Thanks for responding. Yes, in brief, I think you are correct: they were in a sense “assuming Christendom” — and they didn’t even really need to assume it, for they were living in it. This points to a fundamental duality to the Law. Even though we speak of it according to three “uses”, it addresses us negatively (curb and mirror) and positively (guide); though we can rightly speak of three realms, there are two kingdoms, the temporal and the eternal; though we can in some sense speak of three kinds of righteousness, the Confessions speak of two, righteousness coram Deo and coram hominibus, to whit:

It is also correctly said that believers who in Christ through faith have been justified, have in this life first the imputed righteousness of faith, and then also the incipient righteousness of the new obedience or of good works. But these two must not be mingled with one another or be both injected at the same time into the article of justification by faith before God. For since this incipient righteousness or renewal in us is incomplete and impure in this life because of the flesh, the person cannot stand with and by it [on the ground of this righteousness] before God’s tribunal, but before God’s tribunal only the righteousness of the obedience, suffering, and death of Christ, which is imputed to faith, can stand, so that only for the sake of this obedience is the person (even after his renewal, when he has already many good works and lives the best [upright and blameless] life) pleasing and acceptable to God, and is received into adoption and heirship of eternal life. (FC SD III.32)

The difference between the reformers’ day and our own is that which you point out: we live in a liberal and pluralistic society, and civil righteousness coram mundo is relegated to the realm of ethics sans religion — the irony of course being that without religion, ethics (i.e., a recognition of Lewis’s “Tao”) cannot long last.

I like what you are doing here, and thinks it holds promise. One thing that I think is worth exploring in more depth is the “Merely civil righteousness in the City of Man; coram mundo, “before the world”” in article 1. How was this really understood by the Lutheran reformers, who were thinking about things like this primarily in a Christian context? How much, if at all, did they make of this context – did it matter to them that they were talking about these issues in a Christian context and not some other context (for them Muslim, Hindu, Confucian, etc… for us now, an “Anonymous God of American civil religion” context)? As best I can tell – and perhaps someone with a bit more knowledge in this area can speak to this – they would have been thinking about how this “civil righteousness” would have involved the following the 10 commandments before the eyes of men – both second and first tables….

+Nathan