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  • Martin Luther as Comforter: Writings on Death
  • Robert Kolb
Neil R. Leroux. Martin Luther as Comforter: Writings on Death. Studies in the History of Christian Traditions 133. Leiden: Brill, 2007. xliii + 336 pp. index. append. gloss. bibl. $129. ISBN: 978–90–04–15880–1.

Increasing scholarly interest in death and dying has generated a wide range of studies in the late medieval, early modern, Renaissance, and Reformation periods. This volume focuses on the use of rhetorical tools in a theological context, as Martin Luther utilized them to convey his message to the dying and grieving in a number of literary genre. Leroux places Luther’s thinking in the medieval context from which it arose, particularly in the ars moriendi literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. He assesses two documents that appropriated medieval forms for confronting death and bringing pastoral care to the mortally ill, the “Fourteen Consolations” and the “art of dying” — or, as Luther entitled his work, “on preparing to die” — and shows how the reformer both employed and altered these genres as he tailored them to his understanding of death. Leroux pursues his analysis further in Luther’s various forms of writing on martyrdom: in two funeral sermons, preached at the funerals of the two Wettin brothers, Elector Frederick the Wise (1525) and Elector John the Constant (1532); in his consolatory letters to bereaved parents, spouses, and siblings; and in his 1527 treatise, On Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague.

Trained in theology and communications and reflecting (without mentioning it) personal experience with loss through premature death, the author focuses on the variety of rhetorical devices and rhetorical structures put to use in these works, helping readers grasp how the Wittenberg professor intended to convey the consolation of the resurrection of Christ to those facing their own death or that of a loved one. Luther’s lively use of language faced the sober realities of death with the conviction that it is a curse that cannot help but elicit fear and sorrow but also with the certainty that believers will share in the liberation from death won by Christ as he rose from death himself. At a number of points Leroux gently provides a healthy rejoinder to Richard Marius’s argument that Luther was a man terrified by death and that this dread of dying plagued him his whole life, reminding readers [End Page 573] that the sources do not confirm but rather contradict Marius’s case (as do Marius’s own footnotes: see his Martin Luther, The Christian between God and death [1999]).

The strength of this analysis is its careful, detailed attention to the ways in which Luther constructed a piece of communication in print. They reflect the oral culture in which he had been educated and the rules for oral communication according to which he continued to think. Leroux describes how Luther intended to deliver his message of consolation, hope, and confidence in God’s promise of eternal life through Christ with a rhetorical strategy based on what he had begun to learn in the trivium. He does so in terms that readers can easily grasp, and he carefully explains the technical terminology of late medieval rhetoric with which Luther was most familiar. An accompanying glossary of that terminology aids the digestion of his analysis. Leroux also recognizes the foundations and elements of Luther’s way of thinking, although one misses specific assessment of the reformer’s attitudes toward death within the context of his law-gospel hermeneutic and his “theology of the cross,” which is not merely a message about Christ’s death but more foundationally also a hermeneutic in the face of questions of theodicy (including “why death?” and “why my death?”). This investigation does not suffer from restricting its purview to the literature Leroux chose even though this list obviously does not exhaust the possibilities, such as the reformer’s pericopal sermons, particularly on texts such as the raising of Jairus’s daughter and the son of the widow of Nain. But such sources would not produce different results from those that Leroux has drawn from these genre that are most appropriate for giving access to the...

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