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THE POLITICAL USE OF THE BIBLE IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN:
image, and therefore, even the heathen could discern
and declare God’s truth. Grace can restore Nature to its
God-ordained place.
Milton prioritised the Gospel over the Mosaic Judicials
and sought to extend the benefits of church reformation
to civil government, and hence, institutional limitations
on civil magistrates. The Judicials combined the
ecclesiastical with the civil, which the Gospel sundered,
explaining why he never looked to the old priestly and
Levitical pattern for England’s civil model. Nevertheless,
the Gospel dispensation never removed the prominence
of the Law’s moral authority, which still maintained
jurisdiction over men. It now operated as an internal
regulator of conscience as opposed to a legislative sword
wielded by magistrates. The Gospel dispensation also
elevated regenerate man’s faculties to approximate
God’s more perfect pattern, transformed him from a
slave to a son, and sensitised him to the nature of true
Christian liberty. Milton’s proposal of restricted
elections and governing qualifications is more easily
understood in light of this; those most acquainted with
Christian liberty are its best keepers!
The significant political features of Milton’s model
commonwealth are a unicameral federated republic with
a standing senate, local judicatures, and a limited
political franchise. These features are linked to his
political reading of biblical texts directing attention back
to God’s divinely ordained commonwealth and Christ’s
command against gentile lordship. Milton understood
Deuteronomy 17:14-18, 1 Samuel 8:10-19, and
Matthew 20:25-28 as divine civil commands and
warnings emanating from both the Father and the Son,
and hence continuous and mutually supportive. For
lawful rule to proceed, and liberty to prevail, England’s
civil settlement must be divested of any remnants of
lordship or absolute human authority. Milton
remained loyal to these political readings through the
successive Interregnum administrations, contradicting
common assertions that he was a second-rate political
theorist, or that he spun them out unreflectively in
moments of civil crises.
Milton’s readings of Deuteronomy 17 and 1 Samuel 18,
combined with his understanding of Gospel liberty, can
also be summarised as anti-monarchy and anti-lordship,
popular sovereignty and the liberty of civil choice, and
the lordship of God as England’s only governor and
king. His unique civil reading of Matthew 20:25-28 as a
warning against the “gentilizing” effect of kingship
represents his most prominent New Testament political
text for establishing a free commonwealth form
incorporating a perpetual senate of servant leadership
devoid of king and House of Lords. Milton
manipulated his translation of this passage in The readie
and easie way to enforce the impending threat of regal
tyranny in contrast to the liberty-serving leadership of a
perpetual senate. His powerful political combinations of
the Matthew text with Deuteronomy 17 and 1 Samuel 8
enforced his emphasis upon God’s dissatisfaction of
Israel’s choice of “heathenish government,” which
embodied a king as lord and tyrant. Milton stressed
that Israel’s civil choice of a king was ruinous, and an
example Christ instructed his disciples to avoid, not
imitate; a radical contradiction of the political position
of his royalist contenders.
Milton’s understanding of Romans 13:1-5 and
1 Peter 13:13-16 clarify his view of the divine origin and
purpose of civil government, as well as its lawful use.
Though he never employs them textually in his model,
they represent a pervasive undercurrent of civil
limitation.
Finally, Milton did not construe contemporary civil
exemplars from Jewish magistrates. Instead, he extracted
the great divinely ordained framework of the Hebrew
Commonwealth while embracing the Gospel’s
jurisdictional distinctions between church and state.
The exact nature of this pattern might be inferred from
his constant references to God ordaining a
commonwealth for the Jews, acting as their supreme
magistrate and governor, and without any human
magistrate competing or acquiring a civil capacity equal
to His own. The most relevant political principle to be
institutionalised in England was God’s sovereignty and
absolute lordship. Since the Hebrew Commonwealth
also contained the Jewish Sanhedrin which seemed to
sit perpetually, Milton may have had this in mind when
considering the perpetual nature of his own senate. It
still remains to be seen if the local dimension of his
form was extracted at all from Israel’s court system.
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