Which of the following is the most historically accurate assessment of the Theory of Divine Rights??
People in the 15th Century knew it was an absurd theory, but were powerless in the face of a Church supported monarchy.
Divine Rights of Kings mimicked what people saw in nature, where certain animals such as the lion appeared to rule as if by divine right.
That God created an orderly world and would place certain people in positions as monarchs, to rule in his behalf was a logical idea based on the beliefs of the 15th Century.
Divine Rights for most people made sense because people were incapable of the kind of logical and reasoned thought we have today.
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That God created an orderly world and would place certain people in positions as monarchs, to rule in his behalf was a logical idea based on the beliefs of the 15th Century.
The Divine Right of Kings is a European political and religious doctrine of political absolutism. Such doctrines are largely, though not exclusively, associated with the medieval and ancient regime eras, based on contemporary Christian belief that a monarch owed his rule to the will of God, not to the will of his subjects, parliament, the aristocracy or any other competing authority. This doctrine continued with the claim that any attempt to depose a monarch or to restrict his powers ran contrary to the will of God.
The concept of Divine Right of Kings is only one manifestation of a much broader concept of "royal God-given rights", which simply says that "the right to rule is anointed by god(s)" which is found in other cultures. Unlike the Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven which legitimized the overthrow of an oppressive or incompetent monarch, a European king could not lose the Divine Right by misrule. In addition, the concept of Mandate of Heaven required that the emperor properly carry out the proper rituals, consult his ministers, and made it extremely difficult to undo any acts carried out by an ancestor.
Japanese imperial theory based the legitimacy of the Emperor of Japan on his descent from Amaterasu, however unlike the European case, this divinity did not usually translate into political power.
In the western world it came to be associated with Roman Catholicism and other Christian faiths in the Reformation period. The notion of divine right of kings was certainly in existence in the medieval period. However it was in the early modern era, under the ancien régime, that the notion became extensively used as a primarily political mechanism i.e. for increasing the power of kings within centralized monarchies relative to their nobles and subjects. It was given its most comprehensive formulations by the French bishop Bossuet and King James I of England, but it owes much to the earlier writings of St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Paul of Tarsus.
The answer is "that God created an orderly world and would place certain people in positions as monarchs, to rule in his behalf was a logical idea based on the beliefs of the 15th century".
It's called the theory of divine RIGHT (singular), not rights (plural).