Romans 13 and Constitutional Power amidst emergencies

We need to learn from what happened this past year to the Church under emergency orders. Here is one of things that I am learned.

Indiana was less demanding than some other states. At its most stringent last Spring we were able to keep services going. We simply had to limit each service to the celebrant and nine others. Our county health commissioner added an extra level of detail specifically targeting churches. We were forbidden from having more than ten people in the building at a time no matter how large the building was, if there were multiple exits, etc. We complied . Thus we were spared from completely cancelling services. We simply offered at least 3 services every day of the week with sign ups and then asked people not to come more than once a week. This gave us enough seats because we had a significant population that didn’t come at all for one reason or another during those weeks.

At that point we really didn’t know how contagious or deadly Covid was. There were plenty of media reports claiming that it was going to be absolutely devastating and there were pictures of disaster in Italy. People were scared. The governor of Indiana was visibly scared and having press conferences daily, as were various health officials. The mandates and emergency orders were constantly evolving. We were responding on the fly. While it may not have been a total disaster, we could have done better.

I think we could have done better by not taking the governor so seriously. Maybe it was different in other states, but almost every time our governor or someone else issued an emergency order, it was modified under pressure from the attorney general or other judges and lawyers within a few days. The governor was under a lot of pressure. He often acted as though he had more authority than he actually did. It was as new to him as it was to us. He didn’t quite know or understand the limits of his authority or if there were limits in an emergency. At the same time, any Christians were claiming that even if we didn’t know whether or not wearing a mask was tantamount to murder, a claim many were making at the time, that we had no freedom because we were bound by the 4th commandment and Romans 13 to obey the government.

Through all of this, I tried to insist that this was never a question about the theology of the 4th commandment or Romans 13. It is clear that God has made us subject to ruling authorities. There is no promise that those authorities will be competent, just, or kind. Even if and when they are not, if they want to overtax us, if they want to persecute us, we must submit. But this past Spring, I wasn’t asking whether or not we should submit to legitimate authorities that we disagreed with about something outside of God’s clear moral law. I don’t like the answer to that question but I know what it is. We must. The question I think we needed to ask was purely a political question. Here is the question: what is the legitimate authority?

Americans live under a constitution and a set of laws. The governor of Indiana is not sovereign. The people are. That is what the 4th commandment and Romans 13 bind us to, not a man temporarily in office. The governor and the rest of the government have limits. They are not the emperors of Rome or Medieval kings. The Christian citizens of Indiana are morally obligated by God to follow the constitution and laws of Indiana and the United States insofar as though laws don’t contradict the revealed moral law of the Bible.

Therefore if the governor claims to have authority that he does not, even if he does so without malice, in ignorance, and with the best of intentions, Christians should feel no obligation to obey what he says. They might comply out of freedom but they are not obligated to. Given our governor’s track record, I think the best course of action for us would have been to have ignored his various emergency mandates around worship and assemblies of the Church for at least a few days so that the orders would have time to be proven lawful or modified so that they would be lawful, rather than jumping every time he held a press conference and trying to figure out how to meet the letter of the law and not scare people but still provide spiritual care and Word and Sacrament.

If we should return to such a condition that is how I intend to operate. In the meantime, We and our people need not only to better understand the Scriptures and our faith. We also need to better understand the unique freedoms, rights, and duties of American citizenship.so that the Scriptures can be rightly applied to our circumstances.