Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) by John Calvin & Martin Luther

Author:John Calvin & Martin Luther [Calvin, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1991-09-27T06:00:00+00:00

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1 Literally: to make princes into pagans. Scholastic theologians (the ‘sophists’) standardly reconciled the hard sayings of Christ to which Luther refers with the exigencies of practice by distinguishing between what was necessary for ‘perfection’ and what was adequate for those less spiritually ambitious.

2 Luther’s casual habits of expression and the obsolete conceptual equipment of ‘estates’ (for which see the Glossary) here makes an expansion necessary.

3 An den Christlichen Adel deutscher Nation (Appeal to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation), 1520.

4 Luther is referring to the demand of certain Catholic rulers that their subjects surrender their copies of Luther’s German translation of the Bible.

5 Or faith; the German word Glaube has both meanings.

6 Luther’s expression here is very crabbed. ‘Obedient Christian princes’ is in the original; Luther’s term Fürst does not necessarily mean a ‘sovereign’.

7 The territories subject nominally or in fact to the Holy Roman Emperor at that time also included Spanish, Italian and Burgundian as well as German and Austrian territories, so Luther seems to be making a distinction.

8 Literally: ‘his scales’ (the Devil was often depicted as having scales or plates like a fish or crocodile; see the passage on Leviathan in Job 41, normally interpreted as referring to the Devil) ‘and waterbubbles’: this is a play on words of which ‘and all his bull’ might be a faint imitation; the Latin word bulla literally means a bubble, the reference being to the seal. Luther found this pun irresistible.

9 Literally: ‘until the grey-coats (ie. monks’ habits) vanish’, apparendy an idiom.

10 For Luther’s use of the metaphor of the Sword, see the Introduction, p. xvi.

11 Ordnung may mean an ordinance or an order. The translation of this crucial text which Luther offers here is not that of his later versions in his German Bible. The word I have here translated as ‘power’ (Gewalt) he later rendered as Oberkeit, in later German this became Obrigkeit. Cf. Introduction, p. xv, and Glossary: power.

12 Literally ‘estate’; cf. Glossary. For Luther’s thinking about the morality of soldiering, cf. for example: Ob Kriegsleute auch im seeligen Stand sein könnten (Whether Soldiers too can be in a State of Grace), 1526.

13 The implicit reference is to the parable in Matthew 7.18.

14 i.e. Sermons on the Church’s Year, cf. Weimar edition, 10:2:152–70.

15 Fromm; cf. Glossary: just. Note that Luther’s German here is ambiguous, more so than some commentators allow. He does not say that no one in the world is a Christian or just, merely that no one is so ‘naturally’, which may mean either that some are both, but by divine grace alone, or it may mean, as commentators would like it to mean, that Christians in their outward conduct remain imperfect. It is not in the least obvious that Luther meant the latter, and the lack of clarity is significant, given Luther’s previous bipartite division of the human race, and his insistence that it is ‘Christians’, and not human beings to the extent that they actually behave like Christians, who need no sword or law.

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