Romans 13:1 is a fairly controversial passage in the New Testament, and one can see why: "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God."

Anybody have or know of interpretations of this that add up? I can't really make sense of it on its own; it's too much of a blanket statement. Are we really to presume that, say, Hitler was endowed with a mandate from God and that Germans, as good Christians in the 1930s and 1940s, were obliged to follow him? That's one obvious example but one could come up with a lot more. Maybe I'm reading it too literally...

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