Christian Civil Obedience Seeking Christ’s Political Ethic by Tobias Philip
When faced with a govern-
ment inimical to Christian values in a world saturated with injustice, Christians find themselves obligated to work towards change. The Bible is inundated with injunctions to pursue societal justice;1 “learn to do well: seek judgment, relieve the oppressed.”2 Nevertheless, when evil has reached the organs of the State, and has even been absorbed into law, Christians are torn between the right subjection owed to legitimate government and the impulse to resist. In the apostles’ letters and Christ’s own submission to the Roman state, secular power is shown to be derived from God, and Christians are thus bound by temporal law. The existence of unjust laws, then, creates a difficult situation for the Christian who practices civil disobedience. In our nation, marred as it is by deep division, political strife has recently manifested in violence, and resistance to the President has caused unabashed breaches of the law. Whatever the immorality that we may perceive in our government, Christ bids us to offer our submission, insofar as God’s law allows, in reverence for the God-given power that rules us. Considering the relative religious free-
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dom we enjoy today, it is easy to forget that the Christian religion was born under an oppressive state. Whereas believers today in the United States and similar nations may face undue pressures from the State in their exercise of public practice, the early Christians were seldom guaranteed their very survival. Very much aware of their lives’ temporality, Christians in the early Church regarded themselves as pilgrims in their lives on earth. Tertullian, a second to third century Church apologist, is well known to have written that “nothing is more foreign to us [Christians] than the state.”3 And, rightly so, as Christ himself clarified, “my kingdom is not of this world.”4 To the association of believers, for whom earthly life is but a way-stop to life eternal, nothing could be more indifferent than matters of State. This attitude carried over to the writings of Saint Augustine, perhaps the first great Christian political theorist. Augustine denied that the Platonic ideal for the perfect society of men could ever be realized on earth. For him, “there is only one true republic in which perfect peace, harmony, justice, and satisfaction are assured to all citizens; that society is the civitas Dei, which exists eternally in God’s heaven and is the goal of
God’s elect while they sojourn as pilgrims in this sin-ridden, wretched earthly life.”5 Only in heaven can man experience perfect society, while the world is bound to experience unrest. Christ even promised his disciples persecution, saying, “in the world you shall have distress.”6 With this counsel in mind, Augustine did not advise Christians to withdraw from civil society, quite the contrary, but he was certain not to conflate the end of the State with that of the Church, which is the salvation of believers. What, then, is the end ordained to the State? Certainly it is a force for good, as Saint Paul, who praised temporal authority even as he died by it, wrote, “for princes are not a terror to the good work, but to the evil...For he is God’s minister to thee, for good.”7 Using an Aristotelian argument, Thomas Aquinas reasoned that a ruler is a necessary directive principle whereby the many members of human society may be led to a common end.8 The common end that the State facilitates is human fulfilment, insofar as man can be fulfilled in his temporal life. The State as a human society, however, can only assist in purely human goods, which exclude the eternal salvation for which Christ is the only way. Human
