Saturday, July 4, 2015

Submission & Obedience

I have a new post at Ordinary Times, part of which I excerpt as it relates to an issue central to the ethical implications of America's Declaration of Independence -- what I have blogged about for many years. A taste:
[L]et’s lay a foundation. Both Jesus and St. Paul gave believers instruction on how to make peace with a secular civil government whose principles didn’t perfectly line up with theirs.

When St. Paul said in Romans 13 “government” was a minister of God that believers ought to honor, obey and submit to, the ruler to whom he instructed believers to submit was the pagan psychopath, Nero. Jesus, of course, said “Render unto Caeser….” And the Caeser to whom Jesus said to render unto also wasn’t much of a good guy either.

Yet lines were drawn. Obvious lines. If “man” (including government) tells you to disobey God, then obey God and disobey man. Never are believers instructed to revolt and overthrow government. Simply disobey. Jesus never revolted against Caeser or called on His people to so do. Indeed, He seemed to tell Pilate his most unjust act of crucifixion had civil legitimacy from above.

Jesus did disobey and drove the money lenders out of the Temple, a sacred place.

5 comments:

Bill Fortenberry said...

You're timeline is a little bit mixed up. The Epistle to the Romans was written in A.D. 56, just two years into Nero's reign and eight years before he began persecuting Christians. In fact, Paul's final letter, II Timothy, was written just before the persecutions began, and tradition generally holds that Paul was beheaded very early in that persecution. This means that the government Paul was speaking of in Romans 13 was not that of the "pagan psychopath, Nero." Rather, it was simply the government of Nero, who while he was most certainly a pagan was neither a psychopath nor a tyrant during the time that Paul wrote his epistles.

Bill Fortenberry said...

If we really want to learn what the Bible teaches about resisting tyranny, we need to go to the passages that were written about that topic instead of inferring things from the silence of other passages. The book of Judges would be a good place to start. We could then move on to the books of Kings and Chronicles followed by the book of Esther. All of these books deal directly with the subject of tyranny and present various responses which are acceptable. Attempting to understand the biblical teaching regarding tyranny by studying only the books of the New Testament would be like trying to understand the First Amendment by studying the debates over the Seventeenth Amendment.

Jonathan Rowe said...

I thought it was a sound principle of traditional biblical understanding to read the Old Testament in light of the New. You seem to want to flip this.

Bill Fortenberry said...

That's a bit overly simplistic. The actual principle is that the entire Bible reflects the consistency of an unchanging God. This means that when God provides an explanation in the New Testament for something that was left vague in the Old Testament, then the Old Testament passage must be understood in the light of the New Testament explanation. But the reverse is also true. When the Old Testament is more clear on a given subject than the New Testament, then the clear statement in the Old Testament should restrict our understanding of the passage in the New Testament. The two testaments must always be viewed in a way which recognizes their agreement with each other.

Tom Van Dyke said...

When the Old Testament is more clear on a given subject than the New Testament, then the clear statement in the Old Testament should restrict our understanding of the passage in the New Testament. The two testaments must always be viewed in a way which recognizes their agreement with each other.

Interesting, and internally coherent.

However, FTR, gents, this ain't a theology blog; we don't do theological truth claims. What's important--and illuminating--is what Christians of the Revolutionary era believed. The Christian religion gets enough bashing these days without using a history blog to argue the Bible against itself.

BTW, there's an obscure Old Testament story...

In pre-Revolutionary America, on the other hand, the "Curse of Meroz" was a blockbuster. Imported from the 17th century religious civil wars in England, the term quickly became a favorite whip with which Puritan preachers lashed the pro-British Tories who preferred to stand on the sidelines as the 13 colonies fought for the independence they achieved 239 years today. The term was still being used in the 20th Century by pundits lambasting American neutrality in the two world wars; a cursory search in Google shows that it features in Christian sermons to this very day.

In his book American Zion, Haifa University historian Eran Shalev (an acquaintance, but not a relative) provides a riveting account of the enormous influence that the Old Testament had on how Revolutionary America saw itself and how it conveyed that vision to others.


http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/west-of-eden/.premium-1.664253