One of the key turning points of Paul’s life and mission occurs in Acts chapter 25. It happens while Paul is incarcerated for about three years in Caesarea. Brought before the recently installed Roman governor Festus, Paul appeals to Caesar in verses 10 and 11 in order to avoid being returned Jerusalem and very likely murdered upon the way.
In our time, we need to be clear about what Paul’s appeal signifies regarding Christian relationships with political orders. Read in company with what Paul writes in Romans 13:1-7, Paul’s appeal to Caesar might be construed as an endorsement of the moral authority of the Roman emperor and confidence that he will be treated fairly at imperial hands. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The “Caesar” to whom Paul appeals is the last emperor to legitimately bear the name Caesar as a family name. Nero was the last of the Julio-Claudian dynasty which took the name Caesar, beginning with Augustus, from Julius Caesar. Nero was arguably a terrible tyrant, very likely insane, and far from anything like a legitimate moral authority for both Jews and Christians.
Thus Paul’s appeal to Caesar-who-was-Nero should not be taken anything like evidence that Paul trusted the government of Rome to do right by him. In fact, Paul, Jesus and the New Testament make a clear separation between the moral authority of God’s law and the law of human government. It would be a mistake to conflate these and imagine that any merely human rule somehow has God’s authority behind it.
Jaroslav Pelikan is helpful in this in his commentary on Acts 25 verse 8 when he notes how Paul declares his innocence, saying, “I have in no way committed an offense against the law of the Jews, or against the temple, or against the emperor.” Since the Greek word here for “offense” is the word commonly used for sin in the New Testament, Pelikan argues that “the law of the Jews” is clearly God’s law, the eternal moral law governing all humanity. Both temple ritual and imperial regulations are something different and lesser. To be sure, both temple rites and human law may have grounding in God’s eternal law, but they are not the same thing.
This distinction between God’s law and human law has been the ground, down through Christian history, for Christians to challenge governmental authority when it fails to line up with divine moral law. This is clearly seen at the start of Acts in chapter 5 verse 29 when Peter declares to the Sanhedrin, “We must obey God rather than any human authority.”
It is within that distinction between human and divine authority, which we hear from Paul’s own lips, that we must read the passage on civil authority in Romans 13 and understand Paul’s appeal to Caesar. Paul explains in verse 11 of Acts 25 that he does not fear death itself, but does wish to avoid an unjust death at the hands of fanatic opponents. His appeal to the emperor is not done with the conviction that Nero will be more just, but as a pragmatic device to evade an immediate end to his life and mission.
Our attitude to temporal political authority should be the same as Paul’s. We should observe and work within it with clear eyes and minds. Human governments may offer peace and order which are useful to the purposes of God’s kingdom, but we must never confuse the one with the other.