Paul’s guidelines on dealing with rulers and magistrates in Romans 13:1-7 pose an exegetical challenge to scholarship past and present, with interpretations ranging from it being an endorsement of oppressive regimes to an implicit subversion of the empire’s claim to power. In this paper it is argued that the concept of ‘prefigurative politics’, as it is developed in present-day political philosophy, is helpful in discerning the flow in Paul’s argument in chapters 12–13, and in making sense of this passage in view of more critical approaches to the authorities elsewhere in his letters. The logic behind Paul’s teachings becomes particularly evident when we compare them to Hellenistic-Roman philosophical discourses on the ideal ruler and the function of different types of written and unwritten law. By enacting an alternative micro-society in the present, driven by higher ethics than magistrates or their laws can enforce, the ‘rulers of this age’ are ‘rendered inoperative’ (1 Cor 2.6).