In Galatians 6:2 Paul speaks of fulfilling “the law of Christ,” by which he means the spirit and manner of “loving your neighbor as yourself” (13:9). It is this which is the subject of Romans 12 and 13. If grace is the gospel reduced to one word, then agapē is the law reduced to a word (13:9). In chapter 12 Paul spoke of “the law of Christ” as sincere and practical expressions of agapē both inside and outside the church. Another expression of agapē is an affirmation of and submission to governments (13:1–7). Some commentators, noting the abrupt transition at 13:1 and the switch from the second to third person in 13:1–7, regard this section as a departure from Paul’s teaching on agapē and an independent unit of thought. But, in fact, the instruction here is very much a part of the design since chapter 12. In agreement with 12:2 Paul appeals for a considered response “to approve what God’s will is” with respect to rulers. “Those who do what is right” (v. 3) in civil duties also accomplish the good (the word for “right” is in Greek the same word for “good” in 12:9–21) and thus fulfill the rule of agapē. Calvin was surely correct that obedience to magistrates is not the least important way by which to cherish peace and preserve love of others (Romans, pp. 484–85).
13:1–5 The question under consideration is a practical one: what ought to be the attitude of believers toward governing authorities? At the outset we must note the obvious: the apostle was not writing for Americans nurtured by the Declaration of Independence and modern ideas of civil rights, or for any constitutional and participatory democracies. Paul was addressing first-century Christians who were a quite powerless minority under a Roman oligarchy. Willi Marxsen’s observation that Paul was not writing a dissertation on the relation of church and state, but rather making a pragmatic appeal “for loyal conduct in order to avoid a fresh edict” has much to recommend it (Introduction to the NT, p. 100).
Marxsen further warns that it is inadvisable to consult this passage as a timeless theology of church and state. Rather, he continues, Paul is admonishing the Romans not to pull the roof of Nero’s wrath down on their heads as they had under Claudius. On both points Marxsen is doubtlessly correct. Nevertheless, both the context and structure of 13:1–7 reveal that this is not the sum of the matter. Paul’s purpose is more than a note of political expediency, and this becomes apparent when we consider the circumstances in which he wrote.
We may be reasonably certain that on the whole many of Paul’s Jewish Christian readers would have been less hospitable toward Roman rule than he was. This was due to the fact that Israel regarded submission to a heathen nation as a fundamental violation of its status as the chosen people. “Do not place a foreigner over you, one who is not a brother Israelite,” warned Deuteronomy (17:15). After the fall of the monarchy in 586 B.C., Jews tolerated Persian and Egyptian rule, but the outrageous affront of Antiochus IV in sacrificing a sow on the altar of the Jerusalem temple in 168 B.C. swept them into revolt against the Seleucids. Their stunning success under the Maccabees reminded Jews ever after that it was possible to depose Gentile overlords and establish a rule more faithful to the old Israelite ideal (cf. 1 Macc.; m. ’Abot 1.10; 2.3; 3.5). These sentiments reached their zenith in the Zealot movement of Paul’s day, which combined the orthodox theology of the Pharisees with the militant nationalism of the Maccabees. Within a decade of the writing of Romans, in fact, the Zealots would plunge the nation into a disastrous revolt against Rome in A.D. 66.
Nor were such sentiments confined to the Zealot party. They surfaced in a long litany of protests in the first century, including large segments of Jews refusing to pay taxes, riots in Rome and Alexandria, Jewish defiance in the face of Pontius Pilate’s blunders (governor of Palestine from A.D. 26–36), a near-disastrous Jewish revolt when Emperor Caligula threatened to erect—and demand worship of—his statue in Palestine in A.D. 39, and in Claudius’ expulsion of Jews from Rome a decade later. The fledgling church was not unaffected by these movements and the sentiments which provoked them. Had not the disciples put a question to Jesus freighted with political expectations, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6)? In Thessalonica some years earlier Paul had been accused of “defying Caesar’s decrees, saying that there is another king, one called Jesus” (Acts 17:7), and shortly after writing Romans he would be mistaken for an Egyptian terrorist (Acts 21:38; see also Acts 5:37).
Within this politically charged atmosphere, both Jesus and Paul took a remarkably conciliatory attitude toward Rome and instructed their followers likewise. When asked, “[Is] it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” Jesus replied, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” (Matt. 22:15–22). Paul was proud of his Roman citizenship and may have considered Roman rule the power which “holds back” the outbreak of the anti-Christ (2 Thess. 2:7). It is often supposed that Romans 13 depicts Caesar in a positive light because at the time of writing (ca. A.D. 57) Christians had not yet suffered at the hands of the empire. This is only partially true, at best. Paul had not forgotten that Jesus had died at the hands of a corrupt Roman overlord; neither had he forgotten his own humiliation from a Roman governor in Corinth (Acts 18:12–17). Moreover, writings attributed to Paul (1 Tim. 2:1–2; Titus 3:1) and Peter (1 Pet. 2:13–17) preserve substantially the same teaching on government at a period when Rome was openly hostile to Christians.
How then is Romans 13 to be understood? The question has been long and intensely debated in the church. The foregoing historical review would suggest that Paul desired to instruct his Roman readers on the place of government in God’s economy, including the responsibilities of rulers to execute justice and of citizens to submit themselves to government rule. His purpose in so doing was both to demonstrate that civic responsibility was a legitimate and necessary expression of discipleship, indeed of agapē, and to thwart any separatist or antinomian political sentiments in the minds of Roman Christians. His overall purpose was therefore more comprehensive and evangelical than Marxsen’s suggestion that he was trying to avoid further recriminations from Rome, although that short-term goal cannot have escaped his attention. Moreover, Paul had to accomplish this within the social and political exigencies which prevailed in the first-century Mediterranean world, which I have briefly reviewed. From the foregoing, then, we may draw the following conclusions.
First, Paul is speaking of human government in terms of an ideal. This is apparent from the general terminology of the passage. By “ideal” we need not imagine a state of perfection, but simply what government ought to be, which, according to Paul, is an ordered civil structure ordained by God to reward good and punish evil. At the same time, Paul’s failure to raise the question of resistance to governments which violate the ideal cannot be interpreted to mean that he foresaw no circumstances where resistance might be justified. In writing to the capital Paul quite wisely chose to discuss the subject from the ideal rather than from its possible exceptions. This not only showed political savvy on his part (Rome was, after all, a totalitarian state), but it suited his purpose, which was to assert that government is ordained of God and thereby within the scope of Christian discipleship.
Second, the political problem in Paul’s mind was not at all the problem in the minds of modern Christians. Nearly all governments today claim to represent the interests of their constituents, a claim usually reflected in their names (whether or not they are democratic in reality). This is true even (or especially) of repressive governments. It is precisely this democratic ideal which creates the modern political dilemma, i.e., what are the legitimate means of redress for citizens to take against states which claim to be democratic, but which exhibit undemocratic policies?
This is a justifiable concern of modern peoples, including Christians. But it was not Paul’s concern. The Roman Republic was not a democracy; it was, politically speaking, an aristocratic oligarchy, but in practice it was a totalitarian state. The democratic ideals which we hold dearly lay a millennium and a half in the future when Paul wrote Romans 13. Neither Paul nor the nucleus of believers he represented had the right, much less the power, to challenge an iota of an imperial decree.
Paul’s question was simply this: given Rome’s supremacy, what should be expected of Christians with regard to it? On the one hand, he had to combat a naive antinomianism which thought itself exempt from all forms of restraint, including government control. This error might have suggested itself thus: If believers are no longer of this world (John 17:13–16), if they are “aliens and strangers on earth” (Heb. 11:13) and their “citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3:20), and above all, if Christ has overcome this world (John 16:33), why should they obey earthly authorities, much less pagan Romans? On the other hand, Paul had to face the fact that the tremors of Zealotism, which were shaking the foundations of Jewish synagogues around the Mediterranean, might also split Christian congregations. To parties of both persuasions—the one threatening anarchy, the other insurrection—Paul argues that the kingdom of Christ has not yet displaced the kingdom of Caesar, but even now operates through it. These two lines of thought—or something close to them—were the boundaries between which Paul was forced to operate, and any modern interpretation of Romans 13 which fails to take them into consideration will scarcely do justice to his teaching on church and state.
We must add, however, that neither Paul nor the NT teaches that when a government forsakes its God-ordained function of honoring good and punishing evil that a Christian is obligated to serve it. Paul, after all, calls the powers governing authorities, not supreme authorities. He nowhere discusses what would constitute such a departure from God-ordained authority, for to have raised the question in his day would have been tantamount to treason. An answer, were he to offer one, would again have to be found in 12:2 where the renewed mind of believers “test[s] and approve[s] what God’s will is.” That Christians throughout history have found themselves in such dilemmas is no secret. They have sometimes disagreed about what constitutes the legitimate limits of government, but on one point they concur: when the claims of earthly authorities conflict with divine authority over faith and conscience (v. 5), Christians are obliged to confess, “we must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). Obedience to rulers apart from (or against) conscience is idolatry. If all authority is indeed from God, then the claims of God rest on governments as well as on their subjects. Christians know better than the ruling authorities themselves whence their power comes, and they are obliged in their submission to such authorities to remind them that they are God’s servants for good (v. 4).
This lengthy prolegomenon now permits us to move rapidly through the details of verses 1–5. The fundamental principle of verses 1–2 is that God is the source of all rightful authority, of which civil authority is one expression. This is axiomatic in Hebrew literature, in fact. Paul again draws on a family of Greek words (hypotassein [submit, v. 1], antitassesthai [rebels, v. 2], diatagē [instituted, v. 2], and tassein [established, v. 1]), all of which are derivatives of the last word and emphasize God-ordained order. Reinhold Niebuhr rightly noted the paradox in divine order: it is God’s goodness in creation which makes civil order possible, but it is the corruption of sin which makes civil order necessary (quoted from Achtemeier, Romans, p. 204). When the authorities exercise their power for right (v. 3) they faithfully represent the source of their authority and fulfill their duty. Paul does not say that a government must be “Christian” to do this. Nero, who was emperor when Paul wrote, was certainly not a Christian and did not recognize the source of his authority. Nor need government be perfect. But it must reflect the divine order of honoring good and punishing evil.
When Paul writes, Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities (v. 1), the everyone (literally in Greek, “every soul”), which is a Hebraic expression meaning the whole person, emphasizes individual responsibility. The admonition to submit characterizes a wide range of Christian social relations, including government, Christian fellowship (1 Cor. 16:16), marriage (Eph. 5:21), and the church’s relationship to Christ (Eph. 5:24). Christian submission, however, is not slavish or blind obedience without regard to moral responsibility. Always in the NT submission carries the sense of that which would honor Christ, or as Paul says in Colossians 3:18, “as is fitting in the Lord.”
Having established the duty of believers to submit to government in verses 1–2, Paul establishes the responsibilities of government in verses 3–4. Three times he calls rulers God’s servants to honor right and punish wrong (vv. 4, 6). In stating the issue thus Paul establishes the essential and constructive purpose of government. But his formulation implies an unmistakable if unspoken corollary: when a state wholly perverts the ideal (by promoting evil and persecuting good, for example) it can no longer be regarded as God’s servant, and it cannot take the submission of its citizens for granted. The Christian’s higher allegiance to God and good releases him or her from the claims of an idolatrous regime. Martin Luther mistakenly overlooked this corollary when he made the idea of two kingdoms—one sacred, one secular—into a theological doctrine. Some 30 years after Paul wrote Romans, when the Emperor Domitian (A.D. 81–96) aspired to usurp the place of God, the author of the Revelation saw that both the purpose and limits of government had been exceeded and that the state had become “a great prostitute” (Rev. 14:8, 17–18). Obedience to God in such circumstances meant resistance, not submission. This is essentially the message of Exodus, Daniel, and the early disciples’ refusal to obey the Sanhedrin in Acts. Finally, the importance of verse 5 for Paul’s argument ought not be overlooked. He counsels submission on the basis of possible punishment and conscience. Franz Leenhardt draws an important conclusion from this:
It is significant that Paul has brought out in this connection the positive character of obedience, because such a point of view at the same time implies the limits of obedience. If obedience is a matter of conscience, then it is no longer servile; when conscience is introduced as the motive of obedience, the latter can no longer be counted on! It becomes possible to object to authority on the grounds of conscience (Romans, p. 335).
Paul thus approached the relation of church and state not as a Sadducee who lived from the advantages of the state, nor as a Zealot who lived to overthrow the state, nor as a Pharisee who divorced religion from the state, nor as a Roman citizen for whom the state was an end in itself. Paul wrote as a free man in Christ, and he appeals to the church to be equally free in obedience to the state, but not conformed to it.
13:6–7 Because authority is ordained by God, submission entails the practical duties of the paying of taxes, revenue, respect, and honor (v. 7). For Jews, census enrollments and taxation were two of the most onerous effects of foreign rule. In Roman-occupied Palestine, where tax collectors unscrupulously overcharged Jews, the populace was tempted to underpay (or withhold) taxes without compunction. Bitterness over taxes was not confined to Palestine, however. The Roman historian Tacitus reports mounting unrest over taxes in Rome in A.D. 58—only a year after Paul wrote (Ann. 13.50; OCD, “Publicani,” pp. 898–99). But Paul does not lend his voice to this protest. The payment of taxes is also an expression of agapē, for the authorities are God’s servants. The Greek word rendered taxes normally refers to direct taxes or tribute, whereas that rendered revenue refers to indirect taxes, customs duties, etc.
One further duty of the state, according to verse 4, is the use of the “sword.” In the present context the sword is directed to civil disorders rather than military engagements, although in ancient Rome, where soldiers comprised both the police force and the army, there was admittedly less distinction between the two than there is in most modern democracies. At any rate, the metaphor is too general to be conscripted as justification for war. But it does seem to denote the right of capital punishment, for a sword (as opposed to a whip, for instance) was an instrument of death. In the present context, however, it is “God’s servant” who bears the sword, and this excludes all arbitrary and indiscriminate uses of power apart from the cause of justice.
Additional Notes
13:1–5 The Greek word which Paul uses for governing authorities (exousia) is nowhere used in this manner in extrabiblical Greek. Some commentators have therefore suggested that Paul is thinking of supernatural angelic powers (1 Cor. 15:24; Col. 1:15ff.; Eph. 3:10) which manifest themselves in political agencies. This explains, according to the argument, Paul’s surprisingly positive attitude toward Roman rule. In disagreement with this position, it must be said that Paul nowhere calls for submission to powers which in the main oppose Christ (8:37–39; Gal. 4:8–11; Col. 2:15). Moreover, the designation of governing authorities is quite similar to nomenclature for rulers in 1 Timothy 2:2 and 1 Peter 2:13. Above all, the subject here is not supernatural powers (that would belong at the end of ch. 8), but civil authorities and taxation (vv. 6ff.). Full discussions are given in Gaugler, Der Römerbrief, vol. 2, pp. 275–79; and Dunn, Romans 9–16, p. 760.
Similar to Marxsen, Schlatter suggests that word of Paul’s clashes with Roman officials on the missionary field had reached Rome. In response to this, continues Schlatter, Paul wrote 13:1–7 to assure Christians in the capital that he had no intention of challenging authorities in Rome, thus precluding any precautionary measures against him. See Gottes Gerechtigkeit, pp. 350–51.
On Jewish-Roman relations in the first century A.D., see the following: for the Jewish revolt of A.D. 66–70, consult the account of Josephus in Jewish War; for Jewish refusal to pay taxes, Josephus, Ant. 17.355; 18.1–10 for Jewish riots in Alexandria, London Papyri 1912 (quoted in Barrett, New Testament Background, pp. 44–47; for Pilate’s blunders, Josephus, Ant. 18.55ff.; for Caligula’s megalomania, Josephus, War 2.184–87; 192–203; for Claudius’ expulsion of the Jews, Suetonius, Claudius 25.
Among the many passages in Hebrew literature which witness to God as the source of political power, see Ps. 2:2; Prov. 8:15–16; Isa. 45:1–2; Jer. 27:5ff.; Dan. 2:21, 37; Wisd. of Sol. 6:1ff.; and in the NT, John 19:10–11). For rabbinic sources, see Str-B, vol. 3, pp. 303–34.
Luther’s introduction of the idea of two kingdoms entails a separation of the sacred and secular, and this is seemingly foreign to Paul.
In the preceding chapter, [Paul] taught that one must not disturb the order of the church; in this chapter, he teaches that also the secular order must be maintained. For both are of God: it is the purpose of the former to give guidance and peace to the inner man and what concerns him, and it is the purpose of the latter to give guidance to the outer man in his concerns. For, in this life, the inner man cannot be without the outer one.
From this Luther derives the alarming conclusion, “Christians should not refuse, under the pretext of religion, to obey men, especially evil ones.” See Lectures on Romans, p. 358. It must not be forgotten that Luther courageously challenged corrupt papal authority, but he nevertheless discounted the right to challenge secular authority. Calvin, on the other hand, although he affirmed the right and necessity of governments to rule, did not extend this to include tyrannies, which “are full of disorder [and] are not an ordained government” (Romans, p. 479).