Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood
to papal threats was a series of treatises in 1520, the first of which was his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. Here, his theological preoccupations shifted, significantly, from the disposition of power between God and the pope to the conflicts between the Church – specifically the pope, together with the Holy Roman Emperor – and German secular authorities.
This would be followed in rapid succession by two other treatises, laying the groundwork for his mature theology: On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, which, written in strongly vituperative terms, attacked the papacy and challenged the sacramental functions of the Church; and On the Freedom of a Christian, which, though framed in more conciliatory language and even dedicated to Pope Leo X, outlined the principles that would constitute the doctrine of justification by faith. Luther here elaborated on the dualism, or the paradox, at the root of his theology: the simultaneity of human sin and divine justification, the nature of humanity as irreducibly sinful yet saved.
Human beings, Luther argued, are at once sinners by nature and saints by faith. Redeemed by God, they may freely undertake service to others; but, while Luther can be interpreted to mean that justification by faith is simultaneously a free commitment to good works, he insists that ordinary human beings are free as any lord or king and subject to no overlord in matters affecting the soul. Yet, at the same time, as he would soon make clear, the irreducible sinfulness of humanity requires temporal authorities to whom all Christians owe obedience. It is true that, in these early works, Luther not only challenged the division of the world into temporal and spiritual jurisdictions but established the principle that all baptized Christians are equally priests; and the idea of a universal priesthood would be taken up by radical forces as a justification of rebellions far beyond anything envisaged by Luther himself, including the peasant revolt. But this radical appropriation of Lutheran doctrine should not disguise the fact that Luther’s account of the simultaneous duality of sin and justification entailed both a denial of ecclesiastical jurisdiction and an insistence on strict obedience to secular authority.
In 1521, Luther was called before an assembly of the estates of the Holy Roman Empire at the Diet of Worms; and, refusing to recant the views expressed in the 95 Theses and other writings, he was outlawed by the emperor, Charles V. Under threat of arrest, he disappeared for a time. Despite imperial orders for his apprehension and punishment, declaring it a crime to shield him, he was offered protection at Wartburg Castle in Eisenach by a leading German prince, Frederic III, Elector of Saxony. It was then that he began his translation of the Bible into German, which would be printed in 1534 and can reasonably be regarded as his most far-reaching accomplishment, with influences well beyond the German language or Lutheran theology.
The Doctrine of Obedience to Secular Authority
In Luther’s treatises of 1520, ideas essential to the Reformation, challenging the spiritual authority of the Church, its monopoly on the interpretation of scripture and its sole right to call a council of the Church, were formulated with direct reference to the relation between ecclesiastical and secular authority. Whatever effects these treatises may have had in undermining ecclesiastical authority, their implications for obedience to secular government were very different. To challenge the claims of the Church as privileged mediator between humanity and God, it might have been enough to reject, as Luther did in the 95 Theses, its efforts to usurp divine powers of punishment and absolution. Challenging the Church’s claims to temporal power and its usurpation of secular authority required something more, and even that would not suffice to impose on Christians a strict obedience to secular government. The doctrine of justification by faith would achieve all these effects.
Commentaries on Luther’s theology have tended to identify his greatest innovation as his challenge to the Church’s sacramental, sacerdotal powers. By the late Middle Ages, they say, a clear distinction had been established between the sacramental powers of the Church and its jurisdictional authority in the temporal domain, its coercive powers in the public realm (in foro exteriori et publice), its ‘plenitude of power’. Indeed, others before Luther, such as Marsilius of Padua, had challenged its temporal authority. But Luther took the extra step. No one had yet gone quite so far in questioning not just the Church’s temporal authority but even its powers over the souls of the faithful.
Yet, if we follow the logic of Luther’s theological development, it is striking that it proceeds in the opposite direction. He begins by questioning the Church’s power to punish sins, to excommunicate or to confer benefices and indulgences, and then advances from there not simply to attack the temporal authority of the Church but to support secular governments and their claims to almost unconditional obedience. It is at this point that the doctrine of justification by faith becomes truly essential. That doctrine may have contributed even more to the defence of secular authority, and the necessity of obedience to it, than to the attack on the sacramental powers of the Church.
The Lutheran creed of obedience looks back to St Augustine and St Paul, who had, at different moments in the history of the Roman Empire, enunciated doctrines of obedience to secular authority.1 In the first volume of this history, it was argued that the defining principle of Western Christianity was the rendering unto Caesar and God their respective domains of law and obedience. The ‘universal’ Catholic Church was born when what had been a Jewish cult detached itself, in accordance with the doctrines of St Paul, from Judaism’s all-embracing religious law, which applied to both matters of faith and the mundane practices of everyday life. The distinction between Caesar and God, each with his own proper sphere of obedience, would perhaps more than anything else set Christianity, especially in its Western form, apart from the other monotheistic religions.2 It was this, above all, that permitted Christianity to become an imperial religion, which relinquished to Caesar the right to rule this world.
Before the Constantinian conversion, St Paul had already invoked this principle to impose upon Christians a need to obey imperial authority. After Christianity had become the official religion of empire, St Augustine elaborated the principle of obedience to secular power into an even more uncompromising doctrine, which still included submission to pagan rulers. He accomplished this by transforming the old Christian dualism into a rather more complex dichotomy. Instead of a simple distinction between earthly and heavenly realms, or secular and spiritual authority, or even the sacred and the profane, Augustine proposed a dichotomy between the divine and earthly ‘cities’, which are antithetical but inextricably united in this world: the one representing the saintly, holy, elect, pious and just, the other representing the impure, impious, unjust and damned, which runs through every human society and every human institution, including holy institutions of the Church. Since all human beings and all human institutions are tainted by unholiness and sin, no truly just and rightful order is possible in this world; and they must all subject themselves, by divine ordination, to the earthly powers whose purpose is not to achieve some higher principle of holiness or justice on this earth but simply to maintain peace, order and a degree of physical comfort.
For early Christian theologians under imperial rule, a doctrine of obedience to Caesar may have been a relatively simple matter. The issue became infinitely more complicated when empire gave way to the medieval fragmentation of temporal power, in which ecclesiastical authorities were major players. Now theologians had to confront not only a division of labour between Caesar and God, with their respective claims to obedience, but also between Empire and Church, or princes and popes, among a bewildering variety of other autonomous powers, from feudal lords to civic corporations. It is not surprising that much of Christian theology soon took the form of legalistic arguments on jurisdiction.
No philosopher or theologian could ever have decisively resolved the boundary disputes between ecclesiastical jurisdiction and secular governments, especially between the papacy and rising feudal kingdoms, which increasingly plagued Western Christendom in the later Middle Ages; but medieval Christian theology was at least obliged to confront the question in a way that early Christianity was not. It may have been enough in the time of St Paul to elaborate the principle of rendering unto Caesar and God their respective domains; and it may have been enough in St Augustine’s time to construct a theology of other-worldliness, like Christian Neoplatonism, which allowed obedience to Caesar to coexist with a devaluation of earthly existence and a philosophy of mystical release from the material world. But, in the age of Thomas Aquinas, theologians were compelled to contend with, and even to justify,