advising the city council, and ministering to the sick. In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, many Christians have shared quotations from the letter Luther wrote in 1527, Whether One May Flee From a Deadly Plague (see p. 27). While we need historical and theological context to understand why Luther was writing—and what it cost him to stay—his advice is still relevant today.
significant death
Courage and pestilence Luther’s words amid 16th-century plagues our own time in complex ways Chris Gehrz On August 2, 1527, the bubonic plague returned to the German city of Wittenberg. It had been nearly two centuries since the Black Death, but that dreaded disease had continued to flare up, killing 30 percent or more of the population in each of its periodic outbreaks. Though the students and faculty of Wittenberg were told to leave the city, Martin Luther (1483–1546) stayed put: teaching, preaching,
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On average Europe saw a significant outbreak of the plague every nine years from the end of the fifteenth century through the middle of the seventeenth. Luther was no stranger to the disease; it had struck the university town of Erfurt in 1505, in the middle of his famous transition from rising law student to troubled Augustinian monk. The plague intersected often with the history of the Reformation. Eight years before it came to Wittenberg, it killed 1,500 people in the Swiss canton of Zurich, including 22-year-old Andreas Zwingli. His older brother Huldrych (1484–1531), newly called as preacher of the city’s largest church, nearly succumbed himself. Some historians believe the older Zwingli’s brush with death in 1519 helped convince him to bring reform to Switzerland. (It certainly inspired his hymn writing; see p. 29.) One of Zwingli’s followers in Zurich, Conrad Grebel (c. 1498–1526), speak to had fled an outbreak of the plague in Paris. Over time, however, he broke with his mentor and began to rebaptize adults. With the support of Zwingli, the city council persecuted these early Anabaptists. Grebel managed to escape jail in 1526 and flee to Maienfeld, where another outbreak of plague dealt a final blow to his weakened health. A year later the same disease took the life of another Anabaptist leader, Hans Denck (c. 1495–1527), who had taken refuge in Basel. In 1541 that same Swiss city would become the final resting place of radical theologian Andreas Karlstadt (1486–1541). His estranged
Christian History
Illustration from Apocalipsis cu[m] figuris, Nuremburg: 1498 , by Albrecht Dürer ( 1471–1528 )—Typ Inc 2121 A, Houghton Library, Harvard University / [public domain] Wikimedia
here they come Albrecht Dürer gives his version of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, c. 1498.
