# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1864_S268
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

makes use of the political institutions existing in the state, at elections, diets, etc., proceeding not according to the wishes of the powerful but according to his best knowledge and conscience, and so seeks to serve his fellow citizens to the best of his ability and without self-interest. Further, it is no insurrection when subjects defend their religious and civil rights, by every means placed at their disposal by the law of the land, against arbitrary and violent acts of the magistracy. The Evangelical Lutherans in particular can safely leave the sniffing-out of sedition in such matters to the "conservatives," by whom they themselves have already, for more than thirty years now, been held to be revolutionary on account of their opposition to the territorial rulers' Union edicts—with what right, that too will be decided, likewise, by him who "is ready to judge the living and the dead." — XI. But wherein, now, does the opposition between Lutherans and Calvinists regarding the "right of resistance" lie? Simply in this: the former forbid, the latter permit, subjects the use of the sword against the civil authority. This status causae et controversiae we wish to keep steadily in view. For unfortunately, in this point of controversy as in that concerning the Holy Supper, the Calvinists do not proceed honestly; here as there they aim, by sophistical artifice, to pass off their divergent doctrine as that of the Evangelical Lutherans—indeed they do not even shrink from foisting spurious writings on us for this purpose (see below). This dishonesty is so palpable that Herr v. P. often complains of the "weakness of the German Reformed in wanting to be Augsburg-Confession-ish"; it already prompted the Jesuit Keller to the piquant, and not altogether untrue (?!), remark: "They are loath to hear themselves called Calvinists, and would rather be evil than be called so. Hence each of them eagerly grasps a corner of the mantle of the Augsburg Confession, so as to have something with which to conceal the secret Calvinist, and thereby hide Luther's enemy beneath Luther's own cloak." (Appendix 1, p. 419.) To this circumstance all the more attention must be paid, and all the greater weight given, precisely in our case, since the two chief Calvinist pillars of their revolutionary "right of resistance" are in truth nothing but distorted and caricatured propositions of the German Reformation—as will appear in what follows. — XII. In the first place, the Calvinists misuse the Lutheran concept of "subordinate authority" [Unterobrigkeit]. As is well known, even the kings among our forefathers knew nothing of an absolute monarchy. Louis the Pious addressed the estates of the realm thus: "Although the highest royal power seems to be united in our person, yet by divine authority and human ordinance it is so distributed that each of you, in his own place and according to his own rank, has a share in this power." (p. 203.) This division of civil authority between king and estates of the realm was of lasting standing in Germany; it became still further established and extended through the empire's transition from a hereditary to an elective imperial office; already by the fourteenth century it had, in constitutional law, gone so far