Showing posts tagged matthew 22
Submission NOT Endorsement: A Christarchist Primer on Proof Texts
By Ryan Day Thompson
Note: I’m going to examine the following text in two palatable parts. It’s long, and my tendency is to the essay (unlike, say, David McElroy, who can pack a punch in less than a thousand words), so I think you’ll served better by short pieces. <tongueincheek> I know most of you will be reeling by the end of the first paragraph, so I want to make sure I don’t lose you ;-) </tongueincheek>
Consider this the first part of a very long FAQ. The name of the FAQ is “Submission NOT Endorsement,” because I am convinced from reading Scripture that the concept of submission from Paul is being horribly misinterpreted in relation to government. Somehow, in the Christian vocabulary, the words “submit,” “honor,” and, “pray” in the Christian vocabulary related to government have come to mean, “endorse this political candidate,” or, “sign this petition.” Jesus, Paul, Peter, and Titus don’t call us to endorsement, they call us to submission. And, based on a tertiary reading of Acts, I have my doubts that they mean submission in the way most Christians mean submission.
Happy Reading!
Matthew 22:15-21 | Taxation and the Christian
A Personal Note
I HATE taxation. I’m going to be forthright with you. My natural, perhaps fleshly, inclination is that taxation is theft. Think about it: you work hard, you deal with a boss or clients, you stress out, you earn a lot (or a little), you have bills to pay, you get your paycheck, and before you can even decide which over-priced necessity you’re going to use that check for, there’s the state with their hand out demanding your money. For what? The hard work YOU did? Or worse, you deal in goods that don’t even have anything to do with the FRN (Federal Reserve Note; a.k.a. dollar bill) and the state demands payment from you of some sort (like they have a right to portion of the milk from the cow that YOU raised.) It’s ridiculous. The atrocities they commit with that money are abominable. They kill children with that money. They laugh at our poverty while drinking champagne and eating caviar with that money while the homeless starve and the hard-working person like yourself barely has the ability to pay his bills and feed her children. They rescue financial criminals with that money. They pay corrupt judges who work in a corrupt and indecipherable system of arbitrary law to imprison innocent people who have engaged in victimless crimes with that money. They fight endless wars for which we have no money with that money. They pay warmongers in their blue-uniformed standing army to spray innocent people in the face with pepper spray and beat homeless men to death with that money. Every hour you work, 1/3 of your labor goes to immoral state programs. The state parasitically leeches from “its” people in the form of taxes.
I know, some of your hackles are raised (for what reason I cannot fathom), but let’s face it, if any other person took money from your wallet at the point of a gun, you would call the police. And that is exactly what the state does. If you don’t pay your taxes, they’ll show up at your door with a gun, kidnap you, and take you to prison. What gives them this right? It’s “legitimate” because they’re the government. Take off those blinders for just a moment and you will be appalled at this giant game of extortion, kidnap, and ransom.
And don’t even get me started about the “mercy” aspects for which taxes are taken. Anthony Gregory aptly sums up the supposed “good” aspects of state action afforded by taxation like this: “When the State offers you a hand up or a handout, notice the blood dripping from its fingers.” State handouts for medical or financial crises are just cleverly disguised games of bait and switch. You take their money; you belong to them. They own you for your sojourn on this earth.
This is my gut inclination. It is realistic. It calls a spade a spade. What the state is doing is a crime. It is anti-human. It is immoral. It is evil. It violates the basic principles of Genesis 1-6.
If you didn’t pay your taxes, I wouldn’t blame you. If you objected to the money that the state steals from you every day to kill children, I wouldn’t blame you. If you go protest, I won’t blame you. In fact, when the state takes the catastrophic fall it is about to take, I’ll probably write a song commemorating you when it’s all over. If we all stopped paying our taxes, the state would be drained and die rapidly.
However, if you decide to pay your taxes, I won’t blame you either. In fact, if you’re a Christian, I am going to encourage you to pay your taxes in full, and more. Let me explain, from Matthew 22:15-21, why I won’t object to you paying taxes (and I why I begrudgingly allow these tyrants to steal from me when I work in their corrupt system of centralized banking and use their rapidly-devalued dollar bill).
‘Then the Pharisees went and plotted how to entangle him in his words. And they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are true and teach the way of God truthfully, and you do not care about anyone’s opinion, for you are not swayed by appearances. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why put me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. And Jesus said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” They said, “Caesar’s.” Then he said to them, “Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” When they heard it, they marveled. And they left him and went away.’
The Interpretation of the Status Quo
Evangelical Fundamentalists or Theologically Liberal Protestants – the Fascist right-wing and Communist left-wing state’s greatest cheerleaders – interpret this text like this: Jesus is calling for us to pay our taxes, to submit to the state in all things, and to never call into question what any of that money is being used for, because then we wouldn’t be pursuing peace or, “praying for or honoring the king,” as Paul later tells us to do in Romans and in his letters to Timothy. The status quo demands that those who object to taxation SHUT UP, because this text tells them to pay their taxes and be done with it. I have to object to this banal and short-sighted interpretation by the status quo. Why? Not because I think it goes too far, but because I don’t think it goes nearly far enough.
An Attempted Interpretation
There’s something that really bothers me about the status quo’s interpretation: It is usually used by people who are mindlessly entwined in the system and totally misses the heart of the text. The heart of the text is not paying taxes, the heart of the text is giving to God what belongs to God. I would argue that this text cannot be used to argue against taxation but I don’t think that it can be used to argue for taxation, either. To take the text and use it as yet another proof for why we should be the greatest cheerleaders of the state is to blatantly disregard the meaning of Jesus’ injunction. Just what is happening here?
First, allow me to make some observations:
(1) The Pharisees want to find a way to kill or imprison Jesus. They’re fed up with him. They think that if they can trap him in his words to sound like a Pharisee (who despised Caesar’s face being imprinted on anything), they can claim him for their own and attempt to assimilate him into the greater thrust of their teaching; or, conversely, if they catch him saying it is lawful to pay Caesar, they themselves can discredit him for being anti-YHWH (because, again, the Pharisees were livid at the very thought of Caesar’s face being on anything.)
(2) Jesus doesn’t give them the satisfaction of categorizing him so easily, because he more or less says, “You’re right but you’re wrong.” The Pharisees, once again, are being “hypocrites.” How so? Well, in Jesus own words about the Pharisees elsewhere, they “clean the outside of the cup,” and remain “white-washed tombs.” How? They make this humongous fuss about Caesar’s face being on the coin as sinful, and then they worship their own image!
(3) Jesus basically says, “Does it really matter? Give God what belongs to God!”
(4) Allow me to note that nothing belongs to Caesar. That simple understanding should be your first tip-off that Jesus is probably not saying what the status quo is saying about this text. It would be odd for you, as a Christian, to argue that anything belongs to Caesar. Everything belongs to God.
(5) Nonetheless, Jesus argues that if it has Caesar’s face on it, it should be rendered to Caesar.
So, quick question, if a coin bears Caesar’s image, what bears God’s image? We do. Oh, sure, it may be marred and not look like in did in Genesis 1-2, but remnants of it are still there. We bear the image of God. Let me suggest that Jesus is not primarily advocating that we give Caesar 1/3 of our paychecks, Jesus is advocating that we give ourselves to God and that it really doesn’t matter what we give to Caesar as long as it’s whatever Caesar asks for that bears his image.
My question for you now comes from one of our contributors: Why aren’t you giving all of Caesar’s stuff back to him? Why do you insist on being wrapped up in Caesar’s idolatrous system? If Caesar wants his money back - coins that he has wrongfully and sinfully put his own face on - why do you insist on using a currency of idolatry? What makes you think you have a right to anything that bears Caesar’s image? Give it ALL back!
The long and the short of what Jesus is saying is that the Pharisees are asking the question all wrong. While they’re primarily frustrated with Caesar, they need to re-focus what they’re about. What are they to be about? Rendering themselves unto God.
So, you Christians who are urging me to pay my taxes for atrocities and tragedies, you Christians who demand that I play cheerleader for the state with my money, think very carefully before you use this text to support yourself, because Jesus isn’t saying what you’re saying.
Now, I know that the atheists are foaming at the mouth as they read this, and I don’t blame them at all. “No Gods!” Anarchists just need to take a deep breath and realize that what I am saying is not quite what it looks like I’m saying. My solutions to the problem of the seeming theft of taxation are NOT what you would generally hear from the Protestant status quo. On the other hand, the Christians are wondering what on earth happened to my furious stance on taxation. That is what the next part of this article will be about, and I encourage you to come back and see the solutions I present for the problem of taxation. I’ll give you a hint: if you look really closely at the words “likeness and inscription” and consider the overall thrust of this text to render oneself unto God alone, you will see where I am going economically and practically. You may like it, and you may not, but the solutions I’m about to present are good solutions, and they allow you to keep your conscience clear of having to be implicit in the atrocities of the state in taxation.
Check back next week.
[To Be Continued]
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Ryan Day Thompson is a Christian, husband, father, photographer, Christarchist activist, and sometimes writer. He loves good conversations that take seriously real world issues. He hates trolling. If you want to contact him, email him at blogcon [at] gmail [dot] com. If you want to troll him, click here and then click here. Or, you can ask a question by clicking the “Have a Question?” button in the footer of this blog.
