Democracy Is Not Biblical (And That’s Actually Okay)
Transcript
Rick Barry: Democracy is not a biblical concept.
It’s not ANTI-biblical or UN-biblical. But it *is* EXTRA-biblical. The biblical authors never experienced it, and it wasn’t relevant enough to the history of salvation for the prophets to get any revelation about it, so the Bible doesn’t directly address it.
And I think that bearing that distinction in mind—the distinction between extra-biblical and unbiblical—can help us be a healthy part of a healthy democracy without needing to feel like we’re somehow not being faithful to God. It could even help us do democracy in a way that actually makes Jesus look good.
American Government
GOVERNMENT is not an extra-biblical concept. The Bible says that governments exist for a good reason, and the Old Testament and New Testament are filled with stories and that take place in different tribes and city-states and empires, and they all had different kinds of structure to their governments, and the Biblical authors gave a lot of different advice about how to interact with those tribal and city and imperial governments.
But government that’s structured and managed the way we structure and manage government in the US IS an extra-biblical concept.
Christians in the US today are living in a representative and participatory democracy.
The “representative” part means that the citizens are ultimately responsible for governance, but at every level of government, we delegate the day-to-day work to a smaller group of appointed officials, who we hire democratically and expect to serve the interests of all the people in their jurisdiction.
The “participatory” part means that, even though we delegate the day-to-day work of government to specific people, we still have chances to vote directly on the laws that give order and structure to our lives together, mostly at the state and local level.
And and on top of all of that, we also have opportunities beyond government to shape our communities directly ourselves in a hands-on way.
Biblical Governments
On the other hand, when the Bible talks about government, it’s mostly talking about variations on autocracies and monarchies, because those are the kinds of governments the biblical authors mostly lived under.
And I know right here, a lot of you are probably thinking, “Wait, Rome was a republic. It was a democracy.” And yes. It was. At one point.
But we have to remember two things:
First, when we’re looking back at Rome from the perspective of people in the modern US, even the height of the Roman Republic, would still, to modern American eyes, probably look more like an aristocracy than anything we'd call a democracy.
And second, that height of the republic, Rome at its most democratic, the apex of its democracy-ness, was long gone by the time Jesus was born.
Chances are, none of the biblical figures or biblical authors ever experienced Roman democracy. Maybe maybe maybe Simeon and Anna in Luke 2, because I think Luke mentions that they were already very old by the time Jesus was born, but other than them? Probably not.
A couple decades before Jesus was born, there was a guy named Julius Caesar, and after Julius Caesar was assassinated, three men—Mark Antony, Marcus Lapidus, and Caesar's relative Octavius—formed a council called the Second Triumvirate. The Roman Senate took most of its power and most of its authority over the state, and gave it to this council of three guys to use however they thought was best.
And then, around the time Jesus was born, that group of three got whittled down to one. Octavius had consolidated all the power of the triumvirate into just himself, and he had become known as Caesar Augustus—Caesar Most Powerful. That transition of authority from the senate to the second triumverate to Caesar Augustus was Rome’s transition from a declining democracy to a functioning autocracy.
Now, the Senate still existed. But it wasn’t really what it used to be.
Star Wars and Roman Government
If you've ever seen the original STAR WARS movie, the one from 1977, there’s a scene early on where Darth Vader, who’s one of the Emperor’s chief confidantes, walks into a meeting and tells the people there that the Emperor has dissolved the senate. He calls it the last vestiges of the old Republic, the last window dressings of it, and says that it’s finally been wiped away.
The Emperor had been in power for 19 years at that point. Everyone in the movie already KNEW that the Empire wasn’t really a republic anymore. The elites on Alderaan knew it. The peasants on Tatooine knew it. The senate was still hanging around, but it was mostly for the sake of appearances, or out of inertia.
Jesus was born just as Rome was transitioning into that “window dressings of the old republic” stage. The institution of the senate still existed, but the state was functioning as an autocracy, as a monarchy with Octavius as its head.
Engaging with Things That Are Extra-Biblical
Now, if something is un-biblical or anti-biblical, it’s at odds with the values prescribed by the Bible and the themes of salvation as they are portrayed in the overall story of God’s word. Greed and selfish ambition are un-biblical. And if something is unbiblical or antibiblical, our duty as Christians is generally pretty simple: resist conforming to that pattern of the world.
But if something is extra-biblical, if something’s outside the scope of the biblical experience but not essentially prohibited, it’s generally our duty as Christians to figure out how to engage with it in ways where our conduct demonstrates the Bible’s commands, values, themes and promises as clearly as possible to the people around us who don’t yet know the Jesus that we know.
Doing that’s a LOT harder to do. Even just figuring out how to do it is hard to do sometimes. It takes wisdom, and it takes work. It means making huge, consistent efforts to love God with not just our heart and soul and strength, but with our mind, as well.
Trying to treat something that is extra-biblical as though it’s a topic the Bible treats as cut and dried actually makes us look silly to the people around us–and not in a, “the wisdom of God is foolishness to the Greeks” kind of way. It misrepresents God to the people he’s trying to reach, and it sets us up to completely miss the point of the Bible we’re trying to follow.
If we’re trying to demonstrate the healing, redemption and reconciliation of Jesus in every dimension of our lives, then taking the Bible’s advice about how to interact with, like, Roman autocracy and then trying to apply it to interacting with modern representative democracy in a one-to-one way is probably a recipe for disaster.
For reasons we’ll get into over and over again as these videos go on, I think the most biblically consistent thing we can do in a democracy like this isn’t to deny it. Isn’t to withdraw from it. And isn’t to try and turn it into something simpler or less democratic because making it simpler or less democratic would mean figuring out how to live out our faith would be an easier process. It’s to be BETTER at the democracy God has called us into than we would be without him—and maybe to be better FOR that democracy, too.