Theological Journal – August 13 Lee Camp: Scandalous Witness (10a)

 

Here I reproduce in full Camp’s helpful discussion of Romans 13.

More on Romans 13, with a Nod to Revelation 13

To summarize matters already raised but that are indispensable for rightly construing Romans 13: The vocation of the church is to embody the peaceable way of the kingdom of God. This must be held alongside a realism about the ongoing reality of sin in the world. The church’s vocation held alongside the church’s realism then provides specification for the vocation of the powers and governing authorities. Given that the triumph over the power of sin is not yet final, we may expect that wickedness will still rear its ugly head, will strike and lash out. Corruption and murder and death have not yet been finally defeated, and thus we continue to see its work made manifest on the pages of history. It is precisely this reality that defines the work of the governing authorities, which is to channel the vengeance and wickedness back upon itself, to limit the destructive and maddening effects of violence by turning it in on itself. As we have seen, the vocation of the church is to embody the new. But all have not received the new as good news, and thus they continue to live under bondage to the forces of death. What then? The governing authorities are ordered by God to have a preservative effect. Unlike Luther, who claimed that the governing authorities were part of the “orders of creation,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer called the powers “orders of preservation.” That is, they have a function of employing a sharply limited amount of violence or coercion in service to checking chaos, keeping madness at bay. As the prince or king or emperor may thus excusably employ coercion in this manner, meanwhile the church embodies the new and proclaims the new, inviting all to come to participate in the new.

Some have suggested it is important to make a distinction between ordaining and ordering—that Romans 13 claims that God has ordered the powers but not ordained any particular power, has not specifically approved the behavior of what any particular government does. Instead, in God’s providence, they are brought into God’s ordering of human history.

Thus, with little systematic consideration, the New Testament writers simply assume a given role for the governing authorities that may be summarized thus: the governing authorities, with their police function, serve the larger mission of the church. In parallel with Romans 13, 1 Timothy 2, and 1 Peter 2, all depict the relationship between church and governing authorities in this way.

This stands in continuity with the Old Testament witness, in which the powers of the world were used in God’s sovereignty for God’s purposes in history, as noted previously. Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, and Persia are all described in various ways as being the servants of God’s purposes, typically employed for punishing and chastising the wicked. These (themselves often wicked) nations are God’s “ministers” in the limited sense of serving God’s overarching order, in that God employs the arrogance and violence of the nations against one another so that the earth and its creatures are not utterly destroyed.

Several notes in this regard.

First, this way of putting the matter stands at odds with the assumptions already discussed at the heart of Western, liberal democratic orders: of a privatized so-called religion, in which this religion, as a compartmentalizable element of life, need not, and for many ought not, impinge on the so-called realm of the public. For some secularists, religion is simply dispensable and unnecessary altogether, though notions of human rights are thought to require a political order in which so-called religion is protected as a so-called private affair. For others, religion turns out to be something that is needed by democratic regimes, providing something like a moral compass or ethical ballast to a ship that would otherwise wander aimlessly. In this view, called an “instrumental view of the church,” the church serves the broader and purportedly more public role of the nation-state. The nation-state, or democracy, is seen as the larger, more public, and more significant player in human history. So far as history is concerned, the nation-state is seen as the historical savior, is seen as the ‘last great hope of the earth.’ The church thus serves democracy and not the other way around. Thus the New Testament claim is, from the start, offensive to modern sensibilities. In the New Testament it is the governing authorities who serve the church rather than the other way around. Ephesians 3 notes, for example, that the salvific wisdom of God is revealed to the powers in the church. ‘Although I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ, and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; so that through the church the wisdom, of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph. 3:8–10). Paul’s decidedly anti-modern stance in 1 Corinthians 2:8 further demonstrates this claim. When believers go before unbelievers to settle disputes among them- selves, Paul can hardly fathom it. Why, he asks, would you take a dispute to be judged by unbelievers when it is the believers who will, in the end, judge the world? It would be better to be defrauded, he claims. 

It has been suggested by others that it is almost as if the apostle Paul depicts the scenario this way: the church is putting on the stage show, while the governing authorities serve as the ushers at the show. The usher is necessary and helpful. But the artists and musicians and performers are the reason for the gathering. And it does not serve the affair at all for the artists and musicians and performers to busy themselves with ushering, for then the show cannot go on. They have a special vocation to which they must attend. From the New Testament perspective, the state and governing authorities serve the mission of the church, and the church is the primary character in God’s mission to the world. This claim must not and cannot be construed in a triumphalist manner, in which the church then seeks to arrogantly vaunt itself over the powers and over the peoples: for the vocation and mission of the church is to embody suffering love and the peace of God’s kingdom, and call all to participate in this reign. 

Second, for the Christian to “be subject” to the authorities cannot mean, then, ‘blind subjection.’ There is a certain social conservatism on this score: the powers that be are ordered by God to serve their role of keeping wickedness at bay through the employment of a limited coercive force. In serving that role, Christians must not seek to overthrow governments but should acknowledge the ordination or vocation of those powers. (It is no small irony that Romans 13 is often employed to counsel a sort of sociopolitical conservatism— ‘obey the authorities!’—but that the implications are never explored on Independence Day.) 

But again, this cannot mean a blind subjection, an indiscriminate blessing of whatever the powers do. Such a position would obviously stand at odds with the overarching teaching of the entire Bible. From the prophet Nathan to the exiled Daniel, from John the Baptizer to Peter the apostle, a consistent prioritization of allegiances appears. ‘We must obey God rather than human authorities.’ To the degree that the human authority requires something of us which does not stand at odds with our first and prior allegiance to Jesus as Lord, to that same degree must we yield our obedience. There is something that we must yield to Caesar, but only when whatever Caesar demands has not been previously demanded by the Creator.

Third, then, the powers may become demonic, may begin to demand for themselves absolute and abject obedience. The powers may begin to assert themselves as a god. Instead of serving the very limited role ordained by God, the powers too often see themselves as saviors, as being the hope and light of the world. And this terribly dangerous conceit is not a dynamic with which the New Testament is unfamiliar. Thus Revelation 13 needs to be as much in the Christian consciousness as Romans 13, for in Revelation we see the full flowering of an arrogant imperial power demanding abject obedience. And— again it is important to note—in John’s depiction in Revelation, it is not those who rise up in revolutionary violence like Braveheart’s William Wallace (“Freedom!”) or the American patriots against the British (“Give me liberty or give me death!”) who triumph. Instead, John maintains that it is those who bear witness to the Lamb through the sword of God’s Word. It is those who are martyred who triumph over the evil empire. The persecuted ones, even in the midst of their own “axis of evil,” are called not to make the world turn out right by employing the means and methods of empire, but the means and methods of the Lamb of God, trusting that God is at work both in heaven and earth to bring about the triumph of God’s kingdom. A corollary to this claim is this: we cannot assume that whatever specific government or specific governmental policies exist are therefore specifically ordained by God. 

In any case, as our manifesto has sought to make clear, we must not presume that governments alone may carry the mantle of political actor—a matter to which we now explicitly turn.