Martin Luther on the Passions of Evangelical Politics

Now that we have a bit of distance from the Giglio controversy, it’s worth stepping back and thinking through this with a bit more depth:  how should Christians speak in public when those in government oppose them?

I’ve been rereading Luther’s Two Kinds of Righteousness and have found it illuminating in light of recent events.  A brief summary:

After describing public officials as those who have been ordained by God to “punish and judge evil men, to vindicate and defend the oppressed,” Luther turns toward private individuals–including, presumably, clergymen–and identifies three types of response when they have suffered injustices.  It’s an instructive taxonomy and comes very close to identifying some of the shortcomings I had tried to grasp at.

The first type Luther identifies are those who “seek vengeance and judgment from the representatives of God.”  Luther’s basic disposition toward these folk is that we should tolerate them, but not commend them.  In fact, he goes on to suggest that they may not enter the kingdom of heaven(!) unless they forsake “things that are merely lawful” and pursue “those that are helpful.  For that passion for one’s own advantage must be destroyed.”

The second class are those “who do not desire vengeance” and “do not resist any evil.”  Christian Citizenship 202, as it were.  Yet Luther goes a step further and suggests that if the authorities seek to redress the wrongs done on their own, such Christians “do not desire it or seek it, or they only permit it.”  If they’re really advanced, then they may even prevent the government from pursuing justice as they are “prepared rather to lose their other possessions also.”

Yet this isn’t a form of political quietism, at least not of the sort that abdicates any responsibility toward the public square and those who are infringing other people’s liberties within it.  Instead, they “grieve more over the sin of their offenders than over the loss or offense to themselves.  And they do this that they may recall those offenders from sin rather than avenge the wrongs they themselves have suffered.”

There is a third class, though, who are like the second type in disposition but not like the second type in practice.  Which is to say, they “demand back their property or seek punishment to be meted out, not because they seek their own advantage but because they seek the betterment of the one who has stolen or offended.”  Yet Luther isn’t sanguine about this group:

“No one ought to attempt this unless he is mature and highly experienced in the second class just mentioned, lest he mistake wrath for zeal and be convicted of doing from anger and impatience that which he believes he is doing from love of justice.  For anger is like zeal, and impatience is like love of justice so that they cannot be sufficiently distinguished except by the most spiritual.”

Let me be the first to say that I am not among the most spiritual and am almost certainly not going to get the taxonomy of loves and passions right.  But it is  interesting that Luther (like Augustine) recognizes the subtle differences between zeal and love of justice on the one hand and anger and impatience on the other.  He is attentive not only to whether we are seeking the right, but the passions that motivate us to seek it. And one of the criterion he deploys is whether we are properly focused on the offender’s good, rather than rectifying the wrongs done to us for the sake of justice on its own.

Luther’s primary interest is in safeguarding the integrity of Christians’ witness to the Gospel. And no Christian is going to disagree with him on that, at least not that I know of. What’s more, Luther doesn’t specify whether his is only a criterion for action or whether it is also a criterion for communication.