"There, that settles it!" The Protestant cheers as he raises his arms into the air and begins to shake up the bottle of champagne. Christian monarchism is refuted! I can maintain the error of my pro-democratic ways! Back to my Methodist Church and their doctrine of representative democracy! You lose, heathen pious orthodox Christian and your king!
Hang on. There's a lot missing that the Protestant fails to unpack. The whole point of the text to begin with is that Israel demanded a king. It was the people that wanted the king. Before their rejection of Samuel, the point of Israel's statehood was to always be governed by God. There was nothing against having a king! In fact, going back in time, we read...
When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, “I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,” you may indeed set over you a king whom the Lord your God will choose. One of your own community you may set as king over you; you are not permitted to put a foreigner over you, who is not of your own community. Even so, he must not acquire many horses for himself, or return the people to Egypt in order to acquire more horses, since the Lord has said to you, “You must never return that way again.” And he must not acquire many wives for himself, or else his heart will turn away; also silver and gold he must not acquire in great quantity for himself. When he has taken the throne of his kingdom, he shall have a copy of this law written for him in the presence of the levitical priests. It shall remain with him and he shall read in it all the days of his life, so that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, diligently observing all the words of this law and these statutes, neither exalting himself above other members of the community nor turning aside from the commandment, either to the right or to the left, so that he and his descendants may reign long over his kingdom in Israel. (Deut. 17:14-20)
Wait? This was actually already intimated. God already had established a monarchial law. It seems that he intended for Israel to take on a king but much different than the other nations. Indeed, a Christian monarchy is supposed to be governed much differently. The problem is that Israel was going through what John Keble referred to as a "National Apostasy". From his sermon with the same name, he reflects on the consequences of Saul's immorality and his leading of Israel astray.
To this purpose it may be worth noticing, that the ill-fated chief, whom God gave to the Jews, as the prophet tells us, in His anger (Hosea xiii. II), and whose disobedience and misery were referred by himself to his 'fearing the people, and obeying their voice' (I Sam. xv. 24), whose conduct, therefore, may be fairly taken as a sample of what public opinion was at that time supposed to require, his first step in apostasy was, perhaps, an intrusion on the sacrificial office (I Sam. xiii. 8-14), certainly an impatient breach of his engagement with Samuel, as the last and greatest of his crimes was persecuting David, whom he well knew to bear God's special commission. God forbid, that any Christian land should ever, by her prevailing temper and policy, revive the memory and likeness of Saul, or incur a sentence of reprobation like his. But if such a thing should be, the crimes of that nation will probably begin in infringement on Apostolical Rights ; she will end in persecuting the true Church ; and in the several stages of her melancholy career, she will continually be led on from bad to worse by vain endeavours at accommodation and compromise with evil. Sometimes toleration may be the word, as with Saul when he spared the Amalekites ; sometimes state security, as when he sought the life of David; sometimes sympathy with popular feeling, as appears to have been the case, when violating solemn treaties, he attempted to exterminate the remnant of the Gibeonites, in his zeal for the children of Israel and Judah (2 Sam. xxi. 2). Such are the sad but obvious results of separating religious resignation altogether from men's notions of civil duty. (Keble, "National Apostasy")
Keble, writing in 1833, compares the situation of the early Israelite monarchy with his present state of affairs in the Church of England. Of course, if you are Catholic, you'd state the Church of England was already in apostasy when it split from Rome. I'm a former High Anglican so I do hold some sympathies toward the early English Reformed Church. Keble is witnessing an undergoing change of churchmen abandoning the faith and becoming more and more involved with the state nature of the relationship. They are wandering away from an Apostolic Faith in civil governance and doing away with the Church. "[A] nation, having for centuries acknowledged, as an essential part of its theory of government, that, as a Christian nation, she is also a part of Christ's Church, and bound, in all her legislation and policy, by the fundamental rules of that Church the case is, I say, conceivable, of a government and people, so constituted, deliberately throwing off the restraint, which in many respects such a principle would impose on them, nay, disavowing the principle itself" (Keble). Keble is observing a radical separation of Church and state in England. Of course, England was a monarchy. He never advocates for the overthrow of a monarchy! "Submission and order are still duties. They were so in the days of pagan persecution ; and the more of loyal and affectionate feeling we endeavour to mingle with our obedience, the better." Keble is not keen to overthrowing or going into revolution.
Going back to the Israelite monarchy, the point of the text is not to rebuke the Israelites for having wanted a king. The point is to rebuke the Israelites for having rejected God as king. "They have not rejected you [Samuel] but they have rejected me from being king over them" (1 Sam. 8:7). The challenge, far from being a rebuke of monarchism, is actually a rebuke of populism and democracy. Of the kind that the Methodist Church likes to embrace where it votes and decides what it thinks the Holy Spirit is saying and chooses doctrine that way. Or the nature of our current spineless leadership in the Catholic Church with all these Protestant-style synods taking votes on the nature of doctrine. That is the kind of National Apostasy that John Keble warned of. Truth is not a democracy. Truth is a person that we are in relationship with. Truth is not on the side of liberal regressivism. Truth is Jesus Christ. Truth is on the side of the Church. It is always a monarch's job to preserve the Truth and be found in relationship with the Truth, otherwise, he cannot govern properly.
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