4. The Christian and the State (13:1–7)
4. The Christian and the State (13:1–7)
When guidelines are laid down for the behaviour of Christians towards those who are outside the fellowship, it is natural that something should be said about the Christian’s relation to the secular authorities—municipal, provincial or imperial. This subject was destined to become specially acute within the decade following the writing of this letter.
So long as the church was mainly Jewish in composition, problems in this sphere were not lacking, but they were not so difficult as they were later to become. The position of Jews within the Roman Empire was regulated by a succession of imperial edicts. Indeed, as a subject nation within the empire, they enjoyed quite exceptional privileges. Jewish communities had the status of collegia licita (‘permitted associations’). The various practices which marked off Jews from Gentiles were confirmed to them. Those practices might seem absurd and superstitious in Roman eyes, but they were safeguarded none the less by imperial law. They included the sabbath law and food laws and the prohibition of ‘graven images’. Imperial policy forbade governors of Judea to bring military standards, with the emperor’s image attached to them, within the walls of the holy city of Jerusalem. If by Jewish law the trespassing of a Gentile within the inner courts of the Jerusalem temple was a sacrilege deserving the death penalty, Rome confirmed Jewish law in this respect even (quite exceptionally) to the point of allowing the execution of the death sentence for such a trespass when the offender was a Roman citizen.
In the first generation after the death of Christ Roman law, when it took cognizance of Christians at all, tended to regard them as a variety of Jews. When the Corinthian Jews in AD 51 or 52 accused Paul before Gallio, proconsul of Achaia, of propagating an illegal religion, Gallio paid little attention to the charge (Acts 18:12–17). To him Paul was as self-evidently a Jew as his accusers were, and the dispute between him and them was in Gallio’s eyes a difference of interpretation on points of Jewish law, and he had not come to Achaia to adjudicate on matters of that kind.
Gallio’s decision constituted an important precedent; for some ten years thereafter Paul availed himself of the protection which it gave him in his apostolic service, as he continued to propagate the Christian faith not only in the provinces of the Roman Empire but in Rome itself (Acts 28:30–31).
His happy experience of Roman justice is probably reflected in his insistence here that the magistrates, whom he calls ‘ministers of God’ (verse 6), ‘are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad’ (verse 3). Yet the principles laid down here were valid even when the authorities were not so benevolent towards Christians as Gallio had been (in effect) towards Paul.
There is another side to the picture of Christianity’s relation to the state. Christianity started out with a most serious handicap in the eyes of Roman law, for the sufficient reason that its founder had been convicted and executed on a charge of sedition by the sentence of a Roman judge. The charge was summed up in the inscription attached to his cross: ‘The King of the Jews.’ Whatever was the nature of the kingship which Jesus claimed, the one record of him known to Roman law was that he had led a movement which challenged the sovereign rights of Caesar. When Tacitus, many years later, wishes his readers to know what kind of people Christians were, he deems it sufficient to say that ‘they got their name from Christ, who was executed under the procurator Pontius Pilate when Tiberius was emperor’.1 That adequately indicated their character. When, some seven years before the writing of this letter, Paul’s opponents at Thessalonica wished to stir up as much trouble for him and his companions locally as they could, they went to the city magistrates and laid information against them: ‘These men who have caused trouble all over the world have now come here … They are all defying Caesar’s decrees, saying that there is another king, one called Jesus’ (Acts 17:6–7, NIV). This subtle misrepresentation of the truth was calculated to link the missionaries with contemporary fomenters of unrest in Jewish communities throughout the Roman world; it was rendered the more colourable by the fact that Jesus himself had been found guilty before Pilate as an agitator and leader of insurrection.
Nor was Thessalonica the only place where trouble of this kind broke out about the same time. Rome itself remembered the riots of AD 49, stirred up ‘at the instigation of Chrestus’,2 which had moved Claudius to expel the Jewish community of the capital; and some of Paul’s readers may well have cherished resentment for hardships endured in the course of that expulsion. As for Paul himself, even his best friends could not deny that his arrival in a city was, as often as not, a signal for breaches of the peace. Granted that Paul was not responsible for this, the custodians of law and order would naturally take note of it and draw their own conclusions. It was all the more necessary, therefore, that Christians should be specially careful of their public behaviour and give their traducers no handle against them, but rather pay all due honour and obedience to the authorities. Indeed, Jesus had set them a precedent in this matter, as in so much else, for although his words, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’ (Mark 12:17), referred to a specially delicate issue—the payment of tribute to a pagan ruler by the people of God living in the holy land—they express a principle of more general application.
Paul places the whole question on the highest plane. God is the fount of all authority, and those who exercise authority on earth do so by delegation from him; therefore to disobey them is to disobey God. Human government is a divine ordinance, and the powers of coercion and commendation which it exercises have been entrusted to it by God, for the repression of crime and the encouragement of righteousness. Christians of all people, then, ought to obey the laws, pay their taxes and respect the authorities—not because it will be the worse for them if they do not, but because this is one way of serving God.
But what if the authorities themselves are unrighteous? What if Caesar, not content with receiving what is rightfully his, lays claim to ‘the things that are God’s’? Paul does not deal with this question here, presumably because it had not yet arisen; but it was to be a burning question in the Roman state for generations to come. Caesar could so far exceed the limits of his divinely-given jurisdiction as to claim divine honours for himself and wage war against the saints. Can we recognize Paul’s magistrate, the ‘minister of God’, in John’s ‘beast from the abyss’, who receives his authority from the great red dragon and uses it to enforce universal worship of himself and to exterminate those who withhold worship from him?3 We can indeed, for Paul himself foresaw precisely such a development when the restraint of law was withdrawn (2 Thess. 2:6–10). ‘Without justice’, said Augustine, ‘what are kingdoms but great gangs of bandits?’4
Yet the evidence shows how, in face of gross provocation, Christians maintained their proper loyalty to the state, not least in Rome itself. ‘The patience and faith of the saints’ wore down the fury of persecution. When the decrees of the civil magistrate conflict with the commandments of God, then, say Christians, ‘we must obey God rather than men’ (Acts 5:29); when Caesar claims divine honours, Christians must answer ‘No’. For then Caesar (whether he takes the form of a dictator or a democracy) is going beyond the authority delegated to him by God, and trespassing on territory which is not his. ‘Regarding the State’s requirement of worship of Caesar’s image,’ says Oscar Cullmann, ‘Paul would not have spoken otherwise than the author of the Johannine Apocalypse.’5 But Christians will voice their ‘No’ to Caesar’s unauthorized demands the more effectively if they have shown themselves ready to say ‘Yes’ to his authorized demands.
Some years later, in a document written from Rome on the eve of a fiery persecution, we hear an echo of these words of Paul: ‘Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right … Let none of you suffer as a murderer, or a thief, or a wrongdoer, or a mischief-maker; yet if one suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but under that name let him glorify God’ (1 Pet. 2:13–14; 4:15–16).
Later still, in the last years of the first century, a leader in the Roman church who could remember the outrageous ferocity of the Neronian persecution thirty years before, and had very recent experience of Domitian’s malevolence, reproduces a prayer for the rulers who have received ‘glory and honour and power’ over earthly things from God, the eternal king, ‘that they may administer with piety, in peace and gentleness, the authority given to them’.6 Such language shows how seriously the Roman church took to heart Paul’s injunctions about the duty of Christians to the powers that be.
1. Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. ‘The thirteenth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans’, says J. W. Allen, ‘contains what are perhaps the most important words ever written for the history of political thought. Yet’, he continues, ‘it would be a gross mistake to suppose that men, at any time, took their political opinions from St. Paul.’7 Some, however, have made a more deliberate effort to do so than others.
The question is raised whether the ‘governing authorities’ here are angelic powers, or human powers, or both angelic and human powers.8 The general biblical view is that secular power is wielded by ‘the host of heaven, in heaven’ as well as by ‘the kings of the earth, on the earth’ (Isa. 24:21). It is true, moreover, that the plural of exousia (‘authority’) is freely used by Paul to denote angelic powers (cf. 8:38; Eph. 1:21; 3:10; 6:12; Col. 1:16; 2:10, 15). We may compare what he says in 1 Corinthians 2:8 about ‘the rulers (archontes) of this age’ who were responsible for crucifying ‘the Lord of glory’; he appears there to have more than human agents in view. Yet in the present context the ‘authorities’ are best understood as human rulers, who wield ‘the sword’ for the punishment of wickedness and the protection of the good, who therefore have the right to command and receive obedience, and who are to be paid appropriate taxes and other dues, together with fitting respect and honour. Paul’s references elsewhere to angelic powers are very far from suggesting that Christians should be subject to them in any sense; on the contrary, Christians are liberated from their jurisdiction through their union with Christ, for he is the creator and head of all those powers (Col. 1:16; 2:10), and their conqueror when they set themselves in hostility to him and his people (Col. 2:15).
Those that exist have been instituted by God. There is no contradiction between the principle and the argument of 1 Corinthians 6:1–8, where Christians are dissuaded from suing or prosecuting one another in secular law-courts. Recognition of the civil authorities makes no difference to the fact that it is unbecoming for Christians to wash their dirty linen in public. And while civil magistrates or judges are divinely ordained, that ordination carries with it no status in the church: they are ‘men who count for nothing in our community’ (1 Cor. 6:4, NEB).
2. Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed. ‘Few sayings in the New Testament have suffered as much misuse as this one,’ says Oscar Cullmann.9 He thinks especially of its misuse in justifying uncritical submission to the dictates of totalitarian governments. It is plain from the immediate context, as from the general context of the apostolic writings, that the state can rightly command obedience only within the limits of the purposes for which it has been divinely instituted—in particular, the state not only may but must be resisted when it demands the allegiance due to God alone.
The obedience which the Christian man owes to the State is never absolute but, at the most, partial and contingent. It follows that the Christian lives always in a tension between two competing claims; that in certain circumstances disobedience to the command of the State may be not only a right but also a duty. This has been classical doctrine ever since the apostles declared that they ought to obey God rather than men.10
Those who resist will incur judgment. They ‘have themselves to thank for the punishment they will receive’ (NEB).
3. Rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Moffatt’s rendering, ‘magistrates are no terror to an honest man’, is based on the slenderly supported but intrinsically attractive reading agathoergō for agathō ergō.
Do what is good, and you will receive his approval. Cf. 1 Peter 3:13, ‘who is there to harm you if you are zealous for what is right?’ (The words immediately following these, in 1 Pet. 3:14, envisage the possibility that the situation might change: ‘But even if you do suffer for righteousness’ sake …’)
4. He does not bear the sword in vain. The sword was the symbol of a Roman magistrate’s imperium; cf. Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists, 1.25.2: ‘a judge bearing the sword’.
The servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer. The state is thus charged with a function which has been explicitly forbidden to the Christian (12:17a, 19). The Christian state of later days lay, of course, outside the range of Paul’s admonition, and no express direction is given by which the Christian ruler or judge may reconcile his duty as a Christian to leave the exacting of vengeance to ‘the wrath of God’ and his official duty to ‘execute his wrath’. This is not to say that he cannot extract principles to guide him from this and similar passages. But it is plain that two distinct spheres of ‘service’ to God are envisaged.
The sanction that the Bible, here and elsewhere, gives to the forcible restraint of evil puzzles many modern Christians, because of its apparent contradiction to Christ’s way of love and His precept of non-resistance to evil. But this comes from failing to distinguish the preservation of the world from the salvation of the world. The truth is that the Bible affirms both the Law ‘which worketh wrath’ (Rom. 4:15) and the ‘faith which worketh by love’ (Gal. 5:6): both Christ’s strange work and His proper work.11
5. For the sake of conscience. The Christian has a higher motive for obeying the ruler than the unpleasantness of the consequences of disobedience; the Christian knows that such obedience is in accordance with God’s will, and by rendering it will preserve a good conscience in relation to God. For ‘conscience’ see note on 2:15 (p. 97).
6. For the same reason you also pay taxes. RSV is probably right in taking this clause as a statement, not a command; the Greek is ambiguous (the verb may be either imperative or indicative). ‘This is your justification for paying taxes to pagan rulers (a matter of conscience for many Jews, and perhaps for some Christians also), because they are carrying out God’s service.’ Irenaeus, taking issue with a gnostic interpretation, quotes this verse to prove that Paul in this paragraph refers ‘not to angelic powers or invisible rulers, as some venture to expound the passage, but to actual human authorities’.12
The authorities are ministers of God. The Greek word for ‘minister’ here is leitourgos (not diakonos, as in verse 4), a word which in New Testament and early Christian literature is used particularly of religious service. See note on 15:16 (p. 260, n. 3).
7. Pay all of them their dues. Possibly an echo of Jesus’ direction: ‘Render [or ‘give back’, apodote, the same form as here] to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’ (Mark 12:17). But the following verses show that the duty of obedience to secular authorities is a temporary one, lasting only for the present period of ‘night’ (verse 12); in the ‘day’ which ‘is at hand’ a new order of government will be introduced, when ‘the saints will judge the world’ (1 Cor. 6:2).13 The state is to wither away (on this Paul and Karl Marx agree); ‘the city of God remaineth.’