Jesus Christ says: “Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mt 22:21). Last week in our baptismal class at Zion Lutheran Church, Hamburg, I explained to our Persian immigrants the Christian “Doctrine of Two Kingdoms.” According to the Bible verse above, God has created two different “kingdoms”—the government, where the “operating system” is reason, and the Church, where the “operating system” is the Gospel. God rules over both realms and we Christians are citizens in both. The government is not to encroach on the realm of the Church—and vice versa. In other words, in Christian societies there is to be a separation of church and state. However, if the government would try to force a Christian to break God’s laws, the Christian must obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29). I offered an example of what can happen in a Christian country if the government encroaches on the Church and told them about Pastor Erwin Horwitz, who served at Zion Hamburg during the Nazi years. He was of Jewish descent and was therefore always on the brink of being arrested and shipped off to a death camp. As God would have it though, the local bureaucrat processing the files of Jews and other “undesirables” who were to be sent to the concentration camps…was also a member of Zion Lutheran. As this parishioner worked through his stack of files every day, whenever Pr. Horwitz’ name came up, he placed it at the bottom of the stack. This he did repeatedly, and so, Pastor Horwitz was able to escape almost certain death. In fact, Pr. Horwitz survived the war, serving at Zion for 31 years. He died in his sleep in 1989. That dear parishioner chose to obey God rather than men—and risked his life in the process. Our Persian friends were awe-struck that they will be baptized in the same church in which God used a parishioner to save one of His undershepherds, Pastor Erwin Horwitz, and uphold the Doctrine of Two Kingdoms.
The Tiews in Germany 