“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.” – Romans 13.1

“Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees, and the writers who keep writing oppression, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right.” -Isaiah 10.1-2

“nam mihi lex esse non videtur, quae justa non fuerit” (“For I think a law that is not just, is not actually a law.”) -Augustine of Hippo

Those of us who live in the United States have seen the state extend its power significantly over the past 30 years, and even more significantly so in terms of executive reach in the past 15. Since the advent of the PATRIOT Act nearly a quarter century ago, the government has found more and more ways to stick its fingers in uncomfortable places and keep them there as long as it wants.

But an overreaching authority is hardly new, and our current regime is not as novel as some might imagine, so my purpose here is not to litigate our specific circumstances. The times are evil, and the rain falls on the good and evil alike.

My intention is instead to answer an objection that is often raised when one opposes what appear to be unjust laws or expansion of government power. What about St. Paul’s teaching in Romans 13 that every person should be subject to the governing authorities?

Are We Being Faithful to Scripture?

My friend and fellow Faith on View contributor Paul Hand has one pithy response:

So America is Rome? As in, we strive to live in peace out of sacrificial love, though it’s the pagan empire that persecutes Christians?

When the biblical passage in question is trotted out, it is often presented as a slam dunk that those objecting to a given policy or action should now sit down and be quiet, because God has ordained the authority that is acting. Standing against that authority, then, is standing against God.

There are more than two answers to the Romans 13 objection, but I will only take up two, which, for my purposes, are significantly connected. (A third answer is that using verse 13.1 as a proof text that one should always submit to the government is unhealthy cultic nationalism.)

The exegetical approach to the question requires reading the wider passage:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of him who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be subject, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience. For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay all of them their dues, taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due. (10.1-7, RSV)

The additional verses both clarify and complicate the command, because if the state is appointed by God, then resisting the state is resisting God and puts one at risk of not only in the municipal realm but the divine as well. But what if the state is itself acting against God’s commands?

Intentions Matter

The key to understanding the passage is in how it describes the role of the state: to serve as a terror to bad conduct. God has not granted the sword so that the powerful can wield it for power’s sake, but so that they stop wrongdoing. In St. Paul’s view, being subject to the governing authorities is a matter of being subject to the laws that promote the goodness that God intended, which is why his understanding of subjection is not just about avoiding wrath but “for sake of conscience.”

In this understanding, paying taxes is fine because those funds support the servants God has appointed and are part of the honor due them.

But the unstated corollary in the Romans passage is that not all laws and actions are acceptable — the authorities are not blameless by virtue of being authorities. To use an example contemporary to St. Paul, the requirement for Roman citizens to offer a pinch of incense at the altar to the emperor would not have been honor that the apostle thought was properly due.

The command to submit to the state only extends in this passage to the authority that the state has actually been given, and so prosecution of any policy or statute that exceeds that authority is in fact lawlessness. Submitting to the authorities when they tell you to do what is evil, then, is not submitting to God.

Another approach to consider comes from the Natural Law tradition, where, for some thinkers, the conundrum of submitting to the civil authorities was not just a question of avoiding time in the docket. For example, Richard Hooker understood the administration of the law as a teleological matter.

In Hooker’s conception, Divine Law undergirds the superstructure of the universe, and Heavenly and Natural Law proceed from that; the Heavenly Law orders the work of the angels, and Natural Law orders life on earth. Rather than being a strict set of rules that creation has to follow, however, Natural Law is the order by which each created thing achieves its intended end. For humans, that end is the full embrace of the divine image in which they are created.

Because the teleological order is baked into the Natural Law, Hooker concluded that Reason proceeded from it, and that Human Law properly administered came from the Law of Reason and Divine Law, with Divine Law being revealed in the scriptures.

If we are to follow this tradition, policies administered by the authorities have to honor the source from which those authorities draw their mandate. They cannot demand honor or obedience that is out of accord with Reason or Divine Law, and they cannot wield the sword as a terror against the good or innocent and still consider themselves within the stream of authority that God has granted.

Divine Law Supercedes All Else

In short, if the Divine Law commands you to love your neighbor and the municipal law says you must hate them, then the Divine Law says the governing authorities do not have the authority to compel you to do so. Or, to use an example from the Bible, the Pharaoh has God’s sanction to keep the peace and keep terror at bay, but even in the name of keeping the peace, the Pharaoh cannot tell the midwives to kill all of the male Hebrew babies.

The authorities cannot do evil so that good may come of it, because such actions dishonor not only the Divine Law but also the divine image that both those who perpetuate the evil and those upon whom the evil is perpetuated carry. Authority properly exercised not only protects the innocent but also restrains the would-be evildoers from marring themselves, because all wrongdoing is an attack on the divine image within others or ourselves; authority that would allow otherwise is simply unregulated and unrepentant power, and absent God’s blessing.

St. Paul’s life is a model of how complicated and costly submission to the authorities can be — he spent plenty of time in jail, and was ultimately executed, precisely because he chose at times to follow his conscience against the countervailing commands of the earthly administrators he encountered. He understood, fundamentally, that the state has the sword and that principled positions can be costly.

But because he understood that the state’s position came from a higher source than the state itself — even if those leading the state abused it – he understood that his loyalty must extend beyond the state’s municipal mandates. In Pauline thinking, the authorities may have power over death, but Christ has power over resurrection. Consider this passage from Colossians 2:

For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness of life in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of flesh in the circumcision of Christ; and you were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead. And you, who were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, having canceled the bond which stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him. (2.9-15, RSV)

The principalities and powers this passage refers to are elemental spirits that were part of the Colossian audience’s wider cosmology, but how Christ triumphed over them and made an example of them is precisely how he demonstrates the superiority of Divine Law over that of the state — the state has no authority or ability to give life, but through the Resurrection, Christ does. The state can kill, but Christ has disarmed that threat for those who have come to fullness of life in him. By obeying the law that came from God, Paul submitted himself to the greater purpose, the promised Resurrection.

The Uncomfortableness of Acting Christianly

The tension of the idea that we must obey the government except when we mustn’t isn’t comfortable, especially when we acknowledge that the state does wield the sword, and especially in times when it seems like more and more political policies run counter to what is revealed to us in scripture and reason.  As someone who occasionally uses the 1928 Book of Common Prayer (U.S.) in the recitation of the Daily Office, I admit that I used to skip the phrase “Oh Lord, save the state.” In more recent recitations, I’ve come around to use it, but I pray it with an additional implied emphasis: Oh Lord, save the state from itself and steer it to what it should be. This isn’t me praying an endorsement of one political program or the other — I don’t believe the state and its dealings have ever been close to ideal, or that the prevailing parties represent the ideal — but it is an acknowledgement that I have to live under the state’s administration of what it calls law.

So must we submit to the authorities? Yes, in the administration of the good. But when the government veers into lawlessness and steps beyond the blessing that God has bestowed, our answer must echo the apostles: “We must obey God rather than man.”

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