One question continually recurs when we read Romans 13:1–7: Paul says that “the ruler is God’s servant for your good”; but what about when he is not? What about bad governments? How does this passage apply to Hitler or Mugabe?
The issue is not just about whether resistance is legitimate. Perhaps we could cope with the idea that Paul was saying, “even when a government is bad, don’t resist it”. This would raise plenty of political questions and people would get stuck into Christianity for being quietistic and so on; but we’d cope.
The problem is that Paul seems to be saying that all governments are divinely appointed and that they are just: “rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong”. But they do! (At least some of them do.)
We need to distinguish two aspects of Paul’s argument. To take the second part first, I don’t think Paul believed, or indeed was teaching here, that all governments are in fact good. Although the passage can sound like this, I think this is a mistaken interpretation. Paul himself had been frequently arrested by political authorities; he had himself stood up to them; and he knew Jesus had been killed by them. Yet I also suspect Paul viewed these moments as failures on the part of government. He could also entrust himself to rulers with the firm expectation that he would be vindicated (e.g. Acts 25:10–12). I therefore think we’re much better to read this as a statement of what government ought to be, of the role given to political authority in the present age. This is Paul’s take on what government looks like when it is functioning normally.
This brings us to the other point: Paul’s insistence that government is divinely “established”. Well actually, what Paul says is that authority is established by God, not governments. Is this significant? I think it might be. Because it is possible for a government to lose authority. Authority is a tricky thing, you see; it is not identical with force—that’s just coercion. Political authority has, and needs, force (see verse 4); but political authority is not merely the power of force. Authority is something more than that. Authority is itself a reason to act in a certain way. Political authority is a rulers right to rule, to command and expect obedience; it is a relationship between government and governed.
Oliver O’Donovan argues that this right, this relationship, rests on a combination of three factors: the possession of force, the embodiment of a community’s identity, and the act of judgment. What does this mean? It means that political authority depends on the capacity to effectively enact right in the name of a community. Governments can lose authority when they forfeit this capacity, when either they no longer have a monopoly on force (such as when, as recently in Egypt, the military refuse to implement their rulings), or when they no longer represent the community (as when, for example, someone usurps rule but no one recognises his government), or, crucially, when they fail completely to enact right, i.e. to do what Paul talks about here as “punishing wrong and praising right” (verses 3–4).
Does this mean, then, that we don’t have to obey a government that does the wrong thing, or that makes bad laws? No; because such a government might still possess authority (although perhaps not in relation to this or that particular law). And if there is authority, it is from God. But it does mean that we don’t have to submit to a government that has, in fact, lost its authority.
Three more things to say about this. First, whether or not a government has authority is not something you need to decide very often; and its not normally something you decide on your own. There is no basis here, I don’t think, for Christians deciding, on their own judgment, that a government no longer constitutes an authority.
Second, that said, I think there is the basis here for active Christian resistance to governments that have gone profoundly wrong. When a government has so abandoned its task of enacting right that it can no longer be seen to be an “authority”, then there is, I suggest, room for resistance to be the right action. However, I say this very cautiously, because the far more obvious approach to this kind of situation in the Bible is to suffer. The Christian martyrs in Revelation suffer under unjust rulers; they don’t try to blow them up. Nevertheless, I think there is more to be said than this. O’Donovan reminds us that John of Salisbury, in the twelfth century, spoke of the duty of tyrannicide! This, I tentatively suggest, is how we might understand Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the attempted assassination of Hitler.
Third, we need to remember that what we’re talking about is what happens when things go wrong. And things will always be messy when they go wrong. It’s instructive to read this passage from another direction, from the perspective of what guidance it can give to governments. This passage tells a ruler both that he has been given his authority by God (and so is under God’s authority), and that he has the task of doing his subjects good by enacting right. This, I think, is a profoundly helpful thing to say, and in the history of Christian thought made an enormous impact on what good government was thought to involve, and also on how government ought to be constituted. (In Desire of the Nations, O’Donovan argues that the idea of responsible, constitutional government is in fact the legacy of Christendom.)
“The cross challenges the aesthetic basis of representative rules and authorities. The ugliest of sights, the humiliated and tortured figure with ‘no form or comeliness’ (Isa 53:2), has, in a decisive reversal of visual-aesthetic value, become the object of profoundest attraction. The public aesthetic of the cross has revealed new possibilities for political action, evoking compassion as a politically uniting force and empowering the martyr and the oppressed. ‘This beauteous form assures a pitious minde.’ True followers and false imitators of the cross ave between them changed the shape of earthly politics: Ambrose’s ‘tyranny of impotence’ has many victories to its score. As a visible emblem the cross has drawn men, women, and children into a universal community of attention, overreaching the bounds of their national, tribal, and family identities. Buildings that display it have become the focus of cities and the landmarks of rural communities. Its representations in high visual art command continual astonishment. A roomful of tourists in Ghent Cathedral, standing and staring with intense stillness at the Van Eycks’ Adoration of the Lamb, reenact unconsciously the very scene depicted there: pilgrims who stand and gaze at the sight of the sacrificed lamb, the goal and satisfaction of their journeys. And with the pilgrims and the hermits standing before the heavenly city we find judges and soldiers, looking on the true object of their exertions in our earthly cities. Here, indeed, is something to be seen, a sight which, for as long as it is in the world, will organise the world around itself, never eclipsed by the leering faces on election posters and television screens. The sweet cross (dulce lignum) has outshone the glamor and attraction that binds us to our political leaders; it has shown their appeal to be shallow and moody, by calling out the deepest springs of our loyalty and love. In the cross God has pronounced his ‘Ichabod!’ [see 1 Samuel 4:21] upon the limelight of human importance.”
