Thoughts on I Peter 2: Submission to authorities

I am an academic who is supposedly an expert on religion and politics.  As a Christian who is occasionally asked to speak in public on such issues, I've been asked to address the second half of I Peter 2 a lot.  Honestly, I do get tired of talking about it. At the same time, most of the time when I give this talk, what I say surprises the listeners.  I suppose this is a good thing, so I keep agreeing to give these talks.

It seems that most Christians, at least in the US, want to explain away the message of vv 13-20.  They don't want it to say what it says, especially if someone they don't like happens to be running the government at the time.  They don't like the idea of submitting to authorities with whom they disagree.  I suppose this is a very Protestant way of thinking.  The Protestant movement started by breaking away from authorities and it has been doing so on a regular basis since.

That is not the message of the Bible, though.  The message of the Bible is to submit to authorities unless they instruct you to do something that is blatantly contrary to God's teachings.  I don't see any way you can get around this interpretation of this and similar passages (and believe me, I've tried).  So perhaps it's more important to understand the rationale behind submitting to authorities.

The rationale Peter gives for submission to authorities in this passage is twofold: 1) You need to set  a good example; and 2) Christ suffered and you should expect the same.

Many years ago I wrote a short essay entitled "People are watching".  The point was that once people know you are a Christian, they are watching you very carefully and judging the faith by what they see.  How does it look if Christians do not obey authority just because they don't like the instructions or (worse) the source of the instructions?  If Christians disobey authorities, they had better have a good reason that they can clearly articulate to the world.  Otherwise we are actually harming the cause of the Gospel.

Secondly, Peter points out that Christ suffered, so we should expect no less.  Think about it.  Who nailed Christ to the cross?  The government.  Could he have stopped it?  Yes.  Did he? No. Are we better than Christ?  It has always bothered me that Christians (especially in the US) somehow think that they are special and therefore immune to suffering.  We aren't.  In fact, if you read the New Testament, we find that we should actually expect it.  If the government does something that makes our lives hard, we should submit to it.  That doesn't mean we can't act to change the government (within the bounds of submission), but we shouldn't do so out of a feeling of entitlement that we shouldn't have to suffer.