The following “Theoretical Inquiry into Romans 13” has been taken from Eric
Voegelin, Hitler and the Germans, translated and
edited by Detlev Clemens and Brendan Purcell, University of Missouri
Press, 2003, 178-183. In a nutshell: "
And now, in concluding this investigation on the Evangelical side, a
theoretical inquiry into Romans 13 for the Evangelical part, and then for
the Catholic part an inquiry into the theological idea of the corpus mysticum Christi, so that
the decadence I have repeatedly spoken of will come to light.
In all the documents, Evangelical and Catholic, with which those
belonging to the communities were enjoined to obey Hitler, there are two texts
from the Bible invoked by the clergy in order to command obedience to the
authorities. Among the two, on the Catholic side, in the documents I will
present to you next time, the fourth commandment is preferred. That commandment
is “Honor your father and your mother.” This father and mother is now
interpretatively expanded as “Honor the state, carry out its laws, obey the
authorities!” Please note that. Not a word of all that is in the fourth
commandment—for the good historical reason that precisely in the covenant of
Sinai, within which the Decalogue was announced, the people existed under God
and not under authorities. There was no occasion for speaking about having to
obey any kind of authorities at all. So it is unhistoric and anachronistic, and
if such an alteration of an interpretative kind were made to a text in a
secular context by a scholar, one would say: Absolutely barefaced falsification
of the text! When theologians do it, then it is the church.
The same is now done with Romans 13, and here indeed the link is
Luther, who in this regard is fully adopted by the Catholic Church, that is to
say, that “everyone should be subject to authority.” That is the first sentence
of the thirteenth chapter in the letter to the Romans in the Luther
translation. Of this assertion, that “everyone should be subject to the
authorities,” there is not an iota in Romans 13. I will now therefore undertake
an investigation of Romans 13—which is always gladly referred to, especially
this first verse—as a whole. I have for this purpose translated the text. The
whole text of chapter 13 in the letter to the Romans falls into three parts:
the first part, verses 1–7, the second part, verses 8–10, the third part,
verses 11–14, and I will read out and comment on each of them. The first part,
verses 1–7, reads, in literal translation:
Every soul must submit to the higher authorities, for there are no authorities except those under or by means of God. And the existing authorities are ordered by him. Therefore, whoever rebels against the order of the authorities, resists a divine order. And those who offer resistance will bring judgment [krima] down upon themselves. For rulers are not terrors for the good but only for the evil. If you do not want to fear the authorities, do what is good, and you will have their approval, for they are God’s assistants, in order to do good to you. However, if you do evil, then fear them, for they do not bear the sword without reason. They are God’s servants, who cause his anger to be felt by him who does evil. Therefore you should submit yourself to them, not only from fear of anger, but for conscience’s sake. Therefore also bear these burdens, for they are the servants [leiturgoi] of God, who dedicate themselves to this service. Fulfill all your duties, tax where tax, tolls where tolls, fear where fear, honor where honor, is due.
So that is the first part, of which only the first verse is ever
quoted. The language Paul speaks here, in order to clarify the relation to the
authorities, as he calls them, is conventional, taken from the Stoic philosophy
of politics. The idea is that of a hierarchy of authorities in the cosmos,
where God is in the highest place, in the lower places are the authorities in
society, in the lowest place is man himself. That is the hierarchy of being in
its order. So, whoever fits into this order must submit to the law of the
world, which for whatever reasons has provided that there are also orders in
society and representatives with the power of punishment, who must take care
that men obey the moral law and that its violations are punished.
The presupposition of this entire instruction is naturally that one
lives in the Roman Empire at the time when the Stoa had established the ethics
of worldly order. That means that the imperial government, its officials and
their administration, in fact obey and sanction the moral law in the Stoic
sense. That is the presupposition. There isn’t a word there that one should be
subject to any authorities whatsoever, let alone, as we shall then see from the
documents the next time, that one should have to be subject to the authorities
even when they do evil. Let alone what Kant, for example, following Luther,
read into obedience to authorities, that the authorities are holy or anything
of the sort. Nothing of this. The passage is quite obviously directed toward
persons in the Christian community who misunderstand the freedom of the Christian
under God as meaning that one no longer has to obey the ethical order of
society, that is to say, it is directed toward those who violate this ethical
order. These are admonished that in this aion we find ourselves in,
there is also a moral law, the one that will be sanctioned by these higher
authorities. The kingdom of God, that comes only in the future. So, on the
whole, it is not very different from Aristotelian politics, which also
presuppose ethical behavior through orientation of the spirit and the
continuous practice of the virtues.
It then presupposes the corrective—since people are inclined not to be
virtuous—for violations of this order. The correctives in this case are the
power of public order, the higher powers, the municipal authorities,
the archontes of the polis, whose responsibility it is for
restraining these violations or, if they still take place, for punishing them.
So it is classic politics, a bit Hellenistically changed in terms of
vocabulary, but that is all. And always presupposed is the moral order as what
these higher authorities make effective in this world. What now these men
should really do is by no means merely to obey the authorities; rather that
comes now in verses 8–10. There it says:
Owe no one anything, except love for the other, for whoever loves his fellow man has fulfilled the law. For the commandments “you shall not commit adultery, you shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not covet,” along with all the other commandments, can be summed up in this one rule, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love cannot do evil to the neighbor; the fullness of the law, therefore, is love.
If now we translate the language of Paul into the philosophical
language of Aristotle, we would have to say this: All the different virtues
from which the concrete commands follow are subordinated to what I call the
existential virtues, in Aristotle, justice, philia, love,
which is the fundamental ethic of the political community, as the philia politike in the spirit, the homonoia, the noetic virtue, that
is positive order. Subordination is required under the
existing authorities, whose precise goal it is to reestablish order, only
if this positive order, which is enjoined here, is not kept.
Now the Christian element in this matter is something different. It is
that all these negative worldly admonishments—subordinate yourself to the
authorities or the powers!—should be existentially characterized by their
positive accomplishment through love, which has then become one of the
theological cardinal virtues. All of this becomes more urgent because the end
of the world, spoken of in verses 11–14, is imminent:
And above all, you should be aware of the critical time [of the kairos] and the hour for you to awaken from sleep. [Demands formulated like this go back to Heraclitus,] For salvation is closer to us today than when we first believed. [That means, the time from now to salvation is shorter than from that point in time when we began to believe up to the present. So, in a short time, in our lifetime, the end of the world is coming.] The night is almost over and the day is near. Let us therefore cast aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us live decently as in the day, not with feasting and drinking, with lust and fornication, with quarreling and jealousy. Put on the Lord Jesus Christ [as the armor of light], and do not turn your thoughts toward the desires of the flesh.
So, a carefully thought-out literary context aimed at those who are
inclined to misunderstand the Gospel and the arrival of the aion as implying that one may now
be licentious, that everything is permitted. But nothing of the kind. In
this aion the higher
powers, to which one must subordinate oneself, continue, and behavior toward
the neighbor is positively characterized by love as the existential, spiritual
virtue. And above all one should bear in mind that the end of the world and the
second coming of Christ is close, very close indeed, closer than the time from
the beginning of our faith, which has already run out, and that in this
situation of the critical time one should therefore behave according to
the kairos.
All of this has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with one having to
be subject to any kind of authorities—above all, naturally, nothing to do with
having to comply with the Hitler laws, as the bishops commanded, in their
pastoral letters, by invoking the fourth commandment and, here, Romans 13. This
scandalous misuse of a literary text for subjugation—and, indeed, for
unconditional subjugation—under the authorities in the sense of power politics,
if it happened on the secular side, would also be considered a barefaced
falsification. But again, in the theological sphere one may say such things
about the relations of church and state, with which the New Testament has
nothing to do.
However, of late, there has been a certain relaxation of these
misinterpretations. In 1963 the Berlin bishop Otto Dibelius—I am now still
speaking of the Evangelicals—published a study on the authorities.[1] And
already from the layout of the book, in the first part on Romans 13, you can
see an interpretation not very different from what I have given you here. In
the second part, he discusses Luther and the authorities, the bowdlerizing of
this text through Luther’s notion of authority. Further, he treats of the
objections, that Romans 13 also held good for the totalitarian state, and
finally considers the freedom of a Christian. These would then be the problems
of the second and third parts of the letter to the Romans. There we see that
already something has been relaxed. But all of this relaxation takes place
under a very ominous indication. I will read out this passage to you:
But when we speak of Romans 13, it is a question, firstly and above all, of a theological matter within the church.[2]
And a page later:
Once again: it is a question within the church how an important passage of the Bible is to be interpreted. But certainly it is a question that must be considered by the Christian throughout the whole world.[3]
That is a masterpiece of barefacedness. Christ has come among men, but
what he has said may only be interpreted by the theologians. It is only a
matter within the church. And if the theologians within the church interpret
the passage of Romans 13 in such a way that their fellow citizens are
slaughtered, not even then is it a public matter having to do with men and
victims. Oh no, it remains even now a pure theological matter within the
church. Here again you have this problem of the complete lack of human
awareness among Christians. Christ is a private possession of the socially
institutionalized organizations one pays church tax to. Even the lay people
within the church have no say here and may not say, “Look, but that isn’t in
the Letter to the Romans 13 at all.” And naturally whoever does not belong to
the church, for example, Jews, who will be slaughtered, have no say, because
these theologians have interpreted the letter to the Romans in this way.
So, there is this complete perversion in the treatment of Scripture,
this complete failure to be a member of human society, this complete failure in
the duty of being a citizen as well as a human being, this arrogance in
treating Christianity and the words of Christ as a private matter for
theologians, which then can cause horrible murderous wrong. That is still the
attitude of Bishop Dibelius in the year 1963. That’s how things are!
[1] Otto Dibelius, Obrigkeit (Stuttgart:
Kreuz Verlag, 1963). Dibelius (1880–1967) was general superintendent of Kurmark
from 1925 until deposed in 1933. Deeply involved in the Confessing Church, he
was bishop of Berlin, 1945–66; president of the Council of the Evangelical
Church in Germany, 1949–61; and a president of the World Council of Churches in
1954.
[2] Ibid., 72 (emphasis in the text).
[3] Ibid., 73.
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