Through the Back Door
Barry Hankins May/June 1999
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
Luther on Church and State
Many erroneously believe that Martin Luther approved of or even designed Germany's state-church system. On the contraryhe actually attempted to protect the church from state interference. In the 1520s he developed the "two kingdoms" or "two regiments"2 position. Specifically he divided the functions of church and state according to spiritual and temporal authority, the two regiments. The church, quite naturally, had authority in matters spiritual, the inward concerns of the soul. The state had authority over the temporal or external matters of behavior. Church authority rested in the hands of ministers, not the state, yet the church needed the state and its magistrates to maintain law and order, for without social stability neither the church nor any other social institution could function well.
This position may seem to imply the sort of separation of church and state found in modern America. The church does its thing and the state does its; as much as possible the two leave each other alone. However, Luther did not make much of a distinction between the civil and the sacred, or what we today would call the secular and the religious. Rather, for him, the important distinction was inward (spiritual) versus outward or external. But external matters could still be religious, and all external matters were subject to the magistrate's jurisdiction. Thus, there were laws against not only an external matter such as adultery, but also blasphemy, because this clearly outward act could potentially disrupt civil peace. So church and state were two distinct institutions with different responsibilities, but the state couldand, in fact, didsupervise a number of religious acts so long as they were external. The crucial question is What religious acts are strictly internal and therefore off-limits to the state?
Whatever the answer, Luther never envisioned or countenanced state control of the churches. That, for him, was a horrifying prospect. In Luther's theory the state was to have little authority over the church and certainly no authority within it. The state had the authority to police only the outward actions of individual believers, different from setting policy within the churches.
However, as the Protestant Reformation proceeded in the German territories of the1520s, Luther and other leaders found that it was much easier to strip away Catholic practices within parishes than to replace them with new measures in an orderly fashion. Luther first learned this lesson when he returned to Wittenberg after a year hidden in the Wartburg Castle (the authorities had proclaimed him an outlaw at the Diet of Worms in 1521). Upon his return home he found was that the common people were taking into their own hands what they perceived to be the reformation of Catholic churches, actions that often were manifest in the form of disorderly mobs entering church buildings and smashing images and other Catholic artifacts deemed unacceptable to Protestants. Luther, a law-and-order man who believed that all things should proceed methodically and with proper backing from legitimate authorities, chided his people for acting in an unauthorized manner.
The question then became Who shall guide the churches in their new Protestant direction? Here two loopholes in Luther's church-state theory appeared. While always maintaining that the state should not have authority in spiritual matters, Luther also argued that the church should not shun the aid of the magistrate when offered in good faith. Luther believed that the state could act as the "nursing father to the church," provided that the state was represented by a well-meaning Christian magistrate.
The second loophole was Luther's analogy, first articulated in his Address to the Christian Nobility (1520), that whenever a fire breaks out, those best positioned to douse it ought to do so even if they are not firefighters. This idea foreshadowed Luther's later concept of "emergency bishop," which held that the magistrate can act as overseer for the church in an emergency, such as the situation in the 1520s. Once Catholicism and its system of bishops had been eliminated from various German territories, there was nothing to put in its place. Who then would oversee the churches? The need appeared dire as the Reformation had spread rather haphazardly from Wittenberg. In some parishes the old Mass was still being used; in others financial matters were in disarray; and in others the clergy were almost wholly without theological education (It was discovered that one pastor thought the "Ten Commandments" was a new book). Even more pressing, perhaps, was the question of how to ensure that property formerly under the jurisdiction of the Catholic Church be not expropriated by wily nobles and used for their own profane purposes.3 Luther's firefighter analogy suggested that in this sort of situation, the magistrates were in the best position to lend immediate oversightto put out the fire, as it were. They or their representatives could act as temporary overseers to ensure that reform of the churches proceeded smoothly.
During this burgeoning emergency, Elector John of Saxony came to power in 1524. John was a Luther supporter and fervent Protestant. This combination of ecclesiastical need and a supportive, Protestant magistrate led Luther and his allies to modify their previous views on church and state and adopt emergency measures. The elector accepted Luther's request to help the church but suggested that Luther himself come up with a plan to implement it. So Luther and his right-hand man, Phillip Melanchthon, devised what came to be called the "Visitations." This was actually a revival of the medieval visitations to parishes conducted by Catholic bishops who were charged with oversight authority. The new twist in the Lutheran visitations was the participation of the state.4 Whereas in the medieval procedure bishops of the church did the visiting, in Luther and Melanchthon's plan the magistrates would appoint visitors. The two reformers collaborated on a manual entitled Instructions for the Visitors of Parish Pastors in Electoral Saxony, with Luther writing the preface and Melanchthon writing the actual body of the work. The plan became a model for most other German territories and even non-German and non-Protestant lands revived the visitations.5 Luther's preface reveals the kinds of concerns Luther had about this project and the safeguards he believed necessary to ensure the freedom of the churches from state control.
Luther articulated a hairsplitting belief that when the magistrate aided the church, he did so as a Christian and not as a magistrate. In this creative fiction he stipulated that Elector John would undertake the task of appointing visitors "out of Christian love (since he is not obligated to do so as a temporal sovereign) and by God's will for the benefit of the gospel and the welfare of the wretched Christians in his territory."6 Continuing, Luther wrote, "May God grant that it may be and become a happy example which all other German princes may fruitfully imitate, and which Christ on the last day will richly reward."7 Evidently recognizing that some parishes might not take kindly to the prospect of state-appointed agents inspecting their churches, Luther continued, "We hope they will not ungratefully and proudly despise our love and good intention, but will willingly, without any compulsion, subject themselves in the spirit of love to such visitation and with us peacefully accept these visitors until God the Holy Spirit brings to pass something that is better, through them or through us."8
Luther's preface reads like an exercise in wishful thinking written by a theologian not wholly comfortable with what he was proposing. In these quotations there is the sense that the visitation is not the ideal set of affairs but something necessary that will, one hopes, be superseded later by a happier arrangement. In the concluding paragraph to the preface Luther again justified the use of state authority within the churches by reminding the visitors who would be reading the instructions that the whole process was out of the ordinary: "While His Electoral Grace is not obligated [He might better have said "not authorized"] to teach and to rule in spiritual affairs, he is obligated as temporal sovereign to so order things that strife, rioting, and rebellion do not arise among his subjects."9 In effect, Luther was attempting to tie the visitation, which smacked of state meddling in the internal affairs of the churches, to the magistrate's God-ordained duty to maintain law and order in external matters.
Far from being a temporary set of circumstances limited by Luther's safeguards, the visitations opened the door for permanent government intervention in, and eventual control over, the Lutheran churches of Germany. Within a short time the concept of visitors had evolved into superintendents, then a consistory made up of theologians and state officials. Once this pattern of government intervention had been set, other magistrates simply began to introduce church reforms themselves, assuming that as the governing power they had authority over the churches in their territories.10
Twenty years after the first Instruction Lutherin the year preceding his deathwrote a preface for another edition for another diocese. The emergency measure had become permanent. Within a generation or so of Luther's death the Lutheran churches of Germany had become state churches, under the auspices of the magistrates. Luther never desired this, but as several Reformation scholars have written, Luther's well-intended policies allowed the magistrates into the churches through the back door.11
Implications for Today
Though no good historian believes that history repeats itself, and though all good scholars accept that the lessons of history are hard to come by (if they can be learned at all), there are some striking parallels between the Lutheran situation of the sixteenth century and current calls for government funding of faith-based social services and Christian schools.
First, Luther was willing to accept the help of his magistrate (i.e., his government) largely because Elector John was a believer willing to help. John's predecessor had supported Luther politically, but John himself was a fervent Protestant who cared deeply about the church. His offer, therefore, was nearly irresistible for Luther, especially when the Reformation ran into the trouble outlined above.
Much like Luther, many religious conservatives today seem much more willing to link up with government now that the Republican Party controls Congress. For the Religious Right, the Republican Party is the Elector John, the religion-friendly government. Whereas in the past the stock and trade of most evangelical and fundamentalist political activists has been to attempt to reign in the overbearing leviathan (the federal government) this effort is now accompanied by the paradoxical hope that government can be made more accommodating toward religion, and that its funds can be used to help religious institutions do their jobs. Like Luther's attitude toward Elector John, many Christians today are less wary of a Republican government in the nineties than the welfare state of the sixties and seventies. They are ready for a church-state partnership.
A second similarity between Luther's situation and the present concerns the concept of an emergency situation. Just as Luther envisioned a crisis that only the government was well situated to address, so today many who support the Charitable Choice provision of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act argue that social justice demands this new partnership between church and state. Those in this camp are by no means confined to the Religious Right. Rather, some are progressive members of the evangelical Left. Ronald Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action and Jim Wallis of Sojourners have spent their careers working to bring justice for the poor; they have earned the right to be heard on issues related to poverty and discrimination. Unlike Religious Right spokespersons, these social justice evangelicals and some progressive Catholics have not been part of the political conservatism that usually opposes government welfare programs. Rather, they have always argued that government has a role to play in the alleviation of poverty. They see the government as being in the best financial position to deal with massive poverty and injustice, but the churches have the spiritual resources that are needed for a holistic approach to these social problems.12 So the near-crisis proportions of social dislocation and injustice, combined with the need for both funds and spiritual resources to address these problems, seem to have created an emergency situation that can be addressed only by mobilizing the efforts of church and state in tandem.
A third consideration is that Luther and his cohorts argued that the visitations would really be a function of the church. This was Luther's creative fiction, his way of convincing himself that he really wasn't violating his own two regiments theory. Rather, he was calling on the state merely to appoint the visitors and give them official status while the church would exercise all spiritual authority. The state's participation was to be minimal and not intended to suggest that the ruler actually had authority to set religious policy.
So it is with today's supporters of Charitable Choice. They seek the money to engage only in the social ministries they believe the emergency situation requires. "Just give us the money, even indirectly in the form of vouchers," many are arguing today, "and we will make more efficient social service agencies." Please, no strings attached.
These three elements, present in Luther's time as well as now, seem to suggest that the time is right for a church-state partnership previously deemed a breach of the wall separating church and state. But before moving too quickly, supporters of charitable choice should consider what happened in the sixteenth century. Luther and his supporters discovered that unintended consequences resulted from their partnership with government.
Concerning the first point of comparison, a friendly government can cut two ways. Rather than merely appointing the visitors and stepping aside, John ignored the subtleties of Luther's preface, assumed the visitors derived their authority from the magistrate, not the church, and sent them into the churches as direct agents of the state. From the outset John called them "our authorized visitors."13 Luther's finely tuned distinctions between the authority of the church and that of the state was too much for John to grasp, and the state began exercising its authority over the churches in a way that Luther thought inappropriate and that he was powerless to stop.
In the present situation those supporting charitable choice may want to consider the prospect of creeping regulation. If Elector John could scarcely stifle the tendency to monopolize all that his government touched, isn't it even more likely that the pervasive U.S. governmental bureaucracy will do likewise? It is not hard to envision an eventual department of religious affairs visiting, overseeing, and regulating the activities of churches that receive direct or indirect federal funds. Church and parachurch organizations whose budgets rely on the money may find themselves with an unhappy, as opposed to charitable, choice of shutting down for lack of funds or accepting government regulation. Even the friendly magistrate usually wants some, if not complete, control over what he or she subsidizes.
A second unforeseen consequence for Luther was that his own closest advisor, Melanchthon, proved to have somewhat different church-state views. He actually believed that the magistrates, by virtue of their God-ordained office, held a preeminent place in the churches. They were praecipuum membrum ecclesiae, or the principal members of the church. This differed from Luther's view that within the church the magistrate held no greater status than anyone else. Yet Luther's view that the magistrate was best positioned "to put out the fire" served as a prelude to Melanchthon's position, and Melanchton's reformulation of Luther's views proved more influential than Luther's original position, partly because Luther died first.14 Whenever Luther's position proved to be an obstacle to the state, the state needed only to turn to Melanchthon instead of Luther.
In similar fashion some who today advocate charitable choice programs sincerely proclaim their support for separation of church and state. They truly believe that the government can fund religious activities without assuming authority over them. But there is a wide variety of viewpoints within the camp that supports church-state partnership. Wily government officials can always cast about the ideological horizon for the theological views that best suit the government's purposes. When the safeguards against government intrusion are personalized instead ofinstitutionalized, it takes merely a change of personnel to effect momentous changes in the relationship of church and state.
Conclusion
The suggestion is not that the kind of church-state partnership being proposed today is likely to lead to the type of state churches that Germany produced. America is far too pluralistic and America's religious institutions far too insistent on equality before the law for a full-blown state-supported church to gain legal sanction. Nevertheless, those who advocate the sort of changes necessary to bring about government funding of explicitly religious, faith-based social service agencies should consider past church-state partnerships that have gone awry. The changes being made now may over fundamentally alter America's unique church-state arrangement in ways more problematic for the churches than for the state. Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and others who sought support from magistrates are known as the magisterial Reformers of the Protestant Reformation. As scholar Harro Hopfl has written, "indeed, all the Reformers who took this course soon learnt what indeed they might have anticipated, namely that the favor of princes is fitful and unreliable, and never comes without strings."15
Barry Hankins is associate director of the J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.
FOOTNOTES
1 . Among those calling for such partnerships see: Jim Wallis, "The Hurricane is Coming," Sojourners 26 (May-June 1997): 8. Here Wallis writes, "We need new partnerships between government, business, churches, and service providers." At an April 1998 symposium at the J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor University Wallis delivered the keynote address entitled "Overcoming Poverty: A New Era of Partnership."
2 . While old, the most accessible biography of Martin Luther remains Roland Bainton's classic Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (New York: Mentor of Penguin Books, 1977, 1950). This is one of several editions that have been published since the book first appeared in 1950.
3 . W.D.J. Cargill Thompson, The Political Thought of Martin Luther (Sussex, England: The Harvester Press; Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Nobles Press, 1984), 144; For a list of the problems in the Saxon churches see: Clyde Manschreck, Melanchthon: The Quiet Reformer (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1975), 136-37.
4 . Gerald Strauss "Visitations," The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, Hans J. Hillerbrand, ed. in chief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 4:238.
5 . Strauss, 239. Both Luther's preface and Melanchthon's instructions are included in volume 40 of Luther's Works ed. Conrad Bergendoff, general ed. Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1955), 265-320.
6 . Luther's Works, 40: 271.
7 . Ibid., 272.
8 . Ibid., 272-73.
9 . Ibid., 273.
10 . Thompson, 148.
11 . See: Thompson, 154; and Alister McGrath, Reformation Thought: An Introduction, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1993), 209-210. Concerning the unworkable technical distinctions inherent in Luther's church-state thought and its application, McGrath writes, "The way was opened to the eventual domination of the church by the state, which was to become a virtually universal feature of Lutheranism."
12 . For example, see: Jim Wallis, "The Church Steps Forward," Sojourners, March-April 1997, 8, where Wallis writes, "We need new approaches beyond relying either on government programs alone or hoping that churches and charities can, by themselves, take care of the problem. Religious communities and other profits must enter into public-private collaborations with both government and business to find the answers that work."
13 . Quoted in: Roland Bainton, The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), 71. See also: Thompson, 148.
14 . Thompson, 147 and 151.
15 . Harro Hopfl, ed. and trans. Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), xi.