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  • From: Steve Black <sblack AT axionet.com>
  • To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Romans 13:1-7
  • Date: Wed, 15 May 2002 13:28:49 -0700

Title: [corpus-paul] Re: Romans 13:1-7
    Hi All.

    Dick Horsley's seminar has got me thinking again about this much used (or
abused) passage of Paul. I have a great many theological difficulties with
the traditional interpretation, like many others; how can it be said that
'all authority is from God' when authority, then as now, so often becomes a
manifestation of sheer evil. Having personally known a major war criminal,
now thankfully dead, who was at one time Chief Secretary of State and
minister of Mines in Sierra Leone, after a previous spell as Vice-President,
I find this position impossible to accept. Given that Paul was so often in
trouble with Jewish and probably Roman authorities, not to mention his
controversies with the Jerusalem leadership, I find it difficult to imagine
him believing this as traditionally understood.

I have been playing with the idea that Paul's msg had elements in it that scared him, and that in reaction to this, a "conservatism" within him placed fences around certain implications of his own teaching that had dangerous subversive possibilities. In the context of Rom 13, this might mean that in Paul's mind there was the threat that the emphasis on the "lord-ship" of Christ might be understood in a "revolutionary" way. I believe that such an understanding WOULD be consistent with Paul's overall msg. Paul however, was scared by such a notion, and reacting out of fear, "built a fence" around it to protect his followers from such "subversive" and dangerous possibilities.

Such a reading is overtly psychological, but this seems much more satisfactory than Elliott's suggestion that this text is an interpolation. This suggestion is possible, but strikes me as a real cop-out. How easy it is to support any reading by simply suggesting that all counter evidence was added later! (It might be different if there was significant textual evidence)
-- 
Steve Black
Vancouver School of Theology
Vancouver, BC
---

Once in a while you can get shown the light
in the strangest of places in you look at it right...
-Robert Hunter From SCARLET BEGONIAS



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