Main news for 20 April 2025

Paul's attitude toward a person's obligations can at first glance appear somewhat contradictory. He says: if you owe someone something, that debt binds you and requires repayment. Everyone must receive what he has a right to, and this cannot be denied to anyone, whether it is tax, obedience, or simply respect. And immediately he adds: owe no one anything except the debt of mutual love. In fact, Paul evaluates obligations themselves in the context of a person's relation to secular authority, a theme that was undoubtedly very sharp in those days.

Sharp at least because of the rather widespread political messianism in Jewish circles, which regarded the very existence of secular authority as evil and obedience to this authority as sin. Paul does not think so. He says directly that there is no authority that could exist apart from God's will. And this is not a call to blind loyalty, as many would like or, conversely, would not like to think, but the statement of an obvious fact. If God permits one or another authority to exist, then He does not consider it necessary to intervene. As for a Christian's relation to secular authority, here everything is more complex.

On the one hand, one can speak of a "God-pleasing" or "God-opposing" authority as a state institution, in the context of what Paul says, only very relatively. "There is no authority except from God," in the context of world history, and even Roman history, with its palace and other coups, conquests, revolutions, and so on, sounds rather indifferent. If any authority is "from God," then one can speak of legitimate authority only very relatively. But then one can also speak of God-pleasing authority very relatively. Rather one has to conclude that God tolerates any authority until a certain time in order to avoid something worse, and here it is better for a Christian not to interfere. But one can obey any authority only "for conscience's sake"; otherwise obedience loses all meaning.

Any other obedience does not count before God. And if obedience "for conscience's sake" is impossible, then it is more honest before God to refuse obedience to authority. In that way one can at least avoid the hypocrisy of formal obedience to it, and therefore avoid violating at minimum the ninth commandment. And everything a person owes to representatives of secular, or any other, authority, he owes only as a consequence of this obedience "for conscience's sake." But if it is "for conscience's sake," then it must be to the end, so that there is nothing with which to reproach oneself and so that one can answer, also according to conscience, for one's obedience both before people and before God.

Here it is the same Gospel "let your yes be yes, and your no be no." And this concerns all human relationships in general: all obligations flow only from mutual love. Without it, the fulfillment of duty becomes a kind of spiritual, if not psychological, hypocrisy. A fulfillment that spiritually dries up the one who fulfills it and does not benefit the one who uses the fruits of such fulfillment. In the Kingdom such relations are impossible, and the apostle calls Christians in every case to remain inhabitants of the Kingdom, whether this concerns their relation to authority or to one another.