Kierkegaard Renders Unto Caesar

Seeing the most faithful worldliness to its conclusion

Aug 03, 2024

Taxation. A fundamentally stateful problem, one that has forced individuals from various perspectives and walks of life to contend with the cost-benefit analysis of seemingly unconsented seizure of earnings by an official body of some sort, it is no surprise that it plays a prominent part in both the history of anarchism and the gospel itself. There are likely some amongst us who might be more familiar with the right-wing libertarian opposition to taxation made in rabble-rousing sloganeering such as “taxation is theft”1 and the morality of the state taking from the populace without any obvious explicit agreement to facilitate such a thing2. Many Christians have found themselves opposing taxation as it contributes to stateful, violent behaviour or due to broader libertarian commitments, including Catholic anarchist Ammon Hennacy3, Mennonite Dale Glass-Hess4, and various Quaker thinkers like Evans5 and Maule6; in the face of morally objectionable taxes, Christian thinkers have come out in opposition in order to understand that theology, deeply held, has a political dimension that can’t be neglected.

However, despite this apparent moral opposition to taxation, there is a rather difficult-to-navigate objection to the Christian refusing to pay taxes: Mark 12:13-17, Matthew 22:15-22, and Luke 20:20-26, collectively best known as the “render unto Caesar” passages. Concerning Christ’s imperative command that Christians ought to pay the tax to the state, it would be beneficial to quote at least one account here7:

So they watched Him, and sent spies who pretended to be righteous, that they might seize on His words, in order to deliver Him to the power and the authority of the governor. Then they asked Him, saying, “Teacher, we know that You say and teach rightly, and You do not show personal favouritism, but teach the way of God in truth:Is it lawful for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”

But He perceived their craftiness, and said to them, “Why do you test Me?Show Me a denarius. Whose image and inscription does it have?” They answered and said, “Caesar’s.” And He said to them, “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” But they could not catch Him in His words in the presence of the people. And they marvelled at His answer and kept silent.

This seems rather straightforward: pay taxes as they belong to Caesar. What room for movement does the Christian anarchist have here to oppose a servile reverence to the state? As tax resistance is often a path to genuine resistance to the state, anarchists have often refused to partake in tax payments as much as possible; is it possible that Christ has guided us into a blind alley for implying that the path He walked could ever be anarchist in character? The best way to explore this, I believe, is to turn to those holy anarchists, those who opposed the state’s desired right to dictate the authority that the Lord might wield.

Kierkegaard and Tax

Before we get started on a particular Kierkegaardian perspective, it is important to understand how the young S. K. (as Pérez-Álvarez defines it, prior to the 1848 Danish revolution8) saw the purpose of “worldly” government. Although this would change over the course of his lifetime, the basic assumptions about the role of the state can be shown to maintain throughout his life, with the most obvious change being in the state’s capability for dealing with the problems that it creates as opposed to a vindication of the state outright.

More Hobbesian than Hobbes

S. K., in occasionally his broadly Hegelian outlook on life, was by no means opposed to the state’s existence to maintain the Sittlichkeit [“ethical order”] to act as a “floor” for his contemporary Danes; in fact, he was open to the idea that the state, if imperfect, did offer the possibility for the development an “ethically responsible” society9. Despite having never read the works of the arch-pessimist social contractarian, S. K.’s view of society was very similar to the work of Thomas Hobbes10; a government will have to endure in order to ensure that society does not fall apart and into anarchy (in the derisory sense), providing institutions and services to the populace to keep order. As a part of this, tax allows the government to create and maintain the institutions that undergird the moral foundation; by extension, taxation was morally justified as it allowed for humanity to exist in its “premoral” state11.

To add to this, S. K. preferred that this government should be autocratic in some way. In what we might call a particularly quietist view of worldly politics, S. K.’s preference for government was effectively a “benevolent autocrat”; to an even greater extent, a liberal democracy typified the very kind of thinking he opposed:

“Of all tyrannies a people’s government is the most excruciating, the most spiritless, unconditionally the downfall of everything great and sublime...A people’s government is the true picture of hell”12

To say S. K. was an anarchist whilst also holding these views will seem strange, no doubt. However, there is a way to do this. Take the above as the “context” in which S. K. framed his theology of opposition; not as an identity amongst identities, but an earnest understanding of the importance of differentiating the faithful from “the world”. When we recognise the transcendence and prioritarian13 aspects of S. K.’s theology, the picture shall become clearer.

Against Leviathan!

It would be incredibly straightforward to justify viewing S. K. as an accidental Hobbesian, especially in the context of his influence on would-be Nazi thinkers Carl Schmitt14 and Emanuel Hirsch15, and leaving the matter at that. For a long time, many influential and intelligent commentators on the Kierkegaardian oeuvre16 did, in fact, do just that; either representing S. K. as an aristocratic quietist17 or an irrationalist precursor to fascist extremism18, it has been easy to dismiss the more egregious aspects of his sociology as a “product of his time” and not worth considering.

However, this seriously misrepresents both S. K.’s own view of the Christian qua necessarily rebellious against “the world” and the subsequent impact this view, this earnest Nachfolge of the Christian anarchist is something which still requires further unpacking despite early efforts from Vernard Eller with Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship and Christian Anarchy (1968 and 1987), Jacques Ellul with L'idéologie marxiste chrétienne and Anarchie et Christianisme (1979 and 1988), and a variety of other minor commentators. For an introduction to this topic, see “Christian anarchism and the Problem of Nihilism” - especially part I, part II, and part III.

As a recent paper19 illustrated, S. K. might be better understood as viewing the practical benefits of a Hobbesian understanding of the state qua a defence against the descent into outright nihilism, but opposing it for the faithful who have escaped from the “premoral” confusion of pre-Christian life - a political view that rejects the identitarian nonsense of Christian nationalism20, theological backsliding of liberal theology21, and “politics” outright in favour of a postpolitical Behemothic unleashing of the individual within the congregation against the Hobbesian Leviathan of the world. As Christ stands against “the Crowd”, neither the aesthetic nor the ethical can provide a Christian political theology of Nachfolge. By stepping out from the immediacy of the aesthetic and the ethical, the Christian has the key to genuine, life-affirming existence in that the example of Christ offers both the “yes!” of freedom to do as we will and the “no!” of the law to draw us back into God’s fold; only with an understanding that, eventually, God’s law requires us to step out from society, even from a Christian society, in order to follow God’s plan; only when we can do this, always under the promise of being washed in the blood of Christ for the forgiveness of our errors, can we truly experience the liberty of faith promised to us (2 Peter 2:19).

As Neoh illustrates in his paper, while Schmitt seems to have been a faithful interpreter of S. K. and avoided twisting his words, he by no means understood that the Hobbesian view of the state was at most an aesthetic matter that dressed itself as an ethical one - but, regardless of its ethical success, still remained fundamentally nonreligious.

“The sovereign creates the state of exception by suspending the law in relation to the body politic through their willingness to use force independently of the law. The martyr creates the state of exception by suspending the law in relation to themselves through their willingness to suffer the use of force. They are willing to endure the suffering inflicted on their bodies by the body politic.”22

The martyr stands against the state, stands against der Sittlichkeit, and stands against all others in saying “I will be a Christian - and I will pay the price to be a Christian in the knowledge that nothing can harm me”. With that in mind, we can look at two aspects of S. K.’s thought regarding taxation and how it related to the scriptural command to “render unto Caesar”: first, the worldliness of tax resistance; secondly, the unjust nature of the fallen church demanding tithes.

Tax Resistance as a Poverty of Theology

Fundamentally, we can’t reflect on S. K.’s view of taxation without understanding the basic existential dialectic of the Christian: the individual against the established order. For example:

“That the established order has become something divine or is regarded as divine constitutes a falsehood which is made possible only by ignoring its origin. When a bourgeois has become a nobleman he is eager to make every effort to have his vita ante acta forgotten. So it is with the established order. It began with the God-relationship of the individual; but now this must be forgotten, the bridge hewn down, the established order deified.”23

The philistine-bourgeois, the spidsborger, is entirely incapable of becoming a Christian in such a place. The ethical order itself, ironically, drives individuals to become unrecognisably unethical. In the latter half of the authorship, it became assumed that the Hegelian Sittlichkeit [“ethical order”] would have to be to opposed at every step because Christianity, especially in the life of Christ, opposes the established order of secular normality. To show that Christ is King and deserves our reverence, the radicalism of Christianity comes to the surface through recognising that hardship is the road: “the sufferer immediately knows specifically what the task is; he can begin immediately with full power. No doubt can come to slip in between the road and the hardship, because they are eternally inseparable; and therefore it is eternally certain that this road must lead to something, because here no hardship can block the road, which is always passable, just as the hardship is never suprahuman”24.

But who would choose hardship when there is another choice? Who would deny themselves anything, “hold oneself back”25, when the other choice is so tempting? As was so often the case, the perfect life of Christ takes priority as pattern and prototype26. And, in this sense, we link to S. K.’s thoughts on tax payment:

Here the collision again is the same, that of the individual with the established order. That which caused them to be offended would be that the individual would withdraw from relationship with the established order. It must constantly be kept in mind that in neither of these passages (the 17th and the 15th chapters) is the possibility of the offence related to Christ qua God-Man. The question here therefore is not whether He is the God-Man, the situation does not contemplate whether He shows Himself to be what He gives Himself out to be, the God-Man, for He is not thus represented here. The question is about him, this individual man, whether he will recognize the established order by paying the tax.27

So, the individual stands, in their faith, in their earnestness, in their passionate willingness to belong to Christ, against the secular world that demands we understand it in money and money alone. But does Christ recognise the state in paying the tax? In this burning passion of inwardness, is now the time to oppose the world by refusing to give it its coin? We turn to Matthew 17:24-25:

After Jesus and his disciples arrived in Capernaum, the collectors of the two-drachma temple tax came to Peter and asked, “Doesn’t your teacher pay the temple tax?”
“Yes, he does,” he replied.

It seems apparent that Christ was willing to pay the temple tax. There is no resistance, no trickery; only a simple “yes”. It is very possible here, my reader, we find that my endeavours have all been for nothing; it turns out that Christ anticipated my radicalism and forced me back in line when He knew before I was in the womb. So, we ask again, did Christ recognise the state in paying the tax? No, says S. K., remembering that we turn to Christ in order to learn something:

Since this thing of paying a tax is an externality of no importance, Christ subjects Himself and avoids giving offence. It was different in the case of an externality which impudently demanded to be regarded as piety [i.e. in the passage previously dealt with]. If [in this second case] Christ had not yielded, He again would have provoked offence, and the reason would have been, rightly, that an individual, by withdrawing from the established order, seems to make himself more than a man—although (to repeat what was said above) it does not exactly follow that He qualitatively defined Himself as God.
In this story it is noteworthy, moreover, that Christ, who here is simply the individual man in collision with the established order, in avoiding the offence posits the essential offence. He pays the tax, sure enough; but He gets the money by performing a miracle, i.e. He displays Himself as the God-Man. To omit to pay the tax is to make the offence possible with relation to Him as the individual man, but the way by which He gets the money posits the possibility of the essential offence with relation to Him as the God-Man.28

S. K. cuts to the bone - tax, as a matter of money, is “an externality of no importance”. A will towards holding onto money, which, in modernity, would be to succumb to the “bustling busyness” of staging em wirklicher Ausverkauf [a real sale]29 in the place of genuine inwardness, is a will to turn from what is genuinely important in life and succumb to worldliness. Instead, says S. K., Christ invokes the collision; the refusal to recognise the legitimacy of the tax as important at all undermines the power that Caesar wields through his coins, which catches our attention. Is there anyone more dangerous than the one who does not openly fit into either group of those complicit with the state powers nor with the revolutionary zealots and is, as such, an offense to both? In the double danger of refusing to even recognise the state as worthy of His recognition in authority, Christ stands against both those who would hold worldly power and also those who would will to hold worldly power. In a politics of indifference, Christ dismisses the issue in the most impossible of ways.

In this story it is noteworthy, moreover, that Christ, who here is simply the individual man in collision with the established order, in avoiding the offence posits the essential offence. He pays the tax, sure enough; but He gets the money by performing a miracle, i.e. He displays Himself as the God-Man. To omit to pay the tax is to make the offence possible with relation to Him as the individual man, but the way by which He gets the money posits the possibility of the essential offence with relation to Him as the God-Man.30

“Take your coin,” says Christ, “render unto Caesar what is his - but do not waste my time with making me consider a coin to be important!” With a lightning-sharp deliberative reflection, S. K. shows us the anarchic dismissal, the aristocratic obstinacy of the King, of Christ in these passages: even though the “enemies” would have Christ expose Himself as either complicit with the state oppression or a rebel that is looking to spark revolution, He instead subverts and inverts their trap into further offence: “He displays Himself as the God-Man”. In the most unusual of Christ’s miracles, He calls forth a coin from a fish’s mouth; “have your coin - but do not waste my time!” S. K.’s advice is to pay the tax in spite of the state, with an air of indifference and a deflatory rebellion against those who would seek to impose themselves over the authority of God: render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s - because they do not matter to your eternal salvation and, if anything, are an incumberance to that individual becoming a Christian in Christendom - and to God the things that are God’s. Maybe, in the liberal democracies that have prided themselves upon providing suitable bread and circuses, we become anti-Marxists: surrender all that the state would take and surrender it willingly; we do not want or need regardless, for we have become martyrs and will to become martyrs in the Nachfolge.

Thinking more contemporarily, and without the devotional extremism of Anti-Climacus, S. K. thinks again to the faithlessness of his fellow Danes occupying the role of the clergy and the political class. Viewing state taxes through a deeply ironic lens, he asked “why not raise them even further?”—if the population can be raided for economic and social comfort, why not raise more taxes for eternal salvation?31 If, truly, we are to expect that life is so flat and meaningless that coins alone are enough to raise the true Christian faith into society through stateful actions, then why not go the whole way? Why not say we are fully prepared to simply pay the sufficient price to ensure salvation through efficient taxation, thereby circling Lutheranism back into the Catholicism it had broken away from? An act of immediacy will surely lead to salvation - if, truly, God is as Hegel supposes and simply in the immediate.

Paying the tithe - twice

More controversially, S. K. was aware of the fallenness of the Lutheran church and the indifference in particular of the priests in his contemporary Denmark. He was aware that the duty of the priest to spread the good news to the laity was deeply abused, going to the extent of preaching, like a prophet breathing fire, that this could only have been intentional.

“In the New Testament, Christianity is the profoundest wound that can be inflicted upon a man, calculated on the most dreadful scale to collide with everything—and now the clergyman has perfected himself in introducing Christianity in such a way that it signifies nothing, and when he is able to do this to perfection he is regarded as a paragon. But this is nauseating! Oh, if a barber has perfected himself in removing the beard so easily that one hardly notices it, that's well enough; but in relation to that which is precisely calculated to wound, to perfect oneself so as to introduce it in such a way that if possible it is not noticed at all—that is nauseating.”32

At a time when attendance and the tithe was a legal requirement for the Danes, one might have expected the notion of “tithe resistance” to have crossed S. K.’s mind. To make it clear just how ingrained the Danish clergy were in matters of money, this excerpt paints the picture:

The members of each parish had to pay tithe to the pastor, and the pastor charged a fee for performing baptisms, confirmations, weddings, and funerals.
It is worth mentioning that the pastor, in his capacity of civil servant, carried out other duties as well (apart from the strictly pastoral duties). The pastor had to collect the taxes; take the censuses; help with the administration of the compulsory military service; record births, baptisms, deaths, weddings and confirmations in the parish register; supervise and inspect the local schools; encourage agricultural innovations; run the system of poor relief; in some parishes the pastor was in charge even of performing the vaccination against smallpox.33

Calling these clergymen agents of the state almost seems to undersell it, something that S. K. could not abide whatsoever. This temptation, no doubt, would have been strongest at the point when the call came to exclude S. K. from the church services - however, he asked not to be excluded from the tithes, for fear he would be seen to have gained financially from the affair34. If the church was going to become a sacrilegious institution, he would not soften its fall by turning the “attack” into something which could be represented as a financial affair.

Channelling Matthew 5:40-42 in a most extreme way, he took the tithe as a weapon against the “cannibals”35 of the clergy who, as it would play out, were happy to take the money and ignore their apparent role in fostering the faithful in the congregation. Where Christ encourages us: “if anyone wants to sue you and take away your tunic, let him have your cloak also. And whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two. Give to him who asks you, and from him who wants to borrow from you do not turn away”, Kierkegaard responds in the affirmative. Instead of appealing to be excluded from the tithes, he insisted on paying double the tithe and refusing to attend36 - take the money, but leave the profanity of the false preacher at the altar! As “Christendom” was only a matter of extracting wealth from the population via the clergy who had failed to carry Christ’s message into their own lives, who had chosen to fund their lives with the blood of the martyrs, paying it twice but ignoring the requirement to attend allowed S. K. to expose the hypocrisy in the ranks.

As it would turn out, S. K. would not need to pay the double tithe. Such a demand, if the priests were to openly accept it, would have certainly been a difficult policy to explain for Primate Martensen.

The attack would not end there, however; in his most anarchist moments, S. K. would despair that the church, as a demiurgic force that mirrored the state, had learned to wield the power of the police in enforcing its rule - a far cry from the voluntary faith of the Christianity of the New Testament.

“Above all, save Christianity from the State. By its protection it smothers Christianity to death, as a fat lady with her corpus overlies her baby.”37

In taking up the law enforcement arm of the state to extract tithes from the population38, the corrupt clergy had exposed itself for all to see. Faith, as the voluntary surrender to the will of God, was not only impossible, but also a trifling matter; the clergy had a duty to collect tithes and fostering faith was, at very best, a secondary matter. To even begin to think about the earnest faith of Simon Peter, the antithesis of Job39, is out of the question: what would it matter to think of the unthinkable, imprudent person who would willingly surrender their stake in worldly affairs and earnestly follow a madman to his execution. Christianity must be enforced at the point of a sword, the point of a cudgel, otherwise there would be no tithes for the cannibalistic clergy to count.

And, in his typical anarchist spirit, S. K. answered: so be it! By leveraging the apparatus of the church against itself, we expose its hypocrisy - no longer the ἐκκλησία, we are asked to leap into the heresy of leaving the formal church.

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Rendering unto Caesar in his long robes

My reader, I won’t spend this time overcomplicating what you have already read, but I will offer you something else from S. K.’s most notorious work - hopefully you will see the connection:

In the external world, everything belongs to the possessor. It is subject to the law of indifference, and the spirit of the ring obeys the one who has the ring, whether he is an Aladdin or a Noureddin, and he who has the wealth of the world has it regardless of how he got it.
It is different in the world of the spirit. Here an eternal divine order prevails. Here it does not rain on both the just and the unjust; here the sun does not shine on both good and evil. Here it holds true that only the one who works gets bread, that only the one who was in anxiety finds rest, that only the one who descends into the lower world rescues the beloved, that only the one who draws the knife gets Isaac.40

Shall we treat God’s law like the external world, where all is for sale under the law of indifference? Or, shall we try something else, something altogether different? Now, I ask you to reflect on the scriptures and turn your heart Christwards. In place of a proper conclusion, I offer you a prayer:

Lord, give us strength to remember the way You viewed the state before You as you walked in Palestine. Remind us that we are not doomed to succumb to the demands of consumerism or become slaves to money, like the world so readily is; but also remind us that a coin is only a coin, and neither You nor our faith can be overcome simply by coming into contact with it. Lend us the strength to undermine the power of the world, the power to make us take a stance on its issue, on its terms; guide us to hold what is important deep within our hearts, within our minds, within our souls, and to hold away what is unimportant and deserving indifference. Teach us to render unto Caesar, as You did, with the appropriate atittude and guide us towards Your holy prototype, in the faithful Nachfolge we tread in your footsteps You walked; teach us not to hold onto tax or anything of this world when You call us to release both the world and ourselves in your wake, so that we might avoid becoming like Ananias and Sapphira, and that we might become closer to You.

Lend strength to those who are currently holding tightly to the world under the false appearance of the holy. Lend strength to us who need You more than ever, in recognising that You have called upon us not to transform the world, but to transform ourselves; when refusing our duty is easier than maintaining it to a higher cause, lend us strength that we shall not fail. Guide us to render unto Caesar his coin and to render unto God what is His: everything else, from the quietest soul to the loudest faith.

Amen.

Kierkegaardian Reflections