Martin Luther and His Political Philosophy

2. -forcefully describes Christianity’s fundamental transformation of the political problem.
-there was no separation between political and the religious; every religion “was attached
solely to the laws of State which prescribed it.”
-it was Jesus who, by introducing the new idea of kingdom of the other world”, separated
the theological from the political.”
-honors the New Testament’s separation between the spiritual and political kingdoms.
-structures his entire account of the human condition and of history around the distinction
and the rivalry between the city of God and the city of man.
-”Grace perfects nature” as Aquinas influentially thought, those who claim natural political
authority must finally defer to those endowed with the means of grace.

4. CRISIS AND CONVERSION:
Tyranny over his soul
that was the effect
of a fundamental
theological error.
Experienced anxiety
concerning his
identity and purpose
in life from an early
age.
Made a sacred vow
to enter a monastery
“Isn’t it enough that we miserable sinners, lost for all eternity because of
original sin, are oppressed by every kind of calamity through the Ten
Commandments? Why does God heap sorrow upon sorrow through the Gospel
and through the Gospel threaten us with his justice and his wrath?”
Read the passage: “The just person lives by
faith.”
And defined the verse: The justice of God is
revealed through the Gospel, but it is a
passive justice, that by which the merciful
God justifies us by faith.
Luther’s intolerable malaise had
resulted, he now believed, from
a misunderstanding of the
righteousness that God requires
us.

5. LIBERTY OF FAITH vs ROMAN “WORKS”
Luther blames scholastic theology for perverting the biblical meaning of
justification, and he locates none other than Aristotle as the pagan fountainhead
of this perversion.
41st thesis of his Disputation against Scholastic Theology (1517): “The whole of
Aristotle’s Ethics is the worst enemy of grace.”
Scholastic appropriation of Aristotle corrupted Christianity, according to Luther,
by attributing to human nature the power to cultivate a certain measure of
virtue or righteousness.
By practicing moral virtues, Aristotle had taught, people can fulfill their natural
potential and in fact become virtuous.
Theologians from Aquinas down to Ockham and Gabriel Biel had adapted this
teaching in various ways to limit the biblical teaching concerning the falseness of
human nature.
This apparent boon was in fact, source of the harshest tyranny over people’s
soul.

6. CONCERNING CHRISTIAN LIBERTY

7. Most momentous polemic
Direct appeal to secular
rulers to take up the cause of
reforming the church by
dismantling the instruments
of Rome’s worldly powers.

8. Very striking in this text is
Luther’s complete collapsing
of the traditional hierarchy
between spiritual and secular
function.
Leveling is possible only because the
dignity of such functions has been
severed from any humanly accessible
evaluation of higher or lower
purposes.
Makes no attempt at a general theory of
politics; author’s main theoretical
intention was in a way negative: to knock
down theological barriers to immediate
action on behalf of reform.

10. SEPARATION