Government demands obedience "for conscience's sake" (Romans 13:5), which may also be interpreted as "for the Lord's sake" (1 Peter 2:13). . . . In the exercise of the mission of government, the demand for obedience is unconditional and qualitatively total; it extends both to conscience and to bodily life. . . . [The Christian's] duty of obedience is binding on him until government directly compels him to offend against the divine commandment, that is to say, until government openly denies its divine commission and thereby forfeits its claim. In cases of doubt obedience is required. . . . If government violates or exceeds its commission at any point, for example by making itself master over the belief of the congregation, then at this point, indeed, obedience is to be refused, for conscience's sake, for the Lord's sake. It is not, however, permissible to generalize from this offense and to conclude that this government now possesses no claim to obedience in some of its other demands, or even in all its demands. Disobedience can never be anything but a concrete decision in a single particular case. Generalizations lead to an apocalyptic diabolization of government. Even an anti-Christian government is still in a certain sense government . . . . An apocalyptic view of a particular concrete government would necessarily have total disobedience as its consequence; for in that case every single act of obedience obviously involves a denial of Christ (Revelation 3:7). . . . Even in cases where the guilt of the government is extremely obvious, due consideration must still be given to the guilt which has given rise to this guilt. The refusal of obedience must . . . be a venture undertaken on one's own responsibility.
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (1949)
As quoted in the November 1996 issue of First Things journal.