It is notorious that the tendency to make his Church depend upon the secular authorities, as soon as they had embraced his cause, was part of Luther’s plan from the very outset. A State Church corresponded with his requirements. However much at the commencement Luther might emphasise the congregational ideal, tracing the whole authority of the freshly formed communities back to it, viz. to the priestly powers inherent in all the faithful, yet, as occasion arises, he falls back on the one external authority left standing, now that he has definitely set aside one of the two powers recognised of old.
In the sixteenth century the Church was confronted not only by official Protestantism, but by various other opposing bodies, Anabaptists, fanatics and anti-Trinitarians. If among all these only the Wittenberg, Zürich and Geneva groups “were able to assert themselves, this,” says a recent Protestant theologian, Paul Wernle, “was not due, or at least not solely due, to the fact, that they were more true or more profound than the others, but that they accommodated themselves better to existing conditions, and, above all, to the State.”[896] Karl Sell, a Protestant professor of theology, speaks in the same strain: “Where the Reformation gained the day it did so with the help of the secular power, of the Princes or republics and, in every instance, the Reformation itself strengthened the power of these authorities. Upon them devolved the new office of caring ... for religion.... Thus the duty of providing for wholesome doctrine and right faith, for the doctrine which alone could be pleasing to God, became one of the principal concerns of the rulers; hence arose the strict adherence to orthodoxy, the exclusion of erroneous teaching from the confines of the State, in short, the theological police system which prevailed in all Protestant countries till the middle of the seventeenth century.”[897]
The tendency to seek an alliance with the secular powers did not, however, hinder Luther from degrading the authorities and the Princes in the eyes of the people in the most relentless and public manner. In his mortification at the want of response to his call he allowed himself to be carried away to strictures and predictions which greatly excited the masses.
In his work “On the secular power” he asks: “Would you learn why God has decreed such a terrible fate to befall the worldly Princes?” His answer is: “God has delivered them up to a perverted mind and means to make an end of them, just as in the case of the clerical Princes.... Secular lords should rule over the land and the people in outward matters. This they neglected. All they could do was to rob and oppress the people, heaping tax upon tax and rate upon rate.” He reminds his readers that the Romans, too, acted unjustly in things both spiritual and temporal—until “they were destroyed. There now! there you see God’s judgment on the great braggarts.”[898]—“There are few Princes,” he says, in the same writing, “who are not regarded as either fools or knaves. This is because they prove themselves to be such, and the common people are growing to understand it; scorn for Princes, which God calls ‘contemptum,’ prevails among the peasants and common folk; and I fear there will be no stopping this unless the Princes behave as beseems Princes and begin again to govern reasonably and justly. Your tyranny and wantonness cannot be endured much longer.”[899] His chief grievance here and elsewhere is, that the rulers do not allow the gospel to be freely preached, but their “dancing, hunting, races, games and such-like worldly pleasures” he also holds up to execration. “Who does not know that in heaven a Prince is like a hare?” i.e. it would take many beaters to locate one.[900] “I do not say these things in the hope that the secular Princes will profit”; it is not indeed absolutely impossible for a Prince to be a good Christian, “but such a case is rare.” A Prince who is at the same time a Christian is “one of the greatest wonders and a most precious sign of the potency of Divine Grace.”[901]—It has been already pointed out that, in seeking the causes of the Peasant-War, we must take into account these inflammatory discourses of Luther’s to the people and his imperious demand for freedom to preach the “Evangel.”
In his “Exhortation to Peace” of the year 1525, he addresses “the Princes and Lords,” spiritual and temporal, and tells them they have themselves to blame for the seditious risings of the peasants: “We have no one on earth to thank for such disorder and revolt but you, Princes and Lords, and more particularly you, blind bishops and mad priests”; you are not merely enemies of the Evangel, but “rob and tax in order to live in luxury and state, until the poor, common people neither can nor will bear it any longer. The sword is at your throat,” etc.; here he is speaking to the “tyrannical and raging authorities,” as he terms them, of that sword which, according to the words he had flung among the people in earlier years, had long been unsheathed.[902]—To Frederick his Elector he had written, on March 7, 1522, that the Princes who were hostile to the Evangel did not see that they were “forcing the people to rebel, and behaving as though they wished themselves or their children to be exterminated; this, without a doubt, God will send as a punishment.”[903]
How Luther was wont to criticise the authorities in his sermons, regardless of the effect it might produce in such a period of excitement, appears from a sermon preached on August 20, 1525, i.e. at the time of the great peasant rising in Germany.
“Let anyone count up the Princes and rulers who fear God more than man. How many do you think they will number? You could write all their names on one finger, or as someone has said, on a signet ring.”[904] “At the Courts nowadays infidelity, egotism and avarice prevail among the Princes and their councillors ... they say: my will be done and forget that there is a God in heaven above.”[905] “These braggarts and great lords think they are always in the right, and want others to give judgment and pass sentence as pleases them. If this is not done, woe betide the judge.”[906]
In the same sermon, it is true, Luther quotes, happily and at the same time forcibly, passages from Holy Scripture in praise of good rulers. In his popular style he points out what should be the qualities of a righteous sovereign who is solicitous for his people’s welfare. Such a ruler, he says, is courageous and determined in dealing with evil of every sort, and says to himself: “Even though this rich, powerful, strong man, be he Jack or peer, becomes my enemy, I don’t care. By virtue of my office and calling I have one on my side who is far stronger, more respected and more powerful than he, and though he [the enemy] should have all the devils, Princes and Kings on his side, all worse than himself, what is all that to me if He Who sits up there in Heaven is with me? All undertakings should be decided in this way, and one should say: Dear Lord, I leave it in Thy hands, though it should cost me my life. Then God answers: Be steadfast and I will also stand by you.” Luther nevertheless concludes: “But where will you find such rulers? Where are they?”[907] In his sermon of December 3, likewise, he had drawn a beautiful picture of the modesty and renunciation which the example of Christ teaches both Princes and people. Yet there again, at the conclusion, we find him saying: “There is no kingdom that is not addicted to plunder. The Princes are a gang of cut-purses.”[908]
In the writing “On the secular power,” to which we must here revert, Luther says, that the Princes are, as a rule, “the biggest fools or the worst knaves on the surface of the earth”; a good Prince “had always been a rare bird from the beginning of the world.” Because the world is “of the devil,” therefore “its Princes too are of a like nature.” In spite of this Luther ends by saying, that as God’s “hangmen,” the Princes ought to be obeyed.[909] Later on he was to declare that the passages from the Bible, which he had here quoted in support of this obedience, were his best defence against the charge of diminishing the respect due to Princes, or of teaching rebellion. “The fact that, in that work, I based and confirmed the temporal supremacy and obedience on Scripture is of itself sufficient refutation of such slanders.”[910]
When he asserts in the above writing, that “Among Christians no authority can or ought to exist, but that everyone should be subject to all,”[911] his intention was not, as has sometimes been erroneously supposed by his opponents, to incite the people against the secular power; the words, though badly chosen, must be understood in connection with his mystical theory of the true believers, i.e. of the invisible Church, being intended to convey, that no authority should rule by enforced commands, but that, on the contrary, all must ‘serve,’ and that even superiors should be mindful of their duty of ‘service.’ It is not, however, very surprising that such a statement, so unwisely expressed in general terms as that, “among Christians there neither can nor ought to be any authority,” when taken out of its context and published abroad among the people, was misapplied by the malcontents, more especially when taken in conjunction with other questionable utterances of Luther’s.