Neocon Evangelicals don’t know how to read the Bible

David Congdon (Facebook)

The most pernicious view in the evangelical world today is the notion that “whatever government is in power has been instituted by God.” This view derives from a corrupt reading of Romans 13. It is a reading which has no exegetical support, and it is precisely the kind of interpretation which allowed Christians in Germany to legitimate the reign of Hitler. Insofar as evangelicals continue to hold to this reading of the Bible, they are a short step away from being outright supporters of fascism.

The problem with their interpretation has already been addressed, most notably and powerfully by John Howard Yoder. Let me summarize the points here briefly:

(1) The NT has a variety of positions on the state. In the Gospels, we see the state understood as under the power of Satan. In Revelation, the state is the power that oppresses Christians. Even if we accept the (wrong) reading of Rom. 13, there are serious alternatives which cannot be ignored. Especially if you are an evangelical who believes in inerrancy.

(2) Rom. 13 is part of a single literary unit with Rom. 12. In the previous chapter, Paul presents a strong ethic of nonconformity, in which Christians are radically distinct from the state and society. Any proper reading of Rom. 13 has to take this into account. In particular, Rom. 12 says that vengeance belongs to God. In Rom. 13, Paul argues that the state might be used by God for that purpose, as was the case for Israel during the exile. But there is no suggestion that what the state does is thereby morally good according to the gospel. And Christians must still refrain from ever participating in such activities.

(3) Christians are told to submit to whatever power exists, but not because that specific power and institution has been ordained by God. As Yoder puts it, “God is not said to create or institute or ordain the powers that be, but only to order them, to put them in order, sovereignly to tell them where they belong, what is their place. The passage says nothing about what this government should look like or how we should respond to it. “A given government is not mandated or saved or made a channel of the will of God; it is simply lined up, used by God in the ordering of the cosmos. It does not mean that what individuals in government do is good human behavior.”

(4) The use of the text to legitimate Christian involvement in military or police service is fundamentally incorrect. Christians were not allowed to participate in the bearing of the sword during Paul’s time. As such, it is exegetically inappropriate to extend the meaning of the text to such activities for us today. Christians are simply told to be subject to the government which uses these forces, but they are not allowed to participate in them.

(5) Moreover, the bearing of the sword in view is limited to judicial and police force; it does not apply to the questions of war and the death penalty. This is another historical point, but it is also a matter of definition. The violence discussed in this text is a limited form of force which pertains to the civil ordering of society. Based on what the text says, Paul does not have larger issues like war in mind here. There is a categorical difference between police violence and war violence.

(6) To say that the government is ordered by God is not the same as saying “that whatever the government does or asks of its citizens is good.” Here Yoder focuses on the textual issue of the Greek participle “proskarterountes,” used in the phrase: “…attending to this very thing.” He interprets this as an adverbial modifier, so that the passage reads: “The authorities are ministers of God only to the extent to which they carry out their function.” The authorities only exist in their God-given order when they devote themselves to their proper task of ministering for the sake of good. The point is: government stands under an external criterion to which the church must hold them. Taking v. 7 into account, Paul is saying that “the claims of Caesar are to be measured by whether what he claims is due to him.” If they are not due, then the Christian is obligated to disobey. But such disobedience can occur within one’s subordination to the state. “The conscientious objector who refuses to do what government demands, but still remains under the sovereignty of that state and accepts the penalties which it imposes, or the Christian who refuses to worship Caesar but still permits Caesar to put him or her to death, is being subordinate even though not obeying.”

These are the central points in Yoder’s analysis. I lay them out here very briefly simply because most evangelicals have never read Yoder, and for that reason their interpretation of Romans 13 is myopic and narrow and demands massive revision. This is only one of many areas in which neocon evangelicals are unbiblical and thus non-Christian in their basic theopolitical views. Hopefully, this and future posts will help instigate a dialogue on these issues.