CHAPTER 45
INTERPRETATION OF ROMANS 13:1-2 (CONTINUED)
The second reason for Paul’s words is this: [ Everything is to be done orderly and peacefully. The authorities sometimes have the same aim. And the Christians should help them in this, all the more considering that this is what God requires of them. Men of faith do good without waiting to be compelled to it by laws. Also, there are many who, being liberated through the grace of God from the burden of the old law, interpret this freedom as unchecked liberty, giving them a free hand to rebel against their overlords. ]
This thought often moves, even today, good and bad people who, greatly desiring freedom, think of how to humiliate and unseat their lords so that these will not override them. Therefore, Saint Peter, seeing this, calls this freedom a pretext for evil, which wrongly obstructs true freedom.[419] Desiring the freedom of Christ much too physically, they object to being subjected to higher powers who, however, enslave them as guilty, depriving them even of that little freedom of conscience and body they had.
[ That is why Paul urges the Christians to be submissive toward their pagan overlords: ]
Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God; and those that exist have been instituted by God.[420]
There is no authority except from God. That is, there is no other power, good or bad, pagan or heretic, which is a true authority, according to the Scripture. [ However, God uses these ‘evil’ authorities to chastise a rebellious people. ]
As it is happening among us in these days, for almost fifteen years a raging mad authority is destroying everything, caring naught about a just administration of villages, but rather being anxious to destroy, to prostrate, to scorch, to murder, to rob, to imprison, and to devastate everything like a plague of locusts.[421] God has allowed this evil to happen because He wanted to pour out His anger on the sinful people who do not honor Him but, on the contrary, are dishonoring Him by hypocrisy. This power could not have arisen, had He not desired it; for, as the prophet says, “if there be disaster in the city, has not the Lord caused it?”[422]
[ What Paul actually means is this: let the Christians be subject to temporal authorities in externals, but let them remember that the true authority is only the authority of God. Only under that authority can they fully live the Beatitudes. And the Scripture says about those powers that contradict the authority of God that ] the mighty will be mightily tested.[423]
[ In Paul’s days there were no Christian authorities but only pagan authorities. And these authorities were sanctioned by the God of the Old Testament. ]
Were it not so, Paul could not have exhorted the faithful Christians of Rome to obey Emperor Nero the pagan, saying, “There is no authority except from God.” [ But this authority of the pagans cannot make
