Church and State

Romans 13:1-7 is the longest passage in the New Testament on the believer and the state, and it has been used to justify almost everything: obedience to tyrants, resistance to tyrants, the divine right of kings, and the modern democratic state. Before it is used for anything, it should be heard where it was first spoken. Paul wrote to the churches in Rome around AD 57, early in the reign of Nero. These were the relatively calm early years of that reign, before the fire of AD 64 and the persecution that followed it. But the Roman church already knew Rome's power. Claudius had expelled the Jews from the city some years earlier, and Priscilla and Aquila, who were among Paul's readers, had been refugees because of it (Acts 18:2). The historian Tacitus records that around AD 58 there were public complaints in Rome about the greed of the tax collectors (Annals 13.50). Paul's instruction to pay taxes, revenue, respect and honour (Romans 13:7) was not written into a vacuum.

The first thing to notice is where the passage sits. Romans 12 ends with the command never to repay evil for evil, to leave vengeance to God, and to overcome evil with good (12:17-21). Romans 13:8-10 picks up again with love as the fulfilling of the law. The passage on authorities is framed by love and by the refusal of personal revenge. Paul has just told the believer not to avenge himself, and then he tells him that God has appointed an agent of retribution to the wrongdoer (13:4). The two belong together: the Christian lays down private vengeance partly because God has not left the world without public justice.

The second thing to notice is the word play in verse 1. Everyone must submit, hypotassestho, place himself under, because the authorities that exist have been appointed, tetagmenai, set in order, by God. Both words come from the same root. God has arranged an order, and the believer is to take his place within it. Then verses 3 and 4 describe what that order is for: rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad, and the ruler is God's servant for your good. Readers have always asked whether those verses describe every actual government or the purpose every government is given. A ruler who terrorises good conduct and rewards evil is doing the opposite of what verse 4 says he is for. Paul does not answer that question in this passage, and the rest of this lesson is largely about the answers Christians have given.

Romans 13 is not alone. Jesus said, Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's (Mark 12:17), which both grants Caesar a real claim and limits it, since the coin bears Caesar's image and the human being bears God's. Peter told scattered believers to submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every human institution (1 Peter 2:13), and then summed it up: fear God, honor the king (2:17). Notice that the king gets honour and God gets fear. And Jeremiah told the exiles in Babylon, the very empire that had burned Jerusalem, to seek the prosperity of the city to which I have sent you as exiles (Jeremiah 29:7). The steady biblical pattern is that believers pray for, pay, honour and seek the good of even pagan governments, while never giving them the worship that belongs to God alone.

Then there is the other side of the canon. Revelation 13 portrays the imperial power as a beast to whom the dragon gave his power and his throne and great authority (13:2), and which was permitted to wage war against the saints (13:7). The same empire Paul calls God's servant, John sees as the beast. Most interpreters do not think these contradict each other. They think the same institution can be, at different times or in different acts, God's servant restraining evil and an idolatrous power demanding what belongs to God. This is one reason Christian political thinkers, from Augustine in The City of God to Oliver O'Donovan in The Desire of the Nations (1996), have refused to build a politics on one verse. Romans 13 tells you what government is for. Revelation 13 tells you what it becomes when it claims to be God.

Christians who agree on everything in section 1 still differ, sometimes sharply, on how the church should relate to the state. H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture (1951) famously sorted the options into five types, and his typology is still taught, though critics including John Howard Yoder and D. A. Carson, in Christ and Culture Revisited (2008), have argued that the scheme itself tilts the reader toward Niebuhr's own preferred type. This lesson uses four families of answer instead, each with a long history and serious living defenders. Read each one as its own advocates would put it.

Two kingdoms. Martin Luther, in Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed (1523), taught that God governs the world in two ways. Through the gospel, preached in the church, God makes people righteous and rules their hearts by his word and Spirit. Through the temporal government, with its law and sword, God restrains evil and keeps outward peace among people who are not yet, or not fully, ruled by the gospel. Both are God's work; neither should do the other's job. The prince must not try to command faith, because faith cannot be forced, and the preacher must not try to rule the city by the gospel, because, as Luther put it, that would be like a shepherd penning wolves, lions and sheep together and telling them all to be gentle: the sheep would not last long. Defenders today, including Lutheran ethicists and Reformed writers such as David VanDrunen in Living in God's Two Kingdoms (2010), argue that this view keeps the church free to preach the gospel to everyone without becoming a political party, and protects the state from claiming to save anyone. Critics point to Luther's own violent tract against the rebelling peasants in 1525, and to German churches that obeyed Hitler, and ask whether two kingdoms teaches Christians to leave the state alone when they should resist it. Defenders reply that Luther in the same treatise sharply rebuked princes who overstepped their office, that the doctrine limits the state as much as the church, and that the Confessing Church's resistance itself drew on Lutheran resources.

Transformation. Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch theologian who founded the Free University of Amsterdam and later served as prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905, taught what he called sphere sovereignty. God has given distinct spheres of life their own authority under him: the family, the church, the school, business, art and the state. The state has a real but limited sphere, which is public justice, and it must not swallow the others. In his inaugural address at the Free University in 1880 he said, in a line still quoted everywhere, that there is not a square inch of human life over which Christ does not claim lordship. Christians should therefore work in every sphere, including politics, as servants of Christ the king. Defenders argue this view honours the cultural mandate of Genesis 1:28 and has produced Christian schools, universities, trade unions and political parties that served whole nations. Critics answer that transformation can slide into triumphalism, a belief that Christians can build the kingdom by politics, and they note honestly that Kuyper's ideas about separate spheres were later bent by some Afrikaner theologians toward separate peoples, and that Kuyper himself held views on race that his admirers today reject. Defenders reply that a distortion of an idea is not the idea, and that neo-Calvinists were also among apartheid's fiercest critics.

Separation. The Schleitheim Confession of 1527, written largely by Michael Sattler, who was executed for his faith that same year, taught that the sword is ordained by God but stands outside the perfection of Christ, so that a Christian should not take part in the coercive work of the state. The Anabaptist churches that came from this tradition, including the Mennonites, have often refused oaths, military service and political office. In the twentieth century John Howard Yoder, in The Politics of Jesus (1972), and Stanley Hauerwas, with William Willimon in Resident Aliens (1989), argued that the church's first political task is to be the church: a visible community of forgiveness, peace and shared goods that shows the world an alternative to violence. On this view the church does not need the state's power to be faithful, and Christians who seek power usually end up serving it. Critics ask whether this leaves the neighbour without justice, since someone must run the courts and stop the violent. Defenders reply that separation is not withdrawal; Mennonites have been leaders in relief, peacemaking and restorative justice, and the question is not whether Christians serve the world but whether they do so by the sword.

Catholic teaching. The Catholic tradition, drawing on Augustine and Aquinas, teaches that political authority belongs to human nature as God made it, that the state exists for the common good, and that it is bound by a natural law knowable to all people. Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891) began the modern body of Catholic social teaching, and Pius XI's Quadragesimo Anno (1931) gave it the principle of subsidiarity: larger bodies should not take over what smaller ones, such as families and local communities, can do for themselves. The Second Vatican Council, in Dignitatis Humanae (1965), taught that every person has a right to religious freedom which the state must protect, and in Gaudium et Spes (1965) that the political community and the church are independent and autonomous, each in its own field, while both serve the same people. Defenders argue this gives Christians a shared moral language for public life that does not depend on everyone accepting the Bible. Protestant critics worry that natural law can drift from scripture, and some recall the long centuries when the papacy claimed authority over kings. Catholics reply that Vatican II's teaching on religious freedom was precisely a clear statement of the church's present position. The Orthodox churches have their own tradition, often called symphonia, from the Emperor Justinian's Sixth Novel (535), which described the priesthood and the imperial power as two gifts of God meant to work in harmony.

These models are not only European history. In 1991 Zambia's president Frederick Chiluba declared the country a Christian nation, and the phrase was later written into the preamble of its constitution. Zambian Christians have argued about that ever since. Some see it as a right public confession of the faith most citizens hold. Others, including some Zambian church leaders, have worried that it ties the church's witness to the fortunes of politicians and makes it harder to rebuke them. You can hear all four models in that argument, and your own country probably has a version of it.

On one point the historic churches agree without exception. When a government commands what God forbids, or forbids what God commands, the Christian must obey God. Peter and the other apostles replied, We must obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29). The Hebrew midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt had instructed (Exodus 1:17). The three young men told Nebuchadnezzar that even if God did not deliver them, we will not serve your gods (Daniel 3:18). John Calvin, who is often read as a teacher of obedience, ends his chapter on civil government in the Institutes (4.20.32) by insisting that obedience to rulers must never lead us away from obedience to God, and he quotes Peter's words. This is settled. No Christian tradition teaches that a believer may worship an idol, deny Christ, or kill the innocent because a ruler orders it.

Notice what that agreement covers and what it does not. It covers refusal: declining to do the wrong thing, and accepting the consequence. The midwives did not attack Pharaoh. Daniel did not hide his prayers; he prayed just as he had done before (Daniel 6:10), and then went to the lions. The apostles kept preaching and were flogged. The early church prayed for the emperors who persecuted it, as Tertullian insisted in his Apology around AD 197, and its martyrs refused to burn incense to the emperor while refusing also to fight. The harder question, on which Christians genuinely divide, is whether a believer may go beyond refusal: may Christians break a law in public protest, and may they ever resist a government by force?

The first answer is that Christians may refuse but not resist. Its defenders point out that Jesus told Peter to put his sword away, that he said My kingdom is not of this world; if it were, My servants would fight (John 18:36), and that the New Testament never shows a believer resisting by force, even under Nero. The Anabaptist tradition holds this view, and many Christians in the early centuries did. They argue that the cross is the pattern: Christ conquered by suffering, not by seizing power, and the church that takes up arms has stopped looking like its Lord. Critics ask whether this leaves the weak to be slaughtered when a ruler turns on them, and whether love of neighbour can stand by while that happens. Defenders reply that faithfulness, not effectiveness, is the measure of the church, that refusal and protection by every means short of the sword are not standing by, and that the witness of suffering has often done more to end tyranny than the sword has.

The second answer is the doctrine of lesser magistrates. Calvin, in the passage just before the one quoted above (Institutes 4.20.31), allowed that where a constitution appoints lesser officials to restrain the king, as the ephors restrained the kings of Sparta, those officials not only may but must resist a tyrant, because they are themselves God's appointed authority. Lutheran pastors in Magdeburg argued the same in their Magdeburg Confession of 1550, and later Protestant writers developed it. On this view resistance to tyranny is not private rebellion but one God-given authority restraining another. Defenders argue it is simply Romans 13 taken seriously: if a ruler becomes a terror to good conduct, other authorities exist to stop him. Critics ask who decides when the line has been crossed, and note how often such arguments have been used to justify wars that did great harm. Defenders reply that the doctrine is itself a restraint: it gives no private person a right to rebel, but only lawful officials, and only against real tyranny, which is a narrower door than most rebels have wanted.

The third answer is open, nonviolent civil disobedience. Martin Luther King Jr., in his Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963), written to white clergymen who had called his protests unwise, appealed to Augustine's teaching that an unjust law is no law at all, and to Aquinas's account of law as rooted in the eternal and natural law. A Christian may break an unjust law, King argued, but must do so openly and lovingly, and must accept the penalty, so that the punishment itself exposes the injustice. Defenders note that this keeps both truths of section 1: it refuses the unjust command and still honours the order of law by submitting to its penalty. Critics have asked whether ordinary believers can safely judge which laws are unjust, and whether organised law-breaking weakens the respect for law that Romans 13 commends. King's answer was that the alternative, waiting, had become another word for never.

The fourth answer is the hardest. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor and theologian who had helped lead the Confessing Church, became involved in the conspiracy against Hitler within German military intelligence. He was arrested in 1943 and hanged at Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945. Christians still argue about what he did. Some honour him as a man who saw that a mass murderer had to be stopped and who accepted the guilt of acting rather than the guilt of doing nothing, which he believed was the greater. Others, including some who deeply admire his writing, argue that his path cannot be made into a rule, and that the church must not teach believers to plot violence. Historians also differ on how far his own role went. This course does not settle that argument for you. It asks you to hold the settled point firmly, that God must be obeyed rather than men, and to weigh the unsettled point honestly, with the texts and the history in front of you.

Many students of this course live where the government is suspicious of the church, restricts it, or persecutes it. Some live where the danger comes not from the state but from armed groups the state cannot or will not control. Everything in this section is written with that in mind, and the first principle is this: nobody, including this course, has the right to tell you to take a risk with your own life or your family's that you have not weighed before God yourself. The decisions belong to you, your church and your conscience. What scripture and the church's history can give you is wisdom.

The New Testament does not command believers to seek suffering. Jesus told his disciples, When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next (Matthew 10:23), and sent them out like sheep among wolves with the instruction to be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves (10:16). Paul, when the governor of Damascus was guarding the city to seize him, was lowered in a basket through a window in the wall and escaped his grasp (2 Corinthians 11:33). He also used the legal protections he had: when officials at Philippi beat him without trial, he insisted on his rights as a Roman citizen (Acts 16:37), and later he appealed to Caesar (Acts 25:11). Shrewdness, flight and the use of the law are all faithful. The early church took the same view. The account of Polycarp's martyrdom, from the middle of the second century, tells of a man named Quintus who handed himself over to the authorities unasked and then lost his nerve and offered the sacrifice. The writer comments that the church does not praise those who give themselves up, because the gospel does not teach this.

At the same time, there are things a church cannot give up. It cannot deny Christ, worship another, or stop being the church. Daniel kept praying. The apostles kept preaching. The early Letter to Diognetus, usually dated to the second century, describes Christians who live in their own countries as though they were foreigners, sharing in everything as citizens and enduring everything as strangers, obeying the laws and in their own lives going beyond them. Pliny, a Roman governor writing to the emperor Trajan around AD 112, described Christians who met before dawn on a fixed day to sing a hymn to Christ as to a god, and bound themselves by oath not to steal, commit adultery or break their word. His inquiry found nothing worse than what he called a depraved and excessive superstition, yet he executed those who would not give it up. That is a picture of a church that is wise about danger and immovable about worship.

Christians in hostile settings disagree, in good faith, about how far to cooperate with a government that controls religion. In China, since the 1950s, some Protestant churches have registered with the state-approved Three-Self Patriotic Movement, while others have refused and met as unregistered house churches. Those who register argue that Romans 13 asks them to work within the law where they can, that registration has allowed open worship and the printing of Bibles, and that it is not denial of Christ to accept limits a believer would not choose. Those who refuse, following figures such as the pastor Wang Mingdao, who would not join and spent more than twenty years in prison, argue that a state which decides what may be preached has claimed what belongs to Christ. Both groups contain faithful believers. Similar choices face Christians in many countries, and the decision must be made by those who will bear its cost, not by outsiders who will not.

Some wisdom is common to every hostile setting. Pray for those in authority, as Paul urged, for kings and all those in authority (1 Timothy 2:2), including rulers who oppose you; that is commanded, and it is also a protection against hatred. Do not keep lists of members' names, meeting places or leaders on phones or in notebooks that could be seized. Do not post names, photographs or locations of believers online. Do not let outsiders, however well meaning, publish your church's story in ways that could identify people. Do not pressure any believer to take a risk on behalf of the church that they have not freely chosen. And remember that obeying God rather than men usually looks like Daniel, quietly doing what he had always done, rather than like a public act of defiance.

This track asks you to build a casebook: a notebook in which you work real moral questions from your own setting, so that by the end you have the material for a full written case study. This lesson gives you its first political page. Before you write, a word of safety. If you live where the church is watched or restricted, write this page in general terms only. Do not record names of people, churches or places, plans of any kind, or anything that would harm someone if the notebook were found. If even general notes would be dangerous, work the steps in your head and in prayer and write nothing.

Step one. At the top of a fresh page, write the heading Church and State, and under it one sentence describing your country's government as it relates to the church: friendly, neutral, suspicious, hostile, or mixed. Step two. Write which of the four models in section 2 your own church tradition is closest to, and one strength and one weakness of that model as you see it in your setting. Step three. Describe, in general terms, one law, official demand or public pressure in your country that a Christian might find hard to obey in good conscience. Step four. Work it through the questions of section 3. Is this a command to do what God forbids, or to stop what God commands? If so, refusal is required, and you should write what faithful refusal would look like. If not, is it unjust in a way that might call for open, peaceful protest, or is it a burden to be carried with patience? Write which texts from this lesson bear on it.

Step five. Write one sentence of prayer for those in authority over you, by office not by name, and pray it this week. Step six. If you lead others, plan one way to teach your congregation the difference between submitting to the government's order and obeying a command to sin, using the midwives in Exodus 1 or Daniel 6 as the text. Keep the page. Later lessons will add to it, and the final lesson of this track will ask you to choose one case from your casebook and work it fully.