What is Sovereignty? The Ancient Religious Structures (Sovereignty P.1)

Hello Friends,

This is post #1, so I am still figuring out the format here. I was trying to recall the different things that I have been learning over the course of this week and I must say it was not as much as normal. Based on the verse to give “according to [my] ability[...]” (Ezra 2:68–69), I will give out of what I have this week. 

I was considering a few topics for this week’s tithe:

1. Gut Health and Its Implications for Personhood 

2. The “Space” of the Church through: St. Augustine, Leo Strauss, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer 

3. Indigenous Sovereignty in the Sinophone

I was quite tempted to go with number one, because that has been what my undiagnosed-ADHD-rabbit hole was this week, but when I actually sat and prayed about it I felt impressed upon my heart to explore the 3rd topic. I am currently revising a paper for submission on the same topic so it feels quite like ‘work’ to write about it in the Tithing time, but I realize that this should not be a hindrance. Instead I will give my ‘firstfruit’ (Proverbs 3:9) – ‘sovereignty’ is something which I have put some rigorous and prolonged thought into but have yet to connect directly to my faith. In this article I will first lay out what I have learned about the idea of ‘sovereignty’ in an overview (trying to leave links/citations wherever I can), second draw out how this has been relevant to my academic research, and finally show it relates to God. I have thought very much about the first two, but have only scratched the surface of what this means for my faith.

Also, this has turned out to be a larger undertaking than I initially anticipated, so enjoy the first installment here, which introduces the idea of ‘sovereignty’ and does a deep dive into its ancient roots.

Also, also, for those who don’t want the entire slog, just follow charts and the bolded/larger quotations for the main ideas 

What is Sovereignty? 

“Sovereignty” is the idea of total rule and control. In the political sciences sovereignty has come to “refer[..] to supreme political authority, independent and unlimited by any other power” (Alfred 2005:33). It has always been a topic within Abrahamic theology – the sovereignty of God is total – but has come to take a life of its own in philosophy, political sciences, nation building projects, and post-colonial revolutionaries rhetoric alike. 

Bound up in the political – the most frequently used definition – are a number of assumptions: bounded territory, absolute political rule of said territory, unlimited authority in said territory, authority and legitimacy as justification for said rule. But where do these ideas come from? How did we get here? Why does this political definition carry these assumptions and why do many of us find these assumptions so natural? This requires us to go quite a ways back – to the transition between small scale and archaic religions. 

The Ancient Roots of Sovereignty

Most if not all political structures begin with religious structures. For most of human history, the idea of ‘religion’ did not exist. It wasn’t until ‘secularism’ emerged that we even had this idea of something which was exclusively religious . Up to that point, the entire world was suffused with divine meaning – all things in the religious, moral, and political order were inter-laced and indivisible. They did not exist in separate spheres. This is not just saying that the political authority was also the religious authority, rather it says that the political authority was a necessary part of the cosmological structure and moral order. For those in that time, it was inconceivable for the universe, its meaning, and its order to exist – political or otherwise – without the divine. Some scholars have labelled this view a “cosmo–theism,” where each aspect of the cosmos from the Hills to the seasons to political leaders to knowledge itself all correlate with divine entities. In this world, the entire universe is indivisible from what us moderns would call the ‘religious’. 

So, for example, in Ancient Egypt the Pharaoh was not just the political and religious leader at the same time, but was the political leader and something between a God and Man which upholds the order of the universe. He was the intermediary between Gods and Men. Implicit, here, is a kind of immanence of the supernatural. The Gods in this world are not the Gods of salvific religions today – faraway entities which you cannot directly interact with and are beyond challenge, but exist on a scale of relative power with the Pharaoh being near the Gods. Yet, without the Pharaoh, the order of the world would dissolve the same way that it would if you took away gravity or the Day-Night Cycle. It would be chaos and was largely inconceivable. 

Thus, if one had to find a cause for effect the Pharoh was the political leader because he was a religious figure – but again, this distinction wouldn’t make sense to people in this time. It would most likely be conceived of as power – political, personal and divine all woven together. It is for this divine reason that the Pharaoh was justified to rule (aka what we would call ‘sovereign’) as he saw fit – his mercy in doling out food during times of famine or his wrath during times of personal rage – were justified because he was an absolutely necessary component of the religio-political order. 

A different scholar, Robert N Bellah, contextualizes this structure by comparing across different cultures and across time with an abundance of concrete examples in his magnum opus Religion in Human Evolution. 

Specifically, he shows when and where these more absolute rulers emerged. 

He notes that across cultures, this phenomenon which we would call sovereignty today, emerges when societies increase in size and complexity. Accompanying this shift is size and complexity are more hierarchical organizations of power as well as more intense rituals and greater theorization of myth. In these complex societies, we see the emergence of divine kings or '‘God Kings.’ These are liminal figure who overlaps or lapses-between the unseen world of highest powers (Spirits, Gods, Ancestors, etc.). Still in an direct hierarchy of spiritual power (as opposed to the immeasurable gap between God and Man in, say, the Abrahamic faiths) this is the first point when the leader becomes more God than Man. Thus, with the emergence of the ‘God-King’ figure across societies, a rough equation emerges:

Complexity + Size = Intense Hierarchy

Intense Hierarchy x ‘Cosmotheism’ = Sovereignty*

*the Absolute Rule of Sovereign God-King 

While it is arguable that there have been unequal power structures from the start of time, what we see here is that absolute political power by one person – sovereignty – begins in the transition from Small Scale Religions to ‘Archaic’ Religions’ with the figure of the God-King. In concrete examples, these are complex and populous societies like Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Maya, etc. It seems that wherever scholars look, population density and social complexity leads to intense hierarchical religious/political constructions (again, in within ‘cosmotheistic’ worldview the ‘religious’ sphere does not exist separately from the ‘political’ sphere). These constructions involve a kind of absolute rule which, in Europe, becomes the term ‘sovereignty.’

Here is a nifty graph I made :

So what have we learned:

1. The religious and the political are intimately intertwined

2. The term ‘sovereign’ is actually extraordinary ancient and originates with the figure of the ‘God-King.’

I am still getting used to all of the formatting and workflow for this, so I will wrap this post up for this week. Until the next tithe!

Questions for the next installment….

• Immediate Question: How does ancient sovereignty transform into the sovereign nation which we know today? 

• Big Question: How does all of this have to do with my faith?