Two Kingdoms, Rightly Understood
Lutherans are a quiet, homeless bunch in the American religious and political landscape. They are too lavishly sacramental and ceremonial for most Protestants, but obviously sundered from Rome and the East with their fervent flocks of rad-trad converts. They can have a cordial beer with a Roman Catholic in which they both extol the extraordinary gift of the Sacraments in which Christ washes and feeds us for the forgiveness of our sins. And then they can zoom over to a Reformed friend’s home for an evening of epideictics on the glories of the Five Solas. Lutheran pastors, who often wear clerical collars and crucifix necklaces even just to go grocery shopping, have to deal with funny looks when they are seen accompanied by wives and children, just as much as they have to deal with chastisement from Protestants who see their garb as papistic and idolatrous.
Within the realm of culture and politics, the Lutheran situation is more dire. Rome and Geneva have an outsized monopoly on apologetics and invective against the secular epoch. This is primarily due to these respective traditions’ rich heritage of thinking about and practicing the relationship of faith to institutions. Rome has centuries of canon law and direct interference in European affairs under its belt. Geneva has not only its intrepid first generation of Reformers but also Knox, Kuyper, the Puritans, and Moscow. The Lutheran tradition has produced theologians, philosophers, artists, and composers of the highest merit—but no political geniuses. Name a (real!) American Lutheran public figure. I’ll wait.
So, as a confessional Lutheran who believes that the Book of Concord is an entirely true and faithful witness to Scripture, I am burdened with the daunting task of defending the “quiet option” as a viable means for puncturing the malaise of the West. But this is not a task that requires desperate scrounging around for a rationale, forever consigned to acknowledge my tradition’s role of third fiddle to the more prominent advocates of Christendom.
I argue that Lutheranism, with its woefully misunderstood paradigm of “two kingdoms,” its penchant for paradox, its emphasis on serving the neighbor in need, and its declarations of absolute Christocentricity, presents a stalwart model for a true Christian intrusion into secular modernity. I will not directly compare the Wittenberg way of thinking about church and society to the models propounded by my Roman and Genevan brethren. Instead, I will simply lay out some salient aspects of its deeply catholic, orthodox, evangelical, and reformed historical vision for society and plead for its merits.
Godly Areté in the Civil Estates
There was never a point at which the Reformation was not fundamentally an educative endeavor. Its leading men were products of the scholastic university, thoroughly steeped in Aristotelian habits of thinking about man and the world. The classical political thought of the ancients coexisted quite harmoniously with the renewal of Law and Gospel properly preached. Aristotle writes that governments exist to educate their citizens in the spirit of the constitution—the “constitution” being a particular state’s unique expression of the natural law that applies to all men. For the Reformers whom we call Magisterial, the natural law is precisely what Rome had eradicated from the minds and hearts of the commonfolk.
Ignoring the fact of all-corrosive original sin in its preaching of justification by works while keeping the population bereft of Scripture, Europeans had been cut off from reality by a severely defective constitution. Directly contrary to the canard of “just me, my conscience, and my Bible,” the Magisterials realized that simply teaching correct doctrine to individuals was not a recipe for true virtue, which is above all civic and communal. Stadtluft macht frei, as the old German saying goes—that is, “city air makes one free.” Though originally applied to peasants who fled their rural fiefs for the protection furnished by cities, for the Reformation project, it meant that a society reformed in the true ways of evangelical catholicism needed institutions to cooperate to ensure freedom.
The solution was not just to use the power of the complex system of courts and duchies to promulgate the renewed faith. It was to instill true areté, true virtus, in the people by equipping them to be thinkers, readers, and doers of good rather than mere subjects of arbitrary Church authority. Areté and virtus do not simply mean “virtue.” Like so many great words of the classical languages, one would need at least two English sentences to cover everything that the Greeks and Romans thought of when they used that word. A close approximation is “man-ness”: the quality of being a cultivated human. “Valor” could also be considered a synonym; the mental and spiritual muscles of the people must be strengthened to resist false teaching and to exercise themselves with subjects worth studying.
Philip Melanchthon, the great classical scholar, right-hand man of Luther, and author of the 1530 Augsburg Confession, understood this when he set up the largest interconnected network of schools that had ever been seen in Europe. In the eyes of some, he was the founder of the modern public school system. He writes that “we are born and reborn for the one purpose of transmitting, correctly and clearly, the heavenly teaching to others.”1 Transmission is essentially identical with education, for education is the passing down of areté/virtus through one’s cultural inheritance. Naturally, theology was and is at the center of all Christian liberal education. But for both Luther and Melanchthon, the arts of the Trivium and Quadrivium were utterly essential for the formation of the Christian gentlemen and women who would form the bones of the next generations.
These were to be men and women who not only learned to love and value the Western heritage for all its arts, but also to take every good thing captive to Christ, the one true Logos. They sought to seek and receive His gifts in Scripture and the Divine Service so that all good, right, and salutary knowledge may flow from the One Thing Needful. These students would be trained to be deeply committed to their communities, concerned with the just and right use of political influence for the health of the Church, and equally adept at quoting Scripture, catechisms, liturgical chants, Homer, Cicero, and the Church Fathers. Luther and Melanchthon envisioned a generation grafted into Christ at their baptism, catechized into the faith in their formative years, ascending through the arts and languages in adolescence, fortified with the milk and honey of Word and Sacrament, then ready to become mothers, fathers, pastors, civil magistrates, and teachers who would repeat the process for everyone under their authority. These vocations were to be mutually supportive in the web of the state.
The Lutherans also preserved the classical and medieval sense of piety toward institutions higher than oneself. Such piety is the oil that greases liberal education; without it, only the wanton passions of the individual are treated as authoritative. For the ancients, those institutions were codified in the very essence of the polis and the res publica, which to spurn would be to become uncivilized. For the Middle Ages in the shadow of Augustine, the Church Militant became the true and lasting city of the Christian, with the blessings of the City of Man to be embraced but not loved for their own sake. This is epitomized by Melanchthon: “Just as it is said that men are not born for themselves only but for their country, I could say even more truthfully that all good men have to consider themselves born chiefly for the Church.”2
The Lutheran way of liberal education thus harnessed several streams of the Western inheritance into a single model, with Christ the Incarnate Life-Giver as their one true source. These streams include the contemplative philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the oratorical tradition of Isocrates and Cicero (which also sees the virtuous statesman as the ideal output of liberal education), the emphasis on Scriptural meditation through the arts of language that we associate with medieval cathedral schools, and, finally, the contemporaneous movement of Renaissance humanism which exalted the imitation of worthy models and the study of timeless texts in the cultivation of beautiful minds, hearts, and souls. They envisioned a generous role for the state in encouraging such education. For pious families, well-schooled intellects, and citizens set aflame with Christian areté/virtus are not only beneficial for the Church but also for the state if it is to thrive.
“Two Kingdoms” Trauma: Reclaiming the Nomenclature
“It is proper that wise rulers unite the churches and the universities by their care,” says Melanchthon.3 This quote covers the three most vital institutions that are necessary for the preservation of civilized society—the civil government safeguards bodily life and health, the academy nurtures minds and morals, and the Church cares for souls. The political community rightly has an interest in all three.
This is why it is important to distinguish the state—the polis or body politic carved out for the sharing of common values and aims amidst citizens—from the branch of the state which we call civil government, by which evildoers are punished and laws for the protection of citizens’ life, limb, and property are enacted. The government is one of the arms of the state, not the state itself.
So when the Wittenberg Reformers speak of the necessity of state support of the Church, they are primarily referring to the need for the civil government, the academy, and the hoi polloi to cooperate to ensure that the Church can exist as she ought. That is, the state should be very much concerned with establishing the Church on a strong footing. One could say that the government and the academy are like the construction company that builds a spacious venue for the Church, and then only interferes if there are significant flaws in the edifice. The civil government is not to take upon itself the care of souls or the enforcing of orthodoxy (though the academy allows for more room in this). Rather, the government helps to make sure that the Church has a home in which she can carry out her work for the life of the world.
Some may be surprised to hear that this assumption was basically unquestioned in Lutheran orthodoxy until the Enlightenment. We see it in Luther himself, who has never really recovered from the liberal theologian H. Richard Niebuhr’s pigeonholing of him (in his undeservedly influential book Christ and Culture) as a pessimist who believed that the secular realm was not worth a major investment of attention from Christians.
At one point, Luther urged the government of Saxony to call a council of regional churches for the establishment of doctrine. The prince, of course, would not have the authority to make decisions in this council—only to bring it into existence. This was echoed in the 19th century when advocates of confessional orthodoxy sought to sway the regents of the German territories from their milquetoast liberal theology. This was the age when the great cultural iconoclasts Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, both of whose work is utterly infused with Lutheran echoes, railed with unhinged fervor against the torpor of a flabby institutionalized faith centered only on “the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man,” as J. Gresham Machen would later summarize the essence of liberalism. As with Luther, they believed that the government should keep a close eye on the condition of the Church and take action to rectify her strife when necessary. However, Bismarck’s 1871 unification of Germany put all those hopes to bed, as the nation was to become a secular monolith.
The true meaning of Luther’s “two kingdoms,” then, does not amount to a “wall of separation” but to different homes in the same HOA. The term “two kingdoms” was developed in Luther’s essay “On Secular Authority” primarily as a riposte to the papistic conception of Christendom in which there were no boundaries between church and state dominion. To distinguish the “left and right hand kingdoms” (as they continue to be named in Lutheran parlance) is not to sunder them apart so that they can have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. In fact, that nomenclature was intended for quite the opposite purpose: to keep the Church’s integrity safe from the vices that inevitably permeate even the most just regimes; and to liberate the government from the task of “running” the Church so that it can be her friend and patron rather than her unqualified hegemon. Contra many who claim the banner of “two kingdom theology” today, the separatist conception of the regime and its associations being as removed as possible from matters of faith simply was not an option.
Further clarification is afforded by the most significant contribution to political theory from the Lutheran tradition: the 1548 Magdeburg Confession. It was written by the pastors of Magdeburg as a justification for civil disobedience against the tyrannical designs of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V during the Augsburg Interim (unavailable in English for centuries, it has recently been released in an excellent edition). They write,
Although [God] does not desire the powers to be mixed up with each other, nonetheless He desires them to help each other in turn, so that in the end they all may agree, and that everything in its own place and way principally may promote the true knowledge of God and His glory and their eternal salvation.4
The Magdeburgers go on to lay out an argument for the right of “lesser magistrates” to disobey when Caesar attempts to take upon himself the things of Christ. In the most extreme cases, revolution is indeed salutary. The magistrate has the duty to keep the Church from persecution and can—indeed, must—wield his rightful use of the sword when the Church, which is not authorized to bear the sword, is under duress and in need of defense. Here we again see the Lutheran view of a harmonious, mutually supportive society in which the Church is recognized as the highest good on earth, as an ark for the next life. God thus establishes government among men (there is no hint of the liberal idea that government is purely a creation of the people) and is answerable to Him alone—both when it bears the sword unjustly against the Church and when it fails to bear the sword for her protection.
The Crucified God and the Might of Meekness
Any interpretations of “two kingdoms” as a radical division are obviously mistaken. But Lutherans must still answer Niebuhr’s charge that they do not see culture as a fertile ground for infusion with the Gospel. Does Lutheranism not lend itself more to faithful preaching of the Word to those within the Church’s fold than to making serious inroads into hostile territory? At this juncture, I am forced to admit that historical precedent is somewhat dimmer than I and my fellow Wittenberg denizens would prefer. In America, this is in no small part due to the relative lack of Lutheran presence at its headwaters: Henry Muhlenberg did not plant the first Lutheran church on the continent until the 1740s, more than 120 years after the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Even today, it is estimated that only around 1.5% of American Christians are confessional Lutherans.
Regardless of their prominence in apologetics and polemics, there is one area where confessional Lutherans have never been slack: seeing all things through the lens of Christ crucified. The incarnate God who died for the sins of the whole world has freed His elect from bondage to the Law that kills and infused them with the Spirit that gives life. With His word in our mouths and our very bodies redeemed in the baptismal font and with His body and blood, our work in the civil estate is not undertaken to increase our status before God, but to grow in sanctification by loving our neighbor. Luther put it succinctly when he stated that God does not need our good works, but our neighbor does. The left-hand kingdom is instituted as an arena for Christians to serve each other—and the heathen—with the fruits that flower forth naturally from the Spirit’s indwelling. A Lutheran theology of interaction with culture, then, is not grounded on the ideals of conversion or transformation, but on love. This emphasis may very well be part of what has led Niebuhr and others to label Lutherans as essentially retreatist.
But as should be clear, the hope for genuine transformation lies latent in this approach, which is far from a hands-off, vanilla surrender to “thoughts and prayers” for our sickened culture. Instead, it affirms that the pain and triumph of Christ, suffering silently on the cross as the means to His glorification, is also the path He has ordained for us. Lest we doubt that merely practicing self-sacrifice and pouring ourselves out for our neighbors (which encompasses the duties of the civil magistrate to protect his people) is not enough to drive a wedge under the embankment of secular paganism, let us reflect on whether we have really tried it.
Again, I do not want to be misunderstood. Direct institutional reform for the sake of increasing the Church’s presence in society is thoroughly Lutheran, as we have seen. This reform is undertaken because the left-hand kingdom knows that the Church is good for society. From the perspective of the magistrate, it is good not only because it is Christ’s principal dwelling-place, but because it produces the fruit of love, which makes all else fruitful in learning, governance, family, and vocation. Through love, the darkened sinner is shown that his affections are warped beyond his own knowledge through the mirror of the Law; that the Gospel alone brings peace to lands swimming in tribulation, for it proclaims that Christ’s suffering is our own, and His glory our destiny. He reigns over the world that rejected Him. He breathes the Spirit into His flock so that even the most crooked paths of the wayward may be made straight. Government and academy support the Church so that she can perform her work of love. Hence, it ensures that all those in the state are at least aware of the beauty that flows from looking outside oneself to the scandal of the all-creating Word made manifest and slain upon a stake.
Making the sign of the cross plays a major role in Lutheran piety because it brings us back to our baptism, in which we were buried with Him and rose anew to live for Him daily. Yet this sign also reminds us of our daily crosses and trials that grieve and vex us—and the hidden, suffering God who nourishes us behind it all with the promise of our bodily resurrection at the final fullness of time.
It is a sign of lowliness, submission, and willingness to endure all things for the sake of the One who bought us. It thus seems fitting to close with one of many quintessentially Lutheran paradoxes: the Wittenberg tradition has always affirmed that the Church is the state’s highest interest, because strong institutions ought to use their power to enable the Church’s meekness. The Church does not bear the sword for a very good reason—because its sword is of the Spirit, and is thus invisible and foolish to the world. The government does not hold the keys to the kingdom of God for a very good reason—because it holds the keys to justice for those who transgress the natural law of respect for body and property. By carving out a generous, prominent space for the Bride of Christ in the state, the left-hand kingdom uses the might divinely granted it to enable the freedom of Christ’s servants, who conquer evil through holy charity and the mighty blows of the Word that destroy hardness of heart.
In this way, Lutheran ethics sees cultural renewal as a matter of balancing the two types of sword and the kinds of power that accompany them—temporal authority that works through civic persuasion, aided by the coercion of the sword if necessary; and spiritual authority that works through humility.
We need civil servants who live by the sign of the cross because they know what their lasting homeland is, and they know that new citizens of that homeland are only brought in by the Paraclete’s work through the means of grace (Word and Sacrament). To create a state in which the means of grace can be partaken of, celebrated, and promulgated without fear or stigma is the highest role of the left-hand kingdom. For in so doing, the magistrate acknowledges that he is himself under divine authority.
A citizenry educated by the government, academy, and Church in the redeemed areté of Christ is a citizenry whose appetites are whetted for the life to come. And so the “quiet option” of Lutheranism stands, beckoning its “homeless” adherents to work toward a state where the holy paradoxes of Scripture can silently transcend our brokenness and direct our wandering eyes toward the beatific vision.
