Welcome to the Thinking Fellows podcast. My name is Caleb. And today I'm joined by just one of the regular

thinking fellows, Dr. Adam Francisco. Hello, Adam. Hello. How you doing today? All right. It's been,

it's been a while since we recorded. The last time we recorded was that here we still stand.

And unfortunately, there were some complications with that recording. So we were making up for it. We're doing another episode. And unfortunately, there were some complications with that recording. So we're making

up for it. We're doing another episode. And today, we're going to do just you and me because of

some travel and scheduling conflicts and alike. And today we're going to talk about Luther

politics and sort of the backdrop of what he was against politically in the medieval

world and then kind of what's happening in the Reformation.

There's always a lot to talk about here.

I think when Luther gets politicized or people talk about Luther and politics, I think

a lot of times you get sort of this negative Luther, the great secular reformer type

stuff going on.

But or...

And that's even encouraged in some scholarship on Luther.

There's a lot of, when it comes to his so-called two kingdom doctrine, which is actually

really a complex of doctrines.

And Luther doesn't radically change over time, but he develops over time.

It's really easy to read something from, let's say, early Luther, and come to the conclusion

that he is a proponent of a distinction, if not a separation of church and state that in the,

what he called the left-hand kingdom or the secular realm was autonomous and so on.

And there are scholars, I'm putting air quotes around that here in my office,

that have perpetuated that.

...