The Apostle Paul’s directives expressed in Romans 13:1–7 are not the only words he wrote to Christians residing in the Roman Empire’s capital city concerning their posture toward governing authorities. Considering the letter’s destination, surely we must acknowledge that the Christian confession Paul succinctly captures in Romans 10:9—“Jesus is Lord”—is an essential presupposition that governs his admonishing instruction concerning submitting to civil rulers. This article explores the ramifications of Romans 10:9–10, a memorable passage that perhaps has lost its edge for Christians who reside in a political-social-cultural setting where religious freedom is guaranteed by the nation’s Constitution.
The Necessity of Confessing “Jesus is Lord”
This is the familiar passage we consider too glibly:
If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart, one believes and is justified, and with the mouth, one confesses and is saved. (Rom. 10:9–10)
Paul’s mention of “your mouth” and “your heart” is patterned after “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” which he cites from Deuteronomy 30:14. As shown below, Paul’s chiasm emphasizes the mouth’s confessing of the heart’s believing—the central feature—while focusing fully on Jesus. Though taking place in the heart, belief in Jesus, whom God raised from the dead, is not private. It is a matter to be testified to with speech. Thus, what Paul affirms is in keeping with Jesus’s teaching: that from the abundance of the believing heart the mouth confesses, “Jesus is Lord.”
A For if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and
B believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
B1 For with the heart the resurrection of Jesus is believed unto righteousness, and
A1 with the mouth, the lordship of Jesus is confessed unto salvation.
Many readers of English Bibles do not realize that the two Greek verbs in the latter portion of Paul’s chiasm are in the passive voice—“it is believed” and “it is confessed”—as reflected above.[1] Our belief that God raised his Son, Jesus, from the dead is essential to our being declared righteous before God. The two central lines of the chiasm emphatically reiterate Paul’s assertion from Romans 4:23–25. Paul insists that Abraham, who observed that his nearly 100-year-old body was as good as dead, believed God could bring forth a living son from his barren wife. His belief typologically foreshadowed our belief in God who raised his Son from the dead. Thus, Paul wrote, “But the words ‘it was counted to him’ were not written for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:23–25).
1. One commentator who makes this point is John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, reprint 1975 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968), 2.56.
The Confession, “Jesus is Lord,” Has Lost its Edge through Repetition
Properly preached, the gospel of Jesus Christ confronts everyone with totalizing ramifications, transforming our beliefs, practices, and policies concerning every aspect of life in this world. This call subsumes our philosophy on everything: public square issues such as law and justice, politics, economics, society, and culture. In this sin-corrupted world where “repetition breeds familiarity,” our hearts are too often dull to Jesus’s universal dominion, and the preaching of the exhaustive fullness of Jesus’s Lordship becomes commonplace.[2] Three major influences have aided and abetted this dullness: our culture, the enlightenment, and Pietism.
2. Some Evangelicals preach the deviant and erroneous notion that Romans 10:9–10 does not require sinners to confess “Jesus is Lord” and believe that “God raised him from the dead” to be saved. Bob Wilkin embraces this convoluted notion (“Must we Confess in Order to be Eternally Saved?”). This aberrant teaching prompted the so-called “Lordship Salvation Controversy” of the 1980s.
The Impact of Western Culture
Ironically, the first dulling influence is Western Culture itself. How? Christianity, which profoundly shaped Western Culture, played a significant role in establishing the United States and her founding documents—especially the defense of religious freedom. Convinced that our Creator endows all kinds of rights to mankind, the founders brilliantly drafted a Constitution restricting the government’s authority over citizens’ rights. Most formidable of these rights is the First Amendment, including the freedom of religion.[3]
3. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The U.S. Constitution established a nation where Christians would not be subjected to government-sponsored persecution as many of America’s earliest immigrants from Europe had experienced. Assurance that governing officials cannot restrict religious belief and practice or impose an official religion on the citizens removed fear of government-sponsored oppression. With no government-authorized lord threatening Christians, Christians became softer. Christians began to adjust how they read, heard, and heeded what is entailed in confessing “Jesus is Lord.”
The Impact of the Enlightenment
From America’s founding, the rule of law banished tyrants from outside—but this law did not protect against the tyrants from within. The Enlightenment—an anti–Christian worldview that puts the individual at the center—continued infecting North America from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. Enlightenment thinkers shrunk the definition of “religion” and banished it from the public square to be sequestered in the church and home, far away from all that its devotees insist is religiously neutral secular turf.[4] And in that void, people increasingly looked to the state to provide our father the government to provide their daily bread. We all have been infected by this invasive worldview contrary to Christianity.
4. N. T. Wright, “Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire,” Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul 1978–2013 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 171–72.
Thus, Aaron Renn correctly observes that the secularization of American culture took place even during what he identifies as the “Positive World,” which he suggests finally ended in 1994.[5] In the 1960s Francis Schaeffer warned Christians that they had unwittingly separated truth, facts, and reality (conceived of as objective or neutral and occupying the lower story of thinking) from religion, beliefs, and ethics (regarded as subjective or partial and isolated to the upper story of feelings).[6] The false separation of the sacred from the secular strikes again.
5. Aaron M. Renn, “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism,” First Things (February 2022).
6. Francis Schaeffer, Escape from Reason, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1968), 60ff.
Born from the Enlightenment, modernism’s seduction has induced inattentive Christians to accept its bifurcated worldview of “two-story thinking,” to use Schaeffer’s apt expression. Christians must be alert concerning how we engage life in this present evil age, understanding the times. We need to know how to read the times in which we live in light of God’s Word, and we need to be wary of reading the Scriptures and pondering God’s ways through an Enlightenment lens that filters the sacred from the secular as though the two were divisible.
Equally, we must guard against superimposing a lens that projects contemporary social-cultural-political-economic theories onto the biblical text. The Enlightenment’s peculiar child, postmodernism, has made it fashionable to read Scripture through neo-Marxist spectacles of “oppressor versus oppressed”—in economic, ethnic, or sexual dynamics. This thinking seduces many professing Christians who gravitate toward Evangelicals for Harris and The After Party project (created by Russell Moore, David French, and Curtis Chang). Both groups are subversive to the Christian worldview that rejects the lower story-upper story separation, and Christians ought resist this kind of thinking.
The Impact of Pietism
A third harmful influence on seeing Jesus’s universal lordship is pietism, which camouflages itself behind an appealing spiritual veneer. Pietism has dulled Christian sensibilities to the social-economic-cultural-political implications of the good news in Jesus Christ. Pietism is the mistress of the Enlightenment, and both attempted to shrink the definition of “religion” and banish it from the public square merely to churches and religious institutions. By retreating from the public square, pietist Christians ironically participated in and blessed the divorce of the sacred from the secular. Today, Evangelical and Reformed pietism attracts many to its upper-story spirituality away from the lower-story political-cultural fray. Pietistic thinking directs Christians to “stay in their own lane.” Pietists declare political neutrality that functionally allows the governing Leftist political worldview to gain more ground. Pietists claim that Christian ministers have no authorization from Christ to speak concerning civic and political matters. Hence, these contemporary pietists unwittingly teach their adherents that conversations about the public square are unacceptable to both gospel interests and wholesome Christian conversation—unless the conversation comes from the Pietists themselves! Is there any wonder why pollsters anticipate that perhaps 30 to 40 million Evangelicals will sit out this year’s national election on November 5?[7]
7. Leonardo Blair, “More than 100M people of faith could sit out 2024 election: study,” Christian Post (10–10–2024).
Recovering the Full Measure of the Confession “Jesus is Lord”
The U.S. government is restrained in its power on Christian citizenry in contrast to the unrestrained government of first-century Rome. To grasp this difference, it is worth comparing how Christians in America hear the Apostle Paul’s letter and how the first recipients of the letter in Rome heard it when read to them. Though he had not yet visited Rome, Paul, who traveled throughout the Roman Empire, recognized the dangers Christians encountered living in Rome. He had suffered animosity from civil authorities on multiple occasions. He understood state-sponsored threats against Christians whose exclusive allegiance was to Christ Jesus as “Lord.”
Also worth noting, several years before Paul sent his letter to them, Christian churches in Rome endured an emperor-imposed disruption. In A.D. 49, Claudius expelled all ethnic Jews from Rome without distinguishing Christian Jews from non-Christian Jews. So, Aquila and Priscilla left their residence in the empire’s capital city, relocating to Corinth (Acts 18:1–3). When Paul wrote his letter to the Roman Christians from Corinth (A.D. 57), three years after Claudius’s death, when his edict expired, some Jews were moving back to Rome under the new Caesar, Nero (A.D. 54–68), whose depravity and persecution of Christians became notorious.[8]
8. See Kenneth Berding, “Something About the Book of Romans that will Help You Really ‘Get’ It.”
How did Paul’s first recipients of his letter hear the famous confession of Romans 10:9 “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom. 10:9)? They more than likely heard it as a totalizing claim that encompassed all of life. Only by God’s Spirit can one truthfully confess “Jesus is Lord,” affirming his incarnation, sacrificial death, resurrection, ascension, and investiture with universal dominion (cf. Phil. 2:11; 1 Cor. 12:3). Even if Rome’s later mandatory confession, “Caesar is Lord” (Kurios Kaisar), had not yet been imposed on its citizens by the time Paul sent his letter to Rome’s Christians, such inscriptions as “Nero, the lord of the entire world” already existed.[9] The emperor cult with Caesar acknowledged as a deity was emerging.
9. Vision. “Inventing Deities.”
Paul intended the Roman Christians to hear this confession, carefully crafted with chiastic repetition, as a declaration of Christ’s sovereignty over the governing authorities. Nero, in Rome, was the principal ruling official to which the apostle admonishes them to submit (Rom. 13:1).[10] Ponder Paul’s apostolic commission by the Lord Jesus Christ told to Ananias: “Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name” (Acts 9:15–16). So, Paul’s mission included preaching to kings the Lordship of the God-man enthroned on a Roman cross under the banner “King of the Jews,” and this meant nothing less than that Jesus is Lord over everything—Caesar included.
10. One could point to other familiar words—“good news,” “son of God,” “salvation,” and “justice”—as echoes of the “imperial language” associated with the worship of Caesar. See, for example, N. T. Wright, “Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire” (1998), expanded in “Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire,” Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul 1978–2013 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 446–47.
Conclusion
Wherever idolatry reigns, whether in ancient Rome or various nations today, Christians have always faced great hostilities. Government guardians of idolatry are pleased to welcome Jesus Christ into their pantheon of deities and household gods. What they cannot allow is the confession “Jesus is Lord” to exclude acknowledgment of other deities. About 100 years after Paul sent his letter to Rome, Polycarp of Smyrna bore witness to this truth. After the Roman authorities arrested him because he refused to renounce only “Jesus is Lord” and confess divine honors to the Roman emperor, “the police captain Herod and his father Niketas met with him” in an effort “to persuade him and saying, ‘But what harm is it to say, “Lord Caesar,” [Kurios Kaisar] and to offer sacrifice . . . and to be saved [from death]?’”[11] His commitment to Jesus’s lordship is a model every Christian, “Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He never did me any injury: how then can I blaspheme my King and my Savior?”
11. The Martyrdom of Polycarp 8.2.
Vice President Kamala Harris held a political rally on Oct. 17, 2024 in La Crosse, Wisconsin. She berated her opponent, former President Donald Trump, for appointing three justices to the United States Supreme Court “with the intention that they would undo the protections of Roe v. Wade, and they did as he intended.” At that instant, two male students from the University of Wisconsin—La Crosse proclaimed, “Christ is King!” then, “Jesus is Lord,” loudly enough for all in the arena to hear. V. P. Harris promptly retorted, “Oh! You guys are at the wrong rally,” drawing thunderous applause and cheers from the nearly 2500 attendees. The two confessors were promptly ushered out of the arena as V. P. Harris continued mocking them. What a commentary on the depths to which the Democratic Party’s candidate and voters have sunk! Of course, when she brought her rally to a close, without any hint of disconnect between her God-rejecting words and actions, Harris said, “God bless you. God bless the United States of America.”
The First Amendment seems to have lulled many Evangelicals into a slumber from engaging in political and cultural issues from which they must be awakened. The freedom to confess “Jesus is Lord” in the public square is in greater jeopardy than at any previous time. As hostilities increase in our nation against believers who confess exclusive allegiance to one Lord, will we stand firm and confess, “Jesus is Lord”? Are we prepared to acknowledge the exclusive lordship of Jesus, who died a criminal’s death on a Roman cross under that placard that specified his crime, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”? As Jesus taught us, the words we speak with our mouths confirm the beliefs resident in our hearts. Confession without faith is hollow. Faith without confession is proved spurious. Our mouth’s confession reveals and confirms the authenticity of our faith.
