Luther's Two Governments

Martin Luther's doctrine of the two kingdoms distinguishes God's spiritual rule, exercised through the gospel and operating on the inner person's conscience and relationship with God, from God's temporal rule, exercised through civil government and the sword, operating on outward conduct and social order among sinners regardless of their faith. Both kingdoms, on Luther's account, are genuinely instituted by God and neither is subordinate to the other in the way medieval two swords theory made temporal power subordinate to spiritual power, a sharp break from the dominant medieval Western Christian model.

Civil government, for Luther, does not require Christian faith to be legitimate and does not need the church's sanction to exercise its proper function of restraining evil and preserving order, a position that let Luther support the German princes' authority to suppress the Peasants' War in 1525 as a legitimate exercise of temporal government's God given task, a position for which Luther has since drawn considerable criticism. The doctrine gave Lutheran political theology a distinctive account of why Christians owe genuine obedience to secular authority even when that authority is not itself Christian or acting in an explicitly religious capacity.