# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1864_S273
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lic. Ströbel's Account of the Lutheran Doctrine of Civil Authority, as Opposed to the Calvinist. 273

and as deeply as ever possible, into the concept of tyranny; but this happens only in order to give their cause a more splendid appearance; it can easily be shown from their own statements that they posit "tyranny" even where there is no violation of divine right and commandment by the civil authority, but merely an unrestricted monarchical mode of government. Herr v. P. does not conceal "that the most resolute anti-monarchical ideas surfaced among the Calvinists," which what chiefly failed to resist was "the strength of a good conscience"; he acknowledges an "actually monarchical—indeed revolutionary-Calvinist—literature, a (so termed by Hundeshagen) Huguenot public law, consisting of a mixture of thoughts drawn half from biblical, half from profane literature and history." This "Huguenot public law," ripened "in a slow but steady and sure, indeed inevitable (?) progression, under the most varied influences and impressions of a history written in blood, of speculation, of religious, ecclesiastical, and practical life, of learned books and popular pamphlets sunk as low as scandal-chronicles, of the written and the spoken word," contained, among other things, the article: As soon as a monarch becomes a tyrant, he ceases to be lawful civil authority; his subjects then no longer owe him obedience, and may rid themselves of him, if necessary even by force. Already in Calvin this doctrine is found, piously veiled; Herr v. P. cites (p. 46) his statement: "Earthly princes divest themselves of their own power when they rise up against God: indeed, they are not worthy to be counted among human beings. One must rather spit upon their heads than obey them, if they are so insolent as to rob God of his right," etc. With this principle the steel sword against their civil authority was placed into the subjects' hands; the most violent assaults on the dignity, body, and life of a monarch counted no longer as crimes against the God-ordained civil authority, but as permissible—indeed most praiseworthy—resistance against a "tyrant" who had voluntarily stepped outside the sanctified rampart of the Fourth Commandment. Could it, then, well be held against the genuinely Lutheran theologians, when they saw how attacks on the person of certain rulers—already outlawed in every human code of law—were honored with the highest praise as "tyrannicide" and the like, that they raised the question: "Quae Imperantibus exspectanda ab istis civibus obedientia, qui ex Calvino et Lubberto didicerunt, Leges civiles conscientiam non obligare?" [What obedience is to be expected by rulers from those citizens who have learned from Calvin and Lubbertus that civil laws do not bind the conscience?] And did they not have to point out all the more that the obedience of subjects stands in exactly the same relation as the obedience of children? A dutiful son who has an utterly wicked scoundrel for a father shall and will never say: Because of his depravities he has ceased to be my father; therefore I may lay hands on him without scruple, mistreat him, etc. So too the God-fearing subject