ROMANS 13:1-7
A Charter for Political Activism!

BY
THOM STARK

Let every soul subordinate itself to . . . / Be every soul subordinated by . . . the higher authorities, for there is no authority except by God, and the existing authorities have been put in their place by God. Consequently, whoever resists the authority resists what God has put in place. Such resistance will only bring down condemnation upon itself. For the rulers are not a terror for those who do good, but for those who do evil. Do you desire to be free from fear of the authority? Then do good deeds and he will commend you; he is a servant of God to your advantage. But if you do evil, be afraid—he is not wearing his sword for show. He is a servant of God, an avenger of wrath to the one who practices evil. Therefore, it is obligatory to subordinate yourselves, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience. This also is precisely why you pay taxes, for God’s priests are constantly occupying themselves with this very thing. So give back everyone what is owed them: if a tribute is owed, give the tribute; if taxes, then taxes; if fear, then fear; if honor, then honor. (Romans 13:1-7, translation mine)

This difficult little extract is perhaps the most notorious text in the Christian canon. For centuries, ruling elites and their systems of domination have found an ally in these ostensibly unambiguous words from the mouth of the apostle Paul. As Robert Jewett puts it, Romans 13:1-7 “has provided the basis for propaganda by which the policies of Mars and Jupiter have frequently been disguised as serving the cause of Christ” (2007: 803). In the last century alone this text was used by the Nazi party in Germany, by the apartheid regime in South Africa, and by the genocidal Hutu government in Rwanda, to stifle Christian dissent to injustice. The complicity of Christians in but one of these atrocities should have been enough to suggest that there was something abysmally wrong with the traditional reading habits, yet here in the United States, land of the good guy, many continue to appeal to Romans 13 in their sacralizations of an increasingly imperialistic U.S. foreign policy.

From the Holocaust to the present, historians and theologians have been scrambling to provide alternative readings of these seven verses, alternative readings to what would be the “plain sense” of the text to those who have benefited from the long, grueling history of Western domination. The fruits of their collective labors have brought no consensus. Yet all have attempted to come to terms with two realities: the text as it stands, and our common fear of totalitarianism in all its guises. Was Paul hopelessly naïve? Was he a political idealist? An apolitical opportunist perhaps? Or was he a radical subversive? Respectable scholars of all stripes, and even those with comparable methods and commitments, have come to radically different conclusions about the meaning of this text and its significance for us today.

In this essay I will try carefully to lay out the many complementary and contradictory answers scholars have scrambled to provide, evaluating the options in light of exegetical work and with attention to historical background. In the end I will argue in favor of a subversive reading of Romans 13:1-7, in which Paul is actually critiquing the imperial pretentions of Rome by contrasting the Roman body politic with the body politic of Christ, while calling those constituted by the latter to resist the former not by violence, but by creating social counter-formations, marked by agape love, capable of both undermining and transforming the very foundations of the Roman imperial order.

I will attempt to do this, bearing in mind that these sorts of problems are not finally resolved by atomized researchers at computers, wading in books. In fact, these sorts of problems are not the kind that can be finally resolved at all; they can only be resolved once for each moment, and only by Christians gathered together in communities committed to embodying the gospel in an age of extremes. As such, this little research project is motivated by the hope that for a moment it might somehow play a part in the conversation that disarmed people are having “on the ground” as they struggle together to forge the kind of polities in which every subordinated soul can find liberation.

Click Here To View The Bibliography.

Labels: New Perspective on Paul, Paul, Pauline Theology, Romans 13