Two Kingdoms Doctrine

History

Roots

The background is Augustine’s City of God (413–426). “Two cities have been formed by two loves,” he wrote: the earthly by love of self, the heavenly by love of God (book 14, ch. 28). The two are mixed together until the end. The heavenly city, while it sojourns on earth, “makes use of this peace only because it must,” and so Christians pray for rulers and obey the laws that keep order, because “as long as the two cities are commingled, we also enjoy the peace of Babylon” (book 19, chs. 17 and 26). Augustine’s cities are two loves and two peoples, not two offices. Medieval writers turned the picture into a question of jurisdiction, the “two swords” of pope and emperor, with the spiritual power usually claimed as the higher one.

Causes

Martin Luther wrote Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed in 1523, working up sermons preached at Weimar the previous October. Duke George of Saxony, the Elector of Brandenburg and the Dukes of Bavaria had just ordered his German New Testament suppressed. It is translated as Secular Authority in the Philadelphia edition of his Works, vol. 3 (Archive.org). He had two opponents. Princes were claiming power over consciences and books. Radicals were reading the Sermon on the Mount as abolishing the sword among Christians; Luther complains of people who say “they were Christians subject neither to law nor sword, as some are already raving and ranting.”

His answer was to divide “all the children of Adam into two classes; the first belong to the kingdom of God, the second to the kingdom of the world.” True believers need no sword among themselves, but they are few, so “God has ordained the two governments; the spiritual, which by the Holy Spirit under Christ makes Christians and pious people, and the secular, which restrains the unchristian and wicked so that they must needs keep the peace outwardly.” Anyone who tried to rule the world by the gospel would “loose the bands and chains of the wild and savage beasts.”

Influence

The Lutheran confessions made the distinction official. Article 16 of the Augsburg Confession (1530) teaches that “it is right for Christians to bear civil office, to sit as judges … to engage in just wars, to serve as soldiers … to make oath when required by the magistrates,” and condemns “the Anabaptists who forbid these civil offices to Christians.” The gospel, it says, “does not destroy the State or the family,” and Christians must obey magistrates “save only when commanded to sin.”

In practice Lutheran princes gained wide control over the church in their lands from 1525 on, so the clean line Luther drew in 1523 was never fully kept (Two kingdoms doctrine, secondary). The doctrine shaped Lutheran ethics of vocation and office for four centuries. It came under heavy attack in the twentieth century and has been revived in a different form among Reformed theologians in recent decades.

Key ideas and contributors

Two governments, one God. Both kingdoms belong to God. The spiritual government works by word and Spirit and produces faith; the temporal works by law and coercion and produces outward peace. Neither is evil, and neither may do the other’s work. Luther insisted the temporal government “has laws which extend no farther than to life and property and what is external upon earth. For over the soul God can and will let no one rule but Himself.” Hence his line that “heresy can never be prevented by force … Heresy is a spiritual matter, which no iron can strike, no fire burn, no water drown.”

Person and office: Luther’s reading of Matthew 5. The Sermon on the Mount says “do not resist the one who is evil” (Matthew 5:38–42). Medieval theology had softened this by calling such sayings counsels for the perfect rather than commands for all. Luther rejected that: it made Christ “a liar,” and he wanted these teachings kept as “precepts binding on all Christians alike.” His solution was to distinguish what a Christian does for himself from what he does for others. “In what concerns you and yours, you govern yourself by the Gospel and suffer injustice for yourself as a true Christian; in what concerns others and belongs to them, you govern yourself according to love and suffer no injustice for your neighbor’s sake.” So the same Christian may “at the same time suffer evil and injustice and yet punish evil and injustice.” A Christian may serve as a judge or soldier, because the office exists for the neighbor. This is the Lutheran reading of the Sermon summarised in the study note on Matthew.

Calvin’s version. John Calvin also spoke of “a twofold government in man,” one in the soul “which relates to eternal life” and the other concerned with “civil institutions and the external regulation of manners” (Institutes 4.20.1). Like Luther he wrote against the Anabaptists, and called it “a Jewish vanity to seek and include the kingdom of Christ under the elements of this world.” He gave the magistrate a larger religious role, though: civil government is to see “that no idolatry, no blasphemy against the name of God, no calumnies against his truth … break out and be disseminated among the people,” and the magistrate’s calling is “the most sacred, and by far the most honourable, of all stations in mortal life.” Geneva also kept excommunication in the church’s hands, where Lutheran lands had largely handed church order to the prince (Two kingdoms doctrine, secondary).

The Anabaptist two kingdoms. Anabaptist writers used the same language for the opposite conclusion. A Swiss Brethren tract by Hans Schnell (c. 1575) says the kingdom of this world and “the peaceful kingdom of Christ” “cannot share or have communion with each other”: one fights with “spear, sword, armor, guns and powder,” the other with the sword of the Spirit (Christian History Institute). The Schleitheim Confession (1527) had already drawn the practical conclusion: Christians may not hold offices that bear the sword and may not swear oaths. For Luther both kingdoms are God’s and a Christian lives in both; for the Anabaptists a Christian belongs to one and withdraws from the other. See Christian Nonresistance and Menno Simons.

Key controversies

Quietism under Nazism. The heaviest charge is that the doctrine trained German Lutherans to leave politics to the state and so left them defenceless before Hitler. Karl Barth was its sharpest critic. During the Second World War he concluded, in Matthias Gockel’s summary, “that Germany as a whole suffered from its Lutheran heritage and was constantly in danger of relapsing into a neo-pagan worship of power,” though he “stayed away from one-sided causal explanations of German fascism” (Gockel, “Barth, Luther und die Lutheraner,” 2017, abstract).

Barmen. The Barmen Declaration (1934), drafted mostly by Barth for the Confessing Church, answered the “German Christians” with its own account of church and state. Its second thesis rejects “the false doctrine that there could be areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ but to other lords.” Its fifth thesis keeps a distinction of offices: the State has the task “of maintaining justice and peace … by means of the threat and use of force,” but may not “become the sole and total order of human life,” and the Church may not become “an organ of the State.” Lutheran theologians shaped that fifth article (Barmen Declaration, secondary), which is why defenders read Barmen as a correction of the doctrine’s abuse, not a rejection of the doctrine.

Bonhoeffer. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran who joined the resistance, is claimed by both sides. His unfinished Ethics (published 1949) is built on Lutheran Christology and is often read as a critique of a separation of church and world into independent spheres. Michael DeJonge argues the reverse emphasis: “Bonhoeffer is a two kingdoms thinker,” who used the Lutheran ideas of the two kingdoms and the orders of preservation to find a middle way between compromise with the world and radical withdrawal from it (lecture, 2017).

Calvin against Luther, Anabaptists against both. Reformed critics have long said the Lutheran doctrine gives the gospel too little to say about public life. Anabaptists say it lets Christians do as officials what Jesus forbade them as disciples: the person-and-office distinction, on their reading, is exactly the exemption Luther claimed to reject. Lutherans answer that the alternative is either a church that rules the state or a church that abandons the neighbor to the “wild beasts.”

The Reformed revival and neo-Calvinism. In recent decades a group associated with Westminster Seminary California in Escondido has argued that Reformed theology always had a two-kingdoms doctrine. David VanDrunen’s Living in God’s Two Kingdoms (Crossway, 2010) sets it against “modern movements such as neo-Calvinism … that calls for the redemption of earthly society and institutions”: God preserves civil society and redeems the church, and Christians should not expect to transform culture into the kingdom of God. Neo-Calvinists, following Abraham Kuyper’s line that “there is not a square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” (Neo-Calvinism, secondary), hold that Christ’s lordship claims every sphere for redemption. John Frame’s The Escondido Theology (2011, RTS page) attacked the school, naming Michael Horton, Meredith Kline and Darryl Hart, and argued its positions are “not standard Reformed theology.” Lutherans watching the dispute note that the Escondido version differs from Luther’s own.

What remains unresolved

Everyone in the debate agrees that the church does not wield the sword and that God cares about civil justice. The live question is whether the distinction protects the church from the state and the state from the church, or whether it teaches Christians to stop asking what Christ requires of rulers. Defenders point out that Luther’s text says rulers who command sin must be disobeyed, and that heresy cannot be fought with iron. Critics point to how often Lutheran churches in fact deferred to the prince. Whether the doctrine produced that deference, or was misused to excuse it, is still argued.