Wrestling with Romans 13

Considering how others have understood an apparently hard political teaching

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, and those who resist will incur judgment. (Romans 13:1-2)

Paul’s teaching on the “governing authorities” in Romans 13:1-7 is (in)famous. While the text has played an enormous role in Christian political thought, Nazis, supporters of apartheid, and other dictatorial types have also wielded the apostle’s words like a club to smash Christian resistance to oppressive regimes. For instance, pro-slavery advocates cited Romans 13 to demand that Christians obey the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which required officials and citizens to “aid in returning people who had escaped slavery.” (Never mind that Deuteronomy 23:15 directly forbids returning an escaped slave to their enslaver! Here, Rom 13:1-7 apparently justified violating God’s law out of a need to submit to a human one).

But Romans 13:1-7 isn’t just dangerous to apply; it’s hard to understand. Paul’s teaching might seem simple. Yet the apostle’s apparently rosy picture of the “governing authorities” jars with his own experience being regularly beaten and incarcerated by the Romans. Indeed, as Beverly Roberts Gaventa points out, Paul’s apparent claim that “rulers both know and serve the good” seems to contradict the first half of Romans, in which Paul argues extensively that all human beings are “subject to the power of Sin,” fail to “do what is right,” may “desire the good,” but produce “evil”!¹

Elsewhere, Paul describes the “rulers of this age” as crucifying the Lord of glory (1 Cor 2:8). Later, Paul tells his readers that when one governor came to arrest him, he “fled through a window in the city wall, and escaped” (2 Cor 11:32-33)! That doesn’t sound like “being subject to the governing authorities;” it sounds like resisting them.

Maybe Rom 13:1-7 isn’t as straightforward as it seems. After all, Christians have been puzzling over what exactly Paul meant for nearly 2,000 years. Readers and scholars have often wrestled with Romans 13:1-7 in two ways: challenging the allegedly obvious meaning of Romans 13:1-7 itself and reading Romans 13:1-7 alongside other biblical texts.

Re-Reading Romans 13:1-7

Recent interpreters have offered a variety of arguments for interpreting Romans 13:1-7 in ways that would leave room for Christians to resist the state in at least some ways and under some circumstances. On one end of the spectrum, some have argued that Paul is being ironic or using what’s called a “hidden transcript.” The “hidden transcript” argument suggests that Paul’s words sound just “pro-Rome” enough to be safe, should some Roman authorities overhear them, but that they hide a subversive, anti-imperial message beneath the surface.

Others argue that while Paul does see some at least limited good to political authority in general, he is not providing a stamp of approval for any particular authorities. Some argue that the specific Greek language of “being subject” does not necessarily require obedience in every case.

Paul may even demote Roman rulers by leaving them unnamed, and then specifically stating what Caesar and his crew would never have accepted: that they stand under the sovereign rule of Israel’s God. Some emphasize the way Paul’s eschatology has affected his politics; for Paul, Sin and Death are the truly problematic rulers, and Jesus has defeated them. At best, human political authorities are no more than “bit-part players in a drama scripted by the cross and resurrection of Jesus.”²

Others emphasize that Paul is writing a letter, and letters address specific people in specific situations. Perhaps Paul said what he said to the Romans because he knew that they were tempted to revolt against paying taxes (note that taxes are specifically referenced in 13:7). Perhaps Paul worried that Christians would take the freedom of the gospel as inspiration to actively resist Roman rule in ways that would lead to unnecessary persecution. Maybe when Paul wrote Romans, things were going pretty well in the empire, but later on, when persecution intensified, he shifted his opinion.

While I think some of these arguments are stronger than others, all helpfully raise important questions about how we understand Rom 13:1-7.

Reading Romans 13:1-7 Alongside Other Texts

Yet at least since Origen, Christians have often placed Romans 13:1-7 alongside other biblical texts. Many have read Romans 13 alongside Peter’s words that we must “obey God rather than any human authority” (Acts 5:29). Theologians like Karl Barth, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Alan Boesak placed Paul’s depiction of the authorities as the “servant of God” alongside Revelation 13’s depiction of the state as a beast that must be destroyed.

Because Acts 5 and Revelation 13 were written after Romans, the argument here is that Scripture helps us interpret Scripture, not that these other texts help us understand what Paul himself meant. I agree, and have argued elsewhere that Christians, and especially Christians in power, must read Romans 13 alongside other biblical texts about politics.³

However, both Beverly Gaventa and Esau McCaulley have argued that, in Romans, Paul himself drew upon OT texts that make clear he wasn’t simply baptizing all governing authorities or arguing against any Christian resistance to them. Gaventa points out that by the time we get to Romans 13, Paul has already named one specific governing authority: Pharaoh. Indeed, Paul says God “raised” him up for God’s own purposes (Rom 9:17). But while Paul declares that God used Pharaoh for God’s own good purposes, that certainly doesn’t suggest Paul thought Pharaoh himself was “good” or intended the “good.”⁴

Esau McCaulley points out that by referencing Pharaoh in this way, Paul alludes to a biblical story in which a tyrant is confronted and brought down by God, but through “human agents.” Those human agents include Moses, who confronts Pharaoh, and the midwives, who actively lie to Pharaoh to save innocent life (and are rewarded by God for doing so!).⁵

Gaventa and McCaulley’s arguments are groundbreaking. They demonstrate that Paul himself almost certainly doesn’t mean that resistance to the governing authorities is never appropriate. Reading Romans 13:1-7 as a blanket endorsement of the state or a blanket condemnation of any resistance to the state isn’t just bad ethics, it’s a bad reading of Paul’s letter.

Reading Romans 13 with Proverbs?

A few years back, I was reading through Romans with some friends, and noticed that Paul refers to another deeply political text in the Bible: the book of Proverbs. Indeed, Paul refers to Proverbs four times in the verses just before Rom 13:1-7. That got me wondering whether Proverbs shaped Paul’s political teaching, and whether we ought to read Rom 13:1-7 in dialogue with Proverbs as well.

Last week, Studies in Christian Ethics published the results of my wondering: “Reading Paul’s Politics Wisely: Interpreting Romans 13.1-7 Intertextually with the Book of Proverbs.” I’ll be honest; it’s pretty nerdy stuff. But I do think that it makes the case that Proverbs can help us read Paul’s politics wisely. In next week’s post, I’ll share some of the big ideas from that study.

Thanks for reading, and, as always, if you found this helpful, consider sharing with others. If you’ve got pushback or disagreement, I’d love to hear that too!

1. See Beverly Roberts Gaventa, “Reading Romans 13 with Simone Weil: Toward a More Generous Hermeneutic,” Journal of Biblical Literature 136.1 (2017), 10-11.

2. John Barclay, Pauline Churches and Diaspora Jews, 387.

3. For instance, in a newspaper editorial here, as well as in Just Discipleship’s chapters on reading Romans 13 alongside the stories of Joseph and Daniel.

4. See Gaventa, “Reading Romans 13.”

5. See Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2020).