What Has The Bible Ever Done For Us?
Far from being culturally irrelevant, the Bible might just be the single most influential text in British political history – so argues Nick Spencer, author of the newly published, Freedom and Order: History, Politics and the English Bible...
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Version of the Bible. Although widely praised for its impact on our language, literature and culture, the KJV – indeed the Bible itself – is equally widely ignored when it comes to our politics. The Bible may have inspired Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton, but it did little to influence their political masters.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The Bible has been central to our national politics from the earliest days, and can lay good claim to being the single most influential text in British political history.
This is not to say that it has been the only influence on our political life, or that it has always been a benign influence. Rather, it is to claim that, just as it is impossible to appreciate English literature fully without recourse to the Bible, so it is impossible to understand our politics.
Moreover, it is also to claim that many of the political ideas we accept as self-evident today owe a great deal to biblical Christianity. Take political equality, for instance. What earthly reason is there for a ruler to surrender himself to the same laws as his subjects? It seems so obviously right to us now, but it is far from obvious to a whole host of North African dictators, and was certainly not obvious to the innumerable kings and emperors in the past.
The Western political tradition was profoundly influenced by the idea, most pithily expressed in Deuteronomy 17:14-20, that the law was over everyone. The king of Israel could command huge authority as God’s anointed, but ultimately was under the same judgement as everyone else. ‘Whether you will or not’, the scholar Alcuin warned King Ethelred as early as the eighth century, ‘you will have him [God] as a judge’.
Linked to this is the idea of political responsibility. Christian kings were kings, at least in theory, by God’s grace, not by their own right, still less by force of arms. Accordingly, it was only by fulfilling their divinely-mandated duties that they became legitimate kings. These duties included judging justly, securing peace, defending the weak, and protecting and advancing the Christian faith - – duty that led the church down some very grim cul-de-sacs.
Overall, such duties oriented political power towards the ‘common wealth’ of the people. This was not, of course, the same thing as democracy. No one imagined that the people over which a king ruled were the source of his authority. Nevertheless, the fact that God’s grant of political authority was dependent upon the king’s ability and willingness to discharge the responsibilities of justice, peace, protection, and faithfulness was significant as it pointed, in the long run, in the direction of a contract between ruler and ruled. The direction of travel was set early on; thus, the monk Aelfric in a Palm Sunday homily in the early tenth century: ‘no man can make himself king, but the people has the choice to choose a king whom they please’ – an extraordinary idea for the time.
When it came to democracy itself, Christian thinkers had a patchy relationship. What happens, for example, if the people choose ungodly rulers or ungodly laws? Yet, it is unlikely that democracy could have taken root, certainly in the way it did, without the Bible and, in particular, without William Tyndale.
Tyndale himself was about as far from a democrat as it is possible to be. Nevertheless, by translating the Bible into accessible English and insisting that even the ploughboy should be able to read it, he helped create what was, in essence, a spiritual democracy, which, in the long run, came to underpin the political one. If God considered even the humblest man competent to judge for himself the means of eternal salvation, later radicals argued, and government was simply the means of temporal salvation, it followed that government should involve the people in the formation of its laws.
So, we have equality, responsibility, democracy... and toleration. Tolerance is not normally associated with Christian history (for good reasons). Yet it was first articulated as a political virtue not only by biblical thinkers but for biblical reasons. At first it was mainly Christians on the social periphery, such as early Baptists, who argued for toleration, but in time the idea received its fullest and most impressive voice from the great Christian philosopher John Locke. ‘Toleration [is] the chief characteristic mark of the true Church’, he wrote in his influential Letter on the subject, before going on to locate the justification for tolerance in the life and teachings of Christ himself.
Last, but clearly not least, we might also mention the very idea of England, and Britain, as a political entity. When Pope Gregory sent his missionaries to the English people in 597, the English people did not exist. Conceiving of them as a single unit and sending his clerics to them was a momentous move on Gregory’s part, causing one recent historian to observe that ‘the English owe their existence as a people, or at least the recognition of it, to the papacy’. Much the same thing happened 1,100 years later when Protestantism helped forge a common identity following the Act of Union in 1707. In the words of the historian Linda Colley, ‘Protestantism was the foundation that made the invention of Great Britain possible’.
Faithful reflection on biblical teaching thus lies behind many of the basic axioms of our political life. As mentioned above, we should not let this deceive us into believing that the Bible has always been on the side of the political angels. It has not. It is sobering to recall that one of the reasons why the abolitionist cause was so explicitly biblical is that there were serious and committed Christians on the other side of the fence who argued for the slave trade on biblical grounds.
But we should not allow acknowledgment of this chequered past to shame us into downplaying or ignoring the enormous and, on balance, overwhelmingly positive impact that the Bible has had on British political life.
It is impossible to tell whether British political life would have generated its commitment to equality, justice, responsibility, toleration, democracy, and cohesion without the Bible. But it is clear that its commitment to them was grounded in biblical thought. It may well be that we will maintain our commitment to such political virtues if the nation ever jettisons the Christian convictions that have, however imperfectly, underpinned them for the last 1,500 years. But it would be a brave or perhaps a complacent person to suggest that it will necessarily be so.
Nick Spencer
Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos, the public theology think tank. His book, which explores more fully the topic of this article, Freedom and Order: History, Politics and the English Bible, is published by Hodder & Stoughton.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.
