Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague

Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague is an open letter Martin Luther wrote in 1527 in answer to Johann Hess, pastor in Breslau, who had asked on behalf of the clergy there whether a Christian may run from an epidemic. Luther delayed his reply, and by the time he wrote it the plague had reached Wittenberg itself. The university was moved to Jena; Luther stayed, with his pregnant wife Katharina, and opened his house to the sick. The letter was printed and circulated widely in the same year, so that what began as a pastoral answer to one city became counsel for all of German-speaking Europe.

Luther refuses both of the easy answers. He will not say that fleeing is always cowardice, nor that staying is always faith. His governing distinction is office and obligation. Those bound to others by their station must remain: preachers, so that the dying are not left without the Word and the sacrament; magistrates, so that the city is not abandoned to disorder; physicians; parents with children and children with parents; servants and masters; and any neighbor whom another has no one else to care for. Where no such bond exists, a person may flee without sin, because the desire to live is God's own gift and self-preservation is not a vice. Luther is scathing about two kinds of presumption. One is the reckless piety that shuns medicine, ignores contagion, and visits the sick out of bravado, which he calls tempting God rather than trusting him. The other is the selfish fear that leaves the helpless to die, which he names plainly as murder of the neighbor. He urges fumigating houses, avoiding unnecessary contact, using remedies, and moving cemeteries outside the town walls, and he commends the founding of hospitals so that the burden of care does not fall on scattered households. Behind all of it stands his insistence that the devil delights in death and terror, and that the Christian answers him by serving the sick calmly, as if serving Christ.

The letter has endured because it fuses a doctrine of vocation with concrete public-health sense, and because Luther wrote it while practicing what he prescribed. It was read again in the cholera years of the nineteenth century and was widely circulated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when its question became everyone's question. It shows the Reformation's theology of the neighbor at its most practical, and it models a way of speaking to frightened people that neither shames their fear nor flatters it.

Who should read this: pastors, chaplains, health workers, and church leaders deciding what faithfulness requires when staying put carries real risk, and anyone weighing the claims of self-care against the claims of service. It is not a work of consolation for the bereaved, nor a systematic treatise on suffering; it is a short, direct answer to a practical question, and readers looking for extended theological argument should turn to Luther's larger writings.