Ideal Government. Most scholars, including many conservative ones, are unhappy with assessments like Blumenfeld’s. Knowing what we know about the austere dichotomy between the ideology of the Pax Romana and the reality of systemic Roman brutality (cf. Bowley 2000: 771-75; Rapske 2000: 978-84; Elliott 2006: 94-99; Bradley 1987: 113-43), many scholars who take Paul’s “theology of government” at face value, and especially those committed to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, have had to conclude that Paul could not have been describing the powers that be, but rather, the powers that ought to be. One example of many is Cranfield, who argues that Paul did not discuss Rome’s actual problems because his treatise was not pastoral, but theoretical (1965: 73). Paul was painting a picture of the ideal government. Witherington, too, sees in Paul’s instructions an assumption that “the government is functioning properly” (2004: 313).[1]

Such an account was neither politically irrelevant nor theologically abstract, according to Draper, because Paul was rather an early proponent of Modernity’s contractual system of government. Although the first century Christian was not in any position to “affect the exercise of government . . . Paul nevertheless urges the Christian from their side to make the equivalent of a ‘social contract’ with authority, for their own good. They pay taxes, keep the law and pray for the government, while the government rewards virtue and punishes vice” (1988: 37). From Draper’s perspective the purpose of Paul’s idealist picture of government is not so much to describe good government as it is to prescribe good citizenry.

The problem, of course, as Draper himself partially acknowledges, is what Paul would have Christians do whenever government is not living up to the ideal. “If the concept of ‘social contract’ is what really underlies Paul’s legitimation of the state in Romans 13, then a state which ceases to reward virtue and punish vice, which ceases to protect its citizens but preys upon them, would also cease to receive legitimation” (37). Unfortunately, Draper does not attempt to provide an account of an alternative Pauline political ethic for those contexts in which the state has rightly ceased to receive legitimation, nor does he elaborate on what such contexts would look like. Despite Draper’s claim that the purpose of Paul’s political ethic “was to insist that the Christian live out his faith in the real world” (36), Draper leaves unreconciled the disparity between Paul’s negative experience of Roman power (including the illegal execution of his Kyrios, as well as his own imprisonment and torture on multiple occasions) and his—at least superficially—positive description of it. Notwithstanding the attempt to resolve the problems of a reading like Blumenfeld’s, the idealist camp still leaves unanswered a very pertinent question: In which reality does Paul’s political ethic obtain?

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