Of Theocratic States?
Of Theocratic States?
Is it the plain Will of God for Christians today to work and pray to create theocratic states and cities? There are believers who hold emphatically that it is.
For a few months in the 1600s, England teetered on the brink of being a theocracy; a state governed directly by God according to His Law (contained in the Bible), via His (human) "anointed vessels".
After the execution of King Charles I, the abolition of the House of Lords, and a series of purges of the House of Commons, in 1653 the devout Puritan, gentleman farmer, Oliver Cromwell became the "Lord Protector" of the "Commonwealth" of England. He governed as a monarch in all but title and crown, for "the people's good, not what pleases them".
His original vision was astonishingly liberal for those times. "I had rather that Mahometanism were permitted amongst us, than that one of God's children should be persecuted", he said.
 Oliver Cromwell |
The Cursing Act provided for the fining of foul-mouth adults, and the whipping of little swearers ... those under 12 years-of-age. Fornicators faced 3 months in prison, and adulterers the death penalty.
This noble experiment failed for many reasons ... but for two in particular,
- According to Professor Schama "the experiment in enforced virtue was a dismal flop ... because of the impossibility of supplying the manpower to police it".
- God was not in it. "Unless the Lord builds the house, they labour in vain who build it; unless the Lord guards the city, the watchmen keep watch in vain." (Psalm 127.1)
At the same time as sin and vice were under attack from Mr. Cromwell's "divine" dictatorship, so also was religious liberty. The Quakers' (Society of Friends) founder and leader, George Fox, found himself frequently detained in unbelievably squalid prisons for being "a menace to public peace". There he might be urinated and defecated upon by his goalers. One of Fox's followers was convicted of blasphemy in 1656. His tongue was bored through with a hot iron, and his forehead branded with a "B" for blasphemer!
So, all was well in this garden of eden? Yeah, right!
Oliver Cromwell was a good and godly man; but the same cannot be said for all his works. The dead bodies of his foes (and sometimes his "friends") littered his blood-soaked "way of the Lord". (Matthew 3.3)
How could his holy vision of "a free and uninterrupted passage of the Gospel running through the midst of us, and liberty for all (except Roman Catholics!) to hold forth and profess with sobriety their light and knowledge ..." go so terribly wrong?
Because, while it was very likely God's work he undertook, he did not carry it out in God's way. It took two clergyman from the Church of England which Cromwell did not regard fondly, to show the way to convert "carnal England to a state of godly submission".
Within 100 years, sin and carnality in England began to shudder and subside beneath the tidal wave of revival preaching that flowed out of the mouths of the Revs. John Wesley and George Whitefield during the First Great Awakening.
"My aim," Wesley proclaimed, "is to reform the nation, particularly the Church, and to spread Scriptural holiness over the land." And this he did with "power from on high" (Luke 24.49) ... not through the barrel of a gun or parliament.
And for those who failed to grasp this eccentric Oxford scholar's vision, he continued, "Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin, desire nothing but God, and care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen; such alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the Kingdom of God upon earth."
Bodies littered the ground in their thousands at Wesley and Whitefield's huge, outdoor meetings. But these people had not been killed. They fainted beneath the sheer heat and force of Gospel messages from men who truly believed they preached not only for the eternal salvation of individual men and women, but for the divine destiny of their nation.
Some secular historians have concluded that the blood-bathed French Revolution of that time was not able to hop (plague-like) across the narrow English channel, because the First Great Awakening had so altered English Society from top to bottom for God and for good.
The present infatuation of some Western Christians with the building of theocratic states and cities is like the proverbial path paved with good intentions; it leads to "hell". That certainly is the testimony of 17th C Ireland, where Cromwell and his "salvation" armies perpetrated "one of the most infamous atrocities in the entirety of British history". And according to Professor Schama "the most damning witness against Cromwell is Cromwell, who makes no bones about his deliberate intention to perpetrate a slaughter so ghastly that it would dissuade other strongholds from making Drogheda's (a rebellious Irish town) mistake ... refusing peaceful capitulation".
Similarly tragic is the testimony of the Rev. John Alexander Dowie. This most remarkable and inspirational Scottish Congregational pastor was undoubtedly a genuine 20th C apostle ... especially of healing. But he ended his days abysmally; living in his theocratic city (of Zion) near Chicago, delusionally attired as an Old Testament high priest, and of the view that he was the prophet Elijah!
"And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God (to have God in knowledge) any longer, God gave them over to a depraved (void of judgement) mind, to do those things which are not proper." (Romans 1.28)
"For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not in accordance with knowledge. For not knowing about God's righteousness, and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God." (Roman's 10.2-3)
