When Helmut Thielicke, the Lutheran pastor, ran afoul of the Nazi regime in the mid-1930’s he had to wrestle with how to submit to government, how to resist encroachment on the advance of the gospel, and how to discern which political groups to associate with.
In his later volume, titled simply, Politics, published in 1979, he employs much of Luther’s theology, which has come down to us popularly as a Two Kingdoms approach. Nevertheless, Theilicke has a category for understanding totalitarian governments in a way that differs from authoritarian ones. This difference demands a different approach.
Thielicke notes that a state can switch. The state can move from “its sphere of competence as an order of secular power, a kingdom on the left hand, and purports to be a dispenser of salvation.”
This move of totality, is a religious claim on all citizens, all souls.
What is the threshold in Western democracies for a move toward totality? Do the technological abilities of the surveillance state create a new totality even as the remnants of the old liberal democracy offer a familiar facade?
