Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology Review, Pt. 6: Moral Theology Applied

Leave a comment

In this sixth and final installment of my review of A.J. Joyce’s Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology (I salute you faithful few who have followed me all the way through this hopefully engaging but occasionally exhausting exercise), I shall look at her last two chapters, which are both quite brief and have to do, essentially, with the concrete application of Hooker’s moral theology.  Chapter Seven considers the relationship of the “exceptional case” to moral norms, the all-important balance between unchanging general norms and the demands of particular circumstances.  Chapter Eight seeks to bring together, or rather to illustrate, the themes outlined in all the previous chapters by consideration of one particular example, the understanding of marriage in Hooker’s thought.

Both are on the whole helpful chapters, though the first suffers from a frustrating vagueness as to which moral norms are exceptionable and which are not, and the difference between particular injunctions that specify general principles and those that contradict them; the second, perhaps more seriously, suffers from Joyce’s very un-Hookerian determination to try and drive a wedge between reason and Scripture.

Chapter 7 begins with an extended consideration of the Aristotelian ethical tradition, and its understanding that it was the nature of the moral life to be concerned with particulars, and general principles cannot adequately describe moral duties without exception: “for Arristotle, whatever is promulgated by the moral philosopher, political scientist, or lawgiver will only ever take into consideration the majority of cases.  It takes a wise man, whose perception has been developed through experience, to discern what it is that constitutes right action in a concrete situation.” (197-98) Read More

Headship and Authority in 1 Cor. 11

2 Comments

This past Sunday, our senior minister approached with some trepidation 1 Corinthians 11:2-16, the passage which speaks of the subordination of women and their need to wear head coverings.  Also on the agenda was 1 Cor. 14:34-35, which states “Let your women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but they are to be submissive, as the law also says.  And if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is shameful for women to speak in church”—although in the event, the sermon confined itself to the first passage.  These passages naturally can be quite a source of discomfort to churches committed, as ours basically is, to an “egalitarian” rather than “complementarian” position (though I hate those labels!) and to the legitimacy of women’s ordination.  But really, they will be a source of discomfort for almost any Christian today, however “complementarian.”  After all, Paul seems to go beyond a mere outward subordination to suggest that women are naturally inferior: women come from men, and are made to serve men.  Men stand in the same relation to women as Christ does to the Church.  Ouch.  Paul accordingly commands behaviors that only a few radical fringe groups of conservative Christians would actually observe—head coverings for women, silence of women in church.  

So I was genuinely interested in hearing what an egalitarian interpretation of these verses would look like. (The easiest route might to say that Paul was a product of his culture, and thus felt obliged to argue for something that was simply inconsistent with his teaching elsewhere; but I doubted our minister was going to take that route.)  The key argument hinged on the meaning of the word “head” (Gk. kephale) in v. 3, and suggested that of its three main meanings—”physical head,” “authority,” and “source”—it was the third, and not the second, which Paul was using here (in addition to the first, which is of course used in the following verses).  Man is not the boss of the woman, we were told, he is the source.   

However, this didn’t seem to me to be the anti-complementarian trump card that was desired.  What might it really imply to say that man is the “source” of woman?  I offer the following reflections with two major caveats: (1) I have not read any of what is no doubt the copious exegetical literature on this passage, so there will no doubt be a lot of re-inventing (and mis-inventing) the wheel here; (2) I am not trying to argue here for or against women’s ordination, or to provide a decisive solution to the dispute between “egalitarians” and “complementarians”—I am simply trying to trace out the logic of these concepts and of this passage, and see whether it might lead us to conclusions that could be attractive to both sides in certain respects.

 

So first, it’s worth noting that these three meanings of the word “head” are, after all, not three completely unrelated meanings, like the “bark” of a tree and the “bark” of a dog.  Clearly, they are closely related.  The physical head is the source and guide of all intelligible action in the body.  The head of an organization is the source and guide of all intelligible action in the organization.  The head of a river is the source of that river, that which sustains its existence, sends it on its way, establishes its direction.  Clearly, we have three closely interrelated and mutually-interpreting concepts here.  The concept of authority is deeply rooted in the concept of origin.  “It is the authority which has called the form of action into being.  The term ‘authority’ in this sense recalls the Greek word arche, which means at once both ‘beginning’ and ‘rule.'” (O’Donovan, RMO 122)  Obviously, kephale has a somewhat different field of meaning than arche, but I think the analogy with arche is significant.  It was not a coincidence that the Greeks associated rule with beginning.  

While the concept of authority is not exhausted by the concept of origin or initiation (for instance, the concept of “judgment” is generally a central part of what we understand by authority), this is clearly a central part of it.  If we want to know whether an action is authorized in any organization or entity, we will ask where it came from.  If we find out that some order just came from a coworker, then we can scoff at it.  It needs to be traceable back to the “head”—perhaps indirectly, by coming from someone authorized by the head to act in certain matters.  Of course, an individual within the organization may take action on her own accord as circumstances seem to dictate, but if the action is to be meaningful or constructive, it must fit into a shape conferred by the head.  One way or another, all intelligible action in an organization is traceable back to the “head” of the organization, who initiates and orients the actions that are to be taken.  For this reason, of course, the head is also the endpoint, the point where buck stops—the person finally responsible for actions that are taken.

So authority initiates, authority serves as an origin, rule implies beginning.  Is it the other way around though—does an origin always serve as an authority?  Does the “source” of something necessarily have an ongoing claim over it?  Does “beginning” imply rule?  Most societies seem to have thought so.  In early modern political debates, the question of origin was always paramount.  Did the society predate the king as a political entity, did it call the king into being?  Or did the king predate the society, and call the society into being as a political entity.  Who came first?  Who was the source of the other?  The answer to these questions largely determined one’s political theory, one’s judgment as to which was the highest authority, king or parliament.  Theologically, we root God’s authority over the world in the fact that he is the source of it.  He created it, therefore he is king over it.  Likewise, Christ’s headship, in the sense of authority, over the Church, seems inextricable from the fact that he is the source of the Church, that which has brought her into being and sustained her. 

Perhaps there is no reason that we should draw the inference that origination implies authority.  After all, in what sense does the source, the head, of a river have “authority” over that river?  Well, in the sense that it initiates it and directs it.  It gives shape to it.  The source determines which way the river will start flowing, and if the source dries up, the river will not continue flowing.  The river depends on its source, just as a subordinate depends on an authority.

So, if “head” in 1 Cor. 11:3 is not to imply authority in any sense, but only “source,” then what content are we to give to this attribution of source?  What does “source” mean?  The answer that our minister wished to give, it seemed in our conversation afterward, was “mere temporal priority.”  The man is the source of the woman in the sense that January 1st is the source of the new year.  The year does not depend on January 1st, January 1st exercises no directive power over the following year, but January 1st does happen to come first.  Now, the problem is that I am not at all sure, then, that we could meaningfully speak of January 1st as the “source of the year.”  I certainly don’t know anyone who has done so (though I was told that the ancient Hebrews did so).  As a concept, “source” simply has to imply more than mere temporal priority.  Perhaps more problematically, it is unclear how this line of argument could make any sense from the theistic evolutionist standpoint, which is of course the operative standpoint here.  For the theistic evolutionist, there can simply be no literal meaning in the assertion that man is the source of woman, unless perhaps we mean to say that the first hominid that God chose to designate a human being was in fact male, although there were of course a multitude of roughly equivalent female hominids, including his mother.  For the theistic evolutionist, it is hard to see how the narrative in Gen. 2:18-24 could be anything more than metaphorical.  And what then would the point of this metaphor be?  Well, probably something like what Paul seems to say about it—that woman is the glory of man, and woman was created for the man.  

 

Now, the point of all this is to say that it’s not immediately clear that substituting the meaning “source” really gets us away from the concept of “authority.”  But what it does do is to help suggest a new context for the concept of authority; no doubt part of the hostility to the use of that term stems from a misguided paradigm of what “authority” involves—an authority, we think, is someone who can command you to do something without good reasons, who can oblige you to obey whether or not you want to.  Authority, we think, is the opposite of freedom.  But O’Donovan, in his remarkable discussion of authority in Resurrection and Moral Order, invites us to see authority as “the objective correlate of freedom.”  What the heck does that mean?  Well, the concept of authority as initiator, which we have gestured at here, might help us out somewhat.  

At this point, we can finally turn to look again more closely at the passage itself.  We have a good clue that in fact the concept of “source” is central here, in v. 8, “For man is not from woman, but woman from man.”  Does this work with v. 2? “the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.”  Well, let’s work back from the last.  The Father is certainly not “the boss” of the Son, to use the contrastive term our pastor used.  But the Father clearly can be legitimately said to be the “source” of the Son.  He is the fons divinitatis—the Son is eternally begotten from Him.  But although the Son therefore has dependence on the Father, the Father does not for this reason stand over against the Son then as the one who commands him, for the two are perfectly united.  The Father is in the Son, and the Son in the Father.  If we look at the relationship of Christ and the Church, we have the same thing.  The point being made here is not that Christ has authority to command the Church, although that may be true in its own context.  The point is that Church has come out of Christ, it is the creature of the water and blood flowing from his side.  The Church has come out of the side of Christ, and therefore it depends on him, and he has defined its identity and its calling.  It exists in relation to Him. However, again, it is not separate from Him.  He is our King, but that is not the point here.  We are in him, and he in us.  Now clearly, these same points are being made about man and woman.  Woman was taken out of the side of man, just as the Church out of the side of Christ.  For this reason, woman depends on man, exists in relation to man, is oriented toward man.  However, likewise, as with the other two relations, the key point here is indwelling.  Eve was taken out of Adam in order then to be made one flesh with him.  

And this perhaps provides us with a helpful way forward.  For thus far, I expect, few egalitarians are going to be very satisfied with the implications of this concept of source and origin, with its inescapable connotations of dependency.  Woman is dependent on man?  Yuck.  Of course, one might reply, “Sorry, that’s what Paul says.  Deal with it.”  But I’d like to brainstorm some ways in which the egalitarian might take comfort from this passage.

 

First, one might point out that the language of priority is frequently subverted throughout Scripture.  The last shall be first, the elder shall serve the younger.  Throughout the Old Testament, the one who, by virtue of priority, has a claim to be “head,” turns out to be dependent on the one who comes after—Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, David and Saul.  And of course, this repeated plot line turns out to be prophetic of the greatest reversal at all.  The Church comes out of Israel; Israel is the source, the head, of the Church, and yet the Church is greater than Israel.  The feminist could perhaps have a lot of fun with this plotline of reversal—sure, man may have come first, but now woman is in charge.  Naturally, this would be taking it a bit too far.  Indeed, if we look at the illustration of the Church and Israel, Paul cautions the Romans against just this sort of thinking (Rom. 11:16-18).  Yes, there has been something of a reversal, but neither should boast against the other.  Both have need of one another.  The reversal is one in which a relationship of dependency is transformed into one of interdependency.  If we look back at our 1 Cor. 11 passage, we see something very like this being expressed. “Nevertheless, neither is man independent of woman, nor woman independent of man, in the Lord. For as woman came from man, even so man also comes through woman; but all things are from God” (vs. 11-12).  In the beginning, woman came from man, but then, God made it so that every man has to come out of woman.  The initial dependency is transformed into interdependency.  Or, to put it in other terms, man does not command, and woman obey; man initiates, and woman responds, as an equal, in perfect mutuality.

If we look back at Paul’s analogies, we see this picture confirmed.  The Son is eternally begotten of the Father, and yet (without wanting to peer too far into the mystery of inter-Trinitarian relations), their relation is one of perfect mutuality.  The Father initiates, the Son freely responds.  The Son is the equal of the Father.  The Church comes from Christ, and depends on him, and yet Christ is the firstborn of many brothers.  We are co-heirs with him.  By grace, he treats us as equals.  Christ initiates, and his Church freely responds, in a relationship characterized by mutuality.

Of course, these analogies are imperfect—they are not even strictly equivalent to one another, much less to the man/woman relationship.  And yet, perhaps they provide a clue that the concept of headship, although implying a certain kind of authority, does not imply the kind of authority that egalitarians hate.  We still have a certain kind of “complementarianism” here, but the kind that seems unavoidable.  Any river has to have a starting point.  Any organization has to have someone who’s responsible for getting things moving.  Any conversation has to be initiated by someone, or else everyone’s just going to stand there awkwardly looking at their feet.  Every dance has to have a partner who’s ready to take the first steps.  But for the Christian, this initiation serves the purpose of initiating a relationship of genuine mutuality and complementarity, in which both partners are equal participants, responding to one another.  

 

Of course, this does not begin to address the particulars of Paul’s commands to women, and how much they might still apply today.  Most of us are quite happy to say that the head-covering command was a culturally specific one, though “keeping silent in the churches” (14:34-35) is a bit more contentious.  The prohibition on women teaching (1 Tim. 2:12) has seemed to many to have a permanence that the earlier commands do not.  There are important arguments to be had here, to be sure, and I will not attempt to enter in to them.  It is simply worth noting that the answer to these questions is, I think, underdetermined by 1 Cor. 11:3.  It is not clear that the concept of man as kephale in the sense of “initiator,” as I have spelled it out, constitutes a blanket argument against women in the ministry.  Indeed, if we lay our emphasis on vs. 11-12, where the initial relationship of dependence is revealed to be one of of interdependence, one might say that v. 3 constitutes no bar to women’s ordination.  This, I think, would be overly hasty, but so would the conclusion that it constitutes a decisive bar.

Appealing to Caesar

7 Comments

In accounts of Christian’s political responsibilities, it is not uncommon to hear appeals to the way Paul used his Roman citizenship and the Roman political system.  These range from the fairly modest–“Paul’s appeal showed that the Roman Empire, for all its evils, could still serve a useful purpose and Christians need not completely separate themselves from an unjust political system”–to rather more robust claims that Paul’s actions somehow constitute a ratification of the goodness of the Roman order and proof that Christians should be enthusiastic citizens of earthly polities.

In A Secular Faith, Darryl Hart offers something like the latter approach, using Paul’s example in favour of his thesis that Christians must have “hyphenated identities” as inhabitants of the spiritual and earthly kingdoms.  (The real problem with this claim is that in fact he is calling not for hyphenated, but bifurcated identities, not for ‘Christian-American’ but for ‘Christian//American’; but more on that another time).

But what was Paul actually up to?  And what lesson does his appeal to Caesar actually offer?

 

Hart claims that

“Paul’s Christian identity did take precedence over his Roman citizenship.  But the nature of his Christian commitment did not keep him from appealing to Roman law to prolong his life.  Short of having to forsake his duty to preach, Paul was willing to play by nonreligious rules.  In other words, he thought of himself as more than a Christian; his identity was hyphenated–Roman citizen and Christian apostle.” 

Hart is suggesting here that, while of course political citizenship should never lead us to go against the duties of our Christian identity, it need not be justified in terms of Christian identity.  We can and ought to participate in civic life out of the ordinary concerns of citizens, not out of specifically Christian concerns.  We are free to take advantage of political structures to save our lives, for instance.  While of course I think both the narrow point (it’s fine to protect yourself using political structures) and the larger point (Christians do not have to have a distinctively Christian justification for every participation in civic activities) are basically valid (though not necessarily in the way Hart wants to use them), Paul’s example, interestingly enough, supports neither point. 

This is particularly interesting because Hart himself provides the refuting evidence just a few lines earlier: 

“Paul’s appeal to Rome was unusual on several levels.  As it turned out, had he not issued it, he would have been freed in Jerusalem….But instead of being emancipated, Paul had to endure a long and precarious trip to Rome which resulted in further imprisonment and ultimately death.” 

Now this is curious.  In other words, if Paul was really using his Roman citizenship to protect his life, he did a pretty poor job of it.  It’s possible, of course, that he just miscalculated seriously.  But the narrative of Acts, as well as Paul’s letter to the Romans, suggest quite otherwise–that Paul in fact was extremely eager to come to Rome, and indeed to preach before Caesar, and that his appeal was a calculated attempt to bring that about.  Most likely, he was well aware that he could have been released in Judaea, had he so desired.

This suggests then that what we have is in fact an example of precisely the opposite stance to that Hart wants to encourage–a determination to subordinate political identity to religious identity in such a way that action in the civic sphere becomes a tool in favour of a religious agenda.  Paul, it seems, is consciously exploiting the structures of the Roman justice system for evangelistic ends, rather than coolly petitioning for legal protection on his own account.  Needless to say, this suggests a rather different political-theological model than anything Hart would want us to consider.


The Debt of Love: Romans 13:1-7 in Context

3 Comments

Regular readers of this blog know that I have an annoying habit of dropping enigmatic hints about my research on Romans 13 (which I did initially more than two years ago and have been chipping away at again over the last year or so), implying that it contains the answer to this or that problem in ethics or political theology, but providing precious few details.  Well, I don’t think my reading of this passage gives all the answers, but it does, I think, provide a more helpful starting-point not only for understanding this section of Romans, but for hopefully for understanding many issues in political theology.  So, I will stop being enigmatic and share an excerpt from a paper I’ll be giving at the SBL Int’l Meeting next week containing a very concise version of one of the key lines of argument–the literary structure of the passage in context.  Bits of this appear in previous posts, but this is much more systematic, I hope.

…

Can we explain Paul’s admonitions in 13:1-7 within the same logic of love that dominates the surrounding context?  

Paul strongly invites us to do so, I would suggest, through the word-play that interlinks 13:7 with 13:8: the stem opheil, which appears as tas opheilas (“what is owed”) in 13:7, and as meden opheilete (“owe nothing”) in v. 8.  While most commentators have either completely ignored this intriguing repetition, or else dismissed it as merely a rhetorical ornament, this seems odd when a substantive explanation seems so ready-to-hand.  After all, as a few interpreters have noted, 13:7 poses a bit of a riddle.  It says to render to all what is owed them, but it does not solve the problem which has plagued citizens from Paul’s time to our own–what is owed them?  I know plenty of American Christians today who look at Romans 13:7 and say, “Aha!  Render to the government what is their due!  Well, the taxes being demanded are much more than is their rightful due, and so we need not pay.”  13:8 offers the obvious answer–what is owed is not determined by principles of political justice, but by the demands of love.  13:8, on this reading, can be taken to sum up all that goes before, saying, “Every duty which you carry out toward anyone must be conceived as a demand of the duty to love one another.  Of all other obligations you are free, but love’s demands remain.”  Certainly 13:9-10 seem to strongly support this understanding of 8, explicitly subsuming all other duties under that of neighbor-love.  This explanation has been forcefully asserted by John Calvin and Emil Brunner, to name two of the most prominent, but has almost never been picked up on by modern commentators.  

If this reading is correct, then the idea of 13:1-7 as an “independent block,” a self-contained pericope, has been cast into question.  Let us look closer for more clues of its relationship to the context.

 

A few hints of word-play suggest more tie-ins between our pericope and its context than merely the repetiton of ekdikos and orge in 12:19 and 13:4.  For instance, we may note the pervasive repetition of the pair agathos and kakos in these verses.  We meet kakos first in v. 17: “Repay no one evil for evil”–in the context, it suggests in particular violence–we are to show peace in the face of violence.  Then in v. 21 we meet kakos again, opposed now to agathos: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”  The sense again seems to be that in the face of violent force, seizure of their possessions, or other persecution, Christians ought to give freely and overflowingly, in the spirit of Jesus’s admonition: “if anyone seeks to take your tunic, give him your cloak also.”  It is this self-sacrificial peacemaking through giving that constitutes the “good” that overcomes “evil.” 

In light of this, we have a helpful framework for understanding the role of agathos and kakos in 13:3-4.  The ruler should not be source of fear to the one who does good–the Christian who is not solicitous for his own good, but gives freely even in the face of injustice–but to the evil–the one who uses force to further his own interests.   The “good”–those who peaceable and not defensive of their own interests, will generally receive favor from rulers who are above all interested in domestic tranquillity and intolerant of any unrest.  However, if you do resort to the “evil” that characterizes your persecutors–then you should fear the wrath–of the ruler and of God–that is falling on them.  

An additional connective appears in the word apodote, usually translated “render” in 13:7.  However, this is same word that appears in 12:17 as a participial imperative–apodidontes— “Do not be repaying evil for evil.”  If the sense of 12:17 can be sustained in 13:7, then we have the sense that our rendering of tax, tribute, honour, etc. to the authorities is meant to be a response to something we have received from them–we are repaying their actions with these gifts.  The concept of giving is present also in 12:20, where we are to give our enemies whatever it is that they ask for–for thus will our love overcome their evil. 

Finally, the word allelous–“one another”–appears in both 12:16 (“Live in harmony with one another”) and in 13:8 (“Love one another”), suggesting an inclusio.  When we line all of the foregoing connections up, this inclusio blossoms into a very interesting chiasm.

A. Live in harmony with one another (allelous) (12:16)

 B. Do not pay back (apodidontes) evil for evil (12:17)

   C. Live at peace with all men as much as depends on you (12:18)

   D. Do not avenge (ekdikountes), but give place to wrath (orge) (12:19)

    E. Specific commands about doing good to your enemy (12:20)

     F. Do not be overcome by evil (kakos), but overcome evil with good (agathos) (12:21)

      G. Be subject to the governing authorities, for there is none but from God (13:1)

     F.’ Those who resist incur judgment, for the rulers are a not a terror to the doer of good (agathon), but to the doer of evil (kakon) (13:2-3a)

    E.’ Do what is good, if you wish to escape fear. (13:3b)

   D.’ The magistrate is the avenger (ekdikos) for wrath (orge) (13:4)

  C.’ Be in subjection and pay taxes for conscience’ sake (13:5-6)

 B.’ Pay back (apodote) to each what is owed him (13:7)

A.’ Owe no one anything, except to love each other (allelous) (13:8)

 

This chiasm suggests that the imperative in 13:1, far from constituting an entirely new train of thought, is simply a natural application of the line of imperatives that crescendoed through the final verses of 12.  Incredulous interpreters today ask, “How could Paul have spoken so positively of Roman authorities who were so unjust and such enemies to the Christian community?”  But that is precisely it.  Paul is assuming that, from his readers’ perspective, the admonitions to bless persecutors, live peaceably with all, and give food to their enemies will raise the question, “What about the Roman authorities?”  Scholars have particularly drawn attention to two facts that likely made for a very tense relationship between the Christians in Rome and their rulers.  First, we know that Jews (including Jewish Christians) had recently been expelled from Rome, had only recently been permitted to return, and had reason to fear another expulsion.  For another, we know that there was a great deal of unrest and rebellious murmuring in Rome at this time over the highly oppressive taxes.  

Paul, however, takes this as an opportunity to apply his teaching about the need not only to patiently bear with injustice, but to show overflowing generosity in response to it.  This means not merely abstaining from the retaliatory “evil” of violent rebellion, but overcoming the oppressor’s evil through the “good” of joyful service.  The taxes being demanded were unjust, to be sure, so what would it mean for Paul to tell the Christians to pay the Romans what was due to them?  In context, this means to respond to the unjust demands with the unselfishness that love demanded–to the enemy that was hungry, they were to give food, and to the government that was greedy, they were to pay taxes.  

Such a reading, I suggest, is attractive on two levels–both the textual and the ethical levels on which Kallas and others are concerned.  On the textual front, not only does this make 13:1-7 thoroughly at home within its context and offer us an unbroken progression of parenesis from 12:1 through 13:14, but it sheds light on many smaller questions as well–though there is no time to go into these here.

 

On the ethical front, this releases us from the false dilemma that appeared in its sharpest form in the Reformation, when Protestants were divided between reading the passage as a wholesale endorsement of governmental authority, with totalitarian results, or else concluding that the passage must only be speaking of an ideal government, and so the call to submission had no force in the face of injustice.  This reading suggests instead a posture of what John Howard Yoder has called “revolutionary subordination,” in which we are able to challenge injustice, but not in the way it expects–not by leaping to our own defence and refusing all obedience, but by patient and conscientious service motivated and qualified by love, and confident in God’s ultimate control.  What this means in terms of concrete political action will differ depending on concrete political circumstances, and it may be that the modern West affords the Christian more room to actively confront the powers that be than first-century Rome did.  All this requires much further thought.  But a contextually grounded reading of Romans 13, rooted in the virtue of charity, is our best starting-point for this inquiry.


Set Free for Service: Kasemann on Rom. 13

3 Comments

In his 1969 article “Principles on the Interpretation of Romans 13,” Ernst Kasemann offers what may be the best discussion of Romans 13 I have yet come across (and I’ve come across several dozen).  What is most remarkable about the article is that he succeeds in doing this despite resolutely refusing to take into account the context–the end of chapter 12 and 13:8-10–no, Romans 13:1-7 must be interpreted, he doggedly persists, as an independent unit.  Oddly, though, the resulting interpretation he offers is one that fits like a glove into this context, and which absolutely demands to be read in continuity with these flanking passages.  In other words, his conclusion would make much more sense and be much stronger as the result of an exegesis of 12:9-13:10, not merely 13:1-7.   

I shan’t try to summarize the whole article here, but I’ll try to cover a couple key bases and then share some of the particularly fine quotes toward the ends.  Kasemann surveys the basic existing interpretive options for Romans 13 (those existing as of 1969, at least; several more have arisen since) and says that the basic problem with all of them is that they want to reverse the priority of Paul’s command and the grounding he gives that command; they want to shift the emphasis from the concrete ethical directives to the abstract metaphysical principles that they feel must underlie these directives.  The history of the interpretation, he says, “suffers from its conception of the real problem as lying not in the content of the exhortation as such but in the basis on which it is made.”  Although of course the latter is important, he says, “I believe it to be an error to make this the pivot of the whole thing….the tenor of the passage is not didactic as if the parenesis were a conclusion from a thesis.  The stresses must not be incorrectly interchanged; otherwise we shall almost inevitably find ourselves on a path which does not correspond to the emphasis of the passage.”

Kasemann then surveys Paul’s seemingly “conservative,” even “reactionary” teaching on social issues elsewhere in the New Testament to develop the case that in all these places, what is key for Paul is how he wants the Christian to act toward the social order they find themselves in, not so much the theoretical grounding for the existence of that social order, on which Paul is often quite ad hoc.  And how is it that Paul wants the Christian to act?  In a freedom that makes itself the servant of all.  Over and over he rebuts what seem to be reasonable deductions of a doctrine of Christian freedom, because he wants to understand that the Christian has been liberated not to do whatever he wishes, but for service: the Corinthian view “takes account of freedom exclusively as freedom from burdensome compulsion.  The apostle, on the other hand, is concerned here, as always, with the freedom which knows itself to be called to serve.”  And that means a service that is inescapably embedded in the existing social order:

“According to Paul, it is none other than the Spirit who imposes himself on the everyday life of the world as being the locus of our service of God; while emancipation, even when it appeals to the Spirit, prefers to retreat from this everyday life and the possibilities of service that are given with it, and is thus a perversion of Christian freedom….The traditional arguments are, to put it in a nutshell, Paul’s emergency aids to call the Christian to take his stand before the true God, the Lord of the earth, and thus to call him to the possibility of a genuine service in everyday life.  Anyone who prefers to live in isolation from the world and its powers is in practice taking away from the world its character as God’s creation and is thereby disqualified from serious service.  For Christian service must take place on earth and in earth’s everyday life; otherwise it becomes a fantasy….To acknowledge the given nature of this everyday life, which may possibly wear the colours of dictatorship or slavery–it is just this that is charismatic activity, the possibility of Christian freedom.”   

Subjection is not called for so much on the basis of what the powers are but where they are–namely, in the order where the Christian finds himself called to serve:

“Finally, it is not the given realities in themselves which move the apostle to argue that ‘We must be subject’ but the necessity to authenticate Christian existence and the Christian’s status in the eyes of the Lord, who stakes his claim to the world by facing it continually, in the person of his servants, with the eschatological token of his lordship, the quality of tapeinophrosune [lowly-mindedness].” 

Kasemann’s reading finds its crux at verse 5, where he reads, as I do, the “not only fear, but also conscience” more as a “not really fear, but instead conscience”:

“That he [the Christian] does so [fulfils his political duties] without question is seen as proof that he has in fact no reason to fear the bearers of political power.  Verse 5 does not therefore bring a double motivation to bear–obedience both out of fear and for conscience’ sake–but an alternative: others may have grounds to fear the powers that be, the Christian obeys them as one who knows himself to be confronted in their claim with the divine summons and who in his obedience is rendering service to God.  There can then, here or elswehare, be no question of interpreting Christian obedience in action as slavish passive obedience.  Christian obedience is never blind; and indeed, open-eyed obedience, directed by suneidysis, must even be critical.  For him, God does not dissolve into his own immanence to the extent of being identified with it; rather, he remains Lord of the world and as such calls the Christian into the freedom of sonship.  An obedience that does not breathe this freedom of sonship does not deserve the designation ‘Christian’.” 

After a fantastic discussion of whether revolution is ever justified, Kasemann concludes, “In this exercise [understanding Rom. 13] everything will depend on preserving the paradoxical connection of necessity and freedom at the point of their deepest unity–that free man’s service which is the good estate of Christian existence in the world.”