Peace and order are possible without justice. Personal experience and human history alike prove that it is so. The order may be vicious—on a football team, in a barracks, in a banana republic. It may well be unjust insofar as it does not render to each what is due to him. But it is only within the confines of order that it is even possible for justice to emerge. One does not seek justice when someone yells “Fire!” in a crowded theater; one simply tries to avoid being trampled. Without peace and order, there can be no upholding of justice even in principle. For that reason, the mainstream of magisterial Protestant political reflection holds the prima facie surprising view that tyranny is preferable to anarchy.

The relation between justice and peace in civil society presents something of a conundrum, a chicken-and-egg sort of problem: which comes first? If the widely chanted slogan “No justice, no peace!” is correct, then the former is necessary for the latter. Without it, we should expect conflict and chaos. Compelling for inciting a mass movement, perhaps; but as a reasoned political position, it is a fantasy.

While justice may come before peace in the order of being,^[1] peace comes before justice in the order of politics. Some will find this a hard and distasteful truth; but it is a truth all the same.

The reason is a simple one. Peace and order are possible without justice. Personal experience and human history alike prove that it is so. The order may be vicious—on a football team, in a barracks, in a banana republic. It may well be unjust insofar as it does not render to each what is due to him. But it is only within the confines of order that it is even possible for justice to emerge. One does not seek justice when someone yells “Fire!” in a crowded theater; one simply tries to avoid being trampled. Without peace and order, there can be no upholding of justice even in principle. For that reason, the mainstream of magisterial Protestant political reflection holds the prima facie surprising view that tyranny is preferable to anarchy.

We are, of course, currently engaged in a widespread experiment in anarchy in the United States to see whether, just this once, things may turn out differently and the millennium will be ushered in. Though I am not a prophet, I feel quite confident in predicting that it will not.

Our current predicament is not the first of its kind, and it will not be the last. It is therefore worth attending to parallel situations from the past to see what we might learn from them. The cynic would say that what we will learn from them, as a society, is precisely nothing.

The cynic is probably right. But we shall try anyway, and by so doing will at least better our thinking in the process, even if we do not better anything else.

One such parallel situation that springs immediately to mind is the Peasants’ Revolt in Germany in the mid-1520s, which first provoked guarded sympathy from Martin Luther, and, later, abject horror. Even in his sympathetic phase, however—my subject in this post—Luther showed nothing like the naïveté coming from many Christian quarters in response to our own recent unrest. My text is Luther’s 1525 Admonition to Peace: A Reply to the Twelve Articles of the Peasants in Swabia.^[2]

The Swabian peasants had risen up against their lords, and had confederated themselves together according to a kind of constitution. They had, in Luther’s view, some legitimate grievances, even

if they were pursuing them selfishly: they wanted to be able to choose their own pastors and to “protest economic injustices,” especially “confiscatory tax rates.”^[3]

Luther is clear that the German leadership, both civil and ecclesiastical, is to blame for the disaster. The “temporal rulers . . . do nothing but cheat and rob the people,” he says, in order to “lead a life of luxury and extravagance.”

He nevertheless urges the peasants to kindness as the best way of preserving peace. They must “act justly and with a good conscience,” or God will strike them down—both now and in eternity.

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