# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1864_S269
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lic. Ströbel's Account of the Lutheran Doctrine of Civil Authority, as Opposed to the Calvinist. 269

developed to such an extent that the territorial-princely and free-city authorities stood, in one respect, only beneath the emperor; in another, beside him; and in yet a third, even above him (for "the electors deposed the indolent and dissolute Wenceslas from the government and elected in his place, in the year 1400, the elector Rupert of the Palatinate," without anyone finding in this the least trace of revolutionary conduct; cf. p. 452 and elsewhere). Thus Luther, at the outset of his Reformation, found the existing imperial constitution of Germany already in place; he found territorial and free-city powers which were not officers of the emperor but estates of the empire. Was it possible for him, or even permissible, to judge them otherwise, to speak to them otherwise, than according to their actual legal and factual standing, by virtue of which they were subjects of the emperor not absolutely, but only in a qualified sense? Insofar as they were such subjects, he constantly exhorted them, with great earnestness and emphasis, to obedience toward the emperor as their God-ordained authority—insofar as they were not, he neither could, nor might, nor would make them into such; otherwise he would have had to abandon the doctrine to which he remained faithful his whole life long, which also guided him as a sure lodestar through the political storms stirred up by Carlstadt, Münzer, the Anabaptists, and other fanatics: namely, that Christ did not come to overturn the existing order of the kingdoms of this world. But would it not have been a total overthrow of the German constitution, had Luther made "Emperor and Empire" mean: the emperor is the empire? Herr v. P. therefore begins § 5 very unfortunately: "Even the German Reformation bears, though to a degree beyond comparison lesser, the tragic character which we have so painfully lamented in the French Reformation. It too, and its great master-builder and guardian, were driven by fatalistic necessity onto a path that contradicted their inner destiny and against which his Christian conscience rebelled." That is a grave misjudgment, both of the spirit of the evangelical Reformation and, further, of the enormous difference between the German imperial constitution and the French. Luther's "Christian conscience" always rebelled, and not without success, whenever the obedience due the emperor by God and by right was to be withheld from him, or diminished by legal chicanery; but it stirred with equal decisiveness whenever it was a matter of securing the undoubted right of the princes and cities against imperial encroachments. Luther was simply no man of the "modern Christian state," no "conservative" of today; he was an evangelical German who gave the emperor fully what was owed him jure divino et humano, but not one jot more. If we hold fast to this, we find nothing "revolutionary" in the utterance: "Here you see how the poor mortal bag of maggots, the emperor—who is not secure of his life for a single moment—shamelessly boasts that he is the true supreme defender of the Christian faith"—and still less in the,