A Political Citizen and a Christian Apostle

Acts 16:37-38

But Paul said to them, “They have beaten us publicly, uncondemned, men who are Roman citizens, and have thrown us into prison; and do they now throw us out secretly? No! Let them come themselves and take us out.” The police reported these words to the magistrates, and they were afraid when they heard that they were Roman citizens.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

God had given [Paul] the extraordinary position of being a highly trained Pharisee and a Roman citizen, and had called him to do a job. Paul took it for granted that the tools God had given him were tools he should use.

This doesn’t provide an easy template for all subsequent Christians to figure out how they should employ their political or civic status within their Christian vocation. That will vary from time to time, regime to regime, and vocation to vocation. It does suggest, once more, that we should avoid easy dogmatisms of this or that kind and, while holding firmly to the belief that Jesus is Lord and the through him God’s kingdom is indeed coming on earth as in heaven, be ready for some surprises as to how that latter reality is brought to birth (73).

Aaron Orendorff

While much is often said in the church about spiritual gifting, very little instruction is devoted to the much more complicated question of position and vocation. Often, this imbalance is owing to an assumed, though unexamined, dualism that separates the spiritual from the secular. The church, it is implicitly presumed, has to do with what is spiritual in nature and its aim, therefore, ought to be to extract people more and more from the world around them into a cloistered, “godly” existence.

Here, however, in Acts 16, and elsewhere along his journeys, Paul makes full use of his political position as a Roman citizen in the service of his Christian vocation as an apostle of Jesus Christ. In Paul’s mind, the two roles—one secular, the other spiritual—were not separate entities but rather two sides of the same, holistic coin. Paul was who he was and he was willing to bring the totality of his life to bear on his calling to spread the gospel.

The question for us, therefore, ought to be similar: what “secular” positions has God placed us into and how are we being called to bring them to bear in service for the gospel?