The Edict of Milan (315) - when the Empire Christianised officially (or thereabouts) - was the surprising vindication of the martyr’s cause, it seemed. Even the New Testament itself does not foresee a triumph of this scale. It is scarcely imaginable for Paul as he pens the twelfth and thirteenth chapters of Romans that the Imperator might in fact invite the active participation of Christians in his government and offer them a share in his rule. The obedience of the believer to the superior authority (13:1) is in surprising recognition of the divine source of the exousia This is not the default position in the New Testament by any means, and certainly it was not the experience of the early Christians, who could point rather to their experience of unjust rejection at the hands of the rulers who seemed to have set their faces determinedly against the Almighty and his Holy One. In fact, the church had its existence from the fact of Jesus’s sham trail and execution: it knew of itself from this moment of victimization. Its earliest narratives testified to its angularity to the government and citizens of the Empire.

Two remarkable things are salient in Paul’s thought here. First, the apostle does not lapse into a dualism at this point and comfort the believer by pitting Caesar’s regime holus bolus against Christ’s. He is consistent to his own statement of the unity of the power of God, his earlier theme. God has no favourites: the gospel is for all, Jew first, then Gentile. His judgment is similarly universal in scope; that the ruler is his unwitting agent in judgment is not as surprising as it might initially sound. But what is more: 'he is the servant of God to you for good' ! The ruler is the servant of God for the good of the Christian! There is a stern warning to not to resist the authority; which is to say that the superiority of the authority of God does not obliterate the operations of human authority.

Second, Paul refuses to cast the Christian in the role of the victim seeking vengeance. The comfort comes not from knowing that one is rightly a victim and so justified in seeking reprisal, but rather from the controlling hand of providence. The ruler – even the vain and idolatrous emperor – was unwittingly the servant of God, doing the business of a deity he did not even acknowledge. These were not his ancestral gods, but the God of a very minor group indeed – not even of a nation. Yet their insignificance was not evidence of the impotence of their God.