If legislation and external authority were called for in the Church, then this would have to be borrowed from the State, or, as Rudolf Sohm expresses it: “If legislation and judicial authority were needed in the Church of Christ, then, according to Luther’s principles, the government of the Church would have to be set up by the ruler of the land.” For, according to Luther, the authority of the Church is intended merely to foster piety,[261] and a spiritual governing authority would result in compulsion and simply make people “impious.” “The ecclesiastical authority to rule of the parson, i.e. his teaching office, is not a legal power.” In his treatise on canon law, Sohm is one of the principal supporters of this principle.[262] To judge from the praise bestowed upon him by Hermelink, he had “penetrated deeply into Luther’s thought,” and “on the whole saw things in a right light,” although he was possibly too fond of simplifying them in the interests of a system.[263] It is perfectly true that in Sohm and other Protestant Canonists, the contradictions in Luther’s opinions are left in the background; Luther’s views of the formation of congregations having their own rights and their own authority, which appear side by side with his other schemes, receive, as a rule, little attention.
In any case, Luther at that time made use of “every artifice to prove that it was the right of each individual Christian to judge of the preaching of the Gospel and of the avoiding of false prophets.”[264]
In those early days Luther was so full of the ideal of the congregation that, in order to support it, he even appeals to the natural law. In order to save souls every congregation, government or individual has by nature the right to make every effort to drive away the wolves, i.e. the clergy of Antichrist; no apathy can be permitted where it is a question of eternal salvation; the alleged rights and the handed-down possessions of the foes, on which they base their corruptive influence, must not be spared: “We must not fall upon and seize the temporal possessions of others, above all not of our superiors--except where it is a question of doctrine and the salvation of souls; but if the Gospel is not preached, the spiritual authorities have no right to the revenues.”[265] “According to Luther,” says Hermelink, “the authorities of Altenburg had a perfect right to drive away the Provost and his people from Altenburg as ravening wolves”; they were only to wait “a little” to see whether the monks would hold their tongues or perhaps even preach the pure Gospel. When thereupon Luther cries: “Their authority is at an end, abrogated by God Himself, if it be in conflict with the Gospel,”[266] Hermelink admits the presence of a certain “antagonism between the right of each individual Christian and the common law of society.”