To Obey or Not Obey?

The chickens are coming home to roost. The church has experienced weeks of ‘online church’, we face (pun intended) the possibility of forced masking in worship as well as vaccine passports for worship services. Look at the Bill of Rights. Our liberties have been stripped from us. Our right to refuse medical treatment is under threat, our right to freedom of thought, conscience, privacy and religion is imperiled. Our right to peaceful assembly is gone. As are the rights to freedom of association, movement and freedom from discrimination.

The time for decisions is here. The trouble is, our collective Christian minds are creaky and stiff from disuse. Our body, feminine, soft and nurturing in form, but lacking the complementary male strength and roughness of virtues such as courage due to a matriarchal dominance of the church (often in spite of male leaders), is frozen in a semi-recumbent position. What will we do? Well, the women of both sexes will bleat on their social media platforms about doing the right thing and rail at any Christians who awaken enough from slumber to question whether we are in fact in the beginnings of a living totalitarian nightmare. “Obey the Government! Romans 13!” exclaim these newly minted experts in theology who, with their theological position, could no doubt justify yellow stars with the word Jude written in fancy lettering vaccine passports.

Since our minds are seized shut from lack of use and no call of action will get us to actually do anything, we’ll resort to one of our favourite feel-good pastimes. We’ll sing. But we’ll avoid the old hymns of the faith. It’s a bit hard to sing “Stand up for Jesus” when that might require backbone. We’ll no doubt sing lustily some inane and trite modern evangelopop. How about “Who the Son sets free, Oh, is free indeed”? But we’ll do it from our living rooms wearing a mask hoping the State will set us free once the population has been compliant enough and buckled under the State’s loving#kindness.

Is Obedience To the State Required When This Obedience Does Not Require Disobedience to God?

This seems to be the big argument of the flabby and out of shape modern evangelicals. Romans 13 says we must obey the government, and therefore unless they ask us to disobey God we must obey them. So say the Facebook theologians eager to celebrate their recently acquired theological prowess.

Even demonstrating the farcical nature of their position by asking questions like, “What if the government asked citizens to all wear pink tutus and ride a unicycle to work?” provokes no shame or careful clarification of their position.

But since these Christians purport to hold to Scripture, perhaps if we were to provide an example of a saint disobeying the government even though the government wasn’t asking the saint to disobey God that would help.

Take Daniel, one of the greatest saints of the Old Testament. An edict went out that no one was to pray to any god for 30 days except for the king (Daniel 6). Now, nowhere that I am aware of in the Old Testament Scriptures, is there any command from God on the frequency of prayer he requires. (Please correct me here if I am wrong). Certainly, there are requirements regarding not praying to other gods – this is obviously breaking the Ten Commandments. However, if Daniel had taken the position that many Christians today take on Romans 13, he would have put his prayer life on hold for 30 days. He certainly would not have prayed to the king, but he could have rationalised obedience to the first part of the mandate (no prayer for 30 days) because the king had not commanded him to disobey God. He could have put off prayer for 30 days. But of course, that is not what he did. He also could have just prayed privately. But that again is not what he did. He picked a fight. He prayed where he could be seen because he believed God was sovereign over the king and the state had no legitimate authority to command this thing, even if it was not directly in opposition to a command of God. The book of Daniel shows again and again that the rulers of earth are underneath God’s sovereign rule and he raises them up and deposes them as he sees fit. Proud leaders who think they are deities will be punished by the king of heaven to show that they are not.

Are We Already Disobeying God?

But let’s set aside the example of Daniel for a moment and assume that Romans 13 does in fact require the Christian to obey everything the government requires unless they are asking Christians to disobey God. The lockdown rules are causing Christians to disobey God. So even if you are naive and unschooled in Scripture to the extent that you believe Romans 13 is arguing the government has the prerogative to force you to wear pink tutus and ride unicycles, according to your own interpretation of Romans 13, you still ought to be disobeying the government. About what you ask? About not gathering together for worship.

And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. (Hebrews 10:24-25)

“Ah…but Lewis, don’t get carried away, we are meeting virtually. Church online!” First of all, we all know that before the pandemic, churches encouraged their parishioners to come physically to church. In fact, a Christian who didn’t gather physically was looked down on as disobeying this very command. “There’s no replacement for gathering with the saints!” Now that it’s convenient for us to interpret this verse to include non-material gathering, it seems we’ve capitulated. But if that’s your understanding of the Scripture in question, don’t expect people to flock back to churches once the lockdown ends, and don’t berate people who prefer ‘gathering’ from the comfort of their living room.

Let’s think about this verse in its original context. A physical gathering was of course assumed. We are not gnostics, the material world matters. Our bodies are important. We are embodied souls. Therefore we must meet physically. Why? Because, as the context in Hebrews makes clear, if we do not meet together to encourage each other, we are liable to waver from our confession. We need each other. And that means physically not in some ethereal online world. Christ gave the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper as a physical aspect of our worship because we are physical beings. And yet we have not celebrated this sacrament during lockdown despite it being a command of our Lord and Saviour (1 Corinthians 11:24).

So even by the faulty interpretation of Romans 13 that has been bandied about, Christians still ought to be considering how to disobey the government regarding meeting together for worship.

Finally, I would encourage all the pop shealogians both male and female engaging in ill-informed Romans 13 commentary to look to their forefathers in the faith and how they wrestled with these questions. A good start would be “Slaying Leviathan” by Glenn Sunshine. Or if that is too hard, take a look at Ethan Aloiai’s excellent short essay on a Theology of Government (part one here) in these times. And if that is too difficult, perhaps it’s best to think whether you are qualified to take a position on this matter.