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When sovereignty belongs to God, are rulers more limited or less?

Tal Rosen Fellow
· 5 replies
Power & the stateChineseIslamicJewishConfucianismMenciusMuhammad Iqbal#divine-sovereignty#kingship#limits-of-rule#mandate-of-heaven
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Hebrew and Arabic, the two languages I work between, carry traditions that both, at various points, said that sovereignty ultimately belongs to God. I've noticed that the same premise has been used to reach opposite conclusions.

In 1 Samuel 8 the people ask Samuel for a king "like all the nations". Samuel is displeased, and God tells him that it is not Samuel they have rejected, but God himself. Samuel then warns them what a king will take from them: their sons, their daughters, their fields. Here divine sovereignty is a check: human kingship is a concession, viewed with suspicion. Deuteronomy's law of the king makes the same point by limiting what the king may accumulate and requiring him to keep a copy of the law.

Al-Mawardi, as I understand from a reading group here, treats the caliph's authority as delegated and conditional, which also sounds like a limit.

But "divine right" has also been used the other way: James VI of Scotland, in The True Law of Free Monarchies (1598), argued that kings answer to God alone and not to their subjects. There, God's sovereignty shields the ruler from everyone else.

So, an open question: does locating sovereignty in God tend to limit rulers, or to empower them? Or does it depend entirely on who gets to say what God requires?

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5 answers

  1. Ji-woo Ryu

    Fellow

    The Chinese Mandate of Heaven is a striking case, because it's explicitly conditional. Heaven grants the mandate to a dynasty and withdraws it when the ruler fails the people. Mencius goes very far: asked whether it was acceptable for a subject to kill his king, he says he has heard of punishing the "mere fellow" Zhou, but not of killing a ruler. A tyrant has stopped being a ruler. Mencius also quotes an old text saying Heaven sees as the people see and hears as the people hear. That's divine sovereignty used as a weapon against bad rulers.

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  2. Hamza Qureshi

    Fellow

    Pakistan's Objectives Resolution of 1949 begins by saying that sovereignty over the universe belongs to God alone, and that the authority exercised by the people within the limits He prescribes is a sacred trust. It was meant to combine divine sovereignty with democracy: God is sovereign, the people are trustees, the state exercises delegated authority. Iqbal, earlier, had suggested in his Reconstruction that the power of independent legal reasoning could be transferred from individual jurists to an elected Muslim legislative assembly.

    So in that tradition divine sovereignty was meant to limit everyone, ruler and people alike. Tal's last question is the hard one: everything depends on who interprets the limits.

  3. Ikechukwu Anyanwu

    Fellow

    Christianity has both strands in the same New Testament. Romans 13 says every authority is from God, which was used for centuries to counsel obedience. Acts 5 has the apostles telling the council that they must obey God rather than men, which was used for centuries to justify resistance. Aquinas holds both: authority is from God, and an unjust command has no claim on conscience. The premise is the same; what decides is whether you treat God's sovereignty as lending authority to the ruler or as standing over him.

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    1. Tal Rosen

      Fellow

      Ikechukwu, that is the distinction I was groping for: sovereignty that lends versus sovereignty that stands over. Samuel's God stands over; James's God lends. And Hamza's Objectives Resolution tries to make God stand over everyone while lending to the people, which is an interesting third shape.

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  4. Bilal Rashid

    Fellow

    I'd add a note of caution from inside the tradition. The modern idea of God's sovereignty (hakimiyya) as a political slogan has sometimes been used to say that ordinary politics, with its compromises and votes, is itself illegitimate. Classical jurists like al-Mawardi were more modest: they wrote about delegation, conditions and the public good. The more loudly someone claims to speak for God's sovereignty, the more carefully I want to ask who checks him.

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