VARIOUS APPROACHES

In his commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans, Ben Witherington names three basic approaches to our text (2004: 310-11), to which he later tacks on three or four more. In this essay I will be addressing 15 different approaches to the text.[1]

Imperial Perspective. All political authorities claim that their authority comes from some unassailable source, usually something divine. In Israel, YHWH chose David. In Classical Greece and Rome, the pantheon moved the politicians. In imperial Rome, the Caesars were deified (some before, most after death). Constantine claimed the favor of the Christian God. When kings spoke or acted, they were seen as divine agents, speaking and doing the will of the gods. If a king was defeated in battle that usually indicated the gods’ displeasure with him; and thus a new divine agent would rise up in his place, one that would bring reform and enact once again the divine will.

In humanist societies, “the people” (so-called) function as “the gods” behind the throne. The politicians are put in place by the will of “the people,” and act as agents of “the people.” This works until the people begin to realize that they are not the same “the people” their agents claim to be representing, at which point their agents are obliged to fashion new religious myths around which the people can gather (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), myths that speak the will of “the people” in place of the people—religious myths like “democratic capitalism,” for instance. Hijacking the religious language of “the people,” these “authorities” are able to do virtually whatever they please, so long as they are able to justify their actions in the accepted religious vernacular.

It is in this way that governments are able to take religious texts like Romans 13:1-7 and put them to work as a sort of domestic defense system. Virtually every expansionist government throughout history has encouraged such readings of religious texts, and many religious people in turn have been encouraged by such readings. So long as they are not the ones being pacified, “Romans” appreciate the genius of militant pacification. You will find this kind of reading both in governmental propaganda and in churches and homes in developed nations, but only in the governmental propaganda, and not in the churches and homes, of underdeveloped nations. Likewise, in the slums and the ghettos, the imperial reading is looked upon either with great suspicion, great disdain, or great despair. Only those who (consciously or unconsciously) benefit from imperial policy are comforted by the imperial reading.[2]

In the assessment of many scholars, Paul was in fact one of those who wholeheartedly accepted and endorsed the ideology of the Pax Romana. F.F. Bruce, while admitting that Paul may have been somewhat naïve about the capacity of Rome to become a destructive agent against Christianity, argues that Paul’s positive assessment of Roman government was attributable to the benefits he enjoyed as a Roman citizen (1977: 109). Blumenfeld takes this line even further. While those uncomfortable with the imperial reading often argue that Paul was not a political theorist, and that Romans 13 should not be read as some sort of Pauline theory of government (Elliott 2006: 224; Kaylor 1988: 207; Walters 1993: 65), Blumenfeld makes an extensive comparison of Paul’s language to the language of Hellenistic Pythagorean political theory and Roman political dogma, arguing that Paul’s political thinking was thoroughly informed by Hellenistic and Roman sources (2001: 389-95).[3] Blumenfeld in fact contradicts Bruce’s attribution of political naïveté to Paul and argues that Paul had a stake in a theory of Roman despotism over against Classical republicanism precisely because of Paul’s theological commitment to theocracy (390). He sees Paul’s support of the Roman system of taxation as “overt consent to the existing political regime.” Moreover, when Paul taught that all political power comes from God, he was “echoing” the “political dogma of imperial Rome” (392). Finally, according to Blumenfeld, Paul saw Christianity as a system with distinctive “political advantages” which he desired to exploit in order to “strengthen the Roman political system, which he admired and endorsed” (391). Although Blumenfeld’s Paul is aware that the system is frequently abused by the ruling elites, and can even mock the disparity between the system in theory and the system in practice (391-92 n.273); nevertheless, Blumenfeld’s Paul is committed as a true believer to the Roman domination system. He is still “the ideological guardian of the processes and structures of imperial power” (12-16).

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