The Bonhoeffer post the other day provoked some fine, fine discussion on whether or not Roman 13 forbids all resistance to civil authority. The ideas expressed on both sides were thoughtful, showing genuine wrestling with a difficult issue.
I wonder if we could factor into the issue the doctrine of vocation.
Elizabeth Scalia at the First Things blog cited another quotation from Bonhoeffer:
He once argued, “if a teacher says to a child, ‘did your father come home drunk again last night,’ is the child bound to tell the truth?” Bonhoeffer decided no, the teacher [institution] had intruded beyond her scope, and therefore the child, to honor his father, is not obligated to subject him to judgment or mockery, or for that matter governmental intrusion.
That is pure vocation ethics, recognizing that what is sinful outside of vocation (e.g., sex outside of marriage; killing someone), can be a good work when performed within vocation (e.g., sex within marriage; a soldier fighting on a battlefield). In this case, the teacher had no authority, no calling from God, to interfere with the family and make the child betray his father. The child was lying, but he was fulfilling the commandment to honor his father and acting within his vocation.
Romans 13 is about the vocation of the civil authority, describing how all authority is really from God, who works through lawful magistrates to punish evildoers and to reward those who do well.
Where does Hitler fit into Romans 13? He punished those who did well and rewarded evildoers. Did God call him to do that? Was he exercising God’s authority? Or violating it? Was he loving and serving his neighbors in his vocation? How can we say that Hitler had a vocation protected by Romans 13, when in actuality he was consistently sinning against his own office and failing to fulfill its duties? What authority did Hitler have? Not God’s, as in Romans 13, since he was violating God’s authority.
Was Hitler even the lawful magistrate? He was elected to the Chancellorship, but he later suspended the constitution under which he was serving. He banned all political parties other than his own and made himself Fuehrer for life, something that had no legal authority behind it.
Yes, Romans 13 upheld the pagan Roman authorities, but Rome had an excellent legal system, one of the best ever devised. This text was not justifying Nero. Christians certainly saw the self-proclaimed deified Emperors as acting outside of their calling and not worthy of being obeyed when it came to their demands to be worshipped. Christians continued to obey the legal system that restrained evildoers, as Romans 13 says to do, but they denied–at the cost of their lives–the notion that the Emperor has a divine authority in defiance of God’s authority.
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