It is also in this general sense of theocracy that Islam
ought to be considered theocratic. Islam grew up as a reli-
gious community that was its own state, and thus from the
beginning there was no distinction of church and state; rath-
er, there was a unitary society under God’s revealed rule and
law. Islam was much less a church than a theocratic state, but
as a theocracy, it was laical and egalitarian, with traditions
neither of sacred kings nor of a powerful priesthood. The
basis of this divine rule is to be found in shar ̄ıEah, or law,
which provides for a pattern of life uniting all the aspects of
human existence—political, social, religious, domestic—into
a grand whole under divine rule. Such rule has been variously
exercised in Islamic history, but the EulamaD as well as the
caliphs and, in Shiism, the imams have been important in
its application. Many modern Islamic revival movements, re-
acting against Western aggression and internal decline, have
tended toward the repristination of the theocratic elements
in Islam; this was true of the Wa ̄hha ̄b ̄ıyah in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries and has been true of many contem-
porary movements.
ESCHATOLOGICAL THEOCRACY. A fourth kind of theocracy
is eschatological, centering on visions of an ideal future in
which God will rule. Restoration eschatology and messianic
ideas in ancient Israel were of this type. In Christianity, such
eschatological theocracy appeared in the beliefs of the medi-
eval followers of Joachim of Fiore, who anticipated the emer-
gence of a third age in which all would be perfect, and in the
beliefs of the sectarians of seventeenth-century England, such
as the Seekers, Quakers, or Fifth Monarchists, who dreamed
of a coming millennial age when Christ would rule. Such
modern offshoots of Christianity as the Jehovah’s Witnesses
and the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon present
recent examples of groups anticipating an earthly reign of
Christ. Islamic eschatology centering on the figure of the
Mahdi has occasionally begotten similar hopes.
SEE ALSO Charlemagne; Constantine; Dalai Lama; Imamate;
Israelite Law, article on State and Judiciary Law; Kingdom
of God; Kingship; Shiism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
There is no single, synoptic account of the whole range of theo-
cratic phenomena. Among general studies of religion, Gustav
Mensching’s Soziologie der grossen Religionen (Bonn, 1966)
and Soziologie der Religion, 2d ed. (Bonn, 1968), pp. 79f.,
112, and 155–158, take interest in the notion of theocracy.
Among the many studies of sacred kingship in the ancient
world, Henri Frankfort’s now classic text Kingship and the
Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion (1948; reprint,
Chicago, 1978) is a good place to begin. Thomas L. Brauch,
“The Emperor Julian’s Theocratic Vocation,” Society of Bib-
lical Literature Seminar Papers 25 (1986): 291–300, exam-
ines theocracy in the late Roman pagan revival. For a general
account of theocracy and ancient Israel, see John W.
Wevers’s “Theocracy” in the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the
Bible, vol. 4 (Nashville, 1962), pp. 617–619. D. Otto Plöger
deals with Daniel, Joel, and other examples of late Israelite
eschatology in Theokratie und Eschatologie (Neukirchen,
West Germany, 1959). For the concept of theocracy in
Philo, Maimonides, traditional Rabbinic thought, and mod-
ern Israel, see Gershon Weiler, Jewish Theocracy (Leiden,
1988). For Tibetan theocracy, see Franz Michael and Eugene
Knez’s Rule by Incarnation: Tibetan Buddhism and Its Role in
Society and State (Boulder, Colo., 1982). Dieter Georgi, The-
ocracy in Paul’s Praxis and Theology (Minneapolis, 1991),
uses theocracy as a conceptual tool for interpreting the apos-
tle Paul. For royal theocracy in Byzantium, see Deno John
Geanakoplos’s Byzantine East and Latin West (Oxford,
1966), especially chapter 2. Among many treatments of me-
dieval papal thought, the following deal extensively with the
theme of theocracy: La théocratie: L’église et le pouvoir au
moyen âge by Marcel Pacaut (Paris, 1957); L’idée de la royauté
du Christ au moyen âge by Jean Le Clercq (Paris, 1959), espe-
cially chapters 1, 7, and 8; and Church State and Christian
Society at the Time of the Investiture Contest by Gerd Tellen-
bach (1959; reprint, New York, 1979).
A number of authors investigate Reformation and Puritan theo-
cracy: Robert C. Walton in Zwingli’s Theocracy (Toronto,
1967); E. William Monter in Calvin’s Geneva (New York,
1967), especially chapter 6; Harro Höpfl in The Christian
Polity of John Calvin (Cambridge, 1982); George L. Hunt in
Calvinism and the Political Order (Philadelphia, 1965); Rene
Paquin in “Calvin and Theocracy in Geneva,” ARC, The
Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill 28 (2000):
91–113; Aaron B. Seidman in “Church and State in the
Early Years of the Massachusetts Bay Colony,” New England
Quarterly 18 (1945): 211–233, which seeks to set the record
straight on theocracy in the colony; Avihu Zakai, in “Theoc-
racy in New England: The Nature and Meaning of the Holy
Experiment in the Wilderness,” Journal of Religious History
14 (1986): 131–151; and Jerald C. Brauer in “The Rule of
the Saints in American Politics,” Church History 27 (Septem-
ber 1958): 240–255, which also discusses theocratic impulses
in later American history. For a study of the Quakers and
theocracy, see Thomas G. Sanders’s Protestant Concepts of
Church and State (New York, 1964), pp. 125–178. The theo-
cratic aspects of Islam are variously alluded to in Ruben
Levy’s The Social Structure of Islam, 2d ed. (Cambridge,
1957), and E. I. J. Rosenthal’s Political Thought in Medieval
Islam (1958; reprint, Cambridge, 1968); Majid Fakhry deals
with some modern revivals of theocratic thinking in “The
Theocratic Idea of the Islamic State in Recent Controver-
sies,” International Affairs 30 (October 1954): 450–462.
Modern Iran is examined in Mehran Kamrava, The Political
History of Modern Iran: From Tribalism to Theocracy (West-
port, 1992). Legal and ethical issues are explored in Lucas A.
Swaine, “How Ought Liberal Democracies to Treat Theo-
cratic Communities,” Ethics 111 (January 2001): 302–343.
DEWEY D. WALLACE, JR. (1987 AND 2005)THEODICY. Why do the righteous suffer? Why do the
wicked prosper? Why do innocent children experience illness
and death? These are ancient questions, but they have been
given new poignancy in our day by the events of the Europe-
an Holocaust. The fact that many who died in the Holocaust
were devout Jews or Christians also poses a special problemTHEODICY 9111