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Thoughtful proponents of religious freedom throughout the centuries have never advocated an unlimited and unfettered right. This chapter makes a searching analysis of the Western tradition (Tertullian, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Richard Hooker, Thomas Helwys, John Cotton, Roger Williams, William Penn, etc.) on the issue of the authority of the state versus sacred obligations of conscience. Four paradigms or types emerged. Two of them, the “duly ordered relationships” and the “levitical” paradigms, are conspicuously present in periods of religious oppression. In contrast, the “two kingdoms” and the “enlightenment” paradigms actively contributed to the development of religious freedom protections. In these, the state's argument is subjected to scrutiny (as opposed to a conclusive presumption in its favor) and, paradigmatically, the state has been accorded the least (if any) authority over matters of the first tablet of the Ten Commandments: the particulars of worship services, infractions against God, and the form and internal governance of God's church. Under the two kingdom's (and somewhat under the enlightenment) paradigm/type, the basic limiting premise of the free exercise clause is that its protection does not extend to religiously compelled actions which cause harm to the person, property, or privileges of citizenship of another. In these instances, the duty of the state to protect citizens from such harms is deemed paramount.

The Wittenberg Unrest of 1521–2 caused Melanchthon to emphasize civil freedom, although he still maintained the spiritual bondage of the will. This new emphasis occurred in tandem with the development of Luther's political theology of various dualities in reality. Meanwhile, Melanchthon strongly sided with Luther in his dispute with Erasmus over the freedom of the will.

This chapter focuses on Leibniz's treatment of final causes and divine wisdom. It first argues that the question of final causes should be distinguished from that of contingency: there are numerous places where Leibniz seems perfectly happy to admit that God necessarily chooses the best of all possible worlds, thereby allowing that everything is necessary, while at the same time, everything is for a reason. The chapter then explores the way in which Leibniz came to hold that the laws of nature are the result of divine wisdom. It is argued that Leibniz came to this position as a response to Spinoza's denial of an anthropomorphic conception of God. The chapter then goes on to discuss Leibniz's ‘two kingdoms’ metaphor, the view that everything can be explained either through efficient causes or through final causes. Two different senses of that thesis are distinguished. In one sense, illustrated by Leibniz's work in optics, everything can be explained either through the laws of nature or through teleological laws. In another sense, which is close to his principle of pre-established harmony, everything can be explained either through the laws of nature or through the activity of souls.

Presbyterianism favoured limited monarchy, rejecting any form of human absolutism in state, church, and family. However, in the period covered by this book, they were generally political conservatives, and up until the eve of the National Covenant had little to say about advocating rebellion, though they did uphold the Melvillian notion of the two kingdoms in which church and state, while inseparably linked, also tended to different areas of human interest, meaning that when the king tried to interfere with sermon content and liturgy, there was bound to be trouble. Scotland was favoured by God, and defection from the truth would lead inexorably to God's departure from the land—a theme counterbalanced by covenantal notions, again nourished by the Hebrew Bible, that God would at least spare a remnant, so that Scotland's future, while dire, was not without all hope. There was similarly a deep tension in that political change must be effected by the lesser magistrates, the nobility—a caste of men who had for decades shown themselves generally to favour personal advantage over religious loyalty.

This chapter argues that the “two kingdoms” were deeply imbedded in Bonhoeffer’s theology, demonstrating that the logic of the two kingdoms drives a number of Bonhoeffer’s arguments, from the early, church struggle texts such as “The Church and the Jewish Question” through later, Ethics manuscripts such as “Heritage and Decay” and “Ultimate and Penultimate Things.” By treating the spiritual and temporal kingdoms as a differentiated unity grounded in Christ’s presence as the church, Bonhoeffer distinguished his own two-kingdoms thinking from contemporary dualistic or dichotomous accounts, which radically separated spiritual and temporal kingdoms. With justification, Bonhoeffer saw his understanding of the two kingdoms as a return to Luther. This chapter is foundational for those to come, where it is argued that Bonhoeffer’s two-kingdoms thinking informed his reflections on peace, the church struggle, and political resistance.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion on a cross-section of Leibniz’s views. It covers his philosophies on naturalism, universal harmony and the “two natural kingdoms”, and the physical kingdom of nature and moral kingdom of grace. An overview of the essays included in this volume is then presented.

Prominent interpreters of Bonhoeffer (including Clifford Green, Larry Rasmussen, and Stanley Hauerwas) have distanced him from the Lutheran tradition of thinking in terms of “two kingdoms.” An important factor in the denial of Bonhoeffer’s two-kingdoms thinking has been a lack of sympathetic engagement with either that tradition of thought or Bonhoeffer’s understanding of it. Instead, those denials have relied implicitly on accounts of the two kingdoms as understood by its critics, most notably Ernst Troeltsch and Reinhold Niebuhr. For this reason, it is necessary in this chapter to provide an historical overview of the two-kingdoms tradition from Luther himself into the twentieth century. This both provides a genealogy of the caricature of two kingdoms used to separate Bonhoeffer from that tradition and offers a more sympathetic account of that tradition in accord with his understanding of it.

If we assume a Lutheran account of justification as well as the distinction between law and gospel as presented in Chapter 2, the resulting image of God’s activity in the world is a coordinated, twofold action of preservation and redemption. This means we need to add to Chapter 1’s three-act story (creation, fall, redemption) a fourth act: preservation. The theological category of preservation is, for Bonhoeffer, the theological category under which to locate political activity. As this chapter shows, the orientation of Bonhoeffer’s political thought toward preservation distinguishes it from the alternative theo-political visions that he calls “compromise” and “radicalism.” And the main concepts of Bonhoeffer’s political thinking—the two kingdoms and the orders or estates—are ones that structure political life in its preservation toward redemption.

This chapter introduces the hypothesis that the conceptual foundations of the liberal model of religious toleration and secularism were laid by a specific theological framework developed during the Protestant Reformation. It will trace the crystallization of this political theology of Christian freedom and the two kingdoms. This was a normative theological framework, which claimed that all believers ought to be free from human interference in the spiritual realm. By implication, this theology also divided human existence into two realms or kingdoms: the spiritual kingdom, where no man could rule but God alone, and the political kingdom, where the believer should always obey secular authorities. Across Reformation Europe, the political theory of the two kingdoms would constitute the basic framework for debates concerning religious toleration and freedom.

Nelson was created Duke of Bronte and received the vast estate in 1799 as a gift from Ferdinand IV, King of the Two Sicilies. It was a standard, if especially ostentatious, form of military reward and reflected both the ‘Nelson-mania’ prevailing in Naples and the King's personal gratitude to the British for having saved his kingdom from the French Revolutionary armies. But the gift also brought disgrace on Nelson, in that it pointed to his dubious role in the brutal suppression of the Jacobin Republic in Naples (not to mention his love affair with the British ambassador's wife). All was not what it appeared to be in Bronte either. The first British men to arrive there found nothing but trouble and bad luck, and at the time of his death of 1805, Nelson was complaining that the place was a drain on his finances. After Nelson's death, his brother William inherited the estate and the title and, through William's daughter, Charlotte, Lady Bridport, the estate passed to the Bridport family.

The Lutheran Reformation transformed not only theology and the church but also law and the state. Despite Luther’s burning of the canon law books and his berating of lawyers as bad Christians, he soon realized that he needed both law and the legal profession to preserve his theological reforms, and to extend them into the realms of marriage, education, social welfare, and more. Luther and his colleagues ultimately reconciled the new dialectics between gospel and law, church and state, spiritual life and temporal life through Luther’s complex two-kingdoms theory, which remains at the heart of Lutheran thought to this day. They ultimately synthesized their reforms of public and private life in hundreds of new confessions and catechisms, orders, and ordinances, which still shape the laws and policies of Lutheran churches and states to this day.

This chapter introduces Luther’s sermon on usury, and situates it in the context of his day. It then gives a commentary on Luther’s method in the sermon, discussing inter alia such matters as its genre, Luther’s moral understanding of ‘the gospel’ and its relation to financial and commercial matters, and the way in which Luther reads and deploys Scripture in social ethics. Also analysed are the ways in which Luther exploits particular doctrines (such as creation and justification by faith alone) with respect to a moral question, and his core theopolitical concept of the twofold government of God. This chapter analyses the way in which Luther brings these theological motifs to bear on a pressing economic question which confronted him: the rise of the Zinskauf, a method of lending money at interest which circumvented canonical prohibitions on usury.

Far away from the nationalist heroics of Italy's Risorgimento, Bronte experienced these transformations through a 40-year law-suit over the separation of private property from common land, and the redistribution of common land among the peasantry. Between 1820 and 1860, litigation between the Duchy and local community involved all sections of the town, and resulted in bitter hostility between the Duchy and Bronte's elite. This conflict over land and the personal hostility which it engendered became the driving force in local politics, out of which a few families did extremely well: after 1815 the commune of Bronte came under the political control of a few prominent landowning families. But this same situation produced competition within the community, producing a major feud between rival families that left everyone vulnerable to revolt from below.

This chapter relates Bonhoeffer’s resistance to the state to the issue of his concern for the persecution of Jews under the Nazi regime. Although it has been common to see a direct relationship between these two—as if Bonhoeffer resisted the state above all because of its mistreatment of Jews—this chapter argues that the relationship is better understood as mediated by other theological concerns, namely, the two kingdoms and the doctrine of justification. This chapter advances that argument in connection with “The Church and the Jewish Question,” the first part of which is governed by the proper roles of church and state under the two kingdoms, the second part of which is governed by the concern for the message of justification that defines the church community.

This chapter begins examination of the third phase of Bonhoeffer’s resistance, beginning in 1939 and characterized by his participation in a conspiracy to kill Adolf Hitler and overthrow the Third Reich. Notwithstanding the novel character of this kind of resistance in Bonhoeffer’s resistance activity and thinking, much of his thinking about resistance remains stable in this third phase. As this chapter shows with reference especially to Ethics, the main text from this phase, Bonhoeffer remains committed to the two kingdoms, the orders (although these are now named mandates), and the relationship of church and state articulated early in the resistance. Similarly, Bonhoeffer continues to affirm the types of ecclesial resistance developed in the first two phases of resistance (types 2 through 5).

Luther’s method of theology is that of Scriptural interpretation. Erasmus complains that Scripture is obscure, an authoritative tradition is needed to interpret it. Luther confirms both the external and internal clarity of Scripture itself: “External clarity” is guaranteed by the public proclamation of God’s word; the natural meaning of the “text published to the entire world” is found in the very letter of Scripture. “Internal clarity” guarantees that the same Holy Spirit who inspired the canonical authors “internally moves” the hearer of the word granting him/her participation in Christological grace. The Spirit-inspired word is an efficient carrier of Trinitarian grace that changes its hearers. In contrast to the skeptical view of Erasmus, Luther uses the assertive propositions of Scripture as a means of assuring theocentric salvation. Because of its double clarity, “Scripture alone,” sola Scriptura, is a sufficient norm for the truth of the gospel. Another central feature of Luther’s theological method in The Bondage of the Will is his view of the conflict between the opposing transcendental powers which fight over the control of the human beings: the Triune God’s goodness, love, and grace against unfaith, sin, and Satan. Only God’s Spirit can liberate the sinner from captivity by unfaith and evil. Erasmusnever mentions God’s Spirit when discussing grace, and there is no mention of Satan in his treatise. Moreover, the distinction between the “things below oneself” and the “things above oneself” is crucial for Luther’s understanding of law and gospel; Erasmus makes no distinction between the two realms.

For Erasmus, the relationship between God and the human being is rationally and morally acceptable fair play in which both parties have their responsibilities. He follows the teaching of Nominalism: God has promised to grant his grace to anyone who does the minimum that he/she naturally can for receiving grace. “Free choice” means that the human being has the capability of applying him/herself to the things which lead to eternal salvation or turning away from them.Impenitence is a sin that can never be forgiven; moral deeds “attract” grace. For Luther, freedom in moral decisions plays a crucial role in the human community “in front of the world and people,” in relation to the “things below oneself.” But the human being is not free in his/her relation to the “things above oneself,” “in front of God,” or facing the power of unfaith, sin, and demonic evil. Should there be any change in the human’s relation to the realities “above oneself,” it is always a work of God’s prevenient grace effected by the Holy Spirit. Faith is a “new creation” infused into human hearts by God’s Spirit; sola fide is fully a Pneumatological reality for Luther—a fact overlooked in Luther research. The Spirit establishes an intimate union between the Triune God and the human being. Luther creates a massive defense of God’s sovereign grace, sola gratia. The doctrine of two “kingdoms” is the backbone of Luther’s thinking. Erasmus did not make such a distinction; consequently, law and gospel get mixed.