No One Is Exempt: Romans 13:1–7 in Context

Part 1: Prolegomena

Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, “What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you who does it with a great fleet are styled emperor.” — Augustine, City of God IV:4

Whatever else is true of the events since March 2020, we have seen excellent examples of rich and powerful people doing as they please with those who cannot defend themselves. The biggest names in anti-COVID mitigation measures, millionaires all, never missed a day of work or a paycheck, but my barber and my Peruvian cacao farming Christian brother, both of whom have considerably smaller budgets, missed months of both.

The question most Christians ask about the situation is, Does the government have the right to shut down the economy? But to phrase the question that way is to ask if one abstraction has the right to act on another abstraction. This is absurd because abstractions do not act, nor can they be acted upon, nor do they have rights. If “government” is anything tangible, it is people so powerful (and usually rich) that no one can defend himself against them. So, the better way to phrase the question is, Do rich and powerful people have the right to forcibly prevent those who cannot defend themselves from peaceably providing goods and services to their neighbors in voluntary exchange for what they themselves need?

This is a subset of the larger question that is usually phrased, What is the proper function of government? I will argue in this series of posts that that also is an absurd question. Government is an abstraction, so it cannot function. The proper question is, How are rich and powerful people to treat those who cannot defend themselves against them?

On the basis of Romans 13:1–7, the conventional wisdom says that because the “authorities” (exousiai) have been “instituted by God” they are therefore entitled to, among other things, collect taxes because they are “God’s servants devoted to governing.” A man from Mars reading that passage before landing on earth would expect to see nothing but orderly societies run by God’s servants in the political class using tax revenue for the good of their subjects. Would he be surprised at the reality today? Would he have been surprised at what he saw if had landed in the Rome of Paul’s day?

Of course not. But the problem is even worse than that. What if there were a Christian—a devotee of sola Scriptura who truly wanted to serve God—and he were put in charge of a government’s budget: where would he go in Scripture to find guidance for a just tax structure and for where the money should go after it is collected? I was told by one respected Christian leader that taxation can be theft, but is not always, but when asked where Scripture distinguishes the two, he had no answer. Another told me that because Scripture does not address tax rates they are not a moral issue—which I take to mean that tax rates of 5%, 50%, and 95% are equally moral. As anyone familiar with the Laffer curve can attest, those rates would have drastically different effects in the real world, and to say that taxpayers have no moral argument against being taxed into financial ruin seems at best a counterintuitive way to defend the rights of the poor (Jer 5:28). So where does our sola Scriptura Christian magistrate go for wisdom—to John Maynard Keynes?

If a Christian can get no practical guidance in the fundamentals of just governance—taxation being the sine qua non of government—from Scripture, how can we expect God to direct the heathen to govern justly? If they will not believe the law and the prophets and would not believe if someone returned from the dead (Luke 16:31), how will they know what justice is, and how will their hearts receive the wise words that describe it? Will God give them special revelation?

I argue in this series that nobody but nobody has the right to kill innocent people, take their property, defraud them, or defame them (Rom 13:8–10). Winning an election or a war does not entitle a person to do as he pleases with the lives, property, trust, or reputations of those who cannot defend themselves against him. I will be challenging the conventional wisdom on Romans 13:1–7, so I will present in the second installment an interpretation of that passage that keys off of Romans 13:8–10.

The conventional wisdom

The conventional wisdom is that God has instituted the family, the church, and the state. We can see where God institutes the family (Gen 2:24) and the worshiping community (Exod 20–23). I argue that while God gives laws that govern human conduct, he nowhere institutes a state; he nowhere ordains some people to take for any purpose the lives and property of innocent people. He nowhere makes some people exempt from the prohibitions against murder, theft, fraud, or defamation.

Three thousand years ago, the people of God were the freest people the world had ever known or has ever known since. They had been living in a stateless society: “There was no king in Israel” (Jdg 17:6; 18:1; 19:1; 21:25). They paid no taxes. When they obeyed God, their nation was safe from enemies foreign and domestic: “the land had rest” for forty years twice (Jdg 3:11; 8:28) and eighty years once (Jdg 3:30). But the day came when they forgot God. They turned their backs on the perfect law (Ps 19:7) God had given them, despised the times God had delivered them from their enemies despite their sin (1 Sam 12:8–11), and committed great wickedness by demanding a king (1 Sam 12:17). This sin was so heinous that God said that he would not remove the punishment even if they repented (1 Sam 8:18). No matter—they did not repent.

The mentality that drove that revolt is still with us today and has been since at least the Reformation. Matthew Henry speaks for the majority of Christians when he famously writes, “Better a bad government than none at all,” this following the words, “Never did sovereign prince pervert the ends of government as Nero did, and yet to him Paul appealed, and under him had the protection of the law and the inferior magistrates more than once.”[1] What is this “government”? What can be so wonderful that its absence is more to be feared than even its most maleficent forms?

Luther, Calvin, every major Puritan writer, Kuyper, and every major “Bible-based” writer today echo the sentiment. Reformed Christians, as have their Baptist brethren, have stood shoulder to shoulder with tyrants since the beginning, and as the world suffers through the greatest moral crisis at least since the Third Reich—some would look at the unprecedented global scale and say in all of history—the “Bible-believing” church is at best helpless to fight the moral decline and descent into tyranny and at worst helping it along, with the insouciant majority somewhere in the middle.

In what way does today’s church resemble what Jesus was talking about when he said, “I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it” (Matt 16:18)? Europe and the United States could have passed for Christendom a century or so ago, but today, the church, if not in retreat, is certainly losing ground, and these societies are better known for sexual immorality, political corruption, warmongering, and now man-made pestilence—much if not all of it made possible by government.

The state

Government (or the state) for the purpose of this essay is defined as those people who are rich and powerful enough to force their will on other people. They can prohibit their neighbors from peaceable activities and force their neighbors to act contrary to their choice and even to their welfare. They can make rules for others that they themselves do not have to obey. They are those to whom the poor and defenseless cannot say no.

Scripture makes it clear that it is God who has ordained these people to be rich and powerful and enabled them to impose their will on those who cannot resist them, but I will argue that he has not thereby allowed them to take the life or property of innocent people, to defraud them, or to defame them. Innocent is, of course, a loaded term in Scripture. Ultimately, no one is innocent in God’s sight. For our purposes here, however, I define innocent as “not guilty of violating the body, property, reputation, or trust of a person similarly not guilty.”

Is this the Scriptural definition of government? “There was no king in Israel” during the period of the judges, so whatever a king is, there was none in Israel then. First Samuel 8 describes government using Samuel’s description of what the Israelites were asking for:

He will conscript your sons and put them in his chariot forces and in his cavalry; they will run in front of his chariot. He will appoint for himself leaders of thousands and leaders of fifties, as well as those who plow his ground, reap his harvest, and make his weapons of war and his chariot equipment. He will take your daughters to be ointment makers, cooks, and bakers. He will take your best fields and vineyards and give them to his own servants. He will demand a tenth of your seed and of the produce of your vineyards and give it to his administrators and his servants. He will take your male and female servants, as well as your best cattle and your donkeys, and assign them for his own use. He will demand a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will be his servants. (1 Sam 8:11–17)

In a word, they were asking to return to Egypt and live under a Pharaoh, someone exempt from the laws that governed the rest of them and against whom they were helpless (cf. Deut 17:16).

Romans 13:1–7 assumes that government is put in place by God, that it brings judgment and retribution, that it serves God, and that it collects taxes. However, note the pronoun “it.” (I follow the NET here.) Many translations quite understandably regard the abstract exousia (“authority”; vv. 1b, 2a, 3b[,c]) as a metonym for the concrete and human exousiai (“people in authority,” v. 1a), archontes (“rulers,” v. 3a), and diakonos (“servant,” v. 4a, [b,] c). Government is thus not fundamentally an “it.” It is a “them.” It is people. While the conventional reading of Romans 13:1–7 considers them a special privileged class, I will argue that that is not the best way to read the passage.

The questions to be addressed here are these: How are Christians to relate to their neighbors? How are defenseless Christians to relate to the rich and powerful? How are rich and powerful Christians to relate to the defenseless? What does any of this have to do with fulfilling the Great Commission?

The gospel defined

This is my understanding of the gospel: God is good. People have rebelled against him and so deserve nothing but his eternal wrath. Jesus died to pay the penalty of that rebellion for those who repent, believe the gospel, and join in calling the world to repent. The church is repentant sinners calling sinners to repent. As sinners repent and believe the gospel, their lives change as individuals, families, and larger social structures, and we should see societies characterized by people of integrity promoting justice, peace, and prosperity. But going back to square one, if people are to believe the church’s call to repentance—that is, to respond to the Great Commission—Christians have to live out their own repentance. If they live out their repentance—if they truly become disciples who make disciples fulfilling the Great Commission—they will build just, peaceful, and prosperous societies. And for that, they will have to know what it is not only to love God above all else with their entire being and walk humbly with him but how to love their neighbors as themselves, to do justice, and to love mercy. The state as Scripture and the conventional wisdom define it is inimical to the entire Christian purpose.

God does indeed want Christians, as part of the Great Commission, to work toward building a just society; in such a society everyone is truly equal before the law—there are no exceptions—and the rights of the poor and insignificant carry the same weight as those of the rich and powerful. Such a society and only such a society is truly just; because it is just it is peaceful; because it is peaceful it is prosperous. Such a society will have no state.

The biblical case for anarchy

The Israelites in Egypt were under the government of a king, but when they came into their promised land, they were not (Jdg 17:6; 18:1; 19:1; 21:25): under Othniel, “the land had rest for forty years” (Jdg 3:11); under Ehud and the judges who succeeded him, “the land had rest for eighty years” (Jdg 3:30); under Gideon, “the land had rest for [another] forty years” (Jdg 8:28), a record that was never matched after the establishment of the monarchy. Had they really been better off under government in Egypt than they were without it in the promised land? Were the Christians under the government of Nero better off in earthly terms than the Israelites were with no government in the days of the aforementioned judges? If your answer is no, you should enjoy reading on.

It is easy to see where God ordains the family (Gen 2:24) and where he ordains the church (Matt 16:18; John 20:22; Acts 2:4). But Scripture nowhere bestows on one group of people the right to do as they please with the lives and property of their innocent neighbors, even in the name of the latter’s welfare; that is, God nowhere ordains the state.

The argument that the judges were kings in all but name is an argument from silence. A state begins with taxation, but the Torah—which devotes mind-numbing detail to items that seem to be important (e.g., the tribal offerings, Num 7:12–83), no matter how private (e.g., how men are to clean up after nocturnal emissions, Lev 15:17), and therefore cannot be accused of lacking attention to detail—says not a word about a taxation system, nor does it speak of a standing army, road construction, public schools, or any other supposed benefit we associate with the state. The closest it comes to establishing a state is in Deuteronomy 17:14–20, which is a concession, not a prescription. Israel in the promised land had no king, no state, no government.

So if government, the state, some people entitled to tax and govern—“exercise continuous sovereign authority over,” in Webster’s words—their neighbors, is not God’s design for society, God’s best, what is?

Well, what is the most important thing God wants us to keep in mind? When Jesus was asked that question, he said, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. The second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the law and the prophets depend on these two commandments” (Matt 22:37–40). Would God’s best for his people—for all people—not flow from consistent obedience to those two commandments?

What it means to love God

If God’s best for his people does indeed flow from consistent obedience to the commands to love God above all and our neighbors as ourselves, we need to ask what it means to love God, what it means to love our neighbor, and what Jesus meant when he said that loving our neighbor is “like” loving God.

We are to love God first, but the nature of that love is not what comes first to modern minds. We tend to think of love as a feeling that overflows in words, but confessions of love for God are rare even where we would expect to find them, in the Psalms (18:1; 116:1)—as are claims to praise him (71:6,8; 119:164).[2] Instead, the Psalms speak of loving God in terms of obeying his word (Ps 1:2; 119:47, 48, 97, 113, 119, 127, 159, 167). Love seems to hinge on obedience to God’s commands: “If you love me, you will obey my commandments. . . . The person who has my commandments and obeys them is the one who loves me. . . . If anyone loves me, he will obey my word” (John 14:15, 21, 23). This echoes Moses’s words in Deuteronomy: “What does the LORD your God require of you except to revere him, to obey all his commandments, to love him, . . . ? . . . What I am commanding you today is to love the LORD your God, to walk in his ways, and to obey his commandments, his statutes, and his ordinances. . . .  I also call on you to love the LORD your God, to obey him and be loyal to him” (10:12; 30:16, 20).

I assume that at some level the man who asked Jesus about the most important commandment (Matt 19:16) knew that to show his love for God he needed to obey the commands; he was asking where to begin, where to concentrate his efforts. Jesus’s answer was, in essence, “You do not begin with the minutiae of the ceremonial laws; you begin with loving your neighbor.” If we take the idea of love as gushy feelings, then we’re still at square one. But, of course, he gave the man, and by extension us, measurable criteria with which to judge our compliance with that command and thus with the first: “Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother, and love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt 19:18–19). Paul repeats much of this in Romans 13:8–10: “The commandments, ‘Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not covet,’ (and if there is any other commandment) are summed up in this, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law.”

This is not to equate love with obedience. No one obeys perfectly, and even those who do well can sense that they lack something (Matt 19:16). But love for God and man shows itself in obedience (James 2:17–18), specifically respect for the life, property, trust, and reputation of the neighbor.

What it means to love the neighbor

The commandments against murder, theft, fraud, and slander are not invitations to get as close to those activities as possible without crossing the line as they are commands to stay as far away from those activities as possible.

Thus, the true meaning of “Do not murder” is more like “protect and preserve your neighbor’s life” than “it’s OK to beat him or otherwise afflict him as long as you do not kill him.” The parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10) and the teaching about judgment day in Matthew 25 make it plain that there is more to loving one’s neighbor than not harming his body: we are to actively promote his health and physical welfare. But that promotion has to be built on the foundation of doing no harm to him or to anyone else.

Similarly, “do not steal” is not a license to damage property or borrow it unbidden as long as we do not maintain possession of it. Rather, we are to actively enable our innocent neighbors to acquire physical resources (Matt 25:35–36) and to protect them from those who would expropriate them (Ps 82:3; Jer 5:28). John the Baptist defined the repentance to which he called people by saying, “The person who has two tunics must share with the person who has none, and the person who has food must do likewise” (Luke 3:11). John the apostle adds, “Whoever has the world’s possessions and sees his fellow Christian in need and shuts off his compassion against him, how can the love of God reside in such a person?” (1 John 3:7). Promoting our neighbor’s material good has to begin with considering everyone’s property sacrosanct; while we may be called to give up our own property for our neighbor’s benefit, we are not to take from one neighbor to benefit another.

The commands against adultery and false witness both have to do with transgressions against truth. Adultery is simply the worst form of fraud. A man who commits adultery has taken a woman’s virginity, which she can only give once, under the condition that she will have exclusive rights to that man; to go against that condition later is fraud. Anytime anyone promises to give something later in return for something now and does not come through, he has committed fraud.

Similarly, bearing false witness in court is the worst form of defamation. Slander is defamation outside of court, and gossip, while it does not deal with untruths, still conveys facts to those who have no business knowing them such that the betrayed person’s reputation suffers unjustly. Bearing false witness in court exposes the victim to fines, imprisonment, and possibly death.

According to Jesus and Paul, then, the most important thing for us to remember as we seek to please God is to protect innocent people, their property, their trust, and their reputations. Christian discipleship requires more than this, but it requires no less: this is where it begins. The second commandment is, in Jesus’s word, “like” the first because we cannot obey the first without obeying the second.

Tetranomy introduced

Here is the primary message of this series: nobody but nobody has the right to kill innocent people, take their property, or defame them. Nobody but nobody can legitimize killing innocent people by using a different term (like “collateral damage”) for it. Nobody but nobody can legitimize taking innocent people’s property by calling it by another name, even “taxation” or “regulation” or “zoning” or “eminent domain.” Nobody but nobody can defraud or defame his neighbor and justify it by calling it a “cost overrun” or “a campaign promise that was impossible to fulfill” or “a noble lie.” Nobody but nobody can defame his neighbor and justify it by calling it “spin.” I call the resulting ethos, based on these four laws, for lack of an extant term, tetranomy.

The world is full of practical problems. My claim here is that those practical problems can be solved without resorting to any of the practices just mentioned. Without such practices, the world would look very different from how it looks today. Eminent domain, for example, makes possible the highway system that arguably enables better movement of goods and services than what would exist without it. However, the system also results in urban sprawl, increased exhaust emissions, and the scattering of families and weakening of family ties; and, of course, those who lose their proper-ty to eminent domain—by definition the powerless—lose what is proper‑ly theirs—to those who are by definition more powerful—and thus suffer injustice. I will argue that correcting this injustice, while it might make the solutions to the practical problems more difficult, would bring about increased peace and increased prosperity in the ways that truly count. It is of no profit for a society to gain material abundance and forfeit its soul (Mark 8:36).

A matter of the heart

I will address the text of Romans 13:1–7 in a later post, but first, let me address what I think is the issue of the heart. I’m assuming that most of the people I talk to are typical: they consider government—some people rightly controlling other people—essential to a just society and the activities Samuel describes in 1 Samuel 8—military conscription, eminent domain, patronage—simply part of the price that needs to be paid. This is life the way God intended, and they are prepared to give thanks for every part of it. Why?

Why do Christians want to consider taxation a sacred part of life? Why do they want the rich and powerful—the “authorities,” the “powers that be”—to have God’s permission to do as they please with the poor and defenseless? I understand that they want the rich and powerful to defend the rights of the poor and defenseless, and this is why they want Christians and Christ-like thinking to permeate the political power structure (the good intentions of Abraham Kuyper come to mind), but is it not the rich and powerful by definition who act against the poor and defenseless? “Are not the rich oppressing you and dragging you into the courts?” (Jas 2:6). How likely are rich and powerful elite non-Christians (or Christians, for that matter) to work against their own interests for the sake of the poor and defenseless? Why do Christians prefer a system that privileges some at the expense of others to one in which all are equal?

Could it be because they think they are good people and they—or those with whom they sympathize—receive positive benefits from the state and believe that any system that benefits good people like them is thus by definition a good system? Many times I have heard something like, “Public schools can be good. I got a good education in the public schools. They have problems, but we should work to fix the problems, not abolish the schools.” Ditto, mutatis mutandis, for the Americans with Disabilities Act, the highways, sports venues, the War on Drugs, the wars on racism, communism, terror, COVID-19, ad infinitum, and other supposed exceptions to tetranomy. Is it not worth at least considering the possibility that good people can benefit from evil systems? Does the benefit that good people derive from a system justify that system?

The issue is not whether schools, provision for the disabled, highways, and sports venues are good things or whether some evils need to be resisted forcibly; it is rather whether God wants Christians to continue to live under the command to hold life and property sacred when they make those provisions and resist those evils or whether the basic commands to love our neighbors by protecting their lives, property, reputations, and trust can be suspended when we decide they need to be.

Does the scriptural view of human nature say that those who have power over others would not use it for their own benefit? That they would never fool themselves into thinking that they are sacrificing alongside those whom they are oppressing when in fact they are doing nothing of the sort? Does “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it?” (Jer 17:9) not apply to the rich and powerful who win wars and elections?

I assume all Christians really do want the poor and helpless and afflicted to be taken care of and provided for. My argument is that this is more likely to happen under a system in which all people are bound as much as possible by the duty to protect life, property, and truth than they are in a system that allows some people to violate others’ property and lives. “As much as possible” here brooks no legitimate exception: people are sinners, so they will sin, and the system needs to provide for defense against, prosecution of, restitution by, reconciliation with, and, if necessary, execution of malefactors. However, these provisions must be made in a context of respect for innocent life, property, and truth; the system must be voluntary and treat all participants equally.

The first objection the Christian reader is likely to make to my claims thus far is, “Why didn’t God think of that? Romans 13:1–7 assumes that God has ordained some people to govern others.” In my next post, I will show that the conventional wisdom about that passage is simply wrong, but here I explain that conventional wisdom.

The conventional wisdom on Romans 13:1–7

Let us begin by noting that the conventional wisdom does not take the passage at face value. A face-value reading gives the “governing authorities” (NET, ESV) carte blanche: “The authorities that exist have been instituted by God. So the person who resists such authority resists the ordinance of God” (13:1–2). The ordination of the authority (the person) extends to his decrees: he speaks for God, in loco Dei, and his decrees are thus God’s will. “. . . (for rulers cause no fear for good conduct but for bad.) Would you have no fear of the one 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 is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.” There is no room there for a difference between the decree of the authority and the will of God. The text does not say that the ruler should cause no fear for good conduct, that he should approve good behavior, or that he should carry out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer; rather, it says that this is what he does. In matters of governance, then, in a face-value reading of our passage, the governing authority speaks for God and must be obeyed in every detail.

Here the conventional wisdom departs from the face-value interpretation by appealing—and reasonably so—to Acts 5:29, “We must obey God rather than men.” My point is not that this appeal is wrong; it is that by making this appeal, the conventional wisdom departs from the face-value interpretation of our passage and posits that there are times when the governing authority can speak without divine authority.

(It also violates two exegetical principles. By reading the didactic Romans passage in the light of the narrative passage from Acts, it violates the principle that narrative is not normative but didactic passages are. It also reads the later revelation—Romans was written after the events in Acts—in the light of the earlier revelation.)

The logical question, then, is when do governors overstep their authority? The conventional answer is, “When they prohibit us from worship [or from evangelism]” or “When they command us to break God’s law [again usually defined as worship or evangelism].” Do they overstep their bounds if they prohibit peaceable activities, as when the US government made it illegal to own gold? How about if they force people to engage in risky activities, like being injected with experimental substances, or even silly ones, like wearing useless “face coverings” in public? More importantly, how does one determine whether the governor has overstepped his bounds, and what recourse does one have if he does? If we cannot look to Romans 13:1–7, the putative plainest statement of the legitimacy of government, where can we look? If we look at Acts 5:29, we are simply going around the circle again. So how do we get out of the circle?

The stepping-off place is precisely where it is in Romans 13: the “love your neighbor” verses, verses 8–10. This is a restatement of Jesus’s answer to the question about the commandment that is “like” the greatest commandment and from which no one is exempt. Stated positively, it commands us to treat our innocent neighbors, their property, their reputations, and their trust as inviolable. Nobody but nobody has the right to violate these things, nobody but nobody has the right to command that they be violated, and nobody but nobody has the right to obey such commands. Ergo, whenever government commands that innocent people be physically harmed, expropriated, defrauded, or defamed, it is overstepping its bounds. This condemns “collateral damage” and military conscription, taxation and eminent domain, broken campaign promises, and propaganda.

What about Romans 13:6, which assumes that we pay taxes? That verse is a statement of fact, not a command, but the question is legitimate and will be dealt with in the exposition.

An exegetical presupposition

Let me state an important presupposition on which I am basing my exposition: I presume that the highest priority of any state is to stay in power. Scripture attests to this abundantly: The king of Sodom was willing to give up his entire fortune as long as he had people to rule over (Gen 14:21). Even after Egypt had been destroyed (Exod 10:7), the Pharaoh of the exodus was not willing to let go of his power over the Israelites. Saul knew that God was against him (1 Sam 13:14) and that David would someday be king (1 Sam 24:20), yet he never abdicated; instead, he hunted David until his dying day. Herod apparently was so desperate to hold on to his power that he felt he needed to eliminate the threat of a toddler (Matt 2:16).

Would we expect the emperor of Rome to be any different? It would be bad enough for him to have Jews in Rome, those odd people who claim that there is no god but their God. While they had their religion and caused trouble by trying to shake off Roman rule over their homeland, they were in no position to threaten to overthrow the empire by assassinating the Emperor. But an offshoot of that religion that was even more fanatical might be worrisome, saying as it does that the one who would eventually rule the world had been born, had died, and had come back to life; he had gone off to the afterlife but could be expected to come back at any time and set up his rule. (Think of how afraid Herod was that John the Baptist had come back from the dead, Matt 14:2.) Even the Jews did not go that far!

No ruler looks in the mirror and sees an unjust man, and one symptom of the face-saving that characterizes non-Christian religions is that justice is whatever the party that wins armed conflict says it is, a corollary being that the further from godly justice the decrees of ungodly rulers are, the less likely those rulers are to countenance debate or dissent.

We do not know how many Christians were in Rome to read Paul’s epistle. Conceivably dozens or hundreds of Roman Jews could have been converted in Jerusalem at Pentecost (Acts 2:10, 41) and returned. If they were able to make disciples themselves in the subsequent twenty-five years or so, there could have been thousands of Christians in Rome when the epistle arrived. This was less than ten years before the great fire in Rome and Nero’s subsequent notorious persecution of the Christian community. I think it reasonable to assume that the Roman Christian community was visible and a matter of some concern to the Roman government.

As surely as water runs downhill, the Roman government would have sent spies into the Christians’ midst to find out what they were planning—or to look for disenchanted former members who would be willing to tell their secrets. How the people of God were to interact with godless rulers was a question that believers had been facing for centuries, and Paul needed to balance the unjust laws all too familiar to his readers with the jeopardy he was putting his readers in by mentioning those laws generally, let alone specific instances. He thus had to lay any question of the emperor’s legitimacy or morality between the lines.

Am I reading too much into the passage? Allow me to call your attention to the book of Esther, which is notable in part because the most important character in it, the God of the Jews, is nowhere mentioned; the reader needs to enter with presuppositions and read between the lines to arrive at the message of the story. Further, note how the book up to 2:18 introduces the situation: the king as a model of hospitality and fun, the party as a rich Presbyterian wedding reception, the queen as an irrational rebel, and the gathering of the virgins as the chance of a lifetime for a girl to become royalty. Is it unreasonable to read the king as a dissipate monster, the event as a tax-funded drunken orgy, the queen as stripped of her dignity, and the gathering of virgins as kidnap and sex slavery? The former reading is that of the conventional wisdom regarding Romans 13:1–7, the latter of tetranomy.

I do not know whether the Christians in Rome had read the book of Acts or heard of Peter and John’s words to the Sanhedrin, “We must obey God rather than man,” such that they could have heard our passage read and automatically responded, as modern Christians do, “That’s all well and good, but we have to obey God rather than man,” let alone that they would have thought to say, “That’s what rulers are supposed to do, but his rule is legitimate even if he doesn’t.”

What I do know is that after Paul lays out his case in verses 1–7, he reminds his readers what they surely knew because Jesus had said the same thing (Matt 7:12; 22:40): “Love your neighbor as yourself”—as measured by respect for life, property, trust, and whatever other commandment there might be—was the fulfillment of the law (Rom 13:8–10). This, I submit, is the lens through which we are to read our passage and is the basis of what will follow in subsequent posts.

Part Two is here.

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[1] Matthew Henry, “Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible,” Bible Hub, https://biblehub.com/commentaries/mhcw/romans/13.htm.

[2] Psalms-only singing traditions are highly unlikely to fall into the trap of gushy “Jesus is my boyfriend” love songs and endless repetitions of “Hallelujah” and “Praise the Lord.”