Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Symbol: Saul - Samuel, wesentlich für Geschichte

Kurzinhalt: Erfahrungsgrundlage für die Spannung zwischen Königtum und Jahwe-Königtum

Textausschnitt: 47/8 The antiroyalist version of Saul's kingship has created one of the most important symbolisms of Western politics. Through the reception of the Bible into the Scripture of Christianity the relation between Samuel and Saul has become the paradigm of spiritual control over temporal rulership. From the first stirrings of theocratic consciousness in Lucifer of Cagliari and St. Ambrose, in the conflicts of the fourth century A.D., to the end of Christian imperial culture,
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This is the experiential area in which the theocratic symbolism is rooted. For the idea of theocratic order is not a "doctrine" invented by some thinker at a definite point of time but a symbol which articulates the experienced tension between divine and human constitution of society. As long as Israel was a confederacy, resting on the social organization of the Hebrew clans, the tension could become active only in the rare instances of charismatic leadership in an emergency, and that precisely was the situation in which the tension would dissolve before it could harden into a serious problem of order. When the emergency situation crystallized into the routine of permanent organization, even only locally, as in the case of Gideon's attempted dynasty, the outcome was disaster. Now, however, the Israelite theopolity was supplemented by a permanent kingship of national scope; and therefore, the question had to arise whether Israel, by the acquisition of a king like all the nations, had not become a nation like all the nations? whether Israel had ceased to be the chosen people of Yahweh? And if this should be the case, how could kingship be brought into accord with the exigencies of a theopolity?