From monarch to bishop: Covenant, Torah, and community formation in the Old Testament and the Anglican Communion

The Monarchical Role of Bishops

So what is the relationship of these biblical models to the issues of our conference? If we think in terms of contemporary leadership, the Davidic king as depicted in ideal form in the person of Josiah, most resembles the office of bishop. Indeed, it could be argued that there is a diachronic connection between the ancient Israelite office of king, the Second Temple office of high priest, and the early church office of bishop, in which each of these offices can be understood in certain senses to succeed the prior one. Scriptural interpretation played an integral role in shaping how early Jews and Christians conceived of these offices, but an adequate treatment of this complex development would take me beyond the limits of my allotted space, not to mention the limits of my scholarly discipline.11 Rather, I will focus directly on the portrayals of Josiah as the ideal Davidic king and the ways in which they might serve as a model for contemporary bishops.

The first point to make is that King Josiah is considered an excellent monarch in both Kings and Chronicles. He steers the via media which locates the middle path between the decentralized power of Israelites vested in kinship relations and the centralized and hierarchical authority represented by the king's office. He honors both the Mosaic and Davidic covenants, the first of which emphasizes a holy people and its kinship bonds, while the second emphasizes a holy office, held by the person of the Davidic monarch. Of course, the parallels are inexact. To state the most obvious, in a post-Constantinian world, no bishop serves as head of state, nor are there precedents for the House of Bishops and the House of Deputies in our biblical accounts. At the time Kings and Chronicles were written in Hebrew, democracy was still a Greek word; the all-important encounter between Judaism and Hellenistic culture had not yet occurred. A number of other cultural and historical differences distance us from the scriptural model. Yet bracketing the civil role of king, we may still consider the biblical model to have some relevance for the contemporary role and function of the bishop.

Here are several affirmations:

(1) The bishop holds a holy office that is meant to be a bearer of the tradition and a guardian of the faith. Growth, unity, and stability of the polity are the chief responsibilities of the bishop. The bishop is both a sign of unity within the Anglican Communion and must actively work toward ecumenical reconciliation. The portrait of Josiah in Chronicles points particularly to this reconciliation, in that Chronicles heightens the role of Josiah in summoning "all Israel," both the southern kingdom and the disenfranchised northern kingdom, to participate in the Passover and covenant-making ceremony in Jerusalem. Indeed, the view of bishop painted here is one who is engaged in unifying the polity and who is actively engaged in an evangelical effort attuned to extending the reach of the gospel.12 In this sense, we can also learn something not only from this scriptural portrayal, but also from the perspective of our fellow Lutherans on the episcopate. Article 17 of the document "Called to Common Mission," which articulates the relationship of full communion between the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, expresses the following view of the episcopate: