Submit to the Authorities? What 1 Peter 2:13-17 Claims About Political Power
Romans 13:1-7 is one of the most difficult passages in the New Testament. For starters, there is a long and convoluted interpretive history of not only this single
By Alex Bernardo, Libertarian Christian Institute
Romans 13:1-7 is one of the most difficult passages in the New Testament. For starters, there is a long and convoluted interpretive history of not only this single, isolated teaching in Romans but of Paul’s letter as a whole. In my judgment, Romans is by far the most contentious book in the Bible, including the mysterious (but often simply ignored) Revelation of John. There are many reasons for this; the text that ripped the Roman Catholic Church apart in the 16th century was Romans 1:16-17, the stone which the builders rejected that became the chief cornerstone of Martin Luther’s reformation project. The answers to Christianity’s great dogmatic debates about sin and salvation are (thought to be, at least) found in the letter to the Imperial capital. Every serious theologian and Biblical scholar has had to give an account of Romans, and no one, literally no one, completely agrees with other interpreters on various aspects of the Pauline text.
The passage in question, Romans 13:1-7, also has a torturous reception history. Throughout Western history, this passage has been appropriated to support nearly every political program, justify every policy decision, and legitimize every regime. Rarely have interpreters tried to grapple with the historical, cultural, and rhetorical nuances of Romans 13 that might shed light on both what Paul intended to communicate to his audience and how the recipients of his letter would have understood it. I am universally dissatisfied with every interpretation of Romans 13, including my own.
This leads us to the disturbing but accurate reality that no one really takes Paul’s statements in Romans 13 at face value, even if they take his statement seriously. You might say that history disproves this; “Okay, libertarian,” the skeptical reader may ask, “just because it is a problem for your political philosophy doesn’t mean it’s a problem for mine.” Except it is. Christians love to quote Romans 13 when those with whom they agree are in power. Progressive Christians use this passage to justify massive, redistributive welfare states. But what happens when Republicans win elections? #RESIST! Conservative Christians use this passage to justify drug and immigration enforcement. But what happens when blue-state legislatures pass gun-restriction laws? #SHALLNOTBEINFRINGED! And, despite what NPR might try to tell us (they did claim Saddam had WMD’s, after all), we would be hard pressed to find anyone on the mainstream left or right in the United States today arguing that Paul would have happily encouraged Christians to submit to Adolf Hitler. There are limits to Romans 13, and we all know it.
The ‘Romans 13’ of the Catholic Epistles
Whenever I hear someone cite Romans 13:1-17, I groan. Here we go again. But it is not for any of the reasons I have outlined above. Why the disdain for the most infamous political passage in the whole of the Christian canon? Because it unfairly receives all of the attention. Hidden in the New Testament between Hebrews and Revelation, there are a small number of letters (seven, to be exact) known as the ‘Catholic Epistles’ (the word catholic here meaning ‘universal’) that are often entirely overlooked by the average reader of scripture. Much like viewing a full moon on a crystal-clear summer’s night makes one forget that the unseen half of the moon is shrouded in darkness, the radiance of the Gospels, Acts, and Paul overshadow these seven small but significant letters. Contained in the first letter of the apostle Peter (henceforth called by its traditional title ‘1st Peter’) is a passage on the church and political authorities that not only rivals the infamous Romans 13, but might, when understood in its historical context, shed much-needed contextual light on Paul’s perplexing rhetoric. The moon, after all, spins on its axis; the so-called ‘dark side’ of this celestial body is but a matter of perspective. So goes the Catholic Epistles. Let’s forget for a few minutes about one of my least favorite passages in the New Testament, Romans 13:1-7, and focus instead on a neglected and often overlooked statement by Peter that deserves much more attention.
I quote 1 Peter 2:13-17:
“Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether to a king as the one in authority, or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and the praise of those who do right. For such is the will of God that by doing right you may silence the ignorance of foolish men. Act as free men, and do not use your freedom as a covering for evil, but use it as bondslaves of God. Honor all people, love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the king.” (NASB-U)
Sound familiar? There is a reason that some scholars have referred to this passage as the ‘Romans 13 of the Catholic Epistles’. It seems like this would be yet another insurmountable theological problem for limited-government types like myself. Check, and mate. The problem with all political theologies built around passages like this, however, is that they begin with a set of deeply flawed assumptions about what the Bible is and how it deserves to be read. In order to understand this particular passage in 1 Peter, we need to reframe our interpretive presuppositions.
Reading Scripture Responsibly
The art of Biblical interpretation is called hermeneutics, a term which denotes critically (as in critically thinking, a lost art in the contemporary western world) interpreting the library of texts found within the Christian scriptures. One of the first and most important insights of academic Biblical hermeneutics is just that: the Bible is not one book, but rather a collection of books, written by different authors, to different audiences, in different social and historical contexts, using different genres and literary styles, over a period of hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of years. Every single literary work included in the Christian canon needs to be understood as an independent textual unit. A letter like 1 Peter, for instance, absolutely cannot be interpreted in the same way as a poetic text like Psalms, a prophetic work like Jeremiah, or a narrative like Acts. There are different rules of interpretation for each of these documents in the same way that modern readers understand intuitively how novels are meant to be read differently than articles in academic journals.
Given this reality, there are two main contexts in which every work must be interpreted.
The first context is straightforward: every text is a product of history, and therefore must be interpreted within its historical context. Some fundamentalists balk at this point. God’s word, they would say, must be perspicuous and therefore clearly understood by anyone who reads it. No need for historical background information. This hermeneutical assertion deconstructs itself. 1 Peter begins as follows “To those who reside as aliens, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia.” Notice that Peter, author of this inspired, authoritative text, did not address it to modern American fundamentalists. If you believe in the authority and inspiration of all Scripture, then 1 Peter 1:1 states an obvious truth: it was written to people that were different from us. The ancients had a completely different way of understanding the world, and many of the political and economic categories that we take for granted today would have been entirely foreign to Peter’s original audience. Just because we think our modern political questions are important doesn’t mean that the original audience did. Statements that sound similar to modern ideas and concepts almost always have a different historical meaning than the ones we attribute to them today. In order to understand what the writers of the Bible are attempting to communicate, we must try to inhabit the world of antiquity.
The second, which is also stunningly ignored by many readers of the Bible, is the rhetorical (or in the case of a narrative like the Gospels, the narratival) context of a given work. The western tradition since at least the middle ages has treated the Bible as if every verse was an independent puzzle piece that needed to be attached to other independent puzzle pieces to create a systematic whole. This enterprise is entirely wrongheaded. Every work in the Bible is an independent literary unit, and is designed to be read as such. When Peter writes his letter to the churches in Asia minor, he has a particular set of goals in mind and begins establishing themes and concepts that will run throughout the duration of the letter. Just as a modern reader understands that any given passage in a novel contributes to the plot development of the whole, the writers of Scripture also intended their works to be read (or heard) from start to finish (considering the extremely low literacy rates of antiquity, the majority of early Christians would have had these works read to them in a group setting, which also has a major yet often overlooked interpretive impact on the way these works were constructed). Reading a controversial passage like 1 Peter 2:13-17 without trying to understand how it contributes to Peter’s overall agenda and how it is related to every other part of the letter ensures that the interpreter will without a doubt misread the text. We can’t rip a handful of passages out of various texts that are included in the Bible and read them together without first trying to understand how they were designed to function within the larger context of the original work in which they were included.
With both of these larger methodological points in mind, it should become immediately obvious why I didn’t simply rush to attempt to explain this controversial political passage from the outset. If we truly believe in and respect the authority and reliability of Scripture, then we need to be extremely cautious that we don’t misrepresent what the original authors were attempting to communicate. Laying out my problems with anachronistic readings of Romans 13 (which are all fully applicable to 1 Peter 2) and then the larger historical and rhetorical context in which these passages are situated allows us to see why we must carefully and thoughtfully examine these texts before rushing to apply them to our contemporary political context. As history would have it, Peter’s commentary on submitting to authorities is much more nuanced and complex than we have been led to believe.
Somebody Actually Had to Write the Letter…
A husband picks up his wife’s phone to find a text message written to her by another man. The text says, simply, “I love you and I can’t wait to see you next weekend”. But the husband isn’t concerned. Why? Because he knows that the text message is from her father and that they will be traveling to spend a few nights with them over the holidays, which, coincidentally, is next weekend. Authorship matters. In fact, the primary determining factor in discerning the meaning of a text is the intention of the author. Who created the document, and what did they intend to communicate? Twice in 1 Peter does the author identify himself. In 1:1, Peter states that he is the author, and in 5:1 he refers to himself as a ‘fellow elder and witness of the sufferings of Christ’. Why should his audience take Peter seriously? Because he was one of Jesus’s most trusted disciples. He was with Jesus during his life, his ministry, his death (well, kind of), his resurrection, and his ascension. Peter can be trusted because he was an eyewitness to the person about which he is testifying. This means, therefore, that we can be confident that the perspective Peter takes in this letter is informed by his close proximity to Jesus. Despite Peter’s many shortcomings (which were on full display in the Gospels and, more painfully for Peter, Galatians), we know that he is the one to whom Jesus made the promise that “on this rock I will build my Church” (Matthew 16:18). We can not only trust what Peter says, but we are obligated to take it seriously.
This does, however, cut against the broad consensus of modern Biblical scholarship. The assumption that has been made by the majority of New Testament scholars is that Peter couldn’t have written this letter. Wasn’t he just an illiterate fisherman from the ancient equivalent of the hills of Appalachia? Didn’t plenty of writers in antiquity forge letters to legitimize their own arguments? It is safe to say that modern Biblical scholarship was born as a child of Enlightenment skepticism, and as the discipline developed over the course of the 19th century the biases against ‘religion’ (against which ‘science’, whatever that term might mean, became the only path to knowledge) which had political roots in the battle against establishment churches in Europe were embraced whole-heartedly by historians and theologians. Oftentimes, however, this thoroughgoing skepticism has resulted in historical theories about the development of the New Testament that are almost entirely devoid of actual evidence, which was, ironically, supposed to be a hallmark of the Enlightenment. Besides the internal attestation we reviewed above, a historian of the early church named Eusebius, writing in the early 4th century, comments on the authorship of 1st Peter: “As to the writings of Peter, one of his epistles called the first is acknowledged as genuine. This was anciently used by the ancient fathers in their writings as an undoubted work of the apostles” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical Histories, 3:3:1). The ancients seemed to think that 1 Peter is genuine, and I am inclined to agree.
There is another piece of internal evidence that sheds light on both the author and the occasion of the letter. Peter acknowledges that he himself did not actually pen the letter in 1 Peter 5:12: “Through Silvanus, our faithful brother (for so I regard him), I have written to you briefly”. So yes, skeptics, Peter didn’t technically write the letter. But he did have it written for him. How can an illiterate fisherman compose a work like 1st Peter? By using a secretary. New Testament scholar Benjamin Laird describes this phenomenon beautifully:
“As the content and features of ancient writings are examined, it becomes increasingly apparent that writing in the Greco-Roman world often involved significant collaboration between an author and a number of individuals, each of who served a specific role during the compositional process…for many individuals living during the first century, the composition of a personal letter, business or legal document, or virtually any time of literary work involved direct collaboration with a trained secretary…in addition to maintaining the necessary writing materials, secretaries were capable of composing documents in a variety of literary genres and in a style that was typically more efficient, rhetorically effective, and pleasing to the eye.” Creating the Canon (IVP Academic, 2023), pp. 15-16
It is completely historically plausible that Peter used Silvanus as a secretary to write this letter, and the best evidence that we have from antiquity would seem to support this theory. But who is this scribe?
According to the R.E. Nixon (no relation, I am sure, to Richard), ‘Silvanus’ is most likely the Latinized form of the semitic ‘Silas’, and we know from other New Testament documents that Silas was a leading member of the church in Jerusalem who also had prophetic gifts (Acts 15:22, 32). This Silas not only gets a shout-out in 2 Corinthians 1:19, but is also responsible for helping to craft both of Paul’s letters to Thessalonica (1 Thess. 1:1, 2 Thess 1:1). This explains the thematic similarities between those two letters (see Nixon, R.E., ‘Silas’, New Bible Dictionary (IVP, 2006), p. 1101) and allows us to draw the correct conclusion that Peter and Paul, despite Peter’s occasional setbacks, were largely in agreement. According to Acts, this Silas is an instrumental figure at the council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, where, addressing an issue that is at the heart of the New Testament and by extension 1 Peter, the church decides that gentiles (non-Jewish people) can be a part of the family of Abraham without having to follow the Jewish law (Acts 15:1-29). Not only does he participate in this debate that is foundational to the identity of the Church (faith in the messiah, and not following the Jewish law, is what defines the people of God), he is also responsible for delivering (and perhaps even writing) a letter to the law-confused church in Antioch (Acts 15:22). Silas then accompanied Paul on his second missionary journey (Acts 15:36-41) and will eventually wind up once again in the presence of Peter, where he serves as his secretary.
You may at this point be asking yourself why we have spent so much time talking about who wrote 1 Peter and why it is important that Silas is the author. What in the world does this have to do with Christians and politics?
Everything.
The Identity of the Church
Remember that the church in Acts 15 comes to the conclusion that non-Jews are not obligated to follow the law. They put their faith in Jesus, God gives them the Spirit, and they are now a part of Abraham’s family. God is not replacing or superseding the Jews, but, as Paul puts in in Romans 11, gentiles are graciously grafted into the family of God by faith (Romans 11:17-24). Peter struggles with this reality in Galatians (in an event that may have actually triggered the Jerusalem council in Acts 15) by compelling the Gentiles to live like Jews and requesting that they embrace particular aspects of the Jewish law (Galatians 2:11-15). Paul, the Jewish apostle to the gentiles, responds furiously to this, arguing that because of Jesus it is now those who have faith that are the children of Abraham, not just those following the Jewish law (Galatians 3:1-4:11; see especially 3:1-9). The identity of the Church is rooted in Jesus, the Jewish messiah who now rules over all creation. Peter will ultimately come around to Paul’s way of understanding the church and argue passionately for it at the Jerusalem council (Acts 15:7-11). The identity of the church, which is rooted in Jesus the messiah, is a central theme in 1 Peter, and has a direct and often completely overlooked impact on the way in which Christians are supposed to conceptualize the political powers that be.
So why, then, did Peter set out to write a letter to the churches scattered through Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia (all of which are in modern day Turkey)? He is reminding them of their identity as members of the church and the need to be faithful witnesses to Christ in the midst of suffering. There are several places in the letter where Peter makes this intention clear (1:6, 3:13-17, 4:12-19, 5:9), but 3:13-17 is by far the most important for our purposes today. Here is what Peter says, in full:
“Who is there to harm you if you prove zealous for doing what is good? But even if you should suffer for the sake of righteousness, you are blessed. And do not fear their intimidation, and do not be troubled, but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence; and keep a good conscience so that in the thing in which you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ will be put to shame. For it is better, if God should will it so, that you suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong.”
Obviously the members of the churches are experiencing some sort of suffering because of their faith. This suffering is most likely not systematic; instead, it is probably due to the fact that Christians engage in practices that their pagan neighbors find strange. Peter is exhorting them to hold fast to this identity, being willing to defend their faith and maintaining a good reputation in the midst of it all. This statement doesn’t come out of nowhere. In fact, it is the climax of a long section in the letter that runs from 2:11-3:17. Notice what Peter says in 2:12: “Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles [!], so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may because of your good deeds…glorify God on the day of visitation.”
In Biblical studies, verses 2:11-12 and 3:13-17 form what is called an inclusio, or a set of passages that bracket off a particular argument or rhetorical segment of a work. Notice that the themes in 2:11-12 and 3:13-17 are the same: keep your behavior excellent in front of outsiders and don’t compromise your identity. What this means is that all of the material in between these two passages are designed to reinforce that same basic point. It is within this rhetorical device that we find the politically controversial 1 Peter 2:13-17. The careful reader will have already noticed that we have said nothing of the rest of the material in this inclusio, 2:18-3:12. Two more extremely controversial issues are included in this passage that shape how we understand Peter’s teaching on the identity of the church and political authorities, namely the relationship between slave and master and the relationship between wives and (presumably non-believing) husbands. It might help to see an outline of this section of the letter:
2:11-12 | Maintain Identity, Keep Behavior Excellent Before Outsiders
2:13-17 | Christians and Governing Authorities
2:18-25 | Slaves and Masters
3:1-7 | Wives and Husbands
3:8-12 | Summary of Previous Instruction
3:13-17 | Maintain Identity, Keep Behavior Excellent Before Outsiders
In order to understand how Peter’s instructions about Christians and the governing authorities works, we have to set it within the rhetorical context of both the letter as a whole and the individual passage in which it is included, where Peter also provides instruction on the relationships between slaves and masters and wives and husbands. A faithful interpretation of Peter’s statements must correspond to his overall goal of reminding his audience of their identity and encouraging them to maintain that identity despite suffering. We are now finally in a position to begin understanding how Peter conceptualized political authorities.
Family Matters
Christianity does not replace Judaism. In fact, conceptualizing those two categories as separate entities in the first century is historically anachronistic. What would become known as ‘Christianity’ emerges out of second-temple Judaism, and our ‘New Testament’ was written predominantly by Jews (with Luke-Acts being a possible exception). Therefore the theological framework within which Jews like Paul and Peter were thinking was fundamentally Jewish. To be sure, ‘Judaism’ is itself a diverse tradition in the first century, but there are some fundamental beliefs to which the vast majority of Jews subscribed, even if many of them would find different ways to articulate them. One of those central beliefs was election, the idea that God chose Abraham, promised him a family, and that his family was known after the Babylonian exile as the Jewish nation. The idea that Abraham’s family was distinct from the other nations based on God’s gracious election is fundamental to the logic of the Old Testament. Adherence to the law of Moses was what distinguished Israel from the nations surrounding them. As we have discussed already, the only real innovation in this Jewish theology of election among the early Jesus-followers was that, because of the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus the Jewish messiah, gentiles who place their faith in him are incorporated into the family of Abraham without having to follow the Jewish law. This extended and redrew the boundary markers of Abraham’s chosen family around faith. It was in no way a repudiation of ethnic Judaism; Abraham’s family had been called to be a “blessing to the nations” (Genesis 12:3) and the prophets had foretold that when God returns to rescue Abraham’s family from their failure to be obedient that the nations will stream to the renewed Jerusalem (Isaiah 2:2-4) and that the “earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:9). King Jesus made this happen, and the Jewish leaders of the early church would (reluctantly, in Peter’s case) acknowledge that gentiles were fully welcome into Abraham’s family as gentiles by faith in the messiah.
This is the historical and theological context in which many of the statements made by Peter in this letter must be grounded. In the first two verses, Peter refers to his audience as “aliens” and uses the language of election (“chosen”) to refer to his congregation. This is, within the context of 1st century Jewish thought, an obvious appeal to Israel language. Those that believe in Jesus are truly the people of God, and they have been chosen by God to “obey Jesus Christ.” Remember that the word “Christ” is a title which means ‘anointed one’ and is universally used by the writers of the New Testament to refer to Jesus’ messianic status. Jesus is truly, objectively the king of the world, and there are no other competitors. The prophets predicted this, and the Jewish hope for a coming king was fulfilled in Jesus. Of course the boundaries of Israel had to be redefined around the messiah; if Jesus is truly king, then his people are defined by obedience to him. Many theologians, operating within a supposedly “two-kingdoms” theology whereby Jesus is king in a “spiritual” sense but humans should exercise dominion in an ‘earthly’ sense, have completely missed what is a fundamental aspect of New Testament Christology. The reason why Peter can refer to his mixed Jew-gentile audience both as ‘chosen’ and as ‘aliens’, knowing that some of his recipients will be, like Paul, Roman citizens, is because Jesus is the real king and therefore the power and prestige of the Roman empire is relativized in Christ. On the centrality of Jesus’ messianic status to the writers of the New Testament, scholar Joshua Jipp says it best: “the messianic identity of Jesus…is not only the presupposition for, but the primary…content of, New Testament theology…Jesus’s messianic kingship is something of a root metaphor, a primary designation and driving image for making sense of NT Christology” (Jipp, Joshua, The Messianic Theology of the New Testament, p. 3). Peter believes that Jesus is king, and God’s family should understand that their identity as his chosen people makes them “aliens.”
To drive this point home even harder, Peter directly quotes Leviticus 19:2 in 1:16: “you shall be holy, for I [God] am holy.” This statement functions as a refrain in Leviticus, reminding Israel that God has given them the law so that they remain set apart and distinct from the other nations. Peter applies this election language of holiness to the church of those that believe in the Messiah, and states in verses 1:13-15 that the church needs to behave in a manner that is consistent with their identity. He even uses the word ‘obedient’ in v. 14, which clearly connects the set-apartness of the behavior of the chosen people with the idea that they are to be obedient to Jesus, who Peter believes to be the real king of the world. The first chapter of Peter functions as an introduction to the rest of his letter, and he has already made several points abundantly clear. The church has been called and set apart by God, and they are to be obedient to Jesus, the true king despite the fact that they may have to suffer for it. Peter will abandon none of these ideas as he continues to instruct his audience on how they should negotiate relationships given this complex set of realities.
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