No no, you're not raining on my parade at all. I've studied this stuff for years and years! I love nothing more than to go to the mat for it.

So there's interesting background to the epistles sent to the Romans. One of the things to keep in mind is that the epistles were written during a time of, well, a couple of things:

1. Great dissent within the church as to whether or not one had to be firstly Jewish to be a Christian, which threatened to strip the Greek and Roman churches (early Pauline Christians) of most of their attendance. Therefore, Paul had a vested interest in affirming Greek and Roman cultural values in order to maintain church membership. This is why you see a lot of meditations on Greek and Roman culture in the (likely) epistles of Paul, including rants against circumcision and discussions of female Greek and Roman fashions, especially relating to hair and head coverings.

2. Paul was an apocalyptic fellow. He believed the end times were directly upon mankind - that he, in his lifetime, would see the return of Christ. In fact, if you read to the end of the chapter you're partially quoting, that's precisely what he says: be quiet and hunker down, because the world is about to end, and then the evil powers which oppress you will be undone by God. He writes, "And do this, understanding the present time: The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light." So in other words, Paul is not concerned about constructing a more just world on Earth, because he believes that it is literally about to end.

3. Lastly, how each Christian wants to deal with the epistles is up to them, in my thinking. An epistle written then is really no different than any internal Church doctrine written now. You can find different accounts of Christians living communally in the same NT.

4. 'Powers and principalities' are a meditation of Paul's at large. Certainly in Ephesians 6 he seems to associate the evil urges of demonic powers with the oppressive forces that exist in the real world. But his statement, even if you do consider Pauline doctrine the only Orthodoxy, is still nonsensical in the context of Christian anarchism: if the only authorities that exist are ordained by God, then they will be just as justified in ceasing to exercise authority as they were in usurping it. ;) One often finds Paul much more interested in rhetoric than scripture.

Finally, I'm a little disturbed that good exegesis is increasingly described as 'explaining away' scripture. It's not explaining away anything to say that good reading yields deeper meaning than poorly informed reading. Biblical literalism is a fairly modern approach to a text that's anything but literal; even the scholars of the middle ages knew that there was more work to be done in reading the texts of Christianity than 'welp, it appears to say this, so yeah, that must be it.' I'm all for the priesthood of all believers, but I'm also for the development of an intense contemporary Christian scholarship, and that's darn hard to nurture when Christians are hearing 'LITERALISM IS THE ONLY INTERPRETATION' not only from evangelicals, but from nonreligious folk, too.