Tiberius had expelled Jews from Rome twenty-two years before Claudius became emperor. Claudius had wanted to expel the Jews when he first took power, but the Jewish population had grown too large for him to do so without causing a riot, so he outlawed public assemblies by Jews. A few years later, constant rioting by the Jews of Rome forced Claudius to expel them, two of whom were the followers of Christ, Aquila and Priscilla. Paul would have known this history of the Jews in Alexandria and Rome and he had personally experienced rioting by Jews in Thessalonica. In Paul’s day, Christians had not suffered much at the hands of the Romans. In fact, Roman authorities had helped restrain the Jewish and pagan forces that tried to prevent him from preaching. F. F. Bruce wrote,
Paul was thinking much more of his own experience of Roman justice, which encouraged him to think of the empire as being—temporarily, at any rate—a safeguard against the unruly forces which endeavoured to frustrate the progress of the gospel. On the strength of this experience he could write of the imperial authorities several years later—when Nero had already been emperor two years and more—as “ministers of God”; on the strength of this experience, too, he confidently appealed towards the end of A.D. 59 to have his case transferred from the jurisdiction of the procurator of Judaea to the emperor’s court in Rome.
Paul wanted to protect the young church from unnecessary persecution by the Roman state. He may have had in mind Jesus’ warning in Matthew 7:6, “Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.” In other words, do not attract the wrath of the opposition when they show violent tendencies; as much as possible, live in peace.
Finally, Paul had already witnessed the threat Christianity posed to the ancient social order. Romans believed that worshipping their gods caused the gods to protect their cities against invaders so not worshipping them would be treasonous, as was refusal to worship the Caesars. Also, the radical individualism of Christianity threatened the ancient pagan hierarchy of society in which patriarchs ruled as tyrants over women and slaves. Larry Siedentop wrote in Inventing the Individual,
Was it an accident that women and even slaves also played an important part in the growth of Christianity, and that, through them, it spread into the upper classes? The Christian movement gained from being marginal. The offer of dignity through belief in the Christ did not openly challenge patriarchy or servitude. But it offered self-respect. A moral revolution was underway.
The Christian refusal to worship the traditional gods or Caesars and its radical individualism threatened to shred the social fabric. As a result, pagans accused Christians of committing treason, cannibalism and of being atheists. Paul did not want the progress of the gospel to be hindered by unruly behavior on the part of Christians giving credence to those charges. Church fathers for the next two centuries defended Christians against the charge of being unpatriotic or treasonous.
Further evidence comes from I Timothy chapter 2 that Paul’s and Peter’s motives for admonishing Christians to submit to rulers had to do with keeping the peace. Paul encouraged the church to pray for kings and those in authority. In other words, the kingdom flourishes in the hot house environment of peace. O’Donovan added,
How, then, are these supposed to serve the ultimate horizon? By facilitating a ‘quiet and peaceful life’ – for their subjects, that is – ‘in all religion and sobriety’. ‘This’, the apostle goes on, ‘is good and acceptable to God our Savior, whose will is for everyone to be saved and to come to recognise the truth.’...the goals and conduct of secular government are to be reconceived to serve the needs of international mobility and contact which the advancement of the Gospel requires.
The difference between government and the state
Paul wrote that all authority has been established by God. However, God did not create the state. Theologians often claim that God established human government after the flood when he instructed Noah in Genesis 9:6, “Whoever sheds man blood, by man his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God he made man.” The term “image of God” indicated that God had delegated to every human the authority to enforce his laws. However, most of what we know about God’s political theory comes from the Torah. That government consisted exclusively of a court system to apply God’s laws to adjudicate disputes between free citizens. God provided Israel with no human executive other than a supreme court justice. There was no king or pharaoh and no legislative branch, police force or standing army. Those were the main features of the pagan nations and what we characterize as the state. Israel embraced the state when it rejected God in favor of a king like the nations around them.
So while it is clear that God created government, it consisted only of a few laws and courts. God never created the state with kings or pharaohs who oppress the people. States have always been the invention of men who used force to impose their will on others and rob them of their wealth and enslave or kill them. We need to keep this distinction between government and the state in mind when interpreting Romans 13 and the authority that the state has.
On the other hand, God used mankind’s invention of the state for his own purposes. As he warned the Israelis through Samuel in response to their demand for a king in I Samuel 8, kings would oppress them in awful ways. They would take the people’s property and their daughters while killing their sons in continual war. By allowing the state, God was doing what Paul told the Romans he has often done to mankind – let them have what they demanded. Paul wrote in Romans 1:18-19, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.” Mankind had rebelled against God and God’s punishment was to leave them alone: “Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.” (Romans 1:24)
Christians need to keep in mind that God’s perfect will for mankind is a libertarian government, as he designed in the Torah, not a state, not even a democratic state. An oppressive state is part of God’s permissive will as punishment for rebellion. Individual Christians can refuse to submit to states when states try to exercise authority beyond that which God has given them, but the state will likely crush those who try. God has not promised to miraculously rescue Christians who insist on their God-given rights. Submission to God’s laws is a matter of conscience; submission to unjust rulers is a practical affair. Christians are left primarily with the option of fleeing to a less oppressive state as the early Christians did when persecuted.
God will allow the blessings of freedom only to those who embrace him and his designs for government, as he did with the Israelis in the book of Judges. Not everyone has to be Christian and endorse Torah economics, but a critical mass must exist within a nation and when that mass is reached God will allow the people to throw off tyrannical rulers. That happened with the Dutch in the late sixteenth century, England in the seventeenth and the U.S. in the late eighteenth century. However, as each nation has abandoned Christianity it has become increasingly socialist and tyrannical.
With regard to economic tyranny, there is an option between fleeing and civil war, and that is a “black” market. I prefer to call it the free market when it exists in a state with oppressive taxation and regulation. Christians can take part in a free market that follows God’s laws of abstaining from theft, fraud and coercion while exercising their God-given rights to free exchange with others. History has shown that as states become more oppressive in economic matters, more people choose to ignore manmade laws and engage in free trade though it may violate tyrannical laws. The numbers may not be great enough to allow them to set up a separate state, but at some point enough people will become engaged in the free market to make it relatively safe to take part in. Such free markets abounded in the old Soviet Union, Communist China and other socialist tyrannies.
&n
bsp; Free markets within tyrannical states provide vital services, mostly to the poor and powerless. The wealthy have all of the power within the state they need to make tyrannical systems work in their favor. The poor are the ones who always need relief from oppression. Often, smuggling provided food and medicine that would have been scarce without the “illegal” activity. The most common method of saving by poor people outside of the U.S. is to buy dollars on the “black” market and stash them under a mattress. They cannot buy them legally because the rich and powerful have crafted legislation to give themselves monopolies on foreign exchange. Free markets in U.S. dollars help poor people around the world escape the ravages of inflation inflicted on them by states who insist on “printing” money to pay their bills.
Theologians disagree about who has the authority to rein in tyrannical rulers. Some insist that only God can do it. But then God works through his people most of the time. Godly theologians in The Netherlands during the Inquisition could not decide who had the authority to rebel against tyranny and finally left the decision to the nobility. In the multiple liberations of Israel from tyrannical rulers in the book of Judges, God used humans each time, sometimes with miracles and sometimes without. The difference is that the judges and kings in the Old Testament had the advantage of direct revelation from God concerning when to rebel. We do not have that advantage today. On the other hand, God has given us the gifts of his word and the ability to reason from its principles. We can know what God considered immoral and unjust behavior on the part of ruling authorities by applying reason to God’s word.
Consequently, if the majority of a nation is Christian and decides to rebel against the tyranny of the state, as the Dutch Republic and the United States did, God has given them that authority and will bless such rebellion. Until such time, Christians should pay taxes to tyrannical governments, obey the laws as much as possible, and work toward peace and the prosperity of the nation, as God instructed the Jews in Babylon to do.
Christians must keep in mind the principles of interpretation, or hermeneutics, when confronting Romans 13. The Bible is mostly history and to paraphrase Mises, history is so vast and contradictory that people can find support in it for any kind of nonsense. The only way we can have any degree of certainty that our interpretation of scripture comes close to what God intended is by following those principles, which are just common sense. One of those principles is to consider the context, not just the immediate context of the passage, but the historical and cultural context and all of the passages in the Bible that touch on that topic. Most of the scripture that deals with government are in the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Bible. When we include those in the discussion of this chapter we get a different perspective than if it is yanked from its context and used to defend tyranny.
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