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Attorney General Jeff Sessions sparked a heated debate recently on immigration and the meaning of a Bible passage. Sessions cited a verse in Romans chapter 13 while defending the Trump administration's policy of separating parents from their children at the border. The policy has been widely denounced by both religious leaders and immigration advocates, among others.
“I would cite you to the apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13 to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order,” said Sessions, who is also a Sunday school teacher at a United Methodist Church in Mobile, Alabama. Some who share Sessions' faith disagree with his interpretation of the passage. "It was terrible," said Mike Mather, the senior pastor at Broadway UMC in Indianapolis. "If you read the first 11 chapters of Romans, you get a pretty good idea of what the context of that community was. If you read (Chapter) 12, you see love is supposed to be the guiding force. ... (Sessions) didn't read on very far." Romans 12 includes the line, "Contribute to the needs of God’s people, and welcome strangers into your home." Those verses, Mather said, seem to run contrary to the policy Sessions was defending. Launched in May, the policy forcibly removes children traveling with parents caught at the border and places them in government care. Prior to Sessions' speech, a group of religious leaders from the United Methodist Church, Islamic Society of North America, Union for Reform Judaism, Mennonite Church and 20 other diverse religious organizations released a joint statement criticizing the policy. Romans 13 has a history of being used by government officials in defense of their decisions or edicts.The Rev. Rob Saler, executive director for the Center for Pastoral Excellence at Indianapolis' Christian Theological Seminary, said the verses were used by Lutherans in Nazi Germany to justify supporting Adolf Hitler. "Romans 13, for a long time, has been appealed to in an incorrect way, as a justification for 'Obey the laws, no matter what,'" he said. "Whether they're just or not. I don’t want to be too extreme, but ... in Nazi Germany, Lutherans, for the most part, supported Hitler and they used Romans 13 to validate that." In an interview with The Washington Post, John Fea, a professor of American history at Messiah College at Pennsylvania, said the verse was also used to support slavery in the 1840s and 1850s. "(It) is invoked by defenders of the South or defenders of slavery to ward off abolitionists who believed that slavery is wrong," he said. "I mean, this is the same argument that Southern slaveholders and the advocates of a Southern way of life made.” In the late eighteenth century, the Reverend William Graham, rector and principle instructor of Liberty Hall Academy (now Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia), annually lectured the senior class, using the Bible as a defense of slavery. Some religious leaders, inappropriately, used the Bible to teach slaves not to challenge or strike their masters, and to willingly accept punishment (1 Peter 2:21). It was common, thought not always strictly enforced, to forbid slaves to learn how to read. Of course, this kept the Bible unavailable to them except as it was shared by their masters or, eventually, by some literate slave or free black preacher. Saler noted, too, that it's important to consider when Paul wrote Romans. At that time, Christians were being executed by the Roman Empire, he said. What Paul was penning, Saler added, was meant to be a road map to living a gentler life full of charity, a stark contrast to how Paul would have viewed the empire."It's flat-out irresponsible (for Sessions) to use it without attention to the broader context," Saler said. "It's basically practical advice: While you're doing this, sure, go ahead and pay your taxes, give the government its due."But taken as a whole, Romans stands as a counter to unjust government and unjust rule." ~ Dakota Crawford (USA Today)
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The devil believes in God but he has no God. The Lord is not his God. To be at enmity with life is to have nothing to live for. To live forever without life is everlasting death: but it is a living and wakeful death without the consolation of forgetfulness. Now the very essence of this death is the absence of hope. The damned have confirmed themselves in the belief that they cannot hope in God. We sometimes think of the damned as men who think of only themselves as good, since all sin flows from pride that refuses to love.
But the pride of those who live as if they believed they were better than anyone else is rooted in a secret failure to believe in their own goodness. If I can see clear enough to realize that I am good because God has willed me to be good, I will at the same time be able to see more clearly the goodness of other men and of God. And I will be more aware of my own failings. I cannot be humble unless I first know that I am good, and know that what is good in me is not my own, and know how easy it is for me to substitute an evil of my own choice for the good that is God's gift to me. ~ Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island |
Jason E. Royle
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