Should we obey human or divine law?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

The standard harmonization is the hierarchical or "two kingdoms" reading: obey civil authorities in everything except where their commands contradict divine law, in which case obey God. This produces a coherent ethical framework and is the dominant Christian reading from Augustine through Aquinas to the Reformers. Its weakness is that the qualifier must be supplied from outside the texts. Neither Romans 13 nor 1 Peter 2 carves out an exception for unjust or impious commands. Romans 13:1-2 is grammatically categorical: *pasa psychē exousiais hyperechousais hypotassesthō* — "let every soul be subject to the governing authorities" — with the all-encompassing *pasa* ("every") and no conditional clause. Paul intensifies rather than qualifies: "the authorities that exist have been ordained by God" (*hai de ousai hypo theou tetagmenai eisin*), and "the one who resists the authority resists what God has appointed" (13:2). The ruler "does not bear the sword in vain" and is "God's servant, an avenger to execute wrath" (13:4). There is no aperture in the syntax for disobedience.

Acts 5:29, by contrast, has the apostles openly defying a legitimate authority: the Sanhedrin held recognized jurisdiction over Jewish religious life, and Peter flatly refuses to comply — *peitharchein dei theō mallon ē anthrōpois*, "we must obey God rather than men." If Romans 13 is the rule, Acts 5:29 is the exception that Romans 13 nowhere acknowledges.

The cleanest reading treats these as distinct theological streams addressing distinct situations through distinct genres. Romans, written c. 56-57 CE to believers in the imperial capital, urges political quietism as both ethic and survival strategy in the years before the Neronian persecution; some scholars connect 13:6-7 to concrete unrest over taxation under Nero. 1 Peter, addressing dispersed and pressured Christians in Asia Minor (1 Pet 1:1), counsels submission "for the Lord's sake" to "every human institution" (*pasē anthrōpinē ktisei*, 2:13) as a way to disarm slander against the community (2:15). Both are hortatory paraenesis aimed at minimizing friction with Rome. Acts 5:29 belongs to a different genre entirely: Lukan narrative theology, where the apostles are cast as exemplary figures of conscience who defy corrupt power. Each text performs different rhetorical work for a different audience, which is why no single resolution rule emerges from the canon itself.

The downstream history confirms the unresolved character of the tension. Romans 13 has anchored the political theology of nearly every authoritarian Christian regime — invoked by defenders of the divine right of kings, by the pro-apartheid Dutch Reformed establishment in South Africa, and, more recently, by U.S. officials defending immigration enforcement policy (the 2018 appeal by Attorney General Jeff Sessions is the textbook case). Acts 5:29, conversely, is the foundational proof-text for Christian civil disobedience, from the Anabaptist refusal of the magisterial sword to Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail." The same New Testament licenses both unconditional submission and principled resistance, and it supplies no internal mechanism for adjudicating between them. The harmonizing rule is reasonable and ancient, but it is a theological synthesis laid over the texts rather than a reading drawn out of them.

Where the critical reading lands: harmonizable in systematic theology, but the canon itself leaves the resolution to the reader.