On Submission to Authority

When I was a teenager, I attended Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts at the Omni in Atlanta. If I remember correctly (this was last century, after all), the solution to youth conflicts was submission to authority. The idea was pretty simple. God has ordained several types of authority over us: the state, our parents, the church, etc. Our job is to do as we are told and submit to this authority without question. In submitting, we are resolved of all responsibility for any wrongdoing that we commit under orders from authority. The metaphor used as I recall was that we were under the umbrella of authority. If the state tells me to kill someone, I am not a murderer; rather, I am a good and obedient subject untainted by the act. Stepdad wants to rape you? Go ahead and submit; it’s on his head, not yours.

To a point, the advice to mind your folks and obey the law and what not is pretty good. That will reduce conflict in a manner of speaking. Taken too far and too seriously, it is just crazy talk. I knew it even then. Most of my acquaintances who attended with me bought it, though, hook, line and sinker.

Even now, I hear otherwise sensible people say that Romans 13 requires Christians to obey the government, that the government is ordained by God. (JL Wilson links to a great post on how Christian Nazis relied on the passage in support of Hitler http://independentcountry.blogspot.com/2006/02/fourth-reich.html). Of course, these same folks backpedal considerably when confronted with the state’s requiring them to do anything they regard as blatantly un-Christian. For example, I know one man who justifies lobbing bombs into neighborhoods in Iraq under the “obey the government” mantra, but he draws the line at recognizing state approved civil unions for homosexuals. Gothard was at least consistent in his authoritarianism.

I interpret Romans 13 as referring not to earthly authorities. It does not make any sense at all in the light of the revolutionary message and mission of Jesus to read the passage as an endorsement of the state. St Paul himself was apparently not all that enthusiastic in his allegiance to Rome, since he was executed by the state and did not support the worship of the Emperor, a legal requirement at the time. The Christian martyrs defied the state and generally won their martyrdom at the hands of the state. The protestant reformers defied civil and ecclesiastical authorities in their day.