# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1864_S270
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

"before delicate ears" indeed unutterable, "Address of the Reformer to Duke Henry of Brunswick" (the notorious "Heinz the Arsonist," reckoned among the dregs of humanity—see p. 66). We likewise find nothing seditious, nor anything betraying a "Proteus" (the Papist Laurentius Surius's reproach), in the fact that Luther (according to Sleidan) "declared, since, as he had always taught, the Gospel neither combats nor abolishes the civil laws, .... that one may—whether the emperor himself, or someone else in his name, begins the war—conclude a defensive alliance." (Similarly there is expressed, in the "Opinion of the Wittenberg Jurists' Instruction Concerning Self-Defense"—which grants, on the part of himself, of Jonas, Melanchthon, Spalatin, and other theologians, the defense by force of arms—the express statement: "For in that we have hitherto taught that one is not simply to resist the civil authority, we did not thereby mean to grant the civil authority a right of its own, when we have nevertheless everywhere diligently taught obedience toward it;" (p. 70).) On this point, however, we must decidedly protest when it is asserted of Melanchthon "that in his political views he stood to Luther in a relation similar to that in which we see Beza stand to Calvin." Melanchthon and his disciples have, in this matter too, idiosyncratic opinions which may not be laid at the door of Luther and of the German Reformation—of which even Herr v. P. is, in more than a few places, an unwitting witness. The great difference between Luther's and Melanchthon's political principles emerges sharply in the polemic of the Magdeburg theologians (Amsdorf, Flacius) and preachers against the "weathervanes" of the "Wittenberg philosophers and grammarians." Whereas the Wittenbergers, though not lacking in resolve and energy, nevertheless rivaled the Calvinists and Papists in the boldness of their political theories, the "many apologetic writings which the Magdeburgers, like a wildfire driven before storms, sent forth over all Germany" represented Luther's pure doctrine alone. Through almost all the Magdeburg writings there runs "the distinction between higher and subordinate authority," together with the doctrine that the latter, in certain cases, not merely may but must defend the subjects against the former. Self-evidently, what is always meant here is only the "subordinate authority" rightfully existing within the German empire—that is, not the imperial judges, bailiffs, and stewards, whose power was merely an outflow of the emperor's own, but the territorial and free-city authorities, who were entitled to wield the sword of civil authority not, like those others, in the name and by the commission of the head of the empire, but from a dignity of their own, independent standing. But the very last thing the Magdeburgers had in mind, when they spoke of "higher and subordinate authority," were certainly the political conditions of France, altogether unlike those of Germany. There, at the time of the Reformation, there existed no territorial princes of the empire, least of all electors, and no free