Workshop of Sebastiaen Vrancx (1573–1647), A Landscape with Travellers Ambushed Outside a Small Town, oil on panel. Sotheby’s London, 24 April 2008, lot 20. Wikimedia Commons
Hostile Forces Have a Role
in the Unfolding of History
SUMMARY
Political realism insists that we must take things as they are and not as we may wish them to be and then work with those “facts on the ground.” Such realism typically insists that competing interests of power must be balanced with other competing interests of power. In the history of Christian ethics, some Christian form of political realism has often insisted, therefore, that the nonviolence of Jesus is unrealistic if we are to make a difference or be relevant in the world.
We must both accept and reject the claims of the political realists. In fact, the Bible does exhibit a remarkable political realism and asserts that the powers that be have a significant sociopolitical role. And yet the New Testament simultaneously asserts that the church is called to a higher standard in its politic, namely, the way of Christ.
But this dualism does not mean that the church has nothing to say or that the church has nothing to contribute to the powers that be.
EXPOSITION
In the last half century, a great deal of biblical and theological work has sought to make sense of the pervasive New Testament language of power, thrones, dominions, authorities, and principalities.
Three brief notes on the characteristics of the powers: (1) They are “spiritual” in the sense that they cannot be reduced to mere materialistic phenomena or empirically observable data. The powers are such that agency is often ascribed to them, and in many cases, personal agency. (2) And yet they are sociological realities. They do not merely float in the ether, removed to some spiritual realm irrelevant to the historical. Thus particular historical characters are described as intimately intermingled with the various powers, even identified with the powers. The powers crucified Christ, says Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians; these historical characters who crucified Christ, or conspired in the crucifixion of Christ, were various first-century Jewish authorities in shocking alliance with various representatives of the Roman Empire. (3) But in spite of the second point, the book of Ephesians refuses to allow us to depict any particular person or persons as our enemy, but only the rebellious powers themselves. “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12).
Add to these three characteristics four major additional observations about the powers in the New Testament, commonly noted by theologians who have sought to systematize such biblical teaching:
First, the powers were created for good. This is no surprise to any Christian or Jew who is familiar with the Genesis account, in which the recurring refrain of “it was good” structures the whole first chapter of that account. We may say it this way: we need economic structures, language, common moral norms, shared social commitments, and the like to have flourishing human communities.
Second, the powers often overreach. Created to serve humankind, they become, as Walter Wink puts it, “hellbent on control.”1 Intended to foster human flourishing, they become a mechanism of oppression. The Bible is, we might say, the primordial tale of the Game of Thrones: always aware of the way in which there seems to be no depth to which the powers will not stoop to maintain, protect, and preserve their own. All that is good and beautiful gets co-opted at best, corrupted at worst, into the ploys of the dominions.
Thus, the human practices made for good become corrupt and corrupting: “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath,” said Jesus (Mark 2:27). And yet by Jesus’s day, Sabbath was a great power of overweening control and manipulation. Similarly, we might say, humankind was not made for markets, but markets for humankind; humankind was not made for sex, but sex for humankind; humankind was not made for land and country, but land and country made for humankind.
And yet markets become increasingly autonomous and care for little except to eat profits, caring not for the human resources consumed in the process. Sex becomes a vast cultural and industrial power, decimating homes and ruining souls, casting all aside in the wake of its titillation. Land and country become an idol demanding the blood sacrifice of its youth, refusing to allow respectful critics even to take a knee, but only and always with hand over heart, standing at attention.
The thrones and powers and dominions are discussed repeatedly in the New Testament. This fact is of great sociopolitical import and stands in great tension with the naiveté with which both stereotypical liberals and stereotypical conservatives often address social problems. It is they who often are the utopian idealists, not the writers of Scripture. The Bible is much more realistic about the challenges posed by broken social systems. Scripture has no naiveté about the ease with which such brokenness can be made right.
Modernists often act as if “sin” is an utterly unhelpful construct, but this is only because they do not understand the biblical concept. Sin is not some mere moralistic misstep; it not merely a willful breaking of an arbitrary, capricious rule handed down from the Deity-on-High. It is a fundamental missing the point, a fundamental transgression against beauty, truth, and goodness. It is a violation of the liberty of humankind and indeed the whole of creation. And such ventures in missing the point take on an immense power of destruction and can turn any good into a devastating wickedness. “Sin” becomes a slave-master. Because of this phenomenon of power, sin is on occasion personalized in the New Testament, its agency and willfulness subtle and baffling and powerful. The bonds of love for family, friends, and community, for example, may become the bondage of codependency and manipulative control on the personal end of the spectrum. This same sort of social bonding may become the bondage of nationalism and war at the social end of the spectrum.
The examples could be multiplied, but the basic, horrific dynamic remains constant: the good gifts of God, inordinately enjoyed, consumed, taken, all these throw upon us—as individuals, as communities, as civilizations—a mantle of oppression that is no simple matter to throw off.
This same sort of realism must characterize our own sharp social critique. The Bible is no utopian, do-gooder manifesto, but uncomfortably, sometimes painfully, realistic. Yet still the Bible depicts all powers—everything from king to priest, marketplace to temple, marriage bed to social policy—as potential gifts to human communities. Each gift may nonetheless oppress and overreach. Such realism must pervade our thinking regarding the relationship between church and world.
Third, even in their state of rebellion, the powers are used by God. The prophets insisted that the great superpowers of the ancient Near East were used by God in spite of their arrogance and injustice. Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, and Persia were all, at various points, depicted as agents for the sociopolitical agenda of God. That their mighty men were unaware made them no less the agents of God’s purposes.
Similarly, the apostle Paul will insist that the powers, when they check violence and keep chaos at bay, are the servants of God. Paul insists that the first-century Christians should pray for the kings and authorities, that they may keep the peace, so the witness of the church may go forth unhindered by social turmoil.
Fourth, the powers—given that they are good creations of God—do not need to be destroyed but to be redeemed. Or, perhaps more accurately, the particular manifestations of the rebellious powers, claims the New Testament (see especially 1 Cor. 15), will in fact be destroyed. But the powers created for good shall be redeemed and rightly ordered toward the good of God’s bountiful and beautiful creation.
There are at least two reasons Christians are not anarchists: first, since all power and dominion was created for good, to give glory to the Creator and serve the goods of the creation, we can and should celebrate when such power leans toward its intended functions. Such a posture takes seriously, then, that relative goods are important and should not be taken lightly. A relatively stable democracy with due process and shared constitutional commitments to the rule of law, even if full of bickering and brokenness, is undoubtedly preferable to a ruthless totalitarian dictatorship that tortures dissidents, silences critique, and ignores the plight of the poor and hungry.
Instead of hitching our wagon to any particular partisan horse, then, the Christian community is called to practice the sort of pragmatic realism embodied in Scripture itself.
A second reason that Christians are not anarchists is that we are acutely aware that destroying one partisan representative of oppressive power does not ensure the destruction of the power of death itself. Death has already been defeated. Death is suffering its own death pangs. To play the games of death only deepens the struggle. To put it differently, destroy “the Man,” and there will be a line of willing characters to take on the role afresh.
Until the consummation of the kingdom of God—until death has been finally defeated and resurrection triumphant—there are no utopian possibilities to be had. Any given structure of power may be more or less in service to its created ends, but there is no idyllic or partisan utopian solution to be had.
This is key to understanding the fundamental social and political posture of the New Testament: the end of history has been inaugurated, but until its final consummation there are many who still live according to the ways of death. In the midst of this real and often perverse pursuit of the ways of death, the powers—even in their self-centered and perverse grappling after power—still serve a useful function, because the powers themselves often have something at stake in staving off chaos. A balance of powers can keep such chaos at bay. The Bible claims that God employs a balance of powers precisely in service to keeping wickedness in check.
Workshop of Sebastiaen Vrancx (1573–1647), A Landscape with Travellers Ambushed Outside a Small Town, oil on panel. Sotheby’s London, 24 April 2008, lot 20. Wikimedia Commons
Such biblical realism allows us to reject the naive and idealistic notion that evil can be destroyed through the likes of war. It is a self-mockery of American Christianity, and a public exhibition of biblical illiteracy, that President George W. Bush, a self-proclaimed Christian, insisted that he had begun a war to “defeat evil.” The self-mockery was deepened in that so few Christians raised the slightest objection to such claims.
But what then is the New Testament’s prescription for the people of God prior to the time of the consummation of the kingdom of God, vis-à-vis the powers that be? The New Testament says precious little on this score, or at least it says very little in a direct fashion. But we are given at least one direct counsel: the church should show to the powers the wisdom of God (Eph. 3; discussed in proposition 13).
The powers have their own wisdom—self-maintenance, “hellbent on control.” Again, as already noted, God in God’s providence is still using the powers to check chaos (Rom. 13; 1 Tim. 2). But their wisdom is not the wisdom of God, revealed in the suffering servanthood of Christ. Thus the church is called to bear witness to the powers the public goods and sociopolitical relevance of the way of Christ.
This is key for would-be Christians. We go into the world wise as serpents, harmless as doves, wise in carrying with us an eyes-wide-open knowledge of the machinations of power but refusing to fall prey to the coercion and violence of those powers, and bearing witness to the good news of the strength and power of truth telling, generosity, justice, and mercy. We go into the world fully aware of the ways in which Karl Marx was right—that industrialization has alienated human beings from their work and one another—and fully aware of the ways in which Adam Smith was right—that social selfishness is a strong mechanism for the generation of material wealth; and knowing that any sort of ideological or utopian assertion of either Marx’s or Smith’s vision leads to death and destruction and endless war.
Smith and Marx may both have helpful things to teach us about the nature of humankind, the nature of historical struggles, or the nature of human appetites and the social mechanisms that arise out of those appetites. But so often overlooked are the ways in which the ideological capitalists and the ideological communists are precisely the same: committed to a utopian vision of the world, they employ violence and war to propagate their vision. Thus Marx ends his Manifesto calling for the “forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions,” just as the twentieth-century capitalists waged all manner of war in Central and South America or Vietnam or the Korean Peninsula, seeking to make the world safe for capitalist expansion.
A Christian political manifesto must simultaneously be more realistic and more rigorous in its ethic. We must be more realistic in acknowledging the pervasive nature of fallen structures of power, which may be made manifest as much in socialist bureaucracies as in global capitalism, as much in Stalin’s mass murder as in the West’s wars in the Middle East. Simultaneously, we must be more rigorous, insisting what neither Milton Friedman nor Karl Marx will insist: that the good news of the kingdom of God has already triumphed over the forces of war and death and imposition, and that we too shall love and serve in the same ways as our Christ.
Of course there is much more to be said about how Christians may “show to the powers the wisdom of God.” But, as will discussed below, this must be construed as an ad hoc sociopolitical witness, dealing with each issue, abuse, or injustice as it arises without assuming that the capitalists or communists, the Left or the Right, the conservatives or the progressives will necessarily have the answer.
More on Romans 13, with a Nod to Revelation 13
Due to the rhetorical significance of the apostle Paul’s teaching in Romans 13, more commentary may be helpful here.2
To summarize matters already raised but that are indispensable for rightly construing Romans 13: The vocation of the church is to embody the peaceable way of the kingdom of God. This must be held alongside a realism about the ongoing reality of sin in the world. The church’s vocation held alongside the church’s realism then provides specification for the vocation of the powers and governing authorities. Given that the triumph over the power of sin is not yet final, we may expect that wickedness will still rear its ugly head, will strike and lash out. Corruption and murder and death have not yet been finally defeated, and thus we continue to see its work made manifest on the pages of history. It is precisely this reality that defines the work of the governing authorities, which is to channel the vengeance and wickedness back upon itself, to limit the destructive and maddening effects of violence by turning it in on itself.
As we have seen, the vocation of the church is to embody the new. But all have not received the new as good news, and thus they continue to live under bondage to the forces of death. What then? The governing authorities are ordered by God to have a preservative effect. Unlike Luther, who claimed that the governing authorities were part of the “orders of creation,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer called the powers “orders of preservation.” That is, they have a function of employing a sharply limited amount of violence or coercion in service to checking chaos, keeping madness at bay. As the prince or king or emperor may thus excusably employ coercion in this manner, meanwhile the church embodies the new and proclaims the new, inviting all to come to participate in the new.
Some have suggested it is important to make a distinction between ordaining and ordering—that Romans 13 claims that God has ordered the powers but not ordained any particular power, has not specifically approved the behavior of what any particular government does. Instead, in God’s providence, they are brought into God’s ordering of human history.
Thus, with little systematic consideration, the New Testament writers simply assume a given role for the governing authorities that may be summarized thus: the governing authorities, with their police function, serve the larger mission of the church. In parallel with Romans 13, 1 Timothy 2, and 1 Peter 2, all depict the relationship between church and governing authorities in this way.
This stands in continuity with the Old Testament witness, in which the powers of the world were used in God’s sovereignty for God’s purposes in history, as noted previously. Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, and Persia are all described in various ways as being the servants of God’s purposes, typically employed for punishing and chastising the wicked. These (themselves often wicked) nations are God’s “ministers” in the limited sense of serving God’s overarching order, in that God employs the arrogance and violence of the nations against one another so that the earth and its creatures are not utterly destroyed.
Several notes in this regard.
First, this way of putting the matter stands at odds with the assumptions already discussed at the heart of Western, liberal democratic orders: of a privatized so-called religion, in which this religion, as a compartmentalizable element of life, need not, and for many ought not, impinge on the so-called realm of the public. For some secularists, religion is simply dispensable and unnecessary altogether, though notions of human rights are thought to require a political order in which so-called religion is protected as a so-called private affair. For others, religion turns out to be something that is needed by democratic regimes, providing something like a moral compass or ethical ballast to a ship that would otherwise wander aimlessly. In this view, called an “instrumental view of the church,” the church serves the broader and purportedly more public role of the nation-state. The nation-state, or democracy, is seen as the larger, more public, and more significant player in human history. So far as history is concerned, the nation-state is seen as the historical savior, is seen as the “last great hope of the earth.” The church thus serves democracy and not the other way around.
Thus the New Testament claim is, from the start, offensive to modern sensibilities. In the New Testament it is the governing authorities who serve the church rather than the other way around. Ephesians 3 notes, for example, that the salvific wisdom of God is revealed to the powers in the church. “Although I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ, and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph. 3:8–10). Paul’s decidedly anti-modern stance in 1 Corinthians 2:8 further demonstrates this claim. When believers go before unbelievers to settle disputes among themselves, Paul can hardly fathom it. Why, he asks, would you take a dispute to be judged by unbelievers when it is the believers who will, in the end, judge the world? It would be better to be defrauded, he claims.3
It has been suggested by others that it is almost as if the apostle Paul depicts the scenario this way: the church is putting on the stage show, while the governing authorities serve as the ushers at the show. The usher is necessary and helpful. But the artists and musicians and performers are the reason for the gathering. And it does not serve the affair at all for the artists and musicians and performers to busy themselves with ushering, for then the show cannot go on. They have a special vocation to which they must attend. From the New Testament perspective, the state and governing authorities serve the mission of the church, and the church is the primary character in God’s mission to the world. This claim must not and cannot be construed in a triumphalist manner, in which the church then seeks to arrogantly vaunt itself over the powers and over the peoples: for the vocation and mission of the church is to embody suffering love and the peace of God’s kingdom, and call all to participate in this reign.
Second, for the Christian to “be subject” to the authorities cannot mean, then, “blind subjection.”4 There is a certain social conservatism in the text on this score: the powers that be are ordered by God to serve their role of keeping wickedness at bay through the employment of a limited coercive force. In serving that role, Christians must not seek to overthrow governments but should acknowledge the ordination or vocation of those powers. (It is no small irony that Romans 13 is often employed to counsel a sort of sociopolitical conservatism—“obey the authorities!”—but that the implications are never explored on Independence Day.)
But again, this cannot mean a blind subjection, an indiscriminate blessing of whatever the powers do. Such a position would obviously stand at odds with the overarching teaching of the entire Bible. From the prophet Nathan to the exiled Daniel, from John the Baptizer to Peter the apostle, a consistent prioritization of allegiances appears. “We must obey God rather than human authorities.” To the degree that the human authority requires something of us which does not stand at odds with our first and prior allegiance to Jesus as Lord, to that same degree must we yield our obedience. There is something that we must yield to Caesar, but only when whatever Caesar demands has not been previously demanded by the Creator.5
Third, then, the powers may become demonic, may begin to demand for themselves absolute and abject obedience. The powers may begin to assert themselves as a god. Instead of serving the very limited role ordained by God, the powers too often see themselves as saviors, as being the hope and light of the world. And this terribly dangerous conceit is not a dynamic with which the New Testament is unfamiliar. Thus Revelation 13 needs to be as much in the Christian consciousness as Romans 13, for in Revelation we see the full flowering of an arrogant imperial power demanding abject obedience. And—again it is important to note—in John’s depiction in Revelation, it is not those who rise up in revolutionary violence like Braveheart’s William Wallace (“Freedom!”) or the American patriots against the British (“Give me liberty or give me death!”) who triumph. Instead, John maintains that it is those who bear witness to the Lamb through the sword of God’s Word. It is those who are martyred who triumph over the evil empire. The persecuted ones, even in the midst of their own “axis of evil,” are called not to make the world turn out right by employing the means and methods of empire, but the means and methods of the Lamb of God, trusting that God is at work both in heaven and earth to bring about the triumph of God’s kingdom.
A corollary to this claim is this: we cannot assume that whatever specific government or specific governmental policies exist are therefore specifically ordained by God.
In any case, as our manifesto has sought to make clear, we must not presume that governments alone may carry the mantle of political actor—a matter to which we now explicitly turn.
1. Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992), 49.
2. This section is adapted from portions of an essay originally published as “What about Romans 13: ‘Let Every Soul Be Subject’?” in A Faith Not Worth Fighting For: Addressing Commonly Asked Questions about Christian Nonviolence, ed. Tripp York and Justin Bronson Barringer (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012). Used by permission. To download a free PDF of the full essay, visit http://www.leeccamp.com/romans13.
3. Oscar Cullmann, “Paul and the State,” in The State in the New Testament (New York: Scribner’s, 1956), 56.
4. Karl Barth, A Shorter Commentary on Romans, trans. Chr. Kaiser Verlag (London: SCM Press, 1959), 157–58.
5. Cf. Cullmann, “Paul and the State,” 65.