Secular Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed

Von weltlicher Obrigkeit, wie weit man ihr Gehorsam schuldig sei appeared in early 1523, grown out of sermons Luther had preached the previous October at Weimar before Duke John of Saxony, to whom the treatise is dedicated. The immediate provocation was concrete: Duke George of Albertine Saxony had ordered Luther's newly published German New Testament confiscated, and Luther's own followers were asking whether a Christian owed obedience to a ruler who commanded such a thing. The question cut both ways. Some princes claimed authority over souls; some radicals argued that a true Christian needed no magistrate at all. Luther wrote to answer both.

The treatise moves in three parts. First, Luther establishes from Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2 that temporal government is ordained by God, and then reconciles this with the Sermon on the Mount by distinguishing two kingdoms and two governments. Those who are truly Christian belong to the kingdom of God and need no sword for themselves; the rest of humanity, which is to say the great majority, belongs to the kingdom of the world and is restrained by the sword. To try to rule the world by the gospel, he says, would be like loosing wild beasts from their chains. Yet the Christian does not withdraw from the sword; he serves it, as soldier, judge, or hangman, not for his own sake but out of love for the neighbor whom the sword protects. Second, Luther fixes the limit: temporal power extends over body and goods, over outward things, but it has no jurisdiction over the soul. Faith cannot be coerced, heresy is to be met with the Word and not with force, and if a prince demands that you surrender your New Testament, you must refuse, though you must not take up arms; you let him search your house and bear the loss. Thoughts, he remarks, are toll-free. Third, in a brief mirror for princes, he describes a Christian ruler as a servant of his subjects, wary of flatterers, measured in punishment, and dependent on God, and he adds that subjects are not bound to follow a prince into a manifestly unjust war, since it is no one's duty to do wrong. Throughout, Luther's tone toward the princes of his day is unsparing; a wise prince, he says, is a rare bird.

The work became the foundation of what later Lutheran theology called the doctrine of the two kingdoms, and it has been read, defended, and blamed in every subsequent crisis of church and state in the Lutheran world, from the Peasants' War two years later to the German church struggle of the 1930s. It is also one of the earliest Reformation arguments that conscience lies beyond the magistrate's reach, even if Luther himself did not hold consistently to its implications in later decades. Its enduring value is the clarity with which it separates two questions people still confuse: whether government is legitimate, and whether government is competent to command belief.

Who should read this: pastors, students of political theology, and anyone trying to think through the boundary between obedience and refusal when a government oversteps. It is not a theory of the state, not a program for resistance, and not devotional reading; readers wanting a developed account of when Christians may resist tyranny will need to look to later authors who argued with Luther rather than to Luther himself.