The Book of Kings and the Divine Politics of an Empty Throne

Icon of Christ's Empty Throne, "Hetimasia", and Warrior Saints at the Louvre

"And he came thither unto a cave, and lodged there; and, behold, the word of the Lord came to him, and he said unto him, What doest thou here, Elijah? And he said, I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts: for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away. And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out, and stood in the entering in of the cave. And, behold, there came a voice unto him, and said, What doest thou here, Elijah?" 

- I Kings 12:9-13

By Bp. Joseph Boyd (Ancient Church of the West)

In Ancient Christian iconography, like Sakyamuni in pre-Gandharian Buddhism, Christ was often depicted by an Empty Throne, the "Hetimasia", a King who was depicted as present by being conspicuously absent from His Throne. In the book of Kings we have the same struggle understanding the role of authority in this Theocracy-turned-Kingdom, the unique experience of finding the Divine in a still, small voice, and the role that culture and expectations played in holding it all together in dynamic tension. God, for the most part, is absent, but His very absence shows that He is present. This pregnant emptiness was the experience of Moses on Mount Sinai, where the darkness hid the presence of God and in which God revealed His Law, and is the biblical foundations for the theology of negation, that would be called "Apophasis" in the Eastern Tradition of Christianity. 

The Book of Kings is a problem for the modernist mentality. For one, it’s very title puts two concepts together that we would rather see separated – A Book of History and Kingly Cultural Authority. We believe in the “Separation of Academia and State”. Books are supposed to be uncensored, objective, free of propaganda, factually accurate, and above all, they are to be based in material reality – unless, of course, they are works of fiction, in which case, they must be clearly marked! Kings are out of style, too, because we disbelieve in “Divine Right” and prefer instead to believe in “Human Rights” (without discussing why these rights exist, are inalienable, and how they reflect reality). We believe that States rule better when they represent the people, but which people and how they represent them is still a question for most governments, and surprisingly, with the high degree of universality and mutual intelligibility of the kingly system, just about every country has a different view of what actually makes a democracy. 

Christian theology has been overrun with “Westerners”, by men who believe that “non-contradiction” means something, and who believe history is something that occurs outside of men’s minds, and who vainly attempt to “set things straight” according to “what actually happened”. This is unfortunate, because the composers of the Holy Scriptures obviously did not hold such a view of history, but believed what people thought was the obvious reality. Thus, while the writers of Scripture record a history of what people thought about history, we attempt to correct that history by writing history without acknowledging the intermediary presence of human intelligence, writing as if we were objective, unswayed by emotion, and completely truthful to the material reality. This view of writing, and reading, however, is false… it has never actually happened. Until matter itself can write, erasing the intermediation of the human intellect, our textual accounts can never cease to be records of human thought, symbols of occurrences continually one step removed from the “Thing in Itself”. What must we do to remedy the situation? The Church must engage with the wisdom of the Eastern Cultures of India and China, two societies that have maintained vibrantly non-Western ways of thinking until recently. Within the ethos of the non-Western mentality lies a unique understanding of the nature of reality.

The Book of Kings consists of a record of divine revelation in a historical political setting, based on two profound concepts that require two things of the reader: 1) a cultural orientation that is connected to the story in a racial or religious way (the author assumes that the reader cares that Israel diverged from the Covenant made by God with the Hebrews through Abraham and Moses), and 2) a history that assumes this connection to be good and valuable, and that will define linguistic terms by this cultural connection. Within these basic parameters we have two elements of an age-old controversy of “how to understand”, between literal and figurative, between historic and theoric, between “Antiochian” and “Alexandrian” emerge to form a new synthesis in which “history” is a cultural category of self-understanding and “theory” is an understanding of that ethereal space, a combined consciousness, that is formed by this shared history and self definition. Both are not dependent on an Aristotelian understanding of the universe, or upon the materialist logic of the current scientific paradigm. Both were not intended as separate from one another. Both are effected by observation, just as quantum particles shift their places when they become the focus of attention, they both conform to scientific presumptions when a culture of science examines them, but they are not originally dependent upon such a worldview, and the contemporary assumptions (so obvious to us now as we read the text) that disconnect myth from reality, and reality from perception were nowhere apparent to those who were the intended audience of the prophetic record, who composed, edited, re-edited, and saw no problems with combinational methods of the Welhausen hypothesis and the assertion of absolute accuracy, infallibility, and inerrancy. Current scholarship sees this as somehow scandalous, as if the writers were “Forgers”, “writing in the name of God for political power”, never realizing that not only did the ancients believe political power came from God, but it was the highest expression of the culture, which made it the highest revelation of “truth” – the Sacradotum and Emperium of the Byzantine world. In the ancient world, much like with contemporary Indian Dalits and poor Chinese farmers, the world of the grand cultural and political narrative and the world of personal and familial experience were circularly referential, abiding in a cloudy identity of densely packed associations and ideas that could not be unpacked, since they existed only in a compound state. To question the reality of the thought world inherited from the ancestors is just as preposterous as a secularist questioning the existence of matter – it can be done, but the culture assumes that you are crazy for doing it!  

The Empty Throne in the Arian Baptistry, Ravenna, Italy

In our contemporary view, it is easy to describe the message of the Book of Kings as a “dethroning” of the human authority, as a continuation of an antagonistic relationship between God and “the people”, started during the reign of Saul and continued through the contradictions of the reign of Solomon. Many would interpret this as the central message of the Old Testament, and would use this to point towards the resolution of literary dissonance in the person of Christ, who, prophetically in the Person of David, would reign as a “Perfect King” – an idea that seems to be an antimony of opposites held together only by Godhood. It is commonly taught that this is the primary message of the Old Testament prophets, pointing to the failures of the king as a way to discredit and discard the institution as innately corrupt. In this view, the dichotomy is between God’s rule and Man’s rule, between God’s Law and Man’s Sin. This, unfortunately, is an apologetic for a modern political attitude derived from an ancient text, and it is highly doubtful that such an understanding was ever inferred by the original culture in which the Scripture was received. 

The typical prophetic voice of the Book of Kings is a formulaic stating of “if/then” as a bid for belief and action. Contrary to what later generations of “literalists” have insisted, then, the prophetic word was not incontrovertible or prophetic in the sense that it told the future, but was itself conditional! It is the simultaneous proclamation of a blessing and a curse, forcing a choice, conveyed to a person already at the center of a cultural web of relationships, based on their natural talents and charisma, which becomes the motivation of that person to succeed in establishing themselves as an authority – the cultural authority already exists, but the prophecy is the motivation to act! These blessing/curse prophecies move the culture along, providing the mythic drive to the Grand Narrative of the group in telling and retelling its own tales. Based on this blessing, the prospective king makes his successful bid for the throne, undoing the previous dynasty because of its “sins”, yet because of the “curse” we also know from the historical context that this sin is in everyone, making it impossible for one ruler to be better than another. Yet, the Scripture is clear that the seeds of destruction were sown at this stage in some form of oversight or lack of zealousness on the part of the new king, which are the “sins” of the king himself. A cycle of birth and death, rise and fall, and of dynastic flux is established by the contrasting characters of King and Prophet in the Book of Kings that will define both the Prophetic Books of the Bible, and ultimately, form the Christian Traditions recognition of the Messiah, who functions by bringing together both of these capacities perfectly within His Person. When the prophets foretell a worthy king, they are foretelling an eschatological contradiction that points beyond history and into the realm of theoria – the Platonic forms that exist, not in a “World of Forms”, but in the inherited cultural consciousness.

We believe today that we can prove that sacred texts “evolved” and that in so doing, they supposedly disprove “revelation”, showing how the text reflect the historical, cultural, and political needs of the day, instead of actually functioning on the level of independent revelation. But, if it didn’t intend to reflect such a material reality, could it not qualify as “revelation” – To “disincarnate” by leaving the realm of time and space, the flow of history, this prophetic word would be, as the Chinese say, a “Heavenly Book”, implying that no one could read it or follow its directives because it would lack any connection to our situation as humans. Revelation, therefore, must have to do with human life, and human life is derived from family relationships and shared culture, and these are the qualities that are quantified in language, which the text depends on for intelligibility. Thus, revelation must be a cultural construct, presented within time and space, in place (with people), or, at least, fit within the context and operation of culture as a narrative. Therefore, to prove that a text evolved is also not important. 

If the political and cultural reality of the scriptural context is correctly understood, there is no contradiction in the mythical narrative, the historical context, and the revelation of the text. “Evolution”, “Compilation”, or “Real Authorship” means nothing – because the Author is not the authority in the relationship between text and reader, but the reader. And who is the reader’s authority? The authority is the reader’s culture, his relationships, and the assumed history that stands behind the reader. A reader can only “Hear” what he already knows, and his knowledge is never his own, but is the result of an intricate inheritance that reflects the shared experience of all the generations that have lived within the definition of a particular language. The text functions as an extension of words, and words are defined by mutual agreement within the culture, dependent upon a shared common narrative. Even if a Text WAS written by the author who claims to write it, it’s meaning is derived from the culture, not the author. Therefore, the goal of Scriptural Revelation and was not the bequeathing of texts, but was the formation of a cultural milieu. 

History provides meaning, forming the lexical associations of the words, and determines what meaning is derived as the community negotiates the meaning and application of the text. The meaning, therefore, is not in the text. The meaning resides in the community. Therefore, it is impossible for any text to be “literal”, a self-referential piece of revelation that imparts new information or understanding on the hearer. The hearers always hear what they already know, precluding “revelation” as a category; and what they know is determined by the culture’s shared experience, and what the culture recognizes as its experience (and ultimately what the individual recognizes as their own meaning) is determined by history. Therefore, Scripture is in the process of defining history for the community, so that its prophetic word will be understood within this supposed basis, communicating a message that is transformational within this context.

Modern Russian Icon of the "Empty Throne"

All traditional cultures have meshed the natural and the supernatural order in the picture of one man, the ruler, and they have all seen the transcendent possibilities of the individual imagination and the practical needs of the community as meeting in a seemingly “Platonic” imbuing of meaning of Eternal Information into temporal forms - applications that are formed by time and place, but which point back to one, truly universal, origin. Therefore, the society of the Great Tradition becomes a pathway towards eternity, towards truth, a God who is Ultimately Unknowable, the Great Mystery, and each individual can be truly fulfilled in the temporal and practical relationships of this world, while contemplating the existence of that which is beyond human ability to comprehend. 

The triad of God, King, and City (of which the Temple and Palace are the defining features) is universally evident, not only in the Ancient World of the Bible, but also up to the Modern Period in the Far East. These three manifestations of authority, one eternal and undefined, one temporal and reflective (iconic), binding together the world before creation and future reconciliation of all things, and the last a practical and economic incarnation of the life of the people are always present in human society. While they have been abstracted within the current system, are still present in their basic operational principles, in which the universe is God, science is king, and our culture of “progress” is a practical economic outplaying of these systems within the dynamic of human relationships, law, and exchange. 

This is where the Tradition of mankind over the last five thousand years has diverged from our thinking, as of the last five hundred years. Now, we see “truth” as a hard category attached to material existence, only being true if something “happened” – while the Asian mentality is that truth may occur in one’s mind by reading an account, even if the account never “happened”. We do not see that “Truth” is a position that is defined by cultural beliefs, “Truth” is a relational category that juxtapositions the Unknowable as the highest category and the ultimate good with the mundane and broken of the material world in our experience. Truth is also what has been agreed upon by the culture as their shared heritage, and it only exists in the duality of a shared imagination in a less-than-perfect world. Its place within this group mind, this agreed space of psychological history, is where the reality of the event or idea exists, where the locus of truth resides. Even real events (real in the Western sense of actually having occurred along a specific timeline of time and place) have no meaning without assuming their place within this cultural consciousness, existing only in a thought-world apart from this temporal reality. Buddhism, in particular, shows us how similar religions that are dependent only upon mind, and those that claim to be dependent only upon “history” truly are – they develop the same narratives, the same rituals, and the same necessities, only differing in that Buddhism knows that most of its history is an allegory and fundamentalist Protestantism strongly believes that its history is completely material. Eastern Christianity is graced by a more balanced approach to this dichotomy, seeing both the inner cultural consciousness and the historic unfolding of the world as significant and mutually dependent on human relationships and understanding.

This idea of “agreement as truth” is expressed in the Chinese saying, “We Hear the Meaning without Remembering the Words” (忘言得意), or the Tibetan Buddhist concept of “Tulpa”, which is the idea that a belief can become an actual physical reality for persons or groups who believe strongly enough. (The Tibetan term “Tulpa” (སྤྲུལ་པ) in Sanskrit is called “Nirmana” (निर्माण), the opposite of the more famous concept of “Nirvana” (निर्वाण), which is the ability to extinguish the illusion or the delusion of human culture and history, seeing through to the true Cause and Effect of the Sublime Nothingness, while the former concept is the ability to “Construct Reality” through the exertion of mind and will in the process of creating culture.) Thus, reality is defined by people agreeing, believing, and creating expression of this reality around themselves, and this reality is primarily formed by the public recitation of a culture’s foundational text. The core of the cult experience is the study, memorization, discussion, and recitation of the mythic history of the culture, creating a feedback loop between culture and text, as an authoritative cross-referencing from whence all other experiences are derived. Some might call this circular reasoning, but only for those who do not recognize the physical and psychological reality that culture creates. Both of these processes exist within the culture, dependent upon the historical reality of relational communion (“κοινωνία”) now. Text only informs within the continuity of culture, and its power is broken if its formative culture disappears. This is the struggle of Greek Christian usage of the Old Testament, which must, due to its contextual and cultural break with the Jewish categories and expectations, introduce a different way of looking at the text as a valid alternative, presupposing the “equality of culture” and the preparation of the Holy Spirit in the context of pagan cultures. St. Paul said, “For we are all His offspring” (τοῦ γὰρ καὶ γένος εἰμέν) as he quoted the pagan poet Aratus's Phaenomena. This is how the predominantly allegorical method of interpretation came into being, first by Philo of Alexandria’s desire to see Greek philosophical categories illustrated in a Jewish context (thus proving the universality of said characteristics), and secondly by St. John the Theologian and St. Paul of Tarsus’ realization that the Hebrew Covenant had become universal through Christ, and that pagan categories were prepared for Christ in the same way in which Hebrew Revelation was prepared. Thus, the major hermeneutic became the superimposition of Christ’s Life over the Old Testament as a template, and then conforms the narrative and qualities of the Old Testament as “shadow” and “type” upon the text. Christ himself said, “Search the Scriptures, for they testify of me…” (John 5:39) Thus, a shift took place as the Law was detached from the “Word” as the purpose of God’s revelation, and the Word became the Philosophical Logos (λόγος) of Heraclitas and Plato, and the “Wisdom” (חָכְמָה) of the Hebrew Sages was equated with the pre-existent Christ. By this shift in meaning the definition of “righteousness” and “justification” were no longer in conformity to the legal cultural norms of the Jewish People, nor was an outward identification with their heritage, spiritual vision, or race (through discarding circumcision and ritual separation from other nations) a definitive point of “truth”, but now depended upon a relationship with God through the Incarnate Christ. Christianity transformed the Old Testament by interpreting it outside of its own stated context, creating a new hermeneutic and separating Christianity from Judaism forever.  This can be clearly seen in the λόγος σπερματικός of St. Justin Martyr, which was pictured not only, as in the Stoic sense, as the ordering principle of the universe, but the Word working in Nature to impart life, His Image and Likeness, on the world. It must either cease from relevance, like the ancient mystery cults, or form a new culture – as Greek appropriation did with the Hebrew Scriptures. Personal application of this history of revelation becomes an individualized “revelation” itself, and is the primary avenue through which the individual “experiences God”, through the iconic forms, contrived story-lines, and agreed definitions (creeds) which he inherits. 

In our current culture, it is illegitimate to have a human authority figure who plays the iconic role of “sewing together the worlds” within human society (The Confucian adage of a king being “He who unites heaven and earth” 三串為王), a “Son of God”. Authority is understood on “real” terms, “given” by the people, rather than “taken” by the mandate of heaven. But this is a modern concept, far removed from the iconic terms of Ancient and Eastern cultures. The contemporary Western mentality is not as flexible or as realistic as the ancient view – while the King never REALLY was the Son of God, in the way that the West classifies “Reality” (meaning an Aristotelian derivative of the physical world), he functioned within the culture in this way, the culture’s very acceptance of his term and function allowing him to do his job, and that function manifested the eternal, because it brought together the realm of human experience in the material world with the realm of human experience in the speculative, imaginative, and ecstatic worlds - the physical and metaphysical could therefore reflect one another, relate to one another, and thus order the world! Our world has become disjointed and imbalanced with the acceptance of a material definition of reality, our culture’s have become easily manipulated, and their commonalities (the elision of the spiritual and political, the ritual expression of man’s highest forms of associative meaning, and the ability to see the material world filled with an Eternal Spirit) have been minimized, so that they lose their overarching similarities. 

Summery

The Kingdom of Israel is one of the most remarkable topics in the Old Testament, consisting of a pagan people and political system that is drawn, warned, and ultimately judged by Yahweh for disregarding an ancient covenant that they did not recognize or believe in. The Lockian social contract of Israel was "lower taxes", a result of the spendthrift oppression of the Davidic Dynasty, which had used temple building for Yahweh (something that God said He did not want and certainly did not need) as an excuse for oppression and monumental edifice complexes, tributes to the glory of man! God was used as a part of social manipulation and control, a way to raise taxes, and thus, the people were no longer willing to see the religious life of the temple as a necessity or as a part of their life. Thus misinterpreted, God went about to prove that He was not that kind of God - He worked through un-ordained, untrained prophets, met his people in high places, and revealed Himself in the "still, small voice". This passage is central to Kings, as is the experience, relationship, and anointing of Elijah and Elisha, because it provides a context for the entire thesis of the two books - God is not in the grand or fearful, He is not confined to any place, and He is not only to be served by grandiose rituals (but ultimately as empty as the thunder or earthquake). God is not dependent upon dominant cultural narratives (they were all but absent in the Northern Kingdom), and He is not dependent upon place, upon "communion" (Israel was in "schism" with Judah), and called Israel regardless of their "orthodoxy" - Israel was, by its syncretism and forgetfulness, full of the "heresy" of the pagan world. And yet, God did not forget Israel, the covenant He had with them, or the way in which this previous connection tied them to His plan for His people. He is on any mountain that He calls "Holy" - such as the substitution of Sinai for Horeb (Popularly understood to be Mount Carmel in Haifa, although some scholars think that this is Mount Sinai), and He comes in an inner voice and inner light, two things that, regardless of their insignificance compared to gilded temples in Jerusalem, are REAL and can challenge the society's deepest held values. This chronicle is a witness to the reality of God's "ecumenicity" - His love and concern for those who have left Covenant, Tradition, Temple and Sacrifice. He calls them many times to return, before they are "carried off to Assyria", at which time there will be no hope of return.

Icon of the Empty Throne at the First Council of Constantinople, 381AD

The prophetic voice of the Book of Kings proves that there is might and power in the small and seemingly insignificant, that authority is given by the cultural context, and that, rather than an empty construct or a meaningless institution, this projected meaning is absolutely necessary for human thriving and individual purpose. Kings rule from this throne with borrowed authority. God is present and felt, without any bright lights, fanfare or incense. It is the empty throne, the Hetimasia, the depiction of the Undepictable Divinity, from which God rules in the whisper, the rustling, of the still, small voice. As in the Tabernacle of in the Wilderness, silence marks off its holiness. As on the Mountain with Moses, darkness hides what God choses not to reveal, for we could not see His true glory and live. Out of the darkness, the smoke, the silence, comes the revelation of God's person, and we glimpse Him from the empty cleft of the rock.