Beyond Confessionalization's Shadow
How did “confessional Lutheranism” emerge in the first place? Conservative Lutherans typically tell a particular story about how the Lutheran Confessions—which, under Scripture, are the normative theological authorities for many Lutheran denominations today—first came to be. First, Luther recovered the pure Gospel from a culture of clerical corruption and error. But after Luther’s death, his followers fragmented. Some drifted in the direction of Geneva or Rome. Fortunately, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, Luther’s true heirs came together and forged a doctrinal consensus—or better, a concord—that endures to this day, bringing Luther’s own project to an orderly climax.
This is a very appealing story. It is clear, straightforward, and has a logical narrative arc. It offers a coherent counterpoint to those tempted by “Luther against the Lutherans” arguments, who would argue that the era of Lutheran dogmatic formalism represented an occlusion of Luther’s most urgent insights. And it hints that the business of “doing Lutheran theology” has, in a certain sense, already been concluded; what is necessary today is merely adherence to the old formulas, with most other theological issues relegated to matters of indifference. In the end, we are left with a “self-image of the evangelical Church as the true repository of the pure Gospel, liberated by Luther, God’s elected servant, from the yoke of the antichristian Roman Church, and standing under God’s special protection.”[i] Appealing indeed.
But there is an alternative reading of the story of confessionalization that looks very different: a reading in which confessionalization had far less to do with theological consolidation than with temporal political retrenchment. On this view, confessionalization was in fact a sort of nation-building project, consciously encouraged and reinforced by temporal political authorities for their own self-interested purposes. Amidst the crackup of Christendom, local political authorities had a powerful need to centralize sovereignty and solidify control over geographically diffuse populations. And the amplification of the period’s theological differentiation was a crucial part of that process.[ii] In the German case, the process of Lutheran self-definition over against Catholic and Calvinist influences—that is, the drawing of clear boundaries between traditions—increased solidarity among Lutherans, and led to Lutheran believers’ greater sense of self-identification with Lutheran monarchs. (To be sure, this was not simply a Lutheran phenomenon; parallel processes played out within other branches of Christianity). As leading confessionalization scholar Heinz Schilling explains:
Under the pressure of mutual competition the religious groups had no choice but to establish themselves as “churches”, i.e. stable organizations with well defined membership. These new “churches” had to be more rigid than the old pre-Reformation Church, where membership was self-evident and required no careful preservation. Particular confessions of faith served to distinguish these separate religious communities from each other.[iii]
Monarchs benefited handsomely from hybridizing religious identity with commitment to the emerging form of the nation-state. In the words of Markus Wriedt, rulers obtained “three decisive competitive advantages: enforcement of the political identity, extension of a monopoly of power, and disciplining of their subjects.”[iv] Ultimately, according to the confessionalization thesis, the formation of the beloved Protestant Confessions was not so much a theological triumph as a political solution to a problem of fragmented authority, a solution that catalyzed the emergence of the modern nation-state (and, for William Cavanaugh as for Carl Schmitt and others, the migration of theological presuppositions away from the church and toward the secular state[v]). To put the point bluntly: on this theory, confessionalization was a sort of devil’s bargain, a way station on the road to modernity’s ills.
To be sure, from a Christian theological vantage, such hermeneutics of suspicion can go only so far. True to form, proponents of the “confessionalization thesis” insist on the importance of bracketing out the truth-value of the theological points at issue. As Schilling explains, on this thesis, “[c]onfessional phenomena and their consequences attain their impulses no longer from one’s own, confessionally framed Christian existence. What are relevant primarily are the cultural, social, and political functions of the process of confessionalization within the emerging societal system of early modern Europe.”[vi] And yet, there is no a priori reason for Christian theology to accept such a reduction. The fact that temporal authorities may have played a role in securing the conditions necessary for the development of a theological tradition does not, ipso facto, render said developments theologically illegitimate, or untrue. Indeed, the “confessionalization thesis” readily risks lapsing into a version of the Dan Brown-inflected argument that the Nicene Creed is intellectually suspect because the Emperor Constantine played a role in convening the Council of Nicaea.
But even by the lights of Lutheran theology itself, the politics surrounding confessionalization may cast something of a pall over Lutheran political theology. Ernst Troeltsch famously characterized Lutheranism as “favorable to absolutism, but, on the whole, . . . essentially conservative and politically neutral.”[vii] One need not go that far to recognize that, historically, Lutheran churches were in fact readily integrated into the infrastructure of powerful national states—such that, as Cavanaugh writes, “[b]y the seventeenth century, Lutheran clergy were essentially a branch of the civil bureaucracy in most German principalities.”[viii] Similar processes unfolded in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. If the process of confessionalization was, in fact, principally a function of state power-maximization, this is a pattern one would expect to see. The trajectory of these Lutheran state churches is not encouraging to those Lutherans committed to the centrality and truth of Christian theology (that is to say, those Lutherans most inclined, in something of a paradox, to self-identify as “confessional”).[ix] When not serving as mere handmaidens to civil power, those state churches readily lapsed into a theological ossification that, in turn, engendered pietist backlash and a critique of the substance—not merely the political application—of the Confessions themselves.
Interestingly enough, in the American context, Luther’s famous two-kingdoms doctrine has been deployed by some Lutherans as requiring precisely the opposite model of church-state relations. Lutheran writer Daniel Deutschlander has argued that “[w]orldly power is for worldly governments; lowliness, humility, and suffering in imitation of the Savior is for the church as she follows in his footsteps.”[x] There’s a paradox here: while superficially opposed to a “state church” paradigm, Deutschlander unconsciously reaches, in substance, the same result: the exercise of temporal power remains largely immune from theological critique.
Ultimately, in light of all these historical currents, Lutherans today are left with something like this question: whether the Lutheran confessional tradition can itself provide any resources for a transcendental critique of state power. Lutherans, more than most other Christian denominations, have traditionally affirmed a robust conception of temporal authority and eschewed revolutionary politics. But Luther himself recognized that such submission had hard limits.[xi] Since then, though, few Lutherans have done much to work out the applications of such a proviso.
Ethiopian Lutheran theologian, Gudina Tumsa, writing in the context of revolutionary Ethiopia, represents a remarkable exception to this pattern. Gudina served as the leader of the Ethiopian Evangelical Church—Mekane Yesus (EECMY), the world’s largest Lutheran church body, at a time of dramatic political and ideological change in Ethiopia. After decades of oppression and mismanagement, the nation’s longstanding feudal/imperial regime, dominated by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, collapsed and was replaced by a secular Marxist government known as the Derg. Gudina and the EECMY expressed interest in faithfully working with the new government as appropriate, but that cooperation soon soured. Against the will of the regime, Gudina had focused on forging connections with other Christian bodies across national and denominational lines. And this ecumenism, ultimately, led to his martyrdom in 1979: the Derg were disinclined to tolerate potential challenges to their power.
What makes Gudina’s case so fascinating is that, theologically speaking, he was no revolutionary. Quite the opposite: Gudina was a Lutheran churchman whose theo-political convictions emerged organically from his commitment to distinctively Lutheran theological positions. Gudina characterized his church body as “the outgrowth of the activities of the Lutheran missions in Ethiopia,” and expressed his desire for “our church to remain true to its heritage[.]”[xii] And throughout his career, he repeatedly drew on the Lutheran Confessions, deriving from them the conceptual architecture for his views of the church and of the nature of theology in the Ethiopian context.[xiii] In particular, it was a Lutheran commitment to the universality of the church across and beyond institutional or national boundaries that led Gudina to keep forging links with other Christian bodies, both within and without Ethiopia. “Lutheranism,” Gudina stressed, “has not denied the incorporation of other Christian denominations into the body of Christ.”[xiv] This wasn’t a call for a unionism that would collapse doctrinal distinctives into an undifferentiated unity—but rather, a mutual recognition of Christian churches’ common destiny in Christ.
This conception of the church—and the activities Gudina undertook in service of it—constituted a distinctive sort of “counter-political” activity, that the Derg regime quite logically perceived as a critique of their own claims to sovereign power. It was, in short, activity based on the presupposition that the work and authority of God in the world are not limited to the context of one’s own nation-state or political regime. In Gudina’s writings, one finds an assertion of the eschatological reality of the church across denominational and national lines that is, simply by virtue of the kind of political assertion that it is, an implicit critique of any “confessionalization” that would entail uncritical church assimilation to state power. And this assertion is made within the Lutheran tradition, on Lutheran theological grounds.
The Lutheran tradition, Gudina demonstrates, has the resources within itself to rebut the charge that its theology entails docile subservience to the priorities of the nation-state.[xv]Against any such quiescence, Gudina has the confidence to declare, based on his understanding of Lutheran ecclesiology, that “[a] national church’s constitution is not the final law. A national president or bishop is not the Head of the Church—Jesus Christ is.”[xvi] This affirmation, to be clear, does nothing to undercut the Lutheran tradition’s roots as an expression of the “magisterial Reformation”—that is, Lutheranism’s historic affirmation of Christian political engagement with the cares of temporal life, and support for the legitimate role of temporal authority. It does, however, relativize any discourse that would necessarily situate the nation-state at the apex of Christian political thought, or deny to Lutheran theology the possibility of theological critique or genuine theological independence.
Where does this leave confessional Lutherans? Most importantly, we may be rightly grateful to God for the theological inheritance we have received—in particular, the promise that we are justified by grace through faith. In Gudina’s words: “In response to faith in what has been accomplished by the sacrifice of the Son of God for the salvation of mankind, the Christian has tasted heavenly gifts in earthly life. A relationship with the Lord of the Church is possibly only through faith.”[xvii] The preservation of that insight, within the forms of our confessional tradition, is an immense blessing. It should ground our Christian confidence.
And in this confidence, we need not be naïve about the political processes that our fathers in the faith found themselves imbricated within. The fact that the Holy Spirit did in fact work through these tangled webs is not a warrant for attempting to weave them anew; we should not mistake the contingencies of early-modern political history for perennial Lutheran (or Protestant) principles. Late modernity has disclosed the theological problems posed by the consolidation of the nation-state, and it is the task of today’s Lutherans to reckon with this legacy.
Gudina, and other Lutherans like him, will prove valuable guides in this process. In their lives and writings, Lutherans today can find resources for working out the implications of our tradition in the face of contemporary challenges, without repeating missteps of the past. That is a great gift our confessional tradition still offers.
[i] R. Po-Chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550-1750 (New York: Routledge, 1989), 13.
[ii] William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) (“Sharp ecclesial boundaries coincided with the creation of sharp territorial boundaries in the making of the modern state.”).
[iii] Heinz Schilling, “Confessionalization: Historical and Scholarly Perspectives of a Comparative and Interdisciplinary Paradigm,” in Confessionalization in Europe, 1555-1700: Essays in Honor and Memory of Bodo Nischan, eds. John M. Headley, Hans J. Hillerbrand, and Anthony J. Papalas (New York: Routledge, 2004), 57.
[iv] Markus Wriedt, “‘Founding a New Church…’ The Early Ecclesiology of Martin Luther in the Light of the Debate About Confessionalization,” in Confessionalization in Europe, 1555-1700: Essays in Honor and Memory of Bodo Nischan, eds. John M. Headley, Hans J. Hillerbrand, and Anthony J. Papalas (New York: Routledge, 2004), 60.
[v] Cf. William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011).
[vi] Schilling, “Confessionalization,” 24.
[vii] Quoted in Thomas A. Brady, Jr., “Confessionalization—The Career of a Concept,” in Confessionalization in Europe, 1555-1700: Essays in Honor and Memory of Bodo Nischan, eds. John M. Headley, Hans J. Hillerbrand, and Anthony J. Papalas (New York: Routledge, 2004), 3.
[viii] Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, 170.
[ix] For a detailed exploration of this issue, see John Ehrett, “How Christian Nationalism Ended in Scandinavia,” The Conservative Reformer (Mar. 3, 2025), https://www.theconservativereformer.com/articles/how-christian-nationalism-ended-in-scandinavia.
[x] Daniel M. Deutschlander, Civil Government: God’s Other Kingdom (Milwaukee, WI: Northwestern Publishing House, 1998), 56.
[xi] See Martin Luther, “On Civil Authority,” trans. W.H. Carruth, The Open Court 8 (1917): 495 (“what if a prince is in the wrong? Are his people bound to follow him? I answer, No, for it is not proper for any one to act contrary to the right; rather one must obey God, who wishes the right more than men.”).
[xii] Gudina Tumsa, “Address to the Norwegian Missionary Society,” in Witness and Discipleship—Leadership of the Church in Multi-Ethnic Ethiopia in a Time of Revolution: The Essential Writings of Gudina Tumsa, 2nd ed., ed. Paul E. Hoffman (Hamburg, Germany: WDL Publishers, 2007), 144.
[xiii] See, e.g., Gudina Tumsa, “The Responsibility of the ECMY Towards Ecumenical Harmony,” in Witness and Discipleship—Leadership of the Church in Multi-Ethnic Ethiopia in a Time of Revolution: The Essential Writings of Gudina Tumsa, 2nd ed., ed. Paul E. Hoffman (Hamburg, Germany: WDL Publishers, 2007), 16 (invoking the “classical Lutheran definition of the Church”); Gudina Tumsa, “Memorandum to Emmanuel Abraham Re: Some Issues Requiring Discussions and Decisions,” in Witness and Discipleship—Leadership of the Church in Multi-Ethnic Ethiopia in a Time of Revolution: The Essential Writings of Gudina Tumsa, 2nd ed., ed. Paul E. Hoffman (Hamburg, Germany: WDL Publishers, 2007), 69 (“An indigenous theology in the Ethiopian context may be defined as a translation of the Biblical sources, the various Confessions, and traditions transmitted to us throughout the history of the Christian church, to the patterns of the thought of our people[.]”); Gudina Tumsa, “The Church as an Institution (‘The Concept of the Church’),” in Witness and Discipleship—Leadership of the Church in Multi-Ethnic Ethiopia in a Time of Revolution: The Essential Writings of Gudina Tumsa, 2nd ed., ed. Paul E. Hoffman (Hamburg, Germany: WDL Publishers, 2007), 157 (“It is normal to turn to Art. VII of the Augsburg Confession to show that one is orthodox Lutheran in one’s understanding of the concept of the church[.]”)
[xiv] Gudina, “The Church as an Institution,” 165.
[xv] See also Eric Worringer, “The Theology of Two Kingdoms as Resistance: The Norwegian Case” (unpublished manuscript, Aug. 27, 2023), on file with author (discussing how the Lutheran two-kingdoms doctrine, often perceived as a support for civil power, was instead deployed as a critique of Nazi ideology by some Norwegian Lutherans during World War II).
[xvi] See Gudina Tumsa and Paul E. Hoffman, “The Moratorium Debate and the ECMY,” in Witness and Discipleship—Leadership of the Church in Multi-Ethnic Ethiopia in a Time of Revolution: The Essential Writings of Gudina Tumsa, 2nd ed., ed. Paul E. Hoffman (Hamburg, Germany: WDL Publishers, 2007), 48.
[xvii] Gudina Tumsa, “The Role of a Christian in a Given Society,” in Witness and Discipleship—Leadership of the Church in Multi-Ethnic Ethiopia in a Time of Revolution: The Essential Writings of Gudina Tumsa, 2nd ed., ed. Paul E. Hoffman (Hamburg, Germany: WDL Publishers, 2007), 2.
John Ehrett is a Commonwealth Fellow with the Davenant Institute, and an attorney and writer in Washington D.C. His work has appeared in American Affairs, The New Atlantis, and the Claremont Review of Books. He is a graduate of Patrick Henry College, the Institute of Lutheran Theology, and Yale Law School.