Lecture 12.docx

Okay, we dealt yesterday with the crisis of 1522. The net result of the crisis of 1522 is that Zwilling has to leave Wittenberg and he heads to Zwickau, which was where the Zwickau prophets came from, was a center of radicalism, and Karlstadt too, as I mentioned, leaves Wittenberg. From now on,...

Okay, we dealt yesterday with the crisis of 1522. The net result of the crisis of 1522 is that Zwilling has to leave Wittenberg and he heads to Zwickau, which was where the Zwickau prophets came from, was a center of radicalism, and Karlstadt too, as I mentioned, leaves Wittenberg. From now on, Luther will really be the undisputed leader of the Wittenberg Reformation. His power is now consolidated and I think he\'s never again at quite the same personal risk that he was at prior to 1522. His position is now fairly secure. He will not travel much outside of electro-Saxony for the rest of his career. Obviously, his safety is something of a geographical thing for him, but his position will never be in the jeopardy that it was in late 1521, 1522. I want to spend the next few classes then picking up on sort of key moments and key themes of Luther\'s life after 1522. The first thing I want to look at this morning is a text that he wrote in 1523 entitled, On Secular Authority, To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed. It\'s an important text. It\'s an important text in its own time, but it\'s also an important text in the history of Lutheranism. It\'s very difficult to address German Lutheranism without at some point addressing issues surrounding the Third Reich, the rise of Hitler, and issues in Germany between 1933 and 1945. Partly because the events in Germany were so drastic and dramatic, partly because the Lutheran Church itself, many Lutherans did not have a particularly stellar record under the Third Reich. I mentioned earlier in the week the great Luther scholar Paul Althaus was complicit with Nazi propaganda in the 1920s, 1930s. The issue of the relationship between the church and the secular authorities, which is always I think a pressing one and always something that Christians should be reflecting upon, is peculiarly pressing in the history of Lutheranism because of the connection between Lutheranism, Germany, and the Third Reich. One very sort of popular interpretation of Luther is that Luther really gives no basis for resistance to the civil magistrate and therefore provided something of an ideological basis or maybe putting it more negatively, an ideological excuse for Germans to offer no resistance to Hitler in the build up to the Second World War and then during the final solution of the early to mid 1940s. I think it\'s more complicated than that. First of all, as we come to reflect upon Luther, I think it\'s important to always when we do history to remember the distance. There is a trick in doing history. On the one hand, we need to find points of, oh, thank you very much, we need to find points of analogy with the past in order for the past to be comprehensible to us. If there is no analogy between, say, how we experience the world today and how the world has been experienced throughout history, then the past becomes a closed book to us. We have to find analogies. We have to assume that there\'s a certain commonality that we can access in order to do history. On the other hand, we also need to be aware that there are distinct differences between the present and the past. We need to avoid the fallacy of anachronism, and that is reading back into the past, the issues of the present day. We\'ll deal with that in an acute form when we come to look at Luther and the Jews, because the temptation to read modern racial categories back into the 16th century is very, very strong but may not be entirely appropriate. So the art of history is being able, you know, we have to read the past and the present. We are in the present. We have no choice but to stand in the present and look back. But we need to be aware that there are certain temptations that come with that that we must try to resist to the best of our ability. So one of the things that we, when we first approach any action in history, any figure in history, not just Luther, one of the things we want to do is establish what kind of a world it is in which the figure we\'re studying is living. How is it different from our world? One of the things I want to say is that, first of all, one of the differences between Luther\'s world and our world is Luther\'s world is default Christian in the broadest sense of the word. Set aside confessional disagreements between Protestants and Catholics for a moment. The bottom line is that pretty much everybody except the Jews are Christian. They consider themselves Christians. And as I mentioned yesterday, there are a lot of things that simply wouldn\'t be questioned. Is murder wrong, for example? Is adultery wrong? Sure, people committed adultery in the Middle Ages and the early modern age, but there was no real arguments about whether it was a right or a wrong thing. There\'s a lot of what we might call generic Christian ethics that are just assumed as being the norm. So that means we must remember that Luther\'s not quite facing many of the questions that we face today. If you haven\'t read, well, it\'s a huge and very heavy-going book. Charles Taylor\'s book, A Secular Age, is fascinating. If you don\'t want to read that, then read James Smith\'s little summary of it, How Not to Be Secular. And one of the points that Charles Taylor makes in his great study of the rise of modernity is one of the things that characterizes the modern age as opposed to the Middle Ages is intellectual choice. We talked a little bit about this, though not quite in those terms. The church is one. If you\'d grown up in the 15th century, you don\'t really have a choice about where to go to church. You just go to the local parish church. It\'s not a difficult question because there is no choice. What Taylor does, actually quite clever, is that Taylor argues that the heart of secularization is not so much a rejection of religion as the rise of choice in religions. It\'s quite an interesting and clever idea. But from our perspective here, there\'s a lot that Luther just isn\'t questioned. So for Luther, the magistrates with which he\'s always going to be dealing, they\'re always going to be, we might call, broadly Christian in the most generic sense of the word. That\'s an immediate difference of the world in which we live where there\'s a sense in which what was ethically obvious and unquestioned in Luther\'s day, these are all the things that are really challenged in our day. I love Tony Essilen, the Catholic literary scholar, writing about gay marriage, saying it\'s amazing, isn\'t it, that suddenly that which everybody believed the day before yesterday is an unacceptable opinion to voice in the public square. I mean, that\'s kind of true. Barack Obama couldn\'t get elected in 2008 on a pro-gay marriage stance. He had to sort of equivocate at that point. That was just 2008. So we live in a world where there are an awful lot of ethical questions of which Luther would have had no comprehension, not so much of the questions themselves, but of the fact that there was this set of choices, there was this set of questions to ask. And all of that is to say we need to be somewhat careful when we go back to the 16th century, we read a text by Luther and then we jump forward to the present and simply apply it. It\'s a very different world that Luther\'s operating in. There is that famous statement, you know, I\'d rather live under a wise Turk than a foolish Christian. I have never found that in a primary source in Luther. That\'s not to say he didn\'t say it because Luther wrote an awful lot. But I\'ve never found it and nor when I\'ve seen it cited have I seen anyone give me a reference where I can find it. So it\'s one of those sort of sound bites, tweetable things that seems to have gripped the imagination, but Luther may not actually have said it or at least not said it in quite that form. So when we go back to look at Luther wrestling with issues of church and state, I think it\'s important to remember that he\'s not wrestling with quite the same questions that we are today. Secondly, of course, it\'s not a democracy for Luther. Luther lives in a sort of late medieval kind of vestige of feudalism situation. The prince is the prince. It\'s the other, the people don\'t have a say really in how society is run. The whole idea of democracy is anathema to him. Luther would have regarded democracy as a highly dangerous idea. It\'s important I think for us to remember democracy is in so, you know, it\'s a social construct. Most people throughout most of history have not existed in democracies. There\'s nothing about human nature that requires that we always organize ourselves together in a democracy. Luther doesn\'t live in a democracy. He lives in a world where the prince is the prince. Zwingli\'s world will be a little different as we shall see when we come to talk about Zwingli, but Luther doesn\'t live in an era where, you know, you can, you know, throw Congress out every four years. You can get rid of the president after four years if you don\'t like him. That\'s not Luther\'s world. Luther\'s world is in some ways a much more solid world, a much more clearly established world. God has put these princes in place and they are there for good or for ill. There is no democratic mechanism for getting rid of them if they are tyrannical. Again, this is not to say, Luther has nothing to say today about church and state issues, but it is to say we do need to remember that we can\'t just go to Luther and ask him our questions because he doesn\'t address our questions in quite our form. And in fact, he wouldn\'t even have had the conceptual framework to have got his head around them. So all of that\'s background then. Luther\'s writing secular on secular authority. Now let\'s go back and think, well, why is this important for Luther? The issue of secular authority is going to press in on Luther in the 16th century, partly because of course now we\'re getting a situation where certain secular magistrates are at loggerheads with the church, not in the traditional medieval way where it was a kind of political struggling for power, but in a profoundly confessional way. Frederick the Wise is basically a Lutheran, and that puts him at serious odds with the church, and it raises all kinds of questions then about church-state relations. As Protestantism spreads across Europe, it raises all kinds of questions that in many ways have never been faced before. What does it mean to be a loyal subject of a king when your theology and personal religious convictions may differ from that king? That\'s not been a question in the past. How do you negotiate that now? So these questions are coming up for Luther in the 16th century. And Luther writes in 1523, his work on secular authority. Another part of the background to this of course is the Anabaptists. The Anabaptist model. The Anabaptists, when we use the term Anabaptist or radical in the Reformation, the slightly problematic terms, as with so many isms in history, what historians often do is they coin terms to gather together under a single term a number of disparate groups that share something in common. I like the modern, the 20th century philosopher Wittgenstein talking about language, talks about family resemblances. And I think that when we talk about the Anabaptists, what we\'re often doing is putting together groups that share certain family resemblances. They\'re not all the same. They may not even be causally related to each other. But Anabaptism is a useful concept for historians to use to group together certain groups in the 16th century that show that they have more in common together than say they do with the Roman Catholic Church or the magisterial Protestants such as Luther and Zwingli. One of the family characteristics of many Anabaptist groups was what we might call a somewhat separatist view of society, the idea that when you join the Anabaptist group, you effectively left secular society and join the society of the church. And it fits with not saying that all adult believers, Baptists, hold this view, but you can see how that would fit with somebody saying, you know, you\'re being baptized and you\'re making a decision to join this voluntary body. And in doing so, you\'re actually withdrawing yourself from the world. We get vestiges of this. I remember in the 1980s during the height of the Cold War arms race, and I don\'t know if it happened in America, but certainly in Britain, certain Quakers were withholding portions of their tax money. They would calculate what proportion of their tax, when to pay for nuclear weapons, and they would withhold it. It was illegal, of course, and there were court cases pursuing them over this. But behind that idea lay the fact that they were not so much members of society that they were obligated to pay for everything society did. Most Christians, I think, take the view, well, yes, chunks of our tax money will be used for nefarious and bad purposes, but we are obligated as members of society to pay what we\'re legally required to pay. And if the government wish to use our tax money in bad ways, then they must be held to account for that at the end of time kind of thing. But we still see ourselves as members of society subject to the laws of society. There was a strand of Anabaptist thinking in the 16th century that saw Anabaptism as creating an alternative community. This incidentally is why Anabaptists were persecuted so severely. It\'s not the fact that they believed in adult baptism. It\'s the fact that there was no way of assimilating them in society. They were akin to the Jews. They were opting out of society. They were like the Manson family in the 1960s. They were alternative communities and were therefore a threat to the established community. So Luther\'s also writing with this in mind. There will be those around saying, well, you know, if you\'re a Christian, does that mean you are a member of a separate community and not beholden to what we would now call the secular state? So Luther writes this treatise and one of the first things he does is he argues that the secular state, the civil magistrate, is a divine ordinance. The secular magistrate is a divine ordinance. And he points, you know, he said Cain, as soon as Cain has committed a murder, he\'s terrified of punishment. It indicates that there is a civil sphere there, not just to be frightened of God but to be frightened of the social, civil consequences of crimes. And Luther particularly sees the civil magistrate as being necessary after the fall because after the fall there is a need for the innocent to be protected and for the wicked to be put down. The civil power, he says, has the power of the sword though. This is a big distinction for Luther makes between the church and the secular authorities. The church\'s power is the power of the word connected then to the sacraments. The civil magistrate\'s power is the power of the sword. In other words, let\'s say for Luther somebody commits a murder in Wittenberg. How does the church address that? The church addresses that by preaching to this person and using the power of the keys. And if necessary, using the power of the keys to bind this person, to exclude them if you like from the communion of the saints. The civil magistrate, however, has the power of the sword. It is for the civil magistrate to arrest, try, and if found guilty, execute the person. One of the problems Luther sees in the late medieval period is there\'s been this horrible confusion of the power of the word and the power of the sword. What is one of the crimes of the Roman Catholic Church as far as Luther\'s concerned? It\'s taken the power of the sword to itself. It\'s taken up arms in order to do what? To use power coercively, not power as refracted through the actions of God upon the cross. In theory, Luther says that Christians, as Christians, shouldn\'t need the civil magistrate, but we\'re still fleshly human beings. We\'re righteous before God, but as we live in the world, we\'re sinners. And therefore, Christians too need the civil magistrate. The Anabaptist idea that Christians can opt out and form their own alternative community is wrong. The civil magistrate has been put in place by God, Romans 13, and therefore, the Christian is to submit to the civil magistrate in the civic sphere. Luther, if you like, building off that Augustinian idea of the city of God and the city of man, sees the church and the state as having separate spheres and separate responsibilities and purposes, and one is not to confuse them. The problem with the Roman Catholic Church and the problem with the Anabaptists, two sides of the same coin, they confuse the two. They confuse the two. How then does Luther deal with the question of tyrants, wicked rulers? And this is where it gets sort of sticky relative to the later Nazi issue. Now remember, Luther\'s not facing Nazism. But for Luther, if the civil magistrate is wicked, that does not mean that he\'s not a legitimate civil magistrate. He\'s put in place by God. Why is he put in place by God even as a wicked civil magistrate? Well, it may well be to punish the people, you know, to play on the people get the leader they deserve kind of thing. Wicked civil magistrate is there, brought as judgment of God. And Luther, of course, would point to the Old Testament. Nebuchadnezzar. The Babylonians are brought in to punish the people of God for their apostasy and their idolatry. The implication of that, which Luther draws explicitly, is of course you are not to rebel against a wicked magistrate. If your prince is wicked, that does not legitimate rising up and overthrowing him as a Christian. And of course, this is where, you know, Hitler. Okay, let\'s move forward to 1933 to 1945. You\'re a Lutheran pastor. Can you legitimately rise up against Hitler? Well, not on the reading of Luther of 1523 that I\'ve just given. You can\'t do that. Don\'t know how many of you have read, if you read Eberhard Bethge\'s biography of his friend Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer, of course, was a Lutheran pastor and ultimately is sort of tangentially involved in the Stauffenberg Plot against Hitler. And what\'s interesting in the Bethge biography of Bonhoeffer is the agonies that Bonhoeffer goes through in order to sort of justify how he can be involved in this. It\'s not an easy decision for him to resist Hitler because of the theological weight he places on the God-ordained nature of the civil magistrate, even the wicked civil magistrate. I think from memory, Bonhoeffer ultimately comes to the conclusion that Hitler and his regime are so evil that you can effectively identify them with the Antichrist, an Antichrist figure, and therefore sort of the normal rules are suspended at that point. Of course, this is my president of Westminster Seminary, Pete Lilback, is a huge George Washington American Revolution man, or the war of illegal colonial rebellion, as we call it back home. I was telling the D Min guys, sometimes I\'m asked, what do you learn about the American Revolution in Britain? We don\'t learn about it. Who wants to, you know, what\'s the point of learning about wars that you\'ve lost? That\'s no fun there. We learn about beating the French in the Middle Ages. Well, we\'re on the curve. You know, the French, they have an arc de triumph in Paris. I don\'t think they\'ve won a single war in their history, and yet they have this arc de triumph in the middle of Paris. It\'s remarkable. Anyway, you know, I\'ve challenged Pete on a number of occasions. Okay, Pete, American Revolution, Romans 13.1, does a T tax really justify the suspension of Romans 13.1? Are we dealing with the embodiment of the Antichrist in George III? I\'ll just throw it out there for you. I mean, it\'s too late now. There were points in the last election where I was thinking, you know, I\'m pretty sure if you guys wanted to come back, the Queen would be willing to negotiate terms at this point. The great thing about a non-elected head of state is, however embarrassing they are, they\'re generally not as embarrassing as the elected head of state out there. Anyway, the question of Nazism makes this very acute. And I want to argue that actually that Luther isn\'t quite saying, I don\'t think Luther in 1523 is quite saying that there can be no resistance to the magistrate. I think what Luther is saying is that one cannot take up arms against the magistrate. Let me give an example. To think in a Luther 1523 ethical way about abortion today. Say I\'m a doctor working in a hospital and the registrar or whoever I\'m answerable to says to me they\'ll have to perform an abortion and I refuse to do it on grounds of conscience because it is a contradiction of the word of God, you know, they shall not kill and this is not like a just war, this is killing of the innocent. It\'s an absolute contradiction of the word of God, a contradiction of what the civil magistrate should require. And I get fired as a result of that refusal. I think what Luther\'s 1523 ethical position means is I can\'t sue my employer for that because they have every right as my employer to tell me to do things. If they tell me to do something that is morally illegitimate then I can\'t do it, I can refuse to do it but I still have to accept that they have the authority to tell me to do it because they\'re my employer and if my contract simply says you will do what the registrar tells you then I am to honor that contract or accept the consequences of not doing so and to accept the fact that I got fired and my career is in tatters, well, that\'s part of being a theologian of the cross, isn\'t it? As Christ was exalted through his suffering so I will be exalted in Christ through my suffering. So if we transpose that to Nazi Germany 1933 to 1935 I think what it means is the Nazis instructed you to do something, you had, it was necessary, go away and shoot that Jew in the head. No, refuse to do it. If you don\'t do it you\'re going to die, I\'m going to put you up against the wall and shoot you myself. Well, that\'s the consequence of living under a tyrannical regime which has yet been put in place by God and therefore has legitimacy on that level. So I think there is in Luther\'s theology of 1523 I don\'t see him as denying all resistance, I see him as denying the legitimacy of active resistance. I think the kind of passive resistance idea that we see developed by Gandhi in late imperial India or Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1950s and 60s in the south of the United States, I think that kind of resistance could be set within the Lutheran framework and say yes that is acceptable because it\'s not actually defying the ruler in an active way, it is accepting the consequences of not being complicit in wickedness. So I think there is more to Luther than that. The other side of Luther resistance is Luther actually modifies his opinion. Before I said it was either on Tuesday or Wednesday, one of the problems with the popular appropriation of Luther is that people tend to only read selections of Luther and they tend not to set Luther\'s thinking in the context of the whole. Well in 1530 there is another diet at Augsburg and the princes and dignitaries of the empire gathered at Augsburg. Luther can\'t be there. Luther is an outlaw of the empire so he can\'t be there so he is safely sequestered in a nearby castle, the castle of Coburg. And Melanchthon goes to the diet of Augsburg and presents what is now known as the Augsburg Confession. If you don\'t have a copy of the Lutheran Book of Concord, the authoritative collection of Lutheran Confessions, you should get a copy. It is good to collect confessions from different churches and denominations. I always recommend students get hold of the Catholic Catechism as well. If you want to know what friends and foe believe, it is best to get the official documents, not to trust what your neighbors tell you. I am a big believer in collecting creeds and confessions and statements of faith because if they are the official documents then you can trust them as being an accurate account. Get hold of the Book of Concord. At the heart of the Book of Concord is the Augsburg Confession, 1530, composed by Philip Melanchthon, putting together Lutheran theology in an elaborate confessional form. It is the Lutheran equivalent in some ways of the Belgic Confession or the Westminster Confession or the Baptist Confession of 1689. The hope is that the emperors of the Old Testament would be the same. The hope is that the emperor will subscribe the Confession. Politics and theology cannot separate them in the 16th century. The hope is that the emperor will become a Lutheran at this point and that the Holy Roman Empire will become a Lutheran empire. Charles V though is a very convinced and committed Catholic, refuses to subscribe. Number of Lutheran princes and cities subscribe the Confession and we see the birth then in 1531 of the Schmalkaldic League. The Schmalkaldic League is the military alliance of the Lutheran cities and the Lutheran provinces within the empire put together for purposes of mutual protection. They decided that the time has come to consolidate. Philip of Hesse, remember he had the rather weird marital sexual issues. Philip of Hesse is the genius behind this and it has a sort of rotating presidency. The League will really protect Lutheran Protestantism for 15, 16 years until Luther dies and that\'s when the emperor decides to move militarily against the League and really shatters the power of the League in 1547. But that\'s the subscribing of the Augsburg Confession and the formation of the Schmalkaldic League raises questions about the right of resistance. To what extent can these Lutheran territories resist the emperor? And Luther modifies his opinion at this point. He actually changes his thinking and comes to argue that the electors individually can resist the emperor because they elect him and therefore there is a sense in which power flows from the electors to the emperor. So a level of resistance to the magistrate is allowed. Now that\'s a crucial concession in some ways. I think it stands in in positive relation to for example John Calvin\'s view that a lower magistrate can resist a higher magistrate. Calvin certainly doesn\'t want the rabble. That\'s you and me by the way. He doesn\'t want the rabble resisting the authorities. But Calvin does see it as legitimate for a civil magistrate lower in the hierarchy to resist the edicts of a civil magistrate coming from higher up. And that stands I think in positive relation to what Luther\'s doing in 1530. With both Calvin and Luther of course the question of democracy doesn\'t come up. And that\'s why I think when we think what would they think about democracy? Well one could make a case for saying well because power flows from the people to their elected representatives the logic of Luther should mean that there could be democratic resistance to the government. I hesitate to think that Luther would have agreed with that because I think he would have instinctively recoiled from the idea of democracy anyway. And he might have said well yes it\'s okay for the elite to mount resistance to the elites but we really can\'t have the rabble mounting resistance because then you end up with a situation like you had in 1521, 1522 in Vittenberg when the whole town descends into total chaos. But all of this is to say that I think the idea that Luther leaves German Christians impotent in the face of Nazism is incorrect because I think one even the Luther of 1523 who\'s really pretty conservative socially allows room for passive resistance. There was a book a few maybe 20 years ago now published caused a bit of a storm and there was quite a bit of questioning about the accuracy of some of the historical material. There was a book published called Hitler\'s Willing Executioners and this was a scholar questioning this idea that the you know members of the SS had no choice but to be involved in mass murder. And what the author did was he found records of people who\'d been told you know to be part of an Einsatzgruppe or something and had refused and they hadn\'t been put up against the wall and shot. They\'d been sent off to a desk job somewhere and had continued their career within the Nazi bureaucracy without having to dirty their hands directly with mass murder. The book caused a huge storm because of course it blew out of the water this idea that somehow there was this iron grip that Nazism had and that you know a lot of people being involved in this but didn\'t really want to be involved in it. Well I think if there\'s some truth in that thesis then looking at the Luther of 1523 one could say Luther 1523 would give you know an ideological framework for that kind of resistance and therefore Lutheranism can\'t be pointed to as a reason why Germans just rolled over and blindly obeyed whatever their masters told them. But even so if you move on from 1523 to 1530 1531 Luther\'s writings provide more basis for a more active form of resistance I think at that point. Any questions about that? I haven\'t done my research on this before but I remember somebody talking about who was very kind to the whole you know if Nazism come to the war and hide in the basement of the faith. I feel like this person said that lying was permissible in the name of love and that was a Lutheran belief. Is that true? That\'s an interesting question is lying permissible in the name of love? Well I think if you actually look at the biblical text particularly Old Testament narrative lying in extreme circumstances is interesting. I mean I just preached last Sunday on 1st Samuel 20 where Jonathan lies to Saul about the nature of David\'s absence from the feast. He says he\'s got to go back home and do a sacrifice with his family when he knows David\'s hiding out. The text gives no indication whatsoever that that is an inappropriate thing to do. Just prior to that Michal lies about David so David can get away and the text indicates no hint of criticism of that. Rahab the prostitute lies about the spies. The text gives no hint that she\'s done anything wrong and of course she\'s flagged up as a champion of faith in Hebrews 11. Now you know how does one approach those texts? Well one you could turn around and say well it\'s the Lord\'s anointed we\'re dealing with and therefore the normal rules don\'t apply. I\'m not comfortable with that because that injects a certain arbitrariness. To me it solves the difficulty just too easily. I\'m more persuaded by the idea that what the commandments are really forbidding is lying for malicious purposes or the sake of gain. That\'s what the Ten Commandments are really going after in terms of bearing false witness. That\'s stitching somebody up in a court of law. That\'s doing it for gain. You know telling my children on Christmas Eve when they were small you know the sooner you go to sleep the sooner you know it\'ll be Christmas Day. That\'s not true. It just seems that it\'ll be sooner. Telling my children you know pulling their legs about I completely forgot your birthday and didn\'t get you a present. Are those things are these you know we call them white lies. Are they sins? I don\'t think so. I don\'t think so. I think what the scripture is is forbidding is willful dishonesty for a malicious purpose. So when the Nazis come knocking at your door and there are Jews in the basement and they ask you are the Jews hiding in the basement I would have no hesitation in saying no because they wish they have no right to know that information and they want to know it for a wicked and malicious purpose. So I\'d have no hesitation saying no. What I would say is that most of the time when we tell untruth though it\'s not because there are Jews in the basement. Most of the time when we attempted to tell untruths it is for the purpose of getting ourselves off the hook of responsibility or for the purpose of covering up something. It is for some kind of wicked gain. Now wicked might be a very strong word to use but I think most of the time when we attempted to tell untruths it probably is embraced under the ninth commandment, sometimes at a very mild level. But I don\'t think that, you know, just to go back to the original one, I don\'t think that the Bible forbids all factually untrue statements in every situation. I don\'t think that\'s what the commandment does and I think the narratives of the Old Testament indicate that as well. And then, you know, there are even some odd things which Jesus does. When Jesus talks about David taking the bread for the offering when he\'s hungry, he refers to David being with people. David isn\'t with people if you look at the text, he\'s on his own. And he also gets the name of the priest wrong. Is Jesus lying at that point? No, I think Jesus is trying to point out that David was not the perfect guy you thought he was and he\'s using linguistic tricks to do that. So I think the whole question of lying is an interesting one. I think we should always err on the side of caution but I do think that the Jews in the basement one, that\'s not a hard one for me. Of course you tell them a lie. Of course you tell them. These are wicked men seeking to do wickedness as those hunting down David were when Michal said that he was ill in bed or when Jonathan said he was offered a family feast. They\'re trying to murder somebody and therefore telling a lie, that\'s not a sin you\'ll have to repent for. I mean goodness knows there\'ll be plenty of things we will have to feel sorry for on the day of judgment but not that one I don\'t think. I think so. I suspect Luther would have been more sympathetic to the normal rules don\'t apply. You see, you know, he does, this is where there\'s an interesting connection with Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche 19th century philosopher was the son of a Lutheran pastor and of course develops this idea of men emerging who are beyond good and evil for whom the normal rules don\'t apply. Well Luther has hints of that. When he looks back at the Old Testament, Samson for example, Samson\'s a pretty bad guy. He gets up to a lot of bad stuff but Luther will say yes but the normal, you know, he was a special, a special man to whom the normal rules didn\'t apply. I\'m uncomfortable, I\'m not comfortable with that analysis of the Samson situation but that would be Luther\'s. So I think he would probably say, you know, looking at Jonathan and David it\'s simply a situation where the normal rules don\'t apply. Would Luther have an issue with the citizen say in the US with the second amendment taking up arms against someone trying to shoot a Jew? If the Nazi, if the Third Reich have it here, would he have an issue with someone shooting the the civil magistrate that\'s trying to take out a Jew? Yeah that\'s an interesting question and again it\'s sort of somewhat anachronistic because Luther never faces that. I think at that point the ordinary citizen doing that, Luther would say no because the civil magistrate is legitimately put there by God. The most Luther will allow after 1530 is that another civil magistrate might intervene at that point to stop it happening. But I think Luther, if we just take Luther at his word and don\'t sort of speculate about well how would you think he\'d developed if? I think based on 1530, 1531 a magistrate could stop it but the whole idea of the sort of the sovereign citizen being able to do that, no. No. Yeah? If Luther said that the church had the power of the word and the magistrate had the power of the sword, did he consider heresy as a capital crime? He was certainly, I think the thing about heresy is it\'s not just a theological issue in the 16th century. It\'s also a sign of antisocial behavior. If you\'re a heretic in the 16th century it\'s not because you\'re getting confused about theology, it\'s because you\'re a wicked person. Now Luther would say the church certainly can\'t execute somebody but the civil magistrate could in theory, yes. Yes. But it\'s not for the church to do that. What was the title of that book about the SS? Hitler\'s Willing Executions. It\'s got to be 20, 25 years old. It was controversial and there were those who did question its historiography. That it was a very tendentious reading of the evidence. It\'s not my specialist field so I don\'t know exactly but it did cause a huge storm. Yeah? Could you speak a little more to the Anabaptist relationship to the magistrate? Was that a kind of one unifying idea that you call them Anabaptists, that they completely rejected any higher authority? Or was there a variation in what they would accept? I think Anabaptism is a variegated phenomenon so it\'s difficult to generalize. But every believer in believer\'s baptism in the 16th century does one thing that\'s undeniable. And that is they break the established connection between church and state. The assumption of Luther as the assumption of his Catholic opponents is everybody\'s a member of the church. Church and state are two sides of the one population coin. As soon as you have somebody saying no, you have to join the church. You have to actively decide to join the church. You\'re breaking that relationship and you\'re creating very, very difficult problems for how does one therefore govern and rule as a civil magistrate. In the past you can rule and govern a Christian body of people. How do you rule and govern a body of people where some aren\'t Christians? And this is why the Jews are so terribly persecuted. When we talk about Luther and the Jews, one of the points I\'m going to make is it\'s not fundamentally a racial issue in the Middle Ages and the 16th century. The problem with the Jews is not that they\'re a different race. The problem with the Jews is they\'re not Christians. And how do you govern? How do you consider people to be members of society who aren\'t baptized? And this is part of the political agonies of the 16th, 17th centuries working out how do you develop what we would now call a more pluralist view of society where those who do opt out of the state religion can yet be considered decent members of society? That\'s in some ways the big political question in the 16th, 17th centuries. It\'s a hard one to answer. Would the Anabaptists still have a conception of submitting to the higher authority, just not on a level that a Lutheran would? Some of them they well have done. I mean the Anabaptists in Zurich under Zwingli clearly do respect the civil magistrate to some extent because they want the civil magistrate to push the reformation through more thoroughly. Others, such as the ones who gather in the city of Munster, 1535, 1536, they\'re building a new community. They\'re building the new Jerusalem. And they are reigned against every opponent on the face of the earth. You get this sort of amazing Anabaptists from all over Europe flooding to this city to build a new Jerusalem. And they are opting out of society as it is. They want to see that destroyed and replaced with this new Jerusalem, this new heaven on earth. After Munster, Munster is such a catastrophe and it ends in such a violent bloodbath that much of Anabaptism takes a significantly pacifist turn at that point and becomes a much more socially benign entity. Meno, Simon\'s brother, is executed in the Munster debacle and it turns Meno in a dramatically pacifist direction. I\'ve got a little lecture I give about revolutionaries and brothers who are executed. Meno, Simon\'s brother, is executed and he becomes a pacifist. Which other figure in history has a brother executed and it drives him in exactly the opposite direction with dramatic consequences for the whole of humankind? Lenin. Lenin\'s brother is executed and it radicalizes Lenin. It\'s interesting looking at Meno and Lenin as two responses to this. Meno\'s theology is terrible, but there\'s something rather delightful about him as a person, I think. Whereas Lenin\'s thought is terrible and there\'s not much delightful about him as a person, either one has to say. But Anabaptism\'s variegated, I think 1535, 1536 is a bit of a watershed. Though even then, not all Anabaptists are entirely pacifist. 17th century. We often think these days of Quakers. They\'re sort of nice, gentle people. But in the 17th century, George Fox, the English Quaker leader, was petitioning Oliver Cromwell to use the English navy to invade Italy and overthrow the Antichrist. Not a particularly pacifist approach to Roman Catholic and international relations, one has to say. It was a Quaker driving it. So the history of pacifism and Anabaptism or radical groups is also quite an interesting one as well. Yeah. Yeah. Did Luther write anything about Islam and the matter of Islam? I think he did a little. He did touch on Islam a little. I had a student do a paper for me on that a year or two ago. Islam is interesting. I think the 17th century is when you get more substantial intellectual interaction with Islam because then you see the rise of the study of Arabic and of sort of the development of linguistics in the 17th century. The major significance for Luther of Islam was it was a\... It represents an international threat. Typically for Luther, towards the end of his life, there are four groups that have worked to destroy the Reformation. The Anabaptists, the Papists, the Jews, and the Turk, the Saracen, the Muslims. So he comes across them there. One of the interesting things about Islam in the 16th century is there\'s a great paper to be written by somebody on eschatology and geography because it often depended on who was the threat banging on your city walls as to who you identified as the Antichrist. Often Protestants identified the Pope as the Antichrist and that was because they felt most threatened by Roman Catholicism. But the further east you go, the less threatening the Pope seems and the more threatening the Sultan seems with the Ottomans pressing in from the east. So the further east you go, the more likely you are to read the book of Revelation in terms of the Ottoman Empire rather than the Roman Catholic Church. I used to enjoy, in the 90s, for a while I collected end time novels. They\'re always very entertaining. And it\'s interesting, and end time books, and it\'s interesting how you can map American foreign policy to identifications of figures in the book of Revelation. At one time it\'s Saddam Hussein, other time it\'s Leonid Brezhnev. Salem, I always felt that it\'s amazing that Tim LaHaye became the bestseller because Salem Kerbin, I think he sells vacuum cleaners now, he may be dead. But he is my favorite end time novelist. And I think it was his novel 666, it\'s got pictures in it. There\'s a photograph of, I think, Chicago or maybe L.A. policeman holding somebody down on an altar with a 666 brand. They\'re going to brand on this guy\'s forehead. But obviously the Antichrist isn\'t very clever because the 666 brand reads a 666. So when the guy\'s branded, the number will be the wrong way around on his forehead. But Salem Kerbin was my kind of favorite. But again, end time speculation is not a new genre. You can trace it right the way back through church history. And it\'s often connected to immediate perceived social and political threats as to who is identified as what. When I interviewed Greg Beale, my colleague on the podcast, we played him out to, he\'s a classical music guy, but we played him out to Iron Maiden\'s The Number of the Beast, which is one of the great metal tracks of the 1970s. And I actually said, again, I suppose in sort of not breaking the ninth commandment but telling a little untruth, I said, Greg Beale was actually consultant on this album for this track. I don\'t think you\'d ever heard of Iron Maiden.