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1 God's Prophet LIFE IN THE MIDST OF DEATH Born in 1483, Luther lived in a world that knew death intimately.1 And while the terrors of finitude and human limitation were hardly unique to his time, it is nevertheless difficult for us today, with our scientific grasp of reality, to understand Luther’s world. For the people of his day, one thing was clear—once born, there was no escape. This temporal life was but the tip of an eternity that promised either perfect rest or the fury of God’s wrath—forever! Life in this world was hard and short, at least by our modern Western standards. For most ordinary people, this meant years of grueling hard work in the fields, eking out a living by bare subsistence. It meant a life ordered by the cycle of the seasons, and disordered by the disaster of unexplained disease and drought. It meant scrambling to keep a roof over one’s head and food on the table. The death of children was a familiar occurrence. Medicine as we know it today was still a long way off; and in a world not yet knowledgeable about germs and viruses, reason could only construe illness as an evil wind blowing unpredictably through the village, mysteriously spreading plague to some homes but not to others. Viewed as an unwelcome visit by otherworldly forces, the suffering that accompanied disease and starvation was often 1. See Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther’s Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Development, trans. Roy A Harrisville (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), 325: “The Reformation understanding of the righteousness of God and the justification of the sinner is unintelligible apart from its eschatological context. . . . Certainly, Luther’s view owed much to the waning medieval period, when the universal power and presence of death was experienced and reflected on with great intensity.” Lohse notes two authors behind this generalization: Hans-Jurgen Prien, Luthers Wirtschaftsethik (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992), and Hans Pruss, Die Vorstellungen vom Antichrist im spatern Mittelalter, bei Luther und in der Konfesionellen Polemik: Ein Beitrag zur Theologie Luthers und qur Geschichte der Frommigkeit (Leipzig: J. Hinrichs, 1906). 23 explained as divine punishment for some unacknowledged sin, or the devil’s army capriciously thwarting God’s creative ends. It was by way of the institutional church, with its narrative of judgment and salvation, that people were able to make sense of their lives. Without scientific explanations, their desire to understand why and how things happened was satisfied by a deeply held belief in devils, magic, and divine providence. In that world, as in our own, the experience of death was devastating and often incomprehensible. But set within the context of the Christian story, their personal lives (and deaths) were taken up into a larger frame of meaning. This life became the opportunity for achieving something better in the next. With the vision of heaven so prominently displayed in the religious art around them, people lived their lives toward the achievement of this end,2 a goal that promised perfect peace beyond the daily bumps and bruises of this world.3 But it was a heaven not easily won. A person had to live rightly in obedience, and to die rightly, formed in the virtues of faith, hope, and love.4 Life’s purpose was derived not only from the vision of heaven that drew one forward but also from the fear of hell, which provided an equally powerful motivator.5 Men and women, from their birth surrounded by the formal authority of the church and the informal influence of biblical (and extrabiblical) stories, had only to observe the pictures of judgment, carved above the great cathedral doorways, to grasp the trial that awaited each human being.6 It was 2. From Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, in A Reformation Reader: Primary Texts with Introductions, ed. Denis Janz, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 4. According to Janz’s introduction, “Thomas à Kempis (1380–1427) joined the Order of Hermits of St. Augustine in 1406 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1413.. . . . He wrote his Imitation of Christ between 1420 and 1427. Written in all probability for novice monks, it soon became one of the most famous devotional books of the age, for laity and religious alike” (Janz, Reformation Reader, 4). The piece gives us an excellent picture of the kind of piety in which Luther was formed. Themes important to Luther included the fragility and uncertainty of life, flight from...

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