Martin Luther changed the way the West viewed marriage. Redemption Seminary uses this Logos Mobile Ed lecture and short study as part of a course on church history. This study includes a lecture and readings to give you a feel for the engaging lessons you will experience at Redemption Seminary.
Step 1: Watch the Lecture
Step 2: Reading
“For a thousand years, the single, celibate life had been upheld as the Christian ideal. Sex, though grudgingly permitted inside marriage, was not to be enjoyed. As Jerome declared in the fourth century, “Anyone who is too passionate a lover with his own wife is himself an adulterer.”
Then came Luther.
Luther elevated marriage and family life; in one scholar’s words, he “placed the home at the center of the universe.” His teaching and practice were so radical, so long-lasting, some scholars have argued that other than the church “the home was the only sphere of life which the Reformation profoundly affected.”
LUTHER. From a Portrait by Cranach in 1525. At Wittenberg (Schaff, History of the Christian Church)
CATHARINE VON BORA, LUTHER’S WIFE. From a Portrait by Cranach about 1525. At Berlin. (Schaff, History of the Christian Church)
“When Martin Luther heard that the monks joining in his reformation had begun getting married, he rejected the idea for himself: “Good heavens! They won’t give me a wife!”
But time would prove otherwise. In 1523, Katherine von Bora and eleven (some say eight) other nuns wanted to escape their cloister, and they wrote to Luther, whose radical new ideas had filtered into their convent. Though liberating nuns was a capital offense, Luther devised an ingenious plan with Leonhard Koppe, who regularly delivered herring to the cloister. On Koppe’s next delivery, twelve nuns were smuggled out—inside empty herring barrels. As a man in Wittenberg put it, “A wagon load of vestal virgins has just come to town, all more eager for marriage than for life.”
Luther found husbands for most, but he struggled to find a suitable match for Katherine, a feisty redhead in her mid-20s, far beyond the usual age for marriage. He proposed one older man, but she refused him, adding that if Luther himself were willing, she would say yes.
Luther was not interested. “I am not now inclined to take a wife,” he wrote to a friend. “Not that I lack the feelings of a man (for I am neither wood nor stone), but my mind is averse to marriage because I daily expect the death decreed to the heretic.”
Bolstered by his parents’ encouragement to wed, however, Luther married in the summer of 1525, “quickly and secretly.” He knew his best friends would not have approved of his choice: “All my best friends exclaimed, ‘For heaven’s sake, not this one,’ ” he admitted.
The marriage brought even more scorn from his Catholic opponents, such as Henry VIII, who considered the union “a crime.” One pamphlet called Katherine a “poor, fallen woman” who had passed “from the cloistered holy religion into a damnable, shameful life.”
But Luther’s friend Philipp Melanchthon had “hopes that this state of life may sober him down, so that he will discard the low buffoonery that we have often censured.” Kate indeed set about bringing order to Martin’s chaotic personal affairs. He had been a bachelor for many years, and he noted, “Before I was married, the bed was not made for a whole year and became foul with sweat.”
The Luther home usually overflowed with, in one observer’s words, “a motley crowd of boys, students, girls, widows, old women, and youngsters. For this reason there is much disturbance in the place.” Kate supervised the whole with skill and patience. She also planted the fields, cared for an orchard, harvested a fish pond, looked after the barnyard, and slaughtered the livestock.
Though Martin denied having any “burning” passion for his wife, his writings reflect his twenty-year devotion to her. He once chided himself for giving “more credit to Katherine than to Christ, who has done so much for me.” And he declared, “I would not give my Katie for France and Venice together.””