The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained

This volume gathers Martin Luther's sermons on 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and Jude, preached in German to the Wittenberg congregation and published in 1523 and 1524. They come from the years immediately after his return from the Wartburg, when the Reformation had to be built in a parish rather than argued in a disputation. Luther was working through whole biblical books from the pulpit so that ordinary hearers would possess the Scriptures for themselves, and 1 Peter held a special place in that program: in his 1522 preface to the New Testament he had ranked it among the chief books, alongside John's Gospel, Paul's major letters, and 1 John, as a book that shows Christ and teaches everything necessary for salvation. The sermons on 2 Peter and Jude followed, though Luther openly doubted that Jude was apostolic and treated it as dependent on 2 Peter, a judgment he states in the exposition itself.

The heart of the work is Luther's reading of 1 Peter as a compact summary of the gospel. He insists that the epistle is not a new law but a proclamation of what Christ has done, received by faith alone, with good works following as fruit rather than as condition. From 1 Peter 2:9 he draws out the priesthood of all believers: every baptized Christian is a priest who may come before God, pray, and proclaim the Word, and no clerical order stands between believer and Christ. He expounds the household and civil passages with the same logic, holding that obedience to rulers and faithfulness in marriage are forms of service Christians render freely because they are already secure in grace. Suffering, which runs through the letter, he treats as the ordinary shape of Christian life under the cross rather than an anomaly. He is also candid about limits: on the preaching to the spirits in prison in 1 Peter 3 he admits he does not know with certainty what the text means. When he turns to 2 Peter and Jude, the warnings against false teachers become a sustained polemic against the papacy, which he identifies with the corrupt and greedy prophets the epistles describe.

The work has endured because it shows Luther doing what he thought the Reformation was for: putting Scripture into the hands and ears of common people in their own language, with doctrine and daily life held together. It is one of the clearest early statements of the universal priesthood and a model of his habit of reading every text toward Christ. It also displays, without apology, his willingness to rank the canon by how plainly a book preaches the gospel.

Who should read this: pastors and lay readers who want to see Luther's theology of faith, works, and vocation worked out verse by verse in a sermon voice rather than a treatise, and anyone studying the Reformation doctrine of the priesthood of believers at its source. It is not for readers seeking a modern critical commentary on the Petrine letters, nor for those who will be put off by Luther's unrestrained anti-papal invective in the later sections.