Martin Luther Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Martin Luther (1483–1546) was a German theologian, pastor, and professor. His public rejection of the Catholic Church’s practice of selling indulgences ignited the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, which led to a permanent schism in the church. Luther’s actions and beliefs exerted great influence over subsequent theories on the nature and scope of secular authority and the right of subjects to resist their rulers.

Luther enrolled at the University of Erfurt in 1501. In 1507 he entered the Observant Augustinian house in Erfurt, where he took vows as a monk and undertook theological studies in the nominalist tradition. He received his doctorate in theology from the University of Wittenberg in 1512. That same year he took up a faculty position as professor of scripture at Wittenberg, a position that he held until his death. Between 1517 and 1521, Luther definitively rejected the path to salvation mapped out by the medieval Catholic Church in favor of his belief that salvation was attained by faith in God alone. This resulted in his break with the Catholic Church and his renunciation of the priesthood.

Luther’s theological ideas had important implications for the social and political underpinnings of western Europe, and from the early 1520s until his death Luther grappled with these implications. One key idea present in his early works was the rejection of a separate clerical estate and with it all ideas of the church’s temporal authority. Instead he defined the church as nothing more than a congregation of the faithful. Luther conceived an expanded role for secular authorities in this power vacuum. In 1523 he turned to the nature of such secular authority in his tract On Temporal Authority. Drawing heavily on the teaching of St. Paul, he argued that secular authorities are ordained by God to keep the external peace and that even tyrants should not be resisted. However, he was also clear that secular rulers have no authority to intrude into the personal relationship between a believer and God. In this separation of spheres of influence lay Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms.

While On Temporal Authority was to remain Luther’s most coherent statement on the topic of secular authority, radical social and political ideas advocated by some reformers forced Luther to further define his ideas in the 1520s. Luther wrote several works that held steadfastly to his understanding of the teachings of the New Testament as requiring absolute submission to temporal authorities in the maintenance of public order and public peace. The most famous of these tracts, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants (1525), legitimated the use of military force to suppress the insurgents in the Peasants’ War (1524–1525). The peasants justified their rebellion in part through an alternative interpretation of the New Testament that emphasized the equality of all believers under Christ.

In the early 1530s, Luther returned again to the issue of legitimate resistance to secular authority, this time in response to the deteriorating political situation in the Holy Roman Empire that left the Reformed princes under increasing military threat from the Catholic emperor. In this case, Luther further refined his thinking by pronouncing a set of views that supported the rights of lesser princes to resist the emperor in their role as inferior magistrates.

Bibliography:

Bainton, Roland. Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther. New York: Mentor, 1955.
Bornkamm, Heinrich. Luther’s Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966.
Cargill Thompson,W. D. J. The Political Thought of Martin Luther. Toxowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1984.
Luther, Martin. Luther’s Works. Edited by Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut Lehmann. 55 vols. Saint Louis: Concordia, 1955–1986.

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