Pay your taxes! or not . . .

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ST. JOHN'S HARBOUR
“For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience.” (Romans 13:4-5)

I know of no Biblical passage that cries louder for contextual interpretation than does the 13th Chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans. To the new Christians in Rome, Paul appears to be saying, 1) that God appoints ruling authority to keep order, 2) that to disobey government is to defy what God has ordained, and 3) to prevent punishment and keep a good conscience, we ought to pay taxes, obey laws, respect authority.

The dilemma for those who ignore or aren’t aware of the character of the person who wrote it, the situation of the people for whom it was written or the state of the world politic and scientific knowledge of the time is that apparent contradictions present themselves. Numerous Biblical references can be found that advocate civil disobedience, including Paul himself defying orders to stop preaching. (John Piper, chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary details some apparent contradictions here.)

Our adult Study class has been doing an interesting exercise with Paul’s letter to the Corinthian church. We’ve each taken the part of one person in the broad range of people forming the early Corinthian church and imagined how we might have reacted to Paul’s letter and the reams of directives and admonitions in it. There were slave owners and slaves, wealthy traders and the poor, people of influence and people with no influence in the congregation, and the overarching civil authority was the domineering Roman Empire. It’s an interpretive exercise; it’s goal to understand the writer, the times and the audience first, and then to discern what principles found in the letter may provide guidance for us in our time and place.

Take the matter of audience for instance. I took a short-story seminar from author Rudy Wiebe in a semester at the University of Alberta. We had to complete a story every two weeks, duplicate it for the class and subject it to the judgment of our fellow aspiring writers and our mentor. A question Rudy would often ask was, “for whom are you writing this?” Content and style in writing vary according to the audience; the epistles of the New Testament—Romans included—were meant for an audience with a world view shaped by their time . . . not ours. 
 
The entire 15th -16th Century Reformation movement was predicated on an obligation to defy authority when its practices were seen to be in conflict with the laws of God. Piper resolves some of the contradictions by visualizing the Christian life as citizenship in a separate kingdom with Christ as the authority; civil authority is obeyed in the interest of good order unless and until it conflicts with Christ’s teaching and authority.

Piper: “One of the crucial issues before the church in America today is: Shall we be American with a pinch of religious flavoring? Or: Shall we be Christ's people with a pinch of American flavoring?”

Paul himself exhibits a near-schizophrenic set of contradictions. On the one hand, he appears obsessed with the need to chisel the developing, chaotic Christian Church into an orderly institution; this may be a hangover from his past as a Torah-trained, zealous pharisee. On the other hand, he’s a radical Christian and even while he’s prescribing his remedies for early-church problems, he insists as did Christ that “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments [...] are summed up in this one command: ‛Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” (Romans 13: 8-10, NIV)
I pay my taxes, I stop at stop signs, I vote in elections. Respect for authority when it serves the need for peace and good order resonates with most of us, I think, particularly when we see how bad authority destroys peace and well-being for its citizens. But we live in an age where authority is vested in the ballot box, and criticism of authority doesn’t lead to crucifixion.

I wonder what Paul would have said about Christians and government had he written to the church today?

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