Let's say your nation state asked you to do something anti-christian, say for instance participate in a war to prop up Islamic rebels at the expense of Christians (Egypt, Libya, Syria etc.). Would you help your state, or would you not do it, knowing that is was anti-Christian?
I have noticed that many people seem to place "The State" over the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. I will have people tell me that Catholics should just fall in line with the birth control mandate, even though it violates our religious freedom. Yet, Romans 13:1-7 makes me think that we should obey the government, but Acts 5:29 seems to contradict. Thoughts?
Romans 13 tells us that government is put here in order to promote justice and provide order. It was written in a context wherein government was doing that reasonably well. It was also written in a context wherein many may have believed that the claim that Jesus is Lord and Savior and the Son of God meant that Caesar- who claimed to be lord and savior and the son of a god- entailed violent resistance to the political authority of Rome.
What Romans 13 doesn't address one way or another are cases wherein grave injustices make the state
no longer the state, but instead a fully exploitative criminal enterprise that promotes injustice and disorder. In those cases, I think we have to fall back on the social contract theories developed in early modern Europe and put into practice in the American revolution, the first phase of French revolutions, and the liberal Romantic revolutions of 1848.
However, when the state
is basically promoting justice and basically providing order, I do not think we have any right to blatantly disobey government on particular issues. So long as the governing authorities are carrying out their God-given vocations, they are still God's servants whose laws we are bound to obey.
In the case of going off to fight in war, I think classic just war theory should inform the structure of a state's drafting policies, such that individuals may decline to fight in a given conflict if their church authoritatively declares that participation in the conflict is patently unjust. Currently the United States has no such mechanism in place, but only recognizes thoroughgoing pacifism as grounds for conscientious objection.
Of course, they are not only God's servants; they are our servants. Because most of us here live in some form of a constitutional and democratic system, our leaders are also responsible to us and to our laws. In the United States, that means the highest "governing authority" that we are "bound to obey" is not the president; it's the Constitution. And if the president (or anyone else) violates the Constitution, he has broken the highest laws in the land. It is then up to other authorities to carry out God's will in the left-hand (legal/political) realm. Because we have those checks and balances, we don't always need to run toward disobedience; we can instead participate in the political processes in orderly and civil ways.
What people who live in some form of a pure monarchy might do, I'm not as certain. If the king does not care political authority with others, and there are no checks on his behavior, I'm not certain however his subjects might go about redressing issues that are wrongs or are mistakes, but don't overturn his general authority. That was a huge problem in the Reformation era for Catholics, Lutherans, and the Reformed, which my tradition did a particularly bad job of addressing, sad to say. As it is, I can only be thankful that I live in a liberal constitutional democracy.
For more on that last point, check out Quinten Skinner's
The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2.,
The Reformation.
