# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1864_S272
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

Composed by Beza, reworked by Hotman and Languet, the book, in order to roll the shame of it off onto the Calvinists (p. 421), was at first attributed to a certain Ficlerus, "a papal writer," and only afterward, because this seemed more advantageous, laid at the door of the steadfast Magdeburg theologians. Every faithful confessor of the German evangelical Reformation will reject this offspring of the Philippist-Calvinist-Romanist spirit as a foisted changeling. He will do so all the more, since in the "Magdeburg tract," besides the concept of subordinate authority, a second important concept of the German Reformation is also misused and corrupted. — XIII. As at all times, so too in the Reformation the faithful confessors of the Gospel were charged with disobedience toward their lawful, God-instituted civil authority, and the persecutions for their faith visited upon them were represented as the deserved punishment of sedition. Weak consciences were troubled by such reproaches; Luther showed them that there is a difference between civil authorities and tyrants: the former are God's servants and instruments, the latter the devil's. The former protect, the latter persecute the Gospel. Therefore Christians, when oppressed on account of their faith, need make no scruple of conscience regarding their duty of subjects' obedience; what they had to suffer, they suffered not from civil authority, but from tyrants. Thus, for the comfort of weak Christians in no small trial and confusion of conscience, Luther taught the distinction, resting on strong biblical foundations, between authority divinely instituted and tyranny contrary to God—a distinction which, admittedly, can hardly appear to the "modern Christian state" as anything but "revolutionary," but which in reality is nothing less than revolutionary, being simply a straightforward consequence of Acts 5:29, or, more precisely, of the relation of the Fourth Commandment to the First. To be sure, Luther meant, by this separation of the concepts "authorities" and "tyrants," to put a strong weapon into the hands of hard-pressed Christians—but only a spiritual one. They were to trust with joyful confidence in Ps. 82:7, to learn to pray with fresh courage as David did (Ps. 52:1). He expressly forbade, on the other hand, any violent rebellion against tyrannical authority, appealing to 1 Peter 2:19 and other passages. This evangelical distinction between civil authority and tyranny is indeed also mentioned in that "Magdeburg tract"; but the concept of "tyrant" and "tyranny" appears there wholly altered. Luther understood by "tyrants" such authorities as trample God's law and right underfoot; in the "Magdeburg tract," by contrast, exactly as among the Philippists, Calvinists, and Papists, those authorities are called "tyrants" who set themselves above human right and law—in other words, Luther takes the concept of tyranny in the biblical sense, while the pseudo-Magdeburgers and their fellow travelers take it in the classical-pagan sense. To be sure, the latter also try to extend the crime against divine right so far