Gospel and the Government
Recognizing Authority (v1-2)
Role of the Government (v.3-5)
Here, then, are the complementary ministries of the state and its accredited representatives. ‘He is God’s servant to do you good’ (4a) and ‘he is God’s servant … to bring punishment on the evildoer’ (4b). The same dual role is expressed in Peter’s first letter, that ‘governors … are sent by him [sc. the Emperor] to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right’. Thus the state’s functions are to promote and reward the good, and to restrain and punish the evil.
It is important to hold
we may perhaps say that individuals are to live according to love rather than justice, whereas the state operates according to justice rather than love
As an example of the misuse of
We are to submit right up to the point where obedience to the state would entail disobedience to God. But if the state commands what God forbids, or forbids what God commands, then our plain Christian duty is to resist, not to submit, to disobey the state in order to obey God. As Peter and the other apostles put it to the Sanhedrin: ‘We must obey God rather than men!’ This is the strict meaning of civil disobedience, namely disobeying a particular human law because it is contrary to God’s law. To trespass and organize a sit-in, or to obstruct the police in their duties, may also in some circumstances be justified, but it should be called ‘civil protest’ rather than ‘civil disobedience’, since in this case the laws which are being broken in order to publicize the protest are not themselves intrinsically evil.
In each case civil disobedience involved great personal risk, including possible loss of life. In each case its purpose was ‘to demonstrate their submissiveness to God, not their defiance of government.’
Further light is thrown on the ambivalent nature of the state’s authority when
Rendering What’s Owed (v.6-7)
Paul twice uses the very same word which he has used elsewhere of the ministers of the church, namely diakonoi (although the third time he uses leitourgoi, a term which usually meant ‘priests’ but could mean ‘public servants’).
Taxation was widespread and varied in the ancient world, including a poll tax, land taxes, royalties on farm produce, and duty on imports and exports.
