The arrests a few years back of two prominent Jamaicans, politician Ruel Reid and Fritz Jackson, President of the Caribbean Maritime University as well as the impeachment inquiry of President Trump have made popular a now entrenched legal maxim with a most interesting history.
That legally entrenched maxim is “no one is above the law”. It had its genesis arguably, in an encounter between an emperor and a bishop in the 4th century of this era and got two other shots in the arm by the British Magna Carta in the 13th century and a bombshell of a book written by a fellow controversial clergyman in the 17th century.
In A.D./C.E. 390 some people in Thessalonica rioted, arousing the anger of the Christian emperor, Theodosius the Great. He overreacted, slaughtering some seven thousand people, most of whom were innocent.
Bishop Ambrose, who was in Milan—which was also where the emperor lived—did not turn a blind eye to the emperor’s vindictive and unjust behavior. He asked him to repent of his massacre.
When the emperor refused, the bishop excommunicated him. After a month of stubborn hesitation, Theodosius prostrated himself and repented in Ambrose’s cathedral, bringing tears of joy to fellow believers.
The emperor too was under the law and Ambrose would not allow the emperor or others to forget that.
Nor can we forget the significant influence of the Church, through the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton and his Christian colleagues, on the British Magna Carta (the Large Charter) of 1215, which gave new rights to barons and the people in general and which also challenged the notion of the king being above the law. (An aside, Langton was behind the innovation of chapters and verses in the Bible).
The Rev. Samuel Rutherford, a Presbyterian, wrote his Lex, Rex: Or the Law and the Prince in 1644. The main thesis, as implied in the title, is that the law is king, and so the king is under the law and not above it, a notion that was regarded as treasonously contrary to the tradition of the ‘divine right of kings’.
Rutherford was hounded for execution, but he died before they caught him.
I recommend the following, to persons interested in the sources behind this piece.
Alvin Schmidt, Under The Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization, p. 250, Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, p. 105. Francis Schaeffer, The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer, Volume 5, pages 473-476.