Introduction

The rapid deconstruction of law, politics, and society that followed upon such shrill rhetoric soon plunged Germany into an acute crisis – punctuated and exacerbated by the peasants' war, the knights' uprising, and an ominous scourge of droughts and plagues in the 1520s and early 1530s. This chapter explores the combination of theological and legal reforms that rendered the Lutheran Reformation so resolute and resilient. The reality was that Luther and the other theologians needed the law and the jurists, however much they scorned them. Radical theological reforms had made possible fundamental legal reforms. Fundamental legal reforms, in turn, would make possible further radical theological reforms. The starting point of the revamped Lutheran Reformation was Luther's complex theory of the two kingdoms, which came together in the later 1520s and 1530s. In this two-kingdom theory, Luther repeated much of his original theological message.