Members of the Scholars Council are appointed by the Librarian of Congress to advise on matters related to scholarship at the Library, with special attention to the Kluge Center and the Kluge Prize. The Council includes distinguished scholars, writers, researchers, and scientists. “Insights” is featuring some of the work of this highly-accomplished group of thinkers. Dan Turello continues the series interviewing John Witte, Jr.
John Witte, Jr. is Robert W. Woodruff University Professor, McDonald Distinguished Professor, and Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. A specialist in legal history, marriage law, and religious liberty, he has published 250 articles, 16 journal symposia, and 29 books. His full bio is on our website.
John, last fall, you spent four months at the Library of Congress researching the legal dimensions of the Protestant Reformation. What drew you to this period, and what did you find?
The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation was a transformative moment in the history of the West, and Protestant ideas and institutions had a shaping influence on Western law, politics, and society until the twentieth century. My focus at the Library was on the German Lutheran Reformation, whose 500th anniversary is coming up in 2017. The Library of Congress has vast resources on this period – including legal and theological materials that are very hard to find anywhere else, including in Germany. As I tried to document in my Kluge Chair Lecture last November, the Lutheran Reformation brought fundamental changes to German legal life, sometimes in direct expression of the new Lutheran theology. Lutheran reformers pressed to radical conclusions the theological concept of the magistrate as the father of the community, called by God to enforce both tables of the Decalogue for his political children. This idea helped trigger a massive shift in power and property from the church to the state, and ultimately introduced enduring systems of state established churches, schools, and social welfare institutions.
Lutheran reformers replaced the traditional idea of marriage as a sacrament with a new idea of the marital household as a social estate to which all persons are called–clerical and lay alike. They also replaced the traditional understanding of education as a teaching office of the church with a new understanding of the public school as a “civic seminary” for all persons to prepare for their distinctive vocations. And they developed innovative new theories of practical legal reasoning and pious judicial activism, advocating the merger of church courts and state courts, of legal procedures and equitable remedies.
To be sure, these and many other legal changes had antecedents in late medieval legal life and analogues in contemporaneous Catholic movements. But it was the Lutheran Reformation that cast this legal inheritance into a unique new legal ensemble in Germany, and eventually mainstreamed it into the broader Protestant world, including America.
In our current moment, the discourse between secular and religious cultures seems to be as polarized as ever. Could you help us peel back a few layers to look beneath the surface? As a legal scholar and a historian, how would you explain the deeper issues at stake?
One thing that’s clearly changed over the past decades is that Protestant