Apology against Gregory Richter

Jakob Böhme's Schutzrede wider Gregor Richter (Defense against Gregor Richter) is a short polemical treatise of 1624, written in German by the Görlitz shoemaker who had become one of the most discussed religious writers of Lutheran Germany. Gregor Richter was the chief pastor of Görlitz and had been Böhme's antagonist since 1613, when he denounced the manuscript of Aurora from the pulpit and had its author briefly jailed. Richter's hostility did not end there. In 1624 he preached and published fresh attacks, accusing Böhme of heresy and of misleading ordinary people with speculations unbecoming a layman. Böhme's treatise is his reply, composed in the last year of his life.

The work is an apologia rather than a systematic exposition. Böhme answers Richter's charges point by point and insists that he is no sectarian or enthusiast but a Christian who holds to Scripture and the Lutheran confession. He grounds his authority in an experience of illumination rather than in formal theological training, and he argues that the Spirit gives understanding where it wills, not only to the learned clergy. Against the picture of a disorderly lay prophet, he presents himself as someone who writes from what he has been shown and who stands ready to be corrected from the Word of God. Much of the treatise turns Richter's accusations back on him, setting the pastor's confessional zeal and personal invective against what Böhme takes to be the real marks of a Christian life: humility, patience, and love of enemies.

The treatise matters because it is Böhme's most direct statement of how he understood his own vocation and his relation to the church that distrusted him. It shows the tension, central to his whole career, between the claims of lived spiritual experience and the claims of institutional orthodoxy, a tension that recurs throughout the history of Christian mysticism. It also records the conflict that shadowed his final months and shaped the way his writings were received after his death in 1624. For readers of Böhme's longer and denser works, such as Aurora or De signatura rerum, it supplies the personal and ecclesial setting in which those books were written and attacked.

Who should read this: Readers already acquainted with Böhme who want to understand how he defended himself and his calling, and students of Lutheran orthodoxy, lay piety, and religious controversy in early seventeenth-century Germany. It is not an introduction to his cosmology or theology of nature, and anyone seeking that should begin with his major works instead. Nor is it suited to readers wanting a calm devotional text, since much of it is occupied with a specific quarrel.