Letters

Martin Luther wrote letters almost continuously from his years as a young Augustinian friar until the final days of his life, and thousands of them survive. The earliest extant letter dates from 1507, when he invited an older priest to attend his first Mass; the last were written from Eisleben in February 1546, days before he died, including notes to his wife Katharina von Bora teasing her for worrying about him. Between those points lie letters to his confessor Johann von Staupitz, to the electoral secretary Georg Spalatin, to Philip Melanchthon and the other Wittenberg colleagues, to princes and city councils, to his father, his mother, his children, and to a long line of ordinary people who wrote to him in grief, fear, or doubt. The letters were not composed for publication, though many circulated in manuscript and print during his lifetime. They were written to get something done: to steady a friend, settle a dispute, place a pastor, bury a child, or talk himself through a night of terror.

What the correspondence actually does is show the Reformation's central theology being applied in real time to particular lives. Luther wrote in Latin to scholars and churchmen and in German to family and lay correspondents, and the German letters especially carry the pastoral weight. Writing to Melanchthon from the Wartburg in 1521, he tells his anxious colleague to stop treating his own scruples as the measure of grace, since Christ died for real sinners and not imaginary ones. Writing to Jerome Weller, a young tutor in his household prone to depression, he prescribes company, laughter, and defiance of the devil rather than introspection. To his dying mother in 1531 he writes that she should hold to the Christ who has overcome the world, and that the only thing her sins can now do is drive her to him. To Justus Jonas after the death of his daughter Magdalena in 1542 he admits that he and Katharina cannot stop weeping even while they know she is with God. The same hand that could flay an opponent in a public treatise writes to a bereaved widow with almost unbearable gentleness. Throughout, the argument is consistent: the conscience is not to be trusted as a judge, God's promise in Word and sacrament is, and consolation comes from outside the self.

The letters have mattered because they are the place where Luther's doctrine of justification stops being a thesis and becomes a way of speaking to a frightened person. They also preserve the most honest record we have of his own Anfechtung, the spiritual assaults he never fully escaped, and of his marriage and household. Pastors, counselors, and anyone who has tried to say something true to a grieving friend will find a working model here.

Who should read this: Readers who want Luther the pastor rather than Luther the polemicist, and those wrestling with despair or an overactive conscience who need a voice that takes their condition seriously without indulging it. It is not for readers seeking a systematic account of his theology or an orderly narrative of the Reformation; the letters assume you already know who these people are and what is at stake.