Christians and the State

Definition

A framework for reading the New Testament’s instructions on Christian conduct toward governing political authority (Rom 13:1-7, the load-bearing text; Titus 3:1; 1 Pet 2:13-17; Mark 12:13-17 and parallels) in conversation with the New Testament’s other witness on the same question (Acts 4:19-20 and 5:29, “we must obey God rather than men”; Revelation 13 and 17-18, the cosmic critique of empire; the apocalyptic refusal of imperial cult; the cross itself as a political execution). The framework refuses two flat readings. The first is the flat-submission reading that takes Rom 13:1-7 in isolation as a divine warrant for uncritical obedience to whatever government is in power, regardless of its policies or character. This reading produced the German church’s accommodation to the Nazi regime, much of the white Southern church’s defense of slavery and Jim Crow, and innumerable other failures of Christian political witness. The second is the flat-antinomian reading that treats the gospel as merely apolitical or as fundamentally subversive of all governmental order, as if Rom 13:1-7 were simply embarrassing or to be deconstructed away. The framework reads both halves of the canon’s witness together. The state, for the New Testament, is a real but limited divine instrument for restraining evil and ordering common life (Rom 13:1-4); the state is also, persistently, a demonized power that overreaches, demands ultimate loyalty, and persecutes the gospel (Rev 13). The Christian’s posture is therefore neither uncritical submission nor reflexive rebellion but discerning faithfulness: ordinary submission to lawful and limited authority, unyielding refusal when the state demands what belongs to God alone, and constant alertness to the gap between the state’s claims and the gospel’s claims. The lane reads Rom 13 alongside Acts 4-5, Rev 13, Daniel 3+6, Exodus 1, and the cross itself, holding all of them in the same biblical witness. The framework is reused by Romans 13, Titus 3, 1 Peter 2, the Gospel “render to Caesar” passages, the Acts apostolic-civil-disobedience passages, Daniel, and Revelation.

Key proponents

Modern

N.T. Wright, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels (HarperOne, 2012); Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Fortress, 2013); Surprised by Hope (HarperOne, 2008). Wright’s reading of the New Testament’s political claims is the lane’s anchor for the counter-imperial dimension. His argument: the gospel’s announcement that “Jesus is kyrios” was the most-charged political statement that could be made in the first-century Roman world, where Caesar is kyrios was the empire’s foundational confession. The early church preached a political claim (the lordship of Christ over Caesar) inside a political context. Wright is therefore careful with Rom 13: it is not a generic endorsement of state authority but a particular instruction to a specific community on how to live under a particular regime while never confusing it with the kingdom that has already arrived. See counter-imperial reading for the broader frame.
John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (Eerdmans, 1972). The classic Anabaptist articulation of the gospel as inherently political and the church as a distinct political community whose primary mode of engagement with the state is its own life together, not the seizure or sharing of state power. Yoder reads Rom 13 carefully: the chapter does not endorse the state’s legitimacy in any absolute sense; it instructs Christians to not return evil for evil even when the state is the agent of evil (Rom 12:17-21 immediately precedes Rom 13:1-7). The Yoderian reading must be held with awareness of Yoder’s abuse of women, which is a real moral wound on his legacy; the structural argument remains important.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (1953); Ethics (1949); The Cost of Discipleship (1937). Bonhoeffer is the framework’s most-significant twentieth-century witness. As a German Lutheran pastor and theologian during the rise of Nazism, he watched the German church largely capitulate to Hitler on the basis of a flat-submission reading of Rom 13 (the German Christians’ Volkstheologie explicitly grounded itself there). Bonhoeffer broke with this reading. His Ethics develops a careful theology of Christian responsibility under unjust government, including the moral possibility of tyrannicide (he was involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler). His witness, ending with his execution at Flossenbürg in April 1945, is the framework’s most painful and necessary anchor. The lane reads Rom 13 inside the long shadow of what the flat-reading produced under the Third Reich.
Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens (with William H. Willimon, Abingdon, 1989); The Peaceable Kingdom (University of Notre Dame, 1983); A Community of Character (University of Notre Dame, 1981). Hauerwas extends Yoder’s reading into late twentieth-century American context. His argument: the modern American church has so deeply identified with the American political project (in both progressive and conservative variants) that it has forgotten how to be the church. Hauerwas calls the church to recover its alien status, its character as a polis in its own right whose primary witness to the state is its own counter-cultural life together.
Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Fortress, 1978, 2nd ed. 2001); God, Neighbor, Empire (Baylor, 2016). Brueggemann’s reading of the Old Testament’s prophetic-political tradition (Moses against Pharaoh, Elijah against Ahab, Isaiah and Jeremiah against Israel’s own monarchy and the surrounding empires) is the lane’s anchor for the Hebrew Bible dimension of the framework. The prophetic critique of empire (including Israel’s own kingdom when it became imperial) is the deep root of the New Testament’s political instinct. Christians who only know Rom 13 and not Exod 1 or Dan 3 or Isa 36-37 will read political theology wrong.
Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black (IVP, 2020). McCaulley’s chapter on the police and the Black church’s reading of Rom 13 is the lane’s contemporary anchor for the framework’s race-and-state dimension. The Black church’s reading of Rom 13 has never been the flat-submission reading; that reading was used against the Black church for centuries. The Black church’s reading has always held Rom 13 alongside Acts 5:29 and Rev 13, distinguishing between lawful authority that restrains evil and unlawful authority that perpetrates evil. McCaulley’s witness is essential corrective to white-American Christian default readings.
Brian Zahnd, A Farewell to Mars: An Evangelical Pastor’s Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace (David C. Cook, 2014); Postcards from Babylon (Spello Press, 2019). Zahnd’s cruciform-pacifist reading of the New Testament’s political claims locates the gospel’s deepest critique of empire in the cross itself: Jesus is executed by the cooperation of religious authority and Roman political power, and his resurrection is God’s verdict on that cooperation.
Scot McKnight, Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church (Brazos, 2014). McKnight’s argument that the kingdom is the church’s primary political category, not the state, not the nation, not the political party. The state and the kingdom are not the same; the church serves the kingdom and lives under the state, in that order. Strong implications for political theology.
Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers (Fortress, 1992); Naming the Powers (Fortress, 1984). Wink’s recovery of the New Testament’s “powers and principalities” language as including political-institutional powers (alongside spiritual ones) reframes the church-state relation. The state is one of the powers: created good (Col 1:16), fallen, in need of redemption. The Christian’s relation to the state is therefore part of the broader theological category of relating to fallen-but-redeemable powers. See powers and principalities.
Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge, 1996); The Ways of Judgment (Eerdmans, 2005). O’Donovan develops a sophisticated constructive political theology from within the Reformed and Anglican traditions. He defends a more positive role for the Christian engagement with state authority than the Anabaptist tradition allows, while refusing simple identifications between any specific political regime and the kingdom of God. The lane reads O’Donovan as a significant interlocutor without fully adopting his constructive program.
Karl Barth, “The Christian Community and the Civil Community” (1946); Church Dogmatics III.4 §54-55. Barth’s articulation of the relation between the church (the Christengemeinde) and the political community (the Bürgergemeinde) is the foundational twentieth-century Reformed treatment. Barth had himself led the German Confessing Church’s resistance to the Reichskirche and drafted the Barmen Declaration (1934). His reading of Rom 13 is decidedly not flat-submission.
William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Eerdmans, 2011); Torture and Eucharist (Blackwell, 1998). Cavanaugh’s Catholic political-theological reading of the relation between political theology and ecclesiology, with particular attention to the modern state’s claim to ultimate loyalty (which the eucharist refuses).
John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Blackwell, 1990). Radical Orthodoxy’s critique of the modern liberal state as theologically inadequate.

Premodern witnesses

The early Christian martyrs (Polycarp, Justin Martyr, the Scillitan martyrs, the Lyon martyrs, Perpetua and Felicity). The first three centuries of the church’s witness on this question was, primarily, the refusal of the imperial cult and the willingness to suffer death rather than offer incense to Caesar. The martyrs’ line, Christianus sum (“I am a Christian”), is the framework’s original premodern anchor. The state’s claim to ultimate loyalty was the precise point at which the Christian refusal became visible.
Tertullian, Apology (c. 197); To Scapula (c. 212). Tertullian’s defense of Christians against Roman charges is one of the earliest sustained Christian political-theological texts. His distinction between honoring the emperor (which Christians do) and worshiping the emperor (which they refuse) shapes the framework. Tertullian’s famous “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church” (Apology 50) names the framework’s pastoral logic: state violence against the church does not destroy the church.
Augustine, City of God (c. 413-426). The foundational Western Christian political-theological text. Augustine writes after the sack of Rome (410) and the collapse of the assumption that the Roman state was the terrestrial embodiment of God’s purposes. His distinction between the civitas Dei (city of God) and the civitas terrena (earthly city) shapes all subsequent Western political theology. The two cities are intermingled in history but never identical; the church is the city of God in pilgrimage; the state is the earthly city in its less-evil forms (the libido dominandi, the lust for domination, is the earthly city’s deep grammar). Augustine is not a flat-submission theologian; he is the source of the careful, two-cities reading that has shaped Catholic, Reformed, and Lutheran political theology for sixteen centuries.
John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans 23 (on Rom 13:1-7). Chrysostom reads the chapter carefully: the apostolic instruction concerns submission to the role of governing authority, not the personal endorsement of any particular ruler; and the chapter’s limits are set by the rest of the canon (including the apostolic disobedience of Acts 4-5).
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II.II.42 (on sedition) and the political treatises. Aquinas develops Augustine’s two-cities frame into the medieval Catholic synthesis. He defends the legitimacy of certain forms of resistance to tyranny (an unjust law is not a law, lex iniusta non est lex; Summa I.II.96.4) while maintaining a generally positive view of legitimate state authority. The framework’s later defenders of resistance to tyranny (the Reformation’s Vindiciae contra tyrannos, the colonial American resistance) often draw on Aquinas.
Martin Luther, Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed (1523). Luther’s famous two kingdoms doctrine: the temporal kingdom (state) and the spiritual kingdom (church) are both ordered by God, with different functions. The doctrine has been criticized (especially by Yoder and Bonhoeffer in the wake of the Nazi catastrophe) for permitting the church to abandon its political-prophetic responsibility to the state. The framework reads Luther’s two-kingdoms doctrine carefully, with the proviso that neither kingdom is autonomous from the lordship of Christ.
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion IV.20 (1559). Calvin’s treatment of civil government is one of the most-developed Reformation treatments of the question. He defends the legitimacy of resistance to tyranny through legitimate lower magistrates (which becomes a load-bearing doctrine for the Reformed political tradition’s engagement with the early modern absolutist state). Calvin reads Rom 13 carefully and is unwilling to extend its instruction to a blanket endorsement of any specific regime.
The Barmen Declaration (1934), drafted primarily by Karl Barth and the German Confessing Church in resistance to the Reichskirche‘s accommodation to Hitler. Barmen is the framework’s most-significant modern confessional statement. Its central claim: “Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death. We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.” The state, on Barmen, cannot be a source of revelation alongside Christ. This is the framework’s confessional anchor.

See How We Read for the longer lineage of this and the other frameworks on this site.

Core insights

Romans 13:1-7 in its full canonical context. The single most-quoted New Testament text on Christian-state relations must be read inside its immediate context (Rom 12:14-21, which commands love of enemies and not returning evil for evil) and inside the broader canon (Acts 4:19-20 and 5:29, where the apostles openly defy state authority; Rev 13, where the state appears as the beast; the cross itself as the state’s execution of the innocent Lord). Rom 13:1-7 instructs Christians as ordinary citizens of the empire on how to live under lawful governmental authority that performs its God-given function of restraining evil (verses 3-4). The chapter does not address what to do when the state itself becomes the agent of evil; that question is addressed elsewhere in the canon. To extract Rom 13 from its canonical neighbors and treat it as a stand-alone divine warrant for uncritical state obedience is to make the text say what it does not say, and to do so in a way that has produced enormous historical evil (most darkly, the German church under Hitler).

The state is a real-but-limited divine instrument. The framework affirms the New Testament’s positive teaching: governmental authority is established by God for the restraint of evil and the good of common life (Rom 13:1, 4; 1 Pet 2:13-14). Anarchism in the name of the gospel is not a New Testament position. The state has real, limited, derivative authority. The qualifier limited matters as much as the noun real. The state’s authority is not absolute; it is derived from and bounded by the authority of God, which the state can never replace or exceed. When the state demands what belongs to God alone (worship, ultimate loyalty, the violation of the image of God in fellow human beings), the state has exceeded its mandate and the Christian’s obligation reverses: from submission to refusal.

The apostolic-civil-disobedience tradition. The New Testament is not silent on what happens when the state demands what belongs to God. Acts 4:19-20: Peter and John, ordered by the Sanhedrin not to speak in Jesus’s name, reply, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge; for we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.” Acts 5:29: “We must obey God rather than men.” This is the New Testament’s first word on state-versus-God conflict, and it is disobedience to state authority for the sake of obedience to God. The Christian tradition’s deep instinct on this question is not flat-submission but discerning faithfulness: ordinary submission to lawful authority, unyielding refusal when the state demands what God alone may claim.

The Hebrew Bible’s prophetic-political tradition. The framework draws deeply on the Hebrew Bible’s long testimony of resistance to imperial power and to Israel’s own monarchy when it becomes imperial. Exodus 1: the Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah lie to Pharaoh and refuse to kill the Hebrew baby boys, and God honors their disobedience (Exod 1:20-21). Daniel 3: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refuse to bow to Nebuchadnezzar’s image and accept the furnace. Daniel 6: Daniel refuses to stop praying to the God of Israel and accepts the lions’ den. Isaiah 36-37: Hezekiah’s refusal of the Assyrian envoy’s demand for surrender. The prophetic critique of Israel’s own kings (Nathan against David, Elijah against Ahab, Amos against Jeroboam II, Jeremiah against Jehoiakim and Zedekiah) shows the prophetic tradition’s willingness to confront state power even when that power is Israelite. Christians who read Rom 13 without this Old Testament backdrop will read it wrong.

Revelation’s apocalyptic critique of empire. The Book of Revelation contains the New Testament’s most extensive negative assessment of state power. Rev 13’s beast emerging from the sea is widely (and correctly) read as Rome, the same Rome whose authority Rom 13 instructs Christians to submit to under ordinary conditions. The juxtaposition is theologically deliberate: the very state to which the Christian submits in ordinary life is the very state that, in its imperial-cultic overreach, becomes the beast. Rev 17-18’s vision of Babylon-as-Rome is the framework’s most-developed apocalyptic critique of imperial economic-political power. The lane reads Revelation alongside Rom 13 as canon-internal correction: Rom 13’s instruction operates within the limits Rev 13’s vision exposes.

The cross as the deepest political claim. The single most-political event in the New Testament is the cross. Jesus is executed by the cooperation of religious authority (the Sanhedrin) and Roman political power (Pilate, the Roman cohort). His crucifixion is the empire’s verdict on him; his resurrection is God’s verdict on the empire. The gospel is not apolitical; it is political at its center. Christians who say “Jesus is Lord” are saying Caesar is not, and the early church understood this clearly enough that the martyrs went to their deaths over it. The framework reads every contested New Testament political text in light of this central event. Cruciform faithfulness under unjust state power is not a marginal Christian witness; it is the central Christian witness, modeled by the Lord himself.

Three positions on church-state relation in modern political theology.

The Constantinian position: the state and the church are partners in a single Christian society, with the state’s authority sanctified by the church’s blessing and the church’s authority supported by the state’s coercive power. This was the dominant Western pattern from Constantine through Christendom and into the early modern era. It is largely discredited in contemporary theology, though its assumptions still shape much American Christian political reflex (especially the assumption that the state should be a Christian state).

The two-kingdoms position (Lutheran, with variants in Reformed and Anglican traditions): the temporal and spiritual kingdoms have distinct functions; the Christian operates in both; the church’s primary task is the proclamation of the gospel, while the state’s primary task is the maintenance of justice and peace. The position is vulnerable (as Bonhoeffer’s witness in Nazi Germany demonstrated painfully) when the state becomes openly evil; defenders of two-kingdoms theology argue that the position rightly understood includes the Christian’s prophetic responsibility to call the state to its God-given function.

The Anabaptist / kingdom-distinct position: the church is itself a political community, a polis, whose primary mode of witness to the state is its own counter-cultural life together. The church is not primarily a chaplain to the state or a junior partner with the state; it is an alternative society. Yoder, Hauerwas, and the broader Anabaptist tradition. The lane reads this position with deep sympathy, recognizing both its prophetic clarity and its tendency toward sectarian withdrawal.

The framework’s lane reads all three positions critically. Constantinianism is largely abandoned. The two-kingdoms tradition is honored but read with full awareness of its capacity for failure under conditions of state evil (Bonhoeffer’s witness is decisive). The Anabaptist tradition is the lane’s closest sympathies, with the qualifier that the church’s witness to the state is both its own counter-cultural life and its prophetic speech to the powers (Eph 3:10).

The American church’s specific situation. The framework’s contemporary application addresses the American church specifically. American Christianity has, in much of its history, tended toward a Constantinian-lite assumption that the United States is a Christian nation whose state authority should be supported by the church and whose interests align with the gospel’s. This assumption has produced two distinct failures: the uncritical-conservative failure of supporting whatever the state does because the state is “ours,” and the uncritical-progressive failure of identifying the gospel with the policy preferences of a particular political party. The framework’s lane refuses both. The state is not the church’s; the church is not the state’s chaplain or the state’s prophetic critic on behalf of a particular party. The church is a distinct polis, witnessing to the lordship of Christ over every political authority, supporting state action when it serves the gospel’s ends of justice and the common good, refusing state demands when they exceed the state’s mandate, and never confusing the gospel with any specific political program. The framework’s contemporary witness, in McCaulley’s hands, is also specifically about how the American church has failed Black Americans particularly through its uncritical readings of Rom 13 deployed in service of unjust state action.

The framework presses a discerning, not a partisan, Christianity. The lane refuses to map onto American left-or-right political alignments. The framework’s instinct is neither the Christian-nationalist instinct that fuses gospel and state nor the secular-liberal instinct that privatizes the gospel out of public engagement. It is the discerning instinct of the canon itself: submit to lawful authority, refuse what God forbids, name the state’s overreach, live as a distinct polis, witness to the powers, suffer when necessary, and never confuse Caesar with the Lord.

Where it shows up in Scripture

Romans 13:1-7, the load-bearing instruction on submission to governing authorities
Romans 12:14-21 (the immediate prior context, love of enemies and not returning evil for evil)
Titus 3:1, submission to rulers and authorities, readiness for every good work
1 Peter 2:13-17, submission to every human institution “for the Lord’s sake”; honor everyone, love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the emperor
Mark 12:13-17 // Matthew 22:15-22 // Luke 20:20-26, “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s”
Acts 4:19-20 and 5:29, “we must obey God rather than men” (the apostolic civil-disobedience precedent)
Acts 16:35-39; 22:25-29; 25:11, Paul’s appeals to Roman citizenship and to Caesar (the Christian’s use of legal protections without ultimate loyalty to the state)
Revelation 13; 17-18, the beast and Babylon; the cosmic-apocalyptic critique of imperial power
John 18:33-37; 19:10-11, Jesus before Pilate, naming Pilate’s authority as given from above and limited by it
Daniel 3 (Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego), Daniel 6 (Daniel in the lions’ den), the prophetic-resistance precedents
Exodus 1:15-22 (the Hebrew midwives), the foundational civil-disobedience text
1 Samuel 8, Samuel’s warning about the cost of monarchy (“the king will take”)
1 Kings 21 (Naboth’s vineyard), the prophetic critique of state-sponsored injustice
Isaiah 36-37, Hezekiah’s refusal of Assyrian terms
Jeremiah 29:7, “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you… and pray to the Lord on its behalf” (the exilic-engagement model)
Jeremiah 38, Jeremiah’s imprisonment by his own state for prophesying against its policy
Amos 5:11-12, 24 and the prophetic critique of state-sponsored economic injustice
Psalm 2; 110, the Lord’s verdict on the rebellious kings of the earth

Common misreadings to avoid

“Romans 13 means uncritical obedience.” No. The chapter operates inside the canon’s broader witness, which includes Acts 5:29 (“we must obey God rather than men”) and Rev 13 (the state as beast). Rom 13’s instruction concerns ordinary submission to lawful authority that performs its God-given function; it does not apply when the state has become the agent of injustice. The German church’s catastrophic failure under Hitler was largely produced by reading Rom 13 in the flat-submission mode. We are not allowed to repeat the reading that produced that history.
“The gospel is apolitical.” No. The gospel’s central claim, Jesus is kyrios, is the most political claim that could be made in the first-century world. The cross is a political execution. The resurrection is God’s verdict on imperial violence. To call the gospel apolitical is to misread the New Testament entirely.
“The gospel is identical with my political program.” No. Neither the contemporary American right nor the contemporary American left has a monopoly on the gospel. The church’s witness to the state is cruciform, discerning, and never reducible to a partisan position. Christians who identify their political tribe’s program with the gospel have already lost the gospel’s distance from the state.
“The church should withdraw entirely from political engagement.” Half-right and half-wrong. The Anabaptist tradition rightly insists on the church’s distinct polity; it sometimes wrongly accepts sectarian withdrawal as the only mode of witness. The New Testament includes both Pauline-civic engagement (Rom 13; Paul’s use of Roman citizenship) and apocalyptic-critical distance (Rev 13). The framework holds both.
“The Old Testament is the political book; the New Testament is the spiritual book.” No. This is the Marcionite distortion. The Old Testament’s prophetic-political tradition (Exodus, Isaiah, Amos, Jeremiah) grounds the New Testament’s political claims (the Magnificat in Luke 1; the cross; Revelation). The Christian who only reads the New Testament for political theology has cut off the root.
“Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the assassination plot was a violation of his Christian commitments.” Debated, and the framework holds this carefully. Bonhoeffer himself wrestled with the moral weight of his choice; he did not claim it was without cost. The framework does not endorse tyrannicide as a normal Christian option but does honor Bonhoeffer’s witness as showing the extreme limits to which the flat-submission reading of Rom 13 cannot be allowed to go. The same canon that includes Rom 13 also includes Exodus 1 and the Hebrew midwives.

Definition

Key proponents

Core insights

Where it shows up in Scripture

Common misreadings to avoid

Further reading