# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1864_S267
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lic. Ströbel's Account of the Lutheran Doctrine of Civil Authority, as Opposed to the Calvinist. 267

"right of resistance" quite differently than do the Calvinists, who look to the worldly kingdom of David and Solomon and borrow their political maxims from it. — X. Before setting out the chief difference between these two doctrines, a remark must be prefaced. The "Christian state" and its "conservative" defenders reckon to "active resistance" things that do not belong there at all, but flow instead from the ordered relation of subjects—on the one hand to the Lord, their God, and on the other to their lawful civil authority. Once more: the subject does not stand over against the majesty of the magistracy the way man stands over against the divine majesty, but rather as one neighbor to another. The title "by the grace of God" the magistracy can bear on no other, no higher ground than can the lowliest of the people, who likewise is by the grace of God whatever he is. Nor may one represent the estate and calling of a magistracy and of each of its subjects as concentric circles, of which the outermost—the magistracy—centrally conditions the narrower callings of its subjects and, as it were, absorbs them into itself. Rather, the sphere of life of every subject—and above all the office of preachers, heads of households, parents, etc.—has its own independent center, established by God, within the periphery of civil authority; and jure divino these smaller spheres, since they too are illumined by the glory of a divine institution, are owed the same reverence and inviolability as the greater one belonging to the magistracy. Hence the divine right of any given civil authority ceases only where that of another civil authority begins; but likewise it begins only where the equally divine right of the subject finds its limit. It does, of course, happen often enough that subjects are treated by their overlords as mere objects of a proprietary right; but let no one suppose that God ever placed one human being in such a relation to another. On the contrary, God wills that no man, whoever he may be, should encroach upon, diminish, or altogether destroy the calling or office of another; only so can the holy ordinance of God, the threefold hierarchy [Hierarchia triplex], subsist on earth. From what has been said it follows easily what things are wrongly reckoned to "active resistance," or, as the "Christian state" prefers to put it, to "revolution." Our "conservatives" are quick to brand others as "rebels, traitors to majesty," and the like. But: "Say ye not, A confederacy, to all them to whom this people shall say, A confederacy; neither fear ye their fear, nor be afraid," says Isaiah (8:12). So it is, for example, no seditious act, and does not in experience lead to sedition, when preachers, by virtue of their office, that is jure divino, rebuke even the sins of the magistracy; they will fare better on that account at the Last Judgment than those "ear-scratchers" of every age who even talk princes into believing that they are not bound to keep the oaths sworn, for the benefit of their subjects, to uphold the constitutions, rights, and laws of the land. So too it is no seditious conduct when a subject, jure humano, from