Martin Luther on Church and State

1978

The beginning and later growth of the Protestant Reformation of the 16 th century was seen as a new challenge to religious authority that went beyond the Roman Catholic Church. Many viewed it as a threat to the whole social structure of society, from the monarch on down. As protest and dissent against the Church began to increase, several individuals would rise to prominence in Europe. These men would lead the Reformation and at the same time create a new religious structure within Christendom.

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion , 2017

The Lutheran reformation transformed not only theology and the church but law and the state as well. Beginning in the 1520s, Luther joined up with various jurists and political leaders to craft ambitious legal reforms of church, state, and society on the strength of Luther’s new theology. These legal reforms were defined and defended in hundreds of monographs, pamphlets, and sermons published by Lutheran writers from the 1520s to 1550s. They were refined and routinized in hundreds of new reformation ordinances promulgated by German cities, duchies, and territories that converted to the Lutheran cause. By the time of the Peace of Augsburg (1555) -- the imperial law that temporarily settled the constitutional order of Germany--the Lutheran Reformation had brought fundamental changes to theology and law, to church and state, marriage and family, education and charity. Critics of the day, and a steady stream of theologians and historians ever since, have seen this legal phase of the Reformation as a corruption of Luther’s original message of Christian freedom from the strictures of human laws and traditions. But Luther ultimately realized that he needed the law to stabilize and enforce the new Protestant teachings. Radical theological reforms had made possible fundamental legal reforms. Fundamental legal reforms, in turn, would make palpable radical theological reforms. In the course of the 1530s onwards, the Lutheran Reformation became in its essence both a theological and a legal reform movement. It struck new balances between law and Gospel, rule and equity, order and faith, structure and spirit.

2018

As Christians in America are increasingly marginalized and driven from the public square, questions concerning the proper relationship between church and state are in the forefront of the minds of the faithful. In such times, it is wise to listen to our forefathers and their testimony concerning the proper relationship between civil government and the Church. Martin Luther's On Secular Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed has been rightly viewed as a foundational expression of his thought on the distinction and relationship between civil and ecclesiastical authority. However, this work is often read without appropriately taking into consideration the particular circumstances surrounding the writing and the further development of Luther's thought. In 1523, there were still no explicitly Lutheran rulers in the Holy Roman Empire. Luther's confidence in the future gains of the Reformation was still high. The Anabaptists had not yet fully burst on the scene, and the Peasants War still lay in the future. After a brief historical background and review of the immediate circumstances, this paper will offer an analysis of On Secular Authority structured by the writing's three main divisions: a. the first section, where Luther grapples with medieval teaching on secular authority and Christian idealism; b. the second section, "the main part," according to Luther, where he lays out his overarching view of the two realms and two authorities; and, c. the third section, a Fürstenspiegel, a mirror for princes. The sectional will highlight both continuity in Luther's overall thought concerning the proper relationship between civil and ecclesiastical authority and subsequent refinement-particularly in regards to religious liberty.

Theology Today, 2015

The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, 2017

Law and Justice: A Christian Law Review , 2017

The Lutheran Reformation transformed not only theology and the church but law and the state as well. Beginning in the 1520s, Luther joined up with various jurists and political leaders to craft ambitious legal reforms of church, state, and society on the strength of the new Protestant theology. These legal reforms were defined and defended in hundreds of monographs, pamphlets, and sermons published by Luther and his many followers from the 1520s onward. They were refined and routinized in hundreds of new reformation ordinances promulgated by German polities that converted to the Lutheran cause. By the time of the Peace of Augsburg (1555)--the imperial law that temporarily settled the constitutional order of Germany--the Lutheran Reformation had brought fundamental changes to theology and law, to church and state, marriage and family, education and charity.

The beginning and later growth of the Protestant Reformation of the 16 th century was seen as a new challenge to religious authority that went beyond the Roman Catholic Church. Many viewed it as a threat to the whole social structure of society, from the monarch on down. As protest and dissent against the Church began to increase, several individuals would rise to prominence in Europe. These men would lead the Reformation and at the same time create a new religious structure within Christendom.

Church History, 2004

In 1996, Bernhard Lohse wondered if the Luther presented by some would recognize the Luther described by others. Trying to recognize the “political” Luther would be especially difficult. On the one hand, Thomas Müntzer was but the first in a long line of polemicists, journalists, politicians, and scholars who have accused Luther of releasing the sword of secular authority from all control and thereby opening up centuries of authoritarian subjugation. On the other hand, Peter Frarin argued in 1566 that Protestantism equaled sedition, rebellion, and the subversion of civil order. In the criticism of Luther for being either too conservative or too liberal, one thing remained fairly constant: the source of Luther's major shortcoming—his theology of the Two Kingdoms.