Katharina Luther, Part 1

This scripture, he would write, took on new meaning and became inexpressibly sweet to me. And this particular text of Paul became to me the gate to heaven.

Not the monastery, the gospel, this doctrine of sola fidei. And Martin then would go on to preach about the authority of scripture having greater authority than popes and councils and even, he dared to say, the church itself. Martin Luther is certainly one of the most important figures in church history.

His teachings and writings led to the Protestant Reformation. But one of the unsung heroes of that same time period was Luther's wife, Katarina. Katarina lived as a revolutionary role model, not just for the people of her time, but for ours as well. She and Martin established a godly partnership for the gospel and that partnership had a profound impact on their marriage.

This is wisdom for the heart. Stephen Davey is teaching through a series entitled Legacies of Light as he looks at the biographies of several Christian heroes. Today, we meet Katarina Luther. Well, it was Easter Sunday evening, April 5th, 1523, when a brave merchant and his nephew drove a wagon load of empty fish barrels into the courtyard of a convent filled with nuns who were sleeping there in the convent nearby. Not all of them were asleep. A dozen were waiting for the signal, the sound, which they heard, and they took off running down the stone hallway of their sleeping quarters.

Once outside, they were stuffed inside the barrels and they made their daring getaway. A day later, they arrived at the doorstep of a monastery and they were greeted by a former monk who had helped plan their escape. One of those nuns was 24-year-old Katarina von Borra. Now, I'm going to focus on her, but I need to give you a little background about her. She was taken to the convent following the death of her mother at the tender age of five.

We have every indication that her father didn't really want her and he paid the lowest fee allowable for entrance. She was handed over to the convent to be raised. Nine years later, at the age of 16, she officially what they called, quote, married Christ and officially became a nun. Evidently, she took her vows of obedience and chastity and poverty seriously. She joined in with the others in their efforts of self-denial and self-sacrifice and self-deprivation of things like food and sleep. They were considered obstacles to holiness and so they would deprive themselves of food and sleep. She would rise with the other nuns at 2 a.m. for prayers and then again at daybreak. Then throughout the day, their chores would be set aside for praying and readings and singing at 7 a.m., at 9 a.m., at noon, again at 3 p.m., at 5 p.m., and finally at 7 p.m. Talking was considered another distraction from holy living and as you can imagine, friendships would be hard, difficult, nearly impossible to develop. Abstaining from particular foods like meat, they believed would enable her to suppress fleshly desires and also contribute to holiness and God's approval. Evidently, she devoted herself to this lifestyle, taking her vows seriously.

In fact, the official records from the convent reveal that not one time while she was there was there a complaint or reprimand ever registered against one Katarina von Bora. But during those years, news made its way in bits and pieces into those cloistered hallways. Sermons were smuggled in by way of delivery boys. During those years, news reached inside that convent that there was a reformation of sorts taking place outside the walls. There was revolutionary preaching. Somebody out there was the lightning rod who had chosen to defy the church and tradition, preaching things like salvation being a gift from God for anyone who believed, preaching that monasteries and convents were not a guaranteed pathway to heaven or holiness. After all, that preaching reached her ears, preaching that forgiveness was not the result of penance or ritual or baptism or sacrament or self-denial. Preaching was reaching their ears inside the convent that the path to God was by faith alone in the sacrifice of God the Son.

This was revolutionary. Monasteries were being emptied. We don't know all the details of what she particularly heard in the convent. We don't know what specific doubts she struggled with as she attempted to earn holiness and approval with God. We do know from just a few words from her own pen that have been preserved for us, and very little, by the way, has been preserved from her pen, but she prayed feverishly and diligently in the convent. We don't know what those exact feverish and diligent prayers were. We can be fairly confident that one of those feverish and diligent prayer requests would have related specifically to that Easter Sunday night when she risked everything about her past and everything about her future.

In fact, she was risking heaven itself by believing this preaching of the Reformation. So at the age of 24, she's one of the 12 that run out of that convent. In fact, the only thing she owns and takes with her is the clothing on her backs. Doesn't even take a pair of shoes.

None of them do so that they can run quietly down the hallway and escape. She climbs into one of those herring buckets and is driven away. Within 24 hours, she's going to meet the primary preacher of this radical Reformation movement by the name of Martin Luther. Now, let me say just a word about him. He may be newer to the faith, and you need to know that he, like Katerina, knew very little of family love growing up. His father often beat him mercilessly on one occasion to the point of Martin running away for a while.

His mother beat him until he bled for stealing a nut to eat from the dining room table on one occasion. But he had been out one afternoon, though, preparing for law and was surprised by a thunderstorm that came so suddenly he had no time to run, lightning crashing everywhere around him. And he prayed to Saint Anne that if he would survive that storm, he would leave law and enter the monastery. And he survived, claimed it was Saint Anne who allowed him to live, and he kept his word and joined the monastery, becoming a monk. And like Katerina, he became a very diligent, dedicated member of the monastery. In fact, he nearly drove his mentors crazy with his confessions. He would rarely let up. In fact, on one occasion, he confessed for nearly six hours until his confessor begged for mercy, asked him to stop.

He just couldn't rid himself of his guilt. And finally, after seven years of this, his mentor, Jan van Stappitz, put an end to his torment, released him from the monastery, and assigned him to teach at the University of Edinburgh. He moved into a monastery inhabited by Augustinian monks.

It was called the Black Cloister because of the monks' black clothing unique to them. And he began teaching in the university. It would be his role and responsibility as well to preach several times a week, and he chose to begin preaching through the books of Romans and Galatians and selected Psalms. And of course, you can't preach through books of the Bible without first studying them, or at least that's the theory. And so he dove in and began to study the book of Romans. And over the course of his study, Romans chapter 1 and verse 17 just sort of chased him down and changed his life forever. So take your Bible and let's look for a brief moment or two at that text, Romans chapter 1, and we'll back up into verse 16 and get a running start.

Romans chapter 1 and verse 16, for I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it, that is the gospel, is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. As it is written, the righteous man, the just, shall live by faith, not penance, not self-deprivation, not pilgrimages, not austerity by faith. In fact, Luther would later write, although I was an impeccable monk, I knew I stood before God as a sinner, troubled in my conscience. I had no confidence that my merit would satisfy God. But through his study of Romans and Galatians and other passages and this text as well, he came to understand that this word righteousness, and you could write on the margin of your Bible righteousness here, this theological doctrinal truth, righteousness means right with God.

How does a person become right with God? He came to understand it was by sola fidei, that is faith alone. And he believed the gospel. And he would say that this scripture he would write took on new meaning.

In fact, all of scripture took on new meaning and became inexpressibly sweet to me. And this particular text of Paul became to me the gate to heaven, end quote. Not the monastery, the gospel. This doctrine of sola fidei. And Martin then would go on to preach about, you know, the authority of scripture having greater authority than popes and councils, and even he dared to say the church itself.

Now obviously the church wasn't teaching this gospel, it wasn't teaching sola fidei, but he risked everything about his past and his future and his heaven on sola fidei, and he would teach it based on the authority of scripture, what he called sola scriptura, that is the authority of the scriptures alone. Now if I could fast forward the tape, here's 40-year-old Martin Luther standing at the doorway of the black cloister, welcoming a cart full of nuns who are hopping out of fish barrels, barefoot, owning nothing but the clothing on their backs. And he felt a tremendous responsibility because he had been preaching, in fact writing, that the nunnery should empty, the monastery should empty. And he wanted to settle them.

Fairly quickly three of them returned to their family homes, they were young. Eight of them he married off, in fact he was called Martin the matchmaker, he would marry them off to monks and priests and friends. And all that was then left was this one nun without family, we know from history she was effectively disowned, no family, no prospects, this 24-year-old Katarina von Bora. Luther tried to marry her off to a friend of his that he thought would be a good match. The man showed interest, that courted her for nearly a year, and for some strange reason nobody knows why, ran off and married somebody else.

And that just jilted her. Then he, well he knew of another eligible bachelor nearby he thought of, a pastor friend of his who had also begun his involvement in the Reformation. He was intelligent, he was resourceful, he had earned his doctorate in theology and was faithfully pastoring a church nearby. And most importantly, he was eligible, he seemed to Martin to be the perfect husband for Katarina, with one glaring exception, she didn't like him. And she let it be known that she didn't like him. In fact, Luther was exasperated over this nun who evidently had a mind of her own. She sent a note back to him through a mutual friend to tell him to abandon his plans to marry her to this pastor, and then she did something really startling and unusual. She ended the note by suggesting that if he, Martin, sought her hand, she would not refuse. She essentially proposed to Martin Luther. So get this picture. By the way, you don't do that.

You didn't do that. Here's a now 42-year-old leader of the Protestant Reformation, challenged the structure and theology of the church. Now it's several years old, it's gaining incredible momentum. He's now written on God's clear design that church leaders should not be or don't have to be celibate. They can actually be married.

In fact, the qualifications for the elder would be that fidelity in marriage would qualify those who were married by their observation before the congregation as being faithful to their wives. He's written about this. He's married off dozens of monks and priests and nuns. He's written widely on the blessing of children and the ideal of God's design through family life. He, by the way, has brazenly and openly ridiculed the church leaders, bishops and cardinals, along with a truckload of priests for having their own mistresses. He's exposing this. He's written extensively on the obvious created nature of God's delight for a man to find a woman and faithfully love her as his wife, but he's never conceived of the thought of marrying.

It literally has not entered his mind. He's immersed in writing and preaching. His life has this growing risk and threat. He assumes, as he writes to friends, he's going to die a martyr. At any moment, he's going to die, if not that way, through one of the illnesses that he had.

He had several. Now he's just been proposed to by a 26-year-old runaway nun. He's stunned.

And everybody else is as well. And there's absolutely no way he's going to say yes. And then he does. He reminded me of old Boaz out there at the threshing floor.

Remember? His old bachelor and young Ruth comes along and essentially proposes to him. And when he wakes up after fainting, he accepts.

Well, that's Luther. He's shocked. And then he's smitten. Later, he'll write that he, tongue in cheek, he's to tease her and everybody else. But he said that he married Katarina to make his father happy, who wanted grandchildren. I think that's a perfectly good reason for young people to get married, by the way, to give us grandchildren.

So I'm all for that. He also wrote that he got married to rile up the pope, whom he hated. And he said, I married to give the angels reason to laugh and the devil's reason to weep. He would write as well that he wanted to practice what he'd been preaching and what he had been writing about marriage and the home so that he could become a living demonstration with his wife of the love of Christ for the church and the church for Christ. But I got to tell you, if you read the biographies of Martin or Katarina, and I've read several of them, this is a most unlikely marriage. This marriage has little reason to survive. What I want to do is kind of rehearse for you, and I've read much more than I could ever give you, but I've sort of boiled it down to three or four principles whereby we, as we are in this study, observing godly believers and finding in their lives things to imitate, as the apostles encouraged us to do.

So as I kind of boiled down 21 years of marriage, let me give you some principles that are worthy of modeling. And before I give you the first one, let me have you keep in mind, in the 16th century, nobody had a church leader who was married. They didn't have that. If you were a church leader, you were then unmarried. They didn't see an example of a couple. They didn't see this kind of pastor and wife. In fact, Philip Schaff, the historian, wrote that their marriage will become the standard for the Christian family for centuries to come. Nobody had seen this before. Principle number one.

Let me give these to you fairly quickly. Number one, marriage is not a matter of compatibility. It's a matter of commitment. The truth is they barely knew each other when they married. She'd been living with a believing family in town. They'd been courted for nearly a year by a guy that then ran off.

They'd had few conversations. In the meantime, Martin is living the life of a bachelor in the black cloister. He's immersed in his studies and in his writing.

When they marry, he will love books and he will love writing and she will love farming and organizing and cleaning. And let me emphasize cleaning. By this point in time, the monks had all left being reformed. It was only Martin living in the black cloister and it was falling into disrepair. An older monk was living in an attached shed out back and that was pretty much it and this house was filthy. In fact, one of the first things that she does is order two carts full of lime and she will whitewash every wall in that monastery because it was so dirty.

Now, let me tell you this. In a typical marriage of Luther's day, the bride brought her bed into her new home. It was usually handed down from mother to daughter. And along with her bed, she would bring feather quilts that she had made along with embroidered linen and pillows.

And you can see how life is just going to get better here by the presence of a bride. But she didn't own any of that. When he met her, she didn't own a pair of shoes.

So she came with none of that. In fact, Luther later revealed that their wedding night was spent on his bed and he had not changed the rancid straw for over a year. He just hadn't thought about it. There are a lot of things he evidently hadn't thought about. In fact, Luther would later write, there is a lot to get used to in the first year of marriage.

I guess there was. Like changing your bed sheets. That'd be like sleeping on sheets that had been changed for a year. Some of you guys out there are going, yeah, what's wrong with that?

It works for me. He would write, when sitting alone at the table, a married man now thinks, well, before I was alone, now there are two of us. Or when he wakes up in bed, he sees a pair of pigtails on his pillow and they weren't there before. Well, hello to married life. And all the changes that would come, Luther would write as an older man, marriage does not always run smoothly, but one must be committed.

And they would demonstrate that in the most difficult of times. That marriage doesn't work because you're compatible or it's easy, but because you are committed. Number two, let me give you a second principle of marriage worthy of imitating.

Marriage is not the pursuit of happiness. It's the pursuit of humility. Now, both Martin and Katarina, well, they loved each other. Love was part of it, but it wasn't the pursuit based on love of happiness, but humility. They were both strong-willed, opinionated, stubborn, and extremely verbal.

They spoke their minds. Luther would later admit the revelation of his own selfishness after getting married. He would write, good Lord, what a lot of trouble there is in marriage.

Adam has made a mess of our nature. And then he would write perceptively, marriage is the school for character development. See, up until that day, the church was teaching that it was the monastery that was the school for developing virtue. You sequester away. You want to get holy?

Get away from everybody. Luther did it, and he found when he was alone that he was still living with himself, and he would spend six hours confessing his sin. But sequester yourself away, and you'll grow and develop in holiness. Luther will turn all of that now upside down and say, no, no, no, no.

You want a training ground? You want an education in humility? Marriage and family. Well if God has blessed you with a marriage and family, you know that what the Luther's thought was true.

Marriage is God's school for teaching you virtue. We're going to have to stop right here for today. Stephen's lesson isn't complete, but we don't have time to finish it today. We'll come back at this same time tomorrow and then conclude this lesson on the life of Katarina Luther. The series that Stephen's been teaching the last several days is entitled, Legacies of Light. This series has been developed into a beautiful hardback book, and it would make a great addition to your library of Christian resources. Each chapter highlights the biography of one of these godly men and women we've been studying, saints who have made a profound impact on the Christian faith and left a lasting legacy. We can give you more information about this book, Legacies of Light, if you call us today at 866-48-Bible. That's 866-482-4253. Thanks again for joining us today. We'll be back tomorrow with the conclusion to this lesson, right here on Wisdom for the Heart. Thank you.