Listen to the Word of God: 62 Scripture passages that refute 'Christian' Nationalism - #38 Romans 13:1-4

 

Romans 13:1-4 Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. 2 Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. 3 For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. 4 For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.

You might be surprised to see Romans 13:1-4 in this series given that it is the passage most commonly cited by "Christian" Nationalists themselves to justify their subservience to whichever human authority (including those which commit great evil) they have hitched their wagon to.  

The thing is, Paul isn't advocating here for a union of Church and State, far from it.  What Paul is talking about is much more akin to Jesus', "give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s." (Matthew 22:21)  What Paul is teaching is that the idea of human authority, including governmental authority, ultimately comes from God.  We have not been called by the Gospel to become anarchists, it doesn't matter if that impulse comes from the Right or the Left, it is fundamentally contrary to God's design for human society.  Any Rand was wrong about this, along with much else. {The Philosophy of Ayn Rand: Hatred of the authority of God, a post I wrote, ironically, just as the COVID pandemic was starting and governmental authority would be a major worldwide topic}.

Nowhere in Paul's words does he envision a union between the governmental authority established by God with the Bride of Christ.  Given Paul's very negative history with the Sanhedrin, a group that had compromised its moral authority beyond recognition to wield power under both Herod and the Romans, and the Church's understanding of the Roman Empire as the greatest danger facing early believers, we would not expect Paul to be someone who would want to see religious and political authority working hand-in-glove.  Yet, it was not personal experience, or practical reasons, that held Paul back from proposing that the followers of Jesus Christ seek political power in his name, it was his respect for the providential design of God's will, a design in which God's people had all the power they would ever need to change the world in servanthood.

We can have a conversation about what Christian theology has to say about rebellion, revolutions, and non-violent resistance, and we should include Romans 13:1-4 in our study of God's Word with respect to these topics, but we would be dishonoring God's Word if we allowed these words of Paul to be used to justify turning our backs on the evil that governments do, especially when those governments wrap themselves in a Christian flag.

Sermon Video: Paul prefers to boldly go where no one has gone before - Romans 15:17-24

After giving glory to God for the success of his ministry thus far, the Apostle Paul explains to the church in Rome that his previous hesitancy to visit them came from his own conviction that God wanted him to take the Gospel to places where Jesus was unknown.  After decades of doing this, now Paul is planning to visit the church at Rome on his way to another new frontier for the Gospel: Spain.

Listen to the Word of God: 62 Scripture passages that refute 'Christian' Nationalism - #16: Matthew 22:20-21

 

Matthew 22:20-21     New International Version

20 and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”

21 “Caesar’s,” they replied.

Then he said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

It has been a long time since I was a math nerd.  The A that I earned in Calculus in high school was the last math class that I ever needed, or wanted, to take.  But I still enjoy a well laid out Venn Diagram's ability to explain the relationship between things that otherwise are confusing to people.  In my World Religions seminar I created a three circle Veen Diagram to illustrate the overlap and differences between the terms: Jew, Judaism, and Israelite because people can belong to one, two, or all three of those categories.

When the Pharisees tried to trap Jesus between the power of the Roman Empire and man's higher obligation to God, Jesus could have given an answer that would have resoundingly supported both Jewish Nationalism in the 1st Century, and Christian Nationalism in the last two thousand years.  But he didn't.  Not at all, not a bit.  Instead of ranking the obligations that we owe to God and earthly powers, Jesus differentiated between them.

The Pharisees were expecting Jesus to argue that "B is proper subset of A" (the circle within the circle in the chart above), either that God's rule is supreme, or Rome's, but they're all one circle.  In a sense, that's true, God is indeed supreme over all, the entirety of the created universe belongs in a circle contained within the all-encompassing circle of God.  But, and this is key, that's an ontological answer (i.e. the nature of reality), not a functional one.  God chose to allow humanity a degree of freedom and autonomy, to let the governments of humanity exist without being theocracies directly under his immediate rule {Israel prior to their requests for a king come closest to that model}.

In the end, 'Christian' Nationalists want the two circles of human government and God's rule to perfectly overlap, to make them one in the same (i.e. one circle, not two).  Jesus rejected this idea, he wasn't interested in conquering human governments, his Kingdom would be founded on different principles and pursue different goals.  The Church of Jesus Christ must follow his lead.  We are not called to triumph over Caesar, or even to be Caesar, but to continue to give to God what is God's. 

What belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God?  That's an important question, and one God-honoring men and women in the Church might not always agree upon, but one thing is certain, there is a distinction between them.