The Reformation

Issues: Worldly Authority

One of the most difficult issues the reformers had to deal with was that of the relationship of the evangelical Christian to worldly authority, and vice versa. Martin Luther was writing about this as early as 1525, and the topic became ever more important and ever more complex. It was by no means a new issue: the Catholic Church had struggled with the relationship all through the Middle Ages; indeed, even Jesus himself had spoken to the problem when he said "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's" (Matthew 22:21)—a problematic phrase because Jesus doesn't define what is Caesar's and what is God's.

Luther took the most conservative stance among reformers. He urged Christians to obey public authority whether that authority was wise or foolish, whether it supported or persecuted, whether it was godly or ungodly. If the magistracy persecuted, it was the duty of Christians to suffer, as the early Christians had done.

Calvin was more militant, but mainly because for Calvin the civil administration must always be subordinate to the ministers. Every community should have a church council and whether king or city council, the public authority must bow to the church council in matters of religion. Calvin went further, however, and extended that authority to matters of public morality and even of war.

Zwingli was the most militant, because for him the public authority and church authority were one. Only the godly should be put in public office, and their judgments would always be in accord with the needs of the church. When the Anabaptists split from Zwingli, this matter of church-state relations was one of the points of dispute, for the Anabaptists held that all public authority was inherently un-religious and ought to be shunned by the righteous. It should be ignored when possible, resisted when necessary.

These were the controversies that gripped the first generation of reformers. By the second generation—by the 1550s and after—the issue had become reversed. The question now was: which religion would the constituted public authorities choose? For whichever they chose, that would be the religion of the great majority of the people they ruled. Even once the decision was made, a thousand decisions followed as a consequence: how much of religious matters would the state regulate? The later part of the Reformation was preoccupied with this issue.