The Theology of Martin Luther CH509

 LESSON 22 of 24

Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: Church and State

Dr. Robert A. Kolb, Ph.D.

Experience: Professor of Systematic Theology
at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri

Martin Luther is often described as a toady of princes. I’m not sure

what a toady is because I’ve only heard it used in this phrase, “a
toady of princes,” but I’m quite sure it’s not a compliment. There
is a kernel of truth in this accusation, for Luther did have a very
close working relationship with a number of princes, and there
can be no doubt that Luther regarded the princes who supported
him as gifts of God who enabled his message to proceed into
a number of lands in various parts of Europe. But it is a false
impression to make him an ancestor of modern totalitarian views
of the power of government. There was no sharper critic in his day
of princes who opposed the gospel of Jesus Christ, there was no
sharper critic of rulers because of their tyranny over the common
people, no one has ever in the history of Christendom, I think, set
a higher standard for the practice of the office of ruler than did
Martin Luther.

Luther grew up in a world in which government was not conceived

of as a modern state, but rather government was seen as a God-
given ruler. Luther’s family came from a peasant background in
which people learned simply to obey the local authorities and
pay taxes and pray for the welfare of the ruling family. His family
came to Mansfeld, a small village in the county of Mansfeld, and
the prince directed the government of the local village. His father
assumed an office in the administration of Mansfeld, but those
local officials (such as his father) were dependent upon the local
counts. His father was involved also in the smelting business, and
mining and smelting were controlled by the grace of the elector of
Saxony who had certain rights of overlordship, even in the lands
of the counts of Mansfeld. So his father had a high appreciation
for the rulers of not only his own county but also of the larger
area, and this included the elector of Saxony with whom Luther
would later have such a close relationship.

Luther grew up in a fragile world. There were great fears of peasant

rebellion in Luther’s world. It was an unsettled world. There had
been revolts by the peasantry in various parts of Germany within
Luther’s lifetime; and he feared greatly the outbreak of chaos that
was involved inevitably, he believed, when those whom God had

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Lesson 22 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: Church and State

not appointed to rule tried to seize the rule of the land.

It is also true that Luther, like other academics of his day, benefitted
a great deal from princely support. The university was usually in
the hands sometimes of a city government, but more often (as
was the case in Wittenberg) in the hands of a prince. And without
the prince there would have been no university, there would have
been no academic life, even though technically most universities
were chartered by the papacy, sometimes alongside the emperor
but sometimes without any other charter at all.

On the other hand, we must recognize that Luther lived most of his
life as an outlaw. From 1521 on, he was a wanted man in imperial
Germany. The imperial government persecuted his followers,
burned some of them, arranged for the deaths of others. And in
some ways it is remarkable that it took Luther as long as it did to
recognize a right of resistance against tyranny, even though he
never recognized that right as belonging to the individual.

There were a number of concerns that governed Luther’s political

views and his political actions. Perhaps primary was his desire
to preserve the integrity of the gospel. That desire to preserve
the integrity of the gospel was a political concern in the late
Middle Ages because church and state were so intermingled in
their spheres of competence and in their claims of power over
each other. Linked to but distinct from his desire to preserve the
integrity of the gospel was his concern for the integrity of the
church in relationship to the state. Again, Luther was a product
of his own age, and he had no conception of something like a
modern Western understanding of the potential separation of
church and state. He could not imagine a society in which church
and state would be separated in some of the ways in which we
think that separation just naturally takes place. But he did
believe that church and state were created by God, designed by
God for different functions. So he believed the church should do
the church’s work and not interfere with the state, but he also
believed that the state should do its work and not interfere with
the church. So the complementary side of this concern for the
integrity of the church in relationship to the state was a concern
for the integrity of the state in carrying out its assignments without
the interference of popes and bishops. And Luther boasted that
he had so clearly enunciated the distinctions in these spheres of
competence, enunciated them in a way that had not been done
for decades and centuries in Christendom, and he wanted to be
considered a friend of the prince and a friend of the municipal
government in the proper way.

Luther also had a deep concern for public order and public morality;

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Lesson 22 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: Church and State

and he saw one of the assignments of rulers of governments [as]

the preservation of public order and of public morality. Finally,
however, Luther also lived by Peter’s dictum in Acts 5: We ought
to obey God rather than man. And so he finally moved away from
his insistence that Christians can at best only passively resist a
tyrannous government, to a position which finally allowed what
we call today inferior magistrates, princes in the German empire,
to resist higher power such as the emperor.

Luther’s concerns about the relationship between the gospel and

the church on the one hand and the state or the government on
the other were played out at different times in rather different
ways. One of the relationships between church and state that
intrigues us most, I suppose, is Luther’s concept of the prince
as an emergency bishop—an emergency bishop whom he could
advice, one that should do what was right in God’s sight. By
that Luther meant what he thought the princes ought to do. But
Luther did see that in the state of medieval Christendom there
was no other source of political power which could put on the
proper leverage to accomplish ecclesiastical reform. And so while
he did not want that to be a permanent situation, he believed that
it was necessary in his day and age for pious princes to come to
the aid of the church since the church’s own officials, the bishops
and abbots and, above all, the pope, were not about to reform the
church.

In 1520, he published his Open Letter to the German Nobility.

It was addressed to the nobles, but as a matter of fact it was
intended for city councils as well. And many of the reforms that
Luther pushed and proposed in this Open Letter to the German
Nobility were actually introduced first by local city councils. The
Open Letter to the German Nobility is not particularly an original
work. It simply repeated to a large extent the grievances of past
German imperial diets that had been sent off one after another
to Rome and laid before the German bishops and archbishops
and abbots as well. The Open Letter to the German Nobility
does set the whole matter of reform of the church in a different
theological framework, but the specific proposals for ending
financial abuse and moral abuse in the church were not original
with Luther at all. But Luther did establish the competence of
lay leadership called by God to governmental positions in the
secular realm. He established that competence and that sphere
of power against clergy domination. He rejected specifically three
papal claims to power: over temporal rulers, over the Scripture
and the interpretation of Scripture, and over councils and the
decisions of councils. And in this Open Letter, Luther then called
for government aid in reforming a great number (more than 20)
abuses, specific kinds of abuse, within the church, both on the

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Lesson 22 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: Church and State

local level and on the level of Christendom itself. Then he also

called for special attention to a political problem at the imperial
level, the Bohemian problem. Bohemia, the homeland of John
Huss and his followers, remained within the sphere of the German
empire; and since the execution of Huss for heresy in 1415, the
tensions between the Bohemians and the rest of the empire had
not completely gone away. So Luther called on the princes of the
empire to establish peace with the Bohemians on a permanent
basis at long last with concessions. The empire should confess
that Huss and his follower, Jerome of Prague, had been burned
unjustly; the empire should let the Bohemians choose their own
archbishop, their own church leadership; it should let them keep
communion in both kinds; and it should not insist on the return
of lands to the church which had been seized by the local nobility.
Luther also went on to call for princely reform of the universities;
and the program of biblical humanism with its strong emphasis
on the study of ancient languages and literature was an important
part of his call for reform.

In 1520, he was particularly strong in his criticism of many parts

of the Aristotelian corpus and he wanted Aristotle not completely
thrown out of the university but to a large part limited in the
curriculum. And he also called for a number of moral reforms
in the secular sphere: He wanted the rulers to abolish the use of
luxurious clothing. He wanted them to abolish brothels. He called
for an end to excessive eating and drinking, and suggested other
reforms as well, particularly in the economic sphere where he
wanted to limit the spice trade and capitalist trading companies.

But Luther did more than just call for princely action, he assisted
(particularly the elector of Saxony) in functioning as an emergency
bishop. For one thing, Luther was always more than happy to
share his own advice, his own point of view, with his own prince
and other princes as well. Sometimes the distinction is made in
the advice the church gives to the government between principle
and policy. It is suggested sometimes nowadays that the church
may comment on principles of ruling the country but ought not
mix its hand into specific policies. Luther did not understand such
a distinction, he freely gave advice, often sticking to principle but
occasionally telling elector John of Saxony, for instance, or his
son John Frederick, what to do in specific cases.

In 1528, John of Saxony wanted to organize a visitation of the

churches in Saxony. This is a good example of a prince assuming
the powers of a traditional medieval bishop. The bishops had
conducted visitation of churches at times throughout the Middle
Ages, now John wanted to introduce Luther’s reformation into
the local parishes of his lands. And so he called upon Luther

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Lesson 22 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: Church and State

and Luther’s colleague, Philipp Melanchthon, to help him in

organizing and then in carrying out a visitation of the churches
in his domains. And Luther and Melanchthon wrote a series
of articles, a kind of instruction for the visitors, and actually
participated in some of the visitation as well.

Luther was counted on as an advisor to princes and freely gave his

advice also. As the princes tried to work out a religious settlement
with the political forces of the papacy in Germany—particularly
at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 and at the Diet of the Smalcaldic
League in 1537—Luther’s advice was important and played a role,
even though at Augsburg he was kept far from Augsburg because
he was an outlaw and couldn’t venture outside the lands of the
elector of Saxony. But there and at Smalcald in 1537, he helped
shape the approach to the religious policy of his day.

Luther’s theory that stood behind his freely giving advice to

the prince was treated in a number of places, but particularly in
his commentary on Psalm 82 (published in 1530), and a similar
commentary on Psalm 101 (published in 1534). In 1530, with
what I think is somewhat dubious exegesis, he equated the gods
of verse 1 in Psalm 82 with secular rulers; and he affirmed that
they are officers of God, they must be obeyed so that peace may
reign among the children of Adam, Luther said. He did not want
to restrict his appraisal of rulers as officers of God to those who
were pious and Christian. He went on to discuss the integrity
of God’s order for political governance in the whole horizontal
realm and he noted that, of course, abuses will arise. He wrote, “In
order that these proud gods (that is, the rulers) may be deprived
of their defiant boastfulness when they think that there is no one
to judge them or rebuke them without being called a rebel, a little
peg is driven into them and a club is laid beside the dog. Thus,
they are properly rebuked and boldly spoken to, and they must be
threatened sharply and hard. For God keeps the upper hand over
these rulers; God retains the right to judge them; God does not
make them gods in such a way as to abolish His own godhead and
let them do as they please, as if they alone were gods even over
God Himself. On the contrary, it is God’s will that these rulers be
subject to His Word; and they will either listen to it or they will
suffer all misfortune.”

How does God do that? How does God become present in the
presence of the secular ruler? The psalm says he stands in the
congregation. And Luther took that word as the occasion to write,
here God has appointed priests and preachers to whom he has
committed the duty of teaching and exhorting and rebuking and
comforting, in a word, of preaching the Word of God. He then
criticized clergy who are called to, as the psalm says, stand in the

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Lesson 22 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: Church and State

congregation (that is, to confess the Word boldly in rebuking the

secular ruler’s abuse of his God-given office). Luther, first of all,
criticizes unfaithfulness (that is, simply failing to fulfill God’s
assignment), and then he attacks backbiting (that is, preachers
who curse princes and lords, not boldly in public but in corners,
in their own little sects). Luther stated to such preachers, “If you
are in the ministry and are not willing to rebuke your rulers, your
gods, openly and publicly as your office demands, at least leave
off your private backbiting and go hang.”

In commenting on Psalm 101 four years later, Luther wrote, “If a

preacher in his official capacity says to kings and princes and to
all the world: Thank and fear God and keep His commandments,
that is not meddling in the affairs of secular government. On the
contrary, he is thereby serving and being obedient to the highest
government, to God. Thus, the entire spiritual government really
does nothing else than serve the divine authority, which is why
pastors are called servants of God and ministers of Christ in
the Scripture.” Indeed, Saint Paul even calls it a service to the
church and to all the heathen. Thus, if David or a prince teaches
or gives order to fear God and to listen to His Word, he’s not really
acting as a lord of that Word but as an obedient servant. He is not
meddling in spiritual or divine government, but remains a humble
subordinate and a faithful servant. For with respect to God and in
the service of His authority, everything should be identical and
mixed together, whether it be called spiritual or secular, the pope
as well as the emperor, the lord as well as the servant. Luther
then went on in commenting on Psalm 101: “It is a confusion
and a mingling of the secular and the spiritual realm when those
sublime and meddlesome spirits want to change and correct the
civil law in a dictatorial and dominating fashion, even though they
have no directive or authority to do so either from God or from
men. The same is true when spiritual or secular princes and lords
want to change and correct the Word of God in a dictatorial and
dominating fashion when they themselves dictate what should be
preached and taught, even though they themselves have no more
right to do this than the lowest beggar.”

In these comments then, we see Luther’s strong insistence

upon the integrity of each of the two governments or realms,
the ecclesiastical government or hierarchy and the secular
government or hierarchy. In both cases, Luther insisted, they have
responsibilities given to them by God and they must discharge
them. But at the same time, Luther believed that preachers should
help princes in understanding the will of God and ought to preach
to them concerning their responsibilities and concerning the
carrying out of those responsibilities by giving specific guidance
from God’s law and God’s will.

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Lesson 22 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: Church and State

The princes were called, according to Luther’s teaching, to keep

order in society, to do good through their calling to be rulers. In
several instances, Luther was faced with questions regarding the
role of rulers, and particularly the role of subjects as well. In 1522,
there was tension in the air, the Peasants’ Revolt that began in 1524
was looming on the horizon, and there was a sense that peasants
could revolt again in several areas of German. So he wrote his
treatise entitled A Sincere Admonition to All Christians to Guard
Against Insurrection and Rebellion, and there he expressed his
deep concern for the preservation of good government and good
order.

He believed that one of the chief problems was the fact that the
clergy had oppressed the peasantry; and he recognized the justice
of the grievances that Christendom had against many clergymen.
But he warned against revolt against the princes, who also were
church officials (archbishops and bishops and abbots) who held
power in the secular realm in the German medieval system of
government. He believed that the Word of God must defeat error
in the church and that anticlerical violence was wrong. And so he
called upon preachers to pray and to preach against evil clergy,
and he called upon the people of God also to use the weapon of
prayer against those who were abusing their office within the
church. He called upon rulers to preserve order, according to
God’s command and according to their own calling by God. He
argued that insurrection always leads to violence that harms
more innocent people than it does guilty people. He believed that
the devil is the only author of every insurrection.

The situation did not change in the year following the publication
of this Sincere Admonition Against Insurrection and Rebellion,
and so in 1523 Luther published sermons he had preached on the
subject, Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should be Obeyed.
Here he expressed his opinion that government was given as a
remedy for sin. Christians don’t really need government, secular
government, insofar as they obey God. But because unbelievers
need the force of the sword to keep them in line, he believed that
government was necessary. And for the sake of order in society,
for the sake of the unbelievers in their midst, Luther believed that
Christians should participate in government. Later, particularly in
his Genesis commentary, he expressed the opinion that already in
Eden secular government was a part of God’s order for His human
creatures. He taught that Adam was not only the first parent but
also the first priest and also the first prince or emperor.

Luther used Romans 13 and I Peter 2, among other passages,

to teach that God had called rulers and subjects to specific
responsibilities. Subjects were to obey the ruling authorities and

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Lesson 22 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: Church and State

help them preserve order. They were to pray for their rulers that
they might exercise their office justly; and he argued also (on
the basis of Romans 13 and other biblical passages, the Lord’s
word regarding being subject to Caesar as well as to God) that
Christians were obligated to pay taxes and to pay them willingly.
But Luther also argued very strongly that rulers were to limit the
evil and not to practice it; they were to promote the good and not
to oppress it. No one is outside this scheme; no one is outside this
design of God.

Indeed, Luther recognized that the Sermon on the Mount

commanded that individual Christians turn the other cheek rather
than use the sword to smite their foes. He did not believe that the
Sermon on the Mount gave commands of a more perfect kind that
were to be used only as counsels for the monastic life. He believed
that all Christians were called by God to bear injustice without
response, at least the response of violence of force (the response
of admonition, to be sure). In other words, Christians are called
individually to turn the cheek. But at the same time, Christians are
also called to exercise their obligations to protect the neighbor;
and certain Christians at least then have the obligation to use the
sword against sinful creatures that are disrupting public order.
The gospel cannot rule the world; the gospel can only recreate
new people to be the children of God. And so the law must enforce
the standards of God for the practice of horizontal righteousness
in this world. In aiding that practice, Christians may also be called
to use the sword as rulers, as soldiers, as police, and the like.

Luther not only defended the rulers’ competence against claims

of domineering churchmen in the civil sphere, but he also warned
rulers against trying to enforce religious belief. He was opposed
to any kind of persecution. It doesn’t work against heresy, and it
obviously oppresses the gospel.

In writing on Temporal Authority in 1523, Luther also reminded

his readers that there are limits to Christian obedience, even if
Christian obedience to government is generally the order of the
day. When rulers interfere with the church, when rulers oppress
the gospel, when Luther’s followers, for instance, were being
persecuted by imperial authorities, Luther said, we must obey
God rather than these human princes.

In his treatise on Temporal Authority, Luther also employed a

typical medieval genre, the Mirror of the Prince, in laying out a
short sketch of the prince’s duties. He summarized them in four
duties. First of all, the prince is to act toward God with true faith,
with sincere prayer, by dedicating his life to God. Secondly, the
prince’s duty is to act toward his subjects with all love and with

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Lesson 22 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: Church and State

Christian service. Indeed, the prince is the father of his people,

placed on his throne by God for the care, for the provision of
order and temporal mercy to his people; and so it was the duty
of the prince to promote the good in whatever ways was possible.
Thirdly, Luther said it was the duty of the prince to act toward
his own counselors and toward his fellow rulers with an open
mind and with unfettered judgment. That meant that he should
not be taken in by them; he should not simply take the advice of
his advisors without criticizing it; he should not simply follow
other rulers in alliances and the like into courses of action that
were wrong, but he should always keep his judgment subject to
the Scriptures, subject to the will of God, and free from the undue
influence either of his own counselors or of his fellow rulers.
Fourthly, he said that the prince was called upon by God to act
toward evildoers with proper zeal and with firmness, punishing
not for the sake of punishing but punishing for the social good.

As he expanded then on these four central duties, Luther

emphasized the necessity of a ruler’s exercising his own judgment
in dispensing justice. Christians have always wavered between
an emphasis on keeping the law and excluding arbitrary human
judgment on the part of the judges or the rulers from the execution
of justice or, on the other hand, from dealing with the fact that
the law is a wooden instrument and the living heart of a merciful
human being must also be involved. Luther tended to think that
the latter was the better way to go, that the law of the law books
could indeed be a cold and merciless and even cruel thing, and so
rulers needed to exercise judgment as they dispensed justice and
made policy for their people and their lands.

Like many people in many eras, Luther was always suspicious

of the advisors of princes, and so he warned princes to not only
act toward them with unfettered judgment but basically not to
trust them, to be harshly critical in receiving advice from them.
He also insisted that within the constitution of the German
empire, the lower magistrates, the elector of Saxony, the count of
Mansfeld, must obey the emperor. And he would not stray from
this position one iota for almost a decade. We will discuss in just
a few moments the slow move that he made toward justifying the
resistance of inferior magistrates toward superior magistrates in
certain limited instances.

Luther was not a pacifist, but he discouraged princes from going

to war. Only under extreme necessity should they go to war, and
then, again, only against an equal or an inferior, not against a
superior such as the emperor. But Luther believed that war
seldom accomplishes much good. If it is necessary to limit evil,
it is necessary to limit evil. Luther treated the subject of war in a

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Lesson 22 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: Church and State

number of tracts. He had practical examples at hand in the 1520s,

which he could use to expand his treatment of the subject of
organized violence.

In 1525, he was called to comment on the revolt of the peasants

in a number of areas of Germany. He was called, first of all, by
the peasants to comment on the justice of their appeals against
princely tyranny. Luther disliked their use of Scripture to justify
earthly claims. He believed that the devil was using the peasants’
desire for temporal gain to discredit the Reformation. And he
warned against violence of any kind in seeking the goals of the
peasantry. At the same time, in the first tract he issued on the
Peasants’ Revolt, he sharply criticized the tyranny of princes;
and he said that if the peasants were in a rebellious mood, it was
nobody’s fault but the princes themselves. And he called on them
to repent and to return to the godly and biblical ideal of being
a father, a kind and merciful and loving and supportive father
to their people. Luther toured some of the areas in which there
were tensions with the peasantry in Saxony itself, and he was
booed and hooted down and that hostility that he experienced
made him greatly fearful of the future. And then reports came
from southern Germany, isolated reports to be sure, but reports of
peasant violence in which noble families had been massacred. So
in a tract which pleaded for the suppression of rebellious peasants
in the harshest terms, he argued that princes must get into the
field to stop the advance of chaos and disorder. He did so in part
because his own prince, Prince Frederick the Wise, was lying on
his deathbed, and his brother, Duke John, simply did not know
what to do. Luther feared that the whole world was going to go
up in flame if the peasants got the upper hand, and so he echoed
the position of many other intellectuals of his time, calling for
a swift and just repression of the revolt, in part (Luther argued)
to free those peasants who had been forced by the leaders of the
rebellion into the use of violence.

The peasants suffered massive defeats at the hands of a few

princely armies. In the area of Saxony itself, many peasants were
slaughtered, including their leader Thomas Munzer (a former
student of Luther’s who had preached an apocalyptic doctrine
of the return of the kingdom of God under his own leadership).
And when Munzer was executed for promoting rebellion, Luther
probably did not shed a single tear.

In 1526, Luther wrote a tract that dealt with another aspect of

violence in society. He wrote a tract entitled Can Soldiers, Too,
Be Saved? It gave him the opportunity to develop a concept of
vocation in the political sphere. This tract was instigated by a
professional soldier named Asa Von Kram, an evangelical whose

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Lesson 22 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: Church and State

conscience was bothering him, and he wanted to know whether

he could be a soldier or not. Luther began with the distinction
between occupation and person. The occupation is one thing; the
person who holds it is to be kept distinct from the activities of the
occupation. Luther insisted then that the occupation of soldier
is not within the vertical realm, it’s not a matter of becoming
righteous in God’s sight, the question is whether a soldier can do
what is right in the horizontal realm over and against his fellow
human creatures. If war is a punishment for evil and waged for
the protection of the innocent, then it is good. A war of necessity
is permissible. A war of desire, which seeks the gain of the ruler
outside the law of God, is not permitted even to the Christian. And
so Luther advocated a kind of selective conscientious objection as
he wrote to Asa von Kramm. If indeed the war is clearly wrong,
then soldiers ought not go to battle; if soldiers do not know, they
may have to place their consciences in the hands of their leaders.

Luther also commented on societal violence in this period because

of the advance of Turkish armies against Western Christendom,
culminating in 1529 in the siege of Vienna. Luther saw the Turks as
a call to repentance for Western Christendom. He did not support
any kind of crusade and opposed the papal call for crusade. On
the other hand, he finally came to the position of supporting the
Western Christian effort to defeat the Turks and oppose it because
he recognized the justice of protecting the people of Western
Europe from the Turkish invasion. But he saw the Turks as both
Satan’s rod against Western Europe and as God’s tool for calling
it to repentance.

There is one other area of political theory that I want to address

in this lecture, and that is the whole matter of whether Christians
can in good conscience not only passively resist governments
which oppress them (particularly in the religious sphere),
but whether any Christians may take sword in hand against
government. Although he was personally disobedient to his
own ruler, Frederick the Wise, by returning from the Wartburg
to Wittenberg in 1522, Luther believed he was justified because
he had to stop the outbreak of iconoclasm and the disorder that
was really threatening the progress of the Reformation. But
nonetheless, throughout the 1520s he insisted on obedience to
rulers. At best, individual Christians for Luther throughout his
career could only disobey passively. For instance, he said if your
prince comes to seize your Bible, don’t run into the street with it
and volunteer to hand it over to the policeman, make them come
and get it and search it out from under your pillow. But more than
that was not allowed to any Christian, according to Luther, until
about 1530. But then he gradually came to recognize a right of
resistance lodged in the inferior magistrates, in the princes, of the

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Lesson 22 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: Church and State

German empire.

In 1531, the emperor Charles V had renewed his threat to hunt

down the Lutherans and eliminate them from his empire by force
of the sword. So, in his Warning to His Dear Germans in 1531,
although he did not counsel resistance to the emperor directly, he
did not retreat from his insistence that God-given authority must
be obeyed, but he warned that everything which the bloodhounds
(as he called the papal party) labeled as rebellious was not
necessarily rebellious. Self-defense against the bloodhounds
cannot be rebellious, he said. So anyone who permitted the
pope to command his actions, even the emperor, qualified as a
bloodhound. And even though Luther still harbored doubts about
whether Christians really ought to resist persecution by the
emperor, he so stated things that his readers probably gathered
indeed that Luther was shifting his position.

About this time, Luther begrudgingly came to the conclusion,

forced upon him by Melanchthon and by secular counselors
within the Saxon government, that there was a constitutional
argument for resistance by the inferior magistrates within the
German empire against the emperor—that because the emperor
was elected, when he broke his oath, when he did not honor his
agreements with the inferior magistrates, they were in a sense his
equals and had the right to seize the power back.

Then in 1536 and in 1538, Luther signed on to memoranda

prepared by his colleagues that admitted the typical medieval
natural law argument of the right of self-defense even of a prince
in behalf of his people should the emperor unjustly persecute
them. But, in 1539, Luther developed his argument based on his
understanding of vocation in personal correspondence; in 1539,
he clearly indicated on the basis of his own theology that he
believed that resistance to the emperor was permitted when the
emperor no longer exercised his calling correctly but promoted
evil instead of the good, in this case by supporting the papacy
against the gospel.

We see here then Luther’s vocational argument, his two-realms

theory, at work as he taught that princes are called by God but
must act as God’s agents, and subjects are called by God and,
therefore, must obey. But God remains Lord of the civil realm,
both Lord of the rulers and of their subjects.

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