The Death of God in the Death of Kingship

There is one idea that I believe, if we properly understood and embraced it, would illumine much of what we don't understand about Scripture and enable us to accept much of what we don't like about Scripture.  This idea is one that has gradually but steadily been leeching out our consciousness for quite some time, beginning with the French Revolution.  The idea creates a whole category of understanding that we are, for the most part, completely lacking today.  And because we don't have this category in our minds, much of what the Bible says does not make sense to us and cannot be embraced by us, because we have no way to process it.

The concept I am referring to can be named by many names, but for our purposes I will call it Kingship.
The notion of Kingship, generally, is the idea that a person in an office of ultimate authority and power has the sovereign right to rule over all in his domain.  Everything in the kingdom is owned by and is to be used in service to the King.  Now to be fair, never in the history of the world has Kingship been exercised in a perfectly noble way.  That is because there has never been a completely noble king.  In fact, history probably gives us many more examples of unrighteous kings than of righteous ones.  And even the righteous ones were known to have a bad day or two (think of King David taking Uriah's wife Bathsheba, impregnating her and then murdering Uriah to try to cover it up).

But like everything that is based on an ideal, the ideal is based on something even higher: the nature and character of God.  For example, we think of marriage as instituted by God as a helpful arrangement  for the purpose of securing the procreation of the species, the rearing of children, the providence and ordering of society and the felicity of humankind.  While that is true, there is a deeper meaning, origin and purpose to marriage that Scripture teaches us about: "This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church." (Ephesians 5:32 ESV)  Thus, marriage, primarily is not about humans at all - it is, first and foremost, a picture of the relationship between Christ and the church. [this is actually the great travesty of the modern effort to redefine the marriage relationship - but that's another article]

So it is with Kingship.  The human institution of Kingship is based on the ideal of Kingship and the ideal of Kingship is based on an aspect of the nature of God.  If we want to understand the universe rightly, in all its beauty and grandeur and truth, we must have a category in our hearts for Kingship.  Or, stated negatively, if we don't have a concept of a being of power and authority whose right it is to sovereignly rule all things according to his own will and pleasure, we won't be able to make sense of God and his world.

O.k., big deal.  Right?  Who doesn't understand Kingship?  Well, to put it bluntly: we don't.  Modern society is experiencing a Crisis of Kingship.  It is beyond the scope of this article (or the reader's attention span, no doubt) to go into the history of the erosion of the concept of Kingship.  Suffice it to say that, beginning roughly with the Enlightenment, modern culture has all but completely jettisoned the idea of royal rule.

We live in an era where every man is the king of his own kingdom.  Human rights ordains that no person may own another person.  Human equality tells us that no person is above another person.  Democracy dictates that no person may rule another person.  Postmodernism decrees that no person may judge the beliefs of another person.  And humanism preaches that there is nothing of higher value than a person.

So it is with this backdrop that we humans then sit down and read our Bibles and try to make sense of a story in which God, by virtue of his character, owns all people, is far superior to all people, rules all people, judges all people and is of infinitely greater worth than all people.  In fact, the story goes on to say that though humans owed all their allegiance, service and worship to this God, they rebelled against him and are guilty of the highest crime of treason which God will punish in the most severe manner imaginable.

Can you see why many people who read the Bible today experience a huge disconnect between that story and theirs?  They have no category into which to put this kind of narrative.  In reality, a story like this can't be anything but a myth from a bygone era.  

Why?

Because, since Kingship no longer exists, neither does God.