New Testament Theology of the State

0:00Well, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for being here. It's my pleasure to present to you today on work that I've been doing over the process of years called New Testament Theology of the State. First of all, let me give you a little bit of background about myself and just so you know where I'm coming from here. Currently, I'm a PhD student at University of Texas at Austin and a student also at Austin Graduate School of Theology. But probably one of my most passionate projects is libertarianchristians.com, which is a growing community of people, writers, talking about the relationship and intersections between Christianity and libertarian thought. And so what I'd like to do today is describe some of this work that you will find all over the place on my website and then kind of synthesize into a more cohesive theory of theology of the state from a New Testament point of view.

0:51So my objective today is to kind of give you a new vision here. A lot of time when Christians talk about the state, they tend to just immediately jump to one particular passage. And most of you, if you have a background in Christian theology at all, you know what it is. It's Romans 13. And so that's typically what is just thrown out tacitly. And people just accept this. Oh, well, this is the justification of the state that we need. We'll just move on. We don't have to talk about this anymore. But my point of view is that we really So we shouldn't start there at all. In fact, I think even my views have evolved over time to where I used to say actually that you can't really develop a lot of theology of the state in the Gospels or even in the New Testament. I'm thinking I was actually more wrong than I thought. So what we're going to do is I'm going to kind of guide you through a little whirlwind tour.

1:38We're going to go through sort of a naive reading in a sense of the New Testament. And what I think that you see here when you do this is that you kind of are led to a path of a certain kind of anarchism even. And so, as we go through this, I'll read some scriptures and just discuss a little bit about what I'm thinking these are meaning and, you know, what's going on here. So let's begin with the very beginning. And actually, let's think about the birth of Christ. Isn't it ironic? I think this is absolutely astounding that the birth of Christ is actually not taken as commentary at all on the relationship between the powers that be and God. Jesus' life, ironically enough, begins with a government committing genocide.

2:24And nobody seems to take any notice of this, but here's the point. When the birth of Christ is announced and Herod finds out about it, what does he do? Well, he gets all worried that there is this threat to his power. There was an implicit understanding in the messianic theology that had developed over for the course of the previous centuries, that the Messiah, this person who is to come and save Israel, had at least, if not necessarily a true political king, that he was certainly going to disrupt the powers that be. And this is something that does come across in the New Testament. Even if the people at the time were wrong about Christ and that he wasn't coming to And perhaps more important than that, though, is actually when you turn to Matthew 4. And this is another place where, again, it's baffling to me that nobody seems to recognize this as a commentary on the nature of the state itself. In the temptations of Christ, and

3:34This is in Matthew chapter 4. The third temptation is rather striking. And I'm gonna turn to it real quick and just read this particular verse. We'll start in verse eight. Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their splendor. All this I will give you, he said, if you will bow down and worship me. Jesus said to him, away from me, Satan, for it is written, worship the Lord your God and serve him only. Now, this is particularly interesting to me because Jesus does not say, Oh, Satan, you're just a liar. All the kingdoms of the earth, you know, God put them there and it's all, they're all under his control anyway. It's no big deal. No, he doesn't say that at all. He says, in fact, he kind of implicitly says, you're correct, you could do that, and instead responds with the command of God to worship the Lord your God, serve him only.

4:24The implied, the implication here that I see is the kingdoms of the world belong to Satan. There is an inherent evilness to them. And I don't hear that coming from really anybody in the Christian tradition, especially the evangelical tradition of the last hundred years. This is not something people tend to notice, and so I think it's just particularly odd. There's another interesting little point here. The word that is translated devil or Satan is the word diabolos in the Greek. Etymologically, what this word really means is the accuser, or more importantly for our interpretation, the divider. There seems to be even in the background of the language itself that the state is a reason for division between people.

5:09And we know from our understanding of economics and ethics that the state drives a wedge between people. It pits them against each other and causes violence. And so, again, we begin to see that as Jesus enters the picture, his intention is to bring and Peace and Reconciliation between Peoples rather than further division. So turning to a little later in the Gospel of Matthew, Matthew chapter 17 and verse 24, this is a selection that's often called the temple tax. And in this particular section, someone questions the disciples and asks if Jesus pays the temple tax. And so they go and ask him, hey, what are we going to do here?

5:55And Jesus has this kind of strange response, it's really unusual, and it doesn't make a lot of sense until you kind of think about the background and what he's actually saying. What Jesus ends up saying is, look, do princes pay the king a tax? No. So the sons are exempt, he says, and he basically is saying, I am not obligated to pay a religious tax. But in order to not cause offense, we're going to do it anyway. Here's how we're going to do it. Go to the pond, catch a fish, open its mouth, and you're going to find a coin, as though it basically is causing a miracle in a sense, but it's really bizarre because it's just absurd when you think about it, and it's an interesting point because the point actually isn't the miracle itself. Jesus never did miracles just to impress people. In fact, he only did miracles out of love and compassion. In fact, he refuses to do miracles sometimes because

6:55Jesus doesn't want them to become the basis of faith. Rather, he's calling for a different type of belief. So Jesus says he doesn't owe the tax, and yet it's still not worth causing offense. So he calls them on this absurd power that they are creating for themselves, and thus he resolves the problem with an absurd miracle. Go and catch a fish and pull a coin out of its mouth. That's just bizarro. But what we find here is Jesus is showing his indifference to the powers. So, he doesn't regard them with any authority or any power, he just ignores them in a sense. So, it's just an interesting comment on the way that Jesus actually views power above. Okay, so just even a couple chapters later, in Matthew chapter 20, we have another really strange discussion.

7:45In this particular selection, the disciples are arguing amongst one another about who will be closest to him in the coming kingdom. They're still thinking, after all this time, that Jesus is meant to go and establish some kind of earthly kingdom, even though just a few verses before, he tells them that we're going up to Jerusalem, and I'm going to be violently killed by the people that hate me. And they're just showing their lack of understanding in this particular instance. I want to read a couple of verses out of it, because I think they're particularly significant, This is how Jesus views power and the relationship between the Christian and power. So these are verses 25 through 28 in Matthew chapter 20. Jesus called them together and said, You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them, but not so with you.

8:40Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be the first must be your slave. The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. So we note here is that in this discussion of power, he makes no distinction and no reservation, no exception to the powers as to what power is good and what's bad. He says they're all bad. He says this is just the way it works. There is no political power without tyranny. That is that they lord it over other people. We turn now to the oft-talked about Render to Caesar passage in Matthew 22. I don't want to spend a whole lot of time here because I think it's somewhat trivial, actually, although I will comment that Jeff Barr had a great paper last year in 2010 at the Austrian Scholars Conference that you can pick up online where he discusses this, and I thought he did a

9:39great job. But I think it suffices to say a few choice things about it, and we'll quickly The Pharisees and the Herodians in this case are the ones who come and question him, should we pay taxes to Caesar? And these people, the Pharisees, the Herodians, they're bitter enemies. Why would they get together and try and trap him? Well, they're united because they both hate Jesus that much. They're willing to put aside these particular differences, which by the way, were political in nature, in order to try and send him over to the state in order to be, you know, to be killed. They're going to try and pin him as a rebellion leader as opposed to something else. So, of course, Jesus sees through this ruse and turns the tables on them entirely. For one thing, he exposes the triviality of their question in the first place. The coin that he says for them to produce bears Caesar's mark. And in this time, Caesar claimed all money for himself. In fact, there is a history that shows that

10:38At any time, he could confiscate all money because it bore his mark. Marks were a way of discerning ownership at this time. Well, that's funny because it's not unlike today, but we'll move beyond that. The implication, though, is that if something doesn't have Caesar's mark, it's not Caesar's. And it all belongs to God at that point. And Caesar has no right whatsoever to the rest. So in this case, fine, pay the tax. It's no big deal. Caesar is of no consequence in the long run. Moreover, he also is exposing their particular form of treachery by having them even show that coin, which is called the denarius, in the temple. This coin is kind of ironic that it would be in the temple of the Jews at the time because it had a graven image on it.

11:29One of the Ten Commandments is, you shall not have idols, right? Well, this coin, if you read it, there's text on there that says, This is Tiberius Caesar, son of the deified Augustus chief priest. In other words, this is an idol image proclaiming Caesar to be God. Why on earth would they allow that to be in the temple? For the Pharisees and the Herodians, to show that off in the temple was actually idolatry, in a sense. And so, again, Jesus really turns the tables on them and shows them for who they are. A little later in Matthew chapter 26, there's a rather famous saying of Jesus where this is when he's being arrested and he says, you know, those who live by the sword will die by the sword.

12:16Or actually, I think it says, those who draw the sword will have the sword, the sword will be drawn upon them to get there. Yeah, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. Now this is a slight difficulty for us on one level because just a few verses before, before they go out, Jesus has the disciples go by two swords. And so they're actually carrying around weapons at this point. But I think it's kind of absurd to think that this is some kind of implication that violence is just okay to do. In fact, it's actually a conscious fulfillment of prophecy. If you start taking a look at it. But when Jesus says those who draw the sword will die by the sword, he's really giving an absolute judgment on systems of violence entirely.

13:05And in fact we hear echoes here of Matthew chapter 5 and turning the other cheek. Interestingly enough, this saying is repeated in the book of Revelation in chapter 13 in the context of the two great beasts which we'll talk about in a minute. The point of this selection is really to say that we have this orientation automatically as Christians toward nonviolence. If we are not to draw the sword at all, then we have this particular new perspective on how to behave and how to act. Now of course, one other section that is often overlooked with regard to our attitudes toward of the State and Power is the trial of Jesus just before his death.

13:50The Romans, incidentally, were known very, I mean, most of you guys know this, they're known for their legal accomplishment. And some people say, and I'm just going to take their word for it, that it's the best ever system. It's one of the best devised systems of justice in history. Now regardless of where we fall on that particular question, what did this such amazing system of justice actually accomplish? Well, condemnation of an innocent man to death. They was given over to a mob rule. And it reveals, in my opinion, it reveals a basic injustice of a system that purports to be just. And in fact it echoes from Ecclesiastes chapter 316 where it says, in the place of judgment, in the seat of judgment, wickedness was there.

14:37In the place of justice, wickedness was there. In other translations it says the power of wickedness reigns. This is a really interesting point to me because it shows that there is no system of justice that's provided by some type of monopoly of force that is ever going to end up being just. And in fact the attitude of Jesus shows his particular orientation against it. In Jesus' silence, he shows his rejection and scorn for the political authority above him at the time. He regards them as nothing, and thus it's useless for him to defend himself even. And in fact, there are multiple occasions, such as Luke 22, 52, where he accuses the powers of being part of the power of darkness itself, and we've noted in various cases already how he's alluded to this.

15:30Jesus' encounters with authority overall show his irony, scorn, non-cooperation, indifference, and sometimes even accusation against those people. And in fact, I like how Jacques Ellul describes him as an essential disputer. It's a rather interesting description of him. Turning now to the book of Revelation, we see that this book is a book of symbols. And in fact, it's full of challenges to power itself. And just to go through it more very quickly, we'll just discuss the two greatest symbols in the book. First off, there's the symbol of the two beasts. The first beast comes out of the sea and the second beast out of the earth. The first beast is called Babylon.

16:18And what's particularly interesting about this, Babylon is used throughout scripture as being a type of overarching authority of the devil, of Satan. And one of the things that is often overlooked about this is that this also goes back to Genesis. In fact, some of my other research in Old Testament has shown that when you begin to look at the story of the Tower of Babel, this is actually the origin story of the state. And that in the Tower of Babel, you In my opinion, this is an explanation and origin story of the state itself. It is enacted upon, it is begun with a rebellion against God in mind, and it ends up dispersing people as a result. It drives wedges between them.

17:19and so that we see allusions to this all throughout scripture and including finally in the book of Revelation. Now the second beast that comes out of the earth is described as one that compels people to obey the first beast. And I think that after thinking about this a long time, I'm becoming more convinced of Jacques Ellul's interpretation of the second beast that it represents the propaganda of states and the instrumentation that they use in order to compel people to obey. And in particular, that includes things like the police and the military and all these institutions that purport to protect us or something to that effect.

18:05and yet, if we decide to go even minorly against them, they come and begin to violate individual rights. So, the second great challenge or the second great symbol in the book I want to briefly mention is the fall of Babylon itself. And it's interesting here because the way that it describes the people at the time is is that this Babylon becomes drunk with the wine of the fury of their vices and so it's just amazing how you go through these series of things that this Babylon is going about selling and controlling the economic system at the time and it looks a whole lot like fascism even or corporate statism and it looks terrible.

18:55But then the final thing that it says that they trade in are bodies and souls. is that they have the ability to control people. And so my time is almost up here. I want to briefly say that when you begin to look at the context of Romans 13 and other parts of the New Testament, with this type of theology in mind, you begin to read different things. You see different things in the text. I think it's amazing, finally, that even in Romans 13, if we actually back up a little A little bit more, we find that there's a verse that says do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And so I would call us all to begin that process. There is a better way of viewing the state from the perspective of scripture.

19:42And with that, I will cede the balance of my time.