Don’t Take My Word for It

How One Verse Has Been Used to Cover Three Centuries of Harm, and What That Should Teach Us About Whose Word We Trust

Wrestling with the Word, Part 3

“Study to show yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”2 Timothy 2:15 (NKJV)  •  see also Romans 12:21; Romans 13:1–7; Romans 13:8–10

Romans 13 is where my theology changed.

I did not go looking for a challenge. I was trying to understand something that had been bothering me for years: why sincere, Bible-believing Christians had been on the wrong side of almost every major justice question in American history. Not the fringe. Not the radicals. Sincere people, reading the same Bible, arriving at conclusions that covered slavery, Jim Crow, and family separation at the border.

So, I started reading. Not skimming. Reading. Romans 13, with everything before it and after it, in the context of who Paul was and what year it was and what Nero’s Rome actually looked like. What I found was that the verse I had always accepted as a pillar of civil order was being used in ways Paul never intended and would never have recognized.

That discovery is one of the reasons this blog exists. If one verse, honestly read, could reveal that much, then honest reading is not optional. It is how we protect each other.

You Already Know This Feeling

Most of us have lived this. You say something to a friend. They repeat it to someone else. By the time it gets back to you, it has been trimmed and reshaped until it does not carry what you actually said. Maybe they were not trying to twist you. Maybe they only caught half of it. Either way, something true left your mouth and became something damaging by the time it landed.

You know how that feels. Now hold that feeling. Because it matters here.

The Most Misused Verse in American History

Romans 13:1 reads, “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.”

That verse has appeared at three of the most contested moments in American moral history. Not because it kept showing up on its own. Because someone kept pulling it out and pointing it at people who had no power to push back.

In the antebellum South, slaveholders and their theologians quoted Romans 13 to argue that the institution of slavery was divinely ordained. If God establishes governing authorities, and the law of the land permits enslavement, then resistance to that law is resistance to God. That argument was not fringe. It was preached from respectable pulpits. It shaped the proslavery theological tradition that fractured entire denominations before the Civil War.

When Jim Crow replaced slavery, the verse followed. God-ordained order. Divinely sanctioned hierarchy. Subvert it and you subvert the Almighty. The same logic. A different legal structure. The same people bearing the weight of it.

In June 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions stood before a law enforcement audience and quoted Romans 13:1 explicitly to defend the federal family separation policy at the southern border. His words: “Persons who violate the law of our nation are subject to prosecution. I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13.”

Three centuries. Three applications. One verse. One pattern. Always pointed downward, at people without the power to refuse it.

What Paul Was Actually Writing

Here is what the lift-it-out reading leaves out.

Paul wrote his letter to the Romans around 57 A.D., most likely during the early years of Nero’s reign. The church in Rome was navigating real political danger. Jewish Christians had recently been expelled from Rome under the Edict of Claudius and had just begun returning. Paul was not writing a theology of government. He was writing pastoral guidance to a vulnerable community about how to survive a specific political moment without drawing lethal attention.

That same Paul would later be imprisoned by the governing authorities he is accused of endorsing. He would write letters from Roman jails. He would be executed by the Roman state. The governing authority that Romans 13 supposedly commands absolute submission was the same authority that beheaded Paul.

Read what sits on either side of verse one. Romans 12 closes with this: “Do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good.” Romans 13:8 opens with: “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another.” The passage on governing authorities does not sit between two endorsements of state power. It sits between two commands to love. That is not a coincidence. That is context.

N. T. Wright argues that Paul’s framing assumes governing authorities are functioning justly, and the text was never written to address what happens when they are not. The instruction was situational. It was not a constitutional principle.

What Happens When We Do Not Wrestle

The mustard seed gets turned into a comfort verse about small faith. Romans 13 gets turned into a theological weapon. John 3:16 gets quoted without John 3:17. None of these readings came from people sitting with the text. They came from readings that served someone’s purposes. Once a misreading is embedded in tradition, it is hard to dislodge

because questioning it feels like questioning faith itself.

Here is the thing. Questioning a misreading is not an act of doubt. It is an act of faithfulness. It is taking the text seriously enough to ask what it actually says.

Wrestling is not the opposite of faith. It is what faith looks like when it takes the Word seriously. And it is the only protection any of us has against people who would weaponize Scripture against the very people Christ came to save.

How to Spot the Pattern

Three centuries of Romans 13 abuse share a common shape. It starts with a single verse lifted out of its chapter and pointed at people without the power to challenge how it is being used. The verse gets treated as universal when, in context, it was clearly situational. The verses immediately before and after are ignored. The historical setting is erased. And anyone who pushes back is framed as disloyal to Scripture itself, not to the misuse of it.

If you see those five moves stacked together, you are not looking at biblical teaching. You are looking at biblical cover for something somebody already wanted to do. Romans 13 has been the textbook case. It will not be the last.

What This Space Is For

Leaning on the Rock is not here to tell you what to think. It is here to make you think. That is a principle I borrowed from Dr. Howard-John Wesley, a preacher whose approach to the Word has shaped how I read everything. Honest scholarship is not arrogance. It is a gift. Because the reader who has wrestled with the text is the reader who cannot be manipulated with it.

What I believe, and what I want this site to demonstrate, is that Biblical teaching has to connect to the problems people are actually living with today. The policy being justified by a verse someone pulled out of context. The sermon that left you with a duty and no tools. The faith question you have been carrying alone because nobody around you was asking it out loud. That is what this is for.

Don’t take my word for it. Go find out what it says. And once you know what it says, do not let anyone, hand you a misreading dressed up as the gospel.

Reflect & Respond

1. Is there a verse you have accepted your entire life without ever pressing on it yourself? What would it look like to sit with it this week and ask what it actually says?

2. When you hear a scripture quoted to justify a policy or a position, what is your instinct? To receive it or to examine it? What shaped that instinct?

3. Paul wrote Romans 13 from inside an empire that would eventually kill him. What does that biographical fact do to a reading that uses the verse to demand absolute submission to state authority?

4. Look back at the five-move pattern. Where have you seen it in your own life? What would it have taken to spot it earlier?

Sources

1. Romans 12:21; 13:1–10. New International Version. biblegateway.com

2. Jeff Sessions, remarks to law enforcement, Fort Wayne, Indiana, June 14, 2018. U.S. Department of Justice archive.

3. Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

4. Willie James Jennings, Acts, Belief: A Theological Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017), 34–38.

5. N. T. Wright, “The Letter to the Romans,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 10 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002), 716–720.

6. Greek orthotomeo, “to cut straight.” Strong’s G3718. blueletterbible.org