Luther’s doctrine of the state: This certainly is not an easy thing, because many people believe that Luther’s interpretation of the state is the real cause of Nazism. Now first of all a few hundred years means something in history, and Luther is a little bit older than the Nazis! But this is not the decisive point. The decisive point is that the doctrine of the state was a doctrine of positivism, of a Providence which was positivistical1y interpreted.
Positivism means that the things are taken as they are. The positive law is decisive, and this is connected by Luther with the doctrine of Providence. Providence brought this power and that power into existence, and therefore it is impossible to revolt against this power. You have no rational criteria by which to judge the princes. You have, of course, the right to judge them from the point of view whether they are good Christians or not. But whether or not they are, they are God-given, and so you have to be obedient to them. Historical destiny has brought in the tyrant, the Neros, , the Hitlers. And since this is historical destiny, we have to subject ourselves to it.
Now this means that the Stoic doctrine of natural law, which can be used as criticism of the positive law, has disappeared. There is only the positive law. The natural law does not really exist for Luther. The Stoic doctrines of equality and freedom of the citizen in the state, are not used by Luther at all. So he is non- revolutionary, theoretically as well as practically. Practically, he says that every Christian must stand every bad government because it comes from God providentially.
The state, for Luther, is not a reality, in itself, and it is always misleading to speak of the “state theory” of the Reformers. The word “state” is not older than the 17th or .l8th centuries, but instead of that they had the concept of Obrigkeit , i. e. ,authority, superiors. The government is the authority, the superiors, but not the structure called the “state.” This means there is no democratic implication in Luther’s doctrine of the state. The situation is such that the state must be accepted as it is.
But how could Luther maintain this? How could he who more than anybody else has emphasized love as the ultimate principle: of morals, accept the despotic power of the states of his time? Now he had an answer to this and this answer is very much full of spirit. He says that God does two kinds of works, the one is His own, his proper, work, as he calls it namely the work of love, which is mercy, grace, always giving. And then is “strange” work, which also is the work of love, but it is strange; it works through punishment, through threat, through the compulsory power of the state, through all kinds of harshness, as the law demands. Now people say this is against love, and then ask the question: How can compulsory power and love be united with each other? And they derive from this a kind of anarchism, which we find so often in ideas of Christian pacifists and others. The situation formulated by Luther seems to me to be the true one. I believe that he has seen, profounder than anybody whom I know, the possibility of uniting the power element and the love element in terms of this doctrine of God’s “strange work” and God’s “proper work.” The power of the state which makes it possible that we are sitting here, or that works of charity are done, is a work of God’s love. The state has to suppress the aggression of the evil man, of those who are against love, and the strange work of love is to destroy what is against love.
