IF IT PLEASE THE KING
Within the final years of his life, as his death at the hands of a tyrant drew near, the apostle Peter wrote to churches scattered around Asia minor, instructing them to live as those for whom Christ had died and been raised, as those sanctified by his blood, as those confident in the Lord’s return to judge the quick and the dead. The apostle addresses marriage (1 Pet. 3), economics (2:18–25) and political life (2:13–17), in light of the applied accomplishment of Christ. As to political life, he enjoins Christians to “be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution” and to “honor the emperor” (2:13, 17).
This would have triggered readers in Peter’s day, as it might in ours. Does Christ really mean for his followers to give honor to a leader who doesn’t honor him?
Peter, like Paul in Romans 13:1–7, is concerned with the notion of citizenship, primarily in light of the unwieldy fallout of messianic heroism that led some Christians to believe, as Peter himself and the other disciples had once believed (Acts 1:6), that the work of the messiah spelled the end of political subjugation. Paul and Peter write not to temper the urgency of eschatological expectation but to distinguish it from political life, as if to say, “our citizenship is in heaven but in the meantime we are still citizens here.”
This was by no means a concern isolated to the early church. The anti-apartheid Kairos Document, published in South Africa in 1985, argues likewise that in Romans 13 Paul “is simply establishing the fact that there will be some kind of secular authority and that Christians as such are not exonerated from subjection to secular laws and authorities.”[1] The document sought to redress misunderstanding and misuse—indeed, abuse—of the subjugation enjoined in Romans 13. Paul “does not say anything at all about what they should do when the State becomes unjust and oppressive. That is another question.” Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2 are, primarily, restatements of Christian political belonging against the backdrop of a heavenly-mindedness unhinged.
Political activism, and even resistance to government, for which these passages do indeed leave room, must presuppose sincere cooperative investment. Peter, no less than the whole of Scripture, encourages diligent, humble, and lawful participation in political life and public service, serving others because we ourselves have been graciously served, above all loving others, and seeking the glory of God. At the same time, governance is portrayed as first a divine design and provision but in practical terms a “human institution.” Tension will naturally arise, therefore, between the servants of the Creator and an earthly system that favors the destruction rather than the preservation of image-bearing life. But no handy criteria for discerning these moments appear in the Bible, nor is it clear when changing a system requires resisting it, or even what “resisting” would entail.
Those questions notwithstanding, a few principles are indeed clearly discernable in 1 Peter 2. First, the Christian in his political and public conduct ought to seek above all a clear conscience before the Lord—the Christian seeks a unity and organicism of godly living. Second, in public discourse the Christian should appeal always to the knowledge of God that all men have by virtue of being made in God’s image.
PUT YOUR SWORD INTO ITS SHEATH
The reader of 1 Peter is struck perhaps above all with the apostle’s eschatological conviction. Scarcely an imperative appears in the whole of the letter to which there is not appended, in short order, a pointed reminder of the eschatological significance of the resurrection and of the eschatological orientation of Christian hope, conviction, and diurnal coming and going. Peter is sure that he who began a good work will bring it to completion on the day of Jesus Christ, and he is sure of better things for the church, things that belong to salvation (Phil 1:8; Heb 6:9). Peter returns again and again, with fervor and rapturous joy, to eschatological declaratives as he calls the church to holiness domestic, professional, and political. Martyn Lloyd Jones has said that a preacher should preach with his whole body.[2] One dare not imagine Peter, as he drafted this letter to those “elect exiles,” seated and subdued.
Nor does Peter preach fantasy. The Lord has proven himself faithful time and again. As an aid to the faith and hope of his readers, therefore, Peter recalls that great deliverance of Israel from slavery by the outstretched arm of the Lord, and he draws the New Testament church into this covenant history by declaring them “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession,” not because they walked through the Red Sea, but because the Lord “called them out of darkness into his marvelous light” (2:9).
As John Murray has written, “we often think of the Levitical sacrifices,” even of the whole of Mosaic religion, “as providing the pattern for the sacrifice of Christ.”[3] True enough, Murray says, but the perspective of the author of Hebrews is something else, that “the Levitical sacrifices were patterned after the heavenly exemplar.”[4] Old covenant types and ordinances are not merely anticipatory but basically and immediately expository, as it were, of the then present heavenly advocacy of the mediator. Moses preached Christ (John 5:45–47). Peter in this same epistle reminds the church that through the prophets, who preach the law of Moses, the Lord Jesus himself calls, as he has always been calling, his people to himself (1:10–12). The Exodus therefore was not the startling intervention of a god who might still be there; the Exodus published in mighty but fleeting historical terms the basic principles of the coming cosmic renewal of all things yet to be accomplished in Christ in the fullness
of time. Christ is greater than Moses. So Peter proclaims Mosaic history to the exiles of the dispersion in order to draw attention to where God has planted “within the organism of the present world the centre of the world of redemption,” the seed of the new order signaled by the resurrection of Christ from the dead.[5]
The death of Christ was not the quiet disappearance of an outstandingly understated man, but divine victory over death and Satan through the weakness of the Son incarnate.
The reality underwriting Christian political life is therefore the humiliation of Christ unto death on the cross, unto a death that could not contain him, because he, Jesus Christ, was the treasured possession and the beloved Son who at last loved the Father as the Father loved him.
But the humiliation of Christ was not an extreme gesture of self-abandonment or self-renunciation. The death of Christ was not the quiet disappearance of an outstandingly understated man, but divine victory over death and Satan through the weakness of the Son incarnate. And it is, because it is Christ’s victory, the church’s victory as well (Rom 16:20). In the background, as it were, of the work of Christ, is a cosmic confrontation between the kingdoms of darkness and of light. And leveraging divine justice for the deliverance of the church, the Son vanquished the accuser of his people by coaxing him into the open field of judicial reckoning.[6] Jesus knew that his preaching would lead to death because he preached the love, grace, and justice of God in the courts of Satanic hatred. Jesus provoked in perfect innocence, he agitated by tender grace, he spoke the truth in love, and never a bruised reed broke as he brought forth judgment unto truth (Isa 42:3).
Christian political life is pictured in 1 Peter as filling up what is lacking in the suffering of Christ, as joining the Son in rounding out his victory against slander, accusation, and the accuser himself. And victory will be secured through the church as it was in the humiliation of the Son on the cross, where he opened not his mouth, where for the joy that was set before him he endured, and despised the shame. Peter bids us mind the end—not the next election or the next legislative showdown, but the day of visitation—when the honor will be for us who believe, when he will turn our shame into praise (1 Pet. 2:12, 7; Zeph. 3:19). Victory for the church is not a kingdom on earth but the kingdom of heaven, and our great adversary is not the unjust master or the tyrant but that great dragon, the deceiver of the world (Rev. 12:9). Christian political life, in other words, is eschatological.
As our Lord’s death drew near, who defended him? Who stood up to the unjust ruler, spoke out against a failing system, and demanded vindication now? “Get behind me Satan” was our Lord’s response when the ancient serpent attempted to derail Christ’s ministry and mediation through Petrine political hope and misguided loyalty (Matt. 16:23). Persecution and injustice unto death were essential to the accomplishment of redemption. It was not courage but cowardice and panic that severed Malchus’s ear, as Peter’s betrayal later proved. Jesus subverted the wiles of the evil one by laying down his life, even interceding in his last moments for those who persecuted him, and he endured injustice that he might remain faithful unto death (Luke 23:43; Rev. 2:10). And we, likewise, must take up our cross daily.
THAT YOU MAY BE SONS OF YOUR FATHER
Peter encourages the church to “be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human authority,” “to every institution ordained for people,” “every ordinance of man,” or “human authority,” as various translations have it (2:13). Commentators quibble over the best English wording, but the language here denotes all the spheres or structures—the perfect term again eludes us—to which Peter devotes attention in this epistle, including marriage and family, economy, and political order and authority. To each of these structures of culture and human experience—including a head of state of one kind or another—the Christian is to be voluntarily subject. Adoption as a son of God underwrites no dismissive hubris. Quite the contrary, the Christian is to be mindful of the Lord’s hand, and of the call to glorify him, in and through all such institutions.
Regarding political life specifically, Peter says that governors are “sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good,” as Paul has written with categorical clarity that “there is no authority except from God” (1 Pet. 2:14, Rom. 13:1). Being “subject . . . to human authority” is, therefore, obedience to God.
As John Murray points out, the decretive will of God is not the focus here. “Sent by him,” as Peter says, is not the same as “foreordained by him.” The divine appointment in view, says Murray, has to do with governance according to the preceptive will of God, and focuses therefore on the administration of the Lord’s own revealed distinction between good and evil. And if the magistrate is tasked with “fulfilling God’s preceptive will,” we conclude with Murray that “it would be sinful for him to refrain from so doing.”[7]
The magistrate thus wields a heavenly commission that hangs on his faithfulness to the law of God. Divine commission accompanies God’s own law—not any person, administration, party, office, or title. Political godliness is not a subjective possession; there is no imputation of civic integrity; our political heroes err. So, one must be diligent to do the law and not merely hear it (James 1:22)
Nor, on the other hand, may we assume that divine approval will always accompany divine appointment, anymore than the Lord’s tilting a boiling pot away from the north suggests that Nebuchadnezzar was a godly man (Jer. 1:13), or that Babylonian rule was legitimate. Even so, “seek the welfare of the city” (Jer. 29:7) hardly leaves room for revolution. “Christians should not refuse,” Martin Luther says, “under the pretext of religion, to obey men, especially evil ones.”[8] John Murray puts even the American founding in its theological place when he says that Romans 13 “excludes from the outset every notion to the effect that authority in the state rests upon agreement on the part of the governed or upon the consent of the governed. Authority to govern and the subjection demanded of the governed reside wholly in the fact of divine institution.”[9] If we are willingly subject to human authorities when all is politically well and good, what reward do we have? (Matt. 5:46) It is particularly when the exercise of power runs afoul of the law of God that political obedience bears subversive witness to the absolute justice of God in hopes of mercy.
Note the subversive edge to Peter’s characterization of imperial authority as a “human institution,” surely not lost on readers of the first century, who knew firsthand what Emperor worship entailed. If imperial authority is a human institution, it is a fallible institution on the docket for the Lord’s conclusive assessment, just as we all are. And yet, until then, to neglect the apostle’s instructions to be subject to human authority, even the Roman emperor who sets himself up as an object of worship, is to transgress the preceptive will of God—it is, likewise, to sin.
The church must beware the flaming arrows of her accuser, one of which is the lure of political vindication and power.
So the church must beware the flaming arrows of her accuser, one of which is the lure of political vindication and power. Christians will constantly face, as Christ himself did, temptations to trade eschatological glory and the heavenly kingdom for earthly imitations—precisely the thought pattern of Babel and the impulse of idolatry. “The essence of ungodliness,” Murray reminds us, “is that we presume to take the place of God, to take everything into our own hands. It is faith to commit ourselves to God, to cast all our care upon him and to vest all our interests in him.”[10] “The way of faith,” by contrast, is to prioritize the heavenly, to store up treasures in the age to come, to seek things that are above, “to recognize that God is judge and to leave the execution of vengeance and retribution to him.”[11] “Never may we in our private personal relations execute the vengeance which wrong-doing merits.”[12]
By thus deferring to God and looking to him alone in the end to restore the honor of the righteous, the church remains faithful to the God of history. Charging into politics and succumbing to political provocation, joining the acerbity and rancor of public discourse, is to walk in the counsel of the wicked, to conspire together in the immanentizing of the eschaton and the eclipse of the heavenly in Christian public witness. “See to it,” says Martin Luther—himself no stranger to persecution—“that he who hurts you does not cause you to become like him, namely, a wicked person, nor let his wickedness defeat your goodness.”[13] Likewise, John Murray: “we are not to be vanquished ethically by the evil heaped upon us.”[14] “Paul and Peter,” writes Douglas Harink, “issue a call to a messianic, apocalyptic, cruciform engagement in history, against history, for the sake of history.”[15] “This is,” he says, “the revolution that looks like it is not one.”[16] The Christian should hold the moral line, staying true, yes, to political conviction, but supremely to humility and witness unto eschatological joy.
Peter calls Christians to be mindful of the humiliation of Christ, of the Son’s setting aside divine privilege and assuming human weakness and divine curse, when for the sake of mercy “justice was denied him” (Acts 8:33). Peter sees this as the primary strategy for the church’s engagement with a hostile world, to whom the church must both represent and proclaim the grace of God in Christ, but against whose recalcitrance finally and conclusively the saints will one day bear witness (1 Cor. 6:2).
SO THE KING AND HAMAN CAME TO THE FEAST
Peter of course knew well enough that a gentle word will not always turn away wrath, nor was he reluctant when the chips were down to slight the demands of man for the honor of God. “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). On what grounds does Peter defy a human political institution?
Peter’s injunction to humble submission has at times been taken as a call to subjugation unqualified and without exception, even where abuse of power is unseemly and the suffering of the vulnerable severe. The Kairos Document mounted a critique of just such an exaggeration and misdeployment of biblical authority, and other critics, too, have been right to highlight such liabilities—biblical shelter for the tyrant and a blind eye to suffering—and innumerable actual abuses as well. Peter’s political obedience can easily be taken out of context and taken too far.
When considering the council appearances in Acts 4 and 5, it should be noted first of all that Peter’s is a special case, not directly applicable to our own situation. Peter received instructions directly from the risen Lord, along with special Pentecostal endowment, to do precisely that which he is now by Jewish injunction forbidden from doing. Peter and John wielded apostolic recourse. In addition, they on some level had in common with the council the final rationale for local legislation, the law of God, or at least a theistically orientated political order. Peter is not challenging the system itself but, if anything, attempting to reform it. The point is that the apostles are not here involved in civil disobedience, but in an unrepeatable episode in the history of redemption where special revelation was publicly relevant.
Although we do not share Peter’s apostolic moment today, the broader scope of Christian civil conduct is still discernable. In both his case and ours, submission, characterized by lawful participation, is the mode of political conduct until and unless compliance with the authority of man grants victory to the kingdom of darkness and the cause of sin, when the peace of Christian conscience before the king of kings is lost.
Submission, characterized by lawful participation, is the mode of political conduct until and unless compliance with the authority of man grants victory to the kingdom of darkness and the cause of sin, when the peace of Christian conscience before the king of kings is lost.
Even then, Peter’s non-compliance was no political revolution but an appeal to settled legal principia. His appeal was to the legal principles governing his situation. He and John ruffled feathers not by threatening revolt or revolution but by suggesting that the men currently holding office had run afoul of their own mandate. Peter thus appealed subversively, though in his case overtly, to the law of God.
Karl Barth, rarely a help in times of trouble, says in his breakthrough Römerbrief that “the most radical revolution can do no more than set what exists against what exists,” and even a so-called “‘spiritual’ or ‘peaceful’ revolution—can be no more than a revolt.”[17] Political pushback amounts only to “justification and confirmation of what already exists.”[18] He may have had in mind something like Luther’s claim that “this life and the life to come are mutually exclusive.”[19]
Political means are suited to political ends. The citizen of heaven ought always to acknowledge that distinction between the political and the redemptive realms and the implication of a certain logic of Christian political life. Christians ought to participate sincerely in the political realm, but their treasure should be stored elsewhere. We participate in the visible world while prioritizing the world to come. And if we lose track of that distinction, the world will soon remind us. The law, writes Paul, is indeed written on their hearts, as twisted consciences confirm (Rom. 2:15). But through repetition and mutual encouragement men become ignorant—culpably ignorant—of the severity of divine justice, indeed of the very personal nature of transgression. God is man’s context, but suppression of the knowledge of God, meanwhile, is a corporate and thus cultural undertaking (Rom. 1:32).
The God who fills heaven and earth will one day judge “the secrets of men by Christ Jesus” (Rom. 2:16), and on that day, writes Herman Bavinck, “when . . .Christ comes to destroy the works of the devil, then also the ‘deep things of Satan’ become manifest.”[20] So political witness until that day, even or especially where justice fails, serves to call men to attention.
Against Israel stood the witness of Moses, Joshua’s rock at Shechem, and Peter’s raucous preaching; and the unbeliever always has a conscience, a witness to the law and holiness of God that never lets him rest (Josh. 24:27; John 5:46; Rom. 1:32). To these suppressed but in extinguishable revelations of God, Christian political participation makes appeal—despite the lost but also for their sakes—by means of piety and prioritization of the kingdom of God. “The motivation to be subject to human authorities,” and when conscience cannot rest even to pray for systemic reform, “is that thereby one may show his subjection to God.”[21] So, there may come a time when to honor the emperor, we must honor the king of kings despite him. On that day, may a gentle word turn away wrath, but if not, the Lord will go before us. He will not suffer your foot to be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber (Ps. 121:3).
This fortified humility of Christian political life expresses the fact that the humiliation of Christ was not the annihilation of his person. Jesus was a martyr because he was a warrior, so 1 Peter does not exalt victimhood as virtue, nor will the Lord abandon the vulnerable to the whims of the tyrant. The confluence of humility and discernment, therefore, commends a steady hope, gentle as a dove, that political order and power serve to distinguish and divide good and evil in public life, but also an agility and responsiveness, wise as a serpent, to government gone wrong, when the good for which politics was given is eclipsed by an unleashed evil of man.
CONCLUSION: ONLY A NIGHT'S LODGING
This is an essay about the political life of the Christian, but it should be remembered that comfort and prosperity are excessive kindnesses of God to which followers of Jesus have no rightful claim in this world. Privileges, therefore, such as those of life in the United States in the past half century or so have not been given so that we might eat our way to an early grave or bask in dull complacency. Rather, with our liberty of religion, we are free to mourn with those who mourn and remember the brother in prison as though in prison with him, and remember him constantly (Rom. 12:15; Heb. 13:3; 2 Tim. 1:3). A political environment that is hospitable to the Christian, in other words, is a rare provision indeed. So when we are reminded that it is only ever momentary, let us not be dismayed. A servant is not greater than his master, and they nailed our master to a tree. Make no mistake: this is not our home.
So Peter would have us remember as we ponder these things precisely what Martin Luther preached to his congregation five centuries ago, that this life is but
a night’s lodging, and no suffering can compare to the glory prepared for those who love Lord Jesus.[22] So let us hold fast to the hope of the resurrection, encourage one another to wisdom and the fear of the Lord, and be ready to give a reason with gentleness and love, thanking the Lord for every day of mercy while we pray nonetheless, come Lord Jesus.
[1] Gary S. D. Leonard, ed., Kairos: The Moment of Truth: The Kairos Documents (University of KwaZulu-Natal: Ujamaa Center for Biblical and Theological Community Development and Research, 2010), 10.
[2] Martyn Lloyd Jones, Preaching and Preachers (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1972), 82.
[3] John Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955), 15.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Geerhardus Vos, “The Idea of Biblical Theology as a Science and as a Discipline,” Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation: The Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos, ed. Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1980), 18.
[6] On holy war in 1 Peter see Annang Asumang, “‘Resist Him’ (1 Pet. 5:9): Holiness and Non-Retaliatory Responses to Unjust Suffering as ‘Holy War’ in 1 Peter,” Conspectus 11 (2011): 7–46.
[7] John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans: The English Text with Introduction, Exposition, and Notes, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959), 149.
[8] Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans, Library of Christian Classics, Vol. 15, trans. and ed. Wilhelm Pauck (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961), 358.
[9] Murray, Romans, 148.
[10] Murray, Romans, 141–42.
[11] Murray, Romans, 141–42.
[12] Murray, Romans, 142.
[13] Luther, Lectures on Romans, 356.
[14] Murray, Romans, 144.
[15] Douglas Harink, 1 and 2 Peter Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2009), 79.
[16] Harink, 1 and 2 Peter, 76.
[17] Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 482.
[18] Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 482.
[19] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, American Edition, 55 vols.; ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Muehlenberg and Fortress, and St. Louis: Concordia, 1955–86), 30:11. Quoted in Kenneth J. Woo “Suffering as a Mark of the Church in Martin Luther’s Exegesis of 1 Peter,” Concordia Theological Quarterly 77 (2013): 311.
[20] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 3, Sin and Salvation in Christ, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 146.
[21] Donald G. Miller, On This Rock: A Commentary on First Peter (Allison Park: Pickwick, 1993), 208.
[22] Luther, Lectures on Romans, LW (AE), 30:35. Quoted in Woo, "Suffering as a Mark of the Church," 311.