Luther’s “wise Turk” quote that he didn’t say

Last updated on: August 31, 2012 at 6:00 am By Gene Veith

Now that a Mormon is running for president and tends to be favored by Christian conservatives over his Christian liberal opponent, we are hearing more and more that famous quotation from Martin Luther: “I’d rather be ruled by a wise Turk than by a foolish Christian.” The problem is, no one has been able to find that famous quotation in any of the voluminous works of Luther. It appears that the quotation is apocryphal. I suspect it may have originated as an attempt to explain the implications of Luther’s doctrine of the Two Kingdoms, as in, “Luther would have rather been ruled by a wise Turk. . .” which then was recalled as “Luther said he would rather have been. . . .” At any rate, I would love to identify the earliest occurrence of that quotation in print. (If any of you could help with that, I would be very grateful.)

Anyway, despite his reputation as a political fatalist, Luther had quite a bit to say about foolish Christian rulers (just ask Henry VIII). And he had a lot to say about the threat of being ruled by Turks, wise or otherwise, as the Ottoman Empire was then engaged in a major invasion of Europe, an Islamic jihad of conquest that had taken over much of Europe and that was finally turned back at the gates of Viennain 1529.

Anyway, the frequent commenter on this blog with the nom de plume of Carl Vehse has researched these issues. Back in 2007 I posted what he put together on this blog, which, unfortunately, was when it was a sub-blog with World Magazine and so is no longer accessible. So I think it’s time to post it again. Carl has updated and tweaked the original article, which I post with his permission:

The Wise Turk quote

An August 26, 2012, updated version of an article located at http://web.archive.org/web/20071231154836/http://cranach.worldmagblog.com/cranach/archives/2007/02/draftthe_wise_t.html

In his January, 1997 editorial in First Things, “Under the Shadow,” Richard Neuhaus pointed out that despite the efforts he and others have made to show that Martin Luther never said, “I would rather be ruled by a wise Turk than by a foolish Christian” or anything like it (even in German), the alleged quote seems to crop up in articles, sermons, blogs, interviews, and even in testimony before a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The year 2012 is an election year and there are non-Christians on the presidential ballot. Thus political editorials in Christian magazines and websites, as well as the fifth-column media, are bound to repeatedly trot out this hackneyed phrase, misattributed to Martin Luther. Let’s be clear. The “wise Turk” quote is an urban legend, an old wives’ tale, just like the oft-repeated fairy tales that Luther threw an inkwell at the devil (or vice versa), or invented the Christmas tree, or that Billy Graham referred to Lutherans (or the Lutheran Church, or the Missouri Synod) as “a sleeping giant.”

This article is yet another Sisyphean attempt to drive a spike through this urban legend non-quote, and specifically to address the erroneous claim that the alleged quote is a loose paraphrase of the following excerpt from Martin Luther’s “An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation“:

“It is said that there is no better temporal rule anywhere than among the Turks, who have neither spiritual nor temporal law, but only their Koran; and we must confess that there is no more shameful rule than among us, with our spiritual and temporal law, so that there is no estate which lives according to the light of nature, still less according to Holy Scripture.”

As will be shown below the urban legend quote has absolutely nothing to do with this quoted excerpt from “An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility” and any such claimed paraphrase is quite unlikely to have been even loosely uttered (in German or Latin) by Dr. Luther elsewhere. The key points, as they should be for all phrases bandied about as being uttered by (or paraphrased from) Luther, are context, context, context. (more…)

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Misconceptions about the Nicene Creed

Last updated on: June 15, 2025 at 8:14 am By Gene Veith

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In this post, I want to clear up some misconceptions about the Nicene Creed, whose 1700^th anniversary we are celebrating.

First of all, the Nicene Creed is not “Roman Catholic.” It did not have its origins in Catholicism, the Pope had little to do with it, and it does not express any distinctly Roman Catholic teachings.

The Early Church of Greco-Roman society was not ruled by a monarchical pope, nor did it have anything like the hierarchical structure and the centralized authority that we associate with Roman Catholicism today. Back then, the church was conciliar. That is, it was governed by councils. When there was a controversy that needed to be resolved, the bishops—that is, the regional leaders of the churches—gathered together in a big meeting to study, discuss, and come to an agreement about the issue.

The Pope was simply the bishop of Rome. He did have a lot of clout as the leader of the Christians in the imperial capital. But so did the bishop of Constantinople, the leader of Christians in the eastern capital of the empire. The Latin-speaking western churches and the Greek-speaking eastern churches were in fellowship with each other, but they had their differences, which would build until they eventually precipitated the Great Schism of 1054, which was caused largely by the Pope attempting to impose his authority over all Christians. But that was in the future.

The Council of Nicaea is also called the First Ecumenical Council, meaning that bishops from the whole inhabited [Christian] world (from the Greek word oikomenikos), both west and east, were invited to take part.

The Pope of Rome didn’t have the authority to call an ecumenical council. The Emperor did. Constantine, the first Christian emperor, summoned the Council of Nicaea. This would be more in line with the early Luther who called on the secular rulers to reform the church or with the state churches that grew out of the Reformation whose titular head was the nation’s monarch. Not that giving secular rulers an ecclesiastical authority was necessarily a good idea, but it was far from medieval Catholicism, in which the Popes claimed authority over temporal rulers.

This brings up another misconception. I have heard it said that Constantine called the council so that he could impose the dogma that he wanted, changing the simple and kindly teachings of Jesus into an authoritarian imperial religion that he could control and that could cement his power.

But by all accounts, Constantine, who probably called the Council so that he could get a more settled picture of his new religion, was sympathetic to Arianism. Later in life he demanded that the Arians be restored to the church and was baptized on his deathbed by an Arian priest. And his son and successor, Constantius II favored the Arian position that Christ was not fully divine. He called a council of his own in 359 A.D., to be held in Constantinople, a hotbed of Arianism, but hardly any of the bishops showed up. There was talk of rescinding the Nicene Creed.

Far from being suppressed by the Council of Nicaea and its Creed, the Arians were ascendant politically. Ten years after the council, Arians who had gained power in the church called a “synod,” a mini-council, and deposed Athanasius, the great theological champion of the deity of Christ, from being the bishop of Alexandria. Constantine banished him and so did his son Constantius. Councils kept finding him innocent, but the succeeding emperors Julian the Apostate (a non-Christian who sought to reimpose paganism) and Valens (another Arian) subjected Athanasius to five exiles.

The Arians were the ones who wielded political power. (As would the Vandals and Goths who sacked Rome and were also Arians). The church that confessed the Nicene Creed pushed back against that power. (See How Arianism Almost Won.)

Finally, Rome had a devoutly Christian emperor in Theodosius I (reigning 379-395 A.D.). He wanted to restore Nicene theology, so he called the second ecumenical council, the Council of Constantinople, in 381 A.D., which we discussed yesterday. This did set the church on a more orthodox course, with the help of the finished Nicene Creed.

But it wasn’t just councils that put the creed into its final shape. The shift from “we believe” to “I believe” was not a top/down development. It happened from grassroots Christians, how the creed was actually used by ordinary Christians who wanted to use the creed to confess their personal faith.

This was apparently the case with the controversial filioque addition, which arose among western Christians and eventually found its way into the liturgy.

The filioque does not have the authority of an ecumenical council, as the Orthodox rightly complain, but it does have the authority of Scripture. The Holy Spirit does proceed from the Father: “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever” (John 14:22). The Father will send the Spirit because, crucially, the Son asks Him to. And the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son: “But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me” (John 15:26). Here the Son will send the Spirit, who “proceeds” from the Father.

All of this is to say, the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and  the Son.” (Other Biblical texts that apply to the filioque controversy are John 16:7, John 20:22, Romans 8:9, Galatians 4:6, Philippians 1:19, and Revelation 22:1.)

We should believe the Nicene Creed not because it has authority in itself or because it has the authority of church councils, much less popes or emperors. Rather, we should believe it because it expresses the truth as revealed in Scripture.

Confessional Lutherans hold to a “quia” subscription to the Book of Concord, which includes the Nicene Creed. “Quia” is the Latin word for “because.” Lutherans believe in those confessions of faith because they conform to the Word of God.

The often messy history of the church plays its role under the Father’s providential care, the intercession of the Son, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth,” promises Jesus (John 16:13), who in another example of the interrelationships of the Trinity asks His Father to “Sanctify them”—those whom the Father has given Him—“in the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17).

As Luther said at the Diet of Worms, “I believe neither pope nor councils alone, as it is clear that they have erred repeatedly and contradicted themselves—I consider myself convicted by the testimony of the Holy Scriptures, which is my basis; my conscience is captive to the Word of God.”

Illustration: St. Athanasius Icon via Picryl, Public Domain

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Epiphany Miscellany, 1/6/25

Last updated on: January 4, 2025 at 4:46 pm By Gene Veith

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The Twelve Days of Christmas are over, not just because your true love gave to you twelve drummers drumming but because today is Epiphany. On this day, we commemorate the wise men’s homage to the Christ child and thus His revelation to the Gentiles, ushering in a whole season of revelations (a.k.a., “epiphanies”) of Christ (His baptism, His first miracle, etc.), culminating in His Transfiguration. After that high point, we descend with Christ into Lent.

Today we consider Jimmy Carter’s genuine accomplishments; independence for Greenland; and indulgences for the Jubilee Year.

Jimmy Carter’s Genuine Accomplishments

Jimmy Carter was 100 years old when he died on December 29.

The first time I was old enough to vote in a presidential election, I cast my ballot for George McGovern, liberal that I was then back in 1972. By the next presidential election in 1976, I was an evangelical Christian, though not yet a Lutheran, so I voted for Jimmy Carter, thinking naively that his open evangelicalism would make him a better president than Gerald Ford.

Carter’s was not a successful presidency. After he was defeated for a second term by Ronald Reagan, Carter devoted himself to good works, such as building houses for the poor through Habitats for Humanity and negotiating peace treaties as if he were still president, earning a Nobel Peace Prize though not always supporting the right people and drifting ever further to the left. For his weaknesses as a president and afterwards, see this.

And yet, his legacy included some genuine accomplishments that we still benefit from today, as Dominic Pino reminds us in his article Progressives Hate Jimmy Carter’s Best Accomplishments.

Carter deregulated the airlines. Before that, the Civil Aeronautics Board determined the routes that airlines could fly, kept the airlines from competing with each other, and set the prices they could charge. Carter dissolved the Civil Aeronautics Board, showing that it’s possible to actually eliminate a federal agency! Airlines started competing with each other, dropping prices and adding routes, making air travel accessible for ordinary Americans. In the 1970s, before regulation, 49% of Americans had flown on an airline. By 2020, that number had risen to 87%.

Carter deregulated the trucking industry. Before that, the Interstate Commerce Commission decided which routes the trucking companies were allowed to operate and how much they could charge. Deregulation unleashed competition, which sped deliveries and dropped prices. It also opened the door for thousands of independent owner-operators, creating good jobs and improving service even more.

Carter deregulated the railroads. Before that, the Interstate Commerce Commission set routes and prices. The freight train industry was becoming like AmTrak, being forced to operate unprofitable routes by federal regulations. Again, deregulation brought down prices and improved service. Shippers saved billions, delivery times dropped, and today the U.S. has the largest freight-rail network in the world.

So if you or someone in your family flew somewhere for the holidays or bought gifts online with two-day delivery, thank Jimmy Carter.

And DOGE Committee and President Trump, take notice.

Independence for Greenland

President-elect Trump has been talking about buying Greenland from Denmark, yanking the chains of Europeans and stirring fears among progressives of American “expansionism” and “colonialism.”

Greenland, at 836,330 sq. miles, is the size of Alaska and Texas combined and its area is over a fifth, 22%, of the size of the entire United States. Its natural resources are vast and mostly untapped, and its strategic importance in the arctic–an area both Russia and China are contending for–is critical. And yet, because 85% of Greenland is under ice, it has a population of only 57,000.

Denmark says it won’t even consider selling its territory and has and the residents insist they are not for sale.

But the kerfuffle has stirred Greenlanders into considering an alternative: seeking independence from Denmark and making Greenland a sovereign nation.

In his New Year’s speech, the prime minister of Greenland Mute Egede said, “It is about time that we ourselves take a step and shape our future, also with regard to who we will cooperate closely with, and who our trading partners will be.”

There is a big reason why Greenlanders are resenting Danish rule. In 2022, a podcast uncovered shocking information. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Denmark was imposing involuntary birth control on Greenland’s population. Danish doctors implanted IUDs in young Inuit women and girls as young as 12 without their consent or knowledge. This was part of an intentional policy to stop the territory’s population growth. The devices, which work by preventing fertilized embryos from implanting and are thus abortifacients, often created complications including sterility.

A 2022 story on the findings shows the outrage felt by Greenlanders:

Reactions to the podcast have been harsh. “The case is completely absurd and should in no way be ignored or camouflaged. Call it what it is: Genocide”, Greenlandic MP in Denmark Aki-Matilda Høegh-Dam said to the Greenlandic news website sermitsiaq.AG. She argues that the IUD campaign falls under the UN definition of genocide for the crime of “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”. Greenlandic MP Doris J. Jensen said that the disclosures are of such severity that the relationship between Denmark and Greenland should be reconsidered, thereby suggesting a future Greenlandic declaration of independence.

Denmark is conducting an investigation, with the report scheduled to be released this year. That report could be explosive.

Because of its own history, the United States should support independent movements out of principle. The pro-life issues should make American Christians especially sympathetic to Greenland.

Because of our history and that principle of independence, the United States should never take over another country or its territories without consent, which would place us in the same role as the foreign powers we rebelled against.

As far as American interests, though, an independent Greenland could fulfill what Trump called the “absolute necessity” of the U.S. having that vast island. That Prime Minister Egede wants Greenlanders themselves to determine “who we will cooperate closely with, and who our trading partners will be” suggests dissatisfaction with the decisions that Denmark has been making for them.

Surely the United States would be a more formidable protector against Russia and China than the Danes would be. And as a trading partner, the United States would surely bring more prosperity to Greenlanders than the Danes have done. An independent Greenland could be brought into the American orbit, to the benefit of both.

Indulgences for the Jubilee Year

For the Roman Catholic Church, 2025 is a “Jubilee Year.” This is not the same as the ancient Hebrews’ Jubilee described in Leviticus 25, the year after “seven weeks of years” in which debts were forgiven and ancestral property was returned to its original owners. Instead of being every 50 years, the Catholic version comes up every 25 years. Instead of the debts forgiven being monetary, the debts forgiven are the temporal penalty due for sins that have been absolved and forgiven by God, but which still must be punished, if not on earth in Purgatory. The way that happens is by receiving indulgences.

Luther’s critique of the sale of indulgences did have an effect on the Roman church. Indulgences are no longer sold for money. But Catholics still believe that indulgences can lessen or even eliminate the time a soul must spend in Purgatory. Christians can earn indulgences as bestowed by the church by performing various acts of devotion. In a Jubilee Year, extra opportunities to earn indulgences are made available, particularly by means of pilgrimages.

Courtney Mares helpfully explains in an article for the Catholic News Agency entitled How to Obtain a Plenary Indulgence During the 2025 Jubilee:

A plenary indulgence is a grace granted by the Catholic Church through the merits of Jesus Christ to remove the temporal punishment due to sin.

The indulgence applies to sins already forgiven. A plenary indulgence cleanses the soul as if the person had just been baptized. Plenary indulgences obtained during the Jubilee Year can also be applied to souls in purgatory with the possibility of obtaining two plenary indulgences for the deceased in one day, according to the Apostolic Penitentiary.

You can get a plenary indulgence–that is, a complete cancellation of punishment for all your sins up to that time–by walking through the “Holy Doors” of one of the four Basilicas in Rome. Another set of Holy Doors will be set up in an Italian prison

You can also get a plenary indulgence by making a pilgrimage to one of the churches in Rome named after a female saint.

If you can’t afford to go to Italy, you can also get indulgences by going to a local cathedral, performing “works of mercy” (“visiting prisoners, spending time with lonely elderly people, aiding the sick or disabled, and helping those who are in need”), or other specific actions (such as “Abstaining for at least one day a week from ‘futile distractions,’ such as social media or television”).

Read the article for details and for other means of avoid punishment for the sins that God has forgiven. The author says that for these indulgences to work, they must be accompanied by “Sacramental confession, holy Communion, and prayer for the intentions of the pope.”

It has always puzzled me that while Catholics do believe that Jesus has atoned for our sins and forgives them, that forgiveness only means we will not be damned for them. We are forgiven, and yet we still must be punished. And yet, the church, through the authority of the Pope, can remit that punishment. This happens because the Pope can apply the “treasury of the saints,” the extra the saints accumulated that are more than they need for their salvation, to our account. So why can’t the infinite merit of Christ be applied to our accounts? Why doesn’t the punishment of Christ in our place eliminate the need for our punishment?

The church still needs Luther.

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How Christianity Invented the “Secular”

Last updated on: November 15, 2024 at 1:17 pm By Gene Veith

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Scholars, ordinary folks, and even New Atheists have been discovering the profound influence that Christianity has had on Western civilization. Christianity has given us values (compassion, mercy, forgiveness), ideas (equality, freedom, human rights), and institutions (hospitals, universities, science) that just did not exist in classical paganism or cultures untouched by the church. (See Tom Holland’s Dominion and Alvin Schmidt’s How Christianity Changed the World.)

A new book shows how Christianity even invented what seems to be its nemesis today: the concept of the secular. That is, a realm that is distinct from the explicitly religious.

Classical scholar Nadya Williams reviews a book in Providence by intellectual historian David Lloyd Dusenbury entitled The Innocence of Pontius Pilate: How the Roman Trial of Jesus Shaped History. The book is about different theologians’ understandings of Pilate, but Dusenbury sees in that discourse the working out of the relationship between the spiritual and the earthly realms. Williams quotes him:

“The thesis of this book is that what we now call the ‘secular’ is not a Roman (pre-Christian) inheritance, or a late modern (post-Christian) innovation. On the contrary, the ‘secular’ is constituted by Christian philosopher-bishops, legal theorists, and polemicists… I am inclined to think that the term-concept of the ‘secular’ owes incalculably much (1) to a single utterance in the Roman trial of Jesus as it is narrated in the fourth gospel: ‘My kingdom is not of this world’ (John 18:36); and (2) to a singular interpretation of this utterance in the early fifth century by a formidable African bishop, Augustine of Hippo, in his Homilies on the Gospel of John.”

Williams delves into the origins of the word itself. “Secular” derives from the Latin saeculum, which originally meant the span of a human life, or what we call a “generation.” Later, it developed into the French word siècle, meaning “century.” Saeculum was a term for a measure of time, an “age.” It had nothing to do with a lack of religion. Indeed, the “Secular Games,” which the Romans held every 110 years to celebrate the transition from one era to another, were shot through with religious observances.

But then the word was used in the Latin translation of the Bible to render the Greek αἰῶν, or “age” (cf. the derivative eon). Williams explains:

In the Latin Vulgate, whenever Jesus refers to “this age,” the term used is saeculum. Likewise in the Vulgate, Paul uses saeculum to describe “this age” and its antipathy to Christ—e.g., in 1 Corinthians 2:6-8. The key to understand—and Dusenbury returns to this in his conclusion—is that in antiquity, again, there was no separation of religion and state, or sacred and secular (in the modern sense). But Jesus, with his brief statement about the nature of his kingdom at his trial before Pilate, made that very separation, between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the saeculum.

I would add that there is also no separation of religion and culture in the other major world religions. Not in Islam. Not in Judaism. Not in Hinduism. Although some have tried to turn Christianity into another cultural religion, Christians come “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Revelation 7:9). And Christianity is for every age, every saeculum, because Christ is “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age [saeculo] but also in the one to come” (Ephesians 1:21).

The original Greek in Jesus’s confession before Pilate uses the word κόσμοs (“cosmos”) or “world,” so that the English correctly renders the passage as “my kingdom is not of this world.” The Latin Vulgate also renders κόσμοs as mundus, “world,” but Augustine, in discussing the passage, interprets it in the sense of saeculum. For him, “this world” and “this age” constitute the non-spiritual realm, which often opposes the faith and offers temptations to lead us away from the faith. And yet this “secular” world is still part of God’s creation and exists under His sovereignty.

Some Christians, such as the monastics and Protestant anabaptists, would seek to separate themselves from this “secular” world, though the church would also establish orders of what were called “secular priests” who would serve parishes in the world.

I would add that Luther with his doctrine of the Two Kingdoms is especially helpful in sorting out both the distinctions and the relationships between the “temporal” and the “eternal” kingdoms. He also shows the value of what we would call the “secular” realm, explaining how God is present there too, though in a “hidden” way. His doctrine of vocation teaches that Christians are to love and serve their neighbors in their “secular” callings and relationships.

We might do well to bring back the element of time in the word “secular.” The age we are currently in may be oblivious to Christian truth, just as the ancient Greco-Roman age was actively hostile to it, but “the age to come,” in the sense of future generations or future time periods might be more open to Christianity.

Whereas Christianity can embrace both the spiritual and the secular, today’s secularism rejects the spiritual, assuming that this physical world is all that exists and that this present time is normative for all of history. Christianity is much more open-minded and offers a much larger and more comprehensive perspective.

Illustration: Jesus Before Pilate, First Interview by James Tissot, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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The Anti-Revolutionary Party

Last updated on: October 8, 2024 at 8:54 am By Gene Veith

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As Christians are trying to figure out how they should pursue politics and cultural influence in our secularist world, it is helpful to consider models from the past.

Jordan Ballor does that in his Religion & Liberty article The Faithful Christian and the Politics of the Tao. In it, he looks at the political activities of the Reformed theologian Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), who not only started a successful Christian political movement in the Netherlands but actually rose to the position of Prime Minister.

In 1879, he founded the Anti-Revolutionary Party. An odd name for a political party, perhaps, describing what it was against rather than what it was for, but its focus was to oppose the legacy of the French Revolution, which continued to manifest itself in ever-more radical but mostly unsuccessful revolutions in Europe throughout the 19th century, from the widespread liberal revolutions of 1848 to socialist riots that in the next century would culminate in the Russian Revolution.

I was somewhat familiar with Kuyper, mainly from back when I was influenced by Francis Schaeffer, especially with his emphasis on “world views.” His political efforts I chalked up to the Calvinist “one-kingdom theology” that stresses the rule of the saints on earth, with the theocratic goal of ruling earthly societies with God’s law, which even Christians–let alone non-believers–are unable to keep.

But Ballor’s article showed me that I had misjudged Kuyper’s project. He didn’t start a “Christian Party,” much less a “Calvinist Party” designed to set up a millennial Christian utopia. Rather, his “Anti-Revolutionary Party” was oriented around a negative goal of opposing the anti-clericalism, the attacks on the family, and the undermining of other institutions that the spirit of revolution encouraged. At the same time, the “Anti-Revolutionaries” sought to offer more positive alternatives to the genuine problems–the exploitation of labor, poverty, inequality, etc.–that the revolutionaries were trying to address.

You couldn’t say that the “Anti-Revolutionary” party was conservative, at least in the old European sense of trying to build up the power of the monarchies, restoring the aristocracy, and imposing controls on the lower classes. Rather, Kuyper presided over what was, in effect, a populist movement. Says Ballor,

A distinctive feature of Kuyper’s emphasis was on the importance and dignity of the kleine luyden, the “little people.” In this way the ARP was fiercely and deeply democratic, grounding its principles in the dignity of all human beings, each with a vocation before God and a service to provide for others. “Everything can be a spiritual calling,” wrote Kuyper, and everyone should be respected and represented in the political order. This meant a focus on expanding the franchise more broadly (although not universally in a revolutionary fashion), even as it also meant focusing on the family as the basic unit of society.

Central to Kuyper’s political and theological convictions was the concept of “sphere sovereignty,” the notion, in Ballor’s words, that “God has given direct authorization to various social institutions, or ‘spheres,’ which operate according to their own logic and laws and ultimately are accountable to God.” The state has its sphere of sovereignty, but so does each family. Also the church, local governments, schools, businesses, workshops, and many more.

It follows that Kuyper believed in limited government and the decentralization of authority. So what is the role of government in all of these spheres? Ballor explains (my bolds):

While authority and legitimacy were not delegated by the state or through the government to the various spheres, the state did have a unique responsibility to be the forum of last resort for public justice. When conflict arises between the spheres, or there is corruption within an institution such that it needs aid to restore its proper functioning, the state can act in a remedial capacity. The purpose of state intervention, however, is always to restore spheres and institutions to health and self-sufficiency.

The purpose of the state is to protect and build up the other spheres–the family, the schools, economic institutions, local governments, private organizations, and, yes, the church–which strikes me as a principle that Christians interested in politics could apply today. This is a Christian model that is not Catholic “integralism,” with its dreams of papal and imperial rule, nor is it a “post-liberal” model that downplays democracy and individual rights. Rather, it is a Christian kind of liberalism as an alternative to the revolutionary kinds of liberalism.

Kuyper saw that his concept of sphere sovereignty was similar to the Catholic teaching about “subsidiarity,” defined as “the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level.” In 1891, Pope Leo issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum, which applied that principle in many ways, including affirming the dignity and rights of workers while rejecting socialism. The arch-Calvinist Kuyper loved that proclamation from the Pope, to the point that his Anti-Revolutionary Party allied with its Catholic counterparts. According to the politics of this unlikely alliance, the Calvinists and the Catholics would vote for each other’s candidates on second and subsequent ballots in jurisdictions where their party would fall short. This tactic, which would work better in a multi-party parliamentary system rather than a two-party system like ours, led to a coalition that would enact many of the ARP’s policies and make Kuyper Prime minister.

And yet, Kuyper was voted out of office in 1905, and his political program did not survive the two World Wars. The Anti-Revolutionary Party did persist until it merged with other Christian-related parties in 1974 to become part of the Christian Democratic movement, which is another but related approach to Christianity and politics. (See my posts from years ago: Conservative Theologically, but Liberal Politically and Kuyper and Christian Democracy; and my posts on the American Christian Democratic party that may be on your ballot, the Solidarity Party. Check out the party’s website to learn about its presidential candidates, Peter Sonski and Lauren Onak, the thoroughly pro-life alternatives.)

My impression is that “sphere sovereignty” and “subsidiarity” accord well with the Lutheran doctrine of the Estates and the doctrine of vocation. And yet the Anti-Revolutionary Party’s ultimate demise is also confirmation of the Lutheran pessimism about the ability of sinful human beings to establish a consistently moral and Godly society on earth. Christianity is not a political program but the good news of our salvation through Christ. Still, though, God reigns in a hidden way in His temporal kingdom, so we must never reject that temporal kingdom, but rather do what we can in our various vocations, including that of citizenship, to love and serve each other.

So what can we learn from Kuyper?

Photo: Abraham Kuyper by Unknown author – https://josdouma.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/kuyper-75.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43933631

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Natural Religion vs. Supernatural Religion

Last updated on: June 4, 2024 at 9:07 pm By Gene Veith

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Religion is natural for human beings. But natural religion tends to be this-worldly, usually looking to earthly rulers as the highest authority. Christianity, on the other hand, is not a natural religion but a supernatural religion. And yet, Christianity often has to contend against the allure of the religion that is natural to us.

So says Sebastian Morello in a fascinating article in The European Conservative entitled The Modern State Will Become Very Religious. He maintains that what we are seeing as secularism is simply a displacement of religion away from the church as a supernatural mediator onto the state with its political ideologies and personalities. As a result, the state–not the church–has become the moral authority, the enforcer of orthodoxy, and the punisher of heretics.

Morello says that it is completely “natural” for the religious impulse to be directed to earthly authorities, as history shows:

Given that religion is natural to mankind, and political government is the highest natural authority that exists over mankind—that is, mankind instantiated in his communities, nations, and empires, etc.—the proper authority over the religious life of any given natural community is its government. This fact has always been recognised. The Roman Emperor was arbiter over which were the public gods and which were the hearth gods, and eventually he even placed himself among the former. The Athenian statesmen were the protectors of religious life in their polis, and they lawfully executed Socrates for corrupting such religiosity among the young. The barbarian warlords of the north appointed their sacrificial priests and druids just as they appointed their lesser chieftains.

But the advent of Christianity brought about something new:

Our civilisation has historically held that this is the age of Jesus Christ, and consequently supernatural religion has entered the world. Christians claim that their religion does not have its origin in the natural religious impulse of human nature, but has come into the world from without, and in doing so has assumed into itself that natural religious impulse, has transformed it, and superseded it.

In short, Christians claim that their religion is not a natural religion, but a supernatural one. Thus, they claim it requires an institution of purely supernatural origin to be both its interpreter and promulgator, namely the Christian priestly hierarchy. Political leaders, whose role is rooted in the requirements of human nature, are simply not competent to be the highest authorities over this supernatural religion. Thus, in a Christendom model, we have two authoritative institutions on earth, one of natural origin, customarily called the State, and one of supernatural origin, customarily called the Church.

But now the “Christendom model” is disintegrating, and natural religion is re-asserting itself, as before, leading again to a divinized state:

As this disintegration unfolds, in its bid to maintain social stability, the State will naturally attribute to itself final authoritative judgement on religious and moral matters, just as it did in the pre-Christian age. As noted, it will consequently emerge as a post-Christian counterfeit magisterium. Thus, the State will make claims about sex, marriage, family, ‘selfhood,’ when innocent people can be killed, and progressively which opinions it is permissible to hold in one’s cloistered conscience. The State will increasingly interfere with every aspect of its citizens’ lives, implicitly believing its own bureaucratic system to operate as a quasi-providential hand. The last three centuries of Western history have provided ample examples of the State deifying itself, just as the pagan superpowers did in their most decadent epochs. . . .

No sooner will a government claim to be religiously neutral than it will adopt the most fanatical doctrines and practices—as is widely observable today in the post-Christian victim-worship of Western countries and their adoption of liturgical processions and months of festivity in celebration of mere sexual confusion. Moreover, governments will claim powers of encroachment and intrusion hitherto considered unthinkable, treating as heretics those who do not endorse its new religiosity in public, and now increasingly in private.

Morello’s “Christendom model” with two distinct authorities, the temporal and the spiritual, sounds much like the Lutheran doctrine of the Two Kingdoms. I would add that Morello’s paradigm of “natural religion” and “supernatural religion” helps us recognize how Christians sometimes revert to the more “natural” religion centered in temporal rule. I think of the pope’s claim to temporal authority, the earthly communities of the anabaptists, the leftwing “social gospel” of theological modernists, the rightwing “social gospel” of the Catholic integralists, the Reformed dominionists, Seven Mountain charismatics, and Christian nationalists.

Morello, however, is not saying that Christians should abandon temporal concerns. Christendom puts the two realms in relationship to each other, with both under the transcendent reign of God. But he shows what the divinized state looks like. And makes the point that “Every one of the muddled ideological systems that has informed the structure and direction of the modern State has been nothing more than a counterfeit religion of a people claiming to be emancipated from religion.”

Photo: “Priest-king from Uruk, Mesopotamia, Iraq, c. 3000 BCE” by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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