Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie
prayers for the Crown, without a whisper of acknowledgment that sometimes governments do bad things. It even stretched its Protestant principles so far as to anoint one king, the beheaded Charles I, as a saint. Yet when the Church of England has needed help from the state, such as when it was desperately trying to set up workable structures in colonial North America, the state has felt free to block it at every turn. For three centuries, the church did not dare even to question this arrangement. Since then, some of its leaders have wondered whether they should stay in this unequal marriage, but they have never yet walked away. The Church of England even now clings to its subordinate but privileged place in British public life, readier to celebrate than to challenge state power. Henry VIII would have been proud.
Few other Protestant churches were so easily tamed, but they all faced the same dilemmas. How far should they submit to a ruler who was, or claimed to be, on their side? And how far should they resist a ruler who was not?
Luther’s first instinct was to caution against any thought of rebellion, even against the “anti-Christian regime” of the papacy. In a tract written in 1521, he argued that it is always the innocent who end up suffering in rebellions and that politics is none of ordinary people’s business. They could humbly petition their princes, but they could not take matters into their own hands. Who were they to think that they could tear down Antichrist’s kingdom by themselves? Only God could do that. If they truly had faith, they would wait.6
This reflected Luther’s own political context. Saxony was not a law-governed bureaucratic territory. Its prince, the elector, was the beginning and the end of government. Any alternative such as the “rule of law” meant handing power to corrupt local noblemen. Luther disliked law both theologically and politically. As one scholar puts it, he had “more confidence in one enlightened prince than in battalions of lawyers”. In a sermon in 1528, he told his audience,
You aren’t the one who ought to establish justice and punish injustice. When some wrong is done in my house, and my next door neighbour wants to break into my house and do justice there, what should I say to that?
Better to be still and wait on the Lord.7
Carte blanche for rulers, then? Not quite. In 1523, Luther published a longer book bluntly titled Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed. His starting point was that princes themselves are no better than plunderers:
They can do no more than strip and fleece, heap tax upon tax. . . . Since the beginning of the world a wise prince is a mighty rare bird, and an upright prince even rarer. They are generally the biggest fools or the worst scoundrels on earth.
That does not, however, detract from their authority. Rulers only rule with God’s permission. The reason princes are so dreadful is that “the world is too wicked, and does not deserve to have many wise and upright princes”. Indeed, the only reason God has established princes and governments at all is that human beings are sinners. “If the world were composed of real Christians, that is, true believers, there would be no need for or benefits from prince, king, lord, sword or law.”
That might seem like a banal enough observation, but Luther’s theology gives it immediate and practical importance. For him, all believers are “real Christians” of this kind, or rather, that is what they are in God’s eyes, even if they are still outwardly mired in sin. In other words, Christians live simultaneously in two worlds. As redeemed and regenerate believers, they live for God and do not need laws to live by any more than trees need laws to tell them how to grow. But as sinners, subject to human frailty, they both need and deserve the smack of firm discipline.
This is Luther’s theory of the “two kingdoms”, the foundation of Protestant political theory. There is an earthly kingdom: the kingdom of secular politics, a place of law, justice, and punishment. Its purpose is to restrain human evil so that some semblance of peace and order is possible in this world. That is a limited aim but not an ignoble one. God has ordained this kingdom, and Christians can serve it, whether as princes, lawyers, or executioners. But existing alongside it, and far more important than it, is the kingdom of heaven, whose only king is Christ. Here there is no law, and no coercion, because all true Christians are one another’s willing servants. And this is where Christians’ hearts should be set, not on the lumpen business of human politics. It is an idea that has echoed through the centuries.
Plainly, however, it does not answer the question posed by Luther’s title. Whenever two kingdoms exist side by side, there are boundary disputes. Where does the line fall? Luther had some partial answers. He argued that princes could regulate practical features of church life such as finance, property, and governance, but could not trespass onto matters of faith or doctrine. He did not spell out how to deal with issues which straddle that line. He did at least tackle some of the obvious hard cases. Could princes punish heresy? No, because errors should be corrected by loving admonition from ministers, not by persecution. Could they ban books? No. He suggested that if they tried, a Christian should reply,
Gracious sir, I owe you obedience in body and property; command me within the limits of your authority on earth, and I will obey. But if you command me to believe or to get rid of certain books, I will not obey; for then you are a tyrant and overreach yourself.
Luther even argued that if a prince orders his people to fight in an unjust war, it is their duty to disobey him. Importantly, though, such resistance should always be passive. You should refuse an unjust order and then submit peacefully to punishment for that refusal. It is a bold theory, but not a practical one.8
Luther managed to maintain this position for the rest of his life. He happily accepted various princes’ patronage and support. Yet he could still bite, or at least bark at, the hands that fed him. When princes enriched themselves with Church property, he called them robbers. When a small Thuringian town tried to expel its pastor in 1543, Luther vigorously protested on two-kingdoms grounds: “You have not instituted the office, but God’s Son alone has done so. . . . Keep to your own office and leave God’s rule to him.”9 When he learned about the defensive pact that the Protestant princes and cities had agreed to in 1529, he angrily accused them of faithlessness for trusting in human aid rather than in God.
Yet pacts were made, and larger cities were not so easy to boss around. In practice, princes disliked laying down their powers at the gates of Christ’s kingdom. Luther’s Renaissance-minded colleague Philip Melanchthon took a more pragmatic view. If princes were called to punish sin in this world, surely that included punishing sin in the Church? So, surely, they had a right – indeed, a duty – forcibly to reform a corrupt church in their territory, by, for example, expelling clergy who would not renounce the pope and imposing a new, Lutheran order of service? Indeed, is this not actually a prince’s most important calling and responsibility?
Luther was forced to concede the point. Plainly, during the current crisis, with the Church confined in its popish dungeon, no one but a prince could set it free. But he insisted that this was a temporary expedient. Once settled churches were established, princes must relinquish their hold. Likewise, he admitted that the princes should suppress Anabaptists and other “fanatics”. However, he denied that this was religious persecution. It was simply the suppression of rebellion or the punishment of blasphemy, which was legitimate, he argued tendentiously, because openly defying God was a denial of natural justice.
His princely allies could live with the requirement that at some unspecified point in the future they would have to step back from their hands-on role in church life. Only slowly did they begin to argue that that time might never come. The duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg declared that he would always have an obligation to protect and oversee his church, like the kings of ancient Israel. Inexorably, this became Lutheranism’s entrenched orthodoxy. In 1555, German princes were granted legal authority to determine their subjects’ religion.10
It was not too bad a deal for the reformers. Their princely allies might be overbearing, but they were sincere enough. Indeed, because they were now claiming that God had called them to reform their churches, they had to be seen to be doing so in good earnest.