By Uwe Siemon-Netto
Some Protestant denominations are already preparing to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s Reformation less than a decade from now, on Oct. 31, 2017. Given the religious issues in this American election year, this might be a good time to return to one of his most perceptive insights. “The devil never stops cooking and brewing these two kingdoms together,” Luther wrote, meaning the spiritual and the secular realms.
With these words in mind, traditional Lutherans shake their heads over the misuse of Scripture in American politics on both sides of the political divide, to wit Sen. Barack Obama’s former pastor thundering in a sermon, “God damn America,” or Mike Huckabee’s musings about an alleged need to conform the U.S. Constitution more to the Bible.
To adherents of the oldest major Protestant tradition, it seems counterproductive to constantly invoke the Bible, when fighting politically over human concerns. In the Lutheran understanding, natural law should be the appropriate tool for dealing with worldly matters, including the mass slaughter of unborn life and “marriages” of members of the same sex.
Citing Paul, Luther reminded Christians that natural law is “written by the finger of God” on everybody’s heart, and that the conscience of all people, including non-Christians, bears witness to this verity. So if you want to stop abortions, why not team up with the likes of the “Atheist and Agnostic Pro-Life League,” whose conscience tells them that it is wrong to kill the innocents, instead of clobbering these people over their heads with the Bible?
Except in Roman Catholic theology, natural law thinking became unfashionable -- sadly even among many Lutherans -- in the two centuries since Jean Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher of the French Revolution, extolled man-made “positive law” as freedom from internal obstacles that limit vice.
In this context it is worth noting how the martyred Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer judged the French Revolution whose utopian dream was the liberation of man. To Bonhoeffer, this Revolution was “the laying bare of the emancipated man in his tremendous power and most horrible perversity.” He warned that “the liberation of man as an absolute ideal leads only to man’s self-destruction,” and he saw both Communism and Nazism as the French Revolution’s heirs.
The law – Mosaic for Christians and Jews, natural for all others – is the “operating system” in what Luther called the “left-hand kingdom,” where God reigns in a hidden way “through good and bad princes,” who in a democracy include the voters. In this secular realm “reason is the empress,” Luther said, describing reason as a gift from God that enables humanity to manage this temporal world.
However, if reason presumes to speak about God’s nature it becomes, in Luther’s words, “the devil’s whore.” Only by faith does the Christian know what God is like; faith is reason’s equivalent in the “right-hand kingdom,” where God has revealed himself in Christ, and where the Church has its place.
In Lutheran parlance, this is the kingdom of the Gospel, but the Gospel cannot fix the temporal realm, as Christ told Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:38). The Gospel hopefully illumes the believer’s comportment in his relations with others; yet it offers no solution to secular concerns such as illegal immigration, the economy or the war in Iraq. Those have to be dealt with by virtue of reason, and according to the law.
Bonhoeffer considered the inability to distinguish between these two kingdoms a major flaw of American theologies featuring constantly organized struggles of the Church against some particular worldly evil. He would doubtless have placed the homiletics of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor, in this category.
Bonhoeffer wrote, “It is necessary to free oneself from the way of thinking, which sets out from human problems… Such thinking is unbiblical. The way of Jesus Christ and therefore the way of all Christian thinking leads not from the world to God but from God to the world. This means that the essence of the Gospel does not lie in the solution of human problems.”
In the light of these compelling observations, Lutherans might be forgiven for asking their fellow Christians why they keep exposing their highest good – the good news of their redemption by Christ’s vicarious suffering and resurrection – to public derision by using it for the wrong purpose.
Half a millennium after Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church of Wittenberg it would make sense to ponder his down-to-earth comment that in politics as in all other aspects of secular life Christians must act reasonably according to the law. The Gospel has freed them to do just that; it must not be perverted into a weapon to be slapped around other people’s heads.
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