Anderson, Matthew R.

English

Scholars Commons

Consensus
Volume 29
Issue 1 Hospitality - The Healing of the World Article 8
5-25-2003
A Very Brief Discussion of Religion and State in the
New Testament
Matthew R. Anderson
Follow this and additional works at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus
This Studies and Observations is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in
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Recommended Citation
Anderson, Matthew R. (2003) "A Very Brief Discussion of Religion and State in the New Testament," Consensus: Vol. 29 : Iss. 1 ,
Article 8.
Available at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol29/iss1/8
A Very Brief Discussion of Religion and State 
in the New Testament 
Rev. Matthew R. Anderson, Ph.D. 
103 
Department of Theology, Concordia University, Montreal 
Christ the Redeemer Lutheran Church 
Dollard-Des-Ormeaux, Quebec 
What should be the Christian attitude to government? Members of 
Christian congregations are asking themselves this question once 
more in our own day, when God is increasingly invoked by parties on 
all sides of international conflicts, and when so many invoke 
patriotism and godliness in the same statements and with the same 
zeal. Is there a single, faithful, Biblically-based attitude to 
government? 
There was certainly no love lost between most early Christians 
and the one, overwhelmingly-present state that governed their lives 
and sometimes their deaths. Readers of the Hebrew Bible can point 
to a time- however brief and golden with myth - when Israelite faith 
and politics were one. However, the New Testament, unlike the Old, 
has no "holiness code" which once may have had the state-sanctioned 
force of law. Early Christians dreamt of no holy state other than that 
which the tmmpets would announce, and no blessed assembly other 
than that final world council when they would meet their Lord in the 
air. 
Neither is there any real early church equivalent to "official 
Yahwism" of either the tribal or later monarchical stamp, and this for 
one simple reason: New Testament Christianity never had a state. So-
called "Christendom", where Christian dogma would eventually take 
on the weight of law and Christian institutions would be undergirded 
by state supp011, was far in the future for those who wrote the New 
Testament. It is doubtful that many of those earliest writers, 
eschatologically-focussed as they were, would have recognized the 
legitimacy of the humanly-imposed Christendom which later arose-
and to which we are the heirs - in any case. The very earliest Jewish-
Christians lost their state with other Jews at the destmction of 
Jemsalem. Most of the rest of early Christianity lived and worshiped 
Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2003
104 Consensus 
and spread its gospel in an uneasy coexistence, marked by suspicion, 
apologetics, sporadic persecution and occasional martyrdom, with 
the only state most first century Christians knew, namely the Roman 
Empire. In effect, this means that the attitude of the New Testament 
to the state is simply the attitude of the texts to Rome. 
While the New Testament doesn't speak with a single voice on 
this or any other issue, early Christian attitudes to the state are rarely 
positive. They range from ambivalence (i.e. like bad-tasting 
medicine, the state may be necessary now but will pass away quickly) 
to out-right hostility (the monstrous depictions of Rome as Beast and 
harlot in The Revelation to John). 
Twenty-first century Christians wanting to know how to act as 
citizens of a changing world and looking to their scriptures for 
guidance, have some major interpretive distance to overcome. At the 
nub of any discussion of faith and government is the relationship 
between religion and the social order. But that relationship is 
precisely what is missing in the New Testament. The "problem" of 
the New Testament texts and the Christians who produced them is 
that they did not, and could not, either present or represent a civic 
religion. Two of the most fundamental questions of political life are 
simply not addressed by Christianity: (a) What is the nature of the 
public good? (b) What should be the relationships between 
individuals and groups in civic society? 
As later Romans such as Pliny, Tacitus and Suetonius quite 
rightly recognized, Christianity was a "superstition" in that it was 
both new and novel to the Roman mind, and wherever it took root it 
created divisions between citizens (witness the riot accounts in The 
Acts of the Apostles) and took its adherents' loyalties away from 
Rome. And yet while earliest Christianity was not a civic religion in 
the sense of being supportive of the mechanisms of state, neither does 
it seem to be fully engaged with issues of polity as a critical or 
prophetic voice. It simply had other concerns. · 
Paul, who is our earliest reliable witness to Jesus, is famous for 
telling us little about the latter. So it is not surprising that he similarly 
has little information on Jesus' attitude to church and state. But there 
are interesting hints elsewhere that perhaps Jesus engaged the issue 
of church and state in a way different from the immediately 
succeeding generation of Christians. Despite efforts by early 
Christian apologetics to do just this, we cannot escape the mute 
http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol29/iss1/8
Religion and State in the New Testament 105 
eloquence of Jesus' crucifixion - a Roman judgment. Being put to 
death by a government is hardly a ringing endorsement of a 
relationship with it. And the Gospels contain other tidbits. There is 
Jesus' extremely dry ridicule of Rome in the chreia about the whole 
empire owning just its coins: "give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to 
God what is God's". There is the portrayal of Jesus in the Gospel of 
John, standing before the might of the empire, bloodied and yet 
telling a subdued Pilate that "you would have no power over me 
unless it had been given to you from above" (in which pericope, the 
Gospel writer makes the political point that, as with Samuel and Saul 
the people again choose a King over God with the words "we have no 
King but Caesar"). The words of Jesus to his disciples are about the 
inversion of power relationships in the kingdom of God: "You know 
that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers 
lord it over them [but] whoever wishes to be great among you must 
be your servant" (Mk I 0:42-43). 
All these passages and others imply that Jesus' teaching was 
critical of the state. But the point should be made with equal vigour 
that Jesus is no reformer of the state, for to engage in political 
discussion on that level is ultimately to recognize the state as 
legitimate but flawed, and I believe that Jesus' (and certainly Paul's) 
concerns lie elsewhere. 
Was the attitude of the first Christian writers toward the state 
unifonnly negative then? Some might point to the oft-quoted words 
of I Timothy 2: "I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and 
thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high 
positions", as a sign that the earliest Christians practised at least a 
minimal civic responsibility. That may or may not be so. All we have 
is the admonition, not the response. But the very next words in 
Timothy are perhaps more telling: "so that we may lead a quiet and 
peaceable life in all godliness and dignity". Unlike the character 
Maximus in the movie Gladiator, whose familial piety was entirely 
wrapped up in his vision of the true nature of Rome, early Christians 
may have practised their civic duties only as a practical and minimal 
means to the end of worshiping in peace and spreading their faith 
without overt or systematic persecution. 
Likewise with the text that is perhaps the most often quoted as a 
support to secular power. Our history is replete with those who have 
quoted Paul's words in Romans 13: I b: "there is no authority except 
Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2003
106 Consensus 
from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by 
God", as proof for everything from the divine right of kings to the 
crushing of reform movements. Yet Paul's reasoning points toward a 
higher authority than that sitting among the seven hills of Rome, and 
what appears in his words to condone em1hly authority in fact 
contains a stinging analysis of its limitations. Paul is using a simple 
enthymeme to show the following reasoning: (a) all authority is from 
God; (b) Rome exercises authority; therefore (c) Rome's authority is 
from God. The rhetorical purpose of the enthymeme is not to justify 
Rome's power, but to suborn it. Implicit in this syllogism (which is 
remarkably similar to Jesus' words to Pilate) is the early Christian 
belief that Rome has no authority other than that which God has 
given it, and also that, when God would withdraw that support, as 
Paul and others believed would soon happen, Rome would have no 
legitimacy at all. 
A dictionary definition of quietism has that it is "a passive 
withdrawn attitude or policy toward the world or worldly affairs" 
(Mirriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionm)', Tenth Edition). In our day 
the term has become pejorative, since the assumption is that quietism 
gives those who would use government to oppress a green light to go 
ahead. I raise the term here because I do not believe that the very 
earliest Christians were quietists, unless that term can be applied to 
all apocalyptic communities. Rather, at least some early Christians, 
who have left us records of their thoughts, had a very definite opinion 
about what would happen to Rome when Jesus returned. To describe 
the fate of Rome they used what must have seemed revolutionary, 
even seditious words: "[at the resurrection], Then comes the end, 
when Jesus hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has 
destroyed every ruler and and every authority and power" (I Cor 
15:24). What would make Rome an enemy of the early Church (and 
more importantly to the early Christians, of Christ) was that process 
by which Rome began to compete, more and more consciously, with 
Jesus for the allegiance of the first believers. 
It is illuminating and entertaining to explore with some of those 
who have written on the bestial representations of the state in The 
Revelation to John (see, for instance, Harry Maier's recent book, 
Apocalypse Recalled: The Book of Revelation after Christendom. 
Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003). The whole range of human 
emotion and judgment are here, from devastating comedy and parody 
http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol29/iss1/8
Religion and State in the New Testament 107 
to bitterly-tasted revenge. Democratically-minded as we westerners 
are, it is also instructive to note that there is no universal suffrage at 
the Parousia. Quite the opposite: the age-old dream of a theocracy 
comes back at the re-creation of the world, a new covenant 
community with the ILambi providing its light (Rev 21 :23), where 
the city centre is not a parliament but a temple. 
But as fascinating as the Revelation is, I maintain that the most 
complete condemnation of the state comes from Paul. Although his 
writings are much less vitriolic than the apocalyptic depictions of 
Rome in the Apocalypse, there is implicit in Paul's few references an 
almost casual dismissal of government. For example, in I Corinthians 
6, Paul rebukes the Corinthians for taking each other to civil court. 
Where we might reasonably expect that he would use a rationale from 
love or proper ethical behaviour, Paul justifies his admonition that the 
Corinthian Christians should solve disputes among themselves with 
the following: "Do you not know that the saints will judge the 
world?" (6:2). 
The basic problem with Rome, for the earliest Christians, was 
that it was in competition with Christ, and no Christian could serve 
two masters. Moreover, in a world which was already beginning to 
pass away, government good or bad was equally destined for 
destruction, and of little or no account in the brief period before that 
was to happen. Only in our exegesis of Luke and from other later 
writers (for example, I Peter 2: 13-17) do we begin to see the long and 
often rocky process of mutual accommodation between the new faith 
and the master of this world, that would eventually culminate in 
Constantine and Christendom. Even so, a long line of Christian 
writers from Augustine to Gutierrez have remained critical of the 
state, sometimes for prophetic, sometimes for apocalyptic reasons. 
For no New Testament writer are God and the State one and the 
same, and theocracy is not envisioned this side of the re-creation of 
the world. Contemporary Christians would do well to remember the 
hierarchy Paul and other early Christians inherited from Judaism, a 
hierarchy that has the state, like all of creation, existing only as long 
as it is supported by the creator of all. This conception allows for a 
critical distance in our own discussions of faithful attitudes to 
government. Finally, New Testament writers, and especially Paul, in 
their attitude to the state illustrate the magnificent unconcern of a 
community which already hears itself lifted by the eschatological 
Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2003
108 Consensus 
trumpet, and the "arrogance" of those who plan on ruling with Christ 
- and that very soon. 
http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol29/iss1/8


A Very Brief Discussion of Religion and State in the New Testament

Wilfrid Laurier University

ConsensusVolume 29Issue 1 Hospitality - The Healing of the World Article 85-25-2003A Very Brief Discussion of Religion and State in theNew TestamentMatthew R. AndersonFollow this and additional works at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensusThis Studies and Observations is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion inConsensus by an authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended CitationAnderson, Matthew R. (2003) "A Very Brief Discussion of Religion and State in the New Testament," Consensus: Vol. 29 : Iss. 1 ,Article 8.Available at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol29/iss1/8A Very Brief Discussion of Religion and State in the New Testament Rev. Matthew R. Anderson, Ph.D. 103 Department of Theology, Concordia University, Montreal Christ the Redeemer Lutheran Church Dollard-Des-Ormeaux, Quebec What should be the Christian attitude to government? Members of Christian congregations are asking themselves this question once more in our own day, when God is increasingly invoked by parties on all sides of international conflicts, and when so many invoke patriotism and godliness in the same statements and with the same zeal. Is there a single, faithful, Biblically-based attitude to government? There was certainly no love lost between most early Christians and the one, overwhelmingly-present state that governed their lives and sometimes their deaths. Readers of the Hebrew Bible can point to a time- however brief and golden with myth - when Israelite faith and politics were one. However, the New Testament, unlike the Old, has no "holiness code" which once may have had the state-sanctioned force of law. Early Christians dreamt of no holy state other than that which the tmmpets would announce, and no blessed assembly other than that final world council when they would meet their Lord in the air. Neither is there any real early church equivalent to "official Yahwism" of either the tribal or later monarchical stamp, and this for one simple reason: New Testament Christianity never had a state. So-called "Christendom", where Christian dogma would eventually take on the weight of law and Christian institutions would be undergirded by state supp011, was far in the future for those who wrote the New Testament. It is doubtful that many of those earliest writers, eschatologically-focussed as they were, would have recognized the legitimacy of the humanly-imposed Christendom which later arose-and to which we are the heirs - in any case. The very earliest Jewish-Christians lost their state with other Jews at the destmction of Jemsalem. Most of the rest of early Christianity lived and worshiped Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2003104 Consensus and spread its gospel in an uneasy coexistence, marked by suspicion, apologetics, sporadic persecution and occasional martyrdom, with the only state most first century Christians knew, namely the Roman Empire. In effect, this means that the attitude of the New Testament to the state is simply the attitude of the texts to Rome. While the New Testament doesn't speak with a single voice on this or any other issue, early Christian attitudes to the state are rarely positive. They range from ambivalence (i.e. like bad-tasting medicine, the state may be necessary now but will pass away quickly) to out-right hostility (the monstrous depictions of Rome as Beast and harlot in The Revelation to John). Twenty-first century Christians wanting to know how to act as citizens of a changing world and looking to their scriptures for guidance, have some major interpretive distance to overcome. At the nub of any discussion of faith and government is the relationship between religion and the social order. But that relationship is precisely what is missing in the New Testament. The "problem" of the New Testament texts and the Christians who produced them is that they did not, and could not, either present or represent a civic religion. Two of the most fundamental questions of political life are simply not addressed by Christianity: (a) What is the nature of the public good? (b) What should be the relationships between individuals and groups in civic society? As later Romans such as Pliny, Tacitus and Suetonius quite rightly recognized, Christianity was a "superstition" in that it was both new and novel to the Roman mind, and wherever it took root it created divisions between citizens (witness the riot accounts in The Acts of the Apostles) and took its adherents' loyalties away from Rome. And yet while earliest Christianity was not a civic religion in the sense of being supportive of the mechanisms of state, neither does it seem to be fully engaged with issues of polity as a critical or prophetic voice. It simply had other concerns. · Paul, who is our earliest reliable witness to Jesus, is famous for telling us little about the latter. So it is not surprising that he similarly has little information on Jesus' attitude to church and state. But there are interesting hints elsewhere that perhaps Jesus engaged the issue of church and state in a way different from the immediately succeeding generation of Christians. Despite efforts by early Christian apologetics to do just this, we cannot escape the mute http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol29/iss1/8Religion and State in the New Testament 105 eloquence of Jesus' crucifixion - a Roman judgment. Being put to death by a government is hardly a ringing endorsement of a relationship with it. And the Gospels contain other tidbits. There is Jesus' extremely dry ridicule of Rome in the chreia about the whole empire owning just its coins: "give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's". There is the portrayal of Jesus in the Gospel of John, standing before the might of the empire, bloodied and yet telling a subdued Pilate that "you would have no power over me unless it had been given to you from above" (in which pericope, the Gospel writer makes the political point that, as with Samuel and Saul the people again choose a King over God with the words "we have no King but Caesar"). The words of Jesus to his disciples are about the inversion of power relationships in the kingdom of God: "You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them [but] whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant" (Mk I 0:42-43). All these passages and others imply that Jesus' teaching was critical of the state. But the point should be made with equal vigour that Jesus is no reformer of the state, for to engage in political discussion on that level is ultimately to recognize the state as legitimate but flawed, and I believe that Jesus' (and certainly Paul's) concerns lie elsewhere. Was the attitude of the first Christian writers toward the state unifonnly negative then? Some might point to the oft-quoted words of I Timothy 2: "I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions", as a sign that the earliest Christians practised at least a minimal civic responsibility. That may or may not be so. All we have is the admonition, not the response. But the very next words in Timothy are perhaps more telling: "so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity". Unlike the character Maximus in the movie Gladiator, whose familial piety was entirely wrapped up in his vision of the true nature of Rome, early Christians may have practised their civic duties only as a practical and minimal means to the end of worshiping in peace and spreading their faith without overt or systematic persecution. Likewise with the text that is perhaps the most often quoted as a support to secular power. Our history is replete with those who have quoted Paul's words in Romans 13: I b: "there is no authority except Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2003106 Consensus from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God", as proof for everything from the divine right of kings to the crushing of reform movements. Yet Paul's reasoning points toward a higher authority than that sitting among the seven hills of Rome, and what appears in his words to condone em1hly authority in fact contains a stinging analysis of its limitations. Paul is using a simple enthymeme to show the following reasoning: (a) all authority is from God; (b) Rome exercises authority; therefore (c) Rome's authority is from God. The rhetorical purpose of the enthymeme is not to justify Rome's power, but to suborn it. Implicit in this syllogism (which is remarkably similar to Jesus' words to Pilate) is the early Christian belief that Rome has no authority other than that which God has given it, and also that, when God would withdraw that support, as Paul and others believed would soon happen, Rome would have no legitimacy at all. A dictionary definition of quietism has that it is "a passive withdrawn attitude or policy toward the world or worldly affairs" (Mirriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionm)', Tenth Edition). In our day the term has become pejorative, since the assumption is that quietism gives those who would use government to oppress a green light to go ahead. I raise the term here because I do not believe that the very earliest Christians were quietists, unless that term can be applied to all apocalyptic communities. Rather, at least some early Christians, who have left us records of their thoughts, had a very definite opinion about what would happen to Rome when Jesus returned. To describe the fate of Rome they used what must have seemed revolutionary, even seditious words: "[at the resurrection], Then comes the end, when Jesus hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and and every authority and power" (I Cor 15:24). What would make Rome an enemy of the early Church (and more importantly to the early Christians, of Christ) was that process by which Rome began to compete, more and more consciously, with Jesus for the allegiance of the first believers. It is illuminating and entertaining to explore with some of those who have written on the bestial representations of the state in The Revelation to John (see, for instance, Harry Maier's recent book, Apocalypse Recalled: The Book of Revelation after Christendom. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003). The whole range of human emotion and judgment are here, from devastating comedy and parody http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol29/iss1/8Religion and State in the New Testament 107 to bitterly-tasted revenge. Democratically-minded as we westerners are, it is also instructive to note that there is no universal suffrage at the Parousia. Quite the opposite: the age-old dream of a theocracy comes back at the re-creation of the world, a new covenant community with the ILambi providing its light (Rev 21 :23), where the city centre is not a parliament but a temple. But as fascinating as the Revelation is, I maintain that the most complete condemnation of the state comes from Paul. Although his writings are much less vitriolic than the apocalyptic depictions of Rome in the Apocalypse, there is implicit in Paul's few references an almost casual dismissal of government. For example, in I Corinthians 6, Paul rebukes the Corinthians for taking each other to civil court. Where we might reasonably expect that he would use a rationale from love or proper ethical behaviour, Paul justifies his admonition that the Corinthian Christians should solve disputes among themselves with the following: "Do you not know that the saints will judge the world?" (6:2). The basic problem with Rome, for the earliest Christians, was that it was in competition with Christ, and no Christian could serve two masters. Moreover, in a world which was already beginning to pass away, government good or bad was equally destined for destruction, and of little or no account in the brief period before that was to happen. Only in our exegesis of Luke and from other later writers (for example, I Peter 2: 13-17) do we begin to see the long and often rocky process of mutual accommodation between the new faith and the master of this world, that would eventually culminate in Constantine and Christendom. Even so, a long line of Christian writers from Augustine to Gutierrez have remained critical of the state, sometimes for prophetic, sometimes for apocalyptic reasons. For no New Testament writer are God and the State one and the same, and theocracy is not envisioned this side of the re-creation of the world. Contemporary Christians would do well to remember the hierarchy Paul and other early Christians inherited from Judaism, a hierarchy that has the state, like all of creation, existing only as long as it is supported by the creator of all. This conception allows for a critical distance in our own discussions of faithful attitudes to government. Finally, New Testament writers, and especially Paul, in their attitude to the state illustrate the magnificent unconcern of a community which already hears itself lifted by the eschatological Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2003108 Consensus trumpet, and the "arrogance" of those who plan on ruling with Christ - and that very soon. http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol29/iss1/8

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A Very Brief Discussion of Religion and State in the New Testament

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