B. Charismatic Leadership
- The Christian Episcopate
a. Jesus appointed an inner circle of
Twelve, the “Apostles,” who seem to
have enjoyed a recognized authority
among his followers after his death.
b. There were other officials as well,
none very certainly defined, but what
emerges is a church official called an
“overseer” (epikopos) and it is this
bishop who is soon found standing at
the head of every Christian congrega-
tion, and generally regarded as the
spiritual successor of the Apostles.
c. As the Roman Empire gradually
turned Christian in the fourth and fifth
centuries, the organization of these
bishops began to follow that of the
empire, with the bishops of provincial
capitals acknowledged as archbish-
ops with jurisdiction over the other
bishops of that province.
d. The bishops of the provinces report-
ed to another in a larger more cos-
mopolitan community. The final
authority rested with councils of
bishops, or as the Western Church
claimed, with the bishop of Rome
(also, and more often, known by the
sobriquet of “pope”).
e. There was opposition in the Eastern
Churches to the bishop of Rome's
claim of primacy, which resulted in
the schism that separated the
Western or Latin Church from the
Greek Churches of the East. At the
Reformation, the Western Church
was rent into a variety of confession-
al churches that refused to accept
the authority of Rome. Eastern
churches also split into a number of
different ethnic or national churches
with varying degrees of autonomy
from Constantinople.
THEOCRACY
The first-century CE Jewish
historian Josephus is the first
we know of to use the term
“theocracy” to describe a polity
“ruled by God.” He was referring
to the Kingdom of Israel, though
it was a somewhat imperfect
example since its kings neither
spoke for God nor ruled on his
behalf. The Jewish kingdom
was rather a diarchy, where the
kings shared sovereignty with a
priesthood who both spoke and
ministered on God’s behalf.
Can a state truly be run by
God’s divinely revealed laws
rather than by humans’ more
pragmatic statutes? There have
been a number of attempts
among the monotheists, and
two of the more interesting are
the Christian commonwealth
instituted at Geneva by the
French Reformer John Calvin
(1509-1564) and the ongoing
Islamic Republic of Iran,
fathered in large part by the
Ayatollah Khomeini (1900-
1989). In both instances, there
was an attempt to combine a
republican form of govern-
ment—elected assemblies,
councils, magistrates—with
(higher) clerical supervision in
the form of religious overseers
who monitored and vetted exec-
utive, legislative and judicial
decisions in terms of their con-
gruence with Divine Law. The
Christian Republic of Geneva
quickly disappeared under the
post-Reform European prefer-
ence for the separation of
Church and State; the Iranian
experiment is still a work in
progress. And, some surmise, a
second Jewish experiment in
theocracy is waiting to begin.