From Gospel to Law: The Lutheran Reformation and Its Impact on Legal Culture J OHN W ITTE J R 1 Robert Woodruff University Professor of Law, McDonald Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University The Lutheran Reformation transformed not only theology and the Church but also law and the State. Despite his early rebuke of law in favour of the gospel, Martin Luther eventually joined up with various jurists and political leaders to craft ambitious legal reforms of Church, State and society on the strength of his new theology, particularly his new two-kingdoms theory. These legal reforms were defined and defended in hundreds of monographs, pamphlets and sermons published by Lutheran writers from the 1520s onwards. They were refined and routinised in equally large numbers of new Reformation ordinances that brought fundamental changes to theology and law, Church and State, marriage and family, criminal law and procedure, and education and charity. Critics have long treated this legal phase of the Reformation as a corruption of Luther’s original message of Christian freedom from the strictures of all human laws and traditions. But Luther ultimately realised that he needed the law to stabilise and enforce the new Protestant teachings. Radical theological reforms had made possible fundamental legal reforms, which, in turn, would make those theological reforms palpable. In the course of the 1530s and thereafter, the Lutheran Reformation became in its essence both a theological and a legal reform movement. It struck new balances between law and gospel, rule and equity, order and faith, and structure and spirit. Keywords: Luther, Reformation, law, society, two kingdoms INTRODUCTION On 10 December 1520, Martin Luther burned the canon law books of the Catholic Church. A large group of students and colleagues gathered in Wittenberg for the book-burning. Consigned to the flames were Gratian’s Decretum of 1140 and four thick books of later papal laws. Also cast into the fire were a standard confessional book and several tomes on Catholic sacramental theology. ‘This might as well go, too’, Luther muttered, as he threw into the fire the papal bull that threatened his excommunication for heresy. He would later write of his canonical bonfire: ‘I am more pleased with this than any other action in my life.’ 2 1 This article is based on a lecture given at the Law and Religion Centre of Cardiff University on 2 December 2016 and is adapted from J Witte Jr, Law and Protestantism: the legal teachings of the Lutheran Reformation (Cambridge, 2002), and from a short article of the same name in T A Howard and M A Noll (eds), Protestantism After 500 Years (Oxford, 2016), pp 52–74. 2 J Pelikan and H T Lehmann (eds), Luther’s Works, 55 vols (Philadelphia, PA, 1955– 1986), vol XLVIII, pp 186–192 (hereafter LW). (2017) 19 Ecc LJ 271–291 # Ecclesiastical Law Society doi:10.1017/S0956618X17000461 271 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956618X17000461 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 168.151.137.25, on 23 Sep 2017 at 11:17:13, subject to the Cambridge Core