It has been tried in the past and failed miserably. Any society in which the religious minority places severe, and restrictive obligations onto the nominally religious or secular majority is doomed to fail eventually. People don’t like being told what to do in regards to certain areas of their lives, where the rules are easy to live by it is simple to go along. When they begin to affect serious personal, financial, or ethical areas people tend to rebel.
Cite?
I’m pretty sure we’d rapidly run out of stones.
Even the Bible itself does not claim that it should be used as the sole source of law. One of the commandments is actually that people should establish laws and courts to govern themselves, a tacit recognition that the commandments themselves do not constitute a complete body of law.
Christianity arose at a time when the world was largely ruled by non-Christian monarchs, and it appeared that such would ALWAYS be the case.
The earliest leaders of the Church (including St. Paul) simply took it for granted that Christians would always be ruled over by non-Christian governments, and tried to make their peace with those governments. Jesus himself said to render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s, and Paul told his followers to pay their taxes and obey secular laws so long as they were not directly in conflict with the commandments of Jesus.
From the very beginning, Christians were comfortable with the idea that religious law and secular law were two entirely different things. That was NOT the case with Mosaic law or Sharia, both of which were designed to cover almost EVERY aspect of our lives.
Sorry, wrong. The Inquisition sought violators of Canon Law. (Read the article.) The RC Church has never been 100% Bible based. Besides, the Inquisition never really ruled any country.
The Bible is an anthology, not a book of rules. Sure, it contains rules–the Big 10 on down. But there’s also history (or legends with possible historical basis.) And myths–like The Flood–borrowed from other peoples. Plus the poetry–some rather erotic. Besides, the New Testament doesn’t really agree with the Old. Base a society on what Jesus said? What are you, some kind of Commie?
Even the most Fundamentalist of KJV-thumping Protestants actually pick & choose from the Old Testament. How many of them keep kosher?
This is extremely misleading. Certainly the Papacy had little to no direct political authority in Europe (not even in the Papal States), but there is no way you can understand, say, the Holy Roman Empire (at least up to Charles V) without assuming a Papacy with strong political strength in Europe. Not to mention details like the Avignon court, the development of the Inquisition as a judicial institution, and Alexander VI and Julius II’s mercenary armies.
The Popes may not have been “officially” temporal sovereigns, but they sure acted like and were treated as such by other European rulers.
Yes, the Popes were often highly influential. (At other times, they were ignored.)
But the RC Church has never been run on strict Biblical standards.
So what? It’s run on strict religious standards, which is the same thing we’re talking about.
But even in the early days of the Church, thinkers like St. Augustine were already differentiating between “The City of Man” and “The City of God,” and knew that the two provinces weren’t identical.
Has any Muslim thinker of comparable stature ever postulated that religion and secular government are separate sheres?
Islam is similar. If there’s just one set of laws, one shariah, then why are there so many different types of islam? Sunni and shi’ite, just to start with. The Koran is not the end of the story even for devout muslims.
The Bible is incoherent and incomplete as a codification of law, and the incompleteness is magnified by the schism between Jewish rules (keeping kosher, as observed above) and New Testament rules. There are textual reasons for Christians’ abandonment of the Leviticus rules, but that does not make the problem of treating the whole Bible as a codification of law go away. The “render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar, render unto God what belongs to God” thing undermines any attempt to think about the Bible as a fundamentally legal set of rules.
Islam is different. The Koran made significant claims to be prescriptive of behaviour without being burdened by the historical schism I mentioned above between Christianity and OT Judaism, and the Hadith add to that prescriptiveness.
That said, it is interesting to see Islamic law applied in a country that has fundamentally Western traditions. Take Malaysia. Criminal laws are in English, derived from the Stephen Code. But family law is Islamic. Reading family law reports is like reading any other sort of law. There is a head note that sets out the key issues, but then instead of statutory references, there are references to the Koran and the Hadith, which are interpreted using the same intellectual tools as lawyers use elsewhere. And from my certainly incomplete reading of such cases, they seem typically to come to broadly similar conclusions that Western courts would come to, albeit via a different intellectual route.
Golden Rule. That’s the catch-all.
I doubt that’s “the standard Christian thinking”. That’s where there are like 9,000 Mosaic laws.
They are reusable, you know…
Are you under the impression that there are countries where forms of Christianity based upon “reactionary” (I take it that by this you mean “fundamentalist” or “literalist”) interpretations of the Bible are more influential than they are in the United States? :dubious:
+1.
I always tell the abortion protestors who use the Bible as justification to go live in a theocracy. And they have all been the worst governments ever.
Does Calvinist Geneva count?