Overcoming Empire With Love: What Romans 12 Still Has to Say
Overcoming Empire With Love: What Romans 12 Still Has to Say
There is a photograph taken in front of the Colosseum in Rome that captures something important about the ancient world. The structure is massive, almost incomprehensibly so. Its scale communicates exactly what it was designed to communicate: power, permanence, and the absolute authority of the Roman Empire. Rome built roads that stretched to the far corners of the known world. Rome constructed venues that dwarfed everything around them. And Rome crucified those who dared to oppose the emperor, leaving them on public display as a warning to anyone watching.
Into that world, Paul wrote a letter.
His letter to the Romans was addressed to a community of believers living at the very center of that empire. They were not a political party or an ethnic subgroup. They were something far more disruptive. They were a community where Jews and Gentiles sat together, where men and women were treated as equals, where slaves and their masters shared the same table. Rome could tolerate religious difference. It could not easily tolerate what looked like a social and political revolution. Christians, simply by being Christians, looked like a threat.
This is the world in which Paul's words in Romans 12 were first heard. And understanding that world changes everything about how those words land.
A Different Kind of Strength
Paul opens his practical exhortation in Romans 12 with a call to transformation. In verse 2, he urges his readers not to be shaped by the surrounding culture, but to be renewed in their thinking so they can discern what God actually desires. This is not a passive instruction. It is a radical one. In a world defined by conformity to imperial values, Paul is asking an entire community to reorient themselves around something else entirely.
What follows is a rapid, almost breathless list of instructions for how that reorientation looks in daily life. Love genuinely. Hate evil. Hold tightly to what is good. Honor one another. Do not grow lazy in your commitment. Be patient when suffering comes. Pray without giving up. Share what you have with those in need. Welcome the stranger.
And then, perhaps most strikingly: bless those who persecute you. Do not curse them. Bless them.
This is not a call to weakness. It is not an instruction to be passive or agreeable or to simply absorb whatever harm comes your way. It is something far more demanding. It is a call to refuse to become what oppresses you. It is a refusal to let cruelty define the terms of engagement. Paul reinforces this in verse 21, where he makes the logic explicit: do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
At the center of all of this is love. Not sentiment, not politeness, but agape -- the love of God, the love that gives without calculating return. Romans 13:10 draws the whole argument together by describing love as the fulfillment of the law. Everything else flows from this center.
When Buildings Become Statements
History offers us remarkable pictures of what this kind of love looks like when it becomes action.
In the early 18th century, a fire destroyed the rectory at Epworth, England, where a minister named Samuel Wesley and his wife Susanna were raising their children. The fire was likely no accident. The Wesleys were unconventional in ways that made their neighbors uncomfortable. Susanna taught her daughters the same rigorous academic and religious curriculum she gave her sons. She preached in her kitchen when her husband was away, drawing such crowds that people packed in standing room only. She drew on the writings of Catholic monks in a country still raw from religious conflict.
The fire could have ended their presence there. Instead, they rebuilt. The new rectory was larger and more formal, a statement made not in words but in stone and timber: we love this community, and we are not leaving. They remained for the better part of forty years.
Among the children raised in that house were John and Charles Wesley, whose understanding of Christian love shaped an entire theological tradition. In Wesleyan thought, love is not an abstract principle. It is the center toward which every holy practice points. Works of mercy, acts of piety, the cultivation of holy habits -- all of it exists to move a person closer to the love of God and neighbor. And crucially, there is no holiness without social holiness. The inner life and the outward life cannot be separated.
The Wall and the Book
Two more recent moments illuminate what Paul's vision looks like when it breaks into the open.
In November 1989, a bureaucratic error led East German officials to announce that citizens could travel freely to the West, effective immediately. Border guards, faced with crowds they could have met with force, opened the gates instead. What followed was one of the most extraordinary nights in modern history. People wept and embraced. Soldiers received flowers. And then, piece by piece, the Berlin Wall came down. A structure built to enforce division by threat of death was dismantled by people who had simply refused, long enough and at great enough cost, to accept that division as permanent.
And then there is the quieter story of Dolly Parton, who passed away earlier this week, and the Imagination Library she built on a simple premise: any child who wanted a book would receive one. No conditions. No questions. Just a book, and with it, the possibility of a larger future. When a child received the final book in the program, a letter was tucked inside encouraging them to keep reading. Love and generosity, extended without calculation, rippling outward into changed lives.
Right Here, Right Now
The world Paul wrote into and the world we inhabit are not as different as we might like to think. There are still empires of various kinds. There are still walls, literal and otherwise. There are still children who need a book and strangers who need a welcome and enemies who need, against all instinct, a blessing rather than a curse.
The invitation of Romans 12 is not to be nice. It is to be transformed. It is to live from the center outward, from agape into every act of mercy and every moment of patience and every refusal to repay evil with evil.
This is strength in Christ. And it is needed right here, right now.
There is a photograph taken in front of the Colosseum in Rome that captures something important about the ancient world. The structure is massive, almost incomprehensibly so. Its scale communicates exactly what it was designed to communicate: power, permanence, and the absolute authority of the Roman Empire. Rome built roads that stretched to the far corners of the known world. Rome constructed venues that dwarfed everything around them. And Rome crucified those who dared to oppose the emperor, leaving them on public display as a warning to anyone watching.
Into that world, Paul wrote a letter.
His letter to the Romans was addressed to a community of believers living at the very center of that empire. They were not a political party or an ethnic subgroup. They were something far more disruptive. They were a community where Jews and Gentiles sat together, where men and women were treated as equals, where slaves and their masters shared the same table. Rome could tolerate religious difference. It could not easily tolerate what looked like a social and political revolution. Christians, simply by being Christians, looked like a threat.
This is the world in which Paul's words in Romans 12 were first heard. And understanding that world changes everything about how those words land.
A Different Kind of Strength
Paul opens his practical exhortation in Romans 12 with a call to transformation. In verse 2, he urges his readers not to be shaped by the surrounding culture, but to be renewed in their thinking so they can discern what God actually desires. This is not a passive instruction. It is a radical one. In a world defined by conformity to imperial values, Paul is asking an entire community to reorient themselves around something else entirely.
What follows is a rapid, almost breathless list of instructions for how that reorientation looks in daily life. Love genuinely. Hate evil. Hold tightly to what is good. Honor one another. Do not grow lazy in your commitment. Be patient when suffering comes. Pray without giving up. Share what you have with those in need. Welcome the stranger.
And then, perhaps most strikingly: bless those who persecute you. Do not curse them. Bless them.
This is not a call to weakness. It is not an instruction to be passive or agreeable or to simply absorb whatever harm comes your way. It is something far more demanding. It is a call to refuse to become what oppresses you. It is a refusal to let cruelty define the terms of engagement. Paul reinforces this in verse 21, where he makes the logic explicit: do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
At the center of all of this is love. Not sentiment, not politeness, but agape -- the love of God, the love that gives without calculating return. Romans 13:10 draws the whole argument together by describing love as the fulfillment of the law. Everything else flows from this center.
When Buildings Become Statements
History offers us remarkable pictures of what this kind of love looks like when it becomes action.
In the early 18th century, a fire destroyed the rectory at Epworth, England, where a minister named Samuel Wesley and his wife Susanna were raising their children. The fire was likely no accident. The Wesleys were unconventional in ways that made their neighbors uncomfortable. Susanna taught her daughters the same rigorous academic and religious curriculum she gave her sons. She preached in her kitchen when her husband was away, drawing such crowds that people packed in standing room only. She drew on the writings of Catholic monks in a country still raw from religious conflict.
The fire could have ended their presence there. Instead, they rebuilt. The new rectory was larger and more formal, a statement made not in words but in stone and timber: we love this community, and we are not leaving. They remained for the better part of forty years.
Among the children raised in that house were John and Charles Wesley, whose understanding of Christian love shaped an entire theological tradition. In Wesleyan thought, love is not an abstract principle. It is the center toward which every holy practice points. Works of mercy, acts of piety, the cultivation of holy habits -- all of it exists to move a person closer to the love of God and neighbor. And crucially, there is no holiness without social holiness. The inner life and the outward life cannot be separated.
The Wall and the Book
Two more recent moments illuminate what Paul's vision looks like when it breaks into the open.
In November 1989, a bureaucratic error led East German officials to announce that citizens could travel freely to the West, effective immediately. Border guards, faced with crowds they could have met with force, opened the gates instead. What followed was one of the most extraordinary nights in modern history. People wept and embraced. Soldiers received flowers. And then, piece by piece, the Berlin Wall came down. A structure built to enforce division by threat of death was dismantled by people who had simply refused, long enough and at great enough cost, to accept that division as permanent.
And then there is the quieter story of Dolly Parton, who passed away earlier this week, and the Imagination Library she built on a simple premise: any child who wanted a book would receive one. No conditions. No questions. Just a book, and with it, the possibility of a larger future. When a child received the final book in the program, a letter was tucked inside encouraging them to keep reading. Love and generosity, extended without calculation, rippling outward into changed lives.
Right Here, Right Now
The world Paul wrote into and the world we inhabit are not as different as we might like to think. There are still empires of various kinds. There are still walls, literal and otherwise. There are still children who need a book and strangers who need a welcome and enemies who need, against all instinct, a blessing rather than a curse.
The invitation of Romans 12 is not to be nice. It is to be transformed. It is to live from the center outward, from agape into every act of mercy and every moment of patience and every refusal to repay evil with evil.
This is strength in Christ. And it is needed right here, right now.
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