A foundational law promoting worship of the God of the Exodus (the Decalogue's First Commandment) has little meaning without a government policy permitting such worship. Robert Kimball Shinkoskey discusses policies in the Bible which enact freedom of religion for prophets and other dissidents who work to restore worship of the God of their ancestors. In the process, he challenges the theological idea of the cessation of prophecy. New revelation from God is necessary to rescue ancient Israel from backsliding and restore her to a place of security and tranquility in a Mediterranean world gone mad with imperial war-making.
"Robert Kimball Shinkoskey has shown in this remarkable book that at its core, the Bible is a bold, liberative, usually misunderstood challenge--at the very antipodes of sectarian narrowness. Israel is 'chosen' only to spread the message that all of humanity is chosen to risk the experience of life as an adventure where no moral tradition and no religion monopolizes the truth."
-Daniel C. Maguire Marquette University
"Not satisfied with the religious tradition he inherited, Shinkoskey declares that God never intended prophecy to end. He surveys prophets from the first man through Moses and Jesus and suggests the likelihood of prophecy beyond the Bible."
-James H. Gailey Columbia Theological Seminary
Early literary man learned that free speech and free labor were frequently suppressed or obliterated by powerful governments in the Near Eastern world. This is the source of the Bible's passionate interest in liberation from political and economic repression. Moses and his people in Egypt, for example, experienced the rapid disintegration of their traditional right to religious liberty and self-directed labor. They attempted to rectify the situation at Sinai and in Canaan. Mesopotamians and Egyptians, Greeks, Sicilians, and Romans labored against tyranny as well. Robert Kimball Shinkoskey focuses on stories, laws, and movements dealing with the problem of political idolatry in the ancient world. His purpose is to show that the Bible is a civic narrative as much as a religious one, and that the Ten Commandments are articles in a constitutional law system that promotes the steady rule of law rather than the capricious rule of man.
"Shinkoskey makes a serious case for the Bible as a fundamentally political manifesto for freedom and well-being in the face of violent threats and imperial aggressions. The intent of the text is to provide institutional protection against exploitative power. Shinkoskey's claim is against the common reduction of the Bible to an innocuous preoccupation with religion. His argument requires a wholesale reconsideration and suggests an urgency in our current milieu of aggressive power and limitless violence that remains largely unchecked."
-Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary
An inevitable feature of democratic governments is the tendency of their chief executives to pursue domestic policies and foreign wars without the consent of the people. America's own presidents have studiously ignored Congress and the states and have begun to act like all-powerful kings. U.S. presidents make wild promises to get elected, use temporary crises to expand personal power, publish propaganda to divert attention away from their actions, pass out benefits to favored sections of the population in order to get re-elected, and suppress segments of the population who disagree with them. This book chronicles the story of America's lapse into tyranny at the hands of some of its best-known presidents.
"Robert Shinkoskey's The American Kings is a thoughtful meditation on the causes and consequences of presidential accumulation of power. Taking each American president in turn, Shinkoskey drills down to the essence of each administration's quest for influence and reaches powerful and frightening conclusions about the potential for tyranny."
-Justin S. Vaughn, coeditor of The Rhetoric of Heroic Expectations
For 2,000 years Western culture has leaned heavily on the Ten Commandments for guidance in religion, ethics, and morality. The author, drawing upon modern Biblical science, demonstrates that those laws were designed for an entirely different purpose--to provide alternatives to repressive policies Israel reeled under in Egypt. The Decalogue is a political document designed to limit government intrusion into private lives. Its precepts deal with matters like political parties and intellectual freedom, central banking and taxation, occupational choice, free economy, humane working conditions, local government, right to life and international relations, land possession and inheritance, equal justice and education, and citizenship and public health.
The author's interpretation necessitates a wholesale repositioning of Biblical religion. The Bible is not a book about religious worship, but is rather a book about citizen-empowered local democracy. This essay suggests a way out of the woods for an American democracy that has lost its way in a headlong veer toward heavy-handed central government.
"Robert Shinkoskey is on a mission to rescue from privatized piety what Orthodox Jewish theologian Pinchas Lapide calls the 'theopolitical dynamite' in the biblical poetic narratives. Like any classic, the Bible's epic moral vision has perpetual relevance, and Shinkoskey applies it directly to contemporary national and international politics."
-Daniel C. Maguire, Professor, Marquette University; Author, Christianity Without God: Moving Beyond the Dogmas and Retrieving the Epic Moral Narrative
