most emphatically during the peasants’ revolt, that the ungodliness of rulers is no warrant for rebellion.
Luther would, in his later years, reluctantly accept – at the strong and repeated urging of German princes – a right of resistance that went beyond his earlier convictions; but the issue then was whether the princes had a right, even a duty, to form a league to resist the emperor, which Luther had earlier opposed. Some supporters even appealed to Roman civil law in support of the right to resist force with force and to disobey unjust judges. There were those who argued, invoking ‘private law’, that an unjust ruler might forfeit his public authority and effectively become a private person subject to resistance on the grounds of self-defence. Even Luther himself with great hesitation accepted the ‘private law’ doctrine; but, while some did indeed interpret the doctrine as implying a more radical right of individual resistance, for Luther the narrowly circumscribed issue was the right of lesser authorities like German princes actively to resist the higher authority of the emperor.4 The argument developed by rebellious princes to justify resistance to the imperial power was intended, from beginning to end, to be formulated in such a way as to ensure that resistance was not conceived as a general right residing in the people. It was meant, from the start, to be a constitutional argument about the rights of princes and other officials to resist the higher authority of the Empire, especially in matters of religion, and even to repel the emperor with military force. Even if the emperor had become a private person by governing unjustly, his punishment remained a public duty, performed by proper authorities, and not a private right.
Other Christian theologians had devised theories of obedience to secular authority, but Luther faced specific problems that no other theologian had effectively confronted. Unlike, for instance, Marsilius of Padua, who attacked the papacy on behalf of the Holy Roman Empire and its allies in Italian civic communes, in particular the Ghibelline nobility, Luther was asserting the authority of secular rulers, sometimes kings but in particular local princes, who were in conflict with both pope and emperor. To establish that Christians owed obedience to German princes, it was not enough to declare that the Church had no jurisdiction, public or private. This might suffice to shift the balance of authority in worldly affairs from Church to secular government, but princes whose authority was in no way derived from divine associations – such as even the Holy Roman Emperor enjoyed – would seem to have a tenuous claim on the strict obedience of Christian believers. Augustine had gone a long way in establishing the principle that secular and even pagan rulers could command the obedience of Christians; but there remained some loopholes, which were closed by Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith.
Augustine had certainly argued that temporal government is providentially ordained by God to deal with a fallen humanity. Since the purpose of government was simply to maintain peace, order and a fair degree of comfort among sinful human beings who could expect no justice in this world, even pagans could fulfil this modest purpose and could command obedience on the same grounds as did a Christian ruler. The principle of obedience was underwritten by his doctrine of predestination, which seemed to leave little, if any, scope to human effort in achieving salvation. At the same time, as we have seen, Augustine’s view of salvation appeared, in the eyes of some interpreters, to leave room for human effort in cooperating with the grace of God, while his attitude to heresy and his support for its brutal suppression by the state might be understood to imply that Christians did, after all, stand in a different relation to secular authority than did heretics or non-believers. Some might even be inclined to interpret the distinction between the sinful mass of humanity and the elect, rooted in the doctrine of predestination, to mean that secular government was necessary to control the many but that the few might somehow be exempt.
Luther decisively closed all the doors left ajar by Augustine. The Reformation would, to be sure, produce sects, in particular the Anabaptists, who believed that true Christians were subject only to the Word of God and not to the temporal sword. But Luther’s theology is emphatically on the side of obedience to secular government and the need for Christians to submit to it. Whatever he may have believed about predestination or the division between damned and elect, his doctrine of justification by faith effectively rendered them irrelevant to the question of obedience to secular authority, while at the same time giving secular government an unambiguous claim to divine ordination.
Luther accepted the Augustinian opposition between the realm of God and the earthly realm, or the devil’s; but that antithesis was trumped by another distinction, between temporal and spiritual realms, with their corresponding modes of authority, both of which are divine. The antithesis of divine and diabolic ‘kingdoms’ remained important; but it figured in the argument on divinely ordained temporal and spiritual realms only in the sense that it reflected the dual nature of humanity, the simultaneous unity of sin and justification that characterizes Christians, whose human sinfulness requires the temporal sword.
The distinction between temporal and spiritual realms, or between the kinds of order to which they are respectively subject, does not, then, correspond to the antithesis of God’s realm and the devil’s, because, as we have seen, both orders are divine. Nor does Luther situate temporal and spiritual orders in some kind of Thomistic hierarchy. Each has its rightful and inviolable domain and its own mode of governance: the spiritual realm is the domain of the Word, with no business in the sphere of jurisdiction or coercion, which is the preserve of secular government. The line of demarcation between the two domains is clear, and any confusion between them is the work of the devil. This formulation puts paid to the temporal pretensions of the Church, while elevating secular authority to a status no less divine than the spiritual order.
Obedience Transformed into Resistance
Despite the doctrine of obedience, there was always a danger that attacks on abuses of clerical power might put in question any religious legitimation of secular authority; and Lutheran theology was – selectively – invoked by radical Protestants to justify rebellions of a kind Luther himself vehemently opposed. In his absence from Wittenberg after the Diet of Worms, some of his followers promoted more radical reforms of the Church than he had envisaged; and their rebellion did not stop with ecclesiastical authorities but extended to the government of civic magistrates. Luther responded, already in 1521, with A Sincere Admonition to All Christians to Guard Against Insurrection and Rebellion. He was, to be sure, critical of German princes; but even in his treatise Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed (1523), which most clearly expresses his reservations about how princes are actually using their divinely ordained power, he never abandons his call to obedience. Luther admonishes the princes – without much hope, it must be said – to behave like Christians; and he also appears to suggest that true Christians are obliged to sustain the powers of secular government only out of Christian love and service to others who are more in need of coercive correction. Yet his principal message is that, while the Christian soul is governed by the Word, Christians, whether because of their own sinfulness or in service to others, are in the temporal domain no less subject than anyone else to the sword of secular authority and the obligation to obey.
On his return to Wittenberg, Luther managed to subdue his most radical followers; but this did not prevent others – notably the Anabaptist Thomas Müntzer, who had broken with him – from supporting and leading the peasant rebellion. While Müntzer certainly had Luther in his sights when he excoriated a view of the world in which all things and creatures have been turned into property, support for the peasants’ revolt did not require anything quite as radical as an attack on the very institution of private property. But even short of that, given Luther’s unambiguous insistence on obedience to secular authority, it may not be immediately obvious how Lutheran doctrine could lend support to a popular uprising.
Luther’s attack on the Church could be more readily mobilized against the ecclesiastical hierarchy, princes of the Church and the imposition of tithes, which were indeed a major grievance. But during the peasant revolt the challenge to authority went beyond ecclesiastical jurisdiction to include secular authorities, the ever-increasing burden of taxation and gross inequalities of property and power. To justify rebellions such as these in Lutheran terms required a considerable stretch. If Luther
