Not Ordained, Just Ordered. John Howard Yoder attempted to resolve the disparity between the fact of tyranny and Paul’s ostensible praise of government in general by arguing that

God is not said to create or institute or ordain the powers that be, but only to order them, to put them in their place. It is not as if there was a time when there was no government and then God made government through a new creative intervention; there has been hierarchy and authority and power since human society existed. Its exercise has involved domination, disrespect for human dignity, and real or potential violence ever since sin has existed. Nor is it that in his ordering of it he specifically, morally approves of what government does. The sergeant does not produce the soldiers he drills, the librarian does not create nor approve of the book he catalogs and shelves. Likewise God does not take the responsibility for the existence of the rebellious “powers that be” or for their shape or identity; they already are. What the text says is that he orders them, brings them into line, that by his permissive government he lines them up with his purpose. (1972: 203)

Yoder points us to the discontinuity between Paul’s ethic for Christians, for whom wrath is forbidden (12:19), and his description of the work of the state, which is said to exercise wrath (13:4). Yoder explains that “God can in his own way, in his sovereign permissive providence, ‘use’ an idolatrous Assyria (Isa. 10) or Rome. This takes place, however, without his declaring that such action which he thus uses is morally good or that participation in it is incumbent upon his covenant people” (199). While Yoder’s burden is to show that Romans 13 does not constitute license for Christians to abandon an ethic of nonviolence in the name of this or that government,[1] his approach remains significant for our purposes as well.

What are we to make of Yoder’s claim that the authorities in Romans 13 are ordered rather than instituted by God. The English translations have generally taken interpretive license, obscuring the possibility of other translations such as the one Yoder has suggested. In the first two verses Paul expresses in three ways the idea that the authorities are in some way connected to God:

(1) Ou gar estin exousia ei mê hypo theou, literally, “for there is not authority except by God,” while the NIV reads, “for there is no authority except that which God has established.”

(2) Hai de ousai hypo theou tetagmenai eisin literally reads, “But the [authorities] are in the present state of having been ordered by God,” while the NIV reads, “The authorities that exist have been established by God.”

(3) Hoste ho antitassomenos tê exousia tê tou theou diatagê anthestêchen literally reads, “Thus the one opposing the authority, he has resisted the direction of God,” while the NIV reads, “Consequently, he who rebels against the authority rebels against what God has instituted.”

In the first instance, Paul merely uses the preposition upo, which in the genitive case means by— “there is no authority except by God.” The sense of “established,” as the NIV has it, is not in the text itself. In the second and third instances, the words Paul uses—tetagmenai and diatagê, respectively—both come from the same stem, tasso, which can mean, “to appoint,” “to order,” “to determine,” hence, “to arrange,” and in some cases “to set,” or “to direct” (Kittel 1972: 8/27). The word diatagê is a compound of tasso and the preposition dia (through). Two other words in these verses come from this same stem, tasso, namely hyptossesthô (subordinate, submit) and antitassomenos (oppose, resist). Thus, in the same way that God “orders” or “arranges” the powers, we are “ordered” or “arranged” beneath them, by God, and should not therefore seek to rearrange the ordering.

The text, taken by itself, is open to a range of meaning. What Yoder has attempted to do is to read Paul’s language within the matrix of the Hebrew prophetic tradition, over against the Hellenistic tradition which has dominated our Western translations. Yoder has brought texts like Isaiah 10, and Jeremiah 27, 29, and 56 to bear upon our text here in Romans 13. Yoder reads Rome within the tradition of Babylon and Assyria, rather than as some sui generis entity that has somehow come into existence for the first time with the ascension of Nero. Although the prophetic tradition was able to speak of pagan kings as somehow set up, or ordered, by God, they were also conscious of the fact that these rulers sought to establish themselves, over against God (Isa. 14:13-14). Borg agrees with Yoder that reading Romans 13 within the tradition of the Hebrew prophets “acquits Paul of the charge of being over-impressed by his favourable treatment as a Roman citizen or uncritical in his praise of Rome which, like any great power, could be brutal and insensitive. For Paul’s words do not mean that he saw Rome as positively good any more than the words of Isaiah and Jeremiah mean that they were blind to the barbarism and paganism of Assyria and Babylon” (1972: 216).[2]

Indeed, for the Jew there was implicit in any claim about God’s having set up a pagan power a corresponding expectation that God would bring that same power to ruin. Kittel calls our attention to this fact, showing the disparity between God’s desires for his own people and his plans for the agent of wrath. The agent of divine wrath is also

an object and victim of divine wrath. . . . We see here a basic principle of the divine governance. To be an instrument of God’s wrath is eo ipso to be also its victim. . . . The relation of political power to the wrath of God is to be seen in the same light. In Rom. 13:4 the exousia is called theou diakonos eis orgên ekdikos tô to kakon prassonti. The Bible regards many pagan peoples and rulers as executors of God’s wrath. They are this even when, like the devil, they consciously fight against God and his people. In so doing they unconsciously rage in truth against themselves. . . . This is the picture of political powers in Revelation, and it is here that we may see the inner unity between Rom. 13 and Rev. 13ff. (1972: 5/440-41)

Although many exegetes remain intrigued but unpersuaded by Yoder’s rendering of tetagmenai and diatagê as “ordered” and “directed” rather than “established” and “instituted,” it certainly remains an exegetical possibility, one whose likelihood is only increased after the text has been situated within Israel’s counter-imperial prophetic tradition. But even if we are to accept the conventional translation—“established” and “instituted”—Yoder’s argument remains largely unaffected, for within the prophetic tradition the affirmation of a pagan power’s divine constitution is not an affirmation of the pagan power itself. In fact, as we have seen, it is a kind of proclamation of doom against it.[3] Considering also the manner in which these “divine agents of wrath” typically ascended to power—through merciless brutality and bloodlust, as the prophets testify—an argument could quite reasonably be made that the prophetic language about their divine ordination is more a faith statement about YHWH’s sovereignty and adaptability, and faithfulness to Israel, than it is a causal claim meant to explain the ascension of pagan warlords. This point we shall explore presently.

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