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What authority in your life is primary? Is it God? The Bible? The government? Some person? An organization? A business? Whom or what do you fear the most? Or to ask the question in a different way, what authority will you obey above all others?
Some Christian churches claim that the central theme of the Bible is salvation from human sin. But if you read the Bible carefully, you will see that salvation from sin is nowhere nearly as important a theme as the question of power. At its core, the Bible is a book about the use and abuse of power and conflicting demands for obedience to authority.
The Bible, taken as a whole, is a study in the relationship between God, government power, and personal obedience. It claims that God is the ultimate authority, but has mixed messages about whether or not human rulers are agents of God’s authority on Earth.
Most of the Bible stories are about these questions of power and the abuse of power and about authority and conflicting claims to authority. I didn’t learn those Bible stories in Sunday School. Instead, I learned sweet stories about being nice and giving to the poor. Mostly, I learned that I was supposed to be obedient to established authority.
In fact, the stories about Jesus are fundamentally the stories of a man who was acting against the authority of the government with its government-controlled religion. Again and again, Jesus confronted the abuse of power by the religious/political power system. Yet my religious education was almost exclusively about teaching me to obey established authority without question.
For most of us, this is the essence of both religious and public school education. Our lives are one long experience of being told that we must obey some external authority. When we are small, ultimate authority is vested in our parents and teachers and the other big people in our lives. For children, God is just another big person to obey. The idea of God easily becomes a Santa Claus type figure in the sky who is watching to see if we are naughty or nice.
The older we get, the more complicated the questions about obedience to authority become. We have traffic rules, IRS rules, homeowner association rules to obey. Every where there are rules to follow. Don’t walk on the grass. Don’t litter. Don’t park here. And sometimes the obedience to rules makes the difference between life and death.
I am old enough to remember the Vietnam War and the tremendous personal anguish involved in questions of obedience to authority. In the era of the wartime draft, the government claimed obedience as its right. If it drafted one of its citizens, that young man had no choice. He had to obey or face the consequences.
Military training is fundamentally an exercise in teaching people to obey authority, even at the cost of their lives. This is why there are ranks with visible insignia, and people are taught to salute signs of authority.
While my husband was an officer in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, we lived for three years on an Air Force base in Arkansas. We had a sticker on the front bumper of the car signifying that this was an officer’s car.
I used to drive on and off the base to go to work each day, and always felt a bit awkward each time the guard saluted as I drove back onto the base. Even then I thought it was odd. What was he saluting? I didn’t deserve the salute, because I was not an officer in the Air Force. He was told to salute a sticker. If intelligent people can be trained to salute a sticker on the bumper of a car, think of how powerful the forces of persuasion are to persuade people to kill as an act of obedience to authority.
This blog is named “Impolite Topics.” Most churches have their own list of impolite topics. For many churches, the most impolite of all the impolite topics is the question of power in relationship to the government. These churches tend to be mainstream, established, and practicing traditional religion. In contrast, churches made up of people who feel oppressed or excluded from social power are not so polite on the topics of religion and politics. The topics of power and confrontation of government abuse of power are no longer impolite topics, but become central to the teaching of the church.
In my book, Going Broke With Jesus, I wrote about what Jesus said about money as part of his condemnation of the abuse of power by the government and temple system. One of these stories concerns the temple tax. Matthew 22:15-22 and Luke 20:19-26 tell two versions of a story in which members of the political and religious establishment attempt to trap Jesus with a question about paying the temple tax with a coin with Caesar’s image on it. Jesus answered with the words: ”Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.
If anyone has any idea that money is simply a matter of personal morality, this episode brings to the surface the relationship between religion and government. This is a story about taxation. But it is about more than taxation. It involves questions of authority on Earth. Do believers obey God or the government? Interpretation of this particular episode goes far beyond money. The Bible verse: “Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” is responsible for shameful moments in church history, when Christian churches kept silent while governments perpetrated atrocities.
Going Broke With Jesus, Chapter 9, By Kalinda Rose Stevenson
Religion, politics, and the Bible are completely interwoven with questions about authority and obedience. And so this is the fundamental question: What authority will you obey above all others?
Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson
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