Martin Luther’s “Two Kingdom” Philosophy Not Biblical, Gives Us Godless Government, Greased The Skids For Hitler’s Rise To Power
(Our friend, “Camp Director” — Chuck Michaelis - in our “Forum,” has quite correctly denounced Martin Luther’s “two kingdoms” philosophy reminding me that I had written about this egregiously dangerous formulation many years ago. Below is a slightly updated version of what I wrote.)
IN ADDITION TO BURNING the socalled Papal Bull in which the Pope denounced him, Martin Luther’s wrong-headed, un-Biblical ‘Two Kingdom’ theology, in effect, burned God’s Law regarding politics and the civil government.By John Lofton, Editor
“For as theologians we are obliged to teach that a Christian is not to offer resistance but to suffer everything. Nor is he to plead the shift: It is permissible to repel force by force. If, therefore, the Jurists are right in saying that a Christian may offer resistance, not as a Christian but as a citizen or member of the body politic, we let that pass…. But our office will not allow our advising a member of the body politic to offer such resistance, nor are we acquainted with their statute law. They will have to take this responsibility upon their conscience — Martin Luther, writing to Lazarus Spengler in Nurenberg, March 18, 1531, in a letter titled “Resistance Supported Legally, Not Theologically.”
The dangers of a truncated, incomplete Christianity — aside from being, of course, “another Gospel” (Galatians 1:6) and, thus, not Christianity — is that it results in disaster in real-life. Such a false gospel and un-Biblical theology results in Christians that are the savorless salt our Lord speaks of, savorless salt that is cast out by men and so worthless that it is unfit for the dunghil (Luke 14:35). Take, for example, the doctrine of the so-called “two kingdoms” advocated by Martin Luther and Lutheranism.
In his “Table Talk” (Fortress Press, 1967), page 199, comment number 3388b, Luther, in the Fall of 1533, says this: “Our Lord God has reserved the best rule for Himself and His Church, where one proceeds not in the exercise of law but in voluntary freedom… .On the other hand, civil rule proceeds by demand: ‘Do this, don’t do that!’ ‘If you don’t obey,’ says the magistrate, ‘and you do me an injury, I’ll punish you.’….Thus the civil government seeks its advantage with certain rigid demands. Christ’s rule, however, looks to our benefit and allows us pleasing discretion….”
This erroneous view is, alas, very much with us today. A few years ago, I had one of the most depressing, frustrating, maddening conversations I have ever had. A Lutheran refused to have anything to do with me because I’m a Calvinist. Now, that’s discrimination! But, no, I don’t favor a Federal law to remedy it.
In any event, because I admired this cartoonist’s style, I called him and we discussed the possibility of him doing some work for a newsletter I was publishing. He was “honored,” he said, that I called him. He knew who I was. We had a good talk and some laughs re: ideas for cartoons. But, then, a couple of weeks later, I got a telephone call from this man. And what he said, in effect, was no way would he have anything to do with me or my “Lofton Letter” (a few copies of which I had sent him). Why? Because I am a Calvinist who emphasizes the so-called First Table of the 10 Commandments (1-4) and wants to use God’s Law to (gasp!) reconstruct society. Whereas, he said, he emphasizes the Second Table of the 10 Commandments (5-10) and believes that God’s Law is simply to drive people to Christ. Period. That’s it. This is the sole reason he says he will have nothing to do with me.
Now, to be sure, this man said that he, too, is not satisfied with our society. And he, too, would like to see some changes — but not on the basis of God’s Law, and specifically not on the basis of the Old Testament which he seems to believe is no longer valid. OK, so what is his plan for the societal changes he says he wants?
Well, he says there is no plan, that this is a “complex” matter (which, with no plan, it certainly is; indeed, with no plan this is an impossible matter). No plan!, I exclaim. Well, okay, there is a plan, he says, and it is “natural law.” But, I note, “nature” is fallen and thus not normative (a plan) for anything. True, he admits, reiterating that, as he had said, this is a “complex” question.
I say that without God’s Law we don’t really know what to do about anything. He replies, as he is to say regarding many statements I make: “Wellllllll…” I repeat: What is the plan on the basis of which you would try to change things? He says: “Well, it is not on the basis of the Bible that we should try and reconstruct society.” I note that what he just did is tell me how not to change things whereas I asked what we should be doing, as Christians? He says nothing specific.
I tell him his “no plan” plan won’t work. I ask: Are you against abortion? Yes, he is. Does he want to see the law which makes abortion legal changed? Yes, he does. I say: Okay, then on what basis do we change it and why? Where do we get our plan for the change you, and I, want?!
He starts to quote something David says in the Bible. I cut him off. No, no, no, I say. No Bible plan to reconstruct society, remember? And certainly no Old Testament plan! Pausing, he then wonders aloud if some of what’s in Scripture might not still be used for, well — something. I reply: To be sure. Amen! But not by you, according to what you say you believe! I try to show him that this is where his anti-Biblical, antinomian, sinful theology leads: down a road where the bridge is out and one ends up (begins, actually) by being a hypocrite. The hypocrisy here being that you start by chucking God’s Law and/or limiting it to Old Testament Israel. Then, bit-by-bit, as you are forced to be specific, you try and re-introduce it to support what you say you are for. This reduces him to silence. But, still, he is not changing his view. And, still, he says he will, literally, draw nothing for me in my “Letter even if the drawing reflects something we agree on — like being against evolution, the subject of the first cartoon I had requested from him.
Now, I must be blunt here. This man is the enemy. This man is an example of why God’s judgment begins with the church (I Peter 4:17). This man is the savorless salt our Lord spoke about, the kind that was to be trodden under the feet of men, the kind that is so bad it is unfit even for the dunghill (Luke 14:35). Our country is falling apart, and coming under God’s wrath because we have forsaken His Law, and this man is worried about being seen as making common cause with a Calvinist whose unforgivable sin is that he believes God’s Word - all of It — and wants to apply all of It to every area of life.
Okay. So, I believe what I say here and have dedicated my writing and speaking to preaching this. And so did our Lord Who, obviously, was no Lutheran! Our Lord constantly preached the Old Testament and (quoting Deuteronomy) commanded us to live by every word that proceeds out of God’s mouth (Matthew 4:4).
Of course God’s Law is to make us see our sinfulness, to drive us to Christ to be saved. Amen! Adherence to the Law, however, does not save us. Amen! But, once we are driven to Christ, and saved, then what?! Is our salvation the end of things? Are people saved solely to get other people saved, and then they get others saved, etc., etc. As the singer Peggy Lee asked in a song years ago: “Is that all there is?” Is that all Christianity is about — just “soul- winning”? Are there no consequences from being saved? Are Christians, in addition to being saved, born-again, not to, actually, then do something?!! Does faith not produce works? Of course. And if it doesn’t, then this faith is dead, according to chapter 2, verse 17 of the book of James — the book Luther wanted, ignorantly, to tear out of the Bible.
My cartoonist conversationalist not only draws cartoons, he isa cartoon, a hideous, deformed, warped caricature of the Biblical/Christian faith. His theology, writ large, is the reason why we are in the mess we’re in. God gives us a plan, the Bible, all of it. And He commands us to follow it if we love Him (John 14:15). To reject God’s plan is to hate God.
So, how has this Lutheran, un-Biblical “two kingdom” theology worked out in real life? Well, not well, to put it mildly. Take, for example, what happened with Hitler and the Nazis in Germany, a country whose State Church was the Lutheran Church. The Nazis were able to seize power and subvert the Church in this nation precisely because far too few Christians were true Calvinistic Bible-believers and thus dedicated to establishing, through God’s Law, Biblical righteousness.
The record here is crystal clear to anyone who studies it seriously. For example, Hans Rothfels, in his book “The German Opposition to Hitler, An Appraisal” ( Henry Regnery Company, 1948) says that “the ‘radical’ opponents of the Hitler/Nazi regime were in the orthodox Christian camp, in the camp of those who adhered to an undiluted doctrinal position and a pessimistic conception of the so-called natural or ‘demonic’ forces in the world.” He adds that liberal Protestantism was ineffective in opposing Hitler because it “was imbued with an idealistic cultural philosophy and a metaphysic of progress that tended more to an attitude of laissez- faire in outward things and possessed less power of resistance to Nazism.”
In other words, the old saying is true: You can’t beat something with nothing. And, alas, theologically, most German Christians were nothing. While the Nazis were “reconstructionists” — trying to reconstruct Germany according to the “gospel” of National Socialism — most German Christians weren’t about building anything, or resisting anything, according to God’s Law.
In his chapter in the book titled “Totalitarianism” (Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), Franklin Littel tells us what the Nazis were trying to “reconstruct” with their advocacy of “positive Christianity.” What they preached “was grounded in a thorough acceptance of the most radical interpretations of textual critics of the Bible and practitioners of the comparative method in the study of religions. This readily led to placing an equal value upon all religious myths.”
Okay. So, what did most of the “Two Kingdom” Lutherans do, and use, to fight this? Well, nothing, really. Zip. Zilch. In fact, Littel says Hitler’s “positive Christianity” had wide appeal (!) because it was non-sectarian, at first confessionless and, thus, many in all sections of German Christendom “came to accept an ideology and discipline dictated by the State.”
There were, however, thank God, Christians who staunchly resisted the Nazis. Littel says: “With firm grounding in the Bible and the theology of the Reformers, a stand was taken at Barmen, Dahiem, Steglitz, Augsburg, and succeeding synods, against anti- Semitism, against forced introduction of the ‘Fuhretprinzip’ into the Church, against illegal imprisonment and the subversion of an objective justice, against abuse of minority peoples, and against ‘new revelation’ claimed to be embodied in the Third Reich; later actions dealt with sterilization and murder of defectives, refusal to pray for a Hitler victory, and so forth (emphasis mine).
“Within the ramparts of this theological fortress young men were educated for the ministry in bootleg seminaries, pastors expelled by the Nazis were supported by free collections, and a leadership of integrity maintained to take control of church organizations after the collapse by a group which could only testify by the boldness of hope in 1935: ‘We will not abandon this our Church and become a free church; we are the Church.”
In conclusion, Littel says: “It seems a fair summary that the resisting churches, in several branches, were characterized by theological intransigence (emphasis mine) and an open hostility to any attempt to weaken their ideological discipline through syncretism, harmonism, denial of a historical revelation, speculative exegesis or philosophy, or appeal to popular feeling….And it is in the thrust ‘to make everything alike’ that the totalitarian state has run afoul of the universalism of the Christian churches, and will continue to do so whenever there are faithful men to stand up and be counted for the sake of the Lord of History.”
In his book “Dawn And Resurrection” (Madrus House, 1945), Joseph Hromadka writes: “The liberal theology in Germany and in her orbit utterly failed. It was willing to compromise on the essential points of divine law… to dispose of the Old Testament… to replace the ‘Jewish’ law of the Old Testament by the autonomous (not theonomous! — J.L.) law of each race and nation respectively (emphasis mine). Liberal theology had made all the necessary preparation for the ‘Germanization of Christianity’ and for a racial Church.”
The distinguished British scholar J.O. Cobham, in a paper, also notes that those who most effectively resisted Hitler were “the strong conservative elements, loyal to the theologies of the Reformation… The very exaggerations of this theology were a source of strength. They made possible a radicalism of dogmatic statement that would hardly have been possible within, what we in England would regard as, a more balanced presentation of the Christian Gospel”(emphasis mine).
Writing about Germany in the early 1800s in his book “German Youth: Bond Or Free” (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., London, 1946), Howard Becker points out: “As far as religious sects were concerned they had almost none of the Calvinistic passion for the establishment of a Kingdom of God on earth; there was no ideology upon which a peoples’ army of Cromwellian type could be established” (emphasis mine).
In his book “Things That Are Caesar’s: The Genesis Of The Church Conflict” (Round Table Press, 1935), Paul Banwell Means lists the following as among the reasons why the Church was so weak in its fight against Hitler:
It never seriously shouldered the task of building the Kingdom of God on earth, tending instead toward a static rather than a dogmatic conception of society (emphasis mine).
It had a strong tradition of Pietism which theologian Ernest Troeltsch says “supplies the State with loyal servants, who practice submission as a part of the ascetism of their calling; the only obligation it lays on government is that of patriarchal kindness and care of the commonweal….”
It was heavily influenced by modern positivistic thought which “too optimistically accepted bourgeois culture as the expression of a rational universe” and “too naively accepted the idea of progress and failed to develop any radical criticism of modern cultural trends”(emphasis mine).
The German Church was preponderantly influenced “by Lutheranisin rather than Calvinism which challenged the absolutist claims of the State and the right of the State to govern the church, and emphasized the independent and self-governing nature of the church” (emphasis mine).
Means concludes, prophetically, in words we, as Christians, must never forget: “A religious institution sows the seeds of its own destruction when it becomes so wrapped up in its own forms and doctrines of worship that it becomes insulated from the real social needs of the people which it is to serve…. The National Socialist revolution in the church was a tragic witness of the failure of the church to apply its message to modern life and play a role in the nation vital and significant enough to challenge the claims of conflicting loyalties. The church was not able to offer more effective resistance to the inroads of pagan religious movements because its own life and message had become corrupt and complacent. The fate of German Protestantism may well serve as a warning to the Protestant churches of other countries” (emphasis mine).
Amen! And this is precisely the state of the Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches in America today!
Finally, in his book “Theologians Under Hitler” (Yale University Press, 1985), Robert Ericksen, a history instructor at Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington, takes a look at three Protestant theologians — Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch — all of whom were scholarly influential and greeted the rise of Hitler enthusiastically. How could this happen? Well, one thing was an acute manifestation of what Ericksen calls “the crisis of modernity” which effected Weimar (pre-Hitler) Germany. And one of the elements of this crisis was a pluralism which added to the breakdown of shared values. Another element in this crisis of modernity was intellectual. It was a time when “even theologians became scientists in their quest for the true message of God.” And there was “a crisis of relativism” which unavoidably led to “the nihilistic view that no values are valid.”
Prof. Ericksen says this: “Christianity had always claimed a certain uniqueness and a certain authority, based on a unique and authoritative Bible and church. But this becomes untenable, or at least highly vulnerable, in the relativistic sociology and history of religion….The cleft between liberal theology and the man-in-the-pew, therefore, went beyond the obtuseness of the latter. The man-in-the-pew had recognized crucial difficulties in an academic theology. Thus, the result of rational theology seemed to be both a loss of its constituency and a loss of its content. Is theology believable if not scientific? Is it valuable if scientific? The dilemma looked to be insoluble. Given this dilemma, one workable solution seemed to be the abandonment of Christian theology.”
Noting that the views of the three theologians he studied must have been common to many other German theologians and pastors, Prof. Ericksen concludes as follows: “Reason proved inadequate. The crisis of reason, therefore, appears to be real. Existentialism…is shown to be morally neutral. The present need is for historical insight which is more relative, which can provide reliable guidance to the intelligent student of history….
“A second warning in the German church experience lies in its failure to distinguish adequately between Christian concerns and inherently patriotic concerns….The modern intellectual tradition contributes to the crisis. It has peered deeply into the abyss, not enough to see the bottom, but enough to suspect there is no bottom. And this crisis is abetted by the democratic tradition, with its defense of personal freedom and pluralism. Is the non-German world immune to this? Can the experiment with freedom in modern society create a lasting social unity rather than social disintegration? Can it survive hard times?”
Well, no! The answer here is an emphatic “no!” to all of these questions. And unless Christians stand on God’s Holy Word, the Bible, and seek to establish Biblical righteousness in our individual lives, in our nation, in all areas of life, we, too, invite the Hitlerization of our country (which I think is already under way and has been for generations.) And doesn’t that line about the “failure to distinguish adequately between Christian concerns and inherently patriotic concerns” sound familiar?
In a sermon at the Orthodox Presbyterian Church I used to attend, the pastor quoted, approvingly, something supposedly said by C.T. Studd. According to the pastor, Studd, the British missionary to China saved under the preaching of Dwight Moody, said that it was his desire to “set up a rescue shop within a yard of Hell.” But, the analogy here is fatally flawed, from a Biblical perspective. Scripture tells us, clearly, that the “gates of hell shall not prevail against” Christ and His Church (Matthew 16:18). Thus, Christ and His Church, Christians, are not to merely “rescue” people from hell. Christ and His Church are to destroy Hell!
As Matthew Henry puts it: “The Church may be foiled in particular encounters, but in the main battle it shall come off more than a conqueror” (Romans 8:37). Henry says, regarding Christ’s Church and its prosperity, referring to Micah 4:1-7: “There shall be a great accession of converts to it and succession of converts in it. People shall flow unto it as the waters of a river are continually flowing; there shall be a constant stream of believers flowing m from all parts into the Church… .For the law shall go forth of Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. ..the Gospel is not set up in opposition to the Law, but is an explication and illustration of it, and a branch growing out of its roots.”
In I John 3:8, God tells us, explicitly, the purpose why the Son of God was manifested: that He might destroy the works of the devil ! The word “destroy” here means to break up, dissolve, loose, melt, put off. And in other Scriptures (Matthew 12:25-29; Luke 11:17-22; and John 12:31) we are told that a prime purpose of our Lord’s ministry was to overcome the power of Satan! This explains the fierce conflict between Christ and evil spirits when He was here on earth.
Colossians 2:15 tells us that our Lord, having spoiled principalities and powers, made a show of them openly, “triumphing over them”! Indeed. And so must we. And by God s grace, we will, if we stay true to God’s Word, all of It.
There are those who will vehemently deny that Martin Luther’s theology had anything g to do with Hitler’s coming to power. But, this is not true. To paraphrase what Richard Weaver said about ideas, theologies and eschatologies also have consequences.
In his book “Luther In Context” ((Indiana University Press, 1986), Luther scholar David Steinmetz writes, and documents in detail what he says: “While Luther thinks (at least on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays) that Christians make better magistrates than non-Christians because they recognize a judge higher than themselves, he does not believe that magistrates should be Christian in order for the State to function properly. [He believes that] God governs the State through natural law and human wisdom. Luther is not interested in theocratic government, which finds the law code of the State in the Bible and insists on the rule of the elect (emphasis mine). Unlike his great contemporary, Martin Bucer, Luther is a religious reformer who defends the legitimate rights of the secular state….” (page 123.)
Steinmnetz says: “[Luther believes that] Christians cannot become revolutionaries.* They cannot overthrow God’s second government, even when it has fallen into the hands of tyrants. In such cases, they can only witness, pray, and suffer. A historian reading Luther’s discussion of the two kingdoms for the first time might be tempted to remark that it all sounds more like pastoral advice than like political philosophy. And, of course, pastoral advice is exactly what it is….Only incidentally is he interested in advising statesmen on the discharge of their public office….Luther rejects the theocratic state and the notion that Christian magistrates are essential to the proper functioning of the political order. Reason and natural law provide adequate norms for a well-run state. There is no need for a divine polity revealed in the Bible, a polity which can only be interpreted correctly by true believers. The State has its own dignity and authority. It is an independent sphere of God’s government, and Christians may serve it with a good conscience” (emphasis mine.)
So, literally, Martin Luther, though he may have, undoubtedly, preferred Godly government, rule by Godly men, he had no plan whatsoever to bring this about. Indeed, Luther was against reconstructing the civil government with the Bible as its foundation. And in, among other places, Hitler’s Germany and, I would add, our own country, today, we see Luther’s view prevailing, the result being Godless government.
A footnote: Another useful book on this same subject is a new book by Kevin P. Spicer titled “Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy And National Socialism” (Northern Illinois University Press, 2008)