"The Law and the Bible" Part 3

A third note (the first two here and here): Many decrying the centralization of political power in the United States observe that it is inconsistent with the original vision of the Constitution. Indeed, the Constitution explicitly provided both for separation and distribution of political power. Separation among the three branches and distribution between the federal and state governments. Implicit in the founding Constitutional vision was a robust conception of what today goes by the name of civil society (families, churches, voluntary organizations, etc.).

Many on the contemporary Right contend for two additional--and not necessarily consistent--implicit Constitutional presuppositions. First that separation and distribution of powers was biblical in origin and, second,  that it was designed to the end or goal of individual flourishing (often expressed in terms of material prosperity).

The former strikes me as largely correct. Although they admit there is room for doubt, I take William S. Brewbaker III and V. Philips Long, the authors of Chapter 2 of Law and the Bible ("Law and Political Order: Israel's Constitutional History"), to agree: 

Although the claim that the Bible supports a modern conception of separation of powers is the subject of dispute, structural features of the Israelite polity as envisioned in Deuteronomy clearly do place significant limitations on the powers of the king.

The truth of the second assumption is less clear. At least as it pertains to the implicit assumption that the biblical goal of separation and distribution is material flourishing, the authors of Chapter 2 conclude otherwise:

Israel's history is told from a point of view that is in large measure at odds with contemporary approaches to politics. ... The foundational assumption of much contemporary constitutional theory--that humans are capable of engineering a just state structure that can achieve lasting stability by reconciling the competing claims of individuals and groups--is hardly at the forefront of the [biblical historical] narrative. The story of Israel presupposes that God is the Lord of history and that stability or, better yet, blessing and prosperity, are under his righteous control.

The commercialization of the state success has gradually come to assume center stage. Liberty is reconfigured as autonomy and autonomy is, on the Right, frequently conflated with individual economic security. (The contemporary Left vacillates between liberty as sexual autonomy and collective economic security.) Thus, ever-increasing standards of living, a rising gross domestic product, and an improving balance of trade become the summum bonum of state action. Such would have dismayed many of the Constitutional generation and shocked the writers of biblical Israel's history.

(For an alternative conception of liberty not as autonomy--economic or sexual--but as the freedom to follow God's commands, go here to download my article, Looking for Bedrock: Accounting for Human Rights in Classical Liberalism, Modern Secularism, and the Christian Tradition.)