CHAPTER FIVE

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Luther: The Theological and the Political

All terms become new when they are transferred from their proper context to another … When we ascend to heaven, we must speak before God in new languages … When we are on earth, we must speak with our own languages … For we must carefully mark this distinction, that in matters of divinity we must speak far differently than in matters of politics.

—Luther

I. POLITICAL THEOLOGY

In its theology and philosophy, the mediaeval mind displayed a fondness for making complex distinctions which later ages have found both admirable and annoying, admirable because of the analytical subtleties that were developed and annoying because of the seemingly trivial subjects that were discussed. What was most impressive about this penchant for distinction-making, as well as what gives it an appeal for many moderns, was that most mediaeval thinkers could assert fine and even sharp distinctions between matter and spirit, essence and attribute, faith and reason, spirituality and temporality, without dissolving irrevocably their connective tissues. Things might be sharply defined and analytically distinguished, yet this was not taken as evidence of a want of coherence. To an age that distrusted discontinuities, identity, even of a highly distinctive kind, did not denote isolation or autonomy.

In keeping with this vein, mediaeval historians have warned us against reading modern antitheses, like “church” and “state,” into mediaeval thought. Most mediaeval thinkers assumed that regnum and sacerdotium formed complementary jurisdictions within the respublica christiana. Yet the running disputes between the papacy and temporal rulers over such matters as the taxation of the clergy and investiture of bishops should give pause to those who believe that an agreement about fundamental values and assumptions ipso facto eliminates the possibility of bitter conflict. One might just as easily conclude from the mediaeval experience that disputes tend to become more embittered when each side is intent on capturing the same symbols of authority and truth; common ground and battleground can become interchangeable.

From the discussion of the preceding chapter, we can see that the common outlook that informed the mediaeval approach to problems of religion and politics derived its strength from more than a shared set of religious beliefs and habits. It was supported also by the way in which political and religious concepts had come to influence each other. This, in turn, faithfully reflected the realities of mediaeval life where the political and the religious were subtly interwoven. But the great issue that arose near the end of the Middle Ages concerned the fate of these mixed and interdependent modes of thought in a world where national particularism had visibly shaken assumptions about the universal society of Christendom. The end of the alliance between religious and political thought was foreshadowed in the fourteenth-century figure of Marsilius of Padua. What could have been more mediaeval than the opening promise to discuss the “efficient cause” of laws? But the tone changes abruptly and Marsilius announces that he is not going to treat the establishing of laws by any agency other than the human will; that is, he is not interested in God’s role as prime legislator. “I shall treat the establishment of only those laws and governments which spring directly from the decision of the human mind.”1 Yet Marsilius, for all of his radicalism, still retained strong traces of the mediaeval outlook, and it is to the sixteenth century that we must turn in order to discover a revolution in political thought comparable to, and reflective of, what had occurred on the actual plane of political organization.² In the two great impulses of Protestantism and humanism, we find the vital intellectual forces that dissolved the common outlook achieved by the mediaeval mind. Each in its own way worked towards a more autonomous political theory and one that was more national in orientation. On the one side, the contribution of Luther and the early Protestant Reformers was to depoliticize religion; on the other, that of Machiavelli and the Italian humanists worked to detheologize politics. Both sides served the cause of national particularism.

II. THE POLITICAL ELEMENT IN LUTHER’S THOUGHT

The impulse towards disengaging political elements from religious modes of thought had its ultimate origins in Luther’s fervent belief that “the word of God, which teaches full freedom, should not and must not be fettered.”³ This quest for the “real” in religious experience eventually drove Luther into bitter opposition to what he considered as the two main enemies of religious authenticity: the hierarchically organized power structure of the mediaeval Church and the equally complicated subtleties of mediaeval theology. In both areas, Luther’s basic urge was towards simplification: pure truth was to be uncovered by sloughing off the man-made complications which had accumulated over time. Characteristic of this “simplistic imperative” were Luther’s attacks on the confused state of marriage laws:

… Any and all of the practices of the Church are impeded, and entangled, and endangered, on account of the pestilential, unlearned, and irreligious, man-made ordinances. There is no hope of a cure unless the whole of the laws made by men, no matter what their standing, are repealed once for all. When we have recovered the freedom of the Gospel, we should judge and rule in accordance with it in every respect.4

In its broad outlines, Luther’s case implied more than a return to a primitive purity in doctrine and ritual. Its main thrust was directed against ecclesiasticism and scholasticism; that is, against a church structure whose hierarchical principle and temporal entanglements had left a strongly political mark on the life of the Church; and against a mode of thought that had become imbued with political overtones. Consequently, as Luther developed his ideas on doctrine and the nature of the Church he moved steadily in the direction of reducing the political elements in both subjects. In the end he succeeded in creating a religious vocabulary largely devoid of political categories.⁵ Yet, and this is the paradox, it was this depoliticized religious thought that was to exercise a profound influence in the later evolution of political ideas; the more heavily political formulations of Catholicism, on the other hand, exerted little effect except by way of hostility.

The importance of Luther in the history of political thought resides in more than his attack on political theology. He also elaborated an important set of political ideas about authority, obedience, and the political order which were so closely related to his religious beliefs as to point to the conclusion that his political ideas presupposed his religious beliefs in a peculiar way. It was not that Luther’s political ideas were logically deducible from his religious premises, or that both formed part of a unified system. Rather, Luther’s theology “fed” his political ideas in the sense that what he eliminated from the Church in the way of power and political patterns he was compelled to reassert in his conception of temporal government. More succinctly, Luther’s political authoritarianism was the product of the anti-political, anti-authoritarian tendencies in his religious thought. The shape of his political thought was determined in large measure by the basic aim of reconstructing theological doctrine. But, as we have noted, one consequence of the critical destructiveness which accompanied this effort was to depoliticize religious categories. Not only did this have a profound effect on theology, but it had important political repercussions as well. The political elements which had been rejected in matters of dogma and ecclesiology could now be more wholly identified with the concerns of political thought. The effect of this was to be far-reaching, even though Luther had not intended it; for the necessary precondition for the autonomy of political thought was that it become more truly “political.” That the independence of political thought involved more than a matter of theoretical interest is evidenced by the fact that these developments were accompanied by practical actions on Luther’s part which pointed in the same direction. The autonomy of political thought, now rid of the enclosing framework of mediaeval theology and philosophy, went hand in hand with the autonomy of national political power, now unembarassed by the restraints of mediaeval ecclesiastical institutions.

Before turning to these problems, a preliminary difficulty must be disposed of. It has been argued by some commentators that Luther’s thought, from beginning to end, was motivated solely by religious concerns and that, therefore, his outlook was fundamentally non-political. In the words of one recent writer, Luther “was first of all a theologian and a preacher,” hence “he never developed a consistent political philosophy and knew little about the theories underlying the formation of national states in western Europe.”6 Although it would be fruitless to deny the primacy of theological elements in Luther’s thought, it is misleading to conclude on that account that politics was an alien concern. Luther himself held no such modest view of his own political acumen. Prior to his own writings, he declared, “No one had taught, no one had heard, and no one knew anything about temporal government, whence it came, what its office and work was, or how it ought to serve God.”⁷ Underlying this exaggeration was the implicit assumption that a religious reformer could not avoid political speculation. The extraordinary intermixture of religion and politics in that period compelled him to think about politics and even to think politically in religious matters. It was at once Luther’s insight, as well as the source of a good many of his later difficulties, that he understood that religious reforms could not be undertaken in utter disregard of political considerations. It was exactly this lesson that many of the sectarians ignored at great cost. The problems in Luther’s political thought were not the product of a monumental indifference towards politics, but arose from the “split” nature of a political attitude which oscillated between a disdainful and a frenetic interest in politics and sometimes combined both.

Although the historical entanglements of politics and religion in the sixteenth century contributed in no small measure to Luther’s political consciousness, an even more influential factor lay in the nature of the religious institutions that he attacked. His great anti-papal polemics of 1520 were directed against an ecclesiastical institution that, to the sixteenth-century mind, had come to epitomize organized power. The nature of the papacy invited an indictment framed in political terms, and in this stage of its development, Luther’s ecclesiology retained important political elements. His writings of 1520 provide impressive evidence that he clearly recognized the issue to be one involving the power of an ecclesiastical polity. In the first place, the vocabulary employed was heavily sprinkled with phrases and imagery rich in political connotations. The sacramental practices of the priesthood were attacked as “oppressive” (tyrannicum) in that they denied the believer’s “right” (ius) to full participation. The papacy was denounced as the “tyranny of Rome” (Romanam tyrannidem), a “Roman dictatorship” (Romana tyrannis), to which Christians ought to “refuse consent” (nec consentiamus). The demand was then raised for the restoration of “our noble Christian liberty.” “Each man should be allowed his free choice in seeking and using the sacrament … the tyrant exercises his despotism and compels us to accept one kind only.”8

The political note became more pronounced as Luther went on to accuse the papacy of ecclesiastical tyranny: the papacy had arbitrarily legislated new articles of faith and ritual. When its authority had been challenged, it had sought refuge in the argument that papal power was unbound by any law. Moreover, the temporal pretensions of the papacy had not only endangered the spiritual mission of the Church, but had damaged the effectiveness of secular authority as well by confusing secular and spiritual jurisdictions.⁹ The usurpation of temporal power had permitted the popes to advance their temporal claims under the guise of a spiritual mission, and, at the same time, to pervert their spiritual responsibilities by treating them politically. On this latter score, the sale of indulgences, the annates, the proliferation of the papal bureaucracy, and the control over ecclesiastical appointments had as their objective, not religious considerations, but the enhancement of the political power of the papacy. The pope had ceased “to be a bishop and has become a dictator.”¹⁰

During these early years Luther was prepared to accept the perpetuation of the papacy on a reformed basis. His criticisms were founded on the assumptions that religion and politics constituted two distinct realms within the corpus christianum; that each realm required its own form of ruling authority; and that although rulership might be either of a religious or of a political type, it ought not to be both. Despite these distinctions, Luther’s program for papal reform carried strong political overtones in that it was basically a demand for ecclesiastical constitutionalism and owed not a little to conciliarist inspiration.¹¹ The pope was to exchange the role of despot for that of constitutional monarch. Henceforth his power was to be bounded by the fundamentals of Christianity, and he could no longer legislate new articles of faith. Thus the teachings contained in Scripture were to be observed in much the same way as a fundamental law; they performed the function of a doctrinal constitution limiting the power of the popes.¹² To the papal argument that such institutional tinkering was blasphemous in that it would allow unclean hands to tamper with a divine institution, Luther responded that the papacy itself was of human fabrication and hence susceptible of improvement.

The political element in Luther’s case received further emphasis in the remedies he prescribed for dealing with a pope who refused to recognize the bounds of his authority. If a pope persisted in violating the clear injunctions of Scripture, then Christians were obligated to follow the fundamental law of Scripture and to ignore the papal commands.13 Parenthetically it should be noted that this was the same formula employed later by Luther in dealing with secular rulers whose commands ran counter to Scripture. But in one particular Luther was prepared to counsel measures more drastic than anything he proposed against secular rulers. In an argument more political than scriptural, he contended that the papacy might be forcibly resisted. “The Church has no authority except to promote the greater good.” If any pope were to block reforms, then “we must resist that power with life and limb, and might and main.”¹⁴

Although Luther later retracted this and other more sanguinary exhortations,¹⁵ the political element reached a climax when Luther prescribed for the condition in extremis where the papacy blocked all efforts towards reform. Secular authorities possessed the right and the responsibility to initiate the processes of reform:

Therefore, when need requires it, and the pope is acting harmfully to Christian well-being, let any one who is a true member of the Christian community as a whole take steps as early as possible to bring about a genuinely free council. No one is so able to do this as the secular authorities, especially since they are also fellow Christians, fellow priests, similarly religious, and of similar authority in all respects.¹⁶

Despite the acerbity displayed in Luther’s writings of this period, their revolutionary quality was blunted by the reliance on conciliarist arguments. He looked to a combination of secular initiative and conciliar reforms to restore the purity of the papacy. In place of papal supremacy he relied partly on the older notion of the conciliarists that the Church was a societas perfecta, a self-sufficient society containing its own authority, rules, and procedures for regulating the common spiritual life of its members. According to this conception, essentially Aristotelian and political, the Church contained within itself the necessary resources for remedying any ills or grievances that might afflict it.

These conciliarist arguments worked to obscure two emergent aspects of Luther’s thought: the reliance on secular authority and the bias against institutions. As long as Luther placed his hopes in a church council as the agency of reform, the secular ruler was reduced to secondary importance. But once this avenue of reform was closed off, the choice was automatically narrowed down to the secular ruler. When this stage was reached, the idea of the Church as a societas perfecta was dropped; the revitalization of its spiritual life was now held to depend on an external agency. In other words, as Luther’s Church became less political in concept, it became increasingly political in its dependency on secular authority.

As long as Luther adhered to a conciliarist position, and as long as he attributed some utility to the papacy, the revolutionary quality of his theory of the Church would remain muted. But once he had broken with pope and council, the doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers” would assume central importance and the Lutheran conception of the Church would become clearer. Both of these developments, the reliance upon secular rulers and the Lutheran idea of the Church, were interrelated dialectically, in that Luther’s quest for the “real” in religious experience led him to dismiss ecclesiastical institutions and to magnify the political institutions of the ruler. It is only partly correct to attribute Luther’s emphasis on secular authority to the desperate plight of a reformer who had no alternative but to appeal to that quarter. Nor is it correct to view his extreme utterances during the Peasants’ War as marking a sudden discovery of the absolute power of secular princes. There is sufficient evidence to indicate that he held a high opinion of secular authority before the peasant outbreaks. Instead, the emphasis on secular power should be viewed as the outgrowth of the deepening anti-political radicalism of his religious convictions, which, by assigning exclusive rights over the “political” to temporal governors and by minimizing the political character and ecclesiastical power of the Church, opened the way for a temporal monopoly on all kinds of power.

Once this is grasped, Luther’s later dilemma becomes more understandable; the secular powers, whose assistance he had invoked in the struggle for religious reform, began to assume the form of a sorcerer’s apprentice threatening religion with a new type of institutional control. The sources of this dilemma lay in the disequilibrium which had developed between his theory of the Church and his theory of political authority. In the early years of his opposition to the papacy, he did not disavow the central argument of the papalists that spiritual affairs required a ruling head. Thus, although he disagreed with the papalists over the nature of that office, his thinking preserved the mediaeval tradition of a distinctive set of ecclesiastical institutions which might offset the thrusts of temporal powers. But as his views matured into a flat rejection of the papacy and of the entire hierarchical structure of the Church, the whole idea of a countervailing authority was naturally dropped. The tie between religious beliefs and religious institutions was severed; at this stage of his thought, church organization was regarded as an impediment to true belief. Concurrently with these developments in Luther’s conception of the Church, his doctrine of political authority had evolved towards a more enlarged view of the functions and authority of rulers. The rulers were now entrusted with some of the religious prerogatives previously belonging to the pope.17 Thus while institutional authority was being undermined in the religious sphere, it was being underscored in the political.

It was at this point that the supreme difficulty arose. In his later years, Luther began to pay increasing attention to the need for religious organization, a need that he had earlier minimized. But for practical reasons this could not be accomplished except by calling in the secular authorities whose power he had consistently exalted. The institutional weakness of the Church made it no match for the secular power that Luther had rationalized. The end-product was the territorial Church (Landeskirche).

Luther’s elevation of political authority, then, was closely connected with his idea of the Church. The latter, in turn, was an outgrowth of his conception of religion; hence something must be said about his religious doctrines and their bearing upon his ecclesiology and politics.

In Luther’s theology the supreme vocation of man consisted in preparing for God’s free gift of grace. Religious experience was located around an intensely personal communication between the individual and God; the authenticity of the experience depended upon the uninhibited directness of the relationship. Good works, therefore, were unavailing unless informed by God’s sanctifying grace. “Good and pious works can never produce a good and pious man; but a good and pious man does good and pious works.”18 Similarly, the ministrations of an ecclesiastical hierarchy and the full sacramental system were both useless and dangerous; they only multiplied the intermediaries between God and man and raised the inference that there existed a substitute for faith. In sum, everything that stood between God and man had to be eliminated; the only true mediators were Christ and Scripture.

Against this backdrop, Luther’s famous metaphor of the “three walls” surrounding the papacy was symbolic of the dominant driving force in his religious thought: the compulsion to erase and level all that interfered with the right relationship between God and man. The significance of this “simplistic imperative” lies in the variety of ways in which it was expressed: political, intellectual, as well as religious. Intellectually it took the form of a nearly total rejection of the mediaeval philosophical tradition. It was not a rejection steeped in ignorance, but one flowing from a deep conviction that centuries of philosophy had worked to pervert the meaning of Scripture and to support the pretensions of the papacy.¹⁹ The influence of Aristotle was declared to be pernicious; the Christianized Aris-totelianism of Aquinas was condemned as an “unfortunate superstructure on an unfortunate foundation.”²⁰ Impatient with the “Babel of philosophy,” with its endless and subtle disputations concerning substance and accidents, Luther called for a return to the unglossed wisdom of Scripture and the Word of God.²¹ In this connection, his radicalism was also turned against the corpus of traditional knowledge represented by the teachings of the Church Fathers, the pronouncements of the councils, and the doctrines of the canonists. The significance of the attack can best be grasped if it is recalled that mediaeval church doctrine, formal theology, and philosophy had become deeply impregnated with political strains. It was not accident, but a kind of unerring instinct, that led Luther to group together philosophers, canonists, and theologians, for the extent to which each had incorporated political concepts was largely a matter of degree. From this point of view, then, Luther’s attack had the effect of dissolving the alliance between religious and political thought.

One important indication of this trend in Luther’s thought is provided by a contrast between his theory of the sacraments and that held by a mediaeval theologian like Aquinas. One of the most striking aspects of Thomas’s discussion of the sacraments was its doubly political character; the language and concepts evoked a strongly political imagery, and the nature of the sacraments was defined so as to strengthen the political character of the Church and its priesthood. The sacraments, he declared, were to be understood as more than a sign or symbol; they were a form of power (vis spiritualis) which imprinted a certain character on the recipients; the grace that informed the soul was an infused grace (gratia infusa). The “power-nature” of the sacraments also had an important bearing on the role of the priests. The sacrament of ordination established a necessary and salutary inequality of some men over others; the superior excellence of the priesthood was essential to the perfection of the laity. Ordination also conveyed a power (potestas) to the priest to consecrate; that is, to use his divine power to effect a miraculous change in the eucharistic elements of the Mass. Grace thus becomes restricted to a sacramental grace, and it is this alone that justifies men.22

In Luther’s conception, however, these politically suggestive aspects were dropped. Grace was not something administered or infused by the impersonal power of an intermediary. It was the free gift of God, the promise of forgiveness and reconciliation to the repentant sinner. Significantly, Luther reduced the number of sacraments, and among those eliminated was the sacrament of ordination and its accompanying intimations of hierarchy. In subsequent pages we shall further examine the decline in political status of the Lutheran ministry, and here we need only note that this was augured in Luther’s doctrine concerning the relationship between the sacraments and the believer’s state of grace. By insisting upon justification by faith, the power element in the sacraments was diminished in importance and the political overtones practically eliminated. This was clearly registered in some words of Melancthon which can be taken as marking the epitaph of mediaeval political theology:

Sacraments do not justify … Thou mayest be justified, therefore, even without the sacrament; only believe.²³

A second example of the depoliticizing tendencies in Luther is furnished by his conception of the Kingdom of God. From the very beginning, Christian exegetes had resorted to political concepts to define the nature of God’s power and the rule of Christ, and as far back as Eusebius we find an argument in which monotheism and monarchy mutually justify each other. All of these tendencies, however, were resisted by Luther. In repeatedly insisting on a sharp demarcation between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world, he inserted, in effect, a restraining wedge between the two realms which prevented any easy transposition of categories. On the one side stood the Kingdom of God, composed of believing and practicing Christians, earnestly seeking the Word of God and the Spirit of Christ; on the other, the kingdom of the world where temporal government ruled over those non-Christians and lukewarm believers who required a coercive and restraining power to keep them within decent bounds.24

Although the antitheses between these two realms were manifested in several ways—by their contrasting ways of life, by the ethic that prevailed in each, and by the ends pursued—there was one aspect particularly germane to this study. Only one kingdom, that of the world, possessed any political attributes connecting it to the ordinary meaning of kingdom. Here alone was repressive power, law backed by coercion, and all of the other elements of governance. Luther’s conception of Christ’s rulership, on the other hand, lacked any important political qualities. From the outset he insisted that Christ’s vocation had been eminently non-political, and he carried over this notion into the discussion of the role of priests and bishops within the Church.²⁵ The apolitical nature of Christ’s kingdom was made possible not only because coercion and law were unnecessary for Christians, but also because the abolition of the hierarchical principle had destroyed the rationale for distinctions of power and authority among believers.²⁶ Climaxing these notions was Luther’s strong warning that men could not be hurried or pushed into salvation by the use of power. Even in God’s Kingdom the central fact was not His power, but His Word:

No one shall and can command the soul, unless he can show it the way to heaven; but this no man can do, only God. Therefore in matters which concern the salvation of souls nothing but God’s Word shall be taught and accepted.²⁷

III. THE BIAS AGAINST INSTITUTIONS

One product of this revolt against the authority of philosophy and the Catholic conception of an accrued historical wisdom, painstakingly built up through centuries of interpretation, was a pronounced streak of religious primitivism which flaunted simple faith against philosophical complication and was prepared to break “the images of ancestral wisdom” in the name of a return to original Christianity. These aspects of Luther’s thought took on additional dimension when, with the battle cry of “sola Scriptura” and “sola fide,” he carried the assault directly against the mediaeval conception of the Church. Again the emphasis was put on leveling the “walls” that stood between the believer and the object of his beliefs. The whole of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, with its subtle gradations of authority and function, was to be razed. Since the plain meaning of Scripture could be understood by the average man, sacerdotalism was superfluous; there could be no distinctions among believers:

We all have the same authority in regard to the Word and sacraments, although no one has a right to administer them without the consent of the members of his church, or by the call of the majority (because, when something is common to all, no single person is empowered to arrogate it to himself, but we should await the call of the Church) … When a bishop consecrates, he simply acts on behalf of the entire congregation, all of whom have the same authority. They may select one of their number and command him to exercise this authority on behalf of the others.28

The radical egalitarianism implicit in the doctrine of the priesthood of the believers was not dictated by any necessary relationships among the believers themselves. Rather, it grew out of Luther’s conviction that faith could be attained only by individual effort and that, therefore, the “Christian liberty” of the believer must be unbound by externals. Faith could not be created or instilled by an external agency, whether sacerdotal or political; it was an inward disposition of the individual inclining him towards God.²⁹ The reward of faith was membership in the invisible communion of Christians, the corpus mysticum ruled by Christ:

There is no superior among Christians, but Christ Himself and Christ alone. And what kind of authority can there be where all are equal and have the same right, power, possession, and honor, and no one desires to be the other’s superior, but each other’s inferior? One could not establish authority where there are such people, even if one would, since their character and nature will not permit them to have superiors, for no one is willing or able to be the superior.³⁰

The “true” Church, then, was not to be located in any physical assemblage of offices, nor was it to be identified with any hierarchical institution. The Church consisted simply of “an assembly of hearts in one faith … This unity is of itself sufficient to make a Church.”³¹

In this notion of the Church there was one aspect that bore a striking affinity to a theme discussed earlier in connection with Augustine. This is the notion emphasizing the social nature of the Church. The Church emerges as a spontaneous, joyful—“nun freut euch lieben Christen gemein”—and largely coercionless society, one which culminates in the invisible society of saints where “all have all things in common.”³² The dialectical antithesis to this condition is temporal government that rules its society by domination and power. Thus on the one side was a society without government, on the other a government without a true society or fellowship. This emphasis on the fellowship of the believers was rooted in an antipathy towards power which formed one of the basic characteristics of the Lutheran church-society, underlining once more the apolitical tendency in the new ecclesiology.

Implicit in Luther’s theory of the church-society were some novel and farreaching implications. He was advancing the radical proposition not only that a society could retain its identity without the power of a visible, directing “head,” but that the perfection of its nature demanded that it be acephalous. This assertion, that a society could be tightly knit and cohesive, yet remain headless, ran counter to one of the common assumptions of much of classical and mediaeval thought, that any society or order presupposed a directing head, a central source of impulse. There was also Luther’s equally disturbing claim that a society could flourish and express its identity without relying upon a hierarchical principle. As far back as Plato and Aristotle, philosophers had contended that there could be no right order of any kind unless the “lower” were subordinated to the “higher,” the “inferior” to the “superior.” In opposition to this long-standing belief, Luther revived the radical notion of Christian membership: to be a Christian meant to occupy a status that was at once more elevated than any other, yet those who did occupy it entered into a condition of equality each with his fellows.

… We are not baptised unto kings, princes, or even unto the mass of men, but unto Christ and unto God himself; neither are we called kings, princes, or common folk, but Christians.33

This equality of condition, however, did not carry the same meaning as in later democratic thought; that is, the idea of an equality of claims or rights. Rather it meant something at once more provocative and ominous: an equality of mutual subservience where “no one desires to be the other’s superior, but each the other’s inferior.”³⁴

Luther’s rejection of the two principles of monarchy and hierarchy, insofar as these applied to ecclesiastical matters, marked also an important stage in the destruction of certain forms of political imagery. The notion of society as forming a huge pyramid, wherein the power assigned each layer was in an inverse proportion to the length of the layer, was cast aside for the flattened imagery of a society where, ideally, the members were equal. This raises the question of what the role of the ministry was to be in the new Church; if Luther had felt compelled to smuggle back some elements of papal power, this would have been registered in his doctrine of the ministry. Although Luther consistently denied that the equality of the believers obviated the necessity for a trained ministry, this denial in no way presaged the reintroduction of political elements into the Church. The priesthood, as Luther emphasized, did not denote power or authority but “office”; that is, a defined function.³⁵ This meant the transformation of the mediaeval priest into a minister, an agent who administered, expounded and explained the Word.³⁶ This loss in status was accompanied by a drastic change in the relationship between minister and congregation. Unlike the priest, the minister could not draw upon the mysterious sources of authority flowing from a centuries-old tradition. Stripped of the mystique of office, the minister faced his congregation as a primus inter pares. The office itself was no longer consecrated by the representative of a powerful ecclesiastical institution; it was derived from the consent of the pares. Since the minister was the creature of consent, not of authority, he could be removed from office by those who had selected him.³⁷

In depoliticizing the ministry, however, Luther had inserted some broad hints concerning the congregation which were to be caught up in the thought of the radical sectarians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and through that medium were to have a decisive influence on democratic theories. In other words, while ejecting some political elements from his theory of the Church, especially those that came to be embedded in the idea of an ecclesiastical hierarchy, Luther had also ended by adopting others. For example, underlying the equality of the believers and the minimal role of the ministry were certain assumptions about the capacity of the believers to recognize truth, assumptions that seemingly echoed Aristotle’s defense of the citizen’s ability to judge:

… Each and all of us are priests because we all have the one faith, the one gospel, one and the same sacrament; why then should we not be entitled to taste or test, and to judge what is right or wrong in the faith?38

From this followed Luther’s demand that the “second wall,” symbolizing the papal claim to be the final interpreter of doctrine, be swept aside. The papal position, as Luther instinctively recognized, was grounded in a kind of Christianized Platonism which asserted that disputed truths could be resolved only by a specially endowed intelligence.³⁹ Against this “aristocratic epistemology,” Luther advanced a “democratic” one which matched the uncomplicated “simple faith” of the people against the subtleties of theologians and averred both the right and the ability of the congregation to judge religious teachings.⁴⁰ He adopted this position partly from a profound conviction concerning the primacy of the direct communion between God and the individual soul, and partly from a conviction that the individual conscience could not be forced into salvation by an outside human agency. Although Luther later modified his optimism about the capacities of the average believer, his early statements lent a powerful stimulus to the currents that culminated in congregationalism. They also held far-reaching implications for political thought. Latent in this conception of a cohesive religious fellowship which could decide and act without the aid of any hierarchy was the further idea of a community that could express a truth. This represented something more than the Aristotelian notion about the superiority of a pooled judgment contributed by the citizenry. The Lutheran conception did not involve a judgment at all; it did not relate to contingent matters, but to fundamental truths; it was not the product of diverse talents and experience, but of an inner knowledge common to a body of communicants.⁴¹

IV. THE STATUS OF THE POLITICAL ORDER

Nostalgia for the apostolic simplicity of the primitive Church did not blind Luther to the fact that a near-anarchistic form of church organization was an inadequate prescription for an actual congregation whose members dwelt in varying states of grace and faith. At an early stage in his writings, he began to elaborate the distinction between the “visible” and the “invisible” Church. The former consisted of those Christians whose weak faith necessitated a visible form of organizational structure. Unity had to be created externally by human art. The “invisible” Church, in contrast, derived its unity from faith; it was largely independent of organization and regulations.42

In his later years, Luther came to be more impressed with the value of “distinguishing marks,” even for the invisible Church.⁴³ This was less significant, however, than his growing reliance upon secular authority to police the visible Church and to insure a degree of religious uniformity. Given this development, the Lutheran conception of political authority assumes crucial importance; for a religion that had denied itself the power of an ecclesiastical organization was now confronted by, and invited the assistance of, political rulers who were unhampered by the traditional restraints of religious institutions. To appreciate the new theoretical setting within which temporal authority was now to operate, something must be said concerning earlier Christian attitudes towards the political order and the office of ruler.

From its early beginnings, the Christian attitude concerning politics had been complicated by a persistent impulse towards disengagement from the world. The scriptural warning that “My Kingdom is not of this world” was later systematized by Augustine into the tense symbolism of the civitas dei and civitas terrena. Despite the impressive effort of Aquinas to fashion a comfortable accommodation between the political order and the divine, the mystics and the monastics survived as eloquent witnesses to the strain of incivisme in Christianity.

In Luther, the impulse towards disengagement took a quite different form. Where Augustine had relied upon the Church as the main aid to individual salvation and had relegated the state to the role of guardian of order, Luther felt constrained to call upon secular power to help Christian souls in gaining release from the tyranny of the organized Church.⁴⁴ One fundamental reason for the different roles assigned government by Augustine and Luther is to be found in the different historical positions occupied by each. Augustine’s thinking was deeply tinged by the millennial hopes common in the early centuries of the Christian era. It was natural for him to adopt a time-perspective oriented towards the future. Although, in contrast to the expectancies of some of the early Christians, Augustine minimized the imminence of the millennium, the notion of a future pregnant with the promise of deliverance remained a vivid element in his thought.⁴⁵

The thousand years intervening between Augustine and Luther could not but have a sobering effect on Christian optimism. What had been a beckoning future for one became, for the other, an interminable present calling for a certain resignation on the part of the believer. The muted chiliasm of Luther contributed in an important way to his marked antipathy for history. After the days of apostolic simplicity had been passed, history had become a record of the degradation of the Word. Consequently, the theological and ecclesiastical legacy of these centuries must be dismissed. On the basis of these beliefs, Luther’s time-perspective was reflective of a compelling urgency to return to a more primitive state of Christian perfection; it was a part of a radicalism oriented towards recapturing the authentic Christian elements of the distant past.

These contrasts in time-perspectives were closely related to some important differences in the political ideas of Augustine and Luther. Although Augustine had punctured the classical notion of the autonomy and self-sufficiency of the political order, he had not left the political order dangling in limbo. It was an integral part of the whole ordo of creation and contributed its share towards the preservation of the total harmony. For Augustine, the concept of a divine order symbolized more than an ingenious blend of diversities; it was a concordia dynamically oriented towards perfection. Accordingly, the political order, integrated as it was into a cosmos full with meaning and direction, acquired a rooted stability, a sustenance drawn from the nature of creation itself. Thus, even though the political community was destined to be superseded at the climax of history, until that time it participated in the perfection written into the very essence of things.

Luther, however, departed significantly from the Augustinian conception of ordo. For Augustine, ordo had operated as a principle immanent in the whole of creation; therefore, any association, even a non-Christian one, possessed value to the extent that it secured peace and tranquillity. Luther, on the other hand, reduced “order” from an immanent to a formal principle without real viability:

Order is an outward thing. Be it as good as it may, it can fall into misuse. Then it is no longer order but disorder. So no order has any intrinsic worth of its own, as hitherto the Popish Order has been thought to have. But all order has its life, worth, strength, and virtue in right use; else it is worthless and fit for nothing.46

In abandoning the concept of ordo as the sustaining principle within a larger pattern of meaning, Luther deprived the political order of the moral sustenance flowing from this more comprehensive whole. The lack of integration between the political order and the divine order produced a marked tension within Luther’s conception of government. The political order appeared as a distinctly fragile achievement, precarious, unstable, and prone to upset. At the same time, the vulnerability of this order created the need for a powerful, repressive authority. In other words, it was not the political order itself that was sustained by a divine principle; it was the secular power upholding order that was divinely derived. It was no idle boast of Luther’s to assert that he had praised temporal government more highly than anyone since Augustine.⁴⁷ Such praise was necessary once the political order had been extracted from its cosmic context. The divine element in political authority was inevitably transformed from a sustaining principle into a repressive, coercive one.

Luther’s attachment to temporal authority, then, was not the product of a particular stage in his development, but was rooted in the conviction that the fallen world of man was fundamentally orderless. Order had to be imposed:

Let no one think that the world can be ruled without blood; the sword of the ruler must be red and bloody; for the world will and must be evil, and the sword is God’s rod and vengeance upon it.48

Significantly, Luther singled out, as the first “wall” to be leveled, the papal claims to temporal jurisdiction. His logic here displayed the same impulse as his religious theorizing: just as the believer’s free access to Scripture was to be secured from papal interference, so the secular ruler was to be unhampered in his efforts to achieve order:

… The social corpus of Christendom includes secular government as one of its component functions. This government is spiritual in status, although it discharges a secular duty. It should operate, freely and unhindered, upon all members of the entire corpus, should punish and compel where guilt deserves or necessity requires, in spite of pope, bishops, and priests; and whether they denounce or excommunicate to their heart’s desire.⁴⁹

The long scholarly disputes over whether or not Luther preserved the mediaeval conception of a corpus christianum have served to obscure the profound changes he made in the content of that concept.⁵⁰ The emphasis on secular authority was accompanied by other doctrinal changes which enhanced that authority still further. At the same time that Luther was undercutting the sacerdotal hierarchy by the idea of the priesthood of all believers, he was elevating the status of rulers by clothing it with a sacerdotal dignity: rulers “are priest and bishops too.”⁵¹ The sharp line between clergy and laity was erased, and priest and peasant were placed on a level of equality in relation to secular jurisdiction.⁵² The estate of Christendom had fallen to new trustees: the princes “discharge their office as an office of the Christian community, and for the benefit of that community … Each community, council, and administration has authority to abolish and prevent, apart from the knowledge or consent of pope or bishop, anything contrary to God, and hurtful to man in body and soul.”⁵³

The practical significance of the role assigned to political authority lay not so much in its broad mandate, nor in its responsibilities for religious reform, but rather in the fact that its power was now to be exercised in a context where papal institutions had been deprived of divinity and power. The secular ruler alone derived his powers from God; the power of the papacy, in contrast, had resulted from strictly human contrivings, or, worse, from the machinations of the Antichrist.

V. THE POLITICAL ORDER WITHOUT COUNTERWEIGHT

Luther’s view of political authority was not all of one piece; it varied depending on whether the issue was primarily religious or political. When temporal government was called upon to assist in furthering religious reforms, it was viewed as a positive and constructive agency. But in its more secular and political role, government appeared as essentially negative and repressive. In the one area, it was treated as the sole alternative for initiating reform; in the other, as the sole alternative to anarchy.54 The link that bound together the two views of political authority was Luther’s demand that rulers be released from pre-existing restraints in order to accomplish their work. We have already examined this element in connection with Luther’s attack on the papacy; it reappeared when he considered the secular activities of government. Finding the same confusion and complexity in the laws of society as had prevailed in religious matters, Luther advocated a characteristically simple and radical solution:

… The body politic cannot be felicitously governed merely by rules and regulations. If the administrator be sagacious, he will conduct the government more happily when guided by circumstances rather than by legal decrees. If he be not so wise, his legal methods will only result in harm, since he will not know how to use them, nor how to temper them to the case in hand. Hence, in public affairs, it is more important to make sure that good and wise men are in control than that certain laws are promulgated. Men of this kind will themselves be the best of laws, will be alert to every kind of problem, and will resolve them equitably. If knowledge of the divine laws accompanies native sagacity, it is obvious that written laws will be superfluous and noxious.⁵⁵

The only restraints operating on the ruler, other than those of his own conscience, came from the exhortations of the ministers; since the ministers no longer spoke as the representatives of a powerful ecclesiastical establishment, the effectiveness of this restraint would be problematical.

Although some commentators have shown that Luther never intended to emancipate the secular authorities from the dictates of natural law and reason, this proves only that Luther was not Machiavelli. For the point is that natural law becomes a mere set of moral homilies when it is translated into a context where the power of the rulers alone has been elevated above all other institutional rivals and where allegiance to the other great power institution has been condemned.

The situation thus created was ripe for a collision between the two entities that Luther, by analogous arguments, had sought to set free. On the one hand there was the secular ruler, unrestrained by the pressures of competing institutions, and on the other the Christian congregation seeking divine grace, unaided and unguided by sacerdotal institutions. Luther, however, often wrote as though the former never presented a threat to the latter. The true believer was a subject of the Kingdom of God, where Christ alone rules. “Therefore, it is not possible for the secular sword and law to find any work to do among Christians, since of themselves they do much more than its laws and doctrines can demand.”56 If all men were to become true Christians, secular government would be unnecessary. Government was justified by the existence of the large masses of the unrighteous and unregenerate; in the absence of coercion, men would be at each other’s throats and society in chaos. “For this reason God has ordained two governments; the spiritual, which by the Holy Spirit under Christ makes Christians and pious people, and the secular, which restrains the unchristian and wicked so that they must needs keep the peace outwardly, even against their will.”⁵⁷

Even if the secular rulers, whose characters Luther frequently criticized, were to overstep their bounds and issue commands contrary to Scripture, no real harm could be done to the true Christian. Government, laws, and the ways of society could affect the physical goods of man, but never the vital center of his soul:

When we consider the inner, spiritual man and see what belongs to him if he is to be a free and devout Christian, in fact and in name, it is evident that, whatever the name, no outer thing can make him either free or religious. For his religion and freedom, and moreover, his sinfulness and servitude, are neither bodily nor outward.⁵⁸

“Christian liberty,” then, was the state enjoyed by the believer who had severed his external dependencies and had oriented his soul towards a complete submission to God. Although he could be expected to do more than his social and political obligations required, his ultimate salvation was in no way implicated in the world; his good works in the world were the consequence of his faith, and his faith could never be the result of his works. “You have the kingdom of heaven; therefore you should leave the kingdom of earth to any one who wants to take it.”⁵⁹

The doctrine of Christian liberty was modified by Luther in the light of his experiences during the Peasants’ War. The basic question raised at that time was whether the spread of lawlessness might eventually undermine the peace of the faithful and thereby interfere with the quest for salvation. The pressure of events forced Luther to soften the distinction between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world. If the rebellious peasants were to gain the upper hand, “both kingdoms would be destroyed and there would be neither worldly government nor Word of God, but it would result in the permanent destruction of Germany …”⁶⁰ If both the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world possessed a common need for order, as Luther admitted, then the true believer could not be as indifferent towards the political order as the doctrine of Christian liberty implied. Religion and politics were more closely intertwined than the theory of the two kingdoms inferred. Luther’s theory of government, then, came down to this: temporal authority could insure outward peace for the true believer; it could never affect his internal virtue. For the unbeliever, government could impose external order and external virtue. Government existed “in order that the good may have outward peace and protection; and that the wicked may not be free to do evil, without fear, in peace and quietness.”61

Certain confusions began to appear in Luther’s thought, however, when he attempted to relate his doctrine of government to the problems of obedience and freedom of conscience. Sometimes he argued that authority could not coerce the consciences of the believers; and this was consistent with his teaching that externals could not affect the liberty of the Christian man. At other times, he insisted that government ought not to coerce consciences. This could only mean logically that freedom of conscience was useful primarily for the unrighteous who might some day be led back to the fold.

The same difficulty reappeared when Luther allowed that men need not obey when a ruler commanded contrary to the teachings of Scripture.⁶² But this could involve only the true believer, for he alone possessed a conscience guided by Scripture. At the same time, he alone owned a conscience that could not be harmed by external actions.

The contradictory elements were present in other aspects of Luther’s teaching on this same general subject. Earlier he had urged that the secular rulers apply force against the papacy, yet he overwhelmingly maintained that secular rulers ought not to be resisted for any cause. Thus political authority might resist religious authority on either political or religious grounds, while religious authorities might never resist political authority on either religious or political grounds. The final incongruity appeared during the Peasants’ War when Luther advocated the right of anyone to kill a rebellious peasant. Thus a rebel might be slain by anyone, a tyrant by no one.⁶³

VI. THE FRUITS OF SIMPLICITY

Luther has frequently been criticized by later writers for promoting the cause of political absolutism. Figgis, for example, coupled Luther with Machiavelli and treated their ideas as two sides of the same coin.⁶⁴ Although this view is correct in emphasizing the extreme lengths to which Luther went in releasing temporal rulers from previous restraints, it tends to view the problem primarily in terms of moral and religious restraints. Actually, Luther consistently upheld the right of Christians to rebuke the excesses of princes, and his own writings testify to the extent to which he followed that advice. If we are to look for the fundamental weakness in Luther’s thinking, it is to be sought in his failure to appreciate the importance of institutions. His obsession with religious simplicity caused him to ignore the role of religious institutions as political restraints. The social consequences of a weakly organized religion were apparent in his own day. At moments of political and social crisis, he was unable to appeal to any effective religious organization to act as mediator. During the Peasants’ War, he was compelled to entrust the whole cause of peace to the princes, despite his own conviction that all of the wrongs were not entirely on one side. In trying to get out of this predicament, Luther succeeded only in making the Christian ethic appear irrelevant to the logic of the political order: “the sayings on mercy belong in God’s kingdom and among Christians, not in the kingdom of the world …”65

The quest for simplicity also had its effects when Luther considered political institutions. Here it took the form of accepting authority rather than rejecting it. From a few ingenuous ideas about authority, order, and social classes, Luther fashioned a political doctrine of stark simplicity, unrelieved by the shadows of qualification. It was designed essentially to impress on princes the desirability of paternal rule and on subjects the wickedness of disobedience. Just as his religious teachings emphasized the single relationship of a believer who throws himself on God’s mercy, so the political order was stripped of nearly all except the single relationship between ruler and ruled. In both cases the moral impotence and sinfulness of man were the source of his dependence. But the peculiarity of the relationship between political superiors and their inferiors was that so much of it remained unpermeated by religious values. Religious considerations entered only at the extremities of the relationship; the ruler held his authority from God, while the subject was under a divine injunction to obey rulers in every conceivable political circumstance. No provision was made for the other complex relationships in a political order. The political relationship, like the religious, was a personalized rather than an institutionalized one.

These ideas marked the eclipse of the mediaeval conception of a political society with all of its rich suggestion of a corporate whole knit together in a common involvement. There was no counterpart in Luther’s thought to the ideal monarch of Aquinas who looked upon his subjects sicut propria membra, as members of his own body.⁶⁶ Instead Luther’s ruler was cut in the image of an Old Testament God, angry and vengeful, yet softening his wrath by a paternal concern. This growing alienation between political authority and the society over which it ruled was further enhanced by the fact that society itself was no longer pictured through categories colored by the corpus mysticum idea. The promise of a society founded in fellowship had been reserved exclusively for the church-society. Moreover, the common love of Christ which pervaded the membership of this more perfect society created in it an inner dynamism, a capacity for self-generated movement which was lacking in an unsanctified society. Political society was not pervaded by love, but by conflicts which vitiated any possibility of a common life and incapacitated the whole from acting in unison. The inability of political society to generate its own actions provided the justification for the overweening position of the temporal ruler; his absolute power was the logical remedy for a depraved society which urgently needed control but was helpless to provide it; his position outside and above society merely dramatized the malady of a body whose sole movement was the shudder of convulsive conflict.

In this connection, Luther’s doctrine of Christian liberty and his defense of disobedience on religious grounds did little to redress the balance against the secular ruler. Both of these ideas had been hollowed of their political content. “True” liberty had been transformed into an internal state of faith, while obligation was disconnected from political relationships and made to apply solely to religious issues; in political matters, men had to obey unquestioningly.

The foregoing points to the conclusion that the problem presented by Luther was one arising not from the divorce between politics and religious values, but from the political irrelevancy of the Christian ethic. Although Luther certainly assumed that Christian values, such as love, neighborliness, and charity, would exercise a salutary influence in society and politics, he failed to show their viability in dealing with problems other than those located at the elementary level of the household and the neighborhood. The Christian ethic might well be applicable at the intimate, personal level, and yet be quite irrelevant for the relationships created by a complicated political order. Luther remained unaware of this difficulty, because he reduced political relationships to a single form. Something of the political inadequacy of the Christian teaching was glimpsed by Luther himself. In the tract On Trading and Usury (1524), his argument began by laying down the strict Christian teachings on the subject; soon, however, he was led to admit that the Christian ethic was of little utility here inasmuch as most members of society did not act as Christians. His solution was to abandon the Christian argument and to invoke, instead, the coercive arm of government. The argument ended on the note that the world would be reduced to chaos if men tried to govern by the Gospel.67

These doubts about the political effectiveness of Christian teachings had their roots in the fundamental ambiguity characteristic of the thinking of many of the early Reformers. On the religious side they advocated the most uncompromising and radical reforms, while on the political side they enjoined quietism. Luther, for example, vehemently rejected any hierarchical distinctions among Christian believers; yet he assumed that a social hierarchy was natural and necessary.⁶⁸ He eloquently defended the sanctity of the individual conscience; yet he unhesitatingly accepted the institutions of serfdom. He admitted that some of the grievances of the peasants were justified, but counseled the peasant against attaching much value to material concerns. He was willing to raise fundamental questions about every form of religious authority, but towards political institutions he was quite unsceptical, even when he doubted the morals and motives of rulers. His thought represented a striking combination of revolt and passivity.