luther’s doctrine of the christian life: church and state · 2019. 6. 24. · a great deal from...

The Theology of Martin Luther

Transcript - CH509 The Theology of Martin Luther © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 22 of 24CH509

Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: Church and State

The Theology of Martin Luther

Martin Luther is often described as a toady of princes. I’m not sure what a toady is because I’ve only heard it used in this phrase, “a toady of princes,” but I’m quite sure it’s not a compliment. There is a kernel of truth in this accusation, for Luther did have a very close working relationship with a number of princes, and there can be no doubt that Luther regarded the princes who supported him as gifts of God who enabled his message to proceed into a number of lands in various parts of Europe. But it is a false impression to make him an ancestor of modern totalitarian views of the power of government. There was no sharper critic in his day of princes who opposed the gospel of Jesus Christ, there was no sharper critic of rulers because of their tyranny over the common people, no one has ever in the history of Christendom, I think, set a higher standard for the practice of the office of ruler than did Martin Luther.

Luther grew up in a world in which government was not conceived of as a modern state, but rather government was seen as a God-given ruler. Luther’s family came from a peasant background in which people learned simply to obey the local authorities and pay taxes and pray for the welfare of the ruling family. His family came to Mansfeld, a small village in the county of Mansfeld, and the prince directed the government of the local village. His father assumed an office in the administration of Mansfeld, but those local officials (such as his father) were dependent upon the local counts. His father was involved also in the smelting business, and mining and smelting were controlled by the grace of the elector of Saxony who had certain rights of overlordship, even in the lands of the counts of Mansfeld. So his father had a high appreciation for the rulers of not only his own county but also of the larger area, and this included the elector of Saxony with whom Luther would later have such a close relationship.

Luther grew up in a fragile world. There were great fears of peasant rebellion in Luther’s world. It was an unsettled world. There had been revolts by the peasantry in various parts of Germany within Luther’s lifetime; and he feared greatly the outbreak of chaos that was involved inevitably, he believed, when those whom God had

Dr. Robert A. Kolb, Ph.D.Experience: Professor of Systematic Theology

at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri



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not appointed to rule tried to seize the rule of the land.

It is also true that Luther, like other academics of his day, benefitted a great deal from princely support. The university was usually in the hands sometimes of a city government, but more often (as was the case in Wittenberg) in the hands of a prince. And without the prince there would have been no university, there would have been no academic life, even though technically most universities were chartered by the papacy, sometimes alongside the emperor but sometimes without any other charter at all.

On the other hand, we must recognize that Luther lived most of his life as an outlaw. From 1521 on, he was a wanted man in imperial Germany. The imperial government persecuted his followers, burned some of them, arranged for the deaths of others. And in some ways it is remarkable that it took Luther as long as it did to recognize a right of resistance against tyranny, even though he never recognized that right as belonging to the individual.

There were a number of concerns that governed Luther’s political views and his political actions. Perhaps primary was his desire to preserve the integrity of the gospel. That desire to preserve the integrity of the gospel was a political concern in the late Middle Ages because church and state were so intermingled in their spheres of competence and in their claims of power over each other. Linked to but distinct from his desire to preserve the integrity of the gospel was his concern for the integrity of the church in relationship to the state. Again, Luther was a product of his own age, and he had no conception of something like a modern Western understanding of the potential separation of church and state. He could not imagine a society in which church and state would be separated in some of the ways in which we think that separation just naturally takes place. But he did believe that church and state were created by God, designed by God for different functions. So he believed the church should do the church’s work and not interfere with the state, but he also believed that the state should do its work and not interfere with the church. So the complementary side of this concern for the integrity of the church in relationship to the state was a concern for the integrity of the state in carrying out its assignments without the interference of popes and bishops. And Luther boasted that he had so clearly enunciated the distinctions in these spheres of competence, enunciated them in a way that had not been done for decades and centuries in Christendom, and he wanted to be considered a friend of the prince and a friend of the municipal government in the proper way.

Luther also had a deep concern for public order and public morality;



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and he saw one of the assignments of rulers of governments [as] the preservation of public order and of public morality. Finally, however, Luther also lived by Peter’s dictum in Acts 5: We ought to obey God rather than man. And so he finally moved away from his insistence that Christians can at best only passively resist a tyrannous government, to a position which finally allowed what we call today inferior magistrates, princes in the German empire, to resist higher power such as the emperor.

Luther’s concerns about the relationship between the gospel and the church on the one hand and the state or the government on the other were played out at different times in rather different ways. One of the relationships between church and state that intrigues us most, I suppose, is Luther’s concept of the prince as an emergency bishop—an emergency bishop whom he could advice, one that should do what was right in God’s sight. By that Luther meant what he thought the princes ought to do. But Luther did see that in the state of medieval Christendom there was no other source of political power which could put on the proper leverage to accomplish ecclesiastical reform. And so while he did not want that to be a permanent situation, he believed that it was necessary in his day and age for pious princes to come to the aid of the church since the church’s own officials, the bishops and abbots and, above all, the pope, were not about to reform the church.

In 1520, he published his Open Letter to the German Nobility. It was addressed to the nobles, but as a matter of fact it was intended for city councils as well. And many of the reforms that Luther pushed and proposed in this Open Letter to the German Nobility were actually introduced first by local city councils. The Open Letter to the German Nobility is not particularly an original work. It simply repeated to a large extent the grievances of past German imperial diets that had been sent off one after another to Rome and laid before the German bishops and archbishops and abbots as well. The Open Letter to the German Nobility does set the whole matter of reform of the church in a different theological framework, but the specific proposals for ending financial abuse and moral abuse in the church were not original with Luther at all. But Luther did establish the competence of lay leadership called by God to governmental positions in the secular realm. He established that competence and that sphere of power against clergy domination. He rejected specifically three papal claims to power: over temporal rulers, over the Scripture and the interpretation of Scripture, and over councils and the decisions of councils. And in this Open Letter, Luther then called for government aid in reforming a great number (more than 20) abuses, specific kinds of abuse, within the church, both on the



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local level and on the level of Christendom itself. Then he also called for special attention to a political problem at the imperial level, the Bohemian problem. Bohemia, the homeland of John Huss and his followers, remained within the sphere of the German empire; and since the execution of Huss for heresy in 1415, the tensions between the Bohemians and the rest of the empire had not completely gone away. So Luther called on the princes of the empire to establish peace with the Bohemians on a permanent basis at long last with concessions. The empire should confess that Huss and his follower, Jerome of Prague, had been burned unjustly; the empire should let the Bohemians choose their own archbishop, their own church leadership; it should let them keep communion in both kinds; and it should not insist on the return of lands to the church which had been seized by the local nobility. Luther also went on to call for princely reform of the universities; and the program of biblical humanism with its strong emphasis on the study of ancient languages and literature was an important part of his call for reform.

In 1520, he was particularly strong in his criticism of many parts of the Aristotelian corpus and he wanted Aristotle not completely thrown out of the university but to a large part limited in the curriculum. And he also called for a number of moral reforms in the secular sphere: He wanted the rulers to abolish the use of luxurious clothing. He wanted them to abolish brothels. He called for an end to excessive eating and drinking, and suggested other reforms as well, particularly in the economic sphere where he wanted to limit the spice trade and capitalist trading companies.

But Luther did more than just call for princely action, he assisted (particularly the elector of Saxony) in functioning as an emergency bishop. For one thing, Luther was always more than happy to share his own advice, his own point of view, with his own prince and other princes as well. Sometimes the distinction is made in the advice the church gives to the government between principle and policy. It is suggested sometimes nowadays that the church may comment on principles of ruling the country but ought not mix its hand into specific policies. Luther did not understand such a distinction, he freely gave advice, often sticking to principle but occasionally telling elector John of Saxony, for instance, or his son John Frederick, what to do in specific cases.

In 1528, John of Saxony wanted to organize a visitation of the churches in Saxony. This is a good example of a prince assuming the powers of a traditional medieval bishop. The bishops had conducted visitation of churches at times throughout the Middle Ages, now John wanted to introduce Luther’s reformation into the local parishes of his lands. And so he called upon Luther



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and Luther’s colleague, Philipp Melanchthon, to help him in organizing and then in carrying out a visitation of the churches in his domains. And Luther and Melanchthon wrote a series of articles, a kind of instruction for the visitors, and actually participated in some of the visitation as well.

Luther was counted on as an advisor to princes and freely gave his advice also. As the princes tried to work out a religious settlement with the political forces of the papacy in Germany—particularly at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 and at the Diet of the Smalcaldic League in 1537—Luther’s advice was important and played a role, even though at Augsburg he was kept far from Augsburg because he was an outlaw and couldn’t venture outside the lands of the elector of Saxony. But there and at Smalcald in 1537, he helped shape the approach to the religious policy of his day.

Luther’s theory that stood behind his freely giving advice to the prince was treated in a number of places, but particularly in his commentary on Psalm 82 (published in 1530), and a similar commentary on Psalm 101 (published in 1534). In 1530, with what I think is somewhat dubious exegesis, he equated the gods of verse 1 in Psalm 82 with secular rulers; and he affirmed that they are officers of God, they must be obeyed so that peace may reign among the children of Adam, Luther said. He did not want to restrict his appraisal of rulers as officers of God to those who were pious and Christian. He went on to discuss the integrity of God’s order for political governance in the whole horizontal realm and he noted that, of course, abuses will arise. He wrote, “In order that these proud gods (that is, the rulers) may be deprived of their defiant boastfulness when they think that there is no one to judge them or rebuke them without being called a rebel, a little peg is driven into them and a club is laid beside the dog. Thus, they are properly rebuked and boldly spoken to, and they must be threatened sharply and hard. For God keeps the upper hand over these rulers; God retains the right to judge them; God does not make them gods in such a way as to abolish His own godhead and let them do as they please, as if they alone were gods even over God Himself. On the contrary, it is God’s will that these rulers be subject to His Word; and they will either listen to it or they will suffer all misfortune.”

How does God do that? How does God become present in the presence of the secular ruler? The psalm says he stands in the congregation. And Luther took that word as the occasion to write, here God has appointed priests and preachers to whom he has committed the duty of teaching and exhorting and rebuking and comforting, in a word, of preaching the Word of God. He then criticized clergy who are called to, as the psalm says, stand in the



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congregation (that is, to confess the Word boldly in rebuking the secular ruler’s abuse of his God-given office). Luther, first of all, criticizes unfaithfulness (that is, simply failing to fulfill God’s assignment), and then he attacks backbiting (that is, preachers who curse princes and lords, not boldly in public but in corners, in their own little sects). Luther stated to such preachers, “If you are in the ministry and are not willing to rebuke your rulers, your gods, openly and publicly as your office demands, at least leave off your private backbiting and go hang.”

In commenting on Psalm 101 four years later, Luther wrote, “If a preacher in his official capacity says to kings and princes and to all the world: Thank and fear God and keep His commandments, that is not meddling in the affairs of secular government. On the contrary, he is thereby serving and being obedient to the highest government, to God. Thus, the entire spiritual government really does nothing else than serve the divine authority, which is why pastors are called servants of God and ministers of Christ in the Scripture.” Indeed, Saint Paul even calls it a service to the church and to all the heathen. Thus, if David or a prince teaches or gives order to fear God and to listen to His Word, he’s not really acting as a lord of that Word but as an obedient servant. He is not meddling in spiritual or divine government, but remains a humble subordinate and a faithful servant. For with respect to God and in the service of His authority, everything should be identical and mixed together, whether it be called spiritual or secular, the pope as well as the emperor, the lord as well as the servant. Luther then went on in commenting on Psalm 101: “It is a confusion and a mingling of the secular and the spiritual realm when those sublime and meddlesome spirits want to change and correct the civil law in a dictatorial and dominating fashion, even though they have no directive or authority to do so either from God or from men. The same is true when spiritual or secular princes and lords want to change and correct the Word of God in a dictatorial and dominating fashion when they themselves dictate what should be preached and taught, even though they themselves have no more right to do this than the lowest beggar.”

In these comments then, we see Luther’s strong insistence upon the integrity of each of the two governments or realms, the ecclesiastical government or hierarchy and the secular government or hierarchy. In both cases, Luther insisted, they have responsibilities given to them by God and they must discharge them. But at the same time, Luther believed that preachers should help princes in understanding the will of God and ought to preach to them concerning their responsibilities and concerning the carrying out of those responsibilities by giving specific guidance from God’s law and God’s will.



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The princes were called, according to Luther’s teaching, to keep order in society, to do good through their calling to be rulers. In several instances, Luther was faced with questions regarding the role of rulers, and particularly the role of subjects as well. In 1522, there was tension in the air, the Peasants’ Revolt that began in 1524 was looming on the horizon, and there was a sense that peasants could revolt again in several areas of German. So he wrote his treatise entitled A Sincere Admonition to All Christians to Guard Against Insurrection and Rebellion, and there he expressed his deep concern for the preservation of good government and good order.

He believed that one of the chief problems was the fact that the clergy had oppressed the peasantry; and he recognized the justice of the grievances that Christendom had against many clergymen. But he warned against revolt against the princes, who also were church officials (archbishops and bishops and abbots) who held power in the secular realm in the German medieval system of government. He believed that the Word of God must defeat error in the church and that anticlerical violence was wrong. And so he called upon preachers to pray and to preach against evil clergy, and he called upon the people of God also to use the weapon of prayer against those who were abusing their office within the church. He called upon rulers to preserve order, according to God’s command and according to their own calling by God. He argued that insurrection always leads to violence that harms more innocent people than it does guilty people. He believed that the devil is the only author of every insurrection.

The situation did not change in the year following the publication of this Sincere Admonition Against Insurrection and Rebellion, and so in 1523 Luther published sermons he had preached on the subject, Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should be Obeyed. Here he expressed his opinion that government was given as a remedy for sin. Christians don’t really need government, secular government, insofar as they obey God. But because unbelievers need the force of the sword to keep them in line, he believed that government was necessary. And for the sake of order in society, for the sake of the unbelievers in their midst, Luther believed that Christians should participate in government. Later, particularly in his Genesis commentary, he expressed the opinion that already in Eden secular government was a part of God’s order for His human creatures. He taught that Adam was not only the first parent but also the first priest and also the first prince or emperor.

Luther used Romans 13 and I Peter 2, among other passages, to teach that God had called rulers and subjects to specific responsibilities. Subjects were to obey the ruling authorities and



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help them preserve order. They were to pray for their rulers that they might exercise their office justly; and he argued also (on the basis of Romans 13 and other biblical passages, the Lord’s word regarding being subject to Caesar as well as to God) that Christians were obligated to pay taxes and to pay them willingly. But Luther also argued very strongly that rulers were to limit the evil and not to practice it; they were to promote the good and not to oppress it. No one is outside this scheme; no one is outside this design of God.

Indeed, Luther recognized that the Sermon on the Mount commanded that individual Christians turn the other cheek rather than use the sword to smite their foes. He did not believe that the Sermon on the Mount gave commands of a more perfect kind that were to be used only as counsels for the monastic life. He believed that all Christians were called by God to bear injustice without response, at least the response of violence of force (the response of admonition, to be sure). In other words, Christians are called individually to turn the cheek. But at the same time, Christians are also called to exercise their obligations to protect the neighbor; and certain Christians at least then have the obligation to use the sword against sinful creatures that are disrupting public order. The gospel cannot rule the world; the gospel can only recreate new people to be the children of God. And so the law must enforce the standards of God for the practice of horizontal righteousness in this world. In aiding that practice, Christians may also be called to use the sword as rulers, as soldiers, as police, and the like.

Luther not only defended the rulers’ competence against claims of domineering churchmen in the civil sphere, but he also warned rulers against trying to enforce religious belief. He was opposed to any kind of persecution. It doesn’t work against heresy, and it obviously oppresses the gospel.

In writing on Temporal Authority in 1523, Luther also reminded his readers that there are limits to Christian obedience, even if Christian obedience to government is generally the order of the day. When rulers interfere with the church, when rulers oppress the gospel, when Luther’s followers, for instance, were being persecuted by imperial authorities, Luther said, we must obey God rather than these human princes.

In his treatise on Temporal Authority, Luther also employed a typical medieval genre, the Mirror of the Prince, in laying out a short sketch of the prince’s duties. He summarized them in four duties. First of all, the prince is to act toward God with true faith, with sincere prayer, by dedicating his life to God. Secondly, the prince’s duty is to act toward his subjects with all love and with



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Christian service. Indeed, the prince is the father of his people, placed on his throne by God for the care, for the provision of order and temporal mercy to his people; and so it was the duty of the prince to promote the good in whatever ways was possible. Thirdly, Luther said it was the duty of the prince to act toward his own counselors and toward his fellow rulers with an open mind and with unfettered judgment. That meant that he should not be taken in by them; he should not simply take the advice of his advisors without criticizing it; he should not simply follow other rulers in alliances and the like into courses of action that were wrong, but he should always keep his judgment subject to the Scriptures, subject to the will of God, and free from the undue influence either of his own counselors or of his fellow rulers. Fourthly, he said that the prince was called upon by God to act toward evildoers with proper zeal and with firmness, punishing not for the sake of punishing but punishing for the social good.

As he expanded then on these four central duties, Luther emphasized the necessity of a ruler’s exercising his own judgment in dispensing justice. Christians have always wavered between an emphasis on keeping the law and excluding arbitrary human judgment on the part of the judges or the rulers from the execution of justice or, on the other hand, from dealing with the fact that the law is a wooden instrument and the living heart of a merciful human being must also be involved. Luther tended to think that the latter was the better way to go, that the law of the law books could indeed be a cold and merciless and even cruel thing, and so rulers needed to exercise judgment as they dispensed justice and made policy for their people and their lands.

Like many people in many eras, Luther was always suspicious of the advisors of princes, and so he warned princes to not only act toward them with unfettered judgment but basically not to trust them, to be harshly critical in receiving advice from them. He also insisted that within the constitution of the German empire, the lower magistrates, the elector of Saxony, the count of Mansfeld, must obey the emperor. And he would not stray from this position one iota for almost a decade. We will discuss in just a few moments the slow move that he made toward justifying the resistance of inferior magistrates toward superior magistrates in certain limited instances.

Luther was not a pacifist, but he discouraged princes from going to war. Only under extreme necessity should they go to war, and then, again, only against an equal or an inferior, not against a superior such as the emperor. But Luther believed that war seldom accomplishes much good. If it is necessary to limit evil, it is necessary to limit evil. Luther treated the subject of war in a



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number of tracts. He had practical examples at hand in the 1520s, which he could use to expand his treatment of the subject of organized violence.

In 1525, he was called to comment on the revolt of the peasants in a number of areas of Germany. He was called, first of all, by the peasants to comment on the justice of their appeals against princely tyranny. Luther disliked their use of Scripture to justify earthly claims. He believed that the devil was using the peasants’ desire for temporal gain to discredit the Reformation. And he warned against violence of any kind in seeking the goals of the peasantry. At the same time, in the first tract he issued on the Peasants’ Revolt, he sharply criticized the tyranny of princes; and he said that if the peasants were in a rebellious mood, it was nobody’s fault but the princes themselves. And he called on them to repent and to return to the godly and biblical ideal of being a father, a kind and merciful and loving and supportive father to their people. Luther toured some of the areas in which there were tensions with the peasantry in Saxony itself, and he was booed and hooted down and that hostility that he experienced made him greatly fearful of the future. And then reports came from southern Germany, isolated reports to be sure, but reports of peasant violence in which noble families had been massacred. So in a tract which pleaded for the suppression of rebellious peasants in the harshest terms, he argued that princes must get into the field to stop the advance of chaos and disorder. He did so in part because his own prince, Prince Frederick the Wise, was lying on his deathbed, and his brother, Duke John, simply did not know what to do. Luther feared that the whole world was going to go up in flame if the peasants got the upper hand, and so he echoed the position of many other intellectuals of his time, calling for a swift and just repression of the revolt, in part (Luther argued) to free those peasants who had been forced by the leaders of the rebellion into the use of violence.

The peasants suffered massive defeats at the hands of a few princely armies. In the area of Saxony itself, many peasants were slaughtered, including their leader Thomas Munzer (a former student of Luther’s who had preached an apocalyptic doctrine of the return of the kingdom of God under his own leadership). And when Munzer was executed for promoting rebellion, Luther probably did not shed a single tear.

In 1526, Luther wrote a tract that dealt with another aspect of violence in society. He wrote a tract entitled Can Soldiers, Too, Be Saved? It gave him the opportunity to develop a concept of vocation in the political sphere. This tract was instigated by a professional soldier named Asa Von Kram, an evangelical whose



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conscience was bothering him, and he wanted to know whether he could be a soldier or not. Luther began with the distinction between occupation and person. The occupation is one thing; the person who holds it is to be kept distinct from the activities of the occupation. Luther insisted then that the occupation of soldier is not within the vertical realm, it’s not a matter of becoming righteous in God’s sight, the question is whether a soldier can do what is right in the horizontal realm over and against his fellow human creatures. If war is a punishment for evil and waged for the protection of the innocent, then it is good. A war of necessity is permissible. A war of desire, which seeks the gain of the ruler outside the law of God, is not permitted even to the Christian. And so Luther advocated a kind of selective conscientious objection as he wrote to Asa von Kramm. If indeed the war is clearly wrong, then soldiers ought not go to battle; if soldiers do not know, they may have to place their consciences in the hands of their leaders.

Luther also commented on societal violence in this period because of the advance of Turkish armies against Western Christendom, culminating in 1529 in the siege of Vienna. Luther saw the Turks as a call to repentance for Western Christendom. He did not support any kind of crusade and opposed the papal call for crusade. On the other hand, he finally came to the position of supporting the Western Christian effort to defeat the Turks and oppose it because he recognized the justice of protecting the people of Western Europe from the Turkish invasion. But he saw the Turks as both Satan’s rod against Western Europe and as God’s tool for calling it to repentance.

There is one other area of political theory that I want to address in this lecture, and that is the whole matter of whether Christians can in good conscience not only passively resist governments which oppress them (particularly in the religious sphere), but whether any Christians may take sword in hand against government. Although he was personally disobedient to his own ruler, Frederick the Wise, by returning from the Wartburg to Wittenberg in 1522, Luther believed he was justified because he had to stop the outbreak of iconoclasm and the disorder that was really threatening the progress of the Reformation. But nonetheless, throughout the 1520s he insisted on obedience to rulers. At best, individual Christians for Luther throughout his career could only disobey passively. For instance, he said if your prince comes to seize your Bible, don’t run into the street with it and volunteer to hand it over to the policeman, make them come and get it and search it out from under your pillow. But more than that was not allowed to any Christian, according to Luther, until about 1530. But then he gradually came to recognize a right of resistance lodged in the inferior magistrates, in the princes, of the


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German empire.

In 1531, the emperor Charles V had renewed his threat to hunt down the Lutherans and eliminate them from his empire by force of the sword. So, in his Warning to His Dear Germans in 1531, although he did not counsel resistance to the emperor directly, he did not retreat from his insistence that God-given authority must be obeyed, but he warned that everything which the bloodhounds (as he called the papal party) labeled as rebellious was not necessarily rebellious. Self-defense against the bloodhounds cannot be rebellious, he said. So anyone who permitted the pope to command his actions, even the emperor, qualified as a bloodhound. And even though Luther still harbored doubts about whether Christians really ought to resist persecution by the emperor, he so stated things that his readers probably gathered indeed that Luther was shifting his position.

About this time, Luther begrudgingly came to the conclusion, forced upon him by Melanchthon and by secular counselors within the Saxon government, that there was a constitutional argument for resistance by the inferior magistrates within the German empire against the emperor—that because the emperor was elected, when he broke his oath, when he did not honor his agreements with the inferior magistrates, they were in a sense his equals and had the right to seize the power back.

Then in 1536 and in 1538, Luther signed on to memoranda prepared by his colleagues that admitted the typical medieval natural law argument of the right of self-defense even of a prince in behalf of his people should the emperor unjustly persecute them. But, in 1539, Luther developed his argument based on his understanding of vocation in personal correspondence; in 1539, he clearly indicated on the basis of his own theology that he believed that resistance to the emperor was permitted when the emperor no longer exercised his calling correctly but promoted evil instead of the good, in this case by supporting the papacy against the gospel.

We see here then Luther’s vocational argument, his two-realms theory, at work as he taught that princes are called by God but must act as God’s agents, and subjects are called by God and, therefore, must obey. But God remains Lord of the civil realm, both Lord of the rulers and of their subjects.

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