I wrote a longer version of this, which explains all of this more fully. I thought it was good to offer something shorter and more concise, so I wrote this.
These posts were responding to the question "How could it be a good thing for there not to be a king?", occasioned by a Twitter conversation about the last verse in Judges, and how a libertarian found the kinglessness described there to be good, while my non-libertarian interlocutor did not.
What I did after the exchange was attempt to write up my reactions to that question and the exchange off the top of my head. It took me a couple of days and was long. (The later part of the post is mostly concerned with "establishedness", as will be explained below, but in this initial part I considered other topics as well, like comparing the value of a "hands-off" legislative king rather than a "hands-on" direct-ruling king.) This first reaction part fairly directly relates to the original conversation.
Then I realized that the subject (God, kingship, judgeship) demanded that I read the Bible to see if what I thought off the top of my head could be supported with the Bible. So I read Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and the first 11 chapters of 1 Kings (the reign of Solomon). I wanted to see what the Bible said about disestablishedness (Judges) and establishedness (Solomon) and the period in between (1 and 2 Samuel). I was trying to understand why God might have preferred the Judges days, and I thought that establishedness might be a big part of the answer. (Establishedness being something connecting to psychology, politics, and ontology, which could all be foundations of a person's spirituality.)
"Establishedness" as I use it is "how things are put together, that they are a thing, their fullness and wealth, certainty and settledness, stability, order" and similar things. "Disestablishedness" is "hunger, lack, longing, poverty, confusion, incompleteness, being ostracized, questioning, striving" and similar things.
(Looking back, I see that the real issue at stake between me and my interlocutor in our original conversation probably wasn't literal earthly kingship, but rather something king-like or something judge-like in non-monarchical (liberal democratic?) government, or in the valueset associated with kingship or judgeship as found in culture, even culture far away from government itself. I would say now that maybe the difference between "king" values and "judge" values is "more establishedness" and "less establishedness", respectively.)
I found that I could make a case for establishedness and disestablishedness each being "mixed" things (things which call for ambivalence), and that disestablishedness of some sort is needed to break bad establishedness. Bad establishedness leads to spiritual unfaithfulness and spiritual deadness. Disestablishedness gives an opportunity for people to cry out to God, and for him to answer by establishing them. So God could have preferred an experiential environment for his people that was less-established (that of the judges as opposed to the kings), so that they would love and trust him more, and not commit themselves to idols. I read the Bible readings I set myself to read, and as I wrote my notes on the Bible reading, various ideas occurred to me, related to establishedness (how it relates to psychology, social relationships, politics, the church, current events, and other areas), which I wrote down. (I also added a few notes during the time I spent editing these posts.) Some of those ideas were concerned with how disestablishedness could be good in itself, apart from any role as disestablisher of bad establishedness.
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My concerns -- somewhat going into this, and somewhat as they have developed as I've written -- have to do with whether or not people really love and trust God, and avoid idols (or cease attachments to them). (In general, with whether they adopt holiness in general (being set apart to God).) While I have unusual beliefs about the Bible which intensify this concern, I think anyone who values evangelism, and/or who cares about the long-term future of the church, should be concerned with whether people love and trust God fully, and avoid or cease attachment to all idols, and with their holiness in general. For me, it is a direct matter of salvation, whereas for other Christians, it's a step or two upstream of salvation (evangelism is only effective if someone cares enough to evangelize, can image a genuine love and trusting of God, and also through that can minimize the sins that poison an unbeliever's trust of Christianity).
I am concerned that in the future, civilization will someday be able to give humans what they want, and what humans want will not involve notable amounts of disestablishedness, and so people will not have the opportunity to truly love and trust God. So Christians should value disestablishedness to some extent, and thus can agree with God that it is part of a good experiential environment for humans. Disestablishedness can be good in itself (trust requires or is disestablishedness) and even some bad disestablishedness can be better than bad establishedness. Fallen establishedness (what libertarians fear?) is particularly dangerous when it becomes absolute. We know to be concerned about this in the case of dystopia, but it is also the case with utopia. Even a modest government is dangerous, if it becomes part of an overall social order which does not actually point people toward God.
I am concerned that the values of Christians do not diverge significantly enough from secular utopia to really value God and genuine love and trust of God. To me, it seems like we value a nice life on earth more than we do God. God is a means to a nice life on earth. We don't value love apart from its role in getting us nice lives. We want our preferences satisfied and our experiences to be experiences of well-being, which is the same thing that secular civilization wants and works for. When civilization figures out how to give us nice lives, we'll take civilization's version, as we are already doing, to the glory (the finding-trustworthy-of) civilization. We need to find a way to love God for himself, so that there can be no substitutes.
Hedonism and preferentialism seek psychological establishedness. To say "no" to them is a motion of self-disestablishing. This requires that we be willing to de-value establishedness as our highest good, and admit that there is such a thing as good disestablishedness.
Establishedness can make a tempting substitute for God. Also, the church can be tempted by love of establishedness to become the worst kind of chosen people. Love of establishedness is a spiritual danger on multiple fronts (from secular pressures and from within the church).
It's true that civilization (globally speaking) will only get less established in the next decades due to climate change, but AI could change that trajectory somewhat. Optimistically, with respect to this potential spiritual problem, the near-term disestablishedness of the world gives time to prepare and reshape our values to be radically theistic, rather than radically humanistic with belief in God added on. (To value loving and trusting God, more than we do physical or emotional well-being, for instance, and to avoid idols.) The church can listen to the message and internalize it, and Christian thinkers may be able to find a way to articulate it so that non-Christians see that there is a real risk involved to spiritual decay, so that they put safeguards into civilization against it, even if they do not convert to Christianity or theism. An optimistic scenario for AI (for both secular AI safety people, I would assume, as well as for theistic-minded people) is that it remains under the control of humans and obeys human values as conveyed to it through a political process. So to the extent that this process will be democratic, the more people who have radically theistic values, the more likely that good disestablishedness, and good establishedness, are protected, and bad establishedness is opposed.
What this means for Christian humanism (humanists that are Christians, or Christians that are humanist) is that it needs to not forget that the point of what it does is to connect people with God (this is real humanism given God and the possibility of not entering his rest). What I see on the Internet from Christians (and non-Christians) may be somewhat orthogonal to that goal (may overemphasize living a nice life on earth, and bringing about of desired behaviors in the here-and-now that may or may not lead people to love God). Everything interrelates, so there is a connection between any aspect of well-being (and any attempt to affect it) and whether people love and trust God. But understanding exactly what that connection is in each case is something that needs to be considered.
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I ended up, much as I started, without firm preferences for specific types of government, seeing the debate over flavors of government as being not as important as resolving to make whichever one we choose be implemented such that it actually helped connect people to God (or was conducive to us helping that, given that it may not be best for the state to actually do the church's work). Ultimately, if I could do nothing else, highlighting the question implicit in that ("How does this discussion, program, vision, etc. actually connect to people coming to love and trust God fully?") would be a good outcome of these two posts.
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