Dear Friends:
In making his case for government wealth-redistribution (socialism), Christian socialist Ronald J. Sider feels the need to define what he means by “State.” This is a great way to start. Unfortunately, he does not attempt to derive a definition from Scripture, but rather does what most liberal scholars do when they can find no support from Scripture: he turns to another liberal scholar, J. Philip Wogaman. Wogaman, like Tony Campolo, was one of Bill Clinton’s spiritual advisors immediately after the Lewinsky affair. Wogaman even got a book deal out of it, and defended the President, arguing that impeachment due to the affair would be a moral tragedy. Apparently, the spiritual advisor felt that breaking the most fundamental civil and sacred vow of one’s life should not tarnish the trust in one’s vow of public office. Impeachment would be a moral tragedy, but adultery? Eh, well. This is the moral expert Sider chooses for defining what a “State” is.
Not surprisingly, we get a humanistic definition. Wogaman argues that a State is “society acting as a whole, with the ultimate power to compel compliance within its own jurisdiction.”1 This is a humanistic view of the State more akin to Greek philosophy or the radical Enlightenment, not by Scripture. Nevertheless, Sider sees two important elements in this definition. “First, when the state acts, the whole society acts, not just one part of it.”2 “Second… the state alone has authority and power to use coercion to enforce its laws in every area of society.”3
Neither of these two points reflects much biblical teaching. First, the idea that “when the state acts, the whole society acts” neglects the biblical principle of the remnant. During the time of Elijah, the State had degenerated to the point of mass State-sanctioned idolatry, theft, and murder. King Ahab (with his wife Jezebel) exceeded all kings before him in doing evil. He sold himself to do evil in the sight of the LORD. [I Kings 21:25]. Yet the whole society did not act according to the mass wickedness of Ahab’s State: the State did not represent everyone in its evil, nor did God hold all of society accountable. Rather, God assured righteous Elijah that He has preserved a faithful remnant within society, and would establish a new faithful State:
The Lord said to him, “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus, and when you have arrived, you shall anoint Hazael king over Aram; and Jehu the son of Nimshi you shall anoint king over Israel; and Elisha the son of Shaphat of Abel-meholah you shall anoint as prophet in your place. It shall come about, the one who escapes from the sword of Hazael, Jehu shall put to death, and the one who escapes from the sword of Jehu, Elisha shall put to death. Yet I will leave 7,000 in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal and every mouth that has not kissed him.” [I Kings 19:15-18].
The second point faces similar problems. The State does have a monopoly on the official use of force. What concerns us here, however, is Sider’s phrase “its laws.” The State in this view is the source of law and thus enforces its laws. The Bible teaches otherwise. As Sider knows, the ruler is God’s minister (literally, deacon), and God’s agent of wrath [Romans 13:4]. The State is therefore not a source of law but an agency of law.4 It must use coercion to enforce God’s laws in every area of society. When it begins to legislate its own laws, it replaces God as lawgiver, and thus forces a false god and a tyranny upon mankind – the Moloch State.
Maintaining this distinction would preserve the State from causing problems when it comes to the last phrase in Sider’s point, “every area of society.” God also ordained the family and church for society. What would happen if the State created its laws to conflict with God’s law for family or church? What if, for example, the State outlawed, in the name of “equality,” reading sections of the Bible that condemn homosexuality? Would the State have the authority and power to use coercion to enforce such a law within churches or even families? Sider’s definition includes nothing to stop the State in such a situation, although in a later section he does see the principle as necessary: “The state should not pass laws that interfere with the unique responsibilities of other institutions, such as family and church.”5
Yet Sider does not apply this principle consistently. Elsewhere he argues that “the state may be able to provide some resources to encourage other institutions to play their proper role,”6 and, “When other individuals or institutions in the community do not or cannot provide basic necessities for the needy, government rightly helps.”7 According to Sider, the State rightly acts to provide “vital services” including “providing economic opportunity for all, or in providing care for those who cannot care for themselves.”8 The Bible says nothing of the State taking up the slack of other institutions. God did not ordain it with a monopoly of force and coercion in order to supplement the provisions or education of the church and family. Sider’s view makes the State the provider, care-taker, and instructor of final resort, the ultimate provider; in short, he makes the State messianic. As such, Sider finishes his section “What Should We Legislate?” continuing to speak about law as “the State’s law,” instead of God’s law.
In biblical thought, the State is a subordinate institution to God’s law. This means, among other things, that the State cannot legislate beyond what Scripture warrants, nor can it use its monopoly of force in any area of society that Scripture keeps free from it. Thus the State cannot interfere with the sanctions of the church (baptism, discipline, and excommunication), nor the family (education, finance). The State exists to punish evil by ministering God’s wrath. Going beyond this the State usurps the role of other divine institutions and even of God Himself.
More accurately, then, we should define the State purely within its God-given purpose: the executor of God’s wrath within society. R.J. Rushdoony summarizes well, “The state is thus God’s hangman,”9 though he qualifies the startling expression. For the purpose of punishing evil, “The State is a representative collective that can [be] and is judged by God in history.”10 Rulers ought to acknowledge their submission to God as the ultimate lawgiver, and indeed should publically acknowledge His ordination of their office through a Christian oath of office. This was the purpose of the first Pentecost [Numbers 11:16-17, 24-30], as well as the prophets’ anointing of Kings [I Samuel 10:1-7].11
Sider finds a third important point of his definition in the work of fellow socialist James Skillen, namely, the State as “public-legal integrator” of other institutions in a pluralistic society. He writes, “The central role of the State is to integrate – i.e., rightly relate – all these different institutions and persons through fair law so they all enjoy justice.”12 This role of the State nowhere appears in Scripture, let alone as the “central” role of government. God calls civil government to judge all persons impartially and fairly according to His law, not to “integrate” institutions through its own “fair law.” Sider gives no indication of exactly what this integration involves, but since Scripture does not define such a role for the State, the humanistic opinion cannot prove helpful.
What the “State as public-legal integrator” view does, however, is once again place the State as the ultimate orderer of society. However the State decides to make the relationships between institutions “fair,” the family and church will have to submit. This denies biblical teaching that says the State should submit to God’s law, and that it actually should come in behind the church as an ordering institution of society. The ruler’s public submission to God’s word and Spirit [Numbers 11:16-17, 24-30] and the prophetic office’s confirming the anointing of the king [I Samuel 10:1-7] show the former. The laws for sin sacrifices indicate the latter based on the greater degrees of sacrifice required [Leviticus 4].
Likewise, a public-legal integrator State would necessarily need to be an overwhelmingly large and powerful State. How else could it observe, manage, and regulate each and every other institution, between institutions, and between individuals and institutions? Since earthly rulers don’t have omniscience and omnipotence, what Sider envisions would require massive bureaucracy. Sider’s State would be the one institution essentially subsuming all others in society, for none would be free of its probing regulations and nosy inspectors and agents. In fact, Sider’s view of the State presupposes a Behemoth-sized government for nearly every positive measure of government he calls for, even though he argues otherwise at times.
We have seen how Sider thinks the “central” role of government is to act as a “public-legal integrator” dominating all other institutions in society. He exacerbates this role by denying any reciprocal oversight of the government by other institutions like the church. In his mind, the State makes enforceable laws but cannot legislate “internal thoughts and feelings.”13 Good so far. But then he argues the converse for the church: it can teach about thoughts and feelings, but should not deal with the “laws of the State.”14 This denies the biblical model for God sanctioning rulers and rulers publically submitting to His word. The church should have the loudest voice when it comes to determining what is right or wrong in society. If laws or proposed laws do not line up with biblical law, the church should condemn them clearly.
THE STATE AS SAVIOR
Why does Sider wish for a State in which civil government is the most powerful institution? Because liberals think that civil legislation will lead to salvation. Sider, too, sees a salvific role for legislation:
Laws have a teaching function. It is silly to think that whatever the law permits is morally right and whatever it condemns is morally wrong. But many people think that way – at least to a degree. Therefore sometimes public laws rightly forbid private behavior that would largely affect just the person (or a small circle of family members) who chooses the behavior. [Legalizing drugs, for example] would convey the message to many that using these drugs is morally acceptable.15
This should only be done, of course, when the government has enough power to do so. For example, we should not apply this principle to the prohibition of alcohol even though so many people abuse it. Why not? Because, Sider says, it didn’t work last time we tried it. So many people subverted the system that the law was “essentially unenforceable.”16 This means, of course, that if the government had enough power to stop it, the Sider House Rules17 would not allow the production of any hard cider.
So Sider sees a “teaching” and reforming role for civil law. It is a short step from here to salvation by law. Indeed, Sider goes so far as to say, “Over time, laws do frequently change the heart.” If he means God’s law, I wholeheartedly concur: “The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul; The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple” [Psalm 19:7, KJV]. But unfortunately he means “the state’s laws” in this context. While such laws do have the effect of putting people into habits, conditioning their already fallen hearts to accept certain comfortable and submissive patterns of living, this yet falls short of a godly reform of society. Once again, what if the state’s laws teach something contrary to God’s law? It may condition hearts, alright, but Christians should hardly welcome this kind of “change.” Paul held this important distinction: “do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect” [Romans 12:2]. The important teaching function of the law, then, should derive from the voice of the church preaching the gospel until it echoes in the halls of government, and from civil government publically recognizing the law of God as supreme.
Nevertheless, humanists do not like the voice of God in the public square. They believe they can use man’s laws to create a perfect society through State coercion. Herbert Schlossberg reminds us that, “The social democrats who have molded Swedish society for the better part of two generations have taken it as an article of faith that they could create new people by manipulating the environment,”18 meaning its institutions and laws. P.T. Bauer describes the humanistic, socialistic model of Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, who “envisages planning as a wholesale transformation of people’s attitudes, values and institutions, by compulsion if necessary.”19 This is the same old humanist serpent, salvation by politics, salvation by law.20 The State must be father, healer, savior, benefactor.…
Dr. Greg Bahnsen argued that when the State abandons God’s law, some form of tyranny will follow. He writes,
When the questions of ethics are answered without recourse to God, the following views of the state become inevitable:
The State incarnates the Divine Idea upon earth (Hegel).
The State is the supreme power, ultimate and beyond repeal, absolutely independent (Fitche).
Everything for the State; nothing outside the State; nothing against the State (Mussolini).
The State dominates the nation because it alone represents it (Hitler).
The State embraces everything, and nothing has value outside the State. The State creates right (Franklin Delano Roosevelt).21
To this list we could add,
The State is society acting as a whole (Wogaman).
When the State acts, the whole society acts (Sider).
The State is public-legal integrator of all socially differentiating reality (Skillen).
CONCLUSION
In biblical thought, the State simply judges cases of conflict or crime and punishes evil through some form of restitution, or in a few cases death. In the biblical view, while a few penalties may sound harsh to modern ears (death penalty for homosexual acts, for example), what often escapes unnoticed is that the number of laws enforceable by the State’s coercive force would require a drastic reduction in the size and scope of modern government. Some people fear “Biblical law” because they envision governments imprisoning people for “heart sins” like covetousness, however such an absurd action could be arrived at. The truth is, civil government should have the power to punish only those specific crimes that God has revealed punishments for. He did not allow civil rulers to divine people’s hearts, mandate educational curricula, invade bedrooms, or even to enforce certain laws of charity like gleaning. God gave the civil ruler no authority here. The biblical State is a very small institution with a very limited range of power. When it executes that power, it does so definitively and in the name of God; but the range of those powers pales in comparison to the modern Welfare State.
Humanists don’t like such a bound and limited State. They want a Moloch State, whether they call it that or not. Schlossberg has exposed in detail how the humanistic State (“society acting as a whole”) inevitably moves to replace God, family, church, business, etc. The State must be savior, father, idol, educator, shepherd, and more.22 Such images provide great marketing tools for big-government liberals: “The state that acts as a wise parent instead of a vindictive judge has been an attractive image to many people.… The father is a symbol not only of authority but also of provision.”23 “The paternal state not only feeds its children, but nurtures, educates, comforts, and disciplines them, providing all they need for their security.… It supplies us with all blessings, and we look to it for all our needs.”24 This is the State liberals envision. Sider’s vision partakes of it. Schlossberg rightly sees it an Idol for Destruction.
In any of these kinds of States, citizens prostrate themselves, courting government’s favor in order to receive sustenance for their services. This is not “society acting as a whole,” it is society acting as a whore.
SOURCES
1 Quoted in Ronald J. Sider, The Scandal of Evangelical Politics: Why are Christians Missing the Chance to Really Change the World? (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 79.
2 Sider, Scandal, 79.
3 Ibid.
4 See R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (The Craig Press, 1973), 34.
5 Sider, Scandal, 92.
6 Ibid., 93.
7 Ronald J. Sider, Just Generosity: A New Vision for Overcoming Poverty in America, 2nd Ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2007), 88.
8 Ibid., 89.
9 Rushdoony, Institutes, 238.
10 Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion by Covenant (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), 179.
11 See Rushdoony, Institutes, 242.
12 Sider, Scandal, 80.
13 Ibid., 94.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 93-94.
16 Ibid., 94.
17 The phrase “Sider House Rules” generally denotes the replacing of God’s standard by one’s own individual rules.
18 Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and Its Confrontation with American Society (Washington, DC: Regency Gateway, 1990), 189.
[19] Quoted in Schlossberg, Idols, 189 note 30.
20 Sutton, Prosper, 191.
21 Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics, 3rd Ed. (Nacogdoches, TX: Covenant Media Press, [1977] 2002), 12-13.
22 Schlossberg, Idols, 177-231.
23 Ibid., 183.
24 Ibid., 184.
Respectfully,
Mark
Friday, June 25, 2010
Monday, June 21, 2010
Render Unto Caesar: A Most Misunderstood New Testament Passage
Dear Friends:
I. INTRODUCTION
Christians have traditionally interpreted the famous passage “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God, the things that are God’s,” to mean that Jesus endorsed paying taxes. This view was first expounded by St. Justin Martyr in Chapter XVII of his First Apology, who wrote,
And everywhere we, more readily than all men, endeavor to pay to those appointed by you the taxes both ordinary and extraordinary, as we have been taught by Him; for at that time some came to Him and asked Him, if one ought to pay tribute to Caesar; and He answered, ‘Tell Me, whose image does the coin bear?’ And they said, ‘Caesar’s.’
The passage appears to be important and well-known to the early Christian community. The Gospels of St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke recount this “Tribute Episode” nearly verbatim. Even Saying 100 of non-canonical Gospel of Thomas and Fragment 2 Recto of the Egerton Gospel record the scene, albeit with some variations from the Canon.
But by His enigmatic response, did Jesus really mean for His followers to provide financial support (willingly or unwillingly) to Tiberius Caesar – a man, who, in his personal life, was a pedophile, a sexual deviant, and a murderer and who, as emperor, claimed to be a god and oppressed and enslaved millions of people, including Jesus’ own? The answer, of course, is: the traditional, pro-tax interpretation of the Tribute Episode is simply wrong. Jesus never meant for His answer to be interpreted as an endorsement of Caesar’s tribute or any taxes.
This essay examines four dimensions of the Tribute Episode: the historical setting of the Episode; the rhetorical structure of the Episode itself; the context of the scene within the Gospels; and finally, how the Catholic Church, Herself, has understood the Tribute Episode. These dimensions point to one conclusion: the Tribute Episode does not stand for the proposition that it is morally obligatory to pay taxes.
The objective of this piece is not to provide a complete exegesis on the Tribute Episode. Rather, it is simply to show that the traditional, pro-tax interpretation of the Tribute Episode is utterly untenable. The passage unequivocally does not stand for the proposition that Jesus thought it was morally obligatory to pay taxes.
II. THE HISTORICAL SETTING: THE UNDERCURRENT OF TAX REVOLT
In 6 A.D., Roman occupiers of Palestine imposed a census tax on the Jewish people. The tribute was not well-received, and by 17 A.D., Tacitus reports in Book II.42 of the Annals, “The provinces, too, of Syria and Judaea, exhausted by their burdens, implored a reduction of tribute.” A tax-revolt, led by Judas the Galilean, soon ensued. Judas the Galilean taught that “taxation was no better than an introduction to slavery,” and he and his followers had “an inviolable attachment to liberty,” recognizing God, alone, as king and ruler of Israel. The Romans brutally combated the uprising for decades. Two of Judas’ sons were crucified in 46 A.D., and a third was an early leader of the 66 A.D. Jewish revolt. Thus, payment of the tribute conveniently encapsulated the deeper philosophical, political, and theological issue: Either God and His divine laws were supreme, or the Roman emperor and his pagan laws were supreme.
This undercurrent of tax-revolt flowed throughout Judaea during Jesus’ ministry. All three synoptic Gospels place the episode immediately after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem in which throngs of people proclaimed Him king, as St. Matthew states, “And when he entered Jerusalem the whole city was shaken and asked, ‘Who is this?’ And the crowds replied, ‘This is Jesus the prophet, from Nazareth in Galilee.” All three agree that this scene takes place near the celebration of the Passover, one of the holiest of Jewish feast days. Passover commemorates God’s deliverance of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery and also celebrates the divine restoration of the Israelites to the land of Israel, land then occupied by the Romans. Jewish pilgrims from throughout Judaea would have been streaming into Jerusalem to fulfill their periodic religious duties at the temple.
Because of the mass of pilgrims, the Roman procurator of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, had also temporarily taken up residence in Jerusalem along with a multitude of troops so as to suppress any religious violence. In her work, Pontius Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man, Ann Wroe described Pilate as the emperor’s chief soldier, chief magistrate, head of the judicial system, and above all, the chief tax collector. In Book XXXVIII of On the Embassy to Gaius, Philo has depicted Pilate as “cruel,” “exceedingly angry,” and “a man of most ferocious passions,” who had a “habit of insulting people” and murdering them “untried and uncondemned” with the “most grievous inhumanity.” Just a few years prior to Jesus’ ministry, the image of Caesar nearly precipitated an insurrection in Jerusalem when Pilate, by cover of night, surreptitiously erected effigies of the emperor on the fortress Antonia, adjoining the Jewish Temple; Jewish law forbade both the creation of graven images and their introduction into the holy city of Jerusalem. Pilate averted a bloodbath only by removing the images.
In short, Jerusalem would have been a hot-bed of political and religious fervor, and it is against this background that the Tribute Episode unfolded.
III. THE RHETORICAL STRUCTURE OF THE TRIBUTE EPISODE
[15] Then the Pharisees going, consulted among themselves how to insnare him in his speech. [16] And they sent to him their disciples with the Herodians, saying: Master, we know that thou art a true speaker and teachest the way of God in truth. Neither carest thou for any man: for thou dost not regard the person of men. [17] Tell us therefore what dost thou think? Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not? [18] But Jesus knowing their wickedness, said: Why do you tempt me, ye hypocrites? [19] Show me the coin of the tribute. And they offered him a penny [literally, in Latin, “denarium,” a denarius]. [20] And Jesus saith to them: Whose image and inscription is this? [21] They say to him: Caesar’s. Then he saith to them: Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God, the things that are God’s. [22] And hearing this, they wondered and, leaving him, went their ways. Matthew 22:15-22 (Douay-Rheims translation).
A. THE QUESTION
All three synoptic Gospels open the scene with a plot to trap Jesus. The questioners begin with, what is in their minds, false flattery – “Master [or Teacher or Rabbi] we know that you are a true speaker and teach the way of God in truth.” As David Owen-Ball forcefully argues in his 1993 article, “Rabbinic Rhetoric and the Tribute Passage,” this opening statement is also a challenge to Jesus’ rabbinic authority; it is a halakhic question – a question on a point of religious law. The Pharisees believed that they, alone, were the authoritative interpreters of Jewish law. By appealing to Jesus’ authority to interpret God’s law, the questioners accomplish two goals: (1) they force Jesus to answer the question; if Jesus refuses, He will lose credibility as a Rabbi with the very people who just proclaimed Him a King; and (2) they force Jesus to base this answer in Scripture. Thus, they are testing His scriptural knowledge and hoping to discredit Him if He cannot escape a prima facie intractable interrogatory. As Owen-Ball states, “The gospel writers thus describe a scene in which Jesus’ questioners have boxed him in. He is tempted to assume, illegitimately, the authority of a Rabbi, while at the same time he is constrained to answer according to the dictates of the Torah.”
The questioners then pose their malevolently brilliant question: “Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not?” That is, is it licit under the Torah to pay taxes to the Romans? At some point, Jesus must have led His questioners to believe that He opposed the tribute; otherwise His questioners would not have posed the question in the first instance. As John Howard Yoder argues in his book, The Politics of Jesus: vicit Agnus noster, “It is hard to see how the denarius question could have been thought by those who put it to be a serious trap, unless Jesus’ repudiation of the Roman occupation were taken for granted, so that he could be expected to give an answer which would enable them to denounce him.”
If Jesus says that it is lawful to pay the tribute, He would have been seen as a collaborator with the Roman occupiers and would alienate the people who had just proclaimed Him a king. If Jesus says that the tribute is illegitimate, He risked being branded a political criminal and incurring the wrath of Rome. With either answer, someone would have been likely to kill Him.
Jesus immediately recognizes the trap. He exposes the hostility and the hypocrisy of His interrogators and recognizes that His questioners are daring Him to enter the temporal fray of Judeo-Roman politics.
B. THE COIN
Instead of jumping into the political discussion, though, Jesus curiously requests to see the coin of the tribute. It is not necessary that Jesus possess the coin to answer their question. He could certainly respond without seeing the coin. That He requests to see the coin suggests that there is something meaningful about the coin itself.
In the Tribute Episode, the questioners produce a denarius. The denarius was approximately 1/10 of a troy ounce (at that time about 3.9 grams) of silver and roughly worth a day’s wages for a common laborer. The denarius was a remarkably stable currency; Roman emperors did not begin debasing it with any vigor until Nero. The denarius in question would have been issued by the Emperor Tiberius, whose reign coincided with Jesus’ ministry. Where Augustus issued hundreds of denarii, Ethelbert Stauffer, in his masterful, Christ and the Caesars, reports that Tiberius issued only three, and of those three, two are relatively rare, and the third is quite common. Tiberius preferred this third and issued it from his personal mint for twenty years. The denarius was truly the emperor’s property: he used it to pay his soldiers, officials, and suppliers; it bore the imperial seal; it differed from the copper coins issued by the Roman Senate, and it was also the coin with which subjected peoples, in theory, were required to pay the tribute. Tiberius even made it a capital crime to carry any coin stamped with his image into a bathroom or a brothel. In short, the denarius was a tangible representation of the emperor’s power, wealth, deification, and subjugation.
Tiberius’ denarii were minted at Lugdunum, modern-day Lyons, in Gaul. Thus, J. Spencer Kennard, in a well-crafted, but out-of-print book entitled Render to God, argues that the denarius’ circulation in Judaea was likely scarce. The only people to transact routinely with the denarius in Judaea would have been soldiers, Roman officials, and Jewish leaders in collaboration with Rome. Thus, it is noteworthy that Jesus, Himself, does not possess the coin. The questioners’ quickness to produce the coin at Jesus’ request implies that they routinely used it, taking advantage of Roman financial largess, whereas Jesus did not. Moreover, the Tribute Episode takes place in the Temple, and by producing the coin, the questioners reveal their religious hypocrisy – they bring a potentially profane item, the coin of a pagan, into the sacred space of the Temple.
Finally, both Stauffer and Kennard make the magnificent point that coins of the ancient world were the major instrument of imperial propaganda, promoting agendas and promulgating the deeds of their issuers, in particular the apotheosis of the emperor. As Kennard puts it, “For indoctrinating the peoples of the empire with the deity of the emperor, coins excelled all other media. They went everywhere and were handled by everyone. Their subtle symbolism pervaded every home.” While Tiberius’ propaganda engine was not as prolific as Augustus’ machine, all of Tiberius’ denarii pronounced his divinity or his debt to the deified Augustus.
C. THE COUNTER-QUESTION AND ITS ANSWER
After seeing the coin, Jesus then poses a counter-question, “Whose image and inscription is this?” It is again noteworthy that this counter-question and its answer are not necessary to answer the original question of whether it is licit to pay tribute to Caesar. That Jesus asks the counter-question suggests that it and its answer are significant.
(1) Why Is The Counter-Question Important?
The counter-question is significant for two reasons.
First, Owen-Ball argues that the counter-question follows a pattern of formal rhetoric common in first century rabbinic literature in which (1) an outsider poses a hostile question to a rabbi; (2) the rabbi responds with a counter-question; (3) by answering the counter-question, the outsider’s position becomes vulnerable to attack; and (4) the rabbi then uses the answer to the counter-question to refute the hostile question. Jesus’ use of this rhetorical form is one way to establish His authority as a rabbi, not unlike a modern lawyer who uses a formal, legal rhetoric in the courtroom. Moreover, the point of the rhetorical exchange is ultimately to refute the hostile question.
Second, because the hostile question was a direct challenge to Jesus’ authority as a rabbi on a point of law, His interrogators would have expected a counter-question grounded in scripture, in particular, based upon the Torah. Two words, “image” and “inscription,” in the counter-question harkens to two central provisions in the Torah, the First (Second) Commandment and the Shema. These provide the scriptural basis for this question of law.
God Prohibits False Images. The First (Second) Commandment prohibits worship of anyone or anything but God, and it also forbids crafting any image of a false god for adoration, “I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt not have strange gods before me. Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing, nor the likeness [image] of any thing….” God demands the exclusive allegiance of His people. Jesus’ use of the word, “image,” in the counter-question reminds His questioners of the First (Second) Commandment’s requirement to venerate God first and its concomitant prohibition against creating images of false gods.
The Shema Demands The Worship Of God Alone. Jesus’ use of the word “inscription” alludes to the Shema. The Shema is a Jewish prayer based upon Deuteronomy 6:4-9, 11:13-21 and Numbers 15:37-41 and is the most important prayer a pious Jew can say. It commences with the words, “Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad,” which can be translated, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God – the Lord alone.” This opening line stresses Israel’s worship of God to the exclusion of all other gods. The Shema then commands a person to love God with his whole heart, whole soul, and whole strength. The Shema further requires worshipers to keep the words of the Shema in their hearts, to instruct their children in them, to bind them on their hands and foreheads, and to inscribe them conspicuously on their doorposts and on the gates to their cities. Observant Jews take literally the command to bind the words upon their arms and foreheads and wear tefillin, little leather cases which contain parchment on which are inscribed certain passages from the Torah. Words of the Shema were to be metaphorically inscribed in the hearts, minds, and souls of pious Jews and physically inscribed on parchment in tefillin, on doorposts, and on city gates. St. Matthew and St. Mark both recount Jesus quoting the Shema in the same chapter just a few verses after the Tribute Episode. This proximity further reinforces the reference to the Shema in the Tribute Episode. Finally, it is noteworthy that when Satan tempts Jesus by offering Him all the kingdoms of the [Roman] world in exchange for His worship, Jesus rebukes Satan by quoting the Shema. In short, Jesus means to call attention to the Shema by using the word “inscription” in the counter-question as His appeal to scriptural authority for His response.
(2) Why Is The Answer To The Counter-Question Important?
The answer to the counter-question is significant for two reasons.
First, while the verbal answer to the counter-question of whose image and inscription the coin bears is a feeble, “Caesar’s,” the actual image and inscription is much more revealing. The front of the denarius shows a profiled bust of Tiberius crowned with the laurels of victory and divinity. Even a modern viewer would immediately recognize that the person depicted on the coin is a Roman emperor. Circumscribed around Tiberius is an abbreviation, “TI CAESAR DIVI AUG F AUGUSTUS,” which stands for “Tiberius Caesar Divi August Fili Augustus,” which, in turn, translates, “Tiberius Caesar, Worshipful Son of the God, Augustus.”
On the obverse sits the Roman goddess of peace, Pax, and circumscribed around her is the abbreviation, “Pontif Maxim,” which stands for “Pontifex Maximus,” which, in turn, means, “High Priest.”
The coin of the Tribute Episode is a fine specimen of Roman propaganda. It imposes the cult of emperor worship and asserts Caesar’s sovereignty upon all who transact with it.
In the most richly ironic passage in the entire Bible, all three synoptic Gospels depict the Son of God and the High Priest of Peace, newly-proclaimed by His people to be a King, holding the tiny silver coin of a king who claims to be the son of a god and the high priest of Roman peace.
The second reason the answer is significant is that in following the pattern of rabbinic rhetoric, the answer exposes the hostile questioners’ position to attack. It is again noteworthy that the interrogators’ answer to Jesus’ counter-question about the coin’s image and inscription bears little relevance to their original question as to whether it is licit to pay the tribute. Jesus could certainly answer their original question without their answer to His counter-question. But the rhetorical function of the answer to the counter-question is to demonstrate the vulnerability of the opponent’s position and use that answer to refute the opponent’s original, hostile question.
D. REFUTING BY RENDERING UNTO GOD
In the Tribute Episode, it is only after Jesus’ counter-question is asked and answered does He respond to the original question. Jesus tells His interrogators, “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God, the things that are God’s.” This response begs the question of what is licitly God’s and what is licitly Caesar’s.
In the Hebrew tradition, everything rightfully belonged to God. By using the words, “image and inscription,” Jesus has already reminded His interrogators that God was owed exclusive allegiance and total love and worship. Similarly, everything economically belonged to God as well. For example, the physical land of Israel was God’s, as He instructed in Leviticus 25:23, “The land [of Israel] shall not be sold in perpetuity; for the land is mine, and you [the Israelites] are but aliens who have become my tenants.” In addition, the Jewish people were to dedicate the firstfruits, that first portion of any harvest and the first-born of any animal, to God. By giving God the firstfruits, the Jewish people acknowledged that all good things came from God and that all things, in turn, belonged to God. God even declares, “Mine is the silver and mine the gold.”
The emperor, on the other hand, also claimed that all people and things in the empire rightfully belonged to Rome. The denarius notified everyone who transacted with it that the emperor demanded exclusive allegiance and, at least, the pretense of worship – Tiberius claimed to be the worshipful son of a god. Roman occupiers served as a constant reminder that the land of Israel belonged to Rome. Roman tribute, paid with Roman currency, impressed upon the populace that the economic life depended on the emperor. The emperor’s bread and circuses maintained political order. The propaganda on the coin even attributed peace and tranquility to the emperor.
With one straightforward counter-question, Jesus skillfully points out that the claims of God and Caesar are mutually exclusive. If one’s faith is in God, then God is owed everything; Caesar’s claims are necessarily illegitimate, and he is therefore owed nothing. If, on the other hand, one’s faith is in Caesar, God’s claims are illegitimate, and Caesar is owed, at the very least, the coin which bears his image.
Jesus’ counter-question simply invites His listeners to choose allegiances. Remarkably, He has escaped the trap through a clever rhetorical gambit; He has authoritatively refuted His opponents’ hostile question by basing His answer in scripture, and yet, He never overtly answers the question originally posed to Him. No wonder that St. Matthew ends the Tribute Episode this way: “When they heard this they were amazed, and leaving him they went away.”
IV. THE CONTEXT IN THE GOSPELS: A TRADITION OF SUBTLE SEDITION
Subtle sedition refers to scenes throughout the Gospels which were not overtly treasonous and would not have directly threatened Roman authorities, but which delivered political messages that first century Jewish audiences would have immediately recognized. The Gospels are replete with instances of subtle sedition. Pointing these out is not to argue that Jesus saw Himself as a political king. Jesus makes it explicit in John 18:36 that He is not a political Messiah. Rather, in the context of subtle sedition, no one can interpret the Tribute Episode as Jesus’ support of taxation. To the contrary, one can only understand the Tribute Episode as Jesus’ opposition to the illicit Roman taxes.
In addition to the Tribute Episode, three other scenes from the Gospels serve as examples of subtle sedition: (1) Jesus’ temptation in the desert; (2) Jesus walking on water; and (3) Jesus curing the Gerasene demoniac.
A. EMPERORS OF BREAD AND CIRCUSES
Around 200 A.D., the Roman satirist Juvenal lamented that the Roman emperors, masters of the known world, tenuously maintained political power by way of “panem et circenses,” or “bread and circuses,” a reference to the ancient practice of pandering to Roman citizens by providing free wheat and costly circus spectacles. Caesar Augustus, for example, boasted of feeding more than 100,000 men from his personal granary. He also bragged of putting on tremendous exhibitions:
Three times I gave shows of gladiators under my name and five times under the name of my sons and grandsons; in these shows about 10,000 men fought. * * * Twenty-six times, under my name or that of my sons and grandsons, I gave the people hunts of African beasts in the circus, in the open, or in the amphitheater; in them about 3,500 beasts were killed. I gave the people a spectacle of a naval battle, in the place across the Tiber where the grove of the Caesars is now, with the ground excavated in length 1,800 feet, in width 1,200, in which thirty beaked ships, biremes or triremes, but many smaller, fought among themselves; in these ships about 3,000 men fought in addition to the rowers.
By the time of Jesus and the reign of Tiberius Caesar, the Roman grain dole routinely fed 200,000 people.
At the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, the Spirit led Him into the desert “to be tempted by the devil.” The devil challenged Him with three tests. First, he dared Jesus to turn stones into bread. Second, the devil took Jesus to the highest point on the temple in Jerusalem and tempted Him to cast Himself down to force the angels into a spectacular, miraculous rescue. Finally, for the last temptation, “the devil took him up to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their magnificence, and he said to him, ‘All these I shall give to you, if you will prostrate yourself and worship me.’”
The devil dared Jesus to be a king of bread and circuses and offered Him dominion over the whole earthly world. These temptations are an instantly recognizable reference to the power of the Roman emperors. Jesus forcefully rejects this power. Jesus’ rejection illustrates that the things of God and the things of Rome/the world/the devil are mutually exclusive. Jesus’ allegiance was to the things of God, and His rebuff of the metaphorical power of Rome is an example of subtle sedition.
B. TREADING UPON THE EMPEROR’S SEAS
At the beginning of Chapter 6 in St. John’s Gospel, Jesus performs a miracle and feeds 5,000 people from five loaves of bread; He then refuses to be crowned a king of bread and circuses. Immediately thereafter, St. John recounts the episode of Jesus walking on a body of water in the middle of a storm. That body of water was the Sea of Galilee, which, St. John reminds his readers, was also known as the Sea of Tiberias. Around 25 A.D., Herod Antipas built a pagan city on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee and named it in honor of the Roman emperor, Tiberius. By Jesus’ time, the city had become so important that the Sea of Galilee came to be called the “Sea of Tiberias.” Thus, not only does Jesus refuse to be coronated a Roman king of bread and circuses, but He literally treads upon the emperor’s seas, showing that even the emperor’s waters have no dominion over Him. Treading on the emperor’s seas is an additional instance of subtle sedition.
C. A LEGION OF DEMONS
St. Mark details Jesus’ encounter with the Gerasene demoniac in another example of subtle sedition. The territory of the Gerasenes was pagan territory, and this particular demoniac was exceptionally strong and frightening. In attempting to exorcise the demon, Jesus asked its name. The demon replied, “Legion is my name. There are many of us.” Jesus then expels the demons and casts them into a herd of swine. The herd immediately drive themselves into the sea. First century readers would have been well-acquainted with the name, “Legion.” At that time, an imperial legion was roughly 6,000 soldiers. Thus, the demon “Legion,” an agent of the devil, was a thinly-veiled reference to the Roman occupiers of Judaea. Swine were considered unclean animals under Jewish law. The symbol of the Roman Legion which occupied Jerusalem was a boar. The first century audience would have easily grasped the symbolism of Jesus’ casting the demon Legion into the herd of unclean swine, and the herd driving itself into the sea. Thus, the healing of the Gerasene demoniac is another example of subtle sedition.
D. TRIBUTE AS SUBTLE SEDITION
In the Tribute Episode, Jesus’ response is subtly seditious. The first-century audience would have immediately apprehended what it meant to render unto God the things that are God’s. They would have known that the things of God and Caesar were mutually exclusive. No Jewish listener would have mistaken Jesus’ response as an endorsement of paying Caesar’s taxes. To the contrary, His audience would have understood that Jesus thought the tribute was illicit. Indeed, opposition to the tribute was one of the charges the authorities levied at His trial, “They brought charges against him, saying, ‘We found this man misleading our people; he opposes the payment of taxes to Caesar and maintains that he is the Messiah, a king.’” To the Roman audience, however, the pronouncement of rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s sounds benign, almost supportive. It is, however, one of many vignettes of covert political protest contained in the Gospels. In short, the Tribute Episode is a subtle form of sedition. When viewed in this context, no one can say that the Episode supports the payment of taxes.
V. WHAT DOES THE CATHOLIC CHURCH SAY?
The Catholic Church considers Herself the authoritative interpreter of Sacred Scripture. The 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church “is a statement of the Church’s faith and of catholic doctrine, attested to or illumined by Sacred Scripture, the Apostolic Tradition, and the Church’s Magisterium.”
The 1994 Catechism instructs the faithful that it is morally obligatory to pay one’s taxes for the common good. (What the definition of the “common good” is may be left for a different debate.) The 1994 Catechism also quotes and cites the Tribute Episode. But the 1994 Catechism does NOT use the Tribute Episode to support the proposition that it is morally obligatory to pay taxes. Instead, the 1994 Catechism refers the Tribute Episode only to justify acts of civil disobedience. It quotes St. Matthew’s version to teach that a Christian must refuse to obey political authority when that political authority makes a demand contrary to the demands of the moral order, the fundamental rights of persons, or the teachings of the Gospel. Similarly, the 1994 Catechism also cites to St. Mark’s version to instruct that a person “should not submit his personal freedom in an absolute manner to any earthly power, but only to God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Caesar is not ‘the Lord.’” Thus, according to the 1994 Catechism, the Tribute Episode stands for the proposition that a Christian owes his allegiance to God and to the things of God alone. If the Tribute Episode unequivocally supported the proposition that it is morally obligatory to pay taxes, the 1994 Catechism would not hesitate to cite to it for that position. That the 1994 Catechism does not interpret the Tribute Episode as a justification for the payment of taxes suggests that such an interpretation is not an authoritative reading of the passage. In short, even the Catholic Church does not understand the Tribute Episode to mean that Jesus endorsed paying Caesar’s taxes.
V. CONCLUSION
St. John’s Gospel recounts the scene of a woman caught in adultery, brought before Jesus by the Pharisees so that they might “test” Him “so that they could have some charge to bring against Him.” When asked, “‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say,’” Jesus appears trapped by only two answers: the strict, legally-correct answer of the Pharisees, or the mercifully-right, morally-correct, but technically-illegal answer undermining Jesus’ authority as a Rabbi. Notably, Jesus never does overtly respond to the question posed to Him; instead of answering, “Jesus bent down and began to write on the ground with his finger.” When pressed by His inquisitors, He finally answers, “‘Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her,’” and, of course, the shamed Pharisees all leave one by one. Jesus then refuses to condemn the woman.
The scene of the woman caught in adultery and the Tribute Episode are similar. In both, Jesus is faced with a hostile question challenging His credibility as a Rabbi. In each, the hostile question has two answers: one answer which the audience knows is morally correct, but politically incorrect, and the other answer which the audience knows is wrong, but politically correct. In the scene of the woman caught in adultery, no one roots for Jesus to say, “Stone her!” Everyone wants to see Jesus extend the woman mercy. Likewise, in the Tribute Episode, no one hopes Jesus answers, “Pay tribute to the pagan, Roman oppressors!” The Tribute Episode, like the scene of the woman caught in adultery, has a “right” answer – it is not licit to pay the tribute. But Jesus cannot give this “right” answer without running afoul of the Roman government. Instead, in both Gospel accounts, Jesus gives a quick-witted, but ultimately ambiguous, response which exposes the hypocrisy of His interrogators rather than overtly answers the underlying question posed by them. Nevertheless, in each instance, the audience can infer the right answer embedded in Jesus’ response.
Over the centuries, theologians, scholars, laymen, and potentates have interpreted the Tribute Episode incorrectly as Jesus’ support for the payment of taxes. First, this interpretation does not square with the political climate of the times. The Tribute Episode is set in the middle of a decades-old tax-revolt against Caesar’s tribute. Second, the rhetorical structure of the Tribute Episode, itself, contradicts any interpretation that Jesus supported paying taxes. Third, the Gospels contain episode after episode of subtle sedition. The Tribute Episode is just another of these subtly seditious scenes. When seen in the context of subtle sedition, the phrase “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” means that the emperor is owed nothing. Finally, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the authoritative interpreter of Sacred Scripture, does not construe the Tribute Episode to support the proposition that it is morally obligatory to pay one’s taxes. Indeed, it interprets the Tribute Episode to mean the exact opposite – that Christians are obliged to disobey Caesar when Caesar’s dictates violate God’s law. In sum, the pro-tax position of the Tribute Episode is not supportable historically, rhetorically, contextually, or within the confines of the Catholic Church’s own understanding. As Dorothy Day is reputed to have said, “If we rendered unto God all the things that belong to God, there would be nothing left for Caesar.”
Respectfully,
Mark
I. INTRODUCTION
Christians have traditionally interpreted the famous passage “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God, the things that are God’s,” to mean that Jesus endorsed paying taxes. This view was first expounded by St. Justin Martyr in Chapter XVII of his First Apology, who wrote,
And everywhere we, more readily than all men, endeavor to pay to those appointed by you the taxes both ordinary and extraordinary, as we have been taught by Him; for at that time some came to Him and asked Him, if one ought to pay tribute to Caesar; and He answered, ‘Tell Me, whose image does the coin bear?’ And they said, ‘Caesar’s.’
The passage appears to be important and well-known to the early Christian community. The Gospels of St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke recount this “Tribute Episode” nearly verbatim. Even Saying 100 of non-canonical Gospel of Thomas and Fragment 2 Recto of the Egerton Gospel record the scene, albeit with some variations from the Canon.
But by His enigmatic response, did Jesus really mean for His followers to provide financial support (willingly or unwillingly) to Tiberius Caesar – a man, who, in his personal life, was a pedophile, a sexual deviant, and a murderer and who, as emperor, claimed to be a god and oppressed and enslaved millions of people, including Jesus’ own? The answer, of course, is: the traditional, pro-tax interpretation of the Tribute Episode is simply wrong. Jesus never meant for His answer to be interpreted as an endorsement of Caesar’s tribute or any taxes.
This essay examines four dimensions of the Tribute Episode: the historical setting of the Episode; the rhetorical structure of the Episode itself; the context of the scene within the Gospels; and finally, how the Catholic Church, Herself, has understood the Tribute Episode. These dimensions point to one conclusion: the Tribute Episode does not stand for the proposition that it is morally obligatory to pay taxes.
The objective of this piece is not to provide a complete exegesis on the Tribute Episode. Rather, it is simply to show that the traditional, pro-tax interpretation of the Tribute Episode is utterly untenable. The passage unequivocally does not stand for the proposition that Jesus thought it was morally obligatory to pay taxes.
II. THE HISTORICAL SETTING: THE UNDERCURRENT OF TAX REVOLT
In 6 A.D., Roman occupiers of Palestine imposed a census tax on the Jewish people. The tribute was not well-received, and by 17 A.D., Tacitus reports in Book II.42 of the Annals, “The provinces, too, of Syria and Judaea, exhausted by their burdens, implored a reduction of tribute.” A tax-revolt, led by Judas the Galilean, soon ensued. Judas the Galilean taught that “taxation was no better than an introduction to slavery,” and he and his followers had “an inviolable attachment to liberty,” recognizing God, alone, as king and ruler of Israel. The Romans brutally combated the uprising for decades. Two of Judas’ sons were crucified in 46 A.D., and a third was an early leader of the 66 A.D. Jewish revolt. Thus, payment of the tribute conveniently encapsulated the deeper philosophical, political, and theological issue: Either God and His divine laws were supreme, or the Roman emperor and his pagan laws were supreme.
This undercurrent of tax-revolt flowed throughout Judaea during Jesus’ ministry. All three synoptic Gospels place the episode immediately after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem in which throngs of people proclaimed Him king, as St. Matthew states, “And when he entered Jerusalem the whole city was shaken and asked, ‘Who is this?’ And the crowds replied, ‘This is Jesus the prophet, from Nazareth in Galilee.” All three agree that this scene takes place near the celebration of the Passover, one of the holiest of Jewish feast days. Passover commemorates God’s deliverance of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery and also celebrates the divine restoration of the Israelites to the land of Israel, land then occupied by the Romans. Jewish pilgrims from throughout Judaea would have been streaming into Jerusalem to fulfill their periodic religious duties at the temple.
Because of the mass of pilgrims, the Roman procurator of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, had also temporarily taken up residence in Jerusalem along with a multitude of troops so as to suppress any religious violence. In her work, Pontius Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man, Ann Wroe described Pilate as the emperor’s chief soldier, chief magistrate, head of the judicial system, and above all, the chief tax collector. In Book XXXVIII of On the Embassy to Gaius, Philo has depicted Pilate as “cruel,” “exceedingly angry,” and “a man of most ferocious passions,” who had a “habit of insulting people” and murdering them “untried and uncondemned” with the “most grievous inhumanity.” Just a few years prior to Jesus’ ministry, the image of Caesar nearly precipitated an insurrection in Jerusalem when Pilate, by cover of night, surreptitiously erected effigies of the emperor on the fortress Antonia, adjoining the Jewish Temple; Jewish law forbade both the creation of graven images and their introduction into the holy city of Jerusalem. Pilate averted a bloodbath only by removing the images.
In short, Jerusalem would have been a hot-bed of political and religious fervor, and it is against this background that the Tribute Episode unfolded.
III. THE RHETORICAL STRUCTURE OF THE TRIBUTE EPISODE
[15] Then the Pharisees going, consulted among themselves how to insnare him in his speech. [16] And they sent to him their disciples with the Herodians, saying: Master, we know that thou art a true speaker and teachest the way of God in truth. Neither carest thou for any man: for thou dost not regard the person of men. [17] Tell us therefore what dost thou think? Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not? [18] But Jesus knowing their wickedness, said: Why do you tempt me, ye hypocrites? [19] Show me the coin of the tribute. And they offered him a penny [literally, in Latin, “denarium,” a denarius]. [20] And Jesus saith to them: Whose image and inscription is this? [21] They say to him: Caesar’s. Then he saith to them: Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God, the things that are God’s. [22] And hearing this, they wondered and, leaving him, went their ways. Matthew 22:15-22 (Douay-Rheims translation).
A. THE QUESTION
All three synoptic Gospels open the scene with a plot to trap Jesus. The questioners begin with, what is in their minds, false flattery – “Master [or Teacher or Rabbi] we know that you are a true speaker and teach the way of God in truth.” As David Owen-Ball forcefully argues in his 1993 article, “Rabbinic Rhetoric and the Tribute Passage,” this opening statement is also a challenge to Jesus’ rabbinic authority; it is a halakhic question – a question on a point of religious law. The Pharisees believed that they, alone, were the authoritative interpreters of Jewish law. By appealing to Jesus’ authority to interpret God’s law, the questioners accomplish two goals: (1) they force Jesus to answer the question; if Jesus refuses, He will lose credibility as a Rabbi with the very people who just proclaimed Him a King; and (2) they force Jesus to base this answer in Scripture. Thus, they are testing His scriptural knowledge and hoping to discredit Him if He cannot escape a prima facie intractable interrogatory. As Owen-Ball states, “The gospel writers thus describe a scene in which Jesus’ questioners have boxed him in. He is tempted to assume, illegitimately, the authority of a Rabbi, while at the same time he is constrained to answer according to the dictates of the Torah.”
The questioners then pose their malevolently brilliant question: “Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not?” That is, is it licit under the Torah to pay taxes to the Romans? At some point, Jesus must have led His questioners to believe that He opposed the tribute; otherwise His questioners would not have posed the question in the first instance. As John Howard Yoder argues in his book, The Politics of Jesus: vicit Agnus noster, “It is hard to see how the denarius question could have been thought by those who put it to be a serious trap, unless Jesus’ repudiation of the Roman occupation were taken for granted, so that he could be expected to give an answer which would enable them to denounce him.”
If Jesus says that it is lawful to pay the tribute, He would have been seen as a collaborator with the Roman occupiers and would alienate the people who had just proclaimed Him a king. If Jesus says that the tribute is illegitimate, He risked being branded a political criminal and incurring the wrath of Rome. With either answer, someone would have been likely to kill Him.
Jesus immediately recognizes the trap. He exposes the hostility and the hypocrisy of His interrogators and recognizes that His questioners are daring Him to enter the temporal fray of Judeo-Roman politics.
B. THE COIN
Instead of jumping into the political discussion, though, Jesus curiously requests to see the coin of the tribute. It is not necessary that Jesus possess the coin to answer their question. He could certainly respond without seeing the coin. That He requests to see the coin suggests that there is something meaningful about the coin itself.
In the Tribute Episode, the questioners produce a denarius. The denarius was approximately 1/10 of a troy ounce (at that time about 3.9 grams) of silver and roughly worth a day’s wages for a common laborer. The denarius was a remarkably stable currency; Roman emperors did not begin debasing it with any vigor until Nero. The denarius in question would have been issued by the Emperor Tiberius, whose reign coincided with Jesus’ ministry. Where Augustus issued hundreds of denarii, Ethelbert Stauffer, in his masterful, Christ and the Caesars, reports that Tiberius issued only three, and of those three, two are relatively rare, and the third is quite common. Tiberius preferred this third and issued it from his personal mint for twenty years. The denarius was truly the emperor’s property: he used it to pay his soldiers, officials, and suppliers; it bore the imperial seal; it differed from the copper coins issued by the Roman Senate, and it was also the coin with which subjected peoples, in theory, were required to pay the tribute. Tiberius even made it a capital crime to carry any coin stamped with his image into a bathroom or a brothel. In short, the denarius was a tangible representation of the emperor’s power, wealth, deification, and subjugation.
Tiberius’ denarii were minted at Lugdunum, modern-day Lyons, in Gaul. Thus, J. Spencer Kennard, in a well-crafted, but out-of-print book entitled Render to God, argues that the denarius’ circulation in Judaea was likely scarce. The only people to transact routinely with the denarius in Judaea would have been soldiers, Roman officials, and Jewish leaders in collaboration with Rome. Thus, it is noteworthy that Jesus, Himself, does not possess the coin. The questioners’ quickness to produce the coin at Jesus’ request implies that they routinely used it, taking advantage of Roman financial largess, whereas Jesus did not. Moreover, the Tribute Episode takes place in the Temple, and by producing the coin, the questioners reveal their religious hypocrisy – they bring a potentially profane item, the coin of a pagan, into the sacred space of the Temple.
Finally, both Stauffer and Kennard make the magnificent point that coins of the ancient world were the major instrument of imperial propaganda, promoting agendas and promulgating the deeds of their issuers, in particular the apotheosis of the emperor. As Kennard puts it, “For indoctrinating the peoples of the empire with the deity of the emperor, coins excelled all other media. They went everywhere and were handled by everyone. Their subtle symbolism pervaded every home.” While Tiberius’ propaganda engine was not as prolific as Augustus’ machine, all of Tiberius’ denarii pronounced his divinity or his debt to the deified Augustus.
C. THE COUNTER-QUESTION AND ITS ANSWER
After seeing the coin, Jesus then poses a counter-question, “Whose image and inscription is this?” It is again noteworthy that this counter-question and its answer are not necessary to answer the original question of whether it is licit to pay tribute to Caesar. That Jesus asks the counter-question suggests that it and its answer are significant.
(1) Why Is The Counter-Question Important?
The counter-question is significant for two reasons.
First, Owen-Ball argues that the counter-question follows a pattern of formal rhetoric common in first century rabbinic literature in which (1) an outsider poses a hostile question to a rabbi; (2) the rabbi responds with a counter-question; (3) by answering the counter-question, the outsider’s position becomes vulnerable to attack; and (4) the rabbi then uses the answer to the counter-question to refute the hostile question. Jesus’ use of this rhetorical form is one way to establish His authority as a rabbi, not unlike a modern lawyer who uses a formal, legal rhetoric in the courtroom. Moreover, the point of the rhetorical exchange is ultimately to refute the hostile question.
Second, because the hostile question was a direct challenge to Jesus’ authority as a rabbi on a point of law, His interrogators would have expected a counter-question grounded in scripture, in particular, based upon the Torah. Two words, “image” and “inscription,” in the counter-question harkens to two central provisions in the Torah, the First (Second) Commandment and the Shema. These provide the scriptural basis for this question of law.
God Prohibits False Images. The First (Second) Commandment prohibits worship of anyone or anything but God, and it also forbids crafting any image of a false god for adoration, “I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt not have strange gods before me. Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing, nor the likeness [image] of any thing….” God demands the exclusive allegiance of His people. Jesus’ use of the word, “image,” in the counter-question reminds His questioners of the First (Second) Commandment’s requirement to venerate God first and its concomitant prohibition against creating images of false gods.
The Shema Demands The Worship Of God Alone. Jesus’ use of the word “inscription” alludes to the Shema. The Shema is a Jewish prayer based upon Deuteronomy 6:4-9, 11:13-21 and Numbers 15:37-41 and is the most important prayer a pious Jew can say. It commences with the words, “Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad,” which can be translated, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God – the Lord alone.” This opening line stresses Israel’s worship of God to the exclusion of all other gods. The Shema then commands a person to love God with his whole heart, whole soul, and whole strength. The Shema further requires worshipers to keep the words of the Shema in their hearts, to instruct their children in them, to bind them on their hands and foreheads, and to inscribe them conspicuously on their doorposts and on the gates to their cities. Observant Jews take literally the command to bind the words upon their arms and foreheads and wear tefillin, little leather cases which contain parchment on which are inscribed certain passages from the Torah. Words of the Shema were to be metaphorically inscribed in the hearts, minds, and souls of pious Jews and physically inscribed on parchment in tefillin, on doorposts, and on city gates. St. Matthew and St. Mark both recount Jesus quoting the Shema in the same chapter just a few verses after the Tribute Episode. This proximity further reinforces the reference to the Shema in the Tribute Episode. Finally, it is noteworthy that when Satan tempts Jesus by offering Him all the kingdoms of the [Roman] world in exchange for His worship, Jesus rebukes Satan by quoting the Shema. In short, Jesus means to call attention to the Shema by using the word “inscription” in the counter-question as His appeal to scriptural authority for His response.
(2) Why Is The Answer To The Counter-Question Important?
The answer to the counter-question is significant for two reasons.
First, while the verbal answer to the counter-question of whose image and inscription the coin bears is a feeble, “Caesar’s,” the actual image and inscription is much more revealing. The front of the denarius shows a profiled bust of Tiberius crowned with the laurels of victory and divinity. Even a modern viewer would immediately recognize that the person depicted on the coin is a Roman emperor. Circumscribed around Tiberius is an abbreviation, “TI CAESAR DIVI AUG F AUGUSTUS,” which stands for “Tiberius Caesar Divi August Fili Augustus,” which, in turn, translates, “Tiberius Caesar, Worshipful Son of the God, Augustus.”
On the obverse sits the Roman goddess of peace, Pax, and circumscribed around her is the abbreviation, “Pontif Maxim,” which stands for “Pontifex Maximus,” which, in turn, means, “High Priest.”
The coin of the Tribute Episode is a fine specimen of Roman propaganda. It imposes the cult of emperor worship and asserts Caesar’s sovereignty upon all who transact with it.
In the most richly ironic passage in the entire Bible, all three synoptic Gospels depict the Son of God and the High Priest of Peace, newly-proclaimed by His people to be a King, holding the tiny silver coin of a king who claims to be the son of a god and the high priest of Roman peace.
The second reason the answer is significant is that in following the pattern of rabbinic rhetoric, the answer exposes the hostile questioners’ position to attack. It is again noteworthy that the interrogators’ answer to Jesus’ counter-question about the coin’s image and inscription bears little relevance to their original question as to whether it is licit to pay the tribute. Jesus could certainly answer their original question without their answer to His counter-question. But the rhetorical function of the answer to the counter-question is to demonstrate the vulnerability of the opponent’s position and use that answer to refute the opponent’s original, hostile question.
D. REFUTING BY RENDERING UNTO GOD
In the Tribute Episode, it is only after Jesus’ counter-question is asked and answered does He respond to the original question. Jesus tells His interrogators, “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God, the things that are God’s.” This response begs the question of what is licitly God’s and what is licitly Caesar’s.
In the Hebrew tradition, everything rightfully belonged to God. By using the words, “image and inscription,” Jesus has already reminded His interrogators that God was owed exclusive allegiance and total love and worship. Similarly, everything economically belonged to God as well. For example, the physical land of Israel was God’s, as He instructed in Leviticus 25:23, “The land [of Israel] shall not be sold in perpetuity; for the land is mine, and you [the Israelites] are but aliens who have become my tenants.” In addition, the Jewish people were to dedicate the firstfruits, that first portion of any harvest and the first-born of any animal, to God. By giving God the firstfruits, the Jewish people acknowledged that all good things came from God and that all things, in turn, belonged to God. God even declares, “Mine is the silver and mine the gold.”
The emperor, on the other hand, also claimed that all people and things in the empire rightfully belonged to Rome. The denarius notified everyone who transacted with it that the emperor demanded exclusive allegiance and, at least, the pretense of worship – Tiberius claimed to be the worshipful son of a god. Roman occupiers served as a constant reminder that the land of Israel belonged to Rome. Roman tribute, paid with Roman currency, impressed upon the populace that the economic life depended on the emperor. The emperor’s bread and circuses maintained political order. The propaganda on the coin even attributed peace and tranquility to the emperor.
With one straightforward counter-question, Jesus skillfully points out that the claims of God and Caesar are mutually exclusive. If one’s faith is in God, then God is owed everything; Caesar’s claims are necessarily illegitimate, and he is therefore owed nothing. If, on the other hand, one’s faith is in Caesar, God’s claims are illegitimate, and Caesar is owed, at the very least, the coin which bears his image.
Jesus’ counter-question simply invites His listeners to choose allegiances. Remarkably, He has escaped the trap through a clever rhetorical gambit; He has authoritatively refuted His opponents’ hostile question by basing His answer in scripture, and yet, He never overtly answers the question originally posed to Him. No wonder that St. Matthew ends the Tribute Episode this way: “When they heard this they were amazed, and leaving him they went away.”
IV. THE CONTEXT IN THE GOSPELS: A TRADITION OF SUBTLE SEDITION
Subtle sedition refers to scenes throughout the Gospels which were not overtly treasonous and would not have directly threatened Roman authorities, but which delivered political messages that first century Jewish audiences would have immediately recognized. The Gospels are replete with instances of subtle sedition. Pointing these out is not to argue that Jesus saw Himself as a political king. Jesus makes it explicit in John 18:36 that He is not a political Messiah. Rather, in the context of subtle sedition, no one can interpret the Tribute Episode as Jesus’ support of taxation. To the contrary, one can only understand the Tribute Episode as Jesus’ opposition to the illicit Roman taxes.
In addition to the Tribute Episode, three other scenes from the Gospels serve as examples of subtle sedition: (1) Jesus’ temptation in the desert; (2) Jesus walking on water; and (3) Jesus curing the Gerasene demoniac.
A. EMPERORS OF BREAD AND CIRCUSES
Around 200 A.D., the Roman satirist Juvenal lamented that the Roman emperors, masters of the known world, tenuously maintained political power by way of “panem et circenses,” or “bread and circuses,” a reference to the ancient practice of pandering to Roman citizens by providing free wheat and costly circus spectacles. Caesar Augustus, for example, boasted of feeding more than 100,000 men from his personal granary. He also bragged of putting on tremendous exhibitions:
Three times I gave shows of gladiators under my name and five times under the name of my sons and grandsons; in these shows about 10,000 men fought. * * * Twenty-six times, under my name or that of my sons and grandsons, I gave the people hunts of African beasts in the circus, in the open, or in the amphitheater; in them about 3,500 beasts were killed. I gave the people a spectacle of a naval battle, in the place across the Tiber where the grove of the Caesars is now, with the ground excavated in length 1,800 feet, in width 1,200, in which thirty beaked ships, biremes or triremes, but many smaller, fought among themselves; in these ships about 3,000 men fought in addition to the rowers.
By the time of Jesus and the reign of Tiberius Caesar, the Roman grain dole routinely fed 200,000 people.
At the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, the Spirit led Him into the desert “to be tempted by the devil.” The devil challenged Him with three tests. First, he dared Jesus to turn stones into bread. Second, the devil took Jesus to the highest point on the temple in Jerusalem and tempted Him to cast Himself down to force the angels into a spectacular, miraculous rescue. Finally, for the last temptation, “the devil took him up to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their magnificence, and he said to him, ‘All these I shall give to you, if you will prostrate yourself and worship me.’”
The devil dared Jesus to be a king of bread and circuses and offered Him dominion over the whole earthly world. These temptations are an instantly recognizable reference to the power of the Roman emperors. Jesus forcefully rejects this power. Jesus’ rejection illustrates that the things of God and the things of Rome/the world/the devil are mutually exclusive. Jesus’ allegiance was to the things of God, and His rebuff of the metaphorical power of Rome is an example of subtle sedition.
B. TREADING UPON THE EMPEROR’S SEAS
At the beginning of Chapter 6 in St. John’s Gospel, Jesus performs a miracle and feeds 5,000 people from five loaves of bread; He then refuses to be crowned a king of bread and circuses. Immediately thereafter, St. John recounts the episode of Jesus walking on a body of water in the middle of a storm. That body of water was the Sea of Galilee, which, St. John reminds his readers, was also known as the Sea of Tiberias. Around 25 A.D., Herod Antipas built a pagan city on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee and named it in honor of the Roman emperor, Tiberius. By Jesus’ time, the city had become so important that the Sea of Galilee came to be called the “Sea of Tiberias.” Thus, not only does Jesus refuse to be coronated a Roman king of bread and circuses, but He literally treads upon the emperor’s seas, showing that even the emperor’s waters have no dominion over Him. Treading on the emperor’s seas is an additional instance of subtle sedition.
C. A LEGION OF DEMONS
St. Mark details Jesus’ encounter with the Gerasene demoniac in another example of subtle sedition. The territory of the Gerasenes was pagan territory, and this particular demoniac was exceptionally strong and frightening. In attempting to exorcise the demon, Jesus asked its name. The demon replied, “Legion is my name. There are many of us.” Jesus then expels the demons and casts them into a herd of swine. The herd immediately drive themselves into the sea. First century readers would have been well-acquainted with the name, “Legion.” At that time, an imperial legion was roughly 6,000 soldiers. Thus, the demon “Legion,” an agent of the devil, was a thinly-veiled reference to the Roman occupiers of Judaea. Swine were considered unclean animals under Jewish law. The symbol of the Roman Legion which occupied Jerusalem was a boar. The first century audience would have easily grasped the symbolism of Jesus’ casting the demon Legion into the herd of unclean swine, and the herd driving itself into the sea. Thus, the healing of the Gerasene demoniac is another example of subtle sedition.
D. TRIBUTE AS SUBTLE SEDITION
In the Tribute Episode, Jesus’ response is subtly seditious. The first-century audience would have immediately apprehended what it meant to render unto God the things that are God’s. They would have known that the things of God and Caesar were mutually exclusive. No Jewish listener would have mistaken Jesus’ response as an endorsement of paying Caesar’s taxes. To the contrary, His audience would have understood that Jesus thought the tribute was illicit. Indeed, opposition to the tribute was one of the charges the authorities levied at His trial, “They brought charges against him, saying, ‘We found this man misleading our people; he opposes the payment of taxes to Caesar and maintains that he is the Messiah, a king.’” To the Roman audience, however, the pronouncement of rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s sounds benign, almost supportive. It is, however, one of many vignettes of covert political protest contained in the Gospels. In short, the Tribute Episode is a subtle form of sedition. When viewed in this context, no one can say that the Episode supports the payment of taxes.
V. WHAT DOES THE CATHOLIC CHURCH SAY?
The Catholic Church considers Herself the authoritative interpreter of Sacred Scripture. The 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church “is a statement of the Church’s faith and of catholic doctrine, attested to or illumined by Sacred Scripture, the Apostolic Tradition, and the Church’s Magisterium.”
The 1994 Catechism instructs the faithful that it is morally obligatory to pay one’s taxes for the common good. (What the definition of the “common good” is may be left for a different debate.) The 1994 Catechism also quotes and cites the Tribute Episode. But the 1994 Catechism does NOT use the Tribute Episode to support the proposition that it is morally obligatory to pay taxes. Instead, the 1994 Catechism refers the Tribute Episode only to justify acts of civil disobedience. It quotes St. Matthew’s version to teach that a Christian must refuse to obey political authority when that political authority makes a demand contrary to the demands of the moral order, the fundamental rights of persons, or the teachings of the Gospel. Similarly, the 1994 Catechism also cites to St. Mark’s version to instruct that a person “should not submit his personal freedom in an absolute manner to any earthly power, but only to God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Caesar is not ‘the Lord.’” Thus, according to the 1994 Catechism, the Tribute Episode stands for the proposition that a Christian owes his allegiance to God and to the things of God alone. If the Tribute Episode unequivocally supported the proposition that it is morally obligatory to pay taxes, the 1994 Catechism would not hesitate to cite to it for that position. That the 1994 Catechism does not interpret the Tribute Episode as a justification for the payment of taxes suggests that such an interpretation is not an authoritative reading of the passage. In short, even the Catholic Church does not understand the Tribute Episode to mean that Jesus endorsed paying Caesar’s taxes.
V. CONCLUSION
St. John’s Gospel recounts the scene of a woman caught in adultery, brought before Jesus by the Pharisees so that they might “test” Him “so that they could have some charge to bring against Him.” When asked, “‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say,’” Jesus appears trapped by only two answers: the strict, legally-correct answer of the Pharisees, or the mercifully-right, morally-correct, but technically-illegal answer undermining Jesus’ authority as a Rabbi. Notably, Jesus never does overtly respond to the question posed to Him; instead of answering, “Jesus bent down and began to write on the ground with his finger.” When pressed by His inquisitors, He finally answers, “‘Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her,’” and, of course, the shamed Pharisees all leave one by one. Jesus then refuses to condemn the woman.
The scene of the woman caught in adultery and the Tribute Episode are similar. In both, Jesus is faced with a hostile question challenging His credibility as a Rabbi. In each, the hostile question has two answers: one answer which the audience knows is morally correct, but politically incorrect, and the other answer which the audience knows is wrong, but politically correct. In the scene of the woman caught in adultery, no one roots for Jesus to say, “Stone her!” Everyone wants to see Jesus extend the woman mercy. Likewise, in the Tribute Episode, no one hopes Jesus answers, “Pay tribute to the pagan, Roman oppressors!” The Tribute Episode, like the scene of the woman caught in adultery, has a “right” answer – it is not licit to pay the tribute. But Jesus cannot give this “right” answer without running afoul of the Roman government. Instead, in both Gospel accounts, Jesus gives a quick-witted, but ultimately ambiguous, response which exposes the hypocrisy of His interrogators rather than overtly answers the underlying question posed by them. Nevertheless, in each instance, the audience can infer the right answer embedded in Jesus’ response.
Over the centuries, theologians, scholars, laymen, and potentates have interpreted the Tribute Episode incorrectly as Jesus’ support for the payment of taxes. First, this interpretation does not square with the political climate of the times. The Tribute Episode is set in the middle of a decades-old tax-revolt against Caesar’s tribute. Second, the rhetorical structure of the Tribute Episode, itself, contradicts any interpretation that Jesus supported paying taxes. Third, the Gospels contain episode after episode of subtle sedition. The Tribute Episode is just another of these subtly seditious scenes. When seen in the context of subtle sedition, the phrase “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” means that the emperor is owed nothing. Finally, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the authoritative interpreter of Sacred Scripture, does not construe the Tribute Episode to support the proposition that it is morally obligatory to pay one’s taxes. Indeed, it interprets the Tribute Episode to mean the exact opposite – that Christians are obliged to disobey Caesar when Caesar’s dictates violate God’s law. In sum, the pro-tax position of the Tribute Episode is not supportable historically, rhetorically, contextually, or within the confines of the Catholic Church’s own understanding. As Dorothy Day is reputed to have said, “If we rendered unto God all the things that belong to God, there would be nothing left for Caesar.”
Respectfully,
Mark
Friday, June 11, 2010
A Theocratic Mistake
Dear Friends:
In a recent interview with The New York Times Magazine, Chuck Colson was asked what he believed was the greatest misconception about Christians. His response was: “That we are intolerant. Christianity has deep convictions about what is true, but I don’t think Christians should impose themselves on people. My greatest concern is theocracy.” Now Chuck Colson deserves great respect for all he has done to further Christianity, but he is way off base here. There are some topics that should not and cannot be answered with three sentences. His answer serves to reinforce a mistaken notion – which is held by most mainstream journalists in this country, and therefore by many citizens in this country – about what “theocracy” really means.
To begin, we need to make a delineation between “theonomy” and “theocracy.” Theonomy refers to God’s law and theocracy refers to God’s rule. All Christians, to some degree, believe that God’s law reveals the true and proper way to live in this world. To that end, all Christians also understand that they should be theocratic (ruled by God) in their earthly obedience; that is, like Peter and the rest of the apostles, they believe they “must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). The secularists in the mainstream media – not to mention the new atheist bulldogs of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, et al. – constantly smear Christians who choose to exercise their right to participate in the political process of this country as “theocrats” who want to turn America into a “theocracy.” Although they never define just what they mean by this, the mental image communicated to the reader is often one of women in burkas, and priests/politicians with AK-47s. This top-down, authoritarian, reign of power was not what Christians had in mind when they spoke of obeying God’s law. But just because the Muslim variety of theocracy is the most visible and vocal one in the world, doesn’t make it the correct one. Sadly, Colson’s answer to the NYT Magazine only perpetuates this misunderstanding.
When Colson says that Christians should not impose themselves on other people, just what does he mean? He seems to be implying that when we impose our “deep convictions about what is true” on other people, we are guilty of being theocrats. And in the true sense of what the word means, this is exactly what we are doing. We are told to obey God rather than men and part of this obedience is to take the truth of God’s Kingdom to all nations, teaching them to obey everything that Jesus commanded (Matthew 28:18-20). In fact, it was the Sanhedrin’s seeking to deny the carrying out of this command that prompted the apostles to answer that they were duty-bound to obey God, not men. The reason why the apostles chose to ignore the Sanhedrin’s demand to keep quiet about Jesus was because they recognized that Jesus represented a higher authority than man. Because they believed in God’s rule, they knew they must obey God’s law. Their decision to disobey was indeed a theocratic one. But this is obviously not what Colson means when he says that theocracy is his greatest concern.
Most times, discussions about “theocracy” involve the always misunderstood doctrine of separation of church and state. When most critics discuss this “separation” what they really mean is that religion can never have anything to do with matters of the state. This is preposterous, not to mention impossible. It must be pointed out that every law is an imposition of morality and every morality stems from a religious belief. Every one of us, irrespective of whether we consider ourselves to be “religious,” believe some things to be true about the world that we have no way of proving or knowing for certain. Take the issue of stealing for example. Most people think that stealing is wrong, but how many ever to stop to ask why. Is there some sort of natural law that we can look to that informs us that theft is wrong? Bigger animals steal food from smaller animals and taller trees steal the sunlight away from smaller trees all the time, but where is the cry of injustice over this? Why aren’t these bully animals and trees brought up on charges of theft and racketeering? The answer is obvious. We don’t expect the animal and plant world to follow the rules that apply to mankind. But why not? Why does mankind follow a “different rule” for not taking what belongs to his neighbor? If there is a natural law about theft, it would be that the bigger and the stronger ones of a society should be the ones that get to thrive and survive. But the rule of the jungle is not the rule of men. Why is this? Simply because man’s views on the rightness or wrongness of theft comes from a religious conviction, not the natural world. The same could be said about murder, lying, cheating, rape, and countless other things that human governments legislate.
Theocracy is an inescapable concept. Everyone is a theocrat in the sense that everyone does or doesn’t do certain things based on what they believe to be right or wrong. Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris believe that religion (and by this they mean the Christian religion) has no place in the public policy arena, because this would invariably lead to a “theocracy;” yet they have no problem bringing their own religious ideas of how men should live and act to the discussion. In fact, most non-Christians would like to have some form of a Christian society (one that abides by the last six of the Ten Commandments), they just don’t want Christ as the Giver of the law. In other words, they believe that not stealing from your neighbor is a perfectly acceptable law to have in a civilized and separatized society, however, saying that we should not steal because Jesus said not to is theocratic and therefore not allowed. In the first instance, man himself is the “god” – deciding for himself what is good and evil; in the second instance, God is God – revealing to us what is good and evil. And this is exactly where the heart of the separation issue lies: either man is god, or God is God.
If we were to follow Colson’s definition of theocracy to its logical conclusion, we can only conclude that he would have us side with the Sanhedrin rather than the Apostles. In other words, in his short, three-sentence answer, Colson has effectively made evangelism impossible. How so? Because evangelism – like human law – is an imposition of your beliefs on other people. Most people believe that speeding cars can kill people, but a person would be roundly condemned (and maybe even arrested) for not imposing this belief on an unsuspecting pedestrian in the crosswalk. In the same way, Christians believe that living without Christ leads to death while living with Him leads to life. But if we refuse to tell someone about Christ out of fear of being labeled a “theocrat,” we are not obeying God, we are obeying man. When we tell someone that they should become a Christian, we are imposing our beliefs about ultimate reality on them; that is, we are telling them something we believe to be universally true and binding on all people.
When God sent Jonah to the Assyrians, He sent him to preach the gospel to them that they might repent from their wicked ways. When Jonah tries to flee from the presence of God to avoid taking the message of judgment to Nineveh, we learn that he did this because he feared that Nineveh might actually do it. Jonah refused to obey God because he couldn’t bear to imagine that God might actually show compassion and grace to this corrupt and sinful city. In the same way, Peter (Simon bar-Jonah, son of Jonah) refused to take the gospel of Christ to the Gentiles, because he couldn’t fathom a world where God would show compassion and grace to non-Jews. In both cases, God gives divine insight that He will do as He chooses and that He is not constrained by the boundaries and limitations of men. Jonah and Peter both re-learned the lesson that it is better to obey God than men. God’s rule demands that we obey Him.
In both of these stories – Jonah and Peter – notice that God’s servants are only required to preach the message. The willingness to obey the demands of God’s law (theonomy) are not imposed by either Jonah or Peter, but flow out from the people’s acknowledgment that God is King (theocracy). When Chuck Colson speaks of theocracy being his greatest concern, he means an external imposition of obedience to God’s law onto people who do not accept God’s rule. The problem is that this is a myth; it is a scare tactic created by the media and the New Atheists. It proves that Goebbels was correct that if a lie is repeated enough times it will eventually become accepted as truth, even among those who should know better. Nowhere in the United States does this “top-down” Christian theocracy exist. Chuck Colson knows this. No Christian has ever promoted the idea that if we could only get enough Christians elected to public office, we would then be able to impose Christianity on the American people. A sign at a church made a very good point in this regard; it said: “Visitors welcomed, Members expected.” This is the real message of the theocracy of Christ. New members are being welcomed with open arms, but current members are expected to be actively engaging and doing the work of “obeying God rather than men.” But when Colson equivocates on what “theocracy” means, as he does in his short quotation, he plays right into the hands of the secularists and the humanists that are seeking to erase every vestige of Christianity from the public square and the history books of this nation. Theocracy is a real concern, but only in its misapplication. As Christians we must be ever mindful of not only how we live out the Gospel in this world, but also how we talk about it and present it.
Respectfully,
Mark
In a recent interview with The New York Times Magazine, Chuck Colson was asked what he believed was the greatest misconception about Christians. His response was: “That we are intolerant. Christianity has deep convictions about what is true, but I don’t think Christians should impose themselves on people. My greatest concern is theocracy.” Now Chuck Colson deserves great respect for all he has done to further Christianity, but he is way off base here. There are some topics that should not and cannot be answered with three sentences. His answer serves to reinforce a mistaken notion – which is held by most mainstream journalists in this country, and therefore by many citizens in this country – about what “theocracy” really means.
To begin, we need to make a delineation between “theonomy” and “theocracy.” Theonomy refers to God’s law and theocracy refers to God’s rule. All Christians, to some degree, believe that God’s law reveals the true and proper way to live in this world. To that end, all Christians also understand that they should be theocratic (ruled by God) in their earthly obedience; that is, like Peter and the rest of the apostles, they believe they “must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). The secularists in the mainstream media – not to mention the new atheist bulldogs of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, et al. – constantly smear Christians who choose to exercise their right to participate in the political process of this country as “theocrats” who want to turn America into a “theocracy.” Although they never define just what they mean by this, the mental image communicated to the reader is often one of women in burkas, and priests/politicians with AK-47s. This top-down, authoritarian, reign of power was not what Christians had in mind when they spoke of obeying God’s law. But just because the Muslim variety of theocracy is the most visible and vocal one in the world, doesn’t make it the correct one. Sadly, Colson’s answer to the NYT Magazine only perpetuates this misunderstanding.
When Colson says that Christians should not impose themselves on other people, just what does he mean? He seems to be implying that when we impose our “deep convictions about what is true” on other people, we are guilty of being theocrats. And in the true sense of what the word means, this is exactly what we are doing. We are told to obey God rather than men and part of this obedience is to take the truth of God’s Kingdom to all nations, teaching them to obey everything that Jesus commanded (Matthew 28:18-20). In fact, it was the Sanhedrin’s seeking to deny the carrying out of this command that prompted the apostles to answer that they were duty-bound to obey God, not men. The reason why the apostles chose to ignore the Sanhedrin’s demand to keep quiet about Jesus was because they recognized that Jesus represented a higher authority than man. Because they believed in God’s rule, they knew they must obey God’s law. Their decision to disobey was indeed a theocratic one. But this is obviously not what Colson means when he says that theocracy is his greatest concern.
Most times, discussions about “theocracy” involve the always misunderstood doctrine of separation of church and state. When most critics discuss this “separation” what they really mean is that religion can never have anything to do with matters of the state. This is preposterous, not to mention impossible. It must be pointed out that every law is an imposition of morality and every morality stems from a religious belief. Every one of us, irrespective of whether we consider ourselves to be “religious,” believe some things to be true about the world that we have no way of proving or knowing for certain. Take the issue of stealing for example. Most people think that stealing is wrong, but how many ever to stop to ask why. Is there some sort of natural law that we can look to that informs us that theft is wrong? Bigger animals steal food from smaller animals and taller trees steal the sunlight away from smaller trees all the time, but where is the cry of injustice over this? Why aren’t these bully animals and trees brought up on charges of theft and racketeering? The answer is obvious. We don’t expect the animal and plant world to follow the rules that apply to mankind. But why not? Why does mankind follow a “different rule” for not taking what belongs to his neighbor? If there is a natural law about theft, it would be that the bigger and the stronger ones of a society should be the ones that get to thrive and survive. But the rule of the jungle is not the rule of men. Why is this? Simply because man’s views on the rightness or wrongness of theft comes from a religious conviction, not the natural world. The same could be said about murder, lying, cheating, rape, and countless other things that human governments legislate.
Theocracy is an inescapable concept. Everyone is a theocrat in the sense that everyone does or doesn’t do certain things based on what they believe to be right or wrong. Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris believe that religion (and by this they mean the Christian religion) has no place in the public policy arena, because this would invariably lead to a “theocracy;” yet they have no problem bringing their own religious ideas of how men should live and act to the discussion. In fact, most non-Christians would like to have some form of a Christian society (one that abides by the last six of the Ten Commandments), they just don’t want Christ as the Giver of the law. In other words, they believe that not stealing from your neighbor is a perfectly acceptable law to have in a civilized and separatized society, however, saying that we should not steal because Jesus said not to is theocratic and therefore not allowed. In the first instance, man himself is the “god” – deciding for himself what is good and evil; in the second instance, God is God – revealing to us what is good and evil. And this is exactly where the heart of the separation issue lies: either man is god, or God is God.
If we were to follow Colson’s definition of theocracy to its logical conclusion, we can only conclude that he would have us side with the Sanhedrin rather than the Apostles. In other words, in his short, three-sentence answer, Colson has effectively made evangelism impossible. How so? Because evangelism – like human law – is an imposition of your beliefs on other people. Most people believe that speeding cars can kill people, but a person would be roundly condemned (and maybe even arrested) for not imposing this belief on an unsuspecting pedestrian in the crosswalk. In the same way, Christians believe that living without Christ leads to death while living with Him leads to life. But if we refuse to tell someone about Christ out of fear of being labeled a “theocrat,” we are not obeying God, we are obeying man. When we tell someone that they should become a Christian, we are imposing our beliefs about ultimate reality on them; that is, we are telling them something we believe to be universally true and binding on all people.
When God sent Jonah to the Assyrians, He sent him to preach the gospel to them that they might repent from their wicked ways. When Jonah tries to flee from the presence of God to avoid taking the message of judgment to Nineveh, we learn that he did this because he feared that Nineveh might actually do it. Jonah refused to obey God because he couldn’t bear to imagine that God might actually show compassion and grace to this corrupt and sinful city. In the same way, Peter (Simon bar-Jonah, son of Jonah) refused to take the gospel of Christ to the Gentiles, because he couldn’t fathom a world where God would show compassion and grace to non-Jews. In both cases, God gives divine insight that He will do as He chooses and that He is not constrained by the boundaries and limitations of men. Jonah and Peter both re-learned the lesson that it is better to obey God than men. God’s rule demands that we obey Him.
In both of these stories – Jonah and Peter – notice that God’s servants are only required to preach the message. The willingness to obey the demands of God’s law (theonomy) are not imposed by either Jonah or Peter, but flow out from the people’s acknowledgment that God is King (theocracy). When Chuck Colson speaks of theocracy being his greatest concern, he means an external imposition of obedience to God’s law onto people who do not accept God’s rule. The problem is that this is a myth; it is a scare tactic created by the media and the New Atheists. It proves that Goebbels was correct that if a lie is repeated enough times it will eventually become accepted as truth, even among those who should know better. Nowhere in the United States does this “top-down” Christian theocracy exist. Chuck Colson knows this. No Christian has ever promoted the idea that if we could only get enough Christians elected to public office, we would then be able to impose Christianity on the American people. A sign at a church made a very good point in this regard; it said: “Visitors welcomed, Members expected.” This is the real message of the theocracy of Christ. New members are being welcomed with open arms, but current members are expected to be actively engaging and doing the work of “obeying God rather than men.” But when Colson equivocates on what “theocracy” means, as he does in his short quotation, he plays right into the hands of the secularists and the humanists that are seeking to erase every vestige of Christianity from the public square and the history books of this nation. Theocracy is a real concern, but only in its misapplication. As Christians we must be ever mindful of not only how we live out the Gospel in this world, but also how we talk about it and present it.
Respectfully,
Mark
Friday, June 4, 2010
The History Con May be Over
Dear Friends:
The liberals got caught flat-footed in the Texas textbook wars. Texas and California drive the content of many textbooks since they have the largest public school populations. Textbook manufactures go where the money is, and less populated states can get what Texas and California decide what goes in their textbooks. It’s possible that a public (government) school in Massachusetts could get history textbooks written by whoever controls the school boards from these two distant states. But this isn’t always the case since technology has made it easier to tailor books to specific markets. Even so, liberals are going crazy and using the new Texas guidelines to clamp down on what goes into their state’s textbooks. Of course, they have to misrepresent the guidelines to accomplish their goal of further historical revisionism. Here’s an example:
“State Senator Leland Yee has introduced a bill that would require the California Board of Education to pay special attention during its textbook reviews for any of the changes approved by the Texas Board, and then report those findings to the state secretary of education and the state legislature, presumably so that those textbooks can be altered or rejected.”
What in particular is stressing many liberals like Mr. Yee (D-San Francisco)? That America’s founding fathers were “guided by Christian principles.”
I suspect that Mr. Yee has not read the Texas standards. This is typical of knee-jerk, ideology-driven Leftists. How many Congressmen who voted for the 2,700-page healthcare bill ever read it? We have admissions from Attorney General Eric Holder and the head of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano that neither read the Arizona immigration law. Of course, this did not stop them from condemning it. The same is true for the new Texas textbook standards. How many times have you read that the standards minimize the notion of separation of church and state? Here’s what the guidelines say on the subject:
Examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America and guaranteed its free exercise by saying that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, and compare and contrast this to the phrase “separation of church and state.”
Yee and his fellow-historical revisionists don’t want students to “compare and contrast” because they don’t want students to realize that they’ve been conned.
To make the point that liberals have little idea of even recent history when it comes to the subject of religion and America’s early founding, Texas Board of Education Member Cynthia Dunbar, a professor at Liberty University School of Law, played a game of historical “gotcha” when she delivered her invocation. It included the following:
I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the Savior have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses…. Whether we look to the first charter of Virginia … or to the Charter of New England … or to the Charter of Massachusetts Bay … or to the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut … the same objective is present: A Christian land governed by Christian principles…. I believe the entire Bill of Rights came into being because of the knowledge our forefathers had of the Bible and their belief in it: freedom of belief, of expression, of assembly, of petition, the dignity of the individual, the sanctity of the home, equal justice under law, and the reservation of powers to the people…. I like to believe we are living today in the spirit of the Christian religion. I like also to believe that as long as we do so, no great harm can come to our country.
After hearing Dunbar’s invocation, the left-leaning Texas Freedom Network wrote the following in response: “She offered the board’s opening prayer this morning and removed any doubt about what she and other far-right board members want students to learn: America’s laws and government should be based on the Christian Bible.” What Dunbar quoted was an excerpt of a speech that Chief Justice Earl Warren gave at the 1954 National Prayer Breakfast. Time magazine published an article about the event. As reported by Time, those in attendance included President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon (who read from John 15), Cabinet members, Congressmen, diplomats, and businessmen. It has always been the goal of liberals to keep these historical facts hidden from children. The children just might ask embarrassing questions.
A 1982 article in Newsweek Magazine stated, “[F]or centuries [the Bible] has exerted an unrivaled influence on American culture, politics and social life. Now historians are discovering that the Bible perhaps even more than the Constitution, is our founding document.” Time magazine said something similar in 1987: “Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea. That good idea combines a commitment to man’s inalienable rights with the Calvinist belief in an ultimate moral right and sinful man’s obligation to do good. These articles of faith, embodied in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution, literally govern our lives today.” Our nation’s values were rooted in the Bible. Of course, this does not mean that all Christian Americans followed the biblical precepts that they claimed to believe, but they could not deny history.
Respectfully,
Mark
The liberals got caught flat-footed in the Texas textbook wars. Texas and California drive the content of many textbooks since they have the largest public school populations. Textbook manufactures go where the money is, and less populated states can get what Texas and California decide what goes in their textbooks. It’s possible that a public (government) school in Massachusetts could get history textbooks written by whoever controls the school boards from these two distant states. But this isn’t always the case since technology has made it easier to tailor books to specific markets. Even so, liberals are going crazy and using the new Texas guidelines to clamp down on what goes into their state’s textbooks. Of course, they have to misrepresent the guidelines to accomplish their goal of further historical revisionism. Here’s an example:
“State Senator Leland Yee has introduced a bill that would require the California Board of Education to pay special attention during its textbook reviews for any of the changes approved by the Texas Board, and then report those findings to the state secretary of education and the state legislature, presumably so that those textbooks can be altered or rejected.”
What in particular is stressing many liberals like Mr. Yee (D-San Francisco)? That America’s founding fathers were “guided by Christian principles.”
I suspect that Mr. Yee has not read the Texas standards. This is typical of knee-jerk, ideology-driven Leftists. How many Congressmen who voted for the 2,700-page healthcare bill ever read it? We have admissions from Attorney General Eric Holder and the head of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano that neither read the Arizona immigration law. Of course, this did not stop them from condemning it. The same is true for the new Texas textbook standards. How many times have you read that the standards minimize the notion of separation of church and state? Here’s what the guidelines say on the subject:
Examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America and guaranteed its free exercise by saying that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, and compare and contrast this to the phrase “separation of church and state.”
Yee and his fellow-historical revisionists don’t want students to “compare and contrast” because they don’t want students to realize that they’ve been conned.
To make the point that liberals have little idea of even recent history when it comes to the subject of religion and America’s early founding, Texas Board of Education Member Cynthia Dunbar, a professor at Liberty University School of Law, played a game of historical “gotcha” when she delivered her invocation. It included the following:
I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the Savior have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses…. Whether we look to the first charter of Virginia … or to the Charter of New England … or to the Charter of Massachusetts Bay … or to the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut … the same objective is present: A Christian land governed by Christian principles…. I believe the entire Bill of Rights came into being because of the knowledge our forefathers had of the Bible and their belief in it: freedom of belief, of expression, of assembly, of petition, the dignity of the individual, the sanctity of the home, equal justice under law, and the reservation of powers to the people…. I like to believe we are living today in the spirit of the Christian religion. I like also to believe that as long as we do so, no great harm can come to our country.
After hearing Dunbar’s invocation, the left-leaning Texas Freedom Network wrote the following in response: “She offered the board’s opening prayer this morning and removed any doubt about what she and other far-right board members want students to learn: America’s laws and government should be based on the Christian Bible.” What Dunbar quoted was an excerpt of a speech that Chief Justice Earl Warren gave at the 1954 National Prayer Breakfast. Time magazine published an article about the event. As reported by Time, those in attendance included President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon (who read from John 15), Cabinet members, Congressmen, diplomats, and businessmen. It has always been the goal of liberals to keep these historical facts hidden from children. The children just might ask embarrassing questions.
A 1982 article in Newsweek Magazine stated, “[F]or centuries [the Bible] has exerted an unrivaled influence on American culture, politics and social life. Now historians are discovering that the Bible perhaps even more than the Constitution, is our founding document.” Time magazine said something similar in 1987: “Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea. That good idea combines a commitment to man’s inalienable rights with the Calvinist belief in an ultimate moral right and sinful man’s obligation to do good. These articles of faith, embodied in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution, literally govern our lives today.” Our nation’s values were rooted in the Bible. Of course, this does not mean that all Christian Americans followed the biblical precepts that they claimed to believe, but they could not deny history.
Respectfully,
Mark
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