The Identity of God. Dunn is especially acute when he reminds us that claims about YHWH’s ordering of pagan power would have been

particularly meaningful for Jews living in the diaspora, as aliens living under a foreign power, and often as slaves and dispossessed. . . . The comfort of such a belief was not that it made them any less vulnerable to the whims of such rulers. . . . The comfort was rather that such rulers were by definition responsible before [the Hebrew] God, and so were under the constraint of God’s final judgment. That particularly Jewish belief would, of course, have little impact on the rulers themselves, but at least it gave their oppressed Jewish subjects the assurance that rulers would come under the judgment of God sooner or later. (1986: 64)

The claim that God, specifically YHWH, ordered or ordained the powers, was a radical claim indeed. The central issue, as Jewett points out (2007: 789), is the precise identity of this God. According to Paul, he by whom the Roman authorities rule is not Jupiter or Mars. He is none of the gods of the Roman civic cult. He certainly is not Nero, who claimed to have been “chosen to serve on earth as vicar of the gods,” and who was worshipped as a god (Ellul 1990: 81-82). Rather, “the God of whom Paul speaks here is . . . the God embodied in the crucified.” For Jewett, the precise identification of God with the rebel Jew whom Rome crucified turns Romans 13:1 “into a massive act of political cooptation” (2007: 790).[1]

These considerations serve as a corrective to the reading of our text that has offended and mocked those who for centuries have suffered under political domination. Perhaps because of the remoteness between us and, for instance, the Isaianic community, the claim that a Cyrus was appointed by God does not strike us as particularly appalling, even if it should. Perhaps if we recontextualized the claim, its character would become plainer to us. We might say, “Adolf Hitler rules by God’s ordinance,” or “Saddam Hussein is a minister of God.” Such claims, if not blasphemous, are at the least oxymoronic, in the same way that Cyrus’s appellation of divine servant was oxymoronic. But in the prophetic tradition, these claims serve a purpose. They function as critiques of tyrannical regimes, not as legitimations of them. Rather than thumbing their nose at the oppressed, such claims are made to comfort the politically marginalized and persecuted. Though the hyperbole can be deceiving (e.g. Ezek. 28:11-14), these are not claims about how such tyrants came to power, as though God personally selected Cyrus, or Nero, because of some virtue one or the other possessed. They are not causal claims at all. They are not explanations of reality but revisions of it. They point to a future in which the powers-that-be are the powers-that-no-longer-are.

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