God is a Capitalist

by Roger McKinney

  There is nothing good about war. An honest historian could argue that every war the U.S. has fought since the war for independence was unnecessary and based on very faulty economics. Every one of them was avoidable, even the Civil War, which was not civil at all. The explosion of manufacturing from the Civil War until WWI and competition from better farming methods outside of the South would have ended slavery peacefully within a few decades. All of those wars greatly impoverished the U.S. How much wealthier would we be today if we had avoided so many wars? And how many young men would have lived?

  Chapter 9 – Romans thirteen

  “Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God. Therefore whoever resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves. For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same; for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil. Therefore it is necessary to be in subjection, not only because of wrath, but also for conscience' sake. For because of this you also pay taxes, for rulers are servants of God, devoting themselves to this very thing. Render to all what is due them: tax to whom tax is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor,” Romans 13:1-7.

  In this passage God tells the Roman Christians through the Apostle Paul to submit to the Roman authorities because God has established those authorities and they are the servants God uses to punish evil people. Many Christians have taken the passage to mean that Christians can never oppose government authorities even when they are unjust or pass unjust laws. Citizens are supposed to endure the abuse. Relief can come only from God’s miraculous intervention. Others take a slightly less absolutist approach and claim that Christians must obey all the laws of a state, fair or unjust, but may use nonviolent means to protest unjust legislation or court rulings in the hopes of changing them. The passage has caused some Christians to condemn the colonial rebellion against England that created the United States as a violation of the commands in Romans. But what does the passage actually say?

  God has established all authority.

  Rebellion against that authority is rebellion against God.

  The ruling authorities act as servants of God to punish evil doers.

  Taxes support those servants.

  What does Paul not say?

  Submit to evil rulers. Paul does not mention evil rulers, only those who do God’s work by punishing evil people, in other words, ideal rulers.

  Ruling authorities can do anything they want with impunity.

  God approves of everything that leaders do.

  God approves of every law that politicians pass.

  Human law is equal to God’s law.

  Rulers are not subject to God’s laws.

  Who will punish evil rulers.

  What should we do about unjust laws.

  Rulers can charge as much tax as they want.

  Those who insist this passage requires Christians to submit absolutely to evil rulers are guilty of eisegesis, that is, reading their own ideas into the passage. Paul refers only to ideal rulers, those who punish evil doers. But who are evildoers? In God’s mind they would be people who break his laws, not necessarily those who break manmade laws.

  What does Paul mean by submit?

  On first look, Paul’s command seems to be absolute; there are no exceptions. However, the command is similar to the one he gave to women: “Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body.” (Ephesians 5:22-23) Few theologians would argue that Paul commanded wives to do whatever their husbands demand regardless of how evil it might be. And at the end of the passage Paul shades his meaning in verse 33: “Nevertheless, each individual among you also is to love his own wife even as himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her husband.” Paul softens his command to one of showing respect. Paul has a habit of making statements that appear to be absolutes when closer investigation shows that he did not intend them to be.

  More evidence that Paul did not mean his command to submit to rulers as absolute comes from Paul’s own behavior. In Acts chapter 9, the Jews in Damascus plotted to kill him. We may assume that they had the authority to do so from the high priest just as Paul had the authority to arrest or kill Christians before his conversion. He had supervised the murder of Stephen under the authority of the same rulers. Paul discovered the plot to kill him, but instead of submitting to that authority, and knowing the Jews were watching the city gates, he allowed other disciples to put him in a basket and lower him through a window in the outer wall so he could escape. Near the end of his career, Paul appeared before the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem to answer charges of having defiled the temple but rather than submitting to the council, Paul caused a riot by pitting the Pharisees against the Sadducees over the reality of the resurrection. The Roman commander had to deploy troops to rescue Paul. He submitted to the Roman authorities only because they could prevent the Jewish authorities from killing him.

  Paul is not the only example of believers who refused to submit to the authorities. When Herod the Great decided to murder all of the baby boys two years of age and younger in the nation, God warned Joseph through an angel to flee to Egypt. The angel did not tell Joseph to submit to the ruling authority. John the Baptist, whom Jesus called the greatest prophet of all time, publicly criticized the marriage of Herod. That was not submission and he lost his head for it.

  Jesus never submitted to the authorities who sought to kill him until his time to die had come, a few times using his divine powers to escape hostile authorities. When the fever to kill him in Judea became too intense, he fled to Galilee. And he warned the disciples not to submit to authorities when they saw Jerusalem surrounded by the Roman armies but to flee to the mountains. Jesus launched his ministry by cleansing the temple of the money changers and sellers of sacrificial animals and closed it with the same event. Both were radical acts of rebellion against the highest ruling authorities at the time in Jerusalem.

  Most theologians recognize one exception to Paul’s command to submit to authorities – when they order Christians to stop preaching the gospel. They point to the episode in Act 5:17-42 when the high priest had the apostles arrested and imprisoned. An angel appeared to the apostles in the night and rather than tell them to submit to the authorities, opened the prison gates and organized a major jail break. The officers found the apostles preaching in the temple, arrested them again and took them back to the Council, which ordered them to stop preaching about Jesus. Peter responded, “We must obey God rather than men.”

  Interpreters who admit this exception insist it is the only exception to Paul’s command to submit to authorities. But let us not forget that it is an exception and destroys the idea that Paul’s command is absolute. However, there is no reason to think that is the only exception. Later, Herod arrested Peter and put in him in prison. An angel appeared to him in prison, but instead of instructing him to submit to the authorities, the angel launched another jail break. Christians in Israel faced persecution after the murder of Stephen, but instead of submitting they left for safer parts of the empire.

  The pattern is clear. The Apostles and Christians did not submit to the authorities when told to stop preaching about Jesus, nor did they submit when the authorities intended to persecute, jail or kill them. But neither did they fight. They simply relocated to safer territories.

  The only examples of rebellion against established authorities are in the Old Testament and mostly in the book of the Judges. Each time Israel succumbed to idol worship, God would punish the people by having a pagan power con
quer and oppress them. God had ordained that judgment so any rebellion against those pagan rulers was disobedience to God. Yet God each time prepared a leader who successfully rebelled and restored Israel’s independence. Some theologians argue that we can no longer rebel as the Israelis did unless God gives us direct revelation to do so as he did to Gideon, for example.

  However, consider how God spoke to his people at that time. They did not have the Holy Spirit and they only had the Torah as permanent revelation so direct revelation was God’s only option. How does God speak to Christians today? Direct revelation is still possible, but we have the Holy Spirit living in us and speaking to us on a regular basis. And we have God’s complete, permanent revelation in the Bible from which God expects us to study and distill theology and principles for godly living and governance. Since the Torah is clear that God wants freedom, justice and independence for his people when they are in a right relationship to him, it is not a logical leap to assume that Christians can rebel against tyrannical rulers much as the Israelis did.

  As an example, most the leaders of the American Revolution against Great Britain were extremely godly men. It is highly likely that the desire for freedom from tyranny that burned in their hearts came from the Holy Spirit residing in them.

  What authority do rulers have?

  Most theologians focus on the word “submit” in the passage, but the word “authority” is more important. Paul wrote that God had established all authority that exists. That does not mean that God approved of everything the emperors and governors did or imply that God has given authorities the right to commit any crimes they wanted to against citizens with impunity. That would be tantamount to the theory of the divine right of kings. If accurate, that would make God complicit in the many crimes of rulers over the centuries. Clearly that was not Paul’s intent. The Old Testament is full of God’s condemnations through the prophets of rulers for their crimes against the people.

  When interpreting Romans 13, it is important to keep in mind that “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me,” (Matt. 28:18) according to Jesus. Paul declared that God has “disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public show of them in Christ’s triumphal procession,” (Col. 2:15). Commenting on these verses, Oliver O’Donovan, Regis professor of moral and pastoral theology at the University of Oxford and Canon of Christ Church wrote in The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the roots of political theology, “That must be the primary eschatological assertion about the authorities, political and demonic, which govern the world: they have been made subject to God’s sovereignty in the Exaltation of Christ. The second, qualifying assertion is that this awaits a final universal presence of Christ to become fully apparent.” Paul employed the imagery of a conquering general who paraded his captured enemies before crowds of citizens to show his victory and authority over the defeated authorities. If humans have any authority, it is derived from Christ. They have authority only to do what Christ allows them.

  What authority did God give rulers? According to Paul, God gave them the authority to punish evildoers. Clearly, rulers have the authority to enforce God’s laws, especially the civil laws that forbid theft, murder, fraud, kidnapping, rape, etc. Governmental authority is not opened ended or a blank check. But what about rulers who want to commit those same crimes against the people, either directly or through laws? Did God give them that authority? Clearly, the answer is no.

  Paul’s delineation of the role of ruling authorities, to punish evil doers, limits state authority because of Christ’s exaltation. Paul’s statement, then, would be one of the first declarations of limited government since the Torah. Paul is telling rulers they have no authority to do anything but punish evil doers who violate God’s laws, the same authority that he gave the judges and people in the Torah government. O’Donovan wrote,

  No government has the right to exist; no nation has a right to defend itself. Such claims are overwhelmed by the immediate claim of the Kingdom. There remains simply the rump of political authority which cannot be dispensed withyet, the exercise of judgment.

  Paying taxes

  Paul and Peter instructed believers to pay their taxes, but Jesus had set the example for his followers and in doing so clarified his attitude toward the existing government authorities. In Matt.17:24-7, Peter is asked to pay the temple tax. Most theologians grasp that this was a religious tax, but it was also a state tax because the authorities who collected it were political rulers as well. Jesus taught Peter that the sons of the king were exempt from the taxes of the subjects. Technically, the fish that Peter caught paid the tax for Jesus and his Apostles with the coin in his mouth. O’Donovan wrote the following about the incident:

  To recognise the coming of God’s Kingdom is to be a son of the Kingdom, and so emancipated from the order in which God’s rule was mediated through such alienating institutions as taxation. But purely as a concession Jesus and his disciples will pay taxes ‘to create no scandal’, i.e. lest they be misunderstood as mere rebels, who refuse God’s mediated rule as such. As it were to emphasize the purely peripheral character of this compliance, their payment is provided for them by the almost comic intervention of a miracle.

  The episode of the temple tax helps clarify the earlier incident in which Pharisees and Herodians tried to trap Jesus into either offending half the crowd or inciting rebellion against Rome (Mark 12:17ff). They asked Jesus if it was right for Israelis to pay the Roman census tax. Jesus responded by asking for a Roman coin. Someone in the crowd produced a coin with the head of Caesar on it. Alfred Edersheim wrote in Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah that such coins were rare in Israel at the time because the Romans respected the Jewish hatred of idolatry and images that might be worshipped, so they used coins in Israel without representations of people or animals. He added that the rabbis taught the people that the right to mint coins implied the right of the state to tax the people.

  Without doubt, Jesus instructed his followers to pay taxes to Rome when he said, “Render unto to Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.” He was not dodging the issue or cleverly disguising his answer as some libertarians want to read the passage. The libertarian assumes that Jesus disapproved of paying taxes to Rome. The best interpretation says that “he treated the question as an irrelevant distraction from the real business of receiving God’s Kingdom. If Caesar put his head upon the coin, then presumably it is his: let him have what is his, if he asks for it (for such transactions are not the stuff of which true government consists), but give your whole allegiance to God’s rule!” according to O’Donovan.

  God’s laws vs. man’slegislation

  Two types of law exist – God’s laws and manmade legislation. God’s laws cannot be repealed no matter how much a legislature might try. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court has made abortion legal. Does that mean U.S. law trumps God’s prohibition of murder? Of course not! Murder is still murder with God regardless of what a human law says.

  Do human laws have the same character of inviolability? For example, if an immigrant has not followed procedure for entering the U.S. he is considered an illegal alien. But the same group of people who made the laws can give the immigrant amnesty, as President Ronald Reagan did, and declare him legal. Is the immigrant still illegal in the sense that a murderer is always a murderer regardless of the legislation? Of course not! Human legislation is arbitrary and fickle. The U.S. experience with prohibition in the 1930’s offers a good example. For more than a decade legislation made everyone who drank alcohol a criminal until the legislation was repealed and the criminals became law abiding citizens overnight without ever changing their behavior. Manmade legislation has none of the authority of God’s law. Often, man’s legislation violates God’s laws.

  We have established that God created authorities but did not give them a blank check to do anything they want to do. They have the authority to enforce God’s laws but God has not given any ruler the authority to violate his laws and commit cr
imes against people with impunity.

  Why did Paul write this?

  An important hermeneutics principle is to look not only at the context in the Bible but the historical and cultural context of the times. Before Paul wrote the passage in Romans 13, he met a Jewish Christian couple named Aquila and Priscilla who had recently fled Rome because Emperor Claudius had expelled all of the Jews from the city (Acts 18). We have to go to secular history to find out the background. The Jews had a habit of rioting and a reputation as trouble makers. In 38 A.D. a riot erupted in Alexandria, Egypt between the Jews and gentiles. After the city sent delegations to Claudius about the riot, Claudius wrote back to the city leaders. F.F. Bruce quoted Claudius in his article “Christianity Under Claudius,” which appeared in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 44:

  The Jews, on the other hand, I bid for their part not to agitate for more than they have previously enjoyed, and never again to send two embassies, as though they lived in two separate cities—the like of which has never happened before. Moreover, they must not engage in contests for such posts as gymnasiarch or games director, but should rest content with what belongs to them by right and enjoy an abundance of all good things in a city which is not theirs. They must not bring in or invite Jews who sail in from Syria or Egypt; this is the sort of thing which will compel me to have my suspicions redoubled. Otherwise I will proceed against them with the utmost severity for fomenting a general plague which infests the whole world.