Commentary on First Peter (63)

The above deals with the alleged conflict between two moral duties when one faces a situation in which each side could directly appeal to a divine command. We have seen that the conflict is in fact not generated by the divine commands themselves, but by the human factor. This is when people refuse to follow instructions as they are actually given, but instead they wish to choose which instructions they would follow and the way in which they would follow them depending on outcomes that they cannot really predict, and consequences that they cannot really control.

Now we will turn our attention to another type of so-called moral dilemmas, in which divine commands conflict with human commands. The alleged conflict arises because these human commands come from human authorities that are in turn established by divine authority.

This part of our discussion follows from our acknowledgment that there are exceptions to the obligation to obey these human institutions. These exceptions, however, are not justified by an approach like graded absolutism. So here is what we do not say: God commands one thing and man commands another, but God also commands us to obey this man, so that the two divine commands contradict one another. However, since God's command to obey God is greater than God's command to obey man, we will follow the former but violate the latter, only this violation does not count as sin in such a situation. This line of thinking acknowledges a genuine contradiction, a genuine dilemma, and resolves it by ranking the commandments and defining sin out of the way.

All our previous comments about graded absolutism apply here as well. As we have noted, this approach is unbiblical, unnecessary, and unbelieving. But there are several other specific observations that we can make about this type of conflicts, where human authorities that are in turn established by divine authority are involved. The additional factor of human authority at first seems to complicate the issue, but the solution is in fact just as plain.

Let us state the problem again. In the context of our passage, the human authority is the civil government. God commands us to obey the government, but what if the government then tells us to disobey God? Or, to consider another relationship, God commands us to obey our parents, but what if our parents tell us to disobey God? If it is just a case of divine authority against human authority, then the solution is obvious. Confusion occurs because the human authority is established by divine authority.

But the problem is the solution. That is, what at first appears to be the problem, namely, the observation that the human authority is established by divine authority, is in fact not the problem but the answer that we need.

We will take as an example the commandment to honor our parents, and we will suppose that we are in a situation in which our parents are telling us to disobey God. For this commandment (to honor our parents) to truly contradict another divine command, we must have on the one hand, "Obey God, even if he contradicts your parents," and then on the other, "Obey your parents, even if they contradict God." For there to be a genuine contradiction, God himself must state or imply the idea "even if they contradict God" in an instance or situation in which he delegates authority to a human institution over people.

However, if the context and intent for delegated authority is for the human institution to maintain God's program rather than to delegate authority just for the sake of delegating authority, then there is the opposite implication instead. That is, since human institutions receive their authority from God, it is implied that this authority does not include the power to command men to rebel against God. Therefore, when a human authority issues a command that contradicts divine authority, it does not generate a contradiction between the moral obligation to obey God and the moral obligation to obey the human institution, since at least in that instance, the human authority has gone beyond its assigned limits and the command that it gives thus lacks divine endorsement. The case, then, is not one of divine authority versus divine authority, but divine authority versus human authority.