Updated: 3/17/20
Let every soul be obedient to higher authorities, for there is no authority unless it comes from God. The authorities that exist have been appointed by God. Therefore he who resists that authority opposes the command of God; and those who oppose it will receive judgment on themselves. For rulers are not a terror to good deeds, but to evil deeds. Do you desire to be unafraid of the one in authority? Do what is good, and you will receive his approval. For he is a servant of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for he does not carry the sword for no reason. For he is a servant of God, an avenger for wrath on the one who does evil. Therefore you must obey, not only because of the wrath, but also because of conscience. Because of this you pay taxes also. For authorities are servants of God, who attend to this very thing continually. Pay to everyone what is owed to them. Tax to whom tax is due, toll to whom toll is due; fear to whom fear is due, honor to whom honor is due (Romans 13:1–7).
For orthodox Christians, there is no escape from this passage. It affirms without qualification the legitimacy of civil government. The civil magistrate possesses God-given authority. Paul spoke of the magistrate as a diakonos [servant] of God (v. 4). A Christian who affirms the authority of the Bible must also affirm the authority of civil government. This has been the universal testimony of the church.
Paul spoke of higher powers. Strong’s Concordance defined the Greek word exousia as follows: “(in the sense of ability); privilege, i.e.(subj.) force, capacity, competency, freedom, or (obj.) mastery (concr. magistrate, superhuman, potentate, token of control), delegated influence: authority, jurisdiction, liberty, power, right, strength.” This applies to more than one covenantal authority. There are multiple hierarchies in this life. God has created competing jurisdictions in order to eliminate the possibility of an absolute centralized tyranny. This is the lesson through the ages of the tower of Babel. There was one people with one confession of faith: faith in autonomous man (Genesis 11:6–8). [North, Genesis, ch. 19:A] Paul said here that lawful authorities deserve obedience. He did not say or imply that there is only one lawful institutional authority that must be obeyed.
In his confrontation with the high priest, recorded in Acts 23, Paul affirmed this position. Even though he was an apostle and in possession of lawful authority, he did not deliberately challenge the high priest. “Paul looked directly at the council members and said, ‘Brothers, I have lived before God in all good conscience until this day.’ The high priest Ananias commanded those who stood by him to strike him on the mouth. Then said Paul to him, ‘God will strike you, you whitewashed wall. Are you sitting to judge me by the law, yet order me to be struck, against the law?’ Those who stood by said, ‘Is this how you insult God's high priest?’ Paul said, ‘I did not know, brothers, that he was high priest. For it is written, “You shall not speak evil of a ruler of your people’” (Acts 23:1–5). Paul honored lawful authorities.
Paul lived under the rule of Nero, a tyrant by any standard. Yet he wrote: “For rulers are not a terror to good deeds, but to evil deeds. Do you desire to be unafraid of the one in authority? Do what is good, and you will receive his approval. For he is a servant of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for he does not carry the sword for no reason. For he is a servant of God, an avenger for wrath on the one who does evil” (Romans 13:3–4). [North, Romans, ch. 11] Christians are to do good deeds, gaining praise from their rulers. God has set rulers in seats of authority to be a terror to evil-doers. Let these rulers devote their efforts to overcoming their enemies, not look for rebellious Christians to prosecute. There are rulers who themselves are evil and allied with evil men. Nevertheless, Paul said to obey. The goal of governments is to defend social order.
God has built into human nature the desire to live in a predictable world. For predictability, there must be rules and sanctions. This is why rules and sanctions make life easier. Every government has rules. It enforces its standards with sanctions. Most civil rulers want more authority for themselves. They want things to run smoothly, meaning predictably. The closer to righteousness that civil laws are, the more voluntary cooperation rulers will gain from the public. Rulers cannot rule without citizens who voluntarily cooperate. If everyone refused to obey a law, there would not be enough police to enforce it. This is why rulers prosecute a representative figure. This sends a message to the public: “If you don’t obey, and everyone else does, we’ll get you.” But there comes a day when many people take a chance and deliberately disobey the law. They refuse to cooperate with the civil government. On that day, the illusion of state omnipotence ends. In my era, the best example of this was the failure of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to maintain control, beginning in mid-August 1991. On December 25, the USSR went out of existence.
Paul’s discussion of institutional authorities follows a passage that challenges personal vengeance. “Repay no one evil for evil. Do good things in the sight of all people. If possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with all people. Do not avenge yourselves, beloved, but give way to the wrath of God. For it is written, ‘Vengeance belongs to me; I will repay,’ says the Lord” (Romans 12:17–19). [North, Romans, ch. 10] If personal vengeance is wrong, then how does God bring vengeance in history? Through civil government. The text does not say that vengeance is wrong. It says that God possesses final authority to impose vengeance. He has delegated the authority to impose physical vengeance to two governments: civil and family.
Peter agreed with Paul on this point. “Obey every human authority for the Lord's sake. Obey both the king as supreme, and also the governors, who are sent to punish evildoers and to praise those who do good. For this is God’s will, that in doing good you silence the ignorant talk of foolish people. As free people, do not use your freedom as a covering for wickedness, but be like servants of God. Honor all people. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the king” (I Peter 2:13–17).
Neither Peter nor Paul demanded obedience to civil government at the expense of obedience to other lawful governments. Peter explicitly told the Jewish leaders, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29b). Yet they had the authority to beat him, which they did (Acts 5:40). He submitted to the beating, but not to their command to stop preaching the gospel. He disobeyed, but he submitted to the sanctions for the sake of his disobedience. So did Paul. My point is this: Peter and Paul self-consciously operated within the existing Roman legal system. Paul understood Roman law, and as a Roman citizen, he invoked it. “Paul said, ‘I stand before the judgment seat of Caesar where I must be judged. I have wronged no Jews, just as you also very well know. Though if I have done wrong and if I have done what is worthy of death, I do not refuse to die. But if their accusations are nothing, no one may hand me over to them. I appeal to Caesar’” (Acts 25:10–11). His words, “I do not refuse to die,” affirmed the legitimacy of civil government, including capital punishment. But, at the same time, he appealed to Caesar to escape the jurisdiction of Festus, who Paul believed was acting on behalf of the Jews. This was consistent with his affirmation of the ministerial office of civil magistrates.
The anarchist rejects all forms of civil government. He can point to every kind of tax as distorting the free market. He insists that the free market should be legitimately autonomous. But then come the problems of violence and sin. How can these be predictably restrained? The biblical answer is government, including civil government. In the anarchist’s world of profit-seeking private police forces and profit-seeking armies, the result is inevitably a warlord society. Militarily successful private armies will always seek to establish their monopolistic rule by killing the competition, literally. Civil governments always reappear. They are one of God’s four ordained systems of government: self-government, church government, family government, and civil government. All four are sealed by an oath. All four involve sanctions.
Sin mandates civil government and civil sanctions. The right of civil rulers to impose physical punishments is affirmed clearly by Paul in Acts 25. He affirmed in Romans 13 the legitimacy of civil government among other legitimate governments. He said that rulers are ordained by God. This is powerful language. It invokes the authority of God on behalf of the state. If Paul is correct, then anarchism is incorrect. There is no way around this exegetically. This has been the teaching of all branches of the Christian church from the beginning. There has been unanimity on this point, as on few others, other than the Trinity.
The threat of crime forces men to allocate scarce economic resources to the defense against criminals. The state is the primary institutional means of crime prevention. It imposes negative sanctions on convicted criminals. The state’s God-given goal is to uphold justice by means of widespread fear. Moses said: “The judges must make diligent inquiries; see, if the witness is a false witness and has testified falsely against his brother, then must you do to him, as he had wished to do to his brother; and you will remove the evil from among you. Then those who remain will hear and fear, and will from then on commit no longer any such evil among you. Your eyes must not pity; life will pay for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot” (Deuteronomy 19:18–21). [North, Deuteronomy, ch. 45:A] Fear adds to the cost of criminal behavior. When the cost of anything increases, other things remaining constant, less of it is demanded. This is the goal of negative civil sanctions: less crime. Institutional authorities seek to reduce crime by imposing negative sanctions on law-breakers.
The costs of crime-prevention reduce men’s wealth. People believe that such expenditures prevent an even greater reduction of their wealth by criminals. People find it more expensive to cooperate when crime increases. Their lives and property are less secure. Crime makes them more cautious about entering into cooperative ventures with people they do not know well. The information costs of dealing with strangers are high, and some people choose not to take these extra risks. This is why, because of sin, the division of labor is reduced. Crime-prevention expenditures reduce risk and increase the level of cooperation.
To maximize the division of labor in a world of sin, the state must impose negative sanctions only on law-breakers, biblically defined. It must conserve resources by not prosecuting innocent people. The Bible offers authoritative guidelines on what the state should prosecute. By adding laws that go beyond the Bible, or even go counter to it, civil rulers increase the cost of crime prevention. Legislators and bureaucrats who go beyond the Bible in seeking to stamp out illegal activities make it more expensive for people to cooperate voluntarily to achieve their ends. This reduces the division of labor. It therefore reduces people’s wealth. The state thereby produces the same condition that criminals produce. The difference is this: good men feel justified in defending themselves against criminals. They feel far less justified in defending themselves against the state. The predator state can become a greater threat to economic and social cooperation than the predator criminal class. In some cases, the state allies itself with the criminal class.
In Part 6, I deal with a few areas of civil government that are legitimate. If I were to deal with those areas of modern civil government that are illegitimate, it would fill several volumes. In the United States, the rules and regulations established by federal bureaucracies are published daily in the Federal Register. Each issue fills around 200 pages of three-column fine print. In some years, the total number of pages exceeds 80,000. In what I would regard as good years, this may be as few as 68,000. Then there are state governments, county governments, and city governments, each with its own laws and bureaucratic rules.
The crucial service that civil government brings to the social order is a system of justice. To gain the cooperation of the public, the state must threaten negative sanctions. But that is an expensive form of rulership to impose. There must be voluntary cooperation from the broad masses of the public. If the state is perceived as unjust, then it will not gain the degree of voluntary cooperation that would be necessary to extend the power of the state further into people’s lives. This is a built-in limitation on the expansion of state power. People will increasingly resist what they regard as unjust rule. This raises the cost to the state of enforcing its growing list of laws and regulations. When the cost of something rises, less is demanded.
The second-most important task of the state is to preserve peace. Paul made this clear. He spoke with respect to the peace of the church: “Therefore first of all, I urge that requests, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in authority, in order that we may live a peaceful and quiet life in all godliness and dignity” (I Timothy 2:1–2). The greater the degree of peace, the more resources that people are willing to invest in dealing with the limits imposed by cursed scarcity. The fewer resources the people must devote to defending themselves against fraud and violence, the more likely they will be productive. This is basic to free-market economic theory. Ludwig von Mises put it this way in Human Action.
The advantages derived from peaceful cooperation and division of labor are universal. They immediately benefit every generation, and not only later descendants. For what the individual must sacrifice for the sake of society he is amply compensated by greater advantages. His sacrifice is only apparent and temporary; he foregoes a smaller gain in order to reap a greater one later. No reasonable being can fail to see this obvious fact. When social cooperation is intensified by enlarging the field in which there is division of labor or when legal protection and the safeguarding of peace are strengthened, the incentive is the desire of all those concerned to improve their own conditions. In striving after his own—rightly understood—interests the individual works toward an intensification of social cooperation and peaceful intercourse (VIII:2).
Mises went on. “State or government is the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion. It has the monopoly of violent action. No individual is free to use violence or the threat of violence if the government has not accorded this right to him. The state is essentially an institution for the preservation of peaceful interhuman relations. However, for the preservation of peace it must be prepared to crush the onslaughts of peace-breakers.” He was a representative of nineteenth-century liberalism: limited civil government as a way to defend freedom.
The free market is not autonomous. It is an extension of the individual or the family, both of which operate under civil law. The free market is under civil law. Civil law covenantally is superior to the free market. The civil covenant establishes the conditions of the free market by shaping public behavior and attitudes. Civil law is enforced by rulers who are servants of God. Taxation as such is not theft, contrary to some libertarian theorists. Most forms of taxation are theft, and all levels above the tithe surely are (I Samuel 8:15, 17), but not all. [North, Historical Books, ch. 14] Lawful authorities are entitled to economic support. Taxation supports the state.
Part 6 is therefore a study of the state is an agency of peacemaking. The individual has no right to impose physical vengeance. “Do not take vengeance or hold any grudge against any of your people, but instead love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord” (Leviticus 19:18). [North, Leviticus, ch. 16] But, because the state claims a monopoly of violence, it is constantly tempted to expand its power beyond the limitations imposed by biblical law. That was the message of the prophet Samuel to the people of Israel when they sought to create a king. He warned them of the tyranny to come (I Samuel 8). They paid no attention. In the modern world, Christians have also paid no attention. They are paying a heavy price for this lack of concern. They will continue to pay a heavy price until such time as the modern humanistic state bankrupts itself in a vain attempt to fulfill all of the political promises that generations of politicians have made to the electorate. That is when the Christian church will need articulate defenders of limited civil government, meaning civil government limited by biblical law and the principles that undergird biblical law. I am inviting you to participate in the development of Christian economic theory and Christian political theory that will present a clear and compelling case for biblical limited civil government.
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