasized the written word, specifically that of scripture over other aspects of the faith. With that focus on the written word, came an parallel reliance on reason and discursive truth claims. The scriptures, the Word of God, was elevated as the primary means through which the truth of the gospel was conveyed. What was rejected was the authority of church to stand alongside the interpretation of the Bible. Each man could encounter the scriptures for themselves. All you needed was the Bible. Gone also was the imagistic in churches. Art, symbols, pictures. Not needed. We had the Word. Pictures and symbols lead to idolatry. So too the teachings on the prayers of the saints offered on behalf of the church. This too was deemed idolatrous. With this came a new emphasis on the Bible, on preaching the content of the gospel, and even on general literacy. People had to be taught to read if they were to read the Bible. Calvin in Geneva was an early advocate of universal schooling for this reason.

But this emphasis on the written word, the linearity of writing, its abstract nature — In that ideas no longer had to be held largely in collective memory because they could be easily put to paper, and disseminated, existing apart from one’s self meant that the way people thought about the world began to change as well, aligning itself to this new reality. In regards to the understanding of scripture, this begins the rise of the hermeneutical problem: that is, how meaning is transferred from the text of scripture to the present day reader. There grew much greater emphasis on historical research, textual research, linguistics, social research, formal studies and so forth. The Word of God would be examined “scientifically.” In keeping with the spirit of the new rationalism that was ascendant, there was an emphasis on uncovering the true meaning of the scriptures. Debates ensued over interpretations. Rational arguments were made. The ideas of scripture were abstracted and systematized. With this, the allegorical, mystical and anagogical interpretation of scripture has largely disappeared. We generally approach a text with the notion that we are reading it in order to determine the abstract, universal meaning of a text that can be formulated into a declarative statement which can then be transported to any and every situation and applied to the lives of people in new situations.

This change in how the Bible was being read was part of a broader embrace of rationalism across society. It was marvelously productive in the areas of academic and scientific research, as well as the development of technology. But as it changed our thinking, it also changed our relationship to intuitive forms of knowing. And the diminishment of this form of knowing led to a change in our relationship with God, the metaphysical, the symbolic, the archetypal, the spiritual and the supernatural. In the Christian west during much of the time period where these changes were happening few would have denied the biblical account. Few in this time stopped believing in God. But during this era our relationship with God changed. This is something which has been documented and discussed by thinkers such as Walter Ong in his book, “Orality and Literacy”; Julian Jaynes in “The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”; and Iain McGilchrist in “The Master and His Emissary: the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.” Each in his own way documents fundamental changes to the way we think about the world and the way we interact with the unseen world merely because of something which we take for granted today: the broad application of reading and the influence of the written word.

The gradual trend from the Late Medieval worldview through the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment then is one in which God, while present in language and ideas, becomes less present to the people in their day-to-day lives. If Jaynes, McGilchrist, and a lesser degree Ong, are to be taken seriously, and I think we should, we might actually be biologically less capable of interacting with God and the unseen spiritual and metaphysical world than people were back before these changes took place. In this sense, changes in theology which document the withdrawal of God such that he becomes the “Watchmaker God” make sense.

I would argue that we should see the rise of the first round of Scholasticism, followed by Protestant Scholasticism and then the great period of systematic theology as a working out of this shift in the faith from aural culture to a written, rational culture. As people became focused on words, especially the words within the Bible, their rational meaning, the systematization of the ideas contained within the scriptures and this focus on the Bible as the primary, and in some quarters, the only way in which God communicates to us, we see a change that mirrors what was happening in society during the rise of the merchant class. Systematic theology is in many ways an analog to the growth of managerialism in society. Systematic theology is not unlike the policy manual, but for Christian teaching. It strives to become a closed system of rationality based on the text of scripture and the reasoning of men, an attempt to encompass the fullness of Christian teaching. It brings technical, scientific ways of thinking applying them to the Christian faith.

With that in mind, I bring up Heidegger’s notion of “enframing” in regards to the technical. Ellul also discusses the effect of machine use on our relationship to what is real. With each layer of abstraction, as the techniques become more sophisticated and the results more abstracted, we increasingly get cut off from reality. You see this more easily with machines. You start with a simple set of tools in which a craftsman is decisive in making things. As machines are introduced, eventually a worker is feeding and removing materials from a machine. At the next stage, he is merely an operator sitting in a room, interfacing with the materials through a set of control panels. His relationship with the material is entirely abstract. I would argue that a similar change has happened in our relationship with God from the time of the Renaissance to now. We as Christians are not unlike the machine operators. We have become enframed in a rationalist approach to the faith, in large part because of our almost exclusive focus on the Biblical text the primary locus of God’s interaction with us.

In a parallel move, a similar thing happens with the created world. The rise of the scientific mindset, focusing on what can be observed, measured, tested and conveyed rationally, often through the use of mathematics, has resulted in a similar stunting of our ability to intuit the symbolic, the metaphysical and the spiritual. We are enframed by scientific rationality. You can see this change manifesting itself religiously in a document like the Belgic Confession which was written in 1567. In article 2 we are told that we come to know God through two ways, the first is through creation itself. But our relationship with the creation is not that of the “superstitious” person who is looking for symbols, signs and intuiting the metaphysical world of the Forms. No, it is a more rational understanding in which the creation is read “like a beautiful book” and all the things we see in creation are “as letters” that make us ponder the invisible things of God. The Belgic Confession, in my mind, stands between two worlds, the older world of superstition, intuition and mysticism that was passing away and the new world of scientific and technical rationalism which was emerging. There is the surviving wonder and awe. But you can see it starting to be contained by the new rationalism, the new hunger for power over wisdom. Creation is now to be read, like a book, linearly, rationally. We are being enframed and cut off from direct intuitive sense of God’s presence, whether directly or as mediated through the metaphysical, symbolic and archetypal.

Step-by-step, little-by-little, what has happened is that out technological, scientific, rational society has been cutting us off from God. We still believe that God is there, but we interact with him as if from afar, like that machine operator in the control room. Our relationship with God is abstract. He is more concept than a directly intuited reality. As we mentioned earlier, we may have even been changing ourselves at a biological level, making it increasingly difficult for us to sense the presence of God. It is probably not something that can be reversed overnight. But like any atrophied ability, if exercised, our capabilities can improve, even if we don’t regain the fullness of our capacity right away. This may be a multi-generational project.

But why does this matter? Why is it important when discussing a “transcendent politics?” I would argue that the changes which have happened both in the Christian faith and the broader society have altered our practical understanding of what it means to shape and form law and policy. Among those who are not part of the Christian tradition and influenced by western, liberal, ways of thinking —which is pretty much everyone— law and policy are formed by some combination of research, discussion and debate, as well as the exercise of reason. This is what people loosely mean when they employ a concept like “the marketplace of ideas.” The Christian very often embraces these ideas but then adds a significant element that the non-Christian does not: the Bible. Additionally, he might add the content of theology, particularly the creeds, perhaps even the pronouncements of figures like the Pope. But these additional writings and pronouncements are approached in a similar manner as the data of the non-Christian. Even claiming that the Bible is the Word of God and thus demands pre-eminence over all other data, whether scientific, experiential or rational, does not change how we relate to the document itself. Even though the faith claim is made that it is God’s Word to us, we almost exclusively approach the document rationally and scientifically. The Christian and the non-Christian primarily use reason in the formation of law and policy, but they draw the content of their reason from two different data sets, or at times a different set of rational presuppositions when looking at the same data set.

This matters, in large part, because functionally both groups are operating within a closed system of rationality that is not grounded on anything. The non-Christian will argue that his legal pronouncements are based on science and reason that cohere with natural reality. The Christian will argue that his pronouncements are grounded in the Word of God. But because of the hermeneutical problem, all statements rationally derived and formulated, regardless of the data set inherently run into the problem of the subjectivity of the interpreter. Because words and their meaning are separate, or the data of science and their meaning are separate, there are as many interpretations as their are interpreters. As post-modern critics have ably argued, eventually the hermeneutical problem, when applied to law and morality, devolves into doing whatever you feel is right and/or the pure will-to-power: might makes right. This was the thesis devastatingly argued by Alasdair MacIntyre.

Where do laws come from then? If all laws are the written expression of a moral frame, where does morality come from? Typically, the answer given is that all morality is essentially religious. But what does this mean? In the Christian tradition, there is an answer for this. You might be thinking that the answer is “the Bible.” You would be only partially correct in that answer. We are told the answer on the pages of the Bible, but “the Bible” is not technically the answer. Ultimately, all law is grounded in the direct encounter and revelation of God. There are various gradations of this from direct theophany, to the intuition of God’s will and presence as revealed in the underlying order in creation: the archetypes, symbols, and stories. It is metaphysical. It is this thing that the Greeks called “the Forms.”

If you look at the story of scripture, it recounts episode after episode of people meeting with God, interacting with God in time, and God speaking through them. We are even told stories about people rejecting God and the consequences that result from this. Our faith is based on the meetings, on the events in these stories and on the words which God speaks through them. Do you believe that God met Abraham and formed a covenant with him? Do you believe that God met Moses in the burning bush? Do you believe that God showed himself to Moses on Mount Sinai? Do you believe that God’s messenger, an angel, met Joshua? Do you believe God spoke to Samuel in the night? Do you believe that God met Elijah and spoke to him in the sound of silence? Do you believe that Peter had a roof top vision? Do you believe that God the Son met Paul on the road to Damascus? Do you believe that Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us in the person of Jesus, that this person is “the truth?” Our faith is founded on the direct encounter with the living God. This distinction is important and one easily glossed over in the era of rationalism.

There is a distinction between hearing the word of God directly from God himself and receiving those words as written down and conveyed after the fact. It is an important difference that is related to the nature of authority. In the period following the Reformation, Protestants have tended to collapse these two things into one. Reading the Bible is the functional equivalent of experiencing a theophany. The Reformers were confronting a two-fold problem in their minds, one was a corrupt Church, a corrupt human authority; the other was superstitions that lead to idolatry. By making the argument that reading the Bible is more or less the same thing as a direct encounter with God, God is speaking to you in the written words of the Bible, you can cut out the middle man, the church, and set aside superstitious interactions with signs, symbols, archetypes and metaphysics. In theory, this seems like a great idea, but what it has done long term is to create a crisis of authority in our society. Not just in how we interpret scripture, but also politically.

There is no way to get around the hermeneutical problem when it comes to the written word God. Even if we accept the sola scriptura argument in regards to God’s communication with us today, that the Bible is sufficient for salvation and no other communication from God is necessary for that purpose, we still do not escape the problem of the interpreter. Because words and the their meanings are separate, regardless of the intentions of the author — and these intentions are real, and must be respected — every hearer, every reader will understand those words differently because of their different experiences or cultural situation. Meaning, when it is communicated, when understanding happens, it is generally an intuitive thing, a thing of spirit.

As we have been discussing, because the modern era of rationality has increasingly cut us off from this kind of intuitive knowing and the real content that is there in our intuition —considering it to veer into the “superstitious”— we have typically sought rational, methodological approaches to interpretation and knowledge. The end result of this is a crisis of authority. As Gadamer ably argued, there are no methodological guarantees. Good methodology does not assure you that you will reach the truth. We as moderns typical trust the person who uses good methodology to advise us on the truth and what to do about it. But how do you know that a person uses good methods? This is what credentials are for. They are meant to tell you that this person has been trained in good scientific methodological approaches to seeking and uncovering the truth. But as a result, this has led to a crisis in authority. We can no longer trust that anyone is telling us truth. How do we know for certain that someone is telling us the truth or giving us good advice? This problem creates a crisis in political leadership as well.

This is not a new problem. It has existed for as long as human beings have quested for the truth. We see this play out in the encounter between Jesus and the religious leaders of his day. These were men who interpreted the scriptures. To give them the benefit of the doubt, let us assume they were trying to do this with integrity and were good at what they did. They were dealing with the written word of God and were trying to apply it faithfully for the lives of the people of the day. But then Jesus came along and exposed something about their leaders that may not have been apparent to them before that. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, the crowds have this reaction to Jesus:

“When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.”

“He taught as one who had authority.” What does this mean? Basically, when people listened to Jesus teach, they felt as if God was speaking directly to them. Jesus let his personage and his words stand on their own. Other than the “truly, truly” device, Jesus did not generally hammer people with claims of “thus says the Lord.” He and his words were their own testimony of authority. Other things, miraculous things, happened when Jesus spoke:

“Then he went down to Capernaum, a town in Galilee, and on the Sabbath he taught the people. They were amazed at his teaching, because his words had authority.

In the synagogue there was a man possessed by a demon, an impure spirit. He cried out at the top of his voice, ‘Go away! What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!’

‘Be quiet!’ Jesus said sternly. ‘Come out of him!’ Then the demon threw the man down before them all and came out without injuring him.

All the people were amazed and said to each other, ‘What words these are! With authority and power he gives orders to impure spirits and they come out!’”

When was the last time you were in church and the demons started to cry out in rebellion because of the authority of your preacher? Your preacher isn’t Jesus, you offer back? Fair enough. But the authority to speak comes from the same source, God himself. The apostle Paul himself pulls back the curtain on the authority to speak:

“I have no command from the Lord, but I give a judgment as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy.”

There are two things happening here. One is the expectation that God would be giving specific commands, speaking specific words into real situations. The other is that when there is no specific word from the Lord, that a person can speak on God’s behalf because they are “trustworthy.” This is the foundation of “authority,” both spiritual and political. The crisis of authority we face began when we separated off the metaphysical, symbolic, archetypal, and even the theophanic because one could not prove rationally or demonstrate scientifically the origin of such experiences, utterances or pronouncements. Whether apprehended directly or intuited from the world around us, no rational or scientific proof of their origin can be offered, yet it is this complex of experiences that form the basis of “authority.” Without this direct connection to the divine, without some level of “thus says the Lord,” law remains grounded in nothing but human subjectivity. It is basically, “what me and my friends deem right in our own eyes,” or, more bluntly, the will-to-power establishes truth, right and wrong, that is, morality and law.

We generally have come to think of the role of bringing the word of God to bear on the lives of the people as something which belongs to the realm of the prophetic, but when you include the broader phenomenon of intuiting the wise choice, we are able to see the role of king as included within this umbrella. Wisdom flows out of the encounter with God. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Out of that divine encounter one is able to see correctly the situation and know the path that must be taken, the choice that must be made. As per Proverbs, do you correct a fool or don’t you? You might have a direct word from God in the moment. But you might be one who is “trustworthy” to make a pronouncement “as if” God is speaking. This is the foundation of authority and the heart of law and the rule of a wise king. The Proverbs themselves speak to the roll of wisdom in the rule of a king:

“It is the glory of God to conceal a matter;
to search out a matter is the glory of kings.
As the heavens are high and the earth is deep,
so the hearts of kings are unsearchable.”

This roots the role of the king in the wisdom tradition that is shown us in passages such as this from the book of Job:

“Where then does wisdom come from?
Where does understanding dwell?
It is hidden from the eyes of every living thing,
concealed even from the birds in the sky.
^…
God understands the way to it
and he alone knows where it dwells”

The great king, the man of true authority, is the one who embraces this quest for wisdom, to seek God until he has understanding and can bring out from the hidden places the deep truths God has placed there. This should not be equated with reason and the rational. Not that it is irrational, but rather it is intuitive. It is spiritual. It is the truth that comes in the moment of decision from the hidden places of God. The role of king as the law giver and the guardian of justice demands that he embrace the role of seer, one who “sees.” Proverbs acknowledges this:

“The lips of a king speak as an oracle,
 and his mouth does not betray justice.”

When people read Carl Schmitt’s “Political Theology” they fixate on the opening line “Sovereign is he who decides the exception,” missing the point that much of the book discusses the problems which arise once the rationalism of the liberal democratic era swept aside the older origin and grounding of authority. He calls this “the miracle of law.” Without this miracle of law, without it being pronounced like an oracle, or as one who is trustworthy to speak on God’s behalf, in the end all that is left is the will of the dictator to remake law in the midst of “the exception,” that crisis for which the closed system of rationally formulated law and policy, the rule of law, cannot account.

In the modern era, we are terrified of the idea of persons in power. We cling to the policy manual or the rule of law to protect us precisely from persons who might claim “authority.” Yet, as the crisis over SARS-CoV-2 exposed to many, our society is experiencing a deep crisis of authority. Rightly ordered authority comes from one place and one place only. It is given by God. And the king speaks an oracle, the word of God, giving the people “the miracle of law.” A similar thing is supposed to happen with preaching. The interpretation of the scriptures requires an interpreter who is able to intuit or hear directly the word, the meaning, of these texts. Every Sunday you should expect from the pulpit some form, some level, some manifestation of “the miracle of law” to be taking place. Authority comes from one place and one place alone. People will recognize it when they hear it. They did in Jesus’ day. Your preacher or your king does not need to be Jesus. He was a singular figure. But they do need to participate in the archetype of “the man of authority” that he revealed so fully. There will be gradations. But this is what we should be looking for. A rebirth of authority. A rebirth of the miracle of law.

These times have happened before:

“In those days the word of the Lord was rare; there were not many visions.”

We can pray earnestly that God will raise up men like this to lead us. Also, that when he does answer this prayer, we will recognize them and will accept their authority.