The Bible quite often tells us to respect and obey the laws of men. So what, say the critics, about this:

This is almost a qualifier for a Golden Duh Award, but not quite. Note well: in Acts, the "law" being set down countermanded God's requirements. The Jews told Peter and Co. to shut up and stop spreading the Gospel; that was opposite to Jesus' command to spread it. The other verses do not say, "unless they countermand God's commands" - but we are given credit for having the intelligence to realize that God's orders should not be overruled by any human intervention!

Indeed, the citation of the other verses as contradictory reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of when and why each was written -- truly enough, context is key, but here it is again a case of more than merely textual context.

Consider the social context of the verses from Romans usually cited in this regard (Rom. 13: 1, 7). When Paul penned this letter, Nero was emperor, but he was still in the realm of sanity and was a fairly good ruler; Christians were not being persecuted by Rome. Paul is not here concerned with the hypothetical possibility which eventually became reality: That the government would turn against the Christian faith. Had these words been penned ten years later, the instructions would assuredly have been tempered quite differently, and be more along the lines of Acts 5:29, where a choice did indeed have to be made between obeying God and man -- because as of the time when this passage was written, there was no human law which was in contradiction to the will of God. Paul could truly say "obey the law" without qualification, because there was no law on the books at the time that was objectionable from a Christian perspective: Christians weren't being persecuted or told to give up or compromise their faith; they were under the protective classification of being a Jewish sect. (This also applies to Matthew 22:21, Titus 3:1 and 1 Pet. 2:13.) As is often the case, skeptics are taking a general principle with a specific historical context and turning it into a timeless universal in order to find contradiction.

And now if that wasn't clear enough, we have some comments from the Ebon Bon Bon website that couldn't seem to grasp the relevance of context. He begins by clumsily proof-texting with some ill-chosen verses from Proverbs, to illustrate the premise that he thought that Christianity was "the religion whose holy text specifically says that human reasoning is invalid and flawed and that humans are not to rely on their own understanding, but to trust the Word of God." He's apparently still unaware that quoting from Proverbs doesn't make for a definite case on any subject and by the nature of the genre implies exceptions. (I would add here that contextually, Proverbs in the passages cited is praising the Wisdom of God, which we are supposed to share in and use, so that it isn't even promoting loss of all understanding in the first place.)

After dragging this red herring in a ceremonial circle around the bush, Ebon gets to the gist of his argument: "More generally, it is a fundamental logical and legal principle that a law means what it says. And the verse in 1 Peter says people should submit to every ordinance of man." That's it. Ebon bases his case on wooden-literal interpretation, bleaching away the pesky context of 1 Peter 2:13, which simply emphasizes the positive witness of good citizenship. Ebon goes to great lengths to emphasize his temporally provincial point, and ends up focusing on another Bible text that he thinks makes the same point (Romans 3:13, which is also included in the reply above). In that instance he repeats his failure to appreciate the context, to say nothing of failing to appreciate the text as a "high context" document in which exceptions would not indeed be delineated, and playing the part of a "fundamentalist atheist" who refuses to respect the historical, social, and literary contexts of the text is not a sufficient answer. His barking reply that "it is a fundamental logical and legal principle that a law means what it says" doesn't make the grade in a high-context setting in which legal rulings were abbreviated as much as possible and law codes were didactic rather than administrative in nature. There is no warrant to complain for the sake of our modernist, literalist, obsessed-with-details bias that God "shoulda" included an exception clause knowing that Nero would pop up soon. (He also plugs that same old, tired "timeless universal principles" gag that we answered here.)

As a side note, Ebon proposes the vacuous thesis that Paul wrote as he did in Romans to "placate the Romans and turn their anger aside from the fledgling Christian faith..." As the Romans at this time were not angry with Christianity, there was nothing to placate. Rome as an institution didn't start "getting mad" at Christianity until 64 AD.