Caesar is Not God

For the Week of June 2, 2003

Last weekend in church coincided with the celebrations of Memorial Day weekend. For most people the weekend meant a barbecue with neighbors, the opening of the local swimming pool, or taking care of those neglected house chores. As a Christian, I find it one of the most ambiguous weekends of the year, for it is the one time of the year when many believers (certainly not all) rather enthusiastically merge their Christian identities with their political patriotism. In other words, it is a time when it is all too easy to confuse fidelity to Jesus and His kingdom with support of the state.

Consider these four examples. I get nervous when Christians cheer wildly at Memorial Day parades when fighter jets scream overhead. Granted, the technology is overwhelmingly impressive, but let’s never forget that the only purpose of such planes is to rain down death and destruction on fellow human beings. I try to imagine how I would feel if that jet was bearing down on my own village. I bristle at singing Battle Hymn of the Republic (1861), a Civil War song written by Julia Howe when she visited a Union Army camp on the Potomac River. Or again, what are we insinuating by displaying an American flag in the church sanctuary? Finally, why do so many American evangelicals give such uncritical support of Israel?¹

With our government’s war against Iraq and subsequent occupation of that country, this subject deserves renewed reflection, all the moreso, too, as the news now reports that the White House has intentions to “destabilize” Iran. Can I support my government’s actions? Should I? Is there such a thing as a Christian view of the state? These are not easy questions, and fine Christians range the spectrum of opinions. In general, though, we can say that there are two reasons why believers should be critically wary of the state and make sure that they do not confuse the agenda of the government with the agenda of Jesus.

On a practical level, for the first three hundred years of Christianity, it was very easy to distance yourself from the state, for it was the Roman government that badly persecuted Christians. Sometimes these persecutions were local and sporadic, but at other times they were systematic and widespread. Having murdered both Peter and Paul, is it any wonder that the book of Revelation refers to the state as a great whore, a beast, or the enemy Babylon? We also know that states and governments persecute other peoples, not just Christians, which is a nice way of saying that in the worst cases, governments commit all sorts of atrocities like Saddam Hussein’s genocide against his own Kurdish citizens. Of course, not all governments act like this, but some do. So, Christians understand that, as a practical matter, states commit all sorts of acts that they as believers find reprehensible, like genocide, neglecting the poor and favoring the rich, discrimination, and so forth.

If Robert Kaplan is right, it might be that governments have to act in ruthless and Machiavellian ways in order to survive. When we look around the world, says Kaplan, we need to think with what he calls a “constructive pessimism” or brutal realism, for just beneath the veneer of civilization there are all sorts of “bleak forces” in human nature. States, then, must use brutal and coercive power to control such chaos. In modern state craft, personal virtue, he thinks, is a decided hindrance when it comes to public policy. The first duty of any state is its own, secular, self-interest. Politics is the realm of political expedience, whereas personal, individual virtue is the realm of moral perfection. The good warrior politician who intends to do good, said Machiavelli, must know how to be bad to accomplish that good. He must readily promote what might be necessary rather than nice, as in sanctioning deceit to avoid war, refusing intervention where there is no strategic self-interest, or killing many people to avoid killing more people.²

I recently read Daniel Ellsberg’s Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, in which he documents how five successive presidential administrations (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon) systematically lied to the American people and the Congress about that war.³ Ellsberg’s story is fascinating because in his early years as a Marine company commander he was an enthusiastic supporter of our government’s war efforts. But after two years in Vietnam and much study of classified documents his eyes were opened to other realities, that it is pretty much impossible for the public to know what your government is doing, since even those officials at the highest level often don’t know and can’t know what is going on. As a result, Ellsberg became radically opposed to the Vietnam War, and in order to try to stop it he leaked the so-called Pentagon Papers to Congress and then to the media—7,000 pages in 47 volumes of top secret documents. The lesson: in practice, believers would be naive to believe all that the government says or to support all that it does.⁴

The second reason Christians should be wary of the state is theological, not practical. When questioned about paying taxes, Jesus urged His followers to “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s (Matthew 22:21, NIV). In other words, there are two realms, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the state, and their interests are very different. They are not the same. Put another way, Caesar is not God, which was a radical notion in the Roman empire when Caesar was considered god. In fact, it is to Christianity, as Bernard Lewis observes, that we owe the idea of a distinctly secular state. If in Rome the state was god, in theocracies such as ancient Israel or modern Iran, god is the state.⁵ Christians reject both views because they believe that however much related the church is to the state, the two realms are separate.

What about Romans 13:1 where Paul commands believers to “submit to the governing authorities?” This is a difficult text over which much theological ink has been spilled, and we should respect the views of differing Christians. But I ask myself: is this a command I should follow absolutely and always, with no exceptions, or is it a command that I should observe in a relative manner? Put this way, I think the answer is easy. For the two reasons just given, practical and theological, Christians can never give uncritical allegiance to the state, and in some instances should actively oppose the state, as was the case with the Christians Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King.

Peter also gave a similar command for believers to “submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every authority instituted among men: whether to the king, as the supreme authority, or to governors” (1 Peter 2:13). At first this sounds rather categorical, but a few verses later he makes an important distinction when he summarizes, “fear God, honor the king” (verse 17). Respect and honor to the government? Yes. Fear and uncritical allegiance? Never.

¹ See “A Very Mixed Marriage: Evangelicals and Israel,” Newsweek, June 2, 2003.
² Robert Kaplan, Warrior Politics : Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (NY: Random, 2002), pp. 42–43, 53.
³ Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (New York: Viking, 2002).
⁴ Cf. Nancy Snow’s two books, Propaganda, Inc.: Selling America’s Culture to the World (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), and Information War: American Propaganda, Free Speech, and Opinion Control Since 9/11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003).
⁵ Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (New York: Oxford, 2002), pp. 96ff.