The Christian’s relationship with the state is always ambivalent. You’ll have often heard me preach that Christians should be the best and most conscientious citizens. But that is born out of our prior citizenship of the Kingdom of Heaven. This is important to realise: we are not conscientious because we are committed to the cultural and political structures that shape our nation’s life. We may have our preferences when it comes to politics… perhaps even our convictions. But Christianity is not wedded to any particular politcal or social environment. The Church has lived in and through the whole gamut of political contexts, from near Anarchy to liberal democracy to totalitarian regimes. In each she has found ways to worhsip and thrive, and in each she has found that which is toxic to her integrity and existence.

The Church’s default, then is conscientious obedience to the authority of a state, but because of our recognition of a higher Authority. As such, we take with utmost seriousness passages such as Rom.13:1-7; I Pet.2:13-16; Titus 3:1. ‘The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted…’ And we do so even where those authorities corrupt and abuse their position. This can lead to deeply disturbing conclusions. In his epistle to the Romans, Paul is writing to a Church figuring out what it means to be Christian in a context where the state has already become the enemy. Yet he refers to Nero - who infamously persecuted the Church - as ‘God’s servant’, and continues to call Christians to civll obedience. The fact that the State kills and imprisons Christians does not give us a mandate to anarchy. A government’s sin doesn’t justify the Church’s sin.

Are we then locked into an uncritical jingoistic patriotism: my country right or wrong? The question of when and how Christians must conscientiously break the law is one that we haven’t had to wrestle with for many years in the UK. As I mentioned in a previous post, we have lived through an anomolous period in recent years, but one that seems to be coming to an end. It is time to dust this question off and find answers. We may need them sooner than we think.

Passages such as Rom.13 have been used regularly to silence the Church in the face of ungodly regimes. Richard Wurmbrand tells the story of a Communist Interrogator ‘preaching’ to him from Rom.13, seeking to undermine Wurmbrand’s own decision to disobey the Party. In some cases, it has been used to justify the Church’s support of patent injustice. You only have to think of tragic errors of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, infamously supporting Apartheid; or the UN-confessing Church in Nazi Germany (we’ll think about Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church later in the series), or large swathes of the Church in Spain and Portugal during the conquestadorial periods of their empires. But there are at least three key observations that mean the use of such passages to silence the Church and enforce aquiescense is simply wrong.

The first is that Paul teaches, alongside the Church’s obligation to obey, the rulers’ obligation to do good (Rom.13:4). The Church in the UK has long since lost any sense of being a prophetic voice that calls government to realise it holds only a delegated authority, and as such remains a steward that will be held to account. In short, God will judge those who hold political authority, in large part, on the basis of how they treated the Church within the nation. The old BCP used to teach us to pray that under our governemnt ‘we may be godly and quietly governed’, and that God would grant to ‘all who are put in authority … that they may truly and indifferently minister justice, to the punishment of wickedness and vice, and to the maintenance of true religion and virtue’. Again we’ll come back to subversive Anglican spirituality in a later post, but let’s just notice here that the Church of England prays and believes that the purpose of Government includes creating a society in which the Church may flourish. As in so many other places, Anglicanism, properly understood, is richly Biblical, politically bold, and pastorally sensitive. This all resonates with the defiance of the prophets, which will also occupy our attention later in the series…

Secondly, Paul doesn’t stop his political ethic in Rom.13:7. He continues on to speak about our commitment to another (higher) Law to which we remain indebted. The Law of God, summarised in the command to love our neighbour. There is no evidence in the Bible that God is pleased with a Church that is complicit in legislation that undermines our ability and freedom to love. Similarly Peter teaches both that we should ‘submit [ourselves] for the Lord’s sake to every human authority’, and continues to say that we should ‘fear God … revere Christ as Lord’. The Apostles may be not so much calling for uncritical obedience, as he is providing a series of criteria for discerning the faithfulness with which a government is fulfilling its God’s given mandate. Yes, we give to Caesar what is Caesars, but also to God what is Gods. This is our poltical ethic in a nutshell - and we live in the tension it creates.

And finally (at least as far as this post goes!) Rom.13 is written by the Apostle Paul. It’s worth bearing in mind how much time Paul spent in prison. Likewise, I Peter 2:13-16 was written by Peter. Peter, who in Acts 4:19 and 5:29 explicitly defies ‘human authority’ at the point where it seeks to prevent his obedience to Christ. However we make sense of such passages, we need to remember they were written by those who we prepared - indeed knew they had a divine mandate - to conscientiously disobey rulers where those rulers proved unfaithful to their own God-given role and responsibility.

There is, of course, nothing new in the Apostles’ willingness to stand against human authority that conspires to silence the Gospel, and undermine the life and integrity of the Church. They are standing in a long tradition of men and women who understood that their first and greatest calling is to obey the Living God. At times they paid for their spiritualism heroism with their lives.

More on this as we go through lockdown…