Labels: Miscellaneous

The internal unity of a Christian church can be attained or maintained today only by minimizing and playing down the radical historical oppositions that divide its members. In other words, one must pass over in silence such matters as color, social class, political ideology, the national situation, and the place of the country in the international market. At the same time one must stress the values that are presumably shared by all the members of the Church in question. In short, the Church must pay a high price for unity. It must say that the issues of suffering, violence, injustice, famine, and death are less critical and decisive than religious formulas and rites.

At this point someone might complain, with some reason, that I am erring by going to the opposite extreme; that I am wrong in placing only religious rites and formulas over against things that are historically decisive. After all, one might object, don't the shared features go beyond mere formulas and rites? Don't they include a deep faith and general conceptions about God and the importance of eternal life?

If I do not place these latter issues in the balance scale, it is precisely because they are shared in common by all. One person pictures a God who allows dehumanization whereas another person rejects such a God and believes only in a God who unceasingly fights against such things. Now those two gods cannot be the same one. So a common faith does not exist within the Church. The only thing shared in common is the formula used to express the faith. And since the formula does not really identify anything, are we not justified in calling it a hollow formula vis-a-vis the decisive options of history?

It would seem that the Church cannot arrogate to itself the divine right of choosing between the oppressors and the oppressed precisely because of this overevaluation of Christian unity.

Juan Luis Segundo
The Liberation of Theology, Orbis: 1976, pp. 42-3.

Labels: Liberation Theology

Labels: Pauline Theology

One of the obvious difficulties with using James C. Scott’s categories of public and hidden transcripts for reading ancient texts is that it is not always clear, given our distance from the social location, exactly where the hidden transcript is surfacing. This is displayed in the numerous different possibilities presented by those who have sought to apply Scott’s categories to Romans 13. Though most of these possibilities are complementary, surely they cannot all have been in the mind of Paul at once! But what is clear is that after the work of James C. Scott, those who want to take the texts seriously, whether religiously, historically, or both together, are not going to be able to do so without paying attention to the discourse dynamics Scott has observed to be in one way or another common to all environments in which asymmetrical power relations obtain. Using Scott’s categories is not “playing fast and loose with the text,” as it may appear to some; on the contrary, it is a practice we must adopt if we are going to treat these texts with the respect they deserve as products of real, historical, and human struggle.

Although the fact remains that all of the problems of Romans 13 may never be resolved exegetically, that is all right, because the problems of Romans 13 were not originally exegetical problems at all, but political ones. Or rather, the problem is that too many scholars persist in denial of the fact that exegesis all too frequently has been just one more bureaucratic function of power politics. Only as more scholars determine consciously to inhabit the political sphere and stand, and live, in solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed will the floodgates open up for them, bursting with new multidimensional exegetical possibilities, not for commentaries, but for communities, who are gathered around the text desperate to find the strength and the wisdom necessary to resist conformity to this present evil age.

Labels: Pauline Theology

It should be clear by now that in Romans 13:1-7, Paul is saying relatively little about government qua government. Paul’s concern is not to demarcate the differences between just and unjust governments, because Paul is writing to a people who obviously are and have been the subjects of systemic Roman injustice for some time. Rather than constituting a treatise on the state, Romans 12-13 taken together is meant to contrast the Roman order against the body of Christ in order to show how the two stand in opposition to one another. In doing this, Paul is also concerned to display how the body of Christ the crucified one is to wrestle with that very real opposition in the very real world of domination and subordination. The strategies Paul suggests, much like the strategies suggested by Jesus of Nazareth (Matt. 5:38-42), are liberating practices which would, if their adoption became pervasive, effectively undermine the very structures of a Roman society built along lines of class, race, and gender difference. Isaak is correct when he notes that

while Paul is expressing a prodemocracy worldview, no longer valued by most westerners, the hermeneutical gap can still be bridged by exercising imaginative appropriation. The moral vision that Paul tapped into calls Christians to choose voluntarily to comply with and to engage the basic political/social structures of the society within which the they live without giving up their primary allegiance, which is reserved for God’s rule/reign. In this way, the Christian political responsibility involves subverting the political system from within and inviting all creation to join in God’s ongoing mission to bring life and wholeness to all. (2003: 45)

Although many have read Romans 13:1-7 as a charter for conservative, political quietism, it is now clear from a three-dimensional engagement with the text that Paul is in fact calling for strategic, grassroots political activism. With this in view, it is no wonder at all that just a few years after the writing of this letter, Nero would deem it necessary, for the sake of Roman order, to unsheathe that decorative sword of his and cut off Paul’s seditious head.

Labels: Pauline Theology

Paul’s letter to the Romans has been seen as, among other things, a systematic theological treatise on salvation by faith alone, a missionary support letter, an apology defending the righteousness/justice of God in his dealings with humanity, an apology to the Jews defending Paul’s gospel of Gentile inclusion, an apology to the Gentiles defending Israel’s continuing role in the story of salvation, and a pastoral letter seeking to reconcile divisions along Jew/Gentile lines within the Roman congregations (Dunn 1993: 839-41). The fact that so many different approaches have been characterized as representing the “central issue” driving the epistle demonstrates, or should demonstrate, that there is not in fact one central concern streamlining throughout Romans (840), but a plurality of concerns that converge upon one another. There may be a unifying theme in their convergence, however, which until recently has gone almost entirely unnoticed by interpreters. The predominant readings, captivated as they have been by constantinian sensibilities, have failed to see the myriad ways Paul utilizes key words from the vocabulary of the Roman imperial propagandists in order to tell the story of Jesus of Nazareth.

Noting the problem of imperial persecution that lurks in the background of Romans—evident in the historical records as well as in the text itself (e.g. Rom. 8:35-38; 12:14-21), Sylvia Keesmaat has shown how from the very outset of the letter, Paul’s language represents a “direct challenge to the empire” (2007: 142). Indeed, the central terms Paul uses in his programmatic declaration in 1:16-17 “are all terms weighted with symbolic and mythic import in the empire” (143). Paul speaks of gospel (euangelion), salvation (sôterion), faithfulness (pistis) and righteousness/justice (dikaiosynê). “In the face of the imperial assertion that Caesar was the one who brought ‘good news,’ the gospel of imperial victory over enemies, Paul describes his own message in terms of a different gospel.”

From the beginning, Paul sets about redefining the very vocabulary the empire has put to work in self-legitimation. Although the Caesars are described in the Roman gospel as the “sons of gods,” a royal appellation in the ancient world, Paul proclaims a “gospel of God” (euangelion theou) centered around a different “son of God,” the one having been raised from the dead after his execution in the name of Pax Romana, and thus named the “son of God in power” (dynamei). Furthermore, “to the Romans, at the heart of an empire that lauded fides (the Latin equivalent of the Greek pistis, faith or faithfulness) as an appropriate response to the salvation of Caesar, Paul asserts in 1:16 that this gospel is the power of salvation to everyone who has faith.” Thus it is clear that Paul is “deliberately weaving together the central terms of the empire and replacing them with the story of salvation by a different gospel, another faithfulness, and a different justice” (143).[1]

Paul has set up his gospel in contrast to the euangelion of Rome, and these currents run throughout the letter, displaying the superiority of salvation by faith/loyalty to Jesus the Messiah to the salvation of the “New Age” promised by Augustus, and now again by Nero (144). In chs. 1-2 Paul presents the scope of the problem, showing that even those who profess to have wrought salvation for the whole world are subjected to a world still thoroughly in need of salvation. This is because the world has rejected God’s justice, and instead has embraced false gods that appeal to the human appetite for power and privilege. In chs. 3-8 Paul displays the scope of God’s salvation, wrought through the suffering of his “son” (royalty language) at the hands of the powers that be. Moreover, in the midst of a pervasively anti-Semitic empire, Paul proclaims a salvation that is “for the Jew first, but also for the Greek,” a salvation which in chs. 9-11 Paul argues, contrary to the salvation proclaimed by the Roman propagandists, is truly universal in scope. In Christ God has brought together into one harmonious body politic both Jew and Gentile, a feat no Roman Peacemaker (Caesar) had ever accomplished.

It is at this point, “at the end of a very detailed argument in which Paul outlines his hopes for salvation for both Jew and Gentile, [that] we find these chapters that flesh out the shape of a new community in Christ” (Keesmaat 2007: 143). Indeed, we are not even able “to grasp the fullness of his soteriological argument until chapters 12 and 13” (Stubbs 2004: 189). Now Paul is ready to bring this “salvation of God” to bear on the real world and describe what this new Jew-Gentile body politic looks like in practice. Paul achieves this by contrasting the Christian body politic (12:1-21 and 13:8-14) with the Roman body politic (13:1-7), bringing the discontinuity between the two into austere relief. Finally, chs. 14-15 continue to flesh out the attitudes and practices necessary for the new body politic to sustain itself in an evil and hostile age.

Now that we have situated our pericope within the broader scope of the letter as a whole, we will take a moment to examine 13:1-7 more closely within its immediate context, from the beginning of chapter 12 to the end of chapter 13.

In 12:1, Paul appeals to the Roman congregations, not to offer sacrifices at the temple in Jerusalem, not to offer sacrifices to the Roman gods or to the imperial cult, but to offer their own bodies as living sacrifices, which is a true spirituality, in contrast to the spiritualities of the world that produce only systemic injustice and sexual exploitation. This true spirituality, of course, turns out to be embodied in a communal life marked by justice, nonviolence, and love, as we will see.

In 12:2, Paul admonishes the Christian body not to be conformed any longer to the pattern of this world. “This world,” as Stubbs has adeptly displayed, is a system of injustices perpetrated in the name of peace through an ideological construct in which the Roman order is simply the way things are. But the salvation Paul proclaimed in chs. 3-8—far from being an otherworldly hope—goes to work exactly here, by making possible a renewal of the mind capable of transforming the new body politic from enslavement to the categories and social stratifications of the Roman order, to the embodiment of God’s will in the habituation of new and just social formations.

In 12:3-8, these social formations are explicitly marked off from those of “the world.” The new and just social formations of the body (politic) of Christ are embodied in humility (in contrast to honor), mutual subordination or equality (in contrast to hierarchical relationships), and unity in diversity (in contrast to unity through conformity).

In 12:9-13, the body of Christ is further contrasted from the body of Caesar, in that the Christians are to be motivated to good works not by compulsion or by the pursuit of personal honor, but through genuine love for the other. Rather than outdoing one another in gaining honor, as in the Roman order, Christians are to compete to see who can give the most honor. More significantly, the ones to whom most honor is due are not those capable of reciprocity, but the poor, the lowly—those who demonstrate a need for hospitality.

Considering that the Jews who were expelled in 49 C.E. by the Edict of Claudius had only recently returned to Rome, it is likely that Paul had them in mind as those in need of hospitality. This is further supported by the fact that Paul here refers to those in need as “the saints” (tôn hagiôn), a word he later uses twice (15:25, 31) specifically to refer to Jewish Christians. For those in the church who were Roman citizens, or for those who wished to advance themselves, there was nothing to be gained (in Roman terms) from honoring Semites with hospitality and affection. But those who are “aglow with the Spirit, [they] serve the Lord” (12:11), which is to say, the Jewish Lord, not the Roman one.

Yet in 12:14, Paul reminds the new body politic that honoring the despised ones, in many cases the Jews, does not entail taking sides with them against their persecutors. On the contrary, the new body politic is marked not by any of the parochial in-group loyalties that comprise the Roman order; rather, the new body politic is marked by love even of enemy.

Of course, as vv. 15-16 display, this love of enemy is not to replace care for and solidarity with the enemy’s victims. The two are to remain in balance, or else the new body politic descends into conformity to the old. The Gentiles are to “associate with the lowly,” to “live in harmony” with the Jews, to mourn with them, and to rejoice with them. They are not to be separate peoples, but one body. It is in this unity that the strength is found, together, to love their now common enemy. In a very significant way, Paul is encouraging the Gentile Christians to make enemies. By identifying themselves with the oppressed, the Gentile Christians are effectively relinquishing their status as good Roman citizens, and are compelled (by love) to undergo a process of conversion through which their most basic loyalties are reinterpreted and renounced. They learn to look upon their very homeland as upon foreign soil.

In 12:17-18, Paul acknowledges that they will continue to be the victims of violent aggression, and that peace between them and their enemies is not ultimately up to them. The Romans will continue to perpetuate violence and hostility—that is, they will continue to tax, stabilize, and make peace (cf. John 10:10). But in contrast, the new body politic does not perpetuate cycles of violence. On the contrary, as 12:19-21 displays, the new body politic is liberated and empowered to disrupt the cycle of violence by extending to their oppressors the same love and care they have (with difficulty) learned to show to one another, even, especially, the lowliest among them.

In 13:1 Paul takes up the public transcript as he moves to make the contrast between the two body politics explicit. According to “this world,” to which the Roman Christians had formerly subjected themselves, and by which they continue to be subjected, Rome’s dominion over its people has been given to it by God (i.e. fortune not violence). If Rome were not divinely instituted, then why is Rome in power? Thus, Roman hegemony is divinely instituted. It is the most natural thing in the world. To challenge this order is to challenge nature itself. Those who challenge the order incur “God’s wrath,” usually administered via crucifixion, as it was with Jesus of Nazareth and tens of thousands of others who wrongly preached any gospel other than Caesar’s. Clearly, these governors are in the right—they would never crucify a good man. Only those who oppose God by opposing Rome deserve to be punished. For who in their right mind would oppose God? But you have nothing to fear from Rome if you do good things—like heal the sick, cast out demons, restore the outcast, give everything you have to the poor, speak out against religious exploitation, castigate extortionists and offer alternative economic systems of mutuality and solidarity. Do good things like that and Rome will commend you publicly. Rome will treat you like royalty. After all, God put Rome here not to be served, but to serve—to serve the interests of the people. But if you break Rome’s law, look out! If you undermine Rome’s authority, beware! Nero may love clemency, but he’ll sign your death warrant, for the stability of the region, if you force his hand. He may detest drawing his sword, but it’s certainly not there for decoration. He’ll use it in a heartbeat if peace is at stake. He’ll regret having to have done it, but he is a servant of God. He has no choice but to bring down God’s wrath, on God’s behalf, upon any and all enemies of the state. Therefore, you might want to consider just giving him a little bow as he passes by, not just to avoid his wrath—which he hates to exercise, by the way—but because it’s a matter of conscience. What possible reason could you have not to want to wholly devote yourself to such an honorable servant-leader? It’s a matter of conscience. That’s also why you pay your taxes. It’s helpful to think about your friendly neighborhood tax collectors like priests. Just think how devoted they are to what they do. They’ve devoted their lives to ensuring that each and every individual soul has the opportunity to give thanks to Nero. After all, we owe him big for saving us from our own barbarisms. That’s why we give everybody what we owe them. Tribute to the tribute collectors. Custom taxes to the guys with swords in the living room. Fear to the good guys. Honor to those who deserve honor.

The significant thing is that, even though the rationale Paul provides for voluntary subordination is obviously bogus, Paul still means to give the instructions that come through in the performance of the public transcript. Like Philo, Paul is promoting “caution” over “absolute frankness of speech.” Paul knows that despite the propaganda about Nero’s temperance, Rome’s wrath will be unleashed swiftly and devastatingly upon any rebellion. Thus, although Paul is using irony to expose the fraudulence of the official transcript, subordination is still the prudent policy.

But in 13:8-10, Paul offers the real explanation for the new body politic’s subservience to the old, securing vv. 1-7 within an inclusio on love for enemy/love for the other (ton heteron). In the new body politic, enemies are not reviled but humanized. The new body politic, through the mutual love its members have learned to share with one another, is empowered in turn to love the wholly other, to give to all human beings more than is their due. The payment of taxes, the offering of honor, these are no longer offered on the terms imposed by the domination system. They are offered willingly, and freely, not because those “above them,” by virtue of their very status, are naturally owed such things, but because the new body politic must learn to respect the God-given dignity of all people. To deny it in the enemy is to deny it in oneself. Thus, the “enemy” of 12:14-21 has become the “neighbor” in 13:8-10. Rather than perpetuate enmity by opposing Rome, or by continuing to conform to subjection on terms of the official transcript, the new body politic is called to engage the enemy with “transforming initiatives,” such as, for instance, offering food and drink in lieu of curses and bloodshed (cf. 2 Kings 6:8-23, esp. vv. 22-23). Such a strategy takes the initiative away from the oppressor and puts the initiative in the hands of the oppressed. The powerless are empowered to resist, not the enemy, but enmity itself.

In 13:11-14 Paul concludes the section begun in 12:1 by alluding to the day of the Lord’s coming, the day of salvation in which the people of God are finally delivered from the domination of ruthless, godless powerholders. This is the day in which “God’s vengeance” (12:19) comes to bear on their oppressors. Many have suggested that 12:19 is fulfilled in 13:4, as if Paul is saying that the Roman order, not the individual, is the proper executor of God’s vengeance. But the reality is that the Roman order is only a parody of that role. By ascribing to themselves the role of divine avenger, the Roman kings have only sealed their doom. For ultimately, if they persist in it, they will become the victims of their own violence.

Yet although this deliverance is held up in the Christian community as a future hope, the undoing of their oppressors is not their concern. They are not to brood in the night wishing violence upon their enemies. They are not to be marked by any of the behavior typical of Roman emperors and elites (drunkenness, orgies, jealousies). These are the deeds of a bygone age. But the day is dawning, and God’s new world order is already breaking in, whenever and wherever the people of God wear their “armor of light,” militating a subversive program of uninhibited love, radical mutuality, and tangible peace.

Labels: Pauline Theology

Auto touto. The NIV translates 13:6 to read:

This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing.

There are multiple problems with this translation, the first of which is that the translators have gratuitously added two English words—“authorities” and “governing” are nowhere to be found in the Greek—effectively solidifying their interpretation of the text by embedding it in the translation. The Greek actually reads: dia touto gar kai phorous teleite. leitourgoi gar theou eisin eis auto touto proskarterountes.

A literal translation would read:

For this also is why you pay taxes. For God’s priests [or God’s ministers] are constantly occupying themselves with this very thing.

The NIV has gratuitously inserted the word “authorities” as the subject of the clause, when in fact leitourgoi (ministers/priests) is in the nominative case, clearly the subject. The participle, proskarterountes, functions grammatically as the object of the subject’s action: For God’s priests (leitourgoi gar theou) are (eisin) constantly occupying themselves (proskarterountes) with this very thing (eis auto touto). The NIV has given the participle its own special clause (who give their full time to governing), but they have done so without any exegetical warrant.The other gratuitous addition is the word “governing.” This is not in the Greek. The Greek says “eis auto touto” (to this very thing), and the referent is actually ambiguous. But the NIV has anachronistically projected modern taxation ideals back onto the Roman taxation system, by suggesting that Paul is arguing that taxes are necessary because they help the state to govern well. But as many have shown (e.g. Keesmaat 2007: 151), the vast majority of ancient tax dollars did not go to governing, but to military expansion and to the aggrandizement of the imperial cult. While auto touto could be a reference to governing, the only mention Paul has made remotely related to governing is in v. 4, which speaks of the terror of the sword. If this “governing” is the “very thing” Paul had in mind to support by encouraging to pay their taxes those in the church who had just been displaced en masse at sword point, his reasoning would hardly have been satisfactory to his hearers.

There is an alternative reading. Grammatically, it is possible that the leitourgoi theou are not members of the Roman bureaucracy at all, but the Christians themselves. This line would read, “This is also why you pay taxes, for God’s priests (i.e. all Christians) are constantly busying themselves with (paying taxes).” But this reading is highly unlikely, especially if we take the chiastic structure of the text to be at all determinative (see above, p. 18).

Ultimately, Herzog’s reading (1994: 358) is the most likely, in which “this very thing,” the thing with which the “ministers of God” are constantly busying themselves, is the collection of taxes itself. Besides being grammatically preferable, it also has the virtue of corresponding rather cogently to the historical situation.

Anthistemi. In 13:2, Paul uses the word anthesteken (resist), a cognate of anthistemi. This is significant because it is the same word used in Matthew 5:39, usually translated, “Do not resist one who is evil.”[1] Wink has shown decisively that “resist” in Matthew 5:39 indicates armed, militant resistance, as in the formation of a militia. Here I quote Wink at length:

Resistance implies “counteractive aggression,” a response to hostilities initiated by someone else. Liddell-Scott defines anthistemi as to “set against esp. in battle, withstand.” Ephesians 6:13 is exemplary of its military usage: “Therefore take the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand [antistenai, literally, to draw up battle ranks against the enemy] in the evil day, and having done all, to stand [stenai, literally, to close ranks and continue to fight].” The term is used in the LXX primarily for armed resistance in military encounters (44 out of 71 times). Josephus uses anthistemi for violent struggle 15 out of 17 times, Philo 4 out of 10. Jesus’ answer is set against the backdrop of the burning question of forcible resistance to Rome. In that context, “resistance” could have only one meaning: lethal violence. Stasis, the noun form of stenai, means “a stand,” in the military sense of facing off against an enemy. By extension it came to mean a “party formed for insurrection” (so also Luke 23:19, 25), in Acts 19:40 as “rioting,” and in Acts 23:10 as “violent dissension.”

In short, antistenai means more in Matt. 5:39a than simply to “stand against” or “resist.” It means to resist violently, to revolt or rebel, to engage in an insurrection. Jesus is not encouraging submission to evil; that would run counter to everything he did and said. He is, rather, warning against responding to evil in kind by letting the oppressor set the terms of our opposition. Perhaps most importantly, he cautions us against being made over into the very evil we oppose by adopting its methods and spirit. He is saying, in effect, Do not mirror evil; do not become the very thing you hate. (1992b: 199)

As we have seen, such an understanding of anthistemi quite neatly fits the historical and literary context of Romans 13, and helps to explain the significance of the terror of “the sword” in 13:4. The machaira (sword), was a symbol of authority donned by Roman police-soldiers, but was also used by special police units in putting down violent resistance movements (Yoder 1972: 206, esp. n.14). If Paul is using anthistemi here as it is used most frequently in the NT and in the LXX, it is clear he has in view the possibility of violent resistance. As Borg has shown (1972: 208-11), militant Jewish uprisings in Rome were by no means unheard of. A reading closely following that of Stubbs, above, would cohere with Wink’s remarks. Here we can see the continuity between Paul and the Jesus tradition precisely in the way they instruct God’s people to resist the enemy. In both cases it is Rome that is in view as the enemy. In both cases militant resistance is denounced. In neither case is political quietism promoted. In both cases, what Stassen has called “transforming initiatives” (2003) and what Scott would call the “weapons of the weak” (1985) are offered as a means of conciliatory resistance to the imperial order.

Moreover, if we take Herzog’s persuasive argument about Jesus’ negative attitude toward Roman taxation as determinative, there is the further possibility of agreement between Jesus and Paul on the question of the tribute. Herzog (2004) argues that Jesus stood firmly opposed to the tribute, but that his response when cornered on the issue in public (Mark 12:13-17) was a virtuoso performance of dissembling discourse in which Jesus alludes to a hidden transcript in the midst of his performance of the public transcript, and in doing so radically reinterprets the payment of the tribute as an exercise in ritual cleansing. The coins Caesar wants back in tribute contain idolatrous inscriptions in the first place. Since no good Jew should possess idolatrous images, the natural thing to do is to return the blasphemous coins back from whence they came.[2] Although Jesus stood in hard opposition to the economic devastation Roman taxation helped to perpetuate in Palestine, his response (Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s) is the perfect example of the “politics of disguise and anonymity” which is the intersection at which the offstage and onstage transcripts collide. If Herzog’s reading of Mark 12 is even close to the mark, and I think it is, then the reading of Stubbs and others—which sees Romans 13:8 (the hidden transcript) as a subversion of 13:7 (the public transcript)—would put Paul firmly in continuity with Jesus on yet another point. Both effectively reinterpret what it means for the people of God to participate in what would ordinarily be oppressive rituals of subordination, subverting rituals of subordination into acts of liberation.

Labels: Pauline Theology

Finally, Monya Stubbs (2004) also seeks to bring the categories of public and hidden transcripts to bear on our text, but takes up an approach quite different than that of the prior three samples, with innovative but complementary results. Stubbs argues that taking 13:1-7 in isolation from its surrounding context produces one-dimensional readings which focus primarily on the “subjection” aspect of the text. If instead we look at 13:1-7 in light of the surrounding context (12:1-13:14), the emphasis is shifted from “subjection as a single hermeneutical frame,” and the frame is expanded “to include subjection-reflection-resistance as a three-dimensional process that Paul espouses for empowering those who may feel powerless in their relationship with governing authorities” (172).[1]

The first part of the hermeneutical frame is subjection, which is the “first step in the three-dimensional process of empowerment” (173). In order to identify how Paul understands subjection (hypotassesthô), Stubbs traces Paul’s use of the word throughout the letter.

The first instance is in 8:7, which reads: “For the mind belonging to flesh is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, indeed it lacks the power.”[2] The mind that is not subject to God is by implication subject to flesh. What is significant here is that “the refusal by those whose minds are set on ‘this world’ to ‘subject’ to the will of God moves beyond the matter of one’s personal will. Paul raises the question of ability.” Humanity, subjected to the flesh (the “flesh” being shorthand for the unjust structures that sustain a rebellious world), “lacks the power to free itself when confronted by the law of God” (176). Thus, although humanity has voluntarily subjected itself to flesh, it is now subjected by flesh.

The second use of subjection is in Romans 8:20: “For the creation was subjected to futility not of its own will, but by the will of the one who subjected it.” Of course, the one who subjected the creation to futility was God himself, and he did it, as the rest of the verse says, “in hope,” that is, in hope that “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God” (v. 21). But what is pertinent for Stubbs is not why the creation was subjected, but that it was subjected by an exterior entity, and “not of its own will.” She calls this “subjection as a consequence of coercion” (176).

Thus, Stubbs establishes that subjection in Romans can be “both an act of volition and imposition,” and sometimes (as in 8:7) both at once. Turning to 13:1, Stubbs asks of the text, “Why do people tolerate subjection?” According to Stubbs, “Paul suggests that people willingly tolerate and perpetuate their subjection because they lack the ability to recognize or resist the influence of power” (177). This raises the question of how to translate 13:1. Pasa psyche exousiais hyperechousais hypotassesthô can be translated in either the imperative middle or the imperative passive. The imperative middle would read, “Let every soul subject itself to the governing authorities.” But if we were to take the dative case of exousiais hyperechousais as the dative of means, the imperative passive would read, “Be every soul subjected by the governing authorities.” Stubbs observes that the former reading treats subjection as a volitional matter, and indicates that Paul’s hearers possess “the power to socially situate themselves within the order of their environment.”

On the other hand, the latter reading would indicate that the governing authority “is a structure in which the Christian is placed or already exists and it acts upon the Christian existence. The Christian cannot but live within a preexisting social system” that by its very structure imposes limitations upon the Christian’s ability to communicate his or her faith through intentional social formations. In other words, for Stubbs, being “subjected by the governing authorities” means accepting the imposed structures of society (typically built along lines of race, class, and gender) as limitations upon an individual’s or a group’s ability to allow their most basic convictions to transform the structures of their social relationships.

But Stubbs contends that the potency of Paul’s logic rests in the both/and, not in the either/or, of these two translations (177). Paul intends to suggest that Christians both act as agents in their subjection and are acted upon by it. “The combined reading takes seriously the enormity of the social and religious ideological weight placed on the lives of individuals within given communities” (179). Significantly, this means that Paul is not so much commanding subjection or prohibiting rebellion as much as he is pressing the Roman Christians “to acknowledge the social reality of their relation to the Roman state” (178). Paul is making explicit the “unspoken/unwritten values that underpin Roman social life,” forcing them to see it as an “ideological construct.” Ideology is a “representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”[3] Or rather, “ideology is that which is self-evident. Yet, that which is self-evident is a construct, is created through the imagination,” and the construct “is the way in which human beings conceive of their relationship” with the structure of society and with other human beings (179).

Thus Paul forces his hearers to face the consequences of their subjection within the terms of the ideological construct. “Every soul be subjected by and to governing authorities for there is no authority if not by God and the existing ones have been appointed by God. So that the ones [who] resist the authority resist what God has ordained, and those who resist shall themselves receive judgment” (vv. 1-2). Here Paul has represented a reality constructed by the ideological construct, that is, “by the social acceptance of the people’s perceived relation to governing authority.” Within terms of this construct, “to resist the system is to resist God and live in a state of alienation from God. Alienation from God is manifested in misfortunes within the system of authority” (180). Therefore, “if you do evil, fear, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain” (v. 4).

Extrapolating on Stubbs’s reading, we might add that within the construct, of course, “evil” is whatever disrupts or controverts the established social order. For instance, in patriarchal orders such as Rome was, any group encouraging female leadership, or coequal leadership, is seen as “evil” and is immediately suspected of every seditious crime from anarchy to zealotry. Or we might take as a more current example McCarthyism as an order, and communism as an “evil,” which is damnable in a democratic cosmos fashioned after self-evident, divinely instituted principles, such as the inalienable right to pursue capital, or the right to privatize and commoditize natural resources.

The “world” Paul urges Christians not to conform to (12:2), the world that is passing away, is the ideological construct, or the public transcript, an artifice the powerholders have created in order to preserve their power. God is co-opted and re-created as the creator of the world, the order, so that what serves the interests of the ruling elites is what is natural, what is divinely instituted. Disobedience to the order is disobedience to God and alienation from God. To be alienated from God is to be crushed beneath the weight of the world of his design. Perhaps it was the weight of precisely such a world that caused a crucified Jewish rebel to wonder whether his God had forsaken him. Was Rome’s god God after all?

According to Stubbs, this is the kind of question Paul intends to incite from his hearers in the first step in his three-dimensional process of empowerment. Because “subjection alone is an oppressive posture and mere submission forces one to remain in a powerless state,” the capacity to acknowledge one’s subjection by the authority is the first step toward empowerment to resist. But Paul’s next step, according to Stubbs, is “to reflect upon the situation in which they live.” Paul is challenging the Christians in Rome “to engage in the process of careful examination that leads to the conviction that God dwells both in and beyond their ‘subjection by governing authorities’” (181). Paul wants them to come to this conviction through reflection on the nature of their relationship to the ideologically constructed world to and by which they are subjected.

Stubbs points out, as we have already noted, that “Paul has already advised the Christian community against accepting as absolute the apparent order of ‘this world’” (181). “Do not be conformed,” Paul writes, “to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God—the good and acceptable and perfect will of God” (12:2). Stubbs finds Enrique Dussel instructive here. Dussel observes that in the scriptures, “this world, is a ‘practical’ totality (a totality constituted and characterized by relationship of praxis), a system or structure of prevailing, dominant social actions and relationships, under hegemony of evil” (1988: 29). “This world” refers to empire, to Babylon, to Egypt, not merely as nations, but as “systems of practices” which confront and engage God’s people. It is “self-totalizing,” lifting itself “as an absolute system of authority which is opposed to the will of God.” This also, Stubbs suggests, is how Paul uses “this world.” It is shorthand for a system of social formations and relations which itself resists the will of God. (2004: 181).

It is to “this world” that Christians are called not to conform, this world as a set of social formations. Instead, Christians are to accurately identify what are “the prevailing norms of the society in which they live,” so that they can understand how to build more just polities, which is what the ecclesiai represent. This capacity to recognize and name the prevailing norms is made possible by what Paul calls the “renewal of the mind,” the transformation of paradigm effected by the Christian’s participation in the body and work of Christ. “The renewing of the mind is evidenced by one’s rational discrimination,” by a person or group’s ability to make the predominant ideology explicit and recognize it precisely as ideology. Thus, “reflection is a process of discernment” (182). Wink reminds us that “discernment does not entail esoteric knowledge, but rather the gift of seeing reality as it really is. Nothing is more rare, or more truly revolutionary, than an accurate description of reality” (1992a: 89). Reflection is a process of discernment that infuses those subjected by the “illusionary relationship of subjection to the ‘governing authorities’ with the ability to discern that subjection to ‘worldly’ authority is not absolute” (Stubbs: 2004: 182). This liberates the subjected ones to reflect on the potential for God’s will, rather than the prevailing societal norms (derived from Roman values, Jewish law or some other ostensibly unassailable source), to shape their social formations.

It is in fact the transformation of the mind from the old patterns of prescribed norms which permits the subjected ones to know God’s will. “The significance of reflection, however, is not to end the subjection. Instead reflection prevents the Christians at Rome from making absolute the Roman political authority.” Or as Wink frames the matter, “the seer’s gift is not to be immune to invasion by the empire’s spirituality, but to be able to discern the internalized spirituality, name it, and externalize it” (1992a: 89). As a result, Stubbs perceives, the humanity of Romans 12:2 “in a state of reflection stands in direct opposition to the state of humanity described in Romans 1:21: ‘for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened’” (2004: 182).

Thus, through the first two steps in Paul’s three-dimensional process of empowerment, namely—through the acknowledgment of the fact of one’s subjection and through the discerning reflection that identifies the ideological nature of this subjection—the gospel of salvation Paul has been proclaiming has finally been brought to bear on the real world.

Whereas reflection makes obvious the subjection, and allows one to envision other possibilities of God’s reality beyond subjection, resistance represents the state of transformation: It represents those acts that a person or a community makes, based on reflection, which places both their minds and bodies beyond the given subjection. Resistance is about acting and speaking in such a way that reflects commitment against conformity both to and by this world. (185)

It is at this point that Stubbs moves into her discussion of the hidden transcript embedded in Romans 13. Having just summarized Herzog’s reading of 13:1-7, Stubbs does not deny the presence of the hidden transcript within those verses. Nevertheless, on her reading, 13:1-7 as a whole functions as the “public transcript” or the “subjection.” The entire pericope is used by Paul to force the Roman Christians to “acknowledge it as the ideological system in which they live.” Paul does this because, “by not recognizing the system, they are not only subjected by it, but they also subject themselves to it” (186). Consequently, for Stubbs, the hidden transcript in the text is not seen in vv. 1-7 (although there are certainly interpretive possibilities there), but comes crashing to the surface in vv. 8-10:

Owe no one anything, except to love one another, for whoever loves the other has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not kill, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this saying: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Thus love fulfills the law. (translation mine)

The “debts” of custom taxes, tributes, fear and honor are debts imposed upon the subjects of Roman domination. This kind of “debt” comes from what Lenski calls “the proprietary theory of the state” common among agrarian rulers (1966: 214-19). Herzog explains that this means “agrarian rulers view their conquered domains as their estate to exploit and dispose of as they choose. Because they rule, they can demand from their subjects whatever they require to maintain their rule. Tribute is but one expression of this right.” This concept of the proprietary “right” was absolutely essential in order for the administration to be able to pursue its political goals. “Rulers of aristocratic empires require enormous amounts of wealth, and they can accumulate that wealth from only two sources, internal tribute through exploitation or external booty through conquest” (1994: 349). That the Neronian administration was, as we have seen, abstracting tribute even from the inhabitants of Rome proper at the time of the writing of Paul’s letter is incredibly instructive. While the public transcript of the Roman empire dictates that “giving all (military and financial bureaucrats) their expected dues is a service to both humanity and God,” Paul tells a different story in v. 8. “Herein lies Paul’s resistance language, where the hidden transcript imposes itself upon the public transcript” (Stubbs 2004: 186). Paul counsels the Roman Christians to “owe no one any debt, except the debt to love.” This is Paul’s call to resistance. Paul “employs the language most indicative of Roman social, political, and economic structure to describe how Christians ought not engage in relationship with each other” (187). While the Roman order characterizes human relationships asymmetrically, along the standard patron-client pattern, so that the term “debt” naturally belongs to asymmetrical relationships of domination and subordination, Paul radically alters the meaning of “debt” by bonding it to love. The two words are now conjoined in such a way that the one effectively redefines the other (188). By transforming debt into the commitment to love “the other” (ton heteron), Paul has undermined the empire’s claim to proprietary rights and has effectively leveled the playing fields. Now “the enemy” (12:20) has become “the neighbor” (13:9).

Thus, Paul’s revolutionary concept of debt as the duty to love is a charter for resistance, discreetly appearing “onstage” in the midst of Paul’s ostensibly loyal performance of the public transcript. Just as significantly, Paul’s allusion to the hidden transcript carries with it a scathing critique of the Roman order by “suggesting that true servants or ministers of God occupy themselves with addressing the physical and spiritual needs of the citizens, not in exacting burdensome taxes and forced military might to maintain control of the masses of people for the benefit of the governing elite.” By juxtaposing debt and love, Paul has called into question the absolute authority of Roman order and has offered “debt of love as an alternative system of authority, as a measuring stick which gauges the actions and intentions of both individuals and governing institutions” (188).

Labels: Pauline Theology

William Herzog (1994), noting the frustration of many that Paul did not choose to more carefully circumscribe just what constitutes a just and an unjust government, suggests that a reading of the text against Scott’s matrix of the public and hidden transcripts immediately resolves this dilemma. “If Paul were dissembling, then this widely acknowledged omission is part of his coded speech. The very imbalance of his argument is part of his disguise” (354). With this possibility held up in plain view, Herzog begins his analysis.

Drawing our attention to the historical conditions that lie beneath Paul’s opening claim (his claim that the existing authorities have been instituted by God), Herzog[1] observes that the “rulers of agrarian societies and aristocratic empires value traditional forms of legitimation.” In order to procure and sustain the legitimation of the local religion, the lords seek to “coopt the temples, priests and sacred texts of their societies” (354-55). Thus Rome installed their own high priestly regime, manufactured their own “king of the Jews,” and accepted the High Priest’s annual sacrifice on the emperor’s behalf.[2] Indeed, “most temples,” as with the one in Jerusalem, “support the ruler’s claim to a mandate from heaven and are handsomely rewarded for their efforts.” Thus, for Herzog, Paul’s opening remarks about the divine constitution of Roman power indicate that Paul recognizes “the reality of how politics works in his world” (355). Paul is simply rehearsing the official transcript, not because he agrees with it, but in order to situate his hearers firmly within the grim reality of their subordination. The official transcript must be established before it can be subverted.

Paul continues in this vein by identifying the three groups around which “the entire exhortation is built,” namely, the authorities, their subjects, and the rebels (355). Paul immediately isolates the rebels and warns them off of violent resistance. “Whoever resists (antitassomenos) authority resists (anthesteken) what God has appointed.” Herzog observes that anthesteken is “more confrontational” than antitassomenos and “refers to useless resistance.” Following Hobsbawm (1959; 2000), Herzog repeats the “truism that there were no revolutions in the ancient world, only rebellions that were crushed” (1994: 355). Thus, v. 2 reiterates another “political fact of life; political rebellion was folly and inevitably came to a bad end.” Of course, Paul does not say this in so many words; he speaks “from a loyalist point of view.”[3]

But v. 4a “comes like a surgical strike,” when Paul finally begins to relativize the imperial pretentions he has been loyally reinforcing until now. These archontes (rulers) are diakonoi (menial servants). “Up to this point, the semantic fields separating rulers, ruled and rebels has been clear, but the introduction of the ruler as diakonos changes the equation.” In the Roman architecture, “ruling and serving were antithetical functions and unrelated semantic fields.” Thus, “in the midst of reiterating the public transcript, Paul introduces a coded message from the hidden transcript” (356), thus relativizing the grandiose claims Roman rulers regularly made about themselves, without overtly denying such claims.

The ascription of diakonos to the ruler is quickly and prudently pursued by the reiteration of the ruler’s “divine right” to brandish his sword about. But, Herzog detects, “even this rhetoric has a ‘hidden’ implication because it specifies that the military be used solely to suppress anarchy and wrong behavior. That the use of the military was hardly ever limited to these purposes was obvious. The ‘sword’ thus provided the means of intimidation and brutality that ensured the subjected populations would quietly endure the so-called Pax Romana” (356). Paul’s legitimation of Roman power thus takes up the line of the official transcript, while exposing the official transcript’s lack of correspondence to reality. “If one lived in such a state, one would obey ‘because of conscience’ not just out of fear of its wrath. Unfortunately, such a state does not exist” (357), so subservience remains an unhappy obligation (anangkê).

While the military’s function was to compel subordination internally and to create new subordinates externally, and were “the primary functionaries in the police state,” no less important to Roman dominion were “the bureaucrats responsible for the collection of direct tribute and indirect taxes.” The tributes and customs were essential to Rome’s ability to maintain control of its vast empire. Herzog sees Paul’s language to be adeptly on point here. Paul reminds the Roman Christians that the leitourgoi theou are “constantly busying themselves with this very thing” (13:6), namely, money-grabbing. It is “an apt description,” Herzog writes, “of the bureaucrats who devoted their lives to providing the revenue stream required by the emperor to maintain and expand his political agenda.” These collectors were expert extortionists, “extracting from the population everything but the barest subsistence” (358).

As such, for the same reason that the slave and poor classes are compelled to be subservient, it is necessary to pay tributes and customs. The reason? “Resistance is foolhardy. Rome holds all the cards. Just as the military devotes itself to physical control, the financial bureaucrats devote themselves to economic control. It is useless to fight them.” The most that can be done in this situation is to “give back” (apodote) what belongs to them. Herzog notes here that apodote is the same verb used in Mark 12:17. According to Herzog, Paul’s point is “to give them their due, but no more. This implies resistance to conceding to the finance ministers more than is their due. Give no more than absolutely necessary” (358).[4]

Paul continues to rehearse the public transcript, exhorting the subordinates to render reverence and honor to those to whom it is due. While reverence (phobos) can easily be translated as “fear,” as it is in 13:4, what are we to make of the admonition to render “honor”? To whom is honor owed? Some have suggested that fear and honor are owed only to God, and thus Paul is carefully inserting into the equation criteria for ethical discrimination, effectively relativizing his prior, more absolute claims about the authorities.[5] While this is a possibility, it is exegetically unlikely, especially if we accept, following Nanos, the chiastic structure of the pericope, in which phobon corresponds to archontes, and timen to exousiais hyperechousais. Others have suggested that we read honor sarcastically, inside quotation marks (Walsh 2008). This could be a more promising reading, based on the irreverent attitude Paul displays toward timocratic mores elsewhere in his corpus.[6] We have already noted a third possibility: Neil Elliott has shown how the aphorism was used by the early Christians, specifically the Christian martyrs of the second century. There the offering of honor to Caesar functioned as a sort of “apologetic of the persecuted” (2006: 225-26), which effectively served to throw the emperor’s villainy into stark relief.

But Herzog argues that Paul is merely counseling the vulnerable Christian community to display the routine “public deference that the oppressed show their masters” (1994: 359). Herzog refers us back to Scott, who observed that “the linguistic deference and gestures of subordination” are not merely “abstracted by power” but “serve also as a barrier and a veil that the dominant find difficult or impossible to penetrate” (1990: 32). In many cases subordinated groups rehearse their acts of conformity offstage, and the skills requisite for theatrical duplicity are instilled in the young by instruction and example. This is why “conformity is too lame a word for the active manipulation of rituals of subordination,” manipulation which transforms the rituals of subordination into security measures that sequester an emancipated space for the dominated to inhabit. Thus, it is not mere conformity, but “an art form in which one can take some pride at having successfully misrepresented oneself” (33).

Certainly one of the things the Jews of the diaspora shared was a long tradition of living under domination. As such, they had grown especially adept in the conforming arts, and Paul, Herzog contends, was no exception. Handing down his expertise, “Paul advises the Romans to practice the arts of resistance but in ways that will not threaten the community lodged near the heart of the Roman system of domination. He has managed to sound obedient and loyal,” but the loyalty Paul offers is to “an empire that does not exist.” Thus Paul has conceded nothing to “the actual empire, and his apparent advice about loyalty is coded language for how to survive in an authoritarian environment” (1994: 359).

Labels: Pauline Theology

Labels: Liberation Theology

Neil Elliott (2004b) has also tried to heed Scott’s call to take texts seriously by paying close attention to the dynamics of discourse that are persistent throughout all asymmetrical power relationships. Scott points out that any hermeneutical analysis “based exclusively on the public transcript is likely to conclude that subordinate groups endorse the terms of their subordination and are willing, even enthusiastic, partners in that subordination” (1990: 2). Elliott sees this, our failure to delve beneath the public transcript, as one of the factors contributing to the cooptation of Romans 13 by the very powers Paul sought to expose therein. “Only the most pernicious twists of fate would later enlist these verses in service of the empire itself” (1997: 204). But the blame does not lie solely on the empires of this world. “That we should allow these verses to thwart even the most modest inquiries into our government’s complicity in repression and murder is a staggering betrayal. . . . Only the arrogant presumptions of our own privilege have allowed us to hear these verses as a sacred legitimation of power” (2006: 226, emphasis mine).

So how ought we to hear these verses? The fact that these words of the apostle Paul were as early as the second century worn incisively on the lips of Christian martyrs should be our first indication that not everything is at it seems on the surface. “The declaration of loyalty,” the public transcript, “belongs together with persecution, in a tradition reaching back to the Jewish martyrs under the Greek tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes” (2006: 225-26). Thus, Elliott proceeds (2004b: 113ff) by locating us more broadly within the milieu of Judaism under Roman domination. Elliott examines the writings of Philo, demonstrating Philo’s frequent oscillation between the public transcript of Roman benefaction and the hidden transcript of Roman brutality. In book 2 of On Dreams, for instance, Philo discusses Joseph’s dream in which sheaves of grain bow down to him. Ostensibly interpreting the biblical text, Philo proceeds to depict the proud men who “set themselves up above everything, above cities and laws and ancestral customs and the affairs of the several citizens,” who impose “dictatorship over the people,” bringing “into subjection even souls whose spirit is naturally free and unenslaved” (De Somniis 2.79-79). Here Philo’s chosen genre, biblical allegory, “allows him a certain ‘deniability,’ a ‘disguise’ for his political views” (2004b: 114).[1] His political views, of course, are seen in his description of an “unnatural imposition of dictatorship upon those who are naturally free” (114). This reading, of course, has no basis in the Genesis text.

Nevertheless, fully conscious of the destructive power of the Roman empire, Philo encourages caution (the public transcript), over against what he calls “ultimate frankness” (the hidden transcript). Philo acknowledges the existence of “lunatics and madmen” who “dare to oppose kings and tyrants in words and deeds.” But, as Elliott points out, Philo does not call them “lunatics” because “they fail to recognize the inherent benefit of accepting their subordination to the imperial order (as the official transcript would define lunacy)” (115). On the contrary, they are lunatics, according to Philo, because they refuse to see how destructive the imperial order can be to those who challenge the public transcript. They are blind to the fact that

not only like cattle are their necks under the yoke, but that the harness extends to their whole bodies and souls, their wives and children and parents, and the wide circle of friends and kinsfolk united to them by fellowship of feeling, and that the driver can with perfect ease spur, drive on or pull back, and mete out any treatment small or great just as he pleases. And therefore they are branded and scourged and mutilated and undergo a combination of all the sufferings which merciless cruelty can inflict short of death, and finally are led away to death itself. (De Somniis 2.83-84)

For this reason, Philo promotes caution over “ultimate frankness.” This can be seen further in another allegorical reading, this time of Genesis 23:7, in which Philo describes Abraham’s obedience to the sons of Heth. “Although the text does not present these terms, Philo insists that Abraham’s obedience was compelled by ‘fear,’ not ‘respect,’ playing on a well-known political topos” (116):[2] “For it was not out of any feeling of respect for those who by nature and race and custom were the enemies of reason . . . that he brought himself to do obedience. Rather it was just because he feared their power at the time and their formidable strength and cared to give no provocation” (De Specialibus Legibus 2.90). Philo’s interpretation, again having no basis in the text, was autobiographical. “The speeches Philo puts into the mouths of the praiseworthy [De Somniis 2.93-95] are worthy of any zealot call to arms. The political subordination Philo describes is tantamount to living as brute livestock, suffering torment and indignity until finally being butchered” (115). But all of this “is said obliquely, in the most general of terms” (116), because “to give no provocation” is the mark of true prudence under domination. “Just as a traveler encountering a bear or a lion or a wild boar on the road will seek to soothe and calm the beast, so the wise citizen will manifest patience and deference to rulers” (De Specialibus Legibus 2.86-87).[3]

We are able to discern in Philo two distinct transcripts: the onstage, public transcript, and the offstage, hidden transcript. Caution must be exercised until “the times are right,” when a “social space is opened up in which the ‘offstage’ transcripts can come onstage” (117), then “it is good to set ourselves against the violence of our enemies and subdue it; but when the circumstances do not present themselves, the safe course is to stay quiet” (De Specialibus Legibus 2.92).

Having established the existence of Scott’s categories within the Judaism of the Roman empire, Elliott proceeds to analyze Paul’s language against this template. First, Elliott sees in Romans 13:11-13 traces of a hidden transcript, appearing onstage, in Paul’s encrypted allusions to “the time,” “the hour,” and “the day.” Paul could expect “these terse phrases to be meaningful to his hearers without elaborating the apocalyptic scenario to which they refer.” (117).

Using Scott’s terminology, we might speak of a fully apocalyptic offstage transcript to which Paul makes repeated references. Indeed, the very intentionality of apocalyptic or “revelatory” rhetoric is to refer to a reality that is not universally, or “publicly,” evident—as Paul puts it, a reality that must be “revealed” as a “mystery” (Rom. 11:25) but is otherwise “unsearchable” and “inscrutable” (Rom. 11:33). These observations lead to the suggestion that every performance of one of Paul’s letters, before a group constituted as an “ekklesia,” generated a social site for the rehearsal and reiteration of a hidden apocalyptic transcript. (118, original emphasis)

According to Elliott, this very “hiddenness” of the apocalyptic transcript in Romans explains why many interpreters who “easily gravitate to more self-evident language” have been baffled by the apparent lack of apocalypticism in Romans, considering the pervasiveness of apocalyptic logic in Paul’s other letters (118).[4]

Elliott suggests that one hermeneutical key for discerning Pauline hidden transcripts is by identifying Paul’s use of the cross of Christ to illustrate his own “apostolic presence.” Elliott points to several Pauline hidden transcripts (1 Cor. 1:18-25; 2:6-8; 2 Cor. 2:15-16; 1 Thess. 5:2-4), but focuses on 2 Corinthians 2:14: “But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ.” The image represents an ironic inversion of the public transcript in which the triumphal procession of the imperial “benefactors” is applied to Paul’s arrest and imprisonment in Ephesus (2 Cor. 1:8-9), whereas “the public transcript regards Paul as simply a humiliated captive.” Thus, according to Elliot, the fact that “here and elsewhere Paul establishes a distinction between public and hidden transcripts in terms borrowed from the ceremonial of the imperial cult suggests that the larger transcript of Paul’s gospel is powerfully ironic and subversive of the imperial order” (119). In this light, Elliott sets out to reexamine Romans 13.

Elliott attempts to draw the hidden transcripts to the surface by situating the pericope against the backdrop of Roman imperial rhetoric. There was a distinction made by Roman propagandists, beginning with Cicero, between the use of persuasion in politics, and the threat of force. The latter was “necessary only for insubordinate and uncivilized peoples,” but the art of persuasion applied to citizens, who would “naturally yield their happy consent” (120). Thus the prudent politician would be skilled in the art of rhetoric, in order to persuade his peers, as well as in military strategy, in order to coerce his inferiors (De Haruspicum Responsis 5.6, 3.41). Persuasion and coercion were long considered the “twin instruments of social order” (History of Rome 2.126).

Thus it was upon this conventional distinction between persuasion and coercion that Nero’s propagandists depended when they argued that “strategies of coercion belonged to a bygone era: The emperor had come to power without resort to violence, and had thus ushered in a golden age of Clemency” (120). Nero’s Clemency had “broken every maddened sword-blade,” forging “peace in her fullness” by “knowing not the drawn sword” (Calpurnius Siculus, Eclogue 1.45-65). The armaments of Rome’s former wars were now “mere historical curiosities,” (120; cf. Einsiedeln Eclogues 25-30). Seneca, who worked for the Nero administration, put this proclamation on the lips of Nero: “With me the sword is hidden, nay, is sheathed; I am sparing to the utmost of even the meanest blood; no man fails to find favor at my hands though he lack all else but the name of man.” Seneca effervesced that such a benign ruler need not fear for his own well-being, hence “the arms he wears are for adornment only” (De Clementia 1.3; 13.5).

With this unflinching propaganda fomenting in the background, we can begin to see the incongruity between the official transcript and the perspective of Paul. Despite the claims of the emperor’s propagandists, Paul reminds the Roman Christians that “the Roman sword is still wielded, provoking terror (phobos, 13:4)” (120). Though the emperor may claim to wear his sword purely for ornamental purposes, the reality is that “he does not bear the sword in vain.” Thus, Paul urges the fledgling Christian community in Rome to adopt a “posture of ‘subjection’ or ‘subordination’ rather than revolt (13:2)” (120). Elliott points out the parallel here between Paul’s hidden transcripts and “the carefully calculated remarks” in Philo’s On Dreams. “While Roman propaganda leads us to expect that a beneficiary of the Roman order would extol consent and agreement . . . Paul speaks, with what would have sounded like the ingratitude of the uncivilized, of two alternatives: subjection (hypotassesthai) or revolt (antitassesthai; anthistemi).” Thus we can see how, “given the exuberant currents of political rhetoric in the Neronian age, Paul’s phrases encouraging submission are remarkably ambivalent.” While Paul’s ambivalence could clearly not be mistaken for outright insubordination, Elliott reminds us that “in a Roman official’s ear, Paul’s language would have seemed to offer a peculiarly grudging compliance, rather than the grateful contentment of the properly civilized” (120-21).

In conclusion Elliott suggests that we read Romans 13:1-7 as an ad hoc strategy for survival produced in turbulent political times. Dunn concurs at least on this point, calling Paul’s realism the “realism of the little people who had the most to lose” should another revolt arise (1998: 155-87). Elliott insists that “Paul was at least as adroitly political a creature as Philo,” who pleaded with his restive kinsmen to discern the political moment (2004b: 121). What is remarkable here is not that Paul was a political animal after all. What is remarkable, Elliott asserts, is how “out of step” Paul’s warning to the Roman Christians would have sounded “to ears accustomed to the exultant themes of Roman eschatology. In effect, Paul declares: ‘The empire is as dangerous as it has ever been. Nothing has changed. Exercise caution’” (121).

Labels: Pauline Theology

T.L. Carter (2004) begins by establishing the discontinuity between Paul’s laudatory description of the Roman power structure and the reality of the systemic injustice that characterized Roman order (210-11). Moreover, Carter contends that because the Christians in Rome would have been “largely made up of poor non-Latin citizens, who occupied no legal position and were of uncertain official status,” they would have been among “the most vulnerable members of Roman society,” their poverty rendering them “easy targets for oppression” and repression within the Roman system of jurisprudence itself.[1] Furthermore, the basic nature of Roman “justice” was such that “peace was imposed upon the local population by means of intimidation and violence,” a fact which was not the exception but the norm (221).[2] As such, any surface reading of the text “leaves the apostle making crass remarks that could not have failed to alienate his audience, who had suffered at the hands of the very authorities he was purporting to commend” (215).

Yet, Carter argues, because “the original audience of the letter shared with Paul a common experience of oppression at the hands of the authorities and were aware of the abuses that took place in the opening years of Nero’s reign, the consequent implausibility of Paul’s language would have alerted his readers to the presence of irony” (209). The key factor in their ability to pick up on Paul’s use of irony is that the Roman Christians’ suffering under Roman domination was an experience they shared in common with him (215). In Scott’s categories, this means that because of their common social location with Paul, the Roman Christians would have been aware that Paul was performing in the mode of the public transcript, and that elements of this performance would contain the hidden transcript Paul actually intended to communicate.

In order to establish the plausibility of an ironic reading, Carter shows (1) that in the Greco-Roman world ironic inversion was a well-established, widely used rhetorical device for “censuring with counterfeit praise” (209, 212-14); (2) that Paul himself made frequent use of irony to shame his opponents (214);[3] and (3) that the picture Paul paints of Roman power would have been incongruous with his most basic convictions as a Pharisaic Jew (212)[4] as well as with his own experiences of Roman “justice” (211-12).

Before proceeding to break down an ironic reading of 13:1-7, Carter stops to situate the pericope within its surrounding context. Although many have seen 13:1-7 as an abrupt change of subject, interrupting the flow from 12:14-21 to 13:8-10, Carter suggests that an ironic reading ties the paraenesis together seamlessly. First, Carter notes that the paraenesis “is bracketed by the exhortations to adopt a distinctive lifestyle in relation to the present age.” Carter points out that 12:1-2 and 13:11-14 function rhetorically as an inclusio, “suggesting that the intervening passage should be read as an exhortation on how Christians should conduct themselves in an evil age which is passing away.” Those who have seen 13:1-7 as a “foreign body” within the paraenesis have often commented on the conspicuous absence of any eschatological rationality therein. But Carter shows that an ironic reading situates 13:1-7 firmly within the eschatological inclusio of 12:1-2 and 13:11-14, thus subverting the superficial endorsement of the imperial bureaucracy. “Paul only seems to grant the authorities an unconditional status: in reality they belong to the present age of darkness which is passing away” (218).

With reference to the immediate context (12:17-21), the step from consideration of the enemy to the Roman authorities is perfectly natural, since many members of the Roman congregation, not least the Jews who had just returned from the expulsion under Claudius, had suffered violence, deprivation, and extortion at the hands of the authorities. Thus, “an ironic reading of Rom. 13:1-7, which portrays the authorities as enemies rather than as friends, provides a secure link with the preceding paragraph” (218).

From here, Carter breaks down an ironic reading of the text itself. He begins by identifying the subversion implicit in the claim that the Roman authorities have been appointed by God, since the authorities in turn “cannot but be subject to the God who has appointed them” (219). Blumenfeld ably underscores the irony: “Paul’s deftness of manipulating the system by working it against its self-negating proclivities is so successful as to camouflage his own wit when castigating its representatives. Throughout Romans 13:1-7 the irony is veiled (to incomprehension) as a political stereotype. ‘Fear the governing officials’ may sound as an irreproachable advice to the authorities’ ear but, these are, unbeknown to themselves, slaves to God as well (13:1)” (2001: 391-92 n.273).[5]

Carter points out that one of the texts often cited as partially underwriting Paul’s belief in the divine institution of the authorities actually subverts the conventional understanding of that claim: “For your dominion was given you from the Lord, and your sovereignty from the Most High; he will search out your works and enquire into your plans. Because as servants of his kingdom you did not rule rightly, or keep the law, or walk according to the purpose of God, he will come upon you terribly and swiftly, because severe judgment falls on those in high places” (Wis. 6:3-5). Carter also reminds us of Jesus’ critical attitude toward Roman rule, reflected in Mark 10:42: “You know that those who regard themselves as rulers over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials are tyrants over them, but not so you.” Carter suggests that “if Jesus’ words and Wis. 6:3-4 are any reflection of popular Jewish opinion of Gentile rulers, they render more unlikely the possibility that Paul’s words would be accepted without question, at least by any Jewish Christian readers in Rome” (2004: 220).

Carter argues that the reference to the sword in 13:4 is also a likely candidate for an ironic reading. “If there were a general perception that those in authority wielded the sword indiscriminately against both innocent and guilty people, it is correspondingly likely that Paul’s audience would have detected irony in his portrait of those in power as the guardians of law and order” (222). Carter cites one famous historical anecdote in which one particular Roman’s use of the sword had little to do with maintaining Rome’s famed peace:

The consulship of Quintus Volusius and Publius Scipio was marked by peace abroad and by disgraceful excesses at home, where Nero—his identity dissembled under the dress of a slave ranged the streets, the brothels, and the wine shops of the capital, with an escort whose duties were to snatch wares exhibited for sale and to assault all persons they met, the victims having so little inkling of the truth that he himself took his buffets with the rest and bore their imprints on his face. Then, it became notorious that the depredator was Caesar; outrages on men and women of rank increased; others, availing themselves of the license once accorded, began with impunity, under the name of Nero, to perpetrate the same excesses with their own gangs; and night passed as it might in a captured town. Julius Montanus, a member of the senatorial order, though he had not yet held office, met the emperor causally in the dark, and, because he repelled his offered violence with spirit, then recognized his antagonist and asked for pardon, was forced to suicide, the apology being construed as a reproach. Nero, however, less venturesome for the future, surrounded himself with soldiers and crowds of gladiators, who were to stand aloof from incipient affrays of modest dimensions and semi-private character: should the injured party behave with too much energy, they threw their swords into the scale.[6]

Carter suggests that if Paul’s audience detects an oblique reference to these events in 13:4, “they would scarcely miss the echo of Nero’s profligate behaviour in the works of darkness mentioned in 13:13. An ironic reading . . . peels back the surface meaning of the text to reveal a sharp criticism of Nero’s excesses” (222).Of course, this passage from Tacitus is merely anecdotal. The Roman police were also infamous for their pervasive abuses of power. But by depicting the authorities “as those who worked for the benefit of upright citizens and who wielded the sword in order to punish evildoers,” Carter contends, “Paul highlights the ways in which the authorities in Rome were actually falling short of the ideal of good government that he portrayed” (222). Paul was indeed speaking the truth when he reminded the Roman Christians that the authorities did not bear the sword in vain—as if they needed reminding—but contrary to Paul’s statement in 13:4, “the innocent had as much to fear from the sword as the wrongdoer” (221).

Carter also sees strong indications of irony in Paul’s discussion of the tax collectors in 13:6. Carter acknowledges that the term leitourgoi (ministers) had a common secular function, signifying a public servant in general. But the term Paul uses is leitourgoi theou (priests of God), which has inescapable cultic overtones. In 15:16, Paul would apply this term to himself (leitourgoi christou), but here he applies it to the Roman tax collectors, “notorious for lining their pockets at others’ expense” (225). According to Quintilian, an effective use of irony is when the ironist attributes to his or her opponents virtues not possessed by them but by the ironist.[7]

Carter further notes that it is precisely because leitourgoi theou is such an unfitting term for these tax collectors that modern translations tend to opt for “God’s servants” rather than “God’s priests,” but Paul’s audience, accustomed to the Septuagint’s cultic use of the term, would have been startled by the formulation in this context. “The lack of correspondence between the language Paul employs and the reality to which it refers is intended to signal the presence of irony. . . . The use of religious language to denote the activity of the tax collectors stretches the meaning of the language to breaking point and highlights the way in which the tax collectors fail to live up to the designation applied to them” (225).

Carter concludes that, although the Roman authorities may have been instituted by God, Paul’s ironic use of language serves to illustrate the ways that these authorities were failing to live up to their divinely allotted responsibilities. Thus, the rationale Paul puts forward for the submission to these failed authorities is intentionally spurious. As Scott has observed, “subordinate groups have typically learned . . . to clothe their resistance and defiance in ritualisms of subordination that serve both to disguise their purposes and to provide them with a ready route of retreat that may soften the consequences of a possible failure” (1990: 96). Carter thus sees Romans 13:1-7 as a rather sharp instance of what Scott terms “the infrapolitics of subordinate groups” (183-201).

Labels: Pauline Theology

Hidden Transcripts. Social scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott unwittingly ignited a revolution in biblical studies with the publication of his Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts in 1990.[1] Scott’s study of peasant and agrarian societies led him to discover certain recurring dynamics of discourse in contexts where asymmetrical power relations obtain, that is to say, in political economies in which a dispossessed class is dominated by an elite, ruling class. Although Scott’s primary work was done in Malaysian peasant societies, his investigation has spanned continents and centuries, and, while his postmodernist sensibilities make him reticent to attempt the construction of any universal theory of power relations, Scott has nevertheless observed “structurally similar forms of domination,” in “cases of slavery, serfdom, and caste subordination,” forms of domination which “bear a family resemblance to one another[2] . . . across cultures and historical epochs” (x).

The main lines of Scott’s observations are as follows: In political economies marked by inequitable power relations, such as in systems of chattel slavery or under colonization, the norm is for the political discourse of the dominated to “dissemble,” that is, “to feign obedience and loyalty to the colonial overlords while pursuing its own hidden agenda” (Herzog 1994: 341). On the surface of such an economy there is what Scott has called the “public transcript,” which represents the “official” interpretation of political events and power relations, engineered and controlled by the ruling elites. Invariably, eddying beneath the surface of such an economy, there is also the “hidden transcript,” a clandestine discourse produced by the subjects of domination. The public transcript is “a shorthand way of describing the open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate” (Scott 1990: 2), whereas the hidden transcript is the “discourse that takes place ‘offstage,’ beyond direct observation by powerholders” (4). Put differently, the public, “onstage,” transcript represents “the self-portrait of dominant elites as they would have themselves seen” (18), while the hidden, “offstage,” transcript, is the discourse of the oppressed, and represents what they truly think about their rulers.[3]

Not surprisingly, the hidden transcript is often “derivative in the sense that it consists of those offstage speeches, gestures, and practices that confirm, contradict, or inflect what appears in the public transcript” (4-5). This is significant, because the derivative character of the hidden transcript allows the oppressed, in the midst of onstage performances of the public transcript, to insert allusions, generally imperceptible to the ruling elites, to the hidden transcript, thus counterfeiting conformity to the architecture of the powerholders while simultaneously engendering solidarity among the dispossessed collaborators. Despite designs for resistance that parade just behind the facade of servile genuflection, the public discourse of the subordinated nevertheless continues to conform to the public transcript and defer to the “flattering self-image of elites” (18) because it is “simply a matter of survival for the powerless to appear compliant and obedient” (Herzog 1994: 341). Scott calls this third form of discourse—which is a commixture of the public and the private transcripts in a single onstage performance—a “politics of disguise and anonymity.” Though it takes place onstage, where the actors are the most vulnerable, it is “designed to have a double meaning” that serves “to shield the identity of the actors,” for their protection. But “a partly sanitized, ambiguous and coded version of the hidden transcript is always present in the public discourse of the subordinate groups” (18-19).

Needless to say, many biblical scholars have found Scott’s observations considerably useful for identifying the effects of Roman-Palestinian power relations on the public discourse of first century Jews, specifically the discourses of Jesus and Paul.[4] Although we are still in the beginning stages of testing the fruitfulness of Scott’s categories (categories which Scott insists are not original to himself), several biblical historians and exegetes have already attempted to read our text, Romans 13:1-7, as an instance of the kind of intersection at which the offstage and onstage transcripts meet to form a “politics of disguise and anonymity.” In this next section of the essay, we will evaluate four different readings of Romans 13:1-7 that have sought to understand Paul’s oral performance in light of the work of James C. Scott.

Labels: Pauline Theology

Apocalyptic Expectation. If some have seen an attenuation of Roman power in the identification of the God of Jesus Christ (implicit in 13:1) as the God by whom Rome rules, even more have seen 13:11-12 as an eschatological mantra which casts an apocalyptic light back over vv. 1-7, thus relativizing and temporalizing the Christian community’s subordination to Roman domination. “Do this,” Paul writes, “knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed. The night is almost gone, and the day is near. Therefore let us lay aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light.” This line can be seen to a very limited extent in Bruce (1977: 110), but is taken up more tenaciously by Elliott when he concludes, contra Dunn (1986: 60; 1988: 772), that vv. 11-14 situate vv. 1-7 within a clear eschatological framework. As such, Elliott writes, “we can hardly suppose that Paul regarded the civil authorities with a resigned sense of inevitability” (1997: 187). Rather, Elliott sees the Roman imperial order in view as an enemy of God’s people (12:14-21), and the Christians “are not to take the righting of wrongs into their own hands by opposing the present ‘disposition’ (diatagê) of earthly power, since God’s redisposition of the powers is imminent anyway (13:11-14)” (2006: 224, original emphasis). Indeed, “the clear implications suggest temporary resignation to the rule of the powers-that-be. For Paul, God’s redisposition of the powers was imminent and nothing should be done to endanger the crucial undertakings of the movement” (Horsley and Silberman 1997: 191). Similarly, Roetzel sees in vv. 11-12 an “imminent expectation of the end” and therefore asks what incentive Paul would have “to develop an anti-imperialistic program” if “the kingdom of God would soon replace the Roman hegemony.” In fact, “one might argue that such intense apocalyptic expectation is by implication anti-imperialistic for it anticipates its imminent demise. . . . One might argue that this is the nature of apocalypticism” (2000: 228).

This kind of apocalyptic critique of the Roman empire is certainly not foreign to Paul. For instance, in 1 Thessalonians 5:3 Paul writes, “While people are saying, ‘Pax et Securitas,’ destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.” Paul’s language here is an “ironic allusion to the official theology and propaganda of the Pax Romana” (Georgi 1991: 28), popularized under Augustus: Pax et Securitas, or eirênê kai asphaleia—“peace and security.” The ones proclaiming Pax et Securitas, of course, are the imperial propagandists, the rulers, and all those who have given their pistis (faith/loyalty) to the Pax Romana. They are the ones living “in darkness” (1 Thess. 5:4; cf. Wengst 1986: 77-78), upon whom the apocalyptic destruction will fall. Abraham Smith sees this as the “eschatological battle in which God will bring the imperial order under judgment” (2004: 48). By it, Ernst Bammel writes, “the pretensions of imperial propaganda are torn away” (cited in Elliott 2006: 190).[1]

Furthermore, Elliott reminds us that Paul has been utilizing inflammatory political language right throughout 1 Thessalonians, language like basileia theou (the rule of God), parousia, apantêsis (vocabulary for royal visitations) and even euangelion (good news, which was the word used to announce imperial military triumphs throughout the empire). Elliott notes that all of this language could easily be construed in a subversive political fashion, and that “rather than prudently retreating from potential ‘misunderstanding’ through some quick and circumspect qualifications, Paul seizes the opportunity to press home his frontal attack on the false peace of the empire” in 5:3 (2006: 190). With this evidence in view, a parallel reading of Romans 13:11-12 as an apocalyptic proclamation of the Roman imperial order’s impending demise is certainly a resounding possibility, especially considering the remarkable parallelism of imagery:

Romans 13:11-12

Do this, knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed. The night is almost gone, and the day is near. Therefore let us lay aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light.

1 Thessalonians 5:2-8

For you know that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, ‘Pax et Securitas,’ destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. But you, brothers, are not in darkness so that this day should surprise you like a thief. You are all sons of the light and sons of the day. We do not belong to the night or to the darkness. So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep, but let us be alert and self-controlled. For those who sleep, sleep at night. . . . But since we belong to the day, let us be self-controlled, putting on faith and love as a breastplate, and the hope of salvation as a helmet.

Echoing Elliott, Horsley and Silberman note that Paul came increasingly “to express his understanding of Christ’s power in the idiom of empire.” Here in 1 Thessalonians 5:8 (as well as in Romans 13:12), Paul invites “the members of the community to become the palace guard of this heavenly emperor,” to put on the armor of light, “the breastplate of love and faith and the helmet of love and salvation. These images, initially drawn from Jewish apocalyptic imagery, were at the same time inextricably linked with the visual symbolism of Roman rule.” Paul’s vision of the kingdom was directly “contesting the legitimacy of Rome,” and Paul knew full well that the “political stakes of such pointed apocalyptic agitation were enormous” (1997: 156).

Finally, as with some of the approaches we have already examined, this line of interpretation also has the virtue of locating Paul at least partially within the tradition of Jeremiah, who advocated subordination to Babylon (Jer. 29:7 = Rom. 13:1), called Nebuchadnezzar “YHWH’s servant” (Jer. 27:6 = Rom. 13:4), and proscribed armed resistance to Babylon (Jer. 27:8-17; 29:8-9, 15-21 = Rom. 13:2), while nevertheless promising that the time of their subservience to Babylon would be short and that they would soon be delivered from the darkness of Babylonian domination (Jer. 27:7, 22; 29:10; 56:52-58 = Rom. 13:11-12). There are striking parallels between the Jeremianic logic and the logic of Romans 13:1-14.

Yet not all have read vv. 11-12 apocalyptically. Characteristically, C. H. Dodd argues that although in 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians Paul seems to expect the parousia within his own lifetime or shortly thereafter, in Romans Paul never mentions the parousia, with the only possible exception being the (allegedly) more ambiguous language of vv. 11-14. Yet Dodd rejects that possibility. “There is no suggestion of ‘interim ethics’ in 12:1-13:10. The positive value assigned to political institutions in 13:1-6 stands in contrast to the depreciation of family life in view of the shortness of time in 1 Corinthians 7.”[2] Thus, Dodd concludes that “the urgent sense of the imminence of ‘the End’ was fading in Paul’s mind as the years passed. He dwelt more and more on the thought that Christians were already living in the New Age, and the date at which it should be consummated became a matter of indifference. Only in the present passage the old idea of nearness of the Day of the Lord survives to give point to his moral exhortations” (1932: 209).

Insofar as Dodd’s position hinges upon the contrast between political institutions and the family, it is fatally flawed. Not only is this is a classic case of comparing apples and oranges, it is quite a misstep, since Paul’s eschatologically-motivated directive for each Christian to “retain the place in life that the Lord has assigned” him or her (1 Cor. 7:17-31) is quite comparable to a non-resistant political ethic. The common denominator is subordination, whether to the powers-that-be or to one’s social or marital status. An eschatological motivation fits both of these contexts quite fluidly.

A more recent and more provocative detractor is Esler. Although Esler, following Dodd, does not see vv. 11-12 as evidence of Paul’s persisting expectation of an imminent parousia, he nevertheless surpasses Dodd by refocusing our attention on the differences between modern and ancient Mediterranean conceptions of time. In the ancient Mediterranean world, there was what Esler calls a “temporal dimension in the existence and maintenance of the identity of a group. . . . Members see the groups to which they belong as being generated over time. As social actors the members understand the groups to which they belong as historical phenomena, stretching backward in time and forward into the future.” According to Esler, “this means that groups tell themselves who they are in part by imagining where they are going. Extrapolations of their group’s future contribute to their sense of identity in the present” (2003: 336-37).

Despite this incredibly helpful alternative template, Esler is misled by his foregone conclusion as to what an eschatological import in vv. 11-12 might look like. He seems to think that if Paul’s language is apocalyptic, then the object of the coming judgment in the immediate context must be the Christian community. He rightly notes that “the picture of the future in 13:11-14 is an unreservedly positive one,” while finding it “particularly noticeable that the horrors of the judgment are not cited here as a motivation for moral behavior in the meantime, even though that message comes through loud and clear in 2:1-10” (337). This discrepancy is easily overcome if we see the Roman domination system—the immediate context—as the darkness from which God’s people are soon to be delivered, a possibility Esler never entertains. As Esler rightly notes, Paul has already used the parousia as a motivation for moral behavior in ch. 2, so there is no need for him to do it again. That would only indicate that the reference to the parousia in 13:11-12 is “an unreservedly positive one” for those who have heeded God’s call to dikaiosynê (justice/righteousness), while remaining a negative reference in respect to those who have not—namely, the powers that be.

But Esler’s account of temporality in the formation of group identity is remarkably useful and, far from undermining the apocalyptic readings of Elliott and others, actually shows how Paul’s apocalyptic logic can be extended across time. The imminent parousia is not a necessary condition for Paul’s logic to obtain, since, as Esler explains, “the (future-oriented) actions of collectivities are often directed toward a future beyond the lifetimes of existing category members” (337). Put differently, the Roman Christians in Paul’s day are empowered to subordinate themselves voluntarily to an unjust domination system, combating it from within through love (13:8-10) rather than from without through violence (12:14-21), because of their belief that they would one day share with future generations the justice and shalom of a newly created cosmos. There is therefore no inherent disconnect, as J. Christiaan Beker rightly argues, between apocalyptic expectation and political activism (1980: 178-79). “One would expect that the church as the blueprint and beachhead of the kingdom of God would strain itself in all its activities to prepare the world for its coming destiny in the kingdom of God” (326). In this light, it may be helpful to think of vv. 8-10 as the centerpiece of chapter 13, making intelligible the prima facie incongruity between vv. 1-7 and vv. 11-14.

Labels: Pauline Theology

Labels: Liberation Theology

The Identity of God. Dunn is especially acute when he reminds us that claims about YHWH’s ordering of pagan power would have been

particularly meaningful for Jews living in the diaspora, as aliens living under a foreign power, and often as slaves and dispossessed. . . . The comfort of such a belief was not that it made them any less vulnerable to the whims of such rulers. . . . The comfort was rather that such rulers were by definition responsible before [the Hebrew] God, and so were under the constraint of God’s final judgment. That particularly Jewish belief would, of course, have little impact on the rulers themselves, but at least it gave their oppressed Jewish subjects the assurance that rulers would come under the judgment of God sooner or later. (1986: 64)

The claim that God, specifically YHWH, ordered or ordained the powers, was a radical claim indeed. The central issue, as Jewett points out (2007: 789), is the precise identity of this God. According to Paul, he by whom the Roman authorities rule is not Jupiter or Mars. He is none of the gods of the Roman civic cult. He certainly is not Nero, who claimed to have been “chosen to serve on earth as vicar of the gods,” and who was worshipped as a god (Ellul 1990: 81-82). Rather, “the God of whom Paul speaks here is . . . the God embodied in the crucified.” For Jewett, the precise identification of God with the rebel Jew whom Rome crucified turns Romans 13:1 “into a massive act of political cooptation” (2007: 790).[1]

These considerations serve as a corrective to the reading of our text that has offended and mocked those who for centuries have suffered under political domination. Perhaps because of the remoteness between us and, for instance, the Isaianic community, the claim that a Cyrus was appointed by God does not strike us as particularly appalling, even if it should. Perhaps if we recontextualized the claim, its character would become plainer to us. We might say, “Adolf Hitler rules by God’s ordinance,” or “Saddam Hussein is a minister of God.” Such claims, if not blasphemous, are at the least oxymoronic, in the same way that Cyrus’s appellation of divine servant was oxymoronic. But in the prophetic tradition, these claims serve a purpose. They function as critiques of tyrannical regimes, not as legitimations of them. Rather than thumbing their nose at the oppressed, such claims are made to comfort the politically marginalized and persecuted. Though the hyperbole can be deceiving (e.g. Ezek. 28:11-14), these are not claims about how such tyrants came to power, as though God personally selected Cyrus, or Nero, because of some virtue one or the other possessed. They are not causal claims at all. They are not explanations of reality but revisions of it. They point to a future in which the powers-that-be are the powers-that-no-longer-are.

Labels: Pauline Theology

Labels: Church/World

Not Ordained, Just Ordered. John Howard Yoder attempted to resolve the disparity between the fact of tyranny and Paul’s ostensible praise of government in general by arguing that

God is not said to create or institute or ordain the powers that be, but only to order them, to put them in their place. It is not as if there was a time when there was no government and then God made government through a new creative intervention; there has been hierarchy and authority and power since human society existed. Its exercise has involved domination, disrespect for human dignity, and real or potential violence ever since sin has existed. Nor is it that in his ordering of it he specifically, morally approves of what government does. The sergeant does not produce the soldiers he drills, the librarian does not create nor approve of the book he catalogs and shelves. Likewise God does not take the responsibility for the existence of the rebellious “powers that be” or for their shape or identity; they already are. What the text says is that he orders them, brings them into line, that by his permissive government he lines them up with his purpose. (1972: 203)

Yoder points us to the discontinuity between Paul’s ethic for Christians, for whom wrath is forbidden (12:19), and his description of the work of the state, which is said to exercise wrath (13:4). Yoder explains that “God can in his own way, in his sovereign permissive providence, ‘use’ an idolatrous Assyria (Isa. 10) or Rome. This takes place, however, without his declaring that such action which he thus uses is morally good or that participation in it is incumbent upon his covenant people” (199). While Yoder’s burden is to show that Romans 13 does not constitute license for Christians to abandon an ethic of nonviolence in the name of this or that government,[1] his approach remains significant for our purposes as well.

What are we to make of Yoder’s claim that the authorities in Romans 13 are ordered rather than instituted by God. The English translations have generally taken interpretive license, obscuring the possibility of other translations such as the one Yoder has suggested. In the first two verses Paul expresses in three ways the idea that the authorities are in some way connected to God:

(1) Ou gar estin exousia ei mê hypo theou, literally, “for there is not authority except by God,” while the NIV reads, “for there is no authority except that which God has established.”

(2) Hai de ousai hypo theou tetagmenai eisin literally reads, “But the [authorities] are in the present state of having been ordered by God,” while the NIV reads, “The authorities that exist have been established by God.”

(3) Hoste ho antitassomenos tê exousia tê tou theou diatagê anthestêchen literally reads, “Thus the one opposing the authority, he has resisted the direction of God,” while the NIV reads, “Consequently, he who rebels against the authority rebels against what God has instituted.”

In the first instance, Paul merely uses the preposition upo, which in the genitive case means by— “there is no authority except by God.” The sense of “established,” as the NIV has it, is not in the text itself. In the second and third instances, the words Paul uses—tetagmenai and diatagê, respectively—both come from the same stem, tasso, which can mean, “to appoint,” “to order,” “to determine,” hence, “to arrange,” and in some cases “to set,” or “to direct” (Kittel 1972: 8/27). The word diatagê is a compound of tasso and the preposition dia (through). Two other words in these verses come from this same stem, tasso, namely hyptossesthô (subordinate, submit) and antitassomenos (oppose, resist). Thus, in the same way that God “orders” or “arranges” the powers, we are “ordered” or “arranged” beneath them, by God, and should not therefore seek to rearrange the ordering.

The text, taken by itself, is open to a range of meaning. What Yoder has attempted to do is to read Paul’s language within the matrix of the Hebrew prophetic tradition, over against the Hellenistic tradition which has dominated our Western translations. Yoder has brought texts like Isaiah 10, and Jeremiah 27, 29, and 56 to bear upon our text here in Romans 13. Yoder reads Rome within the tradition of Babylon and Assyria, rather than as some sui generis entity that has somehow come into existence for the first time with the ascension of Nero. Although the prophetic tradition was able to speak of pagan kings as somehow set up, or ordered, by God, they were also conscious of the fact that these rulers sought to establish themselves, over against God (Isa. 14:13-14). Borg agrees with Yoder that reading Romans 13 within the tradition of the Hebrew prophets “acquits Paul of the charge of being over-impressed by his favourable treatment as a Roman citizen or uncritical in his praise of Rome which, like any great power, could be brutal and insensitive. For Paul’s words do not mean that he saw Rome as positively good any more than the words of Isaiah and Jeremiah mean that they were blind to the barbarism and paganism of Assyria and Babylon” (1972: 216).[2]

Indeed, for the Jew there was implicit in any claim about God’s having set up a pagan power a corresponding expectation that God would bring that same power to ruin. Kittel calls our attention to this fact, showing the disparity between God’s desires for his own people and his plans for the agent of wrath. The agent of divine wrath is also

an object and victim of divine wrath. . . . We see here a basic principle of the divine governance. To be an instrument of God’s wrath is eo ipso to be also its victim. . . . The relation of political power to the wrath of God is to be seen in the same light. In Rom. 13:4 the exousia is called theou diakonos eis orgên ekdikos tô to kakon prassonti. The Bible regards many pagan peoples and rulers as executors of God’s wrath. They are this even when, like the devil, they consciously fight against God and his people. In so doing they unconsciously rage in truth against themselves. . . . This is the picture of political powers in Revelation, and it is here that we may see the inner unity between Rom. 13 and Rev. 13ff. (1972: 5/440-41)

Although many exegetes remain intrigued but unpersuaded by Yoder’s rendering of tetagmenai and diatagê as “ordered” and “directed” rather than “established” and “instituted,” it certainly remains an exegetical possibility, one whose likelihood is only increased after the text has been situated within Israel’s counter-imperial prophetic tradition. But even if we are to accept the conventional translation—“established” and “instituted”—Yoder’s argument remains largely unaffected, for within the prophetic tradition the affirmation of a pagan power’s divine constitution is not an affirmation of the pagan power itself. In fact, as we have seen, it is a kind of proclamation of doom against it.[3] Considering also the manner in which these “divine agents of wrath” typically ascended to power—through merciless brutality and bloodlust, as the prophets testify—an argument could quite reasonably be made that the prophetic language about their divine ordination is more a faith statement about YHWH’s sovereignty and adaptability, and faithfulness to Israel, than it is a causal claim meant to explain the ascension of pagan warlords. This point we shall explore presently.

Labels: Pauline Theology

Labels: Church/World

Social Volatility. The tax situation we have just reviewed is one of several scenarios that scholars have taken up in arguing that we should not understand Paul’s exhortation to political subservience so much in terms of what he says about the state, but more in terms of his pastoral concern for the well-being and survival of the church in Rome. This would make the argument in Romans 13 occasional and restricted, rather than theoretical and general (Reasoner 1999: 161). It should be seen as “the communication of a missionary intervening in a crisis, not that of a theologian composing a systematic doctrine” (Walters 1993: 65). Different volatile historical scenarios have been posited as the background of Paul’s pastoral motivation to prevent the Roman Christians from experiencing the “wrath” of the Roman sword, which he himself had already experienced on several occasions.

Ernst Bammel has hypothesized that Paul is warning the Christians in Rome to be especially law-abiding on account of “Jewish attempts to divert the activities of anti-Jewish officials against the Christians” (1984: 370), but, although plausible, this hypothesis has not been met with wide support, not least because of its lack of documentary evidence.

Dunn, Walters, and Wright all see the Edict of Claudius in the background of the pericope, but have different takes on the dynamics. Dunn believes 13:1-7 represents “Paul’s attempt to redraw the boundaries of the redefined people of God” into “nonethnic terms.” Dunn believes Paul is doing this in order to protect the new, predominantly Gentile, congregations from being identified with the Jews after the tumultuous episode of the Claudian expulsion, in which the Jews were expelled from Rome wholesale on account of some possible messianic uprisings (cf. Borg 1972: 209-11). But Dunn contradicts himself, because he readily admits that it was the Gentile congregations themselves that were taking the initiative in redrawing the boundaries in nonethnic terms, “breaking down or ignoring the very boundaries which had given the Jews their distinctiveness and thus their protection” (1988: 768-69). Elliott criticizes, “Apparently Dunn would have us believe this was a development Paul was concerned to accelerate, in order to protect gentile members of the ekklesia from the harassment Jews must expect to endure” (2006: 221).

Walters sees the effects of the expulsion in a slightly different light. On account of the expulsion, the congregations were ripped in two, exposing the Gentile Christians, making them suddenly vulnerable whereas prior to the expulsion they had enjoyed the protection afforded by the synagogues. “Now they must survive independently, as small house-churches, alienated from the synagogues and lacking the greater tolerance Rome afforded to ancient religions.” So for Walters, Paul’s instructions in 13:1-7 can be summed up that “the best course of action would be for Christians to keep their heads down by living ‘peaceably with all men.’ This would be facilitated by avoiding disruptive encounters of any kind” (1993: 65).

Wright’s view is similar. He argues that, although hotly debated, Romans 13:1-7 “makes a good deal of sense when read against the background of the Roman situation.” Wright sees the expulsion as prompted by riots within the Jewish community impulsore Chresto (“at the instigation of Chrestus”), which he conventionally takes to indicate riots over the identity of Jesus of Nazareth.[1] As such, “the last thing the church needed was to live up to the bad reputation thus implicitly earned. The contemptuous references in Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny[2] show only too well how Romans would naturally regard a cult like Christianity: a reputation for antisocial behavior was almost automatic, and the church should take care not to live up to it” (1995: 62).

While these approaches have the virtue of locating the text within the kind of volatile historical situation necessary for Paul to encourage political quietism, they all fail to provide an explanation for Paul’s absolute claims about the just and divine nature of the Roman order.

Borg (1972) attempts to do just that. His approach is to see the text as a caution against cooperation with Jewish zealotism. Borg brings to light a great deal of material showing that, even in Rome, Jewish nationalistic resistance movements were fertile and strong. (There is some evidence for this background in the text since tax-resistance was the zealot party line,[3] but in light of the city-wide tax protests at the time, this evidence is not determinative.) Paul’s council in Romans 13 then is directed toward those members of the Christian community who felt an obligation to aid their Jewish neighbors in their quest for justice and political independence. Paul himself certainly felt an obligation to Israel (Rom. 9:2-3), “but that obligation, though it extends so far as being willing to surrender one’s own salvation, does not entail joining in Israel’s cause against Rome” (214).[4] Borg sees Jewish nationalism as the central issue of concern for Paul. The nationalists are drawing more rigid ethnic boundaries, marking them off as a nation under YHWH, at a time when Paul believes YHWH is eradicating those boundaries. “Christ bridges the chasm—but Jewish nationalism can only widen it, first, because it perpetuates the incorrect theological notion that God’s purpose is primarily for the Jews, and second, because of the social and military hostility which it engenders between Jew and Gentile” (215).

It is in this light that Borg reads some of the more positive appraisals of Rome in the text of Romans 13:1-7. Because of what God is doing in tearing down the “dividing wall of hostility” between Jew and Gentile, it is not his purpose “at this time in history” to further the cause of Jewish nationalism (215). Thus, “anyone who rebels against this authority is resisting a divine institution, and those who resist have themselves to thank for the punishment they will receive” (13:2). Borg goes on to argue that Paul sees Rome as God’s agent for the good of the church (13:3-4) in that, currently, “Rome is God’s minister of judgment against that particularity which separates Jew from Gentile” (216). Borg sees Paul in continuity here with the prophetic tradition which views pagan regimes as divine instruments of wrath, sometimes even for the chastisement of Israel (215).[5] But Borg’s Paul takes the tradition further by claiming that when Rome suppresses nationalistic resistance with violence, it is in fact working on behalf of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The documentary evidence Borg provides on Jewish resistance efforts in Rome is fascinating, and further serves to demonstrate the volatile situation in which the early Christian communities in Rome found themselves. Moreover, Borg’s attempt to locate Paul within the Hebrew prophetic tradition helps us better to understand Paul’s ostensibly positive descriptions of the Roman order. But Borg fails to note that “the call to subordination in Judaism carried an implicit, if not always explicit, judgment of such foreign governments, even if God was somehow using their evil intentions to accomplish his ultimate goals” (Nanos 1996: 299). And although in broad strokes Borg paints a more accurate picture of the Jewish view of pagan power than the traditional reading of Romans 13 allows, when it comes to specifics his argument quickly becomes tenuous. Borg would have us believe that Paul saw Rome as an agent working for his gospel, rather than against it. “By Rome’s ‘contribution’ Borg apparently means the expulsion of thousands of Jews from their homes and the imposition of martial law in the streets; such measures, we are given to understand, are in harmony with Paul’s gospel, which sees only the benefit for the gentile-Christian majority (‘your good’). But this flies in the face of Paul’s agonized appeal in Romans 9-11” (Elliott 2006: 221).

Finally, the problem with Borg’s hypothesis is the same problem that runs right through all of these social volatility approaches. Elliott hits the nail on the head when he writes that “the very specificity of these proposals is also their weakness. If we ask more broadly about the precarious position Jewish communities usually held in the Roman diaspora, we can see just how volatile these factors could be in combination” (222).

Elliott proceeds to document a long history of systemic anti-Semitism in Rome and in the surrounding provinces. Prior to the writing of Romans, the Jewish communities had been subject to the most heinous abuses and injustices, sponsored by Roman provincial authorities. In Alexandria, for instance, during the reign of Caligula, there was an incident in which Greek resentment against Roman domination was channeled against the Jews, who were more readily at hand. The populace put pressure on Flaccus, the governor, and he bowed, sponsoring the desecration of Jewish synagogues, the deprivation of their civic rights, the theft of their homes and property, and the arrest of their religious leaders. These acts in turn had the effect of whipping the populace into a frenzy of “pillaging, destruction, beatings, torture, and murder” (222). When Claudius came to power, he imposed a truce, but blamed the Jews for the mayhem. He made it a policy to deny Jews citizenship, and forbade the Jews who had undergone the persecution from migrating to Rome, threatening that, “If they disobey, I shall proceed against them as fomenting a common plague for the whole world” (222). Elliott asks us to “see how readily even an established Jewish population could become the scapegoats of other groups resentful of Roman domination” (222-23). He then points out that the Jews in Rome were no more secure, that in fact they were even more vulnerable, as demonstrated by two wholesale expulsions, one under Tiberius in 19 C.E., the other under Claudius in 49 C.E. (223). These events contributed to the proliferation of popular and official anti-Semitism in Rome.

Elliott keenly suggests that these considerations “would have led Paul to expect that any popular outcry against exploitive taxes might be deflected onto the most vulnerable population in the city: the Jewish refugees, who come directly into view in Rom. 14:1-15:13. As such, Elliott does not read 13:1-7 as Paul’s political philosophy of the state. Rather, Paul is warning against the kind of political agitation that would jeopardize “the already vulnerable situation of the beleaguered Jewish population in Rome” (1997: 196).[6] “Paul means simply to keep members of the ekklesia from making trouble in the streets. He wants to deflect his audience from private resentments and from the calculation of one’s just deserts, for these are the spiritual roots of scapegoating violence against the poor; and to impel them rather toward mutual compassion and striving for the common good” (2006: 223). Thus, “if Paul’s remarks in 13:1-7 address specific historical circumstances in Rome, they do so in such a way as to extend to those circumstances the more general ethos Paul has encouraged in the preceding verses: an ethos of mutual accommodation and harmony within the ekklesia (12:3-13) and an ethic of nonretaliation toward enemies without (12:14-21). . . . Within this context, Paul’s exhortation to be subordinate to the authorities (13:1-7) focuses the ethic of nonretaliation on a potentially volatile situation” (224).

Labels: Pauline Theology

Taxing Questions. Victor Paul Furnish (1979: 115-41) locates our pericope principally within the context of the Roman tax system, and argues that Paul is attempting to dissuade the Roman Christians from participation in tax protest, or tax evasion, which was of course a practice of the Jewish Zealots. Furnish argues that the sword of 13:4 is a reference neither to the war-making power of the state, nor to the right of capital punishment, but simply to the tax collector’s sword, used principally for the threat of force in collecting taxes. Recent scholarship has shown that Furnish’s thesis fits the historical situation around the time of Romans almost seamlessly.

In the early Neronian period, there were in fact widespread tax protests over the indirect taxes, as well as considerable unrest among immigrants living in Rome over the direct taxes. First, the city-wide tax revolt was precipitated by widespread abuse of the indirect taxes. While the direct taxes were collected by actual government collectors, the indirect taxes were collected by armed mercenaries hired by corrupt entrepreneurial agencies, what are called “revenue-farmers,” or publicanorum in the Latin. Tacitus informs us that the popular antipathy toward the indirect tax agencies, on account of their excessive greed, was so intensely felt that Nero promised to abolish the indirect taxes altogether. Of course, his senators prevented him from abolishing them by persuading him that if he did so the public would demand the abolition of the direct taxes also (cf. Tacitus, Annals 13.50-51; Walters 1993: 132 n.50; Jewett 2007: 798; Dunn 1986: 60).

From the Roman perspective, this was actually sound advice, because there was also a great deal of unrest at that time over the direct taxes (tributes). The direct tax was levied on residents of the provinces, but normally did not apply to inhabitants of Rome proper. But Coleman has recently provided evidence that the Neronian administration ratified a policy requiring immigrants in Rome to pay the tribute levied by the province in which they had resided at the time of the previous census, around 54/53 C.E. This indicates that the Jews who had been expelled from Rome in 49 C.E. by the Edict of Claudius would have returned to Rome only to find themselves subject to the provincial tribute, since they were not in Rome at the time of the last census (1997: 312-13). Jewett describes the administration’s policy as a “crackdown” on immigrants, one that went to great and novel lengths to squeeze out as much tribute as they could (2007: 799, esp. n.170). There is even evidence that the administration took measures (measures involving “the sword”?) to prevent immigrants from escaping their districts in an attempt to evade the heavy taxes that had recently been thrust upon them (Llewelyn 1998: 97-105).

While the indirect tax revolt was somewhat successful (the indirect taxation system was never abolished but was partially reformed), the direct tax system was concurrently intensified. Roman citizens would not have been affected by this, but a good portion of the Christians in Rome, especially the Jewish Christians, would have been adversely affected by the new direct tax policy. Paul’s letter to the Romans was penned in precisely this period, and so Furnish’s thesis fits the historical context quite neatly. The language Paul uses in 13:7 corresponds exactly to the situation: direct taxes (phoron) and indirect taxes (telos).

There are a few problems with Furnish’s thesis, however. Furnish attempts to limit the scope of the entire pericope to just the tax question, but as Witherington points out, the immediate context in vv. 1-5 indicate government officials in general, not specifically tax officials, “though tax officials seem to be the illustration of the general principle Paul chooses to focus on” (2004: 311). Additionally, several scholars have pointed out that the phrase dia touto gar kai phorous teleite (13:6) can reasonably be translated as an indicative rather than as an imperative, i.e., “this is also the reason you pay taxes,” rather than “for this reason, you must pay taxes” (so Elliott 2006: 219; Dunn 1988: 766; Wengst 1986: 82, and others). But this objection is extraneous, considering that indicatives quite frequently serve the rhetorical function of imperatives. (“That’s why we don’t run with scissors!”) Indeed, it is becoming increasingly clear that the historical situation matches the content of our pericope quite well. While we may not want to limit the identification of the governing authorities to tax officers only, further investigation along this line looks promising.

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Labels: Pauline Theology

The Benefaction Convention. Bruce Winter created something of a stir with the publication of his book, Seek the Welfare of the City (1994),[1] named for the Jeremianic exhortation to an exiled Israel: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf; for in its welfare you will have welfare” (Jer. 29:7 NASB). Winter mines literary and epigraphic evidence from as early as the third century B.C.E. and into the latter part of the first century C.E. documenting the custom of the public honoring of benefactors. Winter shows that in the Greco-Roman world, it was considered one of the responsibilities of local rulers to reward well-to-do benefactors—whose benefactions contributed to the general welfare of the city—with public recognition. Typically, a council would convene and a benefactor would be named for possible recognition. The kinds of benefactions the public recognized included “supplying grain in times of necessity by diverting the grain-carrying ships to the city, forcing down the price by selling it in the market below the asking rate, erecting public buildings or adorning old buildings with marble revetments such as in Corinth, refurbishing the theatre, widening roads, helping in the construction of public utilities, going on embassies to gain privileges for the city, and helping the city in times of civil upheaval” (37). Such benefactors would be recognized publicly in a pompous ceremony, in which the benefactor is crowned, named honorable and noble, and in which an inscription would be erected for public viewing, which would name the benefactor and detail “the benefaction” (ton agathon) in his honor. In Athenian society, there were even laws about where and how the ceremony must take place—specifically, it was required to take place at the theater, and only at a noteworthy, populated event. Winter argues that the kind of good work that was conventionally rewarded thus is precisely the kind of good work (ton agathon) Paul is encouraging in 13:3-4.

His thesis certainly has some explanatory power. Cranfield marveled how Paul could with such “absolute assurance” promise the good doer the praise of the civil authority (1979: 655, n.1). The only way Cranfield was able to explain Paul’s “absolute assurance” we have already noted in our section on the Stoic Interpretation: by allowing the “for your good” of verse 4 to include the most heinous injustices. Winter’s explanation, conversely, has some sense about it. Winter provides primary literary evidence which indicates how firmly established this custom of the public honoring of benefactors was in Greco-Roman society. The sources show that

great importance was attached to meeting the obligation with gratitude. Some saw this obligation not simply as a cultural convention but as ‘a law.’ Benefactions could be called ‘loans’ which were to be repaid with gratitude or, if not properly acknowledged, reclaimed with monetary compensation. Such was the expectation of the benefactor that due recognition would be given in the appropriate way. Others saw failure to acknowledge public works adequately as a sin. (29-30)

In one instance, the famous benefactor Demosthenes had to wait six years to receive a public ceremony on account of an opposition group that raised legal objections to his being recognized after he was recommended for recognition by the “Council of the People.” Demosthenes submitted a complaint of personal injury contingent upon the possibility of his never being recognized, despite the fact that this would not be the first time he had undergone the ceremony (32-33).

For Winter, the rigid legalism in which this custom was fixed is the only possible explanation for what Cranfield called Paul’s “absolute assurance” that the doer of the agathon would be praised by the civil authorities. “It demonstrates that the semantic field from which these words come was that of public benefactions,” and further proves that Paul was “on very secure ground promising Christian benefactors public recognition” (36). Moreover, Winter argues that the agathon of 13:3 could not be merely a general upstanding morality. “In writing to the Christians in the vast city of Rome, how could Paul expect the emperor or those in authority to observe their good works, if the reference is simply to unspecified good moral conduct” (36-37)?

Finally, Winter sees the shift from the plural “you” in v. 3 to the singular “you” in v. 4 as an indication that Paul has gone from addressing the Christian community as a whole, to the individual Christian. This switch is vital for Winter’s argument, in fact, because one of the chief objections many of his critics have raised has to do with the economic capacity of the early Christian communities even to be able to contemplate engaging in the kind of benefaction that merited the attention of the civil authorities and the recognition of the city (e.g. Walters 1996: 537). Winter anticipates this problem when he writes that “the cost of a benefaction was very considerable and beyond the ability of some, if not most, members of the church” (37). Unfortunately, the acumen evident in his anticipation of the problem does not recur in his solution to it: “There must have been Christians of very considerable means to warrant Paul’s injunction in verse 3” (37). The reasoning is circular. Winter recognizes a challenge to his thesis and dismisses it simply by reasserting the thesis.

In actuality, however, the transition from the plural in v. 3 to the singular in v. 4 is much better explained with reference to a rhetorical transition to the diatribe style, as Paul does elsewhere, such as in 1 Corinthians 7:21, 27-28 (Towner 1999: 166). But there are additional problems with Winter’s thesis.

Winter believes that Romans 13:3-4 is so similar linguistically to inscriptions honoring benefactors that the particular agathon in 13:3 must be a reference to public benefaction, but, as Walters points out, the vernacular (agathon, epainos) “is also typical of Greco-Roman moral exhortation. Therefore, limiting the usage to inscriptions honoring benefactors requires compelling reasons” (1996: 537). Walters concedes that if Paul had made specific reference to the kinds of good deeds Winter has in mind, or if Paul had referred to the “council and the people” as those who bestow honor on the benefactor, the referent of agathon would be unmistakable. However, 13:3-4 is situated in a parenetic context (12:1-13:14), and because 13:3a clearly refers to good and bad conduct in general, a more general, moral sense of agathon in 13:3b is more likely (537-38).

Another problem for Winter is his assumption, embedded in the title of his book, that “the good work” of 13:3 is to be performed for the welfare of the politeia. What Winter does not address is the fact that Paul clearly saw the ekklesia as an alternative politeia. Paul speaks elsewhere of doing “the good,” but specifically locates those good works within the reciprocity of the Christian polity. Although outsiders are not excluded, it is the “household of faith” that is specifically targeted (Gal. 6:10). And although Paul is often about the business of fundraising for economic relief, there is not one instance in any of his letters or in Acts in which Paul is raising money for the city. In every case, the object of the benefaction Paul is advocating is some local body of believers (e.g. 2 Cor. 8). Paul indeed advocates benefaction, but in specifics, he only ever does so within the politeia of believers. Although I am sure Paul would not discourage a benefactor from seeking the welfare of the city, we do not have extant a specific example of Paul’s having encouraged it.

In fact—and perhaps this is an unfortunate fact—the evidence for early Christian social work, outside of Christian circles, is scant indeed. It is evident from both pagan and Christian accounts that the peculiar attraction of Christianity in the first few Christian centuries had nothing at all to do with public benefactions, and everything to do with the welfare provided within the Christian community (cf. Kreider 1999: 10-20). Winter reads into texts like Romans 13:3-4 and 1 Peter 2:14-16 a sort of apologetic strategy.[2] He argues that the “public acknowledgement of a generous Christian benefactor by crowning him as a noble person and the permanent reminder of the benefaction on an inscription would be the means of refuting unfounded rumours against a Christian as being a man of ill-will or a threat to the peace and welfare of a city” (39). Yet when the first Christian apologists appealed to the good works of Christians against charges of sedition, the “benefactions” Winter envisions are conspicuously absent from their apologies:

For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all. They are unknown and condemned; they are put to death, and restored to life. They are poor, yet make many rich; they are in lack of all things, and yet abound in all; they are dishonored, and yet in their very dishonor are glorified. They are evil spoken of, and yet are justified; they are reviled, and bless; they are insulted, and repay the insult with honor; they do good, yet are punished as evil-doers. When punished, they rejoice as if quickened into life; they are assailed by the Jews as foreigners, and are persecuted by the Greeks; yet those who hate them are unable to assign any reason for their hatred. (Epistle to Diognetus 7:3-9)

It is noteworthy here that the writer of the epistle blatantly contradicts Romans 13:3 when he writes that “they do good, yet are punished as evil-doers.” What is noteworthy about it is that the good conduct described here is the very same kind that marked Paul’s life (not public benefactions in the conventional sense), as is the punishment for it, even prior to the writing of Romans.

Yet perhaps the most devastating critique of Winter’s thesis has been leveled by Jewett. After noting that Paul had already made clear elsewhere his acute awareness of the disparity between Roman ideology and Roman reality (1 Cor. 2:6-8), what Jewett finds more problematic with Winter’s thesis is that it asks Paul to conform “to the tradition of desiring epainoV (‘praise, commendation’) from human officials.” Jewett points out that in Paul’s “earlier letters, such praise is considered legitimate only if it comes from God, and emphatically not from foreign governmental authorities” (793). Winter’s reading of 13:3-4 fits Paul squarely within the timocratic tradition. It is an appeal to “those who are ambitious for honour” (Winter 1994: 38). Winter even goes so far as to suggest that Paul sees this timocratic arrangement as the fulfillment of Romans 2:10: the ruler becomes the “vicegerent” through whom God lavishes glory, honor and peace upon everyone who does the benefaction (38). It is difficult to see how such a reading does not immediately pit Paul against the Jesus tradition (e.g. Matt. 6, esp. vv. 1-4). Surely, if a reading that places Paul in continuity with the Jesus tradition is exegetically feasible, such a reading ought to be considered superior to any reading that pits Jesus and Paul against one another.

Towner, in dialogue with Winter, suggests just such a reading. While Towner finds Winter’s thesis generally persuasive (1999: 165), he rejects Winter’s claim that Paul is primarily addressing wealthy Christians in 13:3-4 (166). Towner notes that the movement into the first person singular in 3:4 is a movement into the diatribe style, which still addresses all believers; Paul is not singling anyone out. Towner accepts Winter’s locating of Paul’s language within the semantic range of the benefaction convention, but argues that Paul reshapes the convention “in order to apply it to the entire Christian community.” By thus targeting the entire community—rich and poor alike—with the exhortation to seek the welfare of the city, Paul is encouraging a “surprising reversal of values.”

By applying the benefaction matrix to another text in the Pauline tradition, 1 Timothy 6:2, Towner argues that “Christian slaves are called on to serve their believing masters in a way that reverses the benefaction convention and redefines it” (166).[3] Specifically, benefaction is “redefined in resonance with the Jesus tradition” (Luke 22:25-27) which “places a subversive question mark over the social reality of slavery” (167). Significantly, Towner’s position transcends the critique of Jewett, who rightly pointed out that Winter’s reading put Paul at odds with the Jesus tradition which turned the timocratic system on its head. But Towner writes that in “God’s surprising oikonomia slaves serve humbly from the position of power; in fact, nobility and honor, the rewards of benefaction, are accorded here to the slaves” (167).

Towner then proceeds to argue that Romans 13:3-4 represents a similar “co-opting of benefaction.” Here it is not the slave, but the entire Christian community in Rome, that exists in a “(presumed) position of weakness.” According to Towner, “a convention normally associated with the powerful ‘haves’ is co-opted for the ‘have-nots.’” Thus, the concept of benefaction itself, specifically what constitutes benefaction, is radicalized:

The church—powerless, poor, marginalized, and without any official political status in the empire—is directed to participate in the public life of society through humble service, taking the role, again spiritually and in defiance of appearances, of the honorable benefactor. The good it dispenses will be ‘for the welfare of the city,’ but on God’s terms the good goes beyond maintaining the city to transforming it. . . . The call of God directs the church to engage fully in the world in order to bring about transformation of its ways and values. Within that grander missiological and eschatological reality (e.g., chs. 9-11; 15:7-13), benefaction expands to become a responsibility of the church as a whole. . . . Thus Paul’s co-opting of the cultural convention serves to orientate the church in its transforming engagement in the world. (168)

This reading helps to reconcile Paul’s missiology with the fact, noted earlier, of the early church’s relatively isolationist social welfare program. Towner sees Paul as the architect of a sub-politeia that resides within the larger politeia, permeating it, ultimately transforming it as it challenges and subverts unjust structures through counter-formations that put the marginalized at the center. Thus Towner, so influenced by Winter, is nevertheless able to overcome most of the critiques that have, in my opinion, devastated Winter’s otherwise interesting thesis.

Labels: Pauline Theology

Jewish Synagogue Rulers. Nanos has forged a fascinating if fragile thesis about the identity of the ruling authorities in Romans 13:1-7. In The Mystery of Romans (1996), Nanos argues that at the time of the writing of Paul’s letter, the Christ-movement (Jew and Gentile) in Rome was still intimately related to the Judean synagogues in that city. Nanos’s thesis that the “weaker brother” of Romans 14 was the non-Christian Jew has provided much fodder for discussion among Pauline scholars. Less influential has been his reading of Romans 13:1-7 in light of his overarching thesis. Nanos argues (289-336) that the “governing authorities” of Romans 13 are the Jewish synagogue rulers. He contends that Paul was “not concerned with the state, empire, or any other such organization of secular government. His concern was rather to address the obligation of Christians, particularly Christian gentiles associating with the synagogues of Rome for the practice of their new ‘faith,’ to subordinate themselves to the leaders of the synagogues and to the customary ‘rules of behavior’ that had been developed in Diaspora synagogues for defining the appropriate behavior of ‘righteous gentiles’ seeking association with Jews and their God” (291).

Nanos finds a correspondence between the four terms Paul uses for those with authority and four tiers or functions of authority within the Jewish synagogue. The four terms are: (1) exousiais hyperechousais, governing authorities, (2) archontes, rulers, (3) theou diakonos, minister of God, and (4) leitourgoi theou, servants of God. Nanos argues that all of these terms make sense when applied to the context of the Jewish synagogue. He is able to provide some textual support for this application of the terms, mostly from Luke (301-05). Nanos argues that the latter two terms (ministers of God and servants of God) have very specific referents within the synagogue. According to Nanos, “ministers of God” is a reference to those who have been commissioned by the synagogue to discipline or punish morally deviant members of the Jewish community (306), while “servants of God” refers to those charged with collecting the annual Temple Tax. Nanos adds some credibility to this thesis with this chiastic inversion (320):

[A] Authority #1: exousiais hyperechousais (higher authorities)
[B] Authority #2: archontes (rulers)
[C] Authority #3: diakonos (ministers)
[D] Authority #4: leitourgoi (servants)
[D’] Payment due to authority #4 (leitourgoi): phoron (tax)
[C’] Payment due to authority #3 (diakonos): telos (custom)
[B’] Payment due to authority #2 (archontes): phobon (fear)
[A’] Payment due to authority #1 (exousiais hyperechousais): timen (honor)[1]

Although telos (custom) is taken by most scholars to refer to a custom tax, Nanos argues that here it refers to social “obligations” or the “fulfillment” of responsibilities. Thus Paul’s mandate to give telos to whom telos is due would refer to “‘the fulfilling of good results to those concerned with the results of your righteous behavior,’ in the context of fulfilling the halakhot applicable to the ‘righteous gentile’ associating with the synagogue.” Whereas in the traditional reading, Nanos argues, telos (custom tax) and phoron (tax) are redundant, on his reading the reference is to “taxes as well as ethical behavior” (317).

For Nanos, this reading of 13:1-7 is a kind of double-edged sword. First, it resolves the problem many scholars (e.g. Käsemann 1980: 352; Kallas 1964; Munro 1983: 16-19; O’Neill 1975: 207-9; Minear 1971: 88) have characterized as an abrupt transition (or lack thereof) to church-state relations in 13:1-7 from Jewish-Gentile relations in chs. 9-11, local community relations in ch. 12, and back again in ch. 14ff, by bringing “the smaller paraenesis of 13:1-7 into harmony with the several parallel tensions that exist between: Christian gentiles and non-Christian Jews” in chs. 9-11, “Christians and their ‘brethren’” (Jews), in chs. 12 and 14, “Christians and their ‘neighbors’” (Jews), in chs. 12-15, “Christians and their ‘enemies,’” (Jews), in the latter part of ch. 12, and the “strong” (Christians) and the “weak” (non-Christian Jews) of ch. 14 (1996: 322).

Second, Nanos’s reading solves the problem of having to reconcile such a glowing appraisal of the Roman empire with Paul’s other very critical comments about the empire (e.g. 1 Thess. 5:2-8; 1 Cor. 2:6-8; 6:1) and with the broad antagonism that existed toward Rome, even in Rome, within Second Temple Judaism (cf. Borg 1972: 208-11). Nanos reminds us that

the traditional interpretations have not successfully accounted for the fact that this letter was addressed to Rome during the reign of Nero by a Jewish man whose worldview was thoroughly informed by the prophetic writings[2] and who had, along with his whole generation, seen the continual destruction of their people and interests under the tyrannical reigns of Herod and the Roman rulers. . . . It is in this context that the wealth of apocalyptic literature of this period was born with many veiled references to Rome as “Babylon.” These are simply not times in which the posture toward Roman authority was unequivocally positive, to say the least. (290 n.3)

If Nanos’s reading of Romans 13 is correct, this universally acknowledged conundrum simply disappears. In light of such a miracle, the fact that Nanos’s reading of Romans 13 has received little serious attention is somewhat surprising, yet rather revealing, because while Nanos’s account provides some compelling exegesis for his thesis, it also suffers from some insoluble problems.

While Nanos is able to find some uses of exousiai and of archontes in reference to synagogue authorities, he is not able to produce such a reference for the complete term Paul uses, exousiais hyperechousais. Moreover, he is forced to argue that the terms diakonos and leitourgoi could apply to agents of the synagogue, because he is not able to produce textual evidence for such a use. This reading is further vitiated by the fact, as Strobel (1956) has shown, that these terms both had normal referents in the secular vernacular; specifically, they referred to junior authorized officials in the government service. While Nanos acknowledges this, he does not think Paul would have called Roman officials servants or ministers of God (306).[3] And of course, his argument that telos in 13:7 refers to ethical conduct is tenuous at best, especially since phoron and telos were the normal terms for the direct and indirect taxes. Their coupling here is hardly redundant, as Nanos claims it is, in light of the widespread protests against the indirect taxes that were taking place around the time of the writing of the letter (see below).

A more significant problem for Nanos is what to do with the “sword” (machaira) in 13:4. Synagogue authorities did not routinely use the sword in disciplinary matters. Nanos is thus forced to argue that the reference to the sword in 13:4 is a metaphor for the Torah, the Word of God, as mediated by the synagogue authorities who were its proper interpreters. The “sword” then represents the synagogue authorities’ power to “judge behavior (and faith claims) based on their interpretation of Torah” (312). In fact, Nanos points out, Paul himself had been “engaged in such disciplinary functions under the ‘authority’ of the synagogue in his former manner of life against ‘the Way’” (311).[4] Nanos anticipates his critics when he acknowledges that, on the surface at least, a metaphorical/figurative reading of the “sword” might appear strained. In response, Nanos points our attention to 13:12, only eight verses later, where Paul uses the image of the “armor of light.” “Certainly,” Nanos protests, “no one would argue that Paul intended for his audience literally to ‘put on armor,’ or even metaphorically in that they should adopt the moral behavior of a soldier. That would defy the plain sense of the text” (312-13).[5] Despite this attempt at a defense, defying the plain sense of the text is just what Nanos has done in his treatment of the sword in 13:4.

Thus, Esler counters, Paul’s audience “would more naturally have understood it as a reference to Roman power. The ‘sword’ had a literal significance, referring to the power vested in Roman provincial governors to execute Roman citizens by the sword (the ius gladii), but it could also thus have a figurative reference to the power of Roman officials vested with imperium to execute those who fell foul of them, whatever the means of death chosen” (2003: 332). Indeed, Nanos himself acknowledges that the sword was a figurative symbol of Roman power (1996: 310, 313-14), but he does not acknowledge that this poses a problem for his thesis. Esler sums it up well when he writes that the image of the sword seems “too draconian an image for the much lower levels of discipline allowed to synagogue authorities” (2003: 332).

Labels: Pauline Theology

Labels: Church/World

While Jewett’s thesis is relatively fresh, and therefore interesting, it is far less persuasive. According to Jewett, when Paul asks, “Do you want to be free from fear of the authority?” he is speaking directly to those who had recently experienced or witnessed the full weight of Roman oppression (793). Thus, Paul’s answer represents a way to avoid the constant anxiety with which Jews and slaves typically were forced to live: “Then do good deeds and he will commend you; he is a minister of God for your benefit.” But it is difficult to believe that this could have been taken seriously on a superficial level. “We have to wonder, in the first place, whether restive members of the ekklesia . . . really would have had their minds changed by platitudes about magistrates serving the good and punishing only the bad” (Elliott 2006: 219-20). Indeed, Paul and his audience both knew all too well that even Paul’s own good deeds had been met consistently with persecution by the Roman authorities.

Concomitantly, it is difficult to believe that Paul would have risked alienating the vast majority of poor and slave class Christians in Rome in order to win over the minority of well-to-do bureaucrats, especially considering Paul’s antipathetic attitude to conventional power-structures in Roman society (e.g. 1 Cor. 1:26-29). While Paul may indeed have desired the cooperation of the bureaucrats in his Spanish mission, I do not think it characteristic of him to allow such considerations to determine the shape of his theology and ethics. By implication, Jewett here paints Paul as something of an opportunist, and even goes on to claim explicitly that Paul’s opportunism causes him to renege on his own deeply embedded anti-timocratic principles in 13:7 (2007: 803). In my estimation, any reading of 13:1-7 that does not force Paul to contradict himself ought to be preferred to one that does. Moreover, Jewett’s entire thesis hinges upon the assumption that there were in fact Roman bureaucrats in the Christian community. This is of course possible, perhaps even likely, but it is by no means certain.

Labels: Pauline Theology

Stoic Interpretation. As a way of reconciling Paul’s claim in verse 4 that the Roman ruler is a “servant of God to do you good,” with the harsh realities of the Roman ruling class’s treatment of Jews, slaves, peasants, and noncitizens in general, Cranfield argues for a rather idiosyncratic definition of “good.” In Cranfield’s assessment, Paul believes that no matter what the government does to the believer, it will be “good.” If the government rewards good citizens, that is “good.” If the government persecutes good citizens, God is glorified in that too. Witherington, also, follows Cranfield on this point (2004: 314).

A cursory reading of the text makes it clear that this is not at all what Paul is saying. In no uncertain terms, Paul says that the ruler gives rewards to good citizens, and serves up punishment to criminals. To be sure, Paul knew as well as anybody that this was not an historically accurate assessment of Rome’s power relations; nevertheless, that fact is not license to put words into Paul’s mouth that contradict the logic of his argument. I would hardly see fit even to mention this kind of Stoic line of Cranfield’s, were it not for the fact that it is so widely held on a popular level by apolitical Christians. In contemporary culture, the recent upsurge of pacifism in younger Christians has in many respects begun to fall in line with Cranfield’s stoicism on this point. Many Christian pacifists assume that a commitment to nonviolence somehow is the equivalent of a commitment to apoliticism. The idea is that if the government persecutes Christians, God will be glorified in their suffering. It is a “come-what-may” sort of attitude. The problem of course is the failure to recognize that the persecutions of Jesus, Paul, and the early church, by the Roman authorities, were political persecutions. They were persecuted because they represented a threat to what Rome called stability. They were political actors who were forging alternative polities to the power-polities of their day. Early Christian nonviolence was not a “come-what-may” stoicism, but an active, dialectical, and critical engagement with political edifices (cf. Wink 1992b; Stassen 2003; Elliott 2004b; Horsley 1997). That Witherington already recognizes much of this makes his agreement with Cranfield on this point all the more perplexing.

Click Here To View The Bibliography.

Labels: Pauline Theology

Angelic Authorities. Oscar Cullmann (1957: 97ff) famously argued that exousiai (authorities) in Romans 13:1 refers at once to human governmental agents as well as to the angelic/demonic principalities and powers that stand behind them. His argument is fourfold: (1) Primitive Christianity inherited from late Judaism the belief that invisible powers are at work behind earthly institutions. (2) All the other Pauline references to the exousiai are spiritual. (3) The theme of the subjection of the angelic powers to Christ’s lordship is an important one in the Pauline corpus (Col. 2:15). (4) There is a similar double-referent in 1 Corinthians 2:8.

While each of Cullmann’s four points is virtually incontrovertible, the conclusion Cullmann proceeds to derive from them is not. Reading these angelic powers into the exousiai of 13:1, the pericope comes to Cullmann to mean that after the triumph of Christ over the powers (Col. 2:15), these powers have now been “harnessed” and are finally about the business of doing God’s will. In other words, the picture of government Paul is painting in Romans 13:1-7 is an eschatological picture in which the powers that be have been reigned in by the work of Christ.

Problems with this reading are manifold. The first is simply that if this is what Paul is saying, he is wrong. This would make Revelation 13 the corrective to Romans 13.[1] Moreover, it would become clear to Paul in less than a decade that “reigned in” is precisely what these powers are not, as he and thousands of other Christians would fall victim to the sadistic whim of the very emperor that lurks in the background of this passage.

Strobel (1956: 79ff) had already countered Cullmann a year prior. Strobel shows that each of the terms Paul uses to describe government (e.g. authorities, servants, ministers) had a normal referent in secular use. Though that alone does not prove definitively that Paul did not intend a double-entendre, it does suggest that Paul was not sacralizing government, as some have contended (e.g. Dunn 1986: 67). Paul may not have been ascribing religious/cultic terminology to secular rulers so much as reminding his hearers that these secular rulers still fall under the sovereignty of God.

Wink entertains the possibility that Paul could have been referring to spiritual powers “behind the throne,” but nevertheless argues convincingly that while Paul “certainly affirmed the existence of higher spiritual powers behind all the physical expressions of government, he is simply not concerned with that dimension of power here. He is preoccupied instead with the very mundane and practical issue of the church’s behavior toward bureaucratic officials (exousiai).” He argues that context is determinative for the identity of the powers. While in other contexts, Paul’s use of exousiai indicates primarily spiritual forces (Rom. 8:38-39), or both spiritual forces and human agents (1 Cor. 2:6-8), in Romans 13 Paul’s use seems to indicate primarily human agents (1984: 47).

What is clear is that there is not in Romans 13 any kind of convoluted claim about the spiritual powers having been reigned in and put to work for God’s purposes. This interpretation is a non sequitur on the heels of Cullmann’s fourfold argument. Moreover, it ignores the fact that much of what Paul seems to be saying in Romans 13:1-7 is not very different (superficially at least) from the Jewish establishment’s view (superficial at least) of pagan power in the Second Temple period (Dunn 1986: 64). One does not have to accept the notion of Christ’s triumph over the principalities and powers in order to believe that the powers that be are working for God. In fact, the basic lines of Paul’s argument would have been acceptable to most people in the Hellenistic world of Paul’s day, regardless of religion (Malina and Pilch 2006: 280). It did not become the state’s job to reward good and punish evil only after the death and resurrection of Christ. That has always been the function of the state. Therefore, we must conclude, notwithstanding the basic correctness of Cullmann’s observation that Paul saw more than mere human agency in the exousiai, the angelic interpretation has failed to resolve the disparity between the ideal Rome of Paul’s imagination, and the real Rome of Paul’s experience.

Labels: Pauline Theology

Against Anarchy. Käsemann, critiquing idealist interpretations, rightly asks how Paul could have forgotten that Rome crucified his Kyrios, and that he himself had been arrested and flogged by government officials on multiple occasions. Rather than legitimizing the government in a general way, Käsemann sees Paul as merely warding off the dangers of anarchy (1980: 356) in response to what Käsemann argued was a burgeoning form of Christian “enthusiasm” that “in virtue of heavenly citizenship views authorities with indifference or contempt” (351). But there is no textual evidence for the existence of a group of eschatological “enthusiasts,” and Käsemann’s hypothesis has suffered from relentless criticism (e.g. McDonald 1989: 544-45).

Wink suggests that perhaps the only point of Romans 13:1-7 is that “governments are indispensable for the preservation of social order and protection against criminals and invaders.” Paul is not here encouraging “blind obedience to an oppressive system. . . . To assert that God created the Powers does not imply that God endorses any particular Power at any given time” (1992a: 67).[1] Wright agrees. “However much the emperor may proclaim himself to be sovereign, without rival in the divine as well as the human sphere, he remains answerable to the true God.” Nevertheless, “Paul’s main aim, within the broad-brush ethical exhortations of chapters 12-13, is to point out that loyalty to Jesus does not mean anarchy in the state” (2000: 172). Wink and Wright, then, would put severe limitations on Paul’s endorsement of government. He is not endorsing Rome itself, but the basic, general task of all governments to protect the innocent by suppressing the violent—to ward off anarchy, as it were.

The only difficulty facing this line of interpretation is that of demonstrating textually that Paul’s audience was in fact entertaining notions of anarchy at all. This is highly unlikely. Perhaps a group of Christians in Rome was participating in the tax revolt which escalated after Nero reneged on his promise of tax reform (cf. Jewett 2007: 798-800; and Dunn 1986: 60). Perhaps some of them were falling increasingly in line with the program of the Jewish Zealots (so Borg 1972). Neither of these possibilities amounts to anarchism. The former pursues reform, the latter revolution. In both cases a more just government is the envisioned terminus.

Thus, those who read this text as a charter against anarchism have oversimplified the scenario. It may remain that Paul is discouraging the church in Rome from public protest, or acts of “civil disobedience,” but that is not anarchy. Neither, for that matter, is inciting riots necessarily an anarchist act, or so Paul would be obliged to argue.[2] The point here is that “anarchy” is what governments typically label dissent, and so we must be cautious not to privilege unconsciously the imperial perspective in our attempts to identify Paul’s.

Labels: Pauline Theology

Divine Command Clause. What I am calling the “Divine Command Clause” is very close to the ideal government approach. It was classically formulated by Basil: “It is right to submit to higher authority whenever a command of God is not violated thereby” (The Morals 79.1). Similarly, Augustine warned that “if anyone thinks he ought to submit to the point where he accepts that someone who is his superior in temporal affairs should have authority even over his faith, he falls into an even greater error” (Commentary on Romans 72). This is perhaps the most pervasive view. It is basically a conservative view which entails the attitude that the government’s business is the government’s business unless the government attempts to force me to (a) do something that violates a direct command of God or (b) profess belief in a doctrine which violates the integrity of the faith. Sometimes these can be combined into one, as in the case of Daniel in Babylonian exile. When the believer is finally forced to that crossroads, the stock response is summed up in Peter’s words to the Sanhedrin: “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29)! Subordination to the governing authorities is the norm, but there is a clause, a single clause, which forbids the Christian from subordinating him or herself any further.

The problem with this view is that the criteria for determining the Christians’ point of departure from the will of the powers remain perniciously unclear. What constitutes a violation of a divine command? At what point is the authority of a government or of a particular agent of a government determined to be illegitimate? We can quite easily hold up genocidal regimes as clear examples of illegitimate authority, but on the other hand the Hebrew Scriptures sustain accounts that justify the genocidal slaughter of the Canaanites precisely in terms of divine command. Many evangelical Christians have claimed that the widespread practice of abortion in the United States constitutes a genocide, but relatively few of them have seen that as reason enough to engage in revolutionary resistance. And what about a government that has renounced the practice of debt forgiveness? If we support such a government, are we in violation of the divine principle of jubilee? What if a person is a dual citizen of two nations at war with each other? To which does she owe her subordination? Which is her legitimate authority? What does a Christian do when a fellow believer who is an illegal alien (according to one state) seeks safe harbor in his home? What if harboring illegal aliens is an offense punishable by law? Would such a situation constitute for the Christian a legitimate point of departure from an otherwise legitimate authority?

Moreover, who gets to determine which divine commands count—the individual Christian, the household, the local body of believers, the bishop, the scholarly consensus, or some other entity? What constitutes a divine command in the first place? Must it be explicitly stated in Scripture, or can it be derivative of narrative logic and theological and ethical trajectories that are discerned in Scripture? Who determines which trajectories are the right ones from which to derive a “divine command”? Should a Christian consider authority illegitimate only when it is forcing itself upon him or herself, or upon his or her local Christian community, or rather is it legitimate for a Christian to resist an authority on behalf of a remote, otherwise unconnected victim of governmental imposition? Put differently, is the Divine Command Clause self-oriented only, or does it look beyond the self to the needs of the wholly other? If a Christian can resist on behalf of another Christian, can a Christian resist on behalf of a non-Christian? If some German Christians rightly resisted the Nazi regime during World War II, would it have been right for North American Christians to resist the United States government in the aftermath of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, or, for instance, while the Carter administration was upping its sale of arms to Indonesia during Indonesia’s genocidal campaign in East Timor (Chomsky 1987: 303-311)? If genocide constitutes a Divine Command Clause, what about economic oppression? What about the United States government’s endorsement and implementation of the Milton Friedman doctrine (Klein 2007)? What about the displacement of a people, resulting in mass starvation, deprivation, and disease?

And what does normative subordination entail anyway? Is a Christian war-tax resister still in subordination to her government if she willingly goes to prison for tax evasion? Or does the Divine Command Clause require absolute obedience except when the Christian’s individual, personal religious rights are being infringed upon? In that case, how can the Divine Command Clause be reconciled with the divine command to love one’s neighbor as oneself?

Proponents of this approach rarely entertain such questions, but when the tenets of the Divine Command Clause are scrutinized under exacting logical rigor, it quickly becomes apparent that they are not fit for the task of preserving the status quo.

Click Here To View The Bibliography.

Labels: Pauline Theology

Ideal Government. Most scholars, including many conservative ones, are unhappy with assessments like Blumenfeld’s. Knowing what we know about the austere dichotomy between the ideology of the Pax Romana and the reality of systemic Roman brutality (cf. Bowley 2000: 771-75; Rapske 2000: 978-84; Elliott 2006: 94-99; Bradley 1987: 113-43), many scholars who take Paul’s “theology of government” at face value, and especially those committed to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, have had to conclude that Paul could not have been describing the powers that be, but rather, the powers that ought to be. One example of many is Cranfield, who argues that Paul did not discuss Rome’s actual problems because his treatise was not pastoral, but theoretical (1965: 73). Paul was painting a picture of the ideal government. Witherington, too, sees in Paul’s instructions an assumption that “the government is functioning properly” (2004: 313).[1]

Such an account was neither politically irrelevant nor theologically abstract, according to Draper, because Paul was rather an early proponent of Modernity’s contractual system of government. Although the first century Christian was not in any position to “affect the exercise of government . . . Paul nevertheless urges the Christian from their side to make the equivalent of a ‘social contract’ with authority, for their own good. They pay taxes, keep the law and pray for the government, while the government rewards virtue and punishes vice” (1988: 37). From Draper’s perspective the purpose of Paul’s idealist picture of government is not so much to describe good government as it is to prescribe good citizenry.

The problem, of course, as Draper himself partially acknowledges, is what Paul would have Christians do whenever government is not living up to the ideal. “If the concept of ‘social contract’ is what really underlies Paul’s legitimation of the state in Romans 13, then a state which ceases to reward virtue and punish vice, which ceases to protect its citizens but preys upon them, would also cease to receive legitimation” (37). Unfortunately, Draper does not attempt to provide an account of an alternative Pauline political ethic for those contexts in which the state has rightly ceased to receive legitimation, nor does he elaborate on what such contexts would look like. Despite Draper’s claim that the purpose of Paul’s political ethic “was to insist that the Christian live out his faith in the real world” (36), Draper leaves unreconciled the disparity between Paul’s negative experience of Roman power (including the illegal execution of his Kyrios, as well as his own imprisonment and torture on multiple occasions) and his—at least superficially—positive description of it. Notwithstanding the attempt to resolve the problems of a reading like Blumenfeld’s, the idealist camp still leaves unanswered a very pertinent question: In which reality does Paul’s political ethic obtain?

Labels: Pauline Theology

VARIOUS APPROACHES

In his commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans, Ben Witherington names three basic approaches to our text (2004: 310-11), to which he later tacks on three or four more. In this essay I will be addressing 15 different approaches to the text.[1]

Imperial Perspective. All political authorities claim that their authority comes from some unassailable source, usually something divine. In Israel, YHWH chose David. In Classical Greece and Rome, the pantheon moved the politicians. In imperial Rome, the Caesars were deified (some before, most after death). Constantine claimed the favor of the Christian God. When kings spoke or acted, they were seen as divine agents, speaking and doing the will of the gods. If a king was defeated in battle that usually indicated the gods’ displeasure with him; and thus a new divine agent would rise up in his place, one that would bring reform and enact once again the divine will.

In humanist societies, “the people” (so-called) function as “the gods” behind the throne. The politicians are put in place by the will of “the people,” and act as agents of “the people.” This works until the people begin to realize that they are not the same “the people” their agents claim to be representing, at which point their agents are obliged to fashion new religious myths around which the people can gather (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), myths that speak the will of “the people” in place of the people—religious myths like “democratic capitalism,” for instance. Hijacking the religious language of “the people,” these “authorities” are able to do virtually whatever they please, so long as they are able to justify their actions in the accepted religious vernacular.

It is in this way that governments are able to take religious texts like Romans 13:1-7 and put them to work as a sort of domestic defense system. Virtually every expansionist government throughout history has encouraged such readings of religious texts, and many religious people in turn have been encouraged by such readings. So long as they are not the ones being pacified, “Romans” appreciate the genius of militant pacification. You will find this kind of reading both in governmental propaganda and in churches and homes in developed nations, but only in the governmental propaganda, and not in the churches and homes, of underdeveloped nations. Likewise, in the slums and the ghettos, the imperial reading is looked upon either with great suspicion, great disdain, or great despair. Only those who (consciously or unconsciously) benefit from imperial policy are comforted by the imperial reading.[2]

In the assessment of many scholars, Paul was in fact one of those who wholeheartedly accepted and endorsed the ideology of the Pax Romana. F.F. Bruce, while admitting that Paul may have been somewhat naïve about the capacity of Rome to become a destructive agent against Christianity, argues that Paul’s positive assessment of Roman government was attributable to the benefits he enjoyed as a Roman citizen (1977: 109). Blumenfeld takes this line even further. While those uncomfortable with the imperial reading often argue that Paul was not a political theorist, and that Romans 13 should not be read as some sort of Pauline theory of government (Elliott 2006: 224; Kaylor 1988: 207; Walters 1993: 65), Blumenfeld makes an extensive comparison of Paul’s language to the language of Hellenistic Pythagorean political theory and Roman political dogma, arguing that Paul’s political thinking was thoroughly informed by Hellenistic and Roman sources (2001: 389-95).[3] Blumenfeld in fact contradicts Bruce’s attribution of political naïveté to Paul and argues that Paul had a stake in a theory of Roman despotism over against Classical republicanism precisely because of Paul’s theological commitment to theocracy (390). He sees Paul’s support of the Roman system of taxation as “overt consent to the existing political regime.” Moreover, when Paul taught that all political power comes from God, he was “echoing” the “political dogma of imperial Rome” (392). Finally, according to Blumenfeld, Paul saw Christianity as a system with distinctive “political advantages” which he desired to exploit in order to “strengthen the Roman political system, which he admired and endorsed” (391). Although Blumenfeld’s Paul is aware that the system is frequently abused by the ruling elites, and can even mock the disparity between the system in theory and the system in practice (391-92 n.273); nevertheless, Blumenfeld’s Paul is committed as a true believer to the Roman domination system. He is still “the ideological guardian of the processes and structures of imperial power” (12-16).

Labels: Pauline Theology

ROMANS 13:1-7
A Charter for Political Activism!

BY
THOM STARK

Let every soul subordinate itself to . . . / Be every soul subordinated by . . . the higher authorities, for there is no authority except by God, and the existing authorities have been put in their place by God. Consequently, whoever resists the authority resists what God has put in place. Such resistance will only bring down condemnation upon itself. For the rulers are not a terror for those who do good, but for those who do evil. Do you desire to be free from fear of the authority? Then do good deeds and he will commend you; he is a servant of God to your advantage. But if you do evil, be afraid—he is not wearing his sword for show. He is a servant of God, an avenger of wrath to the one who practices evil. Therefore, it is obligatory to subordinate yourselves, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience. This also is precisely why you pay taxes, for God’s priests are constantly occupying themselves with this very thing. So give back everyone what is owed them: if a tribute is owed, give the tribute; if taxes, then taxes; if fear, then fear; if honor, then honor. (Romans 13:1-7, translation mine)

This difficult little extract is perhaps the most notorious text in the Christian canon. For centuries, ruling elites and their systems of domination have found an ally in these ostensibly unambiguous words from the mouth of the apostle Paul. As Robert Jewett puts it, Romans 13:1-7 “has provided the basis for propaganda by which the policies of Mars and Jupiter have frequently been disguised as serving the cause of Christ” (2007: 803). In the last century alone this text was used by the Nazi party in Germany, by the apartheid regime in South Africa, and by the genocidal Hutu government in Rwanda, to stifle Christian dissent to injustice. The complicity of Christians in but one of these atrocities should have been enough to suggest that there was something abysmally wrong with the traditional reading habits, yet here in the United States, land of the good guy, many continue to appeal to Romans 13 in their sacralizations of an increasingly imperialistic U.S. foreign policy.

From the Holocaust to the present, historians and theologians have been scrambling to provide alternative readings of these seven verses, alternative readings to what would be the “plain sense” of the text to those who have benefited from the long, grueling history of Western domination. The fruits of their collective labors have brought no consensus. Yet all have attempted to come to terms with two realities: the text as it stands, and our common fear of totalitarianism in all its guises. Was Paul hopelessly naïve? Was he a political idealist? An apolitical opportunist perhaps? Or was he a radical subversive? Respectable scholars of all stripes, and even those with comparable methods and commitments, have come to radically different conclusions about the meaning of this text and its significance for us today.

In this essay I will try carefully to lay out the many complementary and contradictory answers scholars have scrambled to provide, evaluating the options in light of exegetical work and with attention to historical background. In the end I will argue in favor of a subversive reading of Romans 13:1-7, in which Paul is actually critiquing the imperial pretentions of Rome by contrasting the Roman body politic with the body politic of Christ, while calling those constituted by the latter to resist the former not by violence, but by creating social counter-formations, marked by agape love, capable of both undermining and transforming the very foundations of the Roman imperial order.

I will attempt to do this, bearing in mind that these sorts of problems are not finally resolved by atomized researchers at computers, wading in books. In fact, these sorts of problems are not the kind that can be finally resolved at all; they can only be resolved once for each moment, and only by Christians gathered together in communities committed to embodying the gospel in an age of extremes. As such, this little research project is motivated by the hope that for a moment it might somehow play a part in the conversation that disarmed people are having “on the ground” as they struggle together to forge the kind of polities in which every subordinated soul can find liberation.

Click Here To View The Bibliography.

Labels: Pauline Theology

Labels: Politics

Sources:

1. "The Complicated History of John McCain and MLK Day," ABC News, April 3, 2008
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/04/the-complicated.html

"McCain Facts," ColorOfChange.org, April 4, 2008
http://colorofchange.org/mccain_facts/

2. "McCain More Hawkish Than Bush on Russia, China, Iraq," Bloomberg News, March 12, 2008
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aF28rSCtk0ZM&refer=us

"Buchanan: John McCain 'Will Make Cheney Look Like Gandhi,'" ThinkProgress, February 6, 2008
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/06/buchanan-gandhi-mccain/

3. "McCain Sides With Bush On Torture Again, Supports Veto Of Anti-Waterboarding Bill," ThinkProgress, February 20, 2008
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/20/mccain-torture-veto/

4. "2007 Children's Defense Fund Action Council^® Nonpartisan Congressional Scorecard," February 2008
http://www.childrensdefense.org/site/PageServer?pagename=act_learn_scorecard2007

"McCain: Bush right to veto kids health insurance expansion," CNN, October 3, 2007
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/10/03/mccain.interview/

5. "Beer Executive Could Be Next First Lady," Associated Press, April 3, 2008
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h-S1sWHm0tchtdMP5LcLywg5ZtMgD8VQ86M80

"McCain Says Bank Bailout Should End `Systemic Risk,'" Bloomberg News, March 25, 2008
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aHMiDVYaXZFM&refer=home

6. "Will McCain's Temper Be a Liability?," Associated Press, February 16, 2008
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=4301022

"Famed McCain temper is tamed," Boston Globe, January 27, 2008
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/01/27/famed_mccain_temper_is_tamed/

7. "Black Claims McCain's Campaign Is Above Lobbyist Influence: 'I Don't Know What The Criticism Is,'" ThinkProgress, April 2, 2008
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/04/02/mccain-black-lobbyist/

"McCain's Lobbyist Friends Rally 'Round Their Man," ABC News, January 29, 2008
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4210251

8. "McCain's Spiritual Guide: Destroy Islam," Mother Jones Magazine, March 12, 2008
http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2008/03/john-mccain-rod-parsley-spiritual-guide.html

"Will McCain Specifically 'Repudiate' Hagee's Anti-Gay Comments?," ThinkProgress, March 12, 2008
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/03/12/mccain-hagee-anti-gay/

"McCain 'Very Honored' By Support Of Pastor Preaching 'End-Time Confrontation With Iran,'" ThinkProgress, February 28, 2008
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/28/hagee-mccain-endorsement/

Labels: Liberation Theology

Labels: Liberation Theology