Christianity and Government Authority

Bust of Constantine I,
photographed by
Jean-Christophe Benoist.

This is a must-read article on Romans 13 and Government Authority by Paul Green. For those keeping score, there have been at least three major answers to the problem of just how much authority the government has according to Christian doctrine:

• Absolutist (the government may do more or less whatever it wants).
• Compatibilist (the government may do most things, as long as it does not compel me to do anything against my Christian-informed conscience.)
• Anabaptist (all coercion, violence and authority are immoral. Jesus was a pacifist.)

The Compatibilist view has been I'm sure the most common view, and it exists both on the Religious Left and Right as they are commonly understood. For example, it makes perfect sense in the Compatibilist-Left view that the government can set up a compulsory welfare state, and those on the Right who question whether this is the state's role are missing the point from the Left-Compatibilist's viewpoint. According to him, the government can compel us to do anything not actually immoral; and certainly taking care of the poor is not immoral. The Right-Compatibilist generally concedes that ground, and limits his critique to pragmatic objections -- that churches are better at taking care of the poor than the state -- rather than questioning the very legitimacy of compulsory charity.

The absolutist view is not common, though there is good evidence that it was Luther's view -- such as when he sided against the peasants in their rebellion. Green, of course, gives evidence of its persistence.

The Anabaptist view is also not common, though it has had some brilliant expositors. Tolstoy and Gandhi probably did a good deal to inspire it, but the key works are John Howard Yoder's Politics of Jesus and Jacques Ellul's Anarchy and Christianity. It has some passionate contemporary advocates, such as Shane Claiborne (author of Jesus for President) and the folks at Jesus Radicals.

Yoder's masterpiece
of Christian pacifist
exegesis.

Despite its compelling and often learned advocates, the view is not without flaws. For one thing, it's anachronistic. Christian pacifism simply has more to do with Gandhi and Tolstoy than it has to do with Jesus, and Jesus' teachings and actions are frequently inconsistent with a doctrinaire pacifism (Green cites many of the best examples). Moreover, there is very little historical evidence that the early Christian fathers interpreted the gospel as calling for pacifism -- about the only thing that can be cited are controversies about whether Christians could be soldiers in pagan Rome, and this is inconclusive to say the least, since participating in the Roman army was problematic for any number of Christian reasons without even raising the question of doctrinaire nonviolence. All this is without going into the frank inconsistency of pacifism with the Old Testament (Christian pacifism, it seems to me, demands some form of Marcionism.)

The brilliant part of Green's analysis, though, is that he takes many of the smartest critiques of the Anabaptist school (1 Samuel 8 alone is a pregnant chapter) and demonstrates that they make more sense as a critique of the coercive state than as a critique of violence per se. The verses usually cited by the Anabaptist interpreters retain all of their potency and pose none of the same interpretative problems when read in the way Green suggests. Green's essay might also be profitably read in light of James Davison Hunter's critiques of political Christianity in To Change the World (expect a fuller review of that book in a future post).

Let me close with a quotation that will hopefully pique your interest if it hasn't been already to read the article:

In Anglo-Saxon countries until the mid 1800’s with the introduction of police, the administration of justice worked well, largely without government. The Common Law was (and still is in some places) administered by unpaid local Justices of the Peace and Constables who were independent and often opposed the State. "Citizen’s arrest" was the primary means of enforcement. Enforcement of law under ancient Israel was similar, with Judges and volunteer officers of the court.