Kimball Shinkoskey

Woods Cross

Experts in the religious world believe the Ten Commandments are a moral code intended to guide the private lives of both Jewish and Christian believers. Have the experts ever been wrong before? Hmm . . . experts for a long time were certain that the earth was flat.

Turns out, modern scholars have noted that the commandments exist in the form of an ancient international treaty document. This is a huge signal that the document is a treaty negotiated between two or more separate and independent political entities, like the very proud twelve individual tribes of Israel.

Those legal commandments were written at the time ancient Israel’s tribes existed in a state of nature. They were without a government and were desperately in need of one after having escaped from Egypt.

In fact, the first draft of a government structure was made by Aaron and clearly aimed at a kind of strong central government enriched by a luxurious, golden-calf-style executive department administrative office. Moses talked the people out of adopting a type of autocracy or monarchy and pointed them toward a decentralized and consensual form of government.

The kind of government ratified at Mt. Sinai can be seen more clearly when we examine what happened when the exodus migrants finally arrived in Canaan. Each tribe had a land allotment afforded to it, where tribal members gathered to make regional decisions for themselves. It cannot be overlooked that for thousands of years ownership of land has been the basis for political power wielded locally. The national government was loosely administered by “prophets,” “priests,” and not until later by “kings.”

The Christian world has long taught the doctrine of the “kingdom of God,” whereby newly baptized converts must rally behind the church of Jesus and believe in his capacity to change lives and activate resurrection after death. This very streamlined and attractive interpretation gives short shrift to the civic teachings of Jesus, based as they were on his very egalitarian social doctrine. Jesus accepted that “in the beginning” God said he formed all human beings in his own “image” and “likeness’ and therefore all were clearly empowered to be capable of self-government.

The denominations of the church tend to think their mission is entirely spiritual and ritualistic, and certainly not civil. They are scared away from political engagement in America by our constitutional prohibition on an established church. They believe their work is “not of this world,” that is, not pertaining to secular matters. They don’t teach the history of western civilization, the history of the church, the culture of first century Palestine, or the political science of Moses, the prophets, and Jesus, all of which point to a different interpretation of their mission. For example, church people today believe the Jerusalem “temple” was a place of worship when in actuality it was the national government office building.

The Christian churches in America have largely sloughed-off the larger community surrounding them because those folks don’t believe in God or go to the proper church. They will provide food, emotional support, and invitations to them to find God, but as far as health care, education, jobs . . . that belongs to the secular world and the secular world is not God’s world. God doesn’t preside over the whole of society like the government does, because Jesus never had anything good to say about government . . . or did he?

Jesus spoke loudly about the Ten Commandments not only in his sermons like the one on the mount, but also in his statement that not “one jot or tittle” of the foundational law of Moses should ever pass away. That is because consensual democratic government is God’s long-ordained system of rule for all human beings on earth.

For me, one of several “ah ha” moments that revealed the Bible as a constitutional history of ancient democratic Israel was the regular and seemingly off-handed mentions in the Hebrew Bible/Christian Old Testament about the gathering of “elders” to make decisions about war. This activity–using representatives to debate and decide whether the nation/tribe should go to war–is historically a pre-eminent indicator of the existence of a functioning democracy.

Another “ah ha” moment was reflecting on the fourth commandment’s mandate to work six days a week and rest the seventh. This addressed God’s concern that human beings work long and hard but also have a day off to study in school or church and participate in civic activity, with the overall goal to avoid falling into economic and political slavery at the hands of an autocrat.