God, Authority, and Authoritarianism

This post was greatly expanded on March 11, 2011 and will serve, in modified form, as a chapter in an upcoming publication.

Ni Dieu Ni Maître – “Neither God Nor Master”. The slogan was coined by a Socialist publisher, and has more recently become popular among anarchists. The idea is individual sovereignty; radical equality: the self has no obligation to submission, cultural, political, or spiritual.

Where British liberalism contented itself with conquering political authoritarianism, continental liberalism – which later came to influence Socialist and modern leftist thought – is concerned with emancipation from authority of all types. Formal equality came to be replaced as a goal by material equalization. This ideology – often more aesthetic than systematic – has always taken an anti-religious tone, and often goes beyond simple atheism to a Luciferean antitheism: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”.

It’s a small step, so the logic goes, from submission to God, to submission to the state. The two are part and parcel, one begetting the other and both inherently servile.

God and State: A Deceptive Analogy

If our question is the proper relationship between the Church and earthly powers, the most obvious first place to turn is to the millennia of theology asking, to what extent is God like a government? In what sense is divine authority like earthly authority? The greater the similarity, the easier our question will be: an analogy of relationship logically follows from an analogy of essence, and scripture has plenty to say about the Christian’s relationship to God.

The modern world has inherited this debate on individual sovereignty which, so far as it concerns the divine, is framed by the idea that political authority is delegated from God. Though it might not at first glance seem like a relevant notion, its converse assumption – that the authority of God is essentially a political authority – should it prove true, would have huge implications for the relationship between the Christian and earthly authority.

This identity is certainly understandable. It is hard to fault the antitheists for reasoning upward to divine authority from what they see of human authority when the political philosophers of Christendom for millennia reasoned down that same chain. Everything they said about human authority was derived by analogy from divine authority.

And the analogies are endless. Reasoning upward, modern anarchists assert that earthly authority is always manifested unjustly, and hold it implicit that the rule of a god is no less unjust. Others – Christians among them – have reasoned that earthly rulers have no control over the mind of man, therefore man is metaphysically free before God. Reasoning downward, Thomist thought asserts that the sovereignty of God is bound by reason, justice, and other concepts existing independently of God; therefore no ruler may be above the law. And Nominalist thought, in which the sovereignty of God is totally unbound, came to serve as the intellectual foundation for the rise of monarchial absolutism in the West following the medieval period.¹ If God has the power even to undo what is done, then a sovereign political ruler has the authority to shape the law in any way and at any time he chooses. In any case, whatever the nature thereof, Thomist and Nominalist theologians stood in agreement that authority flowed directly from God to earthly rulers, both spiritual and secular.

All this analogizing was easily justified by a simple reading of Romans 13:1-2. All authority is from God, Paul argues, “therefore he who resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God”. It would appear that God accomplishes his purposes by giving his own authority to earthly rulers who rule in his stead.

This verse is not as simple as it might seem on its surface, however. And yet we must be cautious not to discard the plain sense of the verse, unless as Martin Luther argues, “such be required by some obvious feature of the words and the absurdity of their plain sense”.² I intend to show that this must indeed be the case.

Luther in particular stands out among the major political writers of Christendom in his idea of authority. For him, Romans 13 is little more than divine approval for the idea of secular authority,³ against the Anabaptists who held that it was a sin for Christians to hold office and participate in government.⁴ At the very least, the analogy between divine and earthly authority does not have the entire weight of history behind it. But we must go further.

No Christian would assert that God gives moral approval to each political authority on earth. Even without the dismal judgements pronounced on various authorities by the prophets, it is hardly a stretch to presume that rulers are at least as responsible before God as the rest of us. Some of the most atrocious evils recorded both in the Bible and in modern history have been committed by and at the behest of political authority, and there is no reason to suppose that the veneer of political authority sanctifies them. To argue an analogy between the nature of divine authority and earthly authority on the plain meaning of the words of Romans 13 undoubtedly demonstrates the “absurdity of their plain sense”.

The point of the passage is, however, plainly hortatory. Paul is exhorting the Roman church to submit to authority. He is not pontificating on the essence of authority; his focus is pastoral.

Furthermore, Biblical submission to earthly authority is never unconditional. Throughout the Bible, from Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to Paul, Christians are encouraged to defy authority where it presumes to command a higher allegiance than God’s. “We must obey God rather than men”, Peter says in Acts 5:29. Paul is under no delusion that human authority always comports with God’s will.

His point, then, is to protect the Church from unnecessary persecution. Peter asks (I Pet. 2:20), “what credit is there if, when you sin and are harshly treated, you endure it with patience? But if when you do what is right and suffer for it you patiently endure it, this finds favor with God.” Peter and Paul are both advising Christians to choose their battles, so to speak. One expects to be persecuted for revolution or civil disobedience. The Christian, however, is advised to bring persecution on himself only for the name of Christ. Particular political questions can rarely be decided with a simple appeal to scripture, and there is no reason to suppose that Christians will be more likely than anyone else to choose the “right” side in a conflict, whichever that may be.⁵ As obviously unjust as the Roman system seems to us today, even according to Christian principles, it should give us pause to note that no New Testament author ever opines on a policy question.

This is also the reason why Paul harps on unity in his epistles. What does it matter if you were converted by Paul or Apollos, if God gave the growth (1 Cor. 3:4f)? Why should there be factions within the Church if we all have one Lord, partake of one Baptism, etc. (Eph. 4:1-6)? The Gospel is controversial enough on its own (1 Cor. 1:23), and “God does not want us to be entangled with the affairs of this world to the point where such involvement detracts from our primary mission.”⁶

But though Romans 13 is primarily focused on the behavior of individual believers, Paul seems to be saying something about authority: “For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God.”

Here, we can cite Luther once again to make the necessary distinction between the command and the ordinance of God, something which Catholic doctrine and Thomist tradition consistently fail to do.⁷ He explains it thus in The Bondage of the Will, using the terms “God preached” and “God hidden”, respectively:

We must discuss God, or the will of God, preached, revealed, offered to us, and worshipped by us, in one way, and God not preached, nor revealed, nor offered to us, nor worshipped by us, in another way. . . . God preached works to the end that sin and death may be taken away, and we may be saved. . . . but God hidden in majesty neither deplores nor takes away death, but works life, and death, and all in all; nor has He set bounds to Himself by His Word, but has kept Himself free over all things.

. . . The Diatribe [against which Luther is writing] . . . makes no distinction between God preached and God hidden, that is, between the Word of God and God himself. God does many things which he does not show us in his word, and he wills many things which he does not in his word show us that he wills. Thus, He does not will the death of a sinner – that is, in His Word; but He wills it by His inscrutable will.⁸

Luther comes across here as the strongest of Nominalists: he asserts not only that God has unbound power to do and undo, but that nothing at all happens unless God actively wills it. And yet, he never makes the analogy from absolute divine authority to absolute secular authority. In fact, he stridently argued against it three years earlier in On Secular Authority. Nowhere does his idea of the absolute sovereignty of God translate into sanction for political absolutism.

Norman Horn brings us back to Romans 13, noting in the same vein:

Paul’s primary message for Christians . . . is not that states are specially instituted in the same way as the family and church, but rather that the state is not operating outside of the plans of God. In this sense, the state is divinely instituted in the same way that Satan is divinely instituted. God is not surprised when states act the way they do.

Ordinance is not institution. As we have seen, God – that is, in his Word – does not endorse every exercise of power. We are therefore forced to take Romans 13 to be speaking of the inscrutable ordinance of God, not of his moral will. Paul is not giving a divine stamp of approval to Rome, but is rather comforting believers that God is working good even from a brutally oppressive regime. It is a particular application of the general point he made five chapters earlier, that “God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose.” (Rom. 8:28). Not only do policy and revolution perish in the end, but God is already working current circumstances toward a higher good than we can fathom. The goodness and sovereignty of God free us from preoccupation with these things to focus on the mission of Christ set forth in his Word.

The Authority of God

If it is inappropriate to draw inferences from divine authority to political authority, it is even less appropriate to draw inferences the other way – from political authority to divine authority. What then can we say about the rule of God over the world?

We have a hint of the answer in Luther’s concept of sovereignty: God the Father causes everything to pass which passes, and guides us normatively by his Word. This distinction shatters any analogy from divine rule to earthly rule and vice versa. In it is contained the whole doctrine of election and of salvation by grace alone.

But for now, we are only concerned with authority. God Hidden issues no commands, but “works life, and death, and all in all”. Thus Jesus says, “The Father judges no one” (John 5:22). With no command comes no judgement (cf. Rom. 4:15). Such authority is perfect, infinite, and absolutely inescapable. It is what the nonbeliever would call “fate” or “the course of events”. There are no contingencies, promises, or threats; only “God said” and “there was” (Gen. 1:3).

It makes no sense to speak of voluntary submission to such authority. Submission is involuntary; the very essence of existence. “Apart from him nothing came into being that has come into being” (John 1:3). This authority can no more be resisted than one can will one’s own existence (Rom. 9:20f).

Regardless, our antitheists have no pretensions to such metaphysical superpowers. Their issue is not with being bound by spacetime and the laws of physics – who could argue with that? – but with the normative commands, injunctions, and promises issued by God through his Word. By what authority does the Word of God command “Thou shalt not”, and how does this law differ from one given by an earthly ruler?

We have made a categorical distinction between transcendent, infinite, inviolable authority, and immanent, finite, violable authority – that is, authority which demands a response of the will. The latter type of authority – including that of the Word of God (whose immanence is demonstrated by the very fact that men sin) – is established by the consequences for transgression.

The results of any action can be divided into natural and unnatural consequences: those which follow by necessity from the action, and any judgement – punishment or reward – rendered. If I speed on the highway, for example, the natural consequences are lower fuel efficiency, faster arrival time, and increased risk of a wreck. These are the consequences inherent in the action. A speeding ticket, on the other hand, is unnatural; a punishment: it is imposed from without by force, and has no essential connection to the action.

All political authority is founded on judgement by those in whose interest it is to enforce their own authority. Without speeding tickets, speed limits would have no authority. Nor is this foundation necessarily undesirable. Protection by judgement of certain individual rights is the bedrock of social cooperation.

The authority of an expert, on the other hand, is founded only on natural consequences. One becomes such an authority – in the sciences, for example – by diligent research, study, and publication. Such authority has no interest or need to enforce itself; it is validated by its accuracy with respect to reality. Were I to disregard the authority of a mechanic who tells me I need to replace the transmission in my car, I would likely find myself stranded on the side of the road in the near future. On the other hand, to the degree that expert authority is not grounded in reality, it may be safely discarded.

Is the Word of God then a political or an expert authority? Is it enforced by judgement, or does it proceed by natural consequences?

Both.

The Consequences of Sin

First, the Word of God has no authority apart from the ordinance of God. Jesus says as much in John 13:49: “For I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment.”

More plainly, the authority of the Word of God under the New Covenant consists entirely of natural consequence.⁹ This truth severs the root of many superstitions. God is not a Zeus figure standing in Heaven with a lightning bolt ready to impose doom on those recalcitrant humans who fail to follow his will. He does not bring sickness and death to punish unrelated sins, nor does he reward righteousness with good fortune except so far as it follows naturally from prudence. “He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matt. 5:45).

But only drops pianos on the unrighteous.

The book of Job, for example, is an extended rebuke to Job’s friends, who assume that his bad fortune is the direct consequence of sin in his life. In John 9 as well, Jesus’ disciples ask regarding a blind beggar, “who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?” Jesus does not say “He masturbated too much.” In fact he does not relate it to any sin that would be naturally unrelated to blindness. Instead, he answers that this man was born blind so that “the works of God might be displayed in him” – and proceeds to heal him.

If we imagine reality as Jesus does here, and as Luther laid out above – not as something existing separately from God and in which he periodically tinkers, but as the very expression of the glory of God which owes every facet of its existence to the continued animating work of God, and into which he spoke his Word for our good – then the thought of a totalitarian God makes little sense. The revulsion we feel at the thought of a divine moralistic tyrant is nothing more than a careless agglomeration of the trinity of God into a crude unity.

The Word of God then, is a guide for the elect through the world of the Father’s ordinance, to their highest good. If the commandments of God were arbitrary – if they had no consequence – they would be issued with no authority at all. But in fact, the law is intimately connected to reality and to human happiness. In this sense, the authority of the Word of God looks much like perfect “expert authority” with respect to spiritual reality, whose commands we ignore at our own peril.

Second, just as the Word of God has no authority apart from the ordinance of the Father, it serves no benefit apart from the Spirit of God¹⁰ – that is, without faith. Either, for the nonbeliever, the law brings him to the knowledge of sin (Rom. 3:20, Gal. 3:24) and thus to repentance or condemnation, or for the believer, it exhorts him to unhindered fellowship with God and away from sin and distraction.¹¹ The law of God is never an end in itself.

The faith which the Spirit gives is the concrete apprehension of God as the highest Good for the self. It is the revelation of God’s glory, and the concomitant desire to see more. This is the value of the commandments of God: not benchmarks (by which comes a life either of pride or despair) or imperatives (by which comes a life either of resentment or fear), but signposts – guiding and confirming those already on their way, but of scant use to those headed elsewhere.

Thus the law of God – unlike political law – is less about submitting one’s will than about submitting one’s desire. Will follows naturally afterward. “This is the love of God, that we keep his commandments; and his commandments are not burdensome” (1 John 5:3). How else can this be understood than a will, not merely submitted, but transformed? Obedience to the will of God is not the abdication of our own interests, but the surest pursuit of our highest good. As St. Augustine once quipped, “Love [God], and do what you will”.¹²

Political law, on the other hand, has no power over desire; it can aim only at the will. No earthly ruler can rule the mind of man – even those who attempt to do so must rely on action as a proxy. Thus without spirit-giving faith to transform desire at its deepest level, the law of God seems merely a series of onerous thou-shalt-nots, more or less safely disregarded. If I don’t get caught, why not cheat? Barring STDs, why not sleep around? Not rooted in faith, merely cultural compunctions are swept away by the next generation’s “why not?” – witness the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

But the worst of the “why not” rarely manifests itself materially. It concerns the soul: it blinds us to the Good as it binds us to itself. Just as God himself is both the rewarder and the reward, so sin is both the thing punished and and the punishment itself (Rom. 1:24-32), both following naturally from our choices. This is the mirror image of our definition of faith: apprehension of God as the highest Good entails an apprehension of the incalculable damage done to the soul by lesser pursuits. Our desire, at the most general level, is always fulfilled in the end: either imperishable Good, or perishing goods.

Hell therefore, far from the final spite of a spurned sovereign, is the most natural of consequences. If God is the highest Good – indeed the source of all good – and if faith is the apprehension of that fact, then unbelief is nothing more than to seek one’s good elsewhere. What could be more natural then, according to the ordinance of God, for those whose good is sought in the imperishable to find themselves imperishable, and for those whose good is sought in perishable things to perish themselves? Hell is no more and no less than total separation from all good, voluntarily rejected. Fire and brimstone make for vivid imagery, but they are imagery nonetheless. The essence of Hell is far worse.

The Judgement of God

The authority of the Word of God is not solely political, but neither is it solely expert. The Word of God, by which we navigate the ordinance of God, is God (John 1:1), having lowered himself into the finiteness of his own creation. The spirit of God, by which we obey and take hold of the benefits of the Word of God, is God. Natural consequences are brought forth by the same God from whom the commands are issued. In discussing the trinity of God, we must always keep in view his unity as well.

In this sense, the authority of the Word of God is in fact predicated on judgement. Nor is this surprising, as often as the scriptures speak of the personal wrath and mercy of God. The decay and ultimate destruction of the soul is no more or less divine punishment for sin than is a broken neck for diving into an empty pool. Both follow naturally from their respective action, and both are brought forth by the conscious animating work of God Hidden.

But then, it is hard to imagine God looking down from heaven with moral indignation for jumping into an empty pool, or investing in a ponzi scheme, or any other bad decision which does not necessarily entail a moral lapse. The difference is that sin, unlike merely bad decisions, primarily affects the soul, and it is the resulting estrangement from the Spirit of God that is spoken of as judgement. God cares for the soul of man through his Word; hence the second half of Jesus’ statement in John 5:22: “The Father judges no one, but has given all judgement to the Son.”

All that the Father – God hidden – needs to do regarding sin is to animate the world according to its ordained natural consequences. No judgement is involved. Empty pools break necks, sin breaks souls. The Word of God however – the Son begotten into that world – personally convicts the soul and brings judgement upon it for its blight of sin.

Thus what follows naturally as consequence from God the Father is judgement and wrath from God the Son. And if we, along with Christ himself and the entire Church throughout history, assert that “I [Christ] and the Father are one” – that the trinity of God does not conflict with his essential unity – then we must conclude that, with respect to divine authority, there is no distinction between judgement and natural consequence.

There is peril in myopia on this point. To play up the political nature of the authority of God and to disregard its naturalness is to externalize his reign. A faith based in fear of judgement is no faith at all – “even the demons believe, and tremble” (James 2:19). Without the naturalness of Hell, God becomes unjust and arbitrary – a totalitarian Zeus figure with a lightning bolt. The inherent goodness of God recedes from view, and our service to God commends us to him no more than our service to the state, both proceeding from fear.

On the other hand, to play up the naturalness of the rule of God makes it easy to sacrifice his sovereignty if we disregard the judgement inherent in Hell as well. It seems a kinder God who does not punish us any more than we bring on ourselves. This is the impetus behind many emergent movements within Protestantism, open theism being at the extreme end, to again construe God as a tinkerer in a reality which for the most part operates on its own. Furthermore, the total loss of judgement behind the authority of God erases the doctrine of substitutionary atonement by which Christ took the punishment for our sins upon himself. Substitutionary atonement entails a political analogy to the authority of God – our moral debt is incurred against an authority which itself operates to collect that debt. And though that analogy does not paint the whole picture of the authority of God (for that authority, even in settling our debt, still operates by inescapably natural consequences), it is a necessary framework through which to clearly see the glory of Christ in accomplishing our redemption by payment of that debt.¹³

In sum: the absolute and infinite authority of God Hidden is in no wise analogous to a political authority. One can no more resist the authority of God than the authority of gravity: not just because God has the means to render judgement, but because if we were not de facto subject to it, cause and effect would cease to apply, for actions could not even occur, let alone have consequences. Nor is the immanent authority of the Word of God “merely” political, but by the fact of God’s unity in trinity, is an essentially natural authority as well in a way that earthly political authority cannot be.

Away then, with all conceptions of a vindictive and tinkering God. We do not worship a Zeus in Olympus or a Caesar in Rome, but a God in Heaven, “for whom and through whom are all things” (Heb. 2:10).

1. See Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Sovereignty: God, State, and Self (2008), ch. 1-2 for a fuller narrative.
2. Luther, Martin. Bondage of the Will (1525), trans. by Packer, J.I. et al. (1957), p. 192f. The book is as much a hermeneutical treatise as a theological. Luther is here arguing against Erasmus’ explaining away the plain sense of several passages of scripture by use of indiscriminate figures.
3. Luther, Martin. On Secular Authority (1522), in Clemen, Otto, et al. Luthers Werke in Auswahl (1997), p. 362ff.
4. He demonstrates this point from other passages as well – for example Luke 3:12-14, in which John the Baptist does not advise tax collectors and soldiers to renounce their coercive state jobs, but to execute them honestly and justly.
5. In addition, the “right side” may change with the benefit of historical perspective. It seemed for a long time that Socialism was the wave of the future; a more humane system which would displace the old cacophony of exploitative competition. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the revelations of the atrocities committed therein, Socialism has been widely discredited, and the Christian sects which had jumped onboard are now largely irrelevant.
6. Cobin, John. Christian Theology of Public Policy (2006), p. 125.
7. See for example Pope Boniface VIII. Unam Sanctam (1302), arguing as if ordinance were the same as institution:

   However, one sword ought to be subordinated to the other and temporal authority, subjected to spiritual power. For since the Apostle said: ‘There is no power except from God and the things that are, are ordained of God’ [Rom 13:1-2], but they would not be ordained if one sword were not subordinated to the other and if the inferior one, as it were, were not led upwards by the other.

8. Bondage of the Will, p. 170f.
9. Exceptions may be found in the Old Testament where God stood to the nation of Israel in a more purely political covenant, superadded to the individual saving relationships which God had with the elect within Israel. God speaks of the end of the political covenant and the dawn of the Church in Ezekiel 36:27: “And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.” No longer will God’s chosen people be guided from the outside by promises and threats, but animated internally by God himself..
10. Calvin notes in his Commentary on Ezekiel (1565): “This work of the Spirit, then, is joined with the word of God. But a distinction is made, that we may know that the external word is of no avail by itself, unless animated by the power of the Spirit.”
11. Calvin regards this exhortation as the “principal use” of the law. See Institutes of the Christian Religion (1564), 2.7.12:

    The servant of God will derive this further advantage from the Law: By frequently meditating upon it, he will be excited to obedience, and confirmed in it, and so drawn away from the slippery paths of sin.

12. Augustine, Homily 7 on the First Epistle of John.
13. For a fuller discussion of how losing the judgement of the authority of God cripples the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, see Albert Mohler’s essay “Why They Hate It So: The Denial of Substitutionary Atonement in Recent Theology” in Proclaiming a Cross-Centered Theology (2011). Mohler does, however, appear to fall into the opposite trap in completely denying the naturalness of Hell, which I respond to in a future post.