Concerning Governmental Authority

Overview

Fifty pages, published in 1523, written in German for a general readership and dedicated to Duke John of Saxony. The occasion was concrete. Catholic princes had begun ordering the surrender and burning of Luther’s German New Testament, and Luther wanted to say what a ruler may and may not command. He was also, by this point, being cited by people preparing to take up arms in his name, and the essay is aimed at them as much as at the princes.

It falls into three parts, and Luther signposts them. First, whether temporal authority exists by God’s will at all. Second, how far it extends. Third, how a prince should actually behave.

The style is his usual: direct, concrete, argumentative, full of scripture, and sharp-tongued about named opponents. It is one of the most readable pieces of political theory from the century.

The thing to watch is that the essay runs in two directions at once. It contains a strikingly early defence of freedom of conscience and a strikingly unconditional demand for obedience, and it does not regard these as in tension, because they are addressed to two different jurisdictions.

The argument

Part I: the sword is from God. Luther establishes, against radicals who read the Sermon on the Mount as abolishing government, that temporal authority is divinely instituted. He cites Romans 13 and Peter, and argues that the New Testament’s commands to turn the other cheek and not to resist evil bind Christians in their own case and do not abolish the office.

His explanation of why government is necessary is the interesting part. If everyone were a genuine Christian, no law, sword or prince would be needed, because such people would do right of their own accord and no compulsion would have anything to work on. But real Christians are rare, the world is full of people who will do harm if they can, and so God has instituted the sword to restrain them. Without it, Luther says, the world would become a wilderness and no one could keep a wife, a child or a coin.

Christians therefore submit not because they need to be governed but because their neighbours need them to. A Christian pays taxes, serves as a judge, and takes up the sword when the office requires it, for the sake of others.

Part II: how far it extends. This is the section that matters and the one worth reading twice.

The soul is not under Caesar. Temporal authority governs body and goods and outward behaviour, and it has no jurisdiction over belief. Luther argues this on two grounds. It is wrong, because God has reserved the government of souls to himself, and any prince attempting it is intruding on God’s office. And it is futile, because faith is a free work which no one can be compelled to perform; you can make a man say anything and you cannot make him believe it.

He extends this to heresy. Heresy is a spiritual thing, and no iron, fire or water touches it. God’s word alone fights it, and where that does not succeed nothing else will. He is explicit that the burning of heretics is the resort of authorities who have run out of arguments, and that it produces martyrs rather than converts.

What follows is the practical instruction the essay was written for. If a prince orders you to surrender your books or hold a belief, refuse, and say so openly. But do not rebel. Accept whatever punishment follows and do not take up arms, because resistance would be using the sword in a matter where the sword has no authority.

Part III: how a prince should rule. The last part is a mirror for princes, and Luther is not flattering. He says the wise ruler is a rare bird and that princes are commonly the greatest fools or the worst knaves on earth, so one should expect little good from them. A ruler should regard his office as a service rather than a possession, should attend to the people beneath him and not to the flatterers around him, should use reason and not merely the law books, and should punish without appetite.

Here Luther draws the distinction that has attracted most of the criticism. A prince must be a Christian in his person and does not govern as a Christian in his office: privately he forgives, officially he hangs. The office has its own demands, given by God, and the man serving in it may do what the private man may not.

How to read it

Read part two first if you are short of time. It is the philosophically important section and it is twenty pages.

Read it beside The Freedom of a Christian from three years earlier. That essay makes the Christian inwardly free and subject to all; this one works out the political consequences, and the pair is much clearer than either alone.

Hold the two halves together rather than choosing one. Luther’s defence of conscience and his ban on resistance are the same argument: the sword has no business in the soul, and the soul has no business taking up the sword.

Then read what happened next. The peasants rose in 1525, citing gospel liberty, and Luther wrote a pamphlet urging the princes to stab, smite and slay them, which remains the hardest thing in his output to defend. Read the two texts together and decide whether the second contradicts the first or applies it.

And know the long history. The doctrine of the two kingdoms was used in Germany into the 1930s to argue that the church had no standing to judge the state’s conduct, which is one reason the Barmen Declaration of 1934 was necessary. Whether that follows from Luther or is a misuse of him is a live argument, and the text supports more than one answer.

Questions it raises

• Luther says faith cannot be compelled and so must not be. Is the moral claim doing the work, or only the practical one?
• Refuse unjust orders and accept the punishment without resisting. Is that principled non-violence or an instruction that leaves tyranny untouched?
• If a prince’s office permits what his conscience forbids, who is answerable for what the office does?
• Government exists because most people are not truly Christian. What follows for a society that is not Christian at all?
• The essay defends liberty of conscience and, two years later, its author urged the slaughter of rebellious peasants. Can both be held at once?
• Is the separation of the two kingdoms a protection for the church, a protection for the state, or an abdication by the church?