Romans 13.1-7
The Monday before we kill him the begrudgers try to entrap Jesus with a question, “Teacher, is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?”
The tax in question is the imperial head tax, which Rome levied for the privilege of being a citizen of the empire. The tax was payable only with a silver denarius from the imperial mint. Before Jesus steps into the trap they’ve set for him, he asks to see the coin in question.
And notice— Jesus does not carry one.
"Bring me a denarius and let me see it,” Jesus replies.
They fumble in their pockets until someone in the crowd produces the coin. Jesus looks it over before finally answering.
The Gospel of Mark reports that upon hearing his response the Pharisees and the Herodians “were utterly astounded by Jesus.”
But why?
Even Madison and Jefferson managed to clear this easy hurdle. What was so bewildering about Christ’s answer? It sounds as straightforward as it does commonsensical. Evidently not, for they reacted to his response with utter amazement.
Why?
Exactly what is the astonishment hidden in his apparently anodyne answer?
“Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s. Give to God what belongs to God.”
How is this an utterly amazing answer?
Indeed how is it not every bit the stabilizing compartmentalization to which the apostle Paul exhorts his auditors in his Epistle to the Romans:
"Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.”
Nearly a century ago, under the duress of a different Caesar, the theologian Karl Barth composed a confession of faith that sounds like it contradicts both Jesus’s answer to the question about taxes and Paul’s command to submit to the governing authorities.
The opening salvo of the Barmen Declaration, written in response to the Nazification of the German Church, defiantly declares:
“Jesus Christ [not the Bible] is the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death…Jesus Christ is God’s vigorous announcement of God’s claim upon our whole life.”
Karl Barth wrote the Barmen Declaration on behalf of the dwindling minority of Christians in Germany who publicly repudiated the authority of the Third Reich. Barth drafted the entire document while his colleagues slept off their lunchtime booze. “We reject the false doctrine,” Barth continued in the second thesis, “that there could be areas of our life in which we do not belong to Jesus Christ but to other lords…With both its faith and its obedience, the Church must testify that it belongs to and obeys Christ alone.”
What happened to giving to Caesar what belongs to Caesar?
Where did Paul’s summons to submit to the governing authorities go?
One of the teachers from whom I learned Karl Barth’s theology is Dr. George Hunsinger. Professor Hunsinger has a thick, white beard and usually wore reading glasses perched precariously at the end of his nose. Often his wife would sit at the back of the classroom and signal to him when it was time to wrap up so prone was he to lecture on and on, oblivious to the time.
I remember we were discussing Barth’s Barmen Declaration in class one morning, and Dr. Hunsinger, uncharacteristically, broke from his lecture and took off his reading glasses. His jovial countenance turned serious, and he said, seemingly at random though not random at all, “just outside the Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria, immediately outside the walls of the concentration camp, there was and still is a Christian church.”
It was an 8:00 class but suddenly no one was fighting off a yawn.
He continued:
“Just imagine the prison guards and the commandant at that concentration camp probably went to that church on Sunday mornings and even Wednesday evenings. Every week they walked from gas chambers and gallows, through razor wire, and past cattle cars to the church where they confessed their sins and received the assurance of pardon and prayed to the God of Israel and the God of Jesus Christ, and then they walked out of the church and went back to the camp and obeyed their orders to kill scores of Jews. And they did not think it in any way contradicted their self-identification as Christians.”
“How does that work?” a classmate joked, trying to take the edge off.
And Dr. Hunsinger did not immediately respond. But he did not need to reply. Because anyone who had matriculated all the way to seminary already knew an answer. Taken at face value, the Bible told them so:
“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.”
Commenting on this passage from Paul’s letter, my teacher Beverly Gaventa writes:
“No one takes up a text innocently…These seven verses rank among the most difficult in a letter that overflows with interpretative challenges. Interpretations of this particular passage have a sustained and often troubling history that shapes readers and responses.”
No one takes up a text innocently.
Michael Cassidy is a white evangelist from Johannesburg, South Africa, who founded an ecumenical organization aimed at reconciliation called the African Enterprise. When he was eighteen years old, Cassidy converted to Christianity while in the United Kingdom, crediting the Anglican priest and theologian John Stott with his transformation. Cassidy started African Enterprise after he graduated from Fuller Theological Seminary in California. Starting in the middle of the 1960’s, Cassidy began holding multiracial evangelistic crusades in apartheid South Africa. Years later, Billy Graham received a letter from Nelson Mandela. While he was imprisoned on Robben Island, the gospel had profoundly affected Mandela, prompting him to reach out to the famous preacher. Adverse to getting himself involved in allegedly “radical politics,” Graham asked Michael Cassidy to visit Nelson Mandela in his stead.
Cassidy met with Mandela during which the political prisoner pressed Cassidy to network with other Christian leaders and push for the end of apartheid. Cassidy took Mandela’s request as the call of God upon him. And immediately he set out to work. As a result, Cassidy eventually received a long-sought invitation to a meeting with South Africa’s president.
Recalling his experience, Michael Cassidy writes:
“On October 1985, in an interview with President P.W. Botha in Pretoria, in a private meeting, with the earnest request that apartheid be dismantled: I was immediately aware, on entry into the room, that this was not to be the sort of encounter for which I had prayed. No sooner had I entered than the President stood up at his desk, picked up a Bible, and began to read at me a passage of Romans 13, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed.” President Botha evidently imagined that this passage was enough to justify unequivocal support of the Nationalist Government’s apartheid policy.”
No one takes up a text innocently.
The first seven verses of Romans 13 were deployed against Martin Luther King Jr by white moderate clergy as King sat in a Birmingham jail. Attorney General Jeff Session invoked them to quell criticism of the Trump administration’s border policies. In the summer of 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer attempted to stave off his execution by appealing to the Judge Advocate on the grounds of his agreement with these verses.
To Judge Roeder, Bonhoeffer wrote:
“It is hard for me to see how my earlier conflicts with the Gestapo…have now led to the point when I can be thought capable of a severe failing in the obvious duties of a German towards his people and nation. I still cannot believe this charge has been made against me. If true, would I have offered myself as an army chaplain immediately after the outbreak of war? If anyone wants to learn something of my conception of the duty of Christian obedience towards the authorities, he should read my exposition of Romans 13 in my book The Cost of Discipleship. The appeal to subjection to the will and the demands of authority for the sake of Christian conscience has probably seldom been expressed more strongly than there.”
“Even if guilt hangs on almost every crown…government is an order of God not in its origination but in its being.”
Not only is it surprising to hear the famed, modern-day martyr speaking of the Christian necessity for obedience to empire, it is likewise disorienting that the apostle Paul makes what feels like a jarring turn in his epistle.
Do not forget:
The author of Romans 13.1-7 frequently suffered unjust imprisonment at the hands of the authorities, endured flogging at least three times, knew of Caesar’s edict to ban all Jews from Rome, and eventually died— like his Lord— under an imperial executioner.
Nevertheless, Paul writes to the Christians in Rome, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.”
There was a woman in my first congregation named Rebecca.
Rebecca had thick brown hair and a stern, drawn face. Rebecca wore round, wire glasses over her fierce, sad eyes. Rebecca was a second generation Christian.
Her parents had been Jews who escaped occupied France only because a Russian Orthodox priest and nun supplied them with counterfeit baptismal certificates. They came to the United States as Christians and for their daughter the faith became more than a disguise. Nevertheless, Rebecca struggled at the points where her family’s story seemed to collide with the scriptures.
One Sunday after worship, she made her way through the line in the Narthex and approached me with her bulky Harper Collins Study Bible laying open in her hands like an animal she had found on the side of the road. Rebecca had turned in the Bible to Romans 13. I looked down and saw that in the margins of the thin, crinkly paper, next to these seven verses, she had scrawled in angry, red ink, “What the Hitlers? What about the Stalins and Pol Pots? What about the Wallaces and Husseins…” Her last scribble was followed not by a final question mark but by an ellipsis…
Because it is ever thus.
No one takes up a text innocently.
Paul’s transition in this passage strikes the hearer as so malapropos that the ancient church fathers quickly moved to smooth it of its apparent offense. Polycarp of Smyrna qualified the passage by adding fine print, testifying to a Roman proconsul that Paul “taught Christians to render all due honor to rulers and authorities appointed by God, in so far as it does us no harm.” Others, like the church father Origen, sought to limit the text’s claims by pairing it with other New Testament texts, such as Peter’s response when the cops tell him they ordered him no longer to teach in the name of Jesus, “We must obey God rather than human beings.” Still others paired Romans 13 with Revelation 13. Whereas Paul the apostle commands submission to the governing authorities, John the Revelator depicts Rome and its rulers as sea monsters.
It’s as though, depending upon who is in the White House and how the administration aligns with your politics, you can pick your passage: submit to the ruling authorities or resist the monsters.
But!
Is Paul’s summons so different than Peter’s retort, “We must obey God rather than men?”
Is Revelation’s depiction of Rome really at odds with Jesus’s answer, “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar. Give to God what belongs to God?”
Remember, Paul did not number his sentences.
The tradition only later added chapter divisions to his letter. Therefore, the transition is not as abrupt as it first sounds. The first verse of “chapter thirteen” is inextricable from the final verse of “chapter twelve. In context, these verses should read: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. Let every person submit to the ruling authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.”
It’s about overcoming evil.
It’s not about endorsing the status quo.
Furthermore—
Like the twelfth, the thirteenth chapter follows from Paul’s doxology at the end of Romans 11, in which he gives praise to the primacy of the divine agency, “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory for ever. Amen.” Thus, Paul’s point is that just as God is at work transforming those who are in Christ (chapter twelve), God is also at work in and with and through all realms of life, including the governing authorities (chapter thirteen). Hence, the agency of God supersedes even the ruling authority of Rome.
The epistle is still— here— about the divine agency.
The Lord is more powerful than the sea monster, no matter his name!
As Beverly Gaventa writes, “The governing authorities are outside the church, but they are not outside God’s grasp.” And it’s this grasp of God that puts Paul’s notion of Christian obedience in its proper place. That there is no authority above God means that God is the one to whom true and ultimate obedience is owed. In this way, the passage echoes the epistle’s first eight chapters in which Paul inveighed against humanity’s refusal to give God his proper due. Paul’s comment that “there is no authority except the authority that comes from God” is a far cry from implying blank-check approval of the authorities’s every action.
Indeed!
Even by mentioning God in the same breath as Caesar’s network of authority— even by mentioning God—even by uttering the name, Paul is proclaiming much more than we might suppose.
“How does that work?” my classmate joked, trying to take the edge off picturing believers like ourselves walking past gas chambers and gallows on their way to church.
Dr. Hunsinger let our discomfort linger for a few moments.
Finally, he answered, “It happens when you evict Jesus Christ from every place but the privacy of your heart.”
His righteous anger was like an ember warming inside him.
Then he erupted:
“Why would you give Jesus just your heart? Why would you give him your heart only when EVERYTHING BELONGS TO HIM?!”
“Teacher, is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not? Should we or shouldn’t we?”
The denarius was the equivalent of a quarter.
On one side, Caesar imprinted his image.
On the other side, Caesar inscribed a claim.
The claim on the coin was the same claim Caesar had first inscribed on the monument Res Gestae; namely, the claim that the emperor was divine.
“Teacher, Should we or shouldn’t we?”
Jesus answers, “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar. Give to God what belongs to God.”
And they are “utterly amazed by his answer.”
They’re astonished because merely by positing God as an alternative to Caesar, Jesus has undermined Caesar’s assertion of autonomous authority.
Go ahead, give him his money back. It’s got his face on it. But don’t think for a second he’s the authority over you he alleges. He is not your God! He’s a sea monster!
In his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Karl Barth summarizes this passage with a simple algebraic expression wherein State, Church, Law, and Society are represented by the letters a, b, c, and d.
Barth brackets the expression a+b+c+d within parentheses:
(a+b+c+d)
Then, Barth adds to the expression what he calls “the great divine minus sign.”
— (a+b+c+d).
Barth writes:
“The divine minus sign outside the bracket means that all human principles and politics, all orthodoxies and -isms, all principalities and powers, dominions and authorities, are subjected to the authority and judgment of God.”
Rebecca stood before me outside the sanctuary. Her dark hair was pulled into a bun. Her Bible lay flopped open in her hands, bleeding red ink. She handed it to me. She watched me look over the verses and read her questions in the margins.
“You know my story,” she said, “About my parents.”
I nodded.
“I can’t just shrug my shoulders and read past passages like this one.”
I nodded again.
“Any help?”
I closed the Bible and handed it back to her and said:
“You know, to us, it sounds like Paul is saying more than many of us are comfortable. And a hell of a lot of Christians and politicians have used the sound of it to suit their own ends. But you’ve got to remember Paul wrote this at a time when the head of the government claimed to be God. That's what got Paul killed by the government. What he says there about God and the government’s authority— it actually demotes Caesar from the throne where he wants to sit and the headspace he wants to occupy.”
I have been a pastor for twenty-four years. In all that time, guess how many people I have known who left their political party because its platform no longer aligned with their Christian convictions.
Just one— Gretchen makes one.
But in all that time, I have known more congregants than I can count who left the church because the church no longer aligned with their politics.
Paul meant this passage as gospel.
Paul intended this passage to proclaim the promise that above the antinomies of our history, despite the contradictions of our leaders and the corruption of our institutions, no matter how dark the times appear or ineffective our endeavors, there is a Power above all powers, an Authority above all authorities, a Redeemer who will trump every ruler. So take heart, be of good cheer, and give to God your joyful obedience.
Paul meant this passage to be gospel.
But for us this scripture functions as law.
Lex semper accusast.
The law always accuses.
In Paul’s day—
Caesar had to kill Christians for refusing to bestow divine status upon him.
In our day—
Christians eagerly give what Caesar demanded.
Christians impute to politics a place of ultimate importance that belongs to God alone. We will exit the Body of Christ before we will leave the red or blue tents pitched by our Caesars. We have promoted the sea monster that Jesus and Paul so deftly demoted from the throne above every throne.
Don’t believe me?
How many days until Election Day?
How many days until All Saints?
Or Advent?
No one takes up a text innocently.
Neither do we innocently take up politics.
Fortunately, the Lord is the Friend of Sinners.
And by his authority I can promise you the entire forgiveness of all your sins. What’s more, by his authority I can invite you to a table that is not for the innocent but for the guilty— for those guilty even of giving to Caesar what is God’s. So come, take and eat. For as they are Christ’s real presence, the loaf and the cup are the great, divine minus sign to all your sins.
The Great Divine Minus Sign