Martin Luther's Understanding of God's Two Kingdoms (Texts and Studies in Reformation and Post-Reformation Thought)

A Response to the Challenge of Skepticism

Wright, William J., Muller, Richard

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781441212689
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The concept of God's two kingdoms was foundational to Luther and subsequent Lutheran theology. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, that concept has been understood primarily as a political concept. But is a political reading of the two kingdoms a perversion of Luther's teaching? Leading Reformation scholar William Wright contends that those who read Luther politically and see in Luther a compartmentalized approach to Christian life are misreading the Reformer. Wright reassesses the original breadth of Luther's theology of the two kingdoms and the cultural contexts from which it emerged. He argues that Luther's two-kingdom worldview was not a justification for living irresponsibly on planet earth.

1

Interpretations of Luther’s Idea
of the Two Kingdoms
during the Last Two Centuries

There are two kingdoms, one the kingdom of God, the other the kingdom of the world. I have written this so often that I am surprised that there is anyone who does not know it or remember it.¹

At the start, one must take cognizance of how both the general public and the scholarly community have interpreted Luther’s use of the term “two kingdoms.” As the epigraph shows, Luther already expressed amazement that people did not understand it in his own time. The term “two-kingdoms doctrine” has been a heavily politicized concept for a long time. When the general public shows awareness of Luther’s two-kingdoms teaching, it refers strictly to the separation of church and state. But as Gerhard Ebeling noted some time ago, “anything like the modern separation of church and state” fails to capture the whole meaning and significance of these terms for Luther.² This political interpretation has also had its proponents in the scholarly world. In the Anglo-American environment over the last century, for example, published monographs have been devoted solely to presenting Luther’s political teaching.³

Since the mid-nineteenth century, Luther’s ideas about two kingdoms came to be seen as a political teaching or a political and social ethics. Indeed, many recent (since World War II) treatments of Luther’s two kingdoms were conducted under the label of the doctrine of two kingdoms and two regiments (Zwei-Reiche- und Zwei-Regimente-Lehre).⁴ The use of this phrase seems to link the two kingdoms with the idea that Luther must have been providing some sort of unique political teaching or, even in the strictest sense, dogma.⁵ Even those writers who explicitly disavowed the idea that Luther intended to pronounce a political doctrine used this terminology.⁶ The literature on the history of political theories has used the politically laden phrase “two-kingdoms doctrine,”⁷ while very recently, Joshua Mitchell attempted to present Luther as the first of a select group of progenitors of our modern political views.⁸ The fact is that the term “two kingdoms” itself has been politicized and one can scarcely treat Luther’s work without using it.⁹

In locating the present study within the context of the modern literature on the subject, there are three points to keep in mind. First, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century political doctrine, falsely ascribed to Luther, constitutes a misappropriation of Luther’s original teachings. This modern “doctrine” represents a spurious version of Luther’s understanding of God’s two kingdoms. Created in the context of the last century and a half, it obscures the meaning that Luther actually gave to the two kingdoms in the sixteenth century. Second, the large number of studies on the subject in recent treatments (roughly, since World War II), which represents a vast array of approaches and emphases, presents us with a very complex subject. Third, in spite of all of the literature on the subject, there continues to be a lack of a consensus on the meaning of Luther’s idea of the two kingdoms. This situation makes it difficult if not impossible to understand any of Luther’s teachings, because he understood and explained all of them in the context of God’s two kingdoms.¹⁰

Since many historians have located the origins of the spurious two-kingdoms doctrine in the mid-nineteenth century, this chapter will start there.¹¹ Next, it will examine the turn-of-the twentieth century milieu, in which a much larger step toward the false modern idea was taken. The chapter will then examine the extreme use made of this modern interpretation in the 1930s and 1940s. Then, it will be necessary to identify some of the misguided attempts to correct the Nazi and German Christian perversions of Luther’s teaching and, connected therewith, the attack on Luther’s whole idea of two kingdoms. This discussion will involve not only anti-Nazi work during the 1930s and 1940s, but the flurry of scholarly activity concerned with the idea of two kingdoms during the period from 1950s through the 1970s. The chapter will conclude with an appraisal of the most important recent works touching the subject.

The history of the use of Luther’s understanding of the two kingdoms during the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries is largely the history of the politicization of the great Reformer’s teaching, so that it became known as a political teaching.¹² It is the story of the creation of the spurious two kingdoms and two regiments doctrine. The essence of this perverted doctrine was the idea that the world, human institutions, politicians, and everyday people were free from the power and the laws of God, because the world had its own rules and ethical norms, which were produced by processes internal to the world.¹³ This idea is often labeled with the term Eigengesetzlichkeit, but it is sometimes put under the rubric of “dualisms” that distinguishes and divorces an inner from an outer life.¹⁴ The reactions and responses to the extreme perversion of Luther’s idea of the two kingdoms by the Nazis and their sympathizers have often only perpetuated the spurious doctrine, rather than clarifying how Luther’s original teaching differed from the false one. Since World War II, some have labeled the spurious doctrine the “Luther to Hitler legend.” It has been noted before that such attempts to place blame on the past are generally attempts to “exculpate the present, or at least to justify some present policy or action which could otherwise not stand scrutiny.”¹⁵

Mid-Nineteenth-Century Uses of Luther’s Concept of Two Kingdoms

Until the mid-nineteenth century, Luther’s ideas on the two kingdoms had not been greatly politicized, even though the concept had been absorbed into the state-church constitutions of the German territorial and dynastic states.¹⁶ Hence, several recent writers have traced the beginnings of the deviating modern “two kingdoms and two regiments doctrine” to mid-nineteenth century scholars connected with Erlangen.¹⁷ Some have pointed particularly to the work of Christoph Ernst Luthardt,¹⁸ a product of Erlangen (but he also studied at Berlin from 1842–1843), who, from 1856 on, held professorships first at Leipzig and then at Berlin. Luthardt was known as a Christian apologist, and especially a Lutheran one, defending the church and faith against contemporary intellectual trends, particularly the classical Liberalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹⁹

One can readily see in Luthardt’s influential book Die Ethik Luthers in ihren Grundzügen how he was involved in changing Luther’s use of the phrase two kingdoms and why we should not make him the primary agent of perverting or de-Christianizing it.

Both the other great community circles of human society, domestic economy and state (Haus und Staat), in which the Christian stands belong to the territory of the natural life. Over these the Gospel does not have to make arrangements. For the Gospel has to do with the spiritual life. Reason underlies the natural life, as the source of all natural law and has its own authority and order, to which the Gospel does not have the call to alter.²⁰

At face value, one may find in these words a major objectionable aspect of the modern two-kingdoms doctrine; namely, the idea that in the institutions of the natural world, reason is the source of natural law, which governs the natural world. The natural world, in this case, would be autonomous or free of God’s law, so that people could make their own rules as they go about their lives and work. Moreover, this talk of spiritual life and Luthardt’s general emphasis on morality seem to demonstrate charges that Luthardt reduced Christianity to a matter of mentality or Gesinnung, to the interior of the Christian.²¹ This would clearly be contrary to Luther’s teaching.

However, we should note that in this very quotation, Luthardt continued to frame the discussion within Luther’s institutional parameters of church, state, and daily life (oeconomia, a sixteenth-century term that conveyed the idea of managing daily life through the institutions of marriage, family, and livelihood). Those who identify Luthardt as the beginning point for the spurious two-kingdoms doctrine assert that Luthardt replaced the three institutional orders or Stände with a two-spheres idea (private, inner versus public, outer) and made these two spheres the basis for his focus of Christian ethics.²² But actually, Luthardt did no such thing. Moreover, he did not make human institutions autonomous of divine power. Luthardt declared that even though these institutions were under reason, they “are not really profane, but God’s endowment, order, and will, and God is present in the same.” This was so, according to Luthardt, because God “uses his creatures like ‘larva’ or ‘masks.’”²³ Luthardt was explicit about the point: Go...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTENTS
• SERIES PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. INTERPRETATIONS OF LUTHER’S IDEA OF THE TWO KINGDOMS DURING THE LAST TWO CENTURIES
• 2. THE SKEPTICAL CHALLENGE OF THE EARLY ITALIAN RENAISSANCE
• 3. NORTHERN HUMANISM: THE CONTEXT OF LUTHER’S TWO KINGDOMS
• 4. THE TWO-KINGDOMS WORLDVIEW: HOW LUTHER USED THE CONCEPT IN DIVERSE CONTEXTS
• 5. THE REFORMER APPLIES THE TWO KINGDOMS TO CHRISTIAN LIFE
• BIBLIOGRAPHY