monarchy and Israelite kingship, but such inferences should
be drawn with caution, especially since Israel’s monarchy had
been established within the time of Israel’s historical memory
and had been opposed by a school of thought that felt that
Yahveh alone should be recognized as king (1 Sm. 8:6–22,
Hos. 8:4, 13:10–11). However, Israelite monarchy borrowed
some of the theocratic features of its Near Eastern predeces-
sors, especially elements of court ritual. Still, Israel under the
monarchy was a royal theocracy, for the kings were consid-
ered to be the anointed and chosen servants of Yahveh and
the earthly representatives of Yahveh’s theocratic authority.
Monarchy as the fulfillment of a sacred role of divine
regency also appeared in Christianity. The most obvious ex-
amples have been in Eastern Christianity, both Byzantine
and Russian, in which the imperial office was regarded as
God-given, and the emperor regarded as God’s representa-
tive on earth in all temporal matters, as well as in the external
affairs of the church. In Byzantium, the distinction between
the religious and the secular was not as sharply drawn as it
usually was in the West, and the Byzantine emperor had cer-
tain liturgical prerogatives that were closed to the layperson.
Such sacred kingship also appeared in Western Christianity
among the early Germanic kings who ruled after the dissolu-
tion of the Roman empire, and especially in the rule of Char-
lemagne. It reappeared with some of the Holy Roman em-
perors who sought to counter the claims of papal theocracy
after the eleventh-century Gregorian reform, and at the
courts of Henry VIII and Louis XIV.
GENERAL THEOCRACY. A third type of theocracy, by far the
most common, is that more general type wherein ultimate
authority is considered to be vested in a divine law or revela-
tion, mediated through a variety of structures or polities. In
a sense, both priestly and royal theocracies may be of this
sort: for example, in Israelite monarchy the Law stood as an
authority beyond that of the king at the time of the Josianic
reform; Byzantine emperors in spite of their choice by God
were subordinate to the principles of revealed truth; and even
the Egyptian god-kings were supposed to rule according to
the eternal principles of maat, or justice. Theocracy in this
third sense has been quite common as a conception in such
universalizing religions as Christianity and Islam, where
there has often been a thrust toward bringing the whole
human sphere under the aegis of the divine will; but it has
also appeared in some ancient and tribal societies where the
laws and customs of the people are understood to be revealed
by the gods, as in some of the ancient Greek city-states.
Historical conditions have made this type of theocracy
less common in Christianity than might otherwise have been
the case; in earliest Christianity, theocracy was ruled out by
the sharp dichotomy between the church and a hostile world
that prevailed in Christian thinking, and in modern times,
secularization has rendered otiose any program for the rule
of Christian norms over all of society. Furthermore, some
kinds of Christian thinking about society—for example, the
two-kingdom theory of Lutheranism; Christian Aristotelian-
ism, which grants to the state a basis in its own right; and
the modern acceptance of the separation of church and
state—have weakened the theocratic impulse.
In Christianity, the two most commonly cited examples
of this kind of theocracy have been medieval Roman Cathol-
icism and some of the Calvinist societies of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.
Earlier medieval thought looked upon the spiritual and
the temporal as two coordinate powers under God, with
their own separate structures of rule. After the Gregorian re-
form of the eleventh century, however, papal theorists sought
to divest the temporal overlord of his sacred character and
promoted the view that the church, through the pope, was
sovereign in all temporal affairs, even if this sovereignty were
not exercised directly but through secular rulers whom the
church had the authority to direct, judge, or remove. This
papal theocracy reached its height in the early thirteenth-
century pontificate of Innocent III, who made good his claim
to have the authority to dispose earthly powers when he dis-
ciplined various European monarchs, including King John
of England. Defenders of papal theocracy, however, made
even more far-reaching claims in the next century, asserting
that the popes, as vicars of Christ on earth, exercised all the
prerogatives of Christ’s heavenly kingship, which was both
royal and priestly, and were, theoretically, not only the pos-
sessors of all earthly political sovereignty but the ultimate
owners of all property. Late medieval developments, includ-
ing the papal captivity and schism, the rise of conciliarism,
and nationalism, led to the decline of effective papal theo-
cracy.
Theocracy has often been attributed to the government
of certain Reformed or Calvinist states, whether Zurich
under Huldrych Zwingli, Geneva under John Calvin, En-
gland under Oliver Cromwell, or Puritan Massachusetts. In
none of these cases was there a hierocratic theocracy, since
in most of them the clergy were less likely to hold public of-
fice than they had been previously—for example, Cromwel-
lian England abolished church courts and the House of
Lords with its bishops, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony
forbade the clergy to serve as magistrates. Even in Geneva,
the clergy had only an advisory role in checking and balanc-
ing the civil government. But all of these societies had an
ideal, well expressed by the Strasbourg theologian Martin
Bucer in his De regno Christi, of a holy community on earth
in which the sovereignty was God’s and in which the actual
law should reflect the divine will and the government seek
to promote the divine glory. In the Puritan examples of
Cromwellian England in the 1650s and Massachusetts Bay
in the first generations of its settlement, there was both a
hearkening after Old Testament theocratic patterns and a
sense of the importance of government entrusted to truly re-
generate persons—or the saints—in an effort to create a holy
commonwealth. In fact, however, rule was exercised in both
cases more through a godly laity than through the clergy, and
in both Cromwellian England and Puritan Massachusetts the
state had considerable power in church affairs.9110 THEOCRACY