Schools, Charters, and the Law Above Kings

Today's Scripture

Proverbs 9:10 — "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight."

Proverbs 8:15-16 — "By me kings reign, and rulers decree what is just; by me princes rule, and nobles, all who govern justly."

Psalm 72:1, 4 — "Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to the royal son!... May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the children of the needy, and crush the oppressor!"

The Big Idea

Between roughly 1000 and 1500, Christian Europe built things the world still runs on: the university, the charter that put kings under law, and charity organized into permanent institutions. The same era produced crusades, corruption, and cruelty in Christ's name. Today we look at both without flinching — because the deepest medieval idea, that even kings answer to a law they did not write, is the idea that judges the medieval church too.

Reflection

Faith goes to school

Start with a fact that surprises people: the university is a church invention. Not a Greek one, not a Roman one — Athens had philosophers and Rome had tutors, but neither produced the thing itself: a permanent, degree-granting, self-governing community of teachers and students. That institution emerged from the cathedral and monastery schools of medieval Europe — Bologna by 1088, then Paris and Oxford in the twelfth century — chartered and protected by the church. The great American medievalist Charles Homer Haskins put it flatly:

"Universities, like cathedrals and parliaments, are a product of the Middle Ages." — Charles Homer Haskins, The Rise of Universities

The word itself tells the story. Universitas was medieval Latin for a guild — a sworn association, like the bakers' or masons' guilds, except this one's craft was learning. Students and masters banded together under church protection, won the right to govern themselves, and created something with no ancient ancestor: an institution whose whole job was truth, with a membership card — the degree — recognized across borders.

Why there? Why then? Because of a conviction the era inherited from Scripture: Proverbs 9:10 — "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom." If one rational God made everything, then everything is in principle studiable — and studying it honors him. Anselm, the monk who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093, gave the project its motto, fides quaerens intellectum — faith seeking understanding:

"For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe — that unless I believed, I should not understand." — Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion

Notice the direction. Faith was not the ceiling on thought; it was the floor under it. A century and a half later, Thomas Aquinas — a Dominican friar teaching at the University of Paris — built the era's grandest intellectual system on the same confidence, arguing that reason and revelation cannot finally contradict, because both come from one God:

"Grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it." — Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae

In other words: becoming a Christian does not delete your mind, your culture, or your questions. Grace takes nature seriously enough to heal it. Out of that one sentence flow lecture halls, libraries, degrees, and eventually laboratories — institutions that assumed truth was real, unified, and worth a lifetime.

The parchment that outranked the king

Now the legal revolution. In June 1215, in a meadow called Runnymede, the barons of England forced King John to put his seal to a charter. Standing in the middle of the negotiation was Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury — a Paris-trained Bible scholar (tradition credits him with the chapter divisions still in your Bible) who helped shape and witness the document. Magna Carta's first clause protected the freedom of the English church; its most famous clauses said something kings had rarely been forced to hear: no free man shall be seized or imprisoned "except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land," and — "To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay, right or justice."

King John repudiated the charter almost immediately, and civil war followed — medieval kings did not enjoy being under things. But the parchment refused to die. Reissued, confirmed, and appealed to for eight hundred years, its words flowed into due process, trial by jury, and the constitutional instinct — now global — that rulers are bound by rules they did not make and cannot unmake.

A king. Under law. Where did anyone get such an idea? Not from Rome, where the emperor's will was law. The deep source was the Book the church had been carrying for centuries. Israel's law had legislated for kings as if they were men, because they were: Deuteronomy 17:18-19 — when the king takes his throne, "he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law... and he shall read in it all the days of his life," so that — verse 20 — "his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers." The king does homework. The king has brothers, not subjects only. Proverbs 8:15-16 had located royal authority inside God's wisdom, not above it: "By me kings reign, and rulers decree what is just." And Paul had defined the ruler as a servant: Romans 13:1, 4 — authority is "instituted by God," and the ruler "is God's servant for your good." A servant is accountable to his master; a ruler under God can never be the final word. Augustine had drawn the radical conclusion eight centuries before Runnymede:

"A law that is not just seems to be no law at all." — Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will

That sentence has a long afterlife — Aquinas built on it, and in 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. quoted it from a Birmingham jail. Aquinas also gave the era its working definition of legitimate law, every word of which quietly dethrones tyrants:

"Law is nothing else than an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated." — Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae

For the common good. Not for the crown's convenience. Psalm 72 had already sketched the only royal job description God accepts: Psalm 72:12-14 — "For he delivers the needy when he calls, the poor and him who has no helper... From oppression and violence he redeems their life, and precious is their blood in his sight." Kings exist for the weak. Medieval people believed it imperfectly, enforced it rarely — and wrote it down anyway, where later centuries could find it.

The era also institutionalized mercy on a scale antiquity never attempted. Monasteries ran poor relief; religious orders founded and staffed hospitals across Europe — Paris's Hôtel-Dieu had roots in the seventh century — and care for the sick poor became a permanent, funded, building-and-staff reality rather than an occasional kindness. Tim Keller states the theology that built those wards:

"If you have been assigned the goods of this world by God and you don't share them with others, it isn't just stinginess, it is injustice." — Tim Keller, Generous Justice

The frank paragraph

Now the failures, named plainly, because this plan promised honesty and because the gospel critiques the church first. In 1095 Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade, and in 1099 crusaders took Jerusalem and massacred its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. In 1204 the Fourth Crusade never reached its enemy at all — instead it sacked Constantinople, the greatest Christian city on earth, an outrage between Christians that has never been fully forgotten. Church offices were bought and sold. Inquisitions used coercion in the name of the Prince of Peace. Jewish communities suffered expulsions and slaughters at Christian hands. None of this was incidental; it was the earthly city wearing the heavenly city's robes — power doing exactly what Jesus forbade: Mark 10:42-44 — "those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them... But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant." Every crusader sword broke that command. The medieval church's own Book, the one chained to its lecterns, contained its indictment: Micah 6:8 — "do justice, and... love kindness, and... walk humbly with your God." We do not defend these crimes. We measure them by the church's own Scriptures — which is, tellingly, where the standard for condemning them comes from.

The law above every throne

Here is the gospel thread running through the whole era. The idea that no king is above the law only holds if there is a law no king wrote. The Middle Ages believed that with all their flaws: above charters, above popes, above Christendom itself, a holy standard — and a coming Judge.

But Scripture goes one stunning step further. Psalm 72 describes the king who actually does the job — defending the poor, redeeming the crushed — and the New Testament announces that this King has arrived, and that instead of using the law to crush his lawbreaking subjects, he kept it for them and then bore its sentence in their place. The only ruler ever entitled to stand above the law chose to stand under it, Mark 10:45's servant-king, judged so the guilty could go free. That is why C.S. Lewis's verdict on history holds for this era too:

"If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The schools, the charters, the hospital wards — built by sinners, often badly, always under a law they did not invent, pointing at a King they did not deserve. So do we.

Going Deeper

Identify the one place where you are the king — the room where your word usually wins: a household, a team, a classroom, a friend group. Today, do one deliberately Deuteronomy-17 thing there: put yourself visibly under the rule you hold others to. Apologize first, take the worst task, or ask the person with the least power, "What am I getting wrong?" — and listen without defending yourself. Kings under law are rare in every century. Be one for an afternoon.