Christianity shattered the idolatry of the ancient polis but did not thereby usher in an era of individual freedom as we think of it today. It too, taking for granted that “his service is perfect freedom,” that human beings found their happiness in obedience to God, and that each of us has been born into a particular station by God’s good providence, tended to see no contradiction between the proclamation of Christian liberty and the demands of political order. This was true even for the Protestant Reformation, often maligned (or celebrated) as marking the end of authority and the triumph of individualism. Indeed, the Reformers still believed emphatically that sinful individuals were notoriously poor judges of what will make them and those around them happy, and that society should be knit together as closely as possible by shared norms guiding each political community toward its common good. Luther’s “here I stand” was not meant to be a blueprint for everyday politics, for which Luther rather preached Romans 13’s call to submission as the general rule.
However, Christianity—and especially the Reformation—did render the world a crucial service by reminding earthly rulers that there lay a domain of human life far beyond their competence to command. Each citizen was made not merely to be an obedient subject, but possessed an immortal soul that stood accountable to God alone, ultimately freed from bondage to earthly norms or fear of earthly punishments because it served a higher lord. By means of this truth the bounds of political power were slowly but steadily rolled back; freedom now could be found not merely within the practice of politics, but beyond it in the life of the heart and the mind, and the shared life of a Christian community bound by love rather than law. Such was the stirring implication of Luther’s clarion call in The Freedom of a Christian.
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