A Doctrine Later Lutherans Have Debated

Twentieth century history gave two kingdoms theology its most severe test and its most serious internal critics: some German Lutheran leaders invoked the doctrine's separation of spiritual and temporal authority to justify quietism or accommodation toward the Nazi state in the 1930s, treating political resistance as outside the church's proper spiritual sphere, a use the Confessing Church movement, including theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, rejected as a serious misapplication of Luther's own teaching.

Contemporary Lutheran and broader Protestant political theology remains divided over how to read Luther correctly on this point, with some scholars arguing the doctrine was never meant to silence the church's prophetic voice against manifest civil injustice and others treating the doctrine's historical use as a caution about a real internal weakness in its logic. Two kingdoms theology is frequently compared with and distinguished from Byzantine symphonia and the medieval Catholic two swords doctrine, since all three address the same underlying question, how spiritual and temporal authority relate, but locate the line between them, and the degree of independence each grants the state, quite differently from one another.