Of Good Comfort: Martin Luther’s Letters to the Depressed and their Significance for Pastoral Care Today by Stephen Pietsch (review)

Stephen Pietsch, a lecturer in pastoral theology and counseling at the Australian Lutheran College in Adelaide, South Australia, has probed twenty-one of Luther’s letters to people suffering from depression, setting the Reformer into conversation with contemporary theorists, and suggesting ways in which Luther’s insights might serve pastors today.

While Luther’s world is strange to us in many aspects, it is “strangely familiar” to use the language of Pietsch’s first chapter. What in the sixteenth century was called “melancholy” is now given the name “depression.” Luther himself experienced it and he became skilled in diagnosing and addressing it as a theologian who cared for souls. Drawing on the stellar work of Gerhard Ebeling (Luthers Seelsorge, 1997), Pietsch recognizes that Luther’s theology was not segregated from his pastoral care of Christians. Consolation is grounded in God’s justification of the ungodly through faith for the sake of Christ. Pietsch aptly sets Luther’s own pastoral writings in the context of the late medieval tradition of spiritual care. He demonstrates how Luther used the “art of the letter” as a means to enter into the sufferings of the depressed, anchoring them in Christ and his sure promises that draw them outside of morbid introspection into the crucified and risen Savior. Pietsch carefully examines Luther’s letters to Wittenberg student Jerome Weller and the young Prince Joachim of Anhalt showing how Luther used his evangelical doctrine for consolation while attending to their social situations in offering practical advice. From these and other individual cases, Pietsch demonstrates Luther’s pastoral hermeneutic of the Holy Scriptures as biblical texts are cited to give comfort and direction.

Conversant with the growing body of literature on depression, its causes, and treatments, Pietsch is both appreciative and critical. He engages a wide variety of Christian counseling techniques, sympathetic with the aim to bring Christ to the aid of the distressed but also aware of abuses when the law is not distinguished from the gospel and the path out of depression becomes itself a theology of glory. He notes that “the dominance of clinical and psychological interventions in our culture tends to create pressure for Christian pastoral carers to give up their spiritual means and practices, and bow to the authority of science, as the only significant frame of reference for addressing mental illness” (247). Rather, Christian pastors should follow Luther and “carefully maintain its [the Christian community’s] own legitimate language and categories for understanding and addressing depressive illness as a spiritual reality” (247). Echoing Heiko Oberman, Pietsch recognizes the reality of the devil in Luther’s theology and makes it clear that genuine spiritual care must be cognizant of the devil’s tactics in attacking the conscience and distorting the promises of God in the suffering of God’s children. Observing that the broad category of “spirituality” is invoked even by some secular therapists, Pietsch draws on the work of his faculty colleague, John Kleinig (see Grace Upon Grace: Spirituality for Today, 2008) in suggesting appropriate disciplines of prayer, the reading of the scriptures, and meditation for those who suffer from depression. These disciplines are not legalistic impositions but instruments rooted in God’s will to refresh his people with joy in a world that often seems gray, devoid of hope, and joyless. The author’s discussion of “Luther’s Practical Theology of Joy” (221–238) is particularly rich.

A bonus to the book is Pietsch’s fresh translation of Luther’s letters of consolation to Johann and Elizabeth Agricola, Prince Joachim of Anhalt, Elizabeth von Canitz, Queen Mary of Hungary, Barbara Lißkirchen, John Schlaginhaufen, Georg Spalatin, Mr. and Mrs. Jonas Stockhausen, Jerome Weller and his cousin, Matthias Weller. These letters are included as an appendix. The book concludes with a fine bibliography of theological as well as clinical literature.

Of Good Comfort is a remarkable work...