Kristallnacht and Romans 13: When Must Christians Refuse?
Short answer: Romans 13:1-7 commands Christians to submit to governing authorities because God has ordained them, but it does not command unconditional obedience to every decree. The passage describes authorities as God's servants for good and as avengers of wrath against wrongdoing; it does not grant them a blank cheque to legislate evil. When the state commands what God forbids, the apostles set the pattern, and Acts 5:29 records, "We must obey God rather than men." Kristallnacht is a case study in that limit. The pogrom of 9-10 November 1938 was carried out by a regime using law, police, and mob violence against Jews who had done nothing wrong. Submission to that was not what Romans 13 requires.
What Kristallnacht Actually Was
Kristallnacht, often rendered the Night of Broken Glass, took place on 9 and 10 November 1938 across Germany and the recently annexed territories. Synagogues were burned and demolished. Jewish homes, shops, and businesses were ransacked. Roughly thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps, most of them to Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen. The name comes from the shattered glass that littered streets afterward, but the broken glass was a symptom, not the substance. The substance was coordinated state-sponsored terror against a civilian population defined by ancestry.
What made it more than a riot was the paperwork that followed. The regime did not hide the damage; it fined the Jewish community for it. A collective penalty of one billion Reichsmarks was imposed on German Jews, and insurance payouts owed to Jewish claimants were confiscated by the state. Businesses were closed by decree. This is the crucial detail for anyone thinking about Romans 13, because it shows that Kristallnacht was not merely lawless mob violence. It was violence executed through, and then ratified by, legal and administrative machinery.
Christians in Germany were not passive outsiders to this. Some participated, some cheered, some quietly approved, and some sheltered neighbours at real risk. The Confessing Church, which had already opposed the German Christian movement's capture of church institutions, produced figures who spoke out. Yet the record is mixed and painful. Many pastors and laypeople had spent years learning to treat the state's authority as practically absolute, and that formation did not reverse itself overnight. Kristallnacht exposed what such formation produces when the state turns predatory.
The event is generally treated by historians as a turning point, a public escalation after years of incremental exclusion and legalised discrimination. It matters for this study because it forces a specific question rather than a vague one. The question is not whether governments generally deserve respect, which Romans 13 affirms. The question is what the passage requires when an authority commands, funds, and celebrates the destruction of a defenceless minority and then bills them for the damage.
What Romans 13:1-7 Actually Claims
The passage opens with a broad statement: Romans 13:1 says, "Let every soul be in subjection to the higher authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those who exist are ordained by God." The scope is deliberately universal, addressing every soul rather than a select group. The reason given is not that rulers are virtuous but that authority itself is derivative. No authority exists apart from God's ordering, and the rulers who do exist have been appointed within his providence. That is a claim about the source of authority, not a guarantee about the character of every ruler.
Paul then explains the purpose. Rulers are described as a terror to bad conduct and a praise to good conduct, and Christians are told to do good so as to receive commendation. In Romans 13:4 the ruler is called God's servant for the Christian's good and an avenger who executes wrath on the wrongdoer. This is the functional description that matters most for the argument. The authority being described is one that punishes genuine wrongdoing and rewards genuine good. That is the role the passage attaches to the office.
Verses 5 through 7 draw out the obligations. Submission is owed not only because of wrath but also for conscience's sake, and then Paul specifies concrete expressions: pay taxes, show respect, give honour, render customs and revenue to whom they are due. The command is specific rather than mystical. It concerns paying what is owed, respecting the office, and refusing the self-appointed role of the rebel who resents every exercise of governance. Paul is writing to a church with no political leverage in a city under Roman rule, and he is guarding them against the chaos of contempt for order itself.
Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say that every command issued by an authority must be obeyed. He does not say that rulers cannot become wicked, and he does not say that a ruler remains God's servant for good when he has become the opposite. He describes the office as it is meant to function under God. The moment a ruler commands what God forbids, the same logic that grounds submission grounds refusal, because the authority has departed from the very purpose the passage assigns it.
The Servant of God Who Becomes a Terror to the Good
The phrase in Romans 13:3 that rulers are not a terror to good works but to evil is not a throwaway line. It is the load-bearing description of what the authority is supposed to be. When an authority becomes a terror to good works and a defender of evil, it has inverted the role Paul describes. It is no longer functioning as God's servant for good. That inversion does not automatically dissolve all civic order, but it does mean the moral basis for cooperation in that specific act is gone.
The Old Testament presses the same tension. Psalm 94:20-23 asks, "Shall the throne of wickedness have fellowship with you, which brings about mischief by statute?" The psalm assumes that statutes can be instruments of mischief, and it assumes that God does not partner with such a throne. A throne that legislates wickedness is not thereby made legitimate in that legislation. The psalmist does not say the throne ceases to exist; he says God will not be in fellowship with it, and God will repay.
This is exactly the shape of the Nazi state's Jewish policy. Decrees stripped citizenship, forbade professions, restricted property, and finally authorised seizure and deportation. Each step arrived with a legal form. If submission to authority meant compliance with whatever wore the form of law, then the whole apparatus of persecution was binding. But the passage never said that. It said the ruler is God's servant for good and an avenger against the wrongdoer. A regime whose statutes produced widespread mischief against the innocent had reversed that description.
Christians in Germany who began resisting did not do so by inventing a new doctrine. They appealed to what the church had always taught about the limits of civil obedience when a command directly contradicts God's command. This is not a licence for rebellion against any policy a believer dislikes. It is the narrow, serious claim that when the state commands what God forbids, the believer's allegiance to God governs. The burden of proof is heavy, but it can be met, and Kristallnacht met it.
Acts 5:29 and the Apostolic Precedent
The clearest limit in Scripture comes from the apostles themselves. Ordered by the ruling council to stop teaching in Jesus's name, they answered in Acts 5:29, "We must obey God rather than men." Peter and the apostles did not argue that the council lacked authority in general. They had just been reminded of that authority and had been imprisoned by it. Their answer was not a general theory of revolution but a specific refusal: this command, from this body, cannot be obeyed because it contradicts what God has commanded.
It is worth noticing the setting. The Sanhedrin was not a foreign pagan power. It was the recognized religious and civil leadership of Israel, the body with legitimate standing in the covenant community. If any authority could have claimed the kind of deference Paul later describes in Romans 13, it was this one. Yet the apostles refused, and they did so to the face of the court, accepting the consequences rather than organizing a coup. The refusal was conscientious, public, and costly, and it was grounded in a direct conflict of commands.
1 Peter 2:13-17 says, "Therefore subject yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake: whether to the king, as supreme." Peter, the same man who said we must obey God rather than men, wrote those words. He is not contradicting himself. He is describing the normal Christian posture toward human institutions, including emperors who were not friendly to the faith. The posture is submission for the Lord's sake, which is precisely why it has a limit: submission offered for the Lord's sake cannot be stretched to include denying the Lord.
Lutheran and Reformed teachers in the 1930s reached for exactly these texts. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others argued that the state had overstepped its God-given mandate and had become a disorder rather than an order. Some Christians disagreed about tactics and timing, and it is honest to say that faithful believers differ on how and when public resistance becomes obligatory. But the underlying principle, that a command to do evil cannot bind the conscience, was not a novel invention of the resistance. It was the plain sense of Scripture.
Proverbs 31 and the Duty of Intercession for the Defenceless
Romans 13 tells Christians what they owe the state. Proverbs 31:8-9 tells them what they owe the vulnerable: "Open your mouth for the mute, in the cause of all who are left desolate." The command is not merely to feel compassion but to speak. It is addressed to a king, which means it is addressed to someone with power and responsibility, and by extension to anyone who has a voice that can be heard. Silence in the face of organised cruelty is not neutrality; it is a form of participation.
During Kristallnacht, the Jewish population of Germany was precisely the desolate and the speechless. The regime had spent five years stripping them of legal standing, livelihoods, and public voice, so that by November 1938 they could be attacked in the streets with almost no recourse. Those who could speak for them were their neighbours, including Christian neighbours. Some did, hiding people, warning families, and refusing to participate. Many did not, out of fear, indifference, or a theology that had taught them the state's will was the will of God.
The Proverbs text does not demand that Christians seize the instruments of government. It demands that they use the voice they have. For a pastor that meant preaching and pastoral care. For an ordinary parishioner it meant not joining the crowd, not reporting neighbours, and where possible providing shelter and material help. These are not grand political acts. They are the ordinary obedience of people who understand that the command to speak for the mute does not lapse because speaking is inconvenient or dangerous.
This is where Romans 13 gets misused most tragically. Someone reads that authorities are ordained by God and concludes that whatever the authorities do must be accepted. But Proverbs 31 was also given as God's word to a ruler, and Romans 13 itself says the ruler is meant to be an avenger against the wrongdoer. When the ruler is the wrongdoer, the Christian's obligation is to the purpose of the office, not to the perversion of it. Speaking for the desolate is not rebellion against God's order. It is loyalty to it.
How Good People Washed Their Hands
The German church had been shaped for years by a theology of the state that left it defenceless. Many clergy had sworn oaths of loyalty, and the traditional Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms had been stretched into a claim that the state's domain was entirely its own and the church had no business commenting on civil matters. That teaching, in its distorted form, provided a religious rationale for silence. It sounded pious. It quoted Scripture. And it left the church with nothing to say when the state began destroying its own citizens.
The same thing can happen in any generation. When a church has decided in advance that it will not speak to political matters, it will discover that it has also decided in advance not to speak to persecution, because persecution always arrives in political clothing. The decision to stay out of politics is rarely neutral. It tends to protect whoever holds power, and it tends to cost whoever does not. Kristallnacht was carried out by a government, authorised by decrees, and executed by uniformed officers. There was no version of the event that was not political.
It is important not to flatten the record into a simple tale of heroic resistance. The truth is that a great many Christians did nothing, and some actively supported the regime and welcomed its anti-Jewish measures. Others resisted in ways that history has only slowly recovered. The reason to say this plainly is that the failure was not one of information. Evidence was public and abundant. The failure was moral and theological, produced by a settled framework that treated submission to the state as practically absolute.
That is why the limit matters. If Christians never work out in advance where obedience to God ends and obedience to men begins, they will not work it out in the moment, because the moment is full of pressure, fear, and the temptation to call cowardice patience. The apostles had it settled before they stood before the council. A church that has not settled it will usually find a reason that the present crisis is different, more complicated, better left alone.
What Romans 13 Does Not Do With Kristallnacht
Romans 13 does not make the state the ultimate authority. It describes authorities as ordained by God and as servants for good, which means they are accountable to the God who ordained them. An authority that turns against the very good it was appointed to protect has not become more divine; it has become a rebel against its own commission. Submission to such a perversion is not what Paul commands. It is a misreading of his words that treats the office as if it were the office-holder's property to use however he wishes.
Romans 13 does not require Christians to participate in evil. The passage commands paying taxes, showing respect, and doing good. None of those things requires informing on a Jewish neighbour, joining a mob, or standing by while a synagogue burns. A Christian could pay every tax Caesar demanded and still refuse to participate in a pogrom. The two are not in tension. The confusion arises only when submission is redefined as complicity with whatever the state happens to be doing.
Romans 13 also does not tell us that resistance must always look the same. Scripture gives examples of direct refusal, of flight, of quiet shelter, and of prophetic denunciation. Christians have differed on whether particular forms of resistance were wise or faithful, and it is honest to acknowledge that difference rather than pretending the Bible settles every tactical question. What the Bible settles is the principle: when the state commands what God forbids, God is to be obeyed, and the consequences are to be borne rather than the sin committed.
Finally, Romans 13 does not promise that obedience will be safe. The apostles were beaten and imprisoned for refusing the council's command. The Christians who sheltered Jews in Germany risked arrest and worse. The passage offers no guarantee of protection to those who do right; it promises that the ruler, functioning as he should, is God's servant for good. Where that function is broken, the believer may well suffer precisely for doing good, which is the situation Jesus addresses in Matthew 5:10-12: "Blessed are those who have been persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven."
Biblical fidelity check
Romans 13:1-7 establishes that governing authority is real, that it comes from God, that Christians should normally submit to it, and that this submission includes concrete duties like paying taxes and showing honour. It does not establish that every command of every ruler must be obeyed, because it describes rulers as God's servants for good and as avengers of wrongdoing, and it grounds submission in their God-given purpose. It also does not establish that Christians should remain neutral during persecution. Proverbs 31:8-9 and Acts 5:29 pull in the opposite direction and define the limit clearly.
A common misreading treats Romans 13 as a rule of unconditional obedience. On that reading, whatever the state decrees is binding on the Christian, so German Christians who refused to cooperate with anti-Jewish measures were being disobedient to Scripture. The misreading fails for several reasons. It ignores the passage's own description of rulers as servants for good. It ignores Acts 5:29, where the same apostolic circle that preached submission refused a governing body's command. And it ignores Psalm 94:20-23, which asks whether a throne that legislates mischief can be in fellowship with God. Scripture does not authorise that reading, and it produced terrible fruit.
Other passages that speak to Romans 13:1-7
Several related studies help fill out the themes at work here. 1 Peter 2:13-17 gives the apostolic posture of submission for the Lord's sake, which sets the frame for everything above. For the way these writers connect doctrine and daily life under pressure, see What Does 1 Peter 1:13 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application. On the holiness that must mark Christians who live under hostile authorities, see What Does 1 Peter 1:15 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application. On the redemption that grounds obedience even when it costs, see What Does 1 Peter 1:18 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application, and for the elect identity that steadies believers under pressure, see What Does 1 Peter 1:2 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application.
Frequently asked questions
Did Romans 13 require German Christians to cooperate with Kristallnacht?
No. Romans 13 describes rulers as God's servants for good and as avengers against wrongdoing, and it grounds submission in that purpose. A regime using law and police to destroy a defenceless minority had departed from the role the passage assigns. Christians could still pay taxes and show respect while refusing to join the mob, report neighbours, or celebrate the destruction. Acts 5:29 marks the limit: when the state commands what God forbids, God is obeyed rather than men. Nothing in Romans 13 authorises participation in a pogrom.
Does Romans 13 forbid all resistance to government?
It does not. The passage commands normal submission, including taxes and honour, and it grounds that command in the ruler's God-given role of protecting good and punishing evil. Scripture also records direct refusal when a governing body forbids what God commands, as in Acts 5:29, and it commands speaking up for those left desolate in Proverbs 31:8-9. Christians have differed about the wisest forms of resistance in particular circumstances, but the claim that Scripture requires unconditional compliance with every decree is not supported by these texts.
What can Christians today learn from Kristallnacht?
One lesson is that a church which decides in advance that it will not address political matters has also decided not to speak when persecution arrives in political form. Another is that submission must be defined before the crisis, because it is nearly impossible to define under pressure. Romans 13 gives a real command with a real limit. The command is to submit to authorities as God's servants for good; the limit is that when they command evil, God is to be obeyed. Proverbs 31 and Acts 5:29 show the limit in practice.
