NOTES for Rom 13:7

Paul's attitude toward a person's obligations can at first glance appear somewhat contradictory. He says: if you owe something to someone, that debt binds you and requires payment. Everyone must receive what he has a right to, and no one may be denied this, whether it is tax, obedience, or simply respect. And then 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 attitude toward secular authority, a subject that was certainly very acute at the time.

It was acute at least because political messianism was fairly widespread in Jewish circles, and it regarded the very existence of secular authority as evil and obedience to that authority as sin. Paul does not think so. He says directly that no authority can exist apart from God's will. And this is not a call to blind loyalty, as many would like (or, on the contrary, would not like) to think, but a statement of an obvious fact. If God allows one authority or another to exist, it means He does not consider it necessary to intervene. As for a Christian's attitude toward secular authority, here everything is more complicated.

On the one hand, in the context of what Paul says, one can speak of a "God-pleasing" or "God-opposing" authority as a state institution only in a very relative sense. "There is no authority except from God," in the context of world history, and even Roman history, with its palace coups and other coups, conquests, revolutions, and the rest, sounds rather indifferent. If every authority is "from God," then one can speak of legitimate authority only in a very relative sense. But then one can speak of God-pleasing authority only in a very relative sense as well. One is rather forced to conclude that God, for a time, only tolerates any authority in order to avoid something worse, and here it is better for a Christian not to interfere. But obedience to any authority is possible only "according to conscience"; otherwise obedience loses all meaning.

Any other obedience does not count before God. And if obedience "according to conscience" does not work, then it is more honest before God to refuse obedience to the authority: at least in this way one can avoid the hypocrisy of formal obedience to it, and therefore avoid violating at least the ninth commandment. And everything a person owes to representatives of secular (and any other) authority, he owes only as a consequence of this obedience "according to conscience." But if it is "according to conscience," then it must be to the end, so that there is nothing for which to reproach oneself and so that one can answer, just as conscientiously, 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, fulfilling duty becomes a kind of spiritual, if not psychological, hypocrisy. It is a fulfillment that spiritually dries up the one who performs it and does not benefit the one who uses the fruits of such fulfillment. Such relationships are impossible in the Kingdom, and the apostle calls Christians in every case to remain residents of the Kingdom, whether this concerns their attitude toward authority or toward one another.