Episode Details

I’ve been wanting to write a significant piece about politics and the Christian citizen for some time, but I very much doubt that this week’s Payneful Truth  will be it. 

It will be a step or two down that road, but it’s unlikely I’ll get all the way to the destination in this short piece. All the same, I hope that it edges your own thinking along the path a little. 

We find ourselves at this point because I first observed that expressing opinions (especially in the way that many people do today on social media) can be a foolish and sinful thing to do (‘The Sin of Opinion’, Apr 28); and then I did my best to be more positive and lay some foundations about the nature of justice and judging and political authority (‘Doing Justice’, May 5). I’ll assume you’ve read those pieces.  (include links)

However, given that the role of political authority is to make judgements, do we have any role in respect to those judgements? When a dispute does break in aisle 12, and we find ourselves onlookers—when and how should we get involved? What are our positive obligations and opportunities as Christian citizens?

Romans 13 is a good place to start, since it addresses this very question. It begins like this:

1 Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. 2 Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.

The key idea in these verses is conveyed in the recurring Greek word tassō, which means to bring about an order to things, to arrange or fix or institute things in a certain relation to one another. 

God has tassōed or instituted ‘authorities’, and these authorities are part of a larger order or arrangement of things that God has established. He has created a world in which there is right and wrong, and good and evil. It’s a morally ordered world in which there is such a thing called ‘justice’ (because of the existence of those standards of right and wrong), and in which there are ordered structures within human communities whereby justice can be done. God has ordered and established all this in place, including the authorities who administer that justice (ESV translates the tassō  word in v. 1 as ‘instituted’; ‘established’ says NIV).

Our right response is to submit or sit under this ordered structure of authority—to hupo-tassō ourselves to the authorities that God has established (v. 1). The wrong response is to anti-tassō (v. 2)—to fight against or resist the authority that God has set in place. 

In other words, to obey or submit to political authority is not just knuckling under to the big guy with the sword. It is humbly understanding ourselves and our actions within the whole order of rightness and justice that God has established. 

(There is a massive side-bar we could explore here regarding a foundational question of all political theory—namely, who gives the state its authority? Is it seized by the strong or the noble? Is it granted by divine right? Or is authority given by the people, and if so, how? In the absence of a God who created the world and us, with standards of righteousness and ordered structures of justice, and who delegates authority to human judges, these questions are difficult to anchor and to answer. But all this is too complicated for here and now.)

So our first response is to submit or sit under political authority. This hardly sits well with us. We don’t like submitting to anyone or anything, and the internet gives us the illusion that perhaps we don’t have to. We can click our