Preface to the Latin Writings

In March 1545, less than a year before his death, Martin Luther wrote a short preface for the first volume of the collected edition of his Latin works then being printed at Wittenberg. He had resisted the project. He wanted his books, as he puts it, to be swallowed up in the Bible, and he feared that a growing shelf of Luther would crowd out the Scriptures and the simpler writings of Philip Melanchthon. He yielded only because the Elector and his friends pressed him, and because he reasoned that if he did not set his own works in order, others would do it badly after he was gone. The result is one of the very few places where Luther tells the story of his own conversion in his own words, and it has become the single most quoted autobiographical text he left.

The preface moves in two directions at once. Outwardly it is a chronicle of the years 1517 to 1519: the indulgence controversy, the hearing before Cardinal Cajetan at Augsburg, the negotiations with Karl von Miltitz, the Leipzig disputation with Johann Eck. Luther insists throughout that he was dragged into these events rather than seeking them, that he began as a loyal and even extravagant papist, and that his opponents forced him step by step to examine what the papacy actually was. The reader is asked to remember this when encountering the early writings, which still concede far more to Rome than Luther later would. Inwardly the preface is the account of what happened to him over the words iustitia Dei in Romans 1:17. He confesses that he had hated the phrase, having learned to hear it as the active righteousness by which God punishes sinners, and that he could not love a God who added the gospel to the law as one more threat. Beating on the text, he finally grasped that the righteousness of God is the righteousness God gives, the passive righteousness by which the merciful God justifies through faith. He describes feeling reborn and entering paradise through open gates, running through the whole of Scripture to find other terms transformed in the same way, and afterward discovering in Augustine's On the Spirit and the Letter that the old bishop had read Paul similarly, if less clearly. He places this breakthrough during his second course of lectures on the Psalms, after the indulgence quarrel had already begun.

The preface matters because it is the primary source behind the whole idea of a Reformation discovery. Every account of Luther's theology of justification, and every debate about when and how it formed, begins here, and the chronology Luther gives has been argued over for a century precisely because the preface is the only firsthand testimony. It is also a rare window into how an old man understood his younger self, pleading with readers to judge the early books gently, since no one becomes great from nothing in a single stroke.

Who should read this: anyone who wants Luther's own account of justification by faith in a few pages rather than a few hundred, students of the Reformation who need the primary text behind the tower experience, and readers who find autobiographical confession a more hospitable entry into Luther than the polemical treatises. It is not a systematic exposition and will frustrate anyone looking for a worked-out doctrine; it offers a memory, not an argument.