The Bible and Anarchy
Jacques Ellul was a Christian anarchist, and he wrote a nifty little book about his reasons: Anarchy and Christianity. It's not the greatest book in the world, but it reads smoothly and its arguments are easy to follow.
Essentially, Ellul, a Bible-first Protestant, musters "for" and "against" scriptural arguments. The "against" arguments are well known, I think: Paul's pro-government passages in Romans Chapter 13: there is no authority that does not come from God; 1 Peter 2:13: be subject to the king as supreme"; Jesus' "Render unto Caesar." But he does a decent job of refuting them as "pro-government" positions, especially Jesus' statement about returning Caesar's coins.
He spends more time pointing out the anarchist themes of the Bible. The best known is God's words to Samuel when the Israelites demand a king in the first book of Samuel. God tells them that the Israelites can have a king, as long as they're aware of the immense suffering that will result from it (the king will take your daughters for his harem, etc.). He also points out that, throughout the rest of the Old Testament, there is consistently a prophet that acts as a counterpoise to each king, and that the prophets almost exclusively oppose the king. He concludes, with justification I think, "As I see it, these facts manifest in an astounding way the constancy of an antiroyalist if not an antistatist sentiment."
But the part I found most compelling was his examination of Jesus' temptation in the wilderness. The devil took Jesus to a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and said, "I will give you all these things, if you will prostrate yourself and worship me" (Matthew 4:8-9). Or more poignantly: "I will give you all this power and the glory of these kingdoms, for it has been given to me, and I give it to whom I will" (Luke 4:6-7).
Ellul points out the obvious: According to this incident, the devil controls the governments of the world. That's why he can give them to Jesus. There are countervailing arguments here (e.g., the devil is a liar, but then again, if he's a liar, the offer wouldn't qualify as a temptation), but I'd never considered the devil's undisputed claims in this well-known story.
Ellul also spends a lot of time examining Jesus' words during His Passion (which, coincidentally, made the book good reading during the Triduum). Ellul's conclusion about the attitude Jesus displayed toward government authority seems spot on: Jesus' attitude is, at best, ironic (He says Pilate's authority comes from His Father, but implies that His (Jesus') authority is greater), and probably closer to downright contemptuous (his silence).
Anyway, there's a lot of fodder in the little book for the Christian who wants to think hard about anarchy. Recommended for people in that little intellectual nook of the world.
