Dr. Eric W. Gritsch

2018 Featured Speaker: Dr. Jane Strohl

"Graceful Death: Luther & The Art Of Dying"

     I began my call as pastor of Community Lutheran Church in Enfield, New Hampshire in mid-May of 2017. In late July the president of the church council was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. In the fall, when it became clear that there would be no remission, that the end would be sooner rather than later, Philip remarked that he only hoped he would not disgrace himself as death closed in.

     He echoed a Christian concern of long standing. Beginning around 1400, numerous manuals on the art of dying were published in western Europe. Some were practical handbooks of pastoral care for the clergy, but many were written in the vernacular, providing an avid lay audience with a kind of self-help book. Achieving salvation required that one die well, and that took effort. These guides laid out a practice of preparation so that one could cultivate the right frame of mind and die in the required state of humble acceptance, true repentance and trusting love. With the support of the church on earth and the saints in heaven, the Christian could achieve this end, so pleasing to God, and die peacefully, confident of standing in the state of saving grace.

     Philip left very exacting instructions for his funeral. A eulogy was wholly unacceptable. The sermon must be a Lutheran exposition of the Gospel. Indeed, the full power of Luther’s understanding of the Gospel emerges in the face of death. It comes as no surprise that he rejected the practiced art of dying as taught in the manuals. Luther knew by constant, bitter experience that we are never well served by focusing on our personal worthiness before God or our lack thereof, and least of all as life is ending. Then we are at our weakest, and the temptations of terror, unbelief and despair are fierce. These are Anfechtungen of epic proportions. It is the worst time to be rooting around in your soul for reassuring evidence of true repentance and trusting love. It is a waste of what little energy you have left to try to transform yourself into a model end-stage mortal. A sinner is never saved by turning in on himself. Dying is not performance art.

     The foundational principles of Luther’s theology come critically into play in this situation: extra nos and pro nobis. The dying person must look out, look up and behold the Lord Jesus Christ. She must hear his word of promise, proclaiming her a sinner of his own redeeming, and cling to it. “Seek yourself only in Christ and not in yourself,” writes Luther, “and you will find yourself in him eternally.” In his discussion of Luther’s 1519 Sermon on Preparing to Die, Berndt Hamm writes:

                   Because death, sin, and hell are realities of my existence, I cannot simply look away from them and replace them with ‘positive’ images that offer a friendly message; I cannot simply look at the Christ of the redemption. It depends far more on seeing through my own distress and recognizing that all dying, all the burden of sin, and all the damnation of being abandoned by God are found in the passion and Anfechtung of Christ. That is when I realize that “Christ’s life has taken your death, his obedience your sin, his love your hell, upon themselves and overcome  them.”

     The traditional ars moriendi recognized that God gave the needed grace to save us but insisted that we must also do our part, small though it might be in the face of God’s infinite mercy. Whereas some theologians insisted that a good death could only be the culmination of a good life and that there comes a point beyond which one cannot recoup one’s neglect of holy living, others insisted that it was possible to salvage one’s prospects even at the last. They point to the story of the thief crucified at Christ’s right hand. After a life of sin, death offers him a final chance to gain salvation. He turns to Jesus in a state of true contrition and humble acceptance of his fate and so departs this world in a sanctified state.

Luther, of course, comes at the story quite differently. For him the thief witnesses to the sole necessity of faith. The thief acknowledges that his condemnation and execution are deserved and does not seek to transform his pain and death into any kind of meritorious sacrifice. Rather, he turns to Christ and clings to Him without fasting or penance, “. . . indeed with no works whatsoever.” Depending wholly on Jesus was his only possibility; the Lord’s mercy his only hope. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”  His faith is all that matters.

     Ten days before his death I asked the president of my church council if he was afraid. “I am concerned as to how this process is going to play itself out,” he replied, “and the toll it will take on Susan (his wife). But am I afraid of dying? Why would I be?”  His words echoed the kind of assurance that Luther accorded to those dying in the evangelical faith. He writes:

          This is to be your sole comfort, that you shall feel the Word’s power while here on earth and especially when your last hour draws near, so that death shall be like a sleep. Just as when someone rides along in a thick mist and does not see an assassin, the horseman is shot and killed before he knows what is happening. So it is meant to be here as well. The devil is a murderer and has sworn to kill us — that we well know. But because we have the Word and hold fast to it, we will not be really conscious of the slaughter. For the Word creates fine, gentle people and quiet, joyful hearts, which neither despair nor become impatient in tribulation but allow everything to pass over and comfort themselves with the knowledge that on account of Christ, they have a merciful father in heaven. This they learn through the Word; otherwise they would not know it at all. 

Luther regularly comforts the bereaved with the assurance that their loved one died confessing Christ, making clear in their final moments that, like Simeon, they are ready to depart in peace. The following is typical:

          But this fact should give you the greatest comfort (as it does us), that he fell asleep (rather than died) so cleanly and gently with such fine faith, reason, and confession that we all marveled. And there can be no doubt, so little as the Christian faith can be false, that he is eternally blessed with God his true father. For such a fine Christian death cannot fail to obtain the heavenly kingdom.

     Devastated as he was by the sudden death of his 13-year-old daughter Magdalena, Luther took great comfort from the fact that she fell asleep “full of faith in Christ.” Two months after her passing he writes a friend:

          And our times being what they are, and they will degenerate even more, I pray from the depths of my heart that a similar hour of departure might be granted to me and mine and to you and to all     whom we hold dear. That is, that with such great faith and peaceful repose we too might truly fall asleep in the Lord, neither seeing nor tasting death nor feeling a bit of fear. I hope that now is and    will be the time of which Isaiah spoke: For the righteous are gathered together and they enter peacefully into their resting chambers . . . .

Luther’s own apocalyptic sense of the collapse of the world around him — he goes on to write in this letter that “[c]onditions are such that it is disgusting to live and see anything in this dreadful Sodom” — allows him to accept his daughter’s death with a measure of relief, even gratitude. God rescues betimes those whom God loves, sparing his saints the extremity of suffering and terror yet to come. The president of my church council in his last months did not necessarily regard impending death as a timely rescue from the looming apocalypse, but he was relieved to be able to disengage from the Trumpian turmoil ravaging the rest of us. “No more politics,” he announced one day as his wife and I rolled our eyes and wrung our hands at the latest breaking news. Because of the boundary he was crossing, that was a boundary he was free to set.

     Luther clearly proclaims his confidence in the blessed death of the faithful confessor in a funeral sermon for Elector Johann, preached in 1532. Surnamed the Steadfast, Johann was the ruler of Electoral Saxony at the time of the 1530 Diet of Augsburg and one of the leading Protestant princes appearing before Emperor Charles V to defend the religious reforms they had instituted in their lands. As we know, Johann’s efforts failed politically, yet in Luther’s view he proved uncompromisingly victorious in the cause of the Gospel.  Augsburg was his martyrdom. Like the Lord, he  drained the cup of suffering placed before him and remained faithful to his calling:

          Because St.Paul so extols the dead, as we have heard, we should thank God heartily that he has included our dear Elector in the death and resurrection of Christ. For you know what kind of death he suffered at the Diet of Augsburg . . . when he had to swallow all the evil brew and poison which the devil poured out for him. That is the real, horrible death, when the devil wears one down. There our dear Elector publicly confessed the death and resurrection of Christ before the whole world, took his stand upon it, and risked land and subjects, even his own body and life.

     It was not on account of his goodness that God had preserved him. He was indeed a pious, friendly man, in whom Luther said he found neither falsehood nor any evidence of pride, anger or envy. He knew him to be of a forbearing and forgiving spirit, yet it was not Luther’s intent to transform the dead ruler into a living saint. Princes are human, after all, beset by many more demons than the common person and thus inevitably sinners like all the rest. Yet however numerous Johann’s  shortcomings may have been, when compared to the confession of the Gospel he dared to make publicly, they are no more significant than a spark of fire to the vast engulfing sea. Because of the anguished spiritual death Johan experienced at  Augsburg, his physical death was peaceful and untroubled. He was spared the devilish temptations to fear and despair that commonly afflict people on their deathbed, because he had endured the true death of temptation once and for all at the Diet. Now God has mercifully  removed him from all further danger through “a child’s death,” while the “far more bitter death” of Augsburg, confession of the evangelical gospel, continues to claim martyrs.

     Luther concludes the sermon by exhorting his hearers to humble themselves and embrace the spiritual martyrdom which their Elector endured at Augsburg. Wrapped thus closely in the death of Christ, they may, like their prince, die gently, since death will have no sting for those who have lived believing and confessing the Gospel. Thus, martyrdom is not the privilege of a few but the calling of all. The Diet of Augsburg saw played out publicly and corporately the struggle and sacrifice which adherence to the Word demands of every individual soul.

         In a sense dying is nothing new; it is the culmination of a lifetime of experience and practice in the discipleship of deprivation. From the moment of our baptism we are given life in Christ in the midst of death and through Christ alone. It is that simple. Yet we feel compelled to complicate the matter. We clothe ourselves in piety and good works and cling to our worldly achievements and possessions . We do not want to stand naked before God. And so life is a continual process of being stripped of our self-righteous finery. We do not want to hold on lightly to the things of this world. Even though we know they are transient to begin with, we resist letting go.  And so time and again our grip is broken, our fingers pried loose. God confronts us with our need for a savior. God exposes the utter spiritual indigence untouched by our accumulation of righteousness and riches. God then fills the void by giving us a mere word to cling to. The greatest of treasures is ours, yet our hold on it is fragile. Luther writes: “Therefore our life is simply contained in the bare Word; for we have Christ, we have eternal life, eternal righteousness, help and comfort, but where is it? We don’t see it. We neither possess it in coffers nor hold it in our hands, but only in the bare Word. Thus has God clothed his object in nothingness.”

     It is necessary that we suffer the loss of all things so that we might recognize the only thing that is surely and eternally ours. Here again Luther:    

          . . . the flesh and the understanding of the flesh and reason must be mortified, and all human wisdom must be reduced to nothing . . . . This is easily said speculatively, but practically it is work and       toil to be reduced in this way, to die, and to pass away into nothing so that nothing seems to be left either of life or of carnal feeling except the Word. When I die, I descend into hell; I perish! What am I to do? No help remains except the Word: ‘I believe in God and so forth.’ To this I firmly cling, however angry He may be, however much He may forsake, kill, and lead me down to hell. Why?  Because I have been baptized and absolved; I have made use of Holy Communion. I believe this Word. God grant that even though heaven and earth break apart . . . the promise and the           sacraments are not on that account rejected or denied, even if I should be cast down into hell! These are not speculative matters, but they are taken out of the midst of the real experiences of life, and they should not only be heard or contemplated once in life but should be repeated and practiced often.

Trial and temptation over a lifetime serve to create and renew faith. One will not pass every test, but as long as one has the Word, there is opportunity for restoration, and as long as one has breath, there is time for amendment of life. In the best case scenario, by the time we must surrender to the grave, we have thoroughly internalized the article of justification. We are adept at holding our own in this peculiar relationship where we must counter an enraged, threatening God with his own saving revelation in Word and sacrament. Physically dying will be the final round in what has become business as usual.

But what about the worst case scenario? On several occasions Luther contrasts the fate of the disciple Peter with that of Judas, both of whom betrayed their Lord and were subsequently overcome by sorrow at their sin. Peter is restored, says Luther, because he held fast to the Word so that in his time of need, it was there to sustain him and console his troubled conscience. Judas, on the other hand, did not take the Word to heart in this last critical trial and thus had no antidote to despair, nothing to carry him from death to life. Luther, like his Roman Catholic opponents and the medieval tradition that nurtured them both, isolates one’s dying hour as of ultimate significance for one’s eternal salvation. It looms as the ultimate challenge, potentially fraught with peril. In death as in life there is no neutral territory. The will is ridden either by God or the devil, and for Luther the question is yet to be decided as to which one will lead the way into eternity. Safe passage is not guaranteed.

     Think of the Olympic athlete, who puts in a gold medal performance time and time again in daily practice, But on the one occasion when it really matters, she is plagued by an unanticipated injury or loses focus momentarily and leaves the arena empty-handed. The once-in-a-lifetime opportunity is gone forever. That is what makes the limit imposed by death so fearsome. If one loses one’s grip on the Word at the last, there is no further opportunity for recovering the grace thus surrendered, no chance to get it right the “n+1” time around. If, as Luther says, one will find God to be as once conceives God, then one’s final vision will be an eternal one.  He writes:

          If on your deathbed you won’t believe the Word but paint for yourself a devilish picture, if you say to yourself, “God does not want me; I’m bound for hell,” and then you die, well that’s the way it will      go for you. You have no one to blame but your own unbelief for your failure to regard God as he makes himself known in the Word. Because of that he cannot help you. He will have to let you go, and he will say, “What you believe is what you get. If you dwell on the terrors of hell, you will end up there.”

     While insisting that faith is a gift, Luther still holds the dying person responsible for remaining constant in the conviction that she is saved by grace alone. There is no solace to be had in one’s good works, no assistance to be found in the intercession of Heaven’s saints or the ministrations of fellow members of the church militant. When one is tested by the devil so cruelly in one’s last hour, it is not clear whether one clings to God’s promise or is held by it. Is the final confession on our lips our victory or God’s gift? Luther presents the temptation to doubt and despair as the work of the devil, but this enemy is, after all, also God’s creature, acting despite himself within the Lord’s rule. If we have persevered through a lifetime of Anfechtung  so as to develop consistent strength of faith, it is not clear what purpose is served by a final round at the border of the grave, when faith is about to become altogether unnecessary.

      The ars moriendi assumed a human will able to cooperate with grace and to grow in godliness with each such exercise. Death comes to a person who has made progress in subduing the weakness of the flesh and has been sacramentally transformed into a creature for whom salvation will, as Thomas Aquinas put it, be both a gift and a reward. These are significant personal resources to help one rise to the occasion of one’s death. Not so for Luther. His exhortations to endurance  were directed to a human will that, according to his doctrine of justification, can do nothing to create faith or further the cause of its salvation. The gift of grace makes the believer a saint in the scales of divine judgment but leaves him simultaneously a sinner, unable to improve his nature through any efforts of his own. Salvation is God’s work alone, given whole and complete to the believer in this life. Yet it would seem not to be an irrevocable certainty until God’s constancy has been proved in the hour of one’s death.

     While allowing for the possibility of failure, Luther does not appear personally haunted by the prospect. And given his history of extreme susceptibility to terrors of conscience, this is noteworthy. To dwell on such a fear would be to drift away from the revealed Word and get lost in the mystery of the hidden, electing God. When dying time is here, that’s no better a place to be rooting around than is the turn inward to assess the state of one’s soul. Luther is always able to redirect his gaze, blessedly distracted by the shining external signs of God’s favor: the preaching of the Word and the celebration of the sacraments. Even if God tried to throw him off, his fierce determination to hold the promiser to his promise would not yield an inch. Luther stands with the wrestling Jacob and the persistent Canaanite woman and is confident of victory. Listen to the words he puts in the patriarch’s mouth in his Genesis Commentary: 

          “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” Why? “Because you said that I have been cursed and for this reason my soul was confused. Therefore take back that sentence and bless me. You must provide me with a retraction, or I will not let you go. I have defeated you in strength of body. I will also overcome the words of your mouth, for my soul, which you said is lost and condemned, has        toiled more vehemently than my body and arms. So I will not let you go unless you retract your judgment concerning me and give me the testimony that I have been blessed before God.”

Sassy and stalwart, Luther was of the same mind as my dear friend Philip, “Afraid of dying? Why would I be?”

Thank you.

Jane E. Strohl

March 10, 2018

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Jane Strohl grew up in Annapolis, MD. She holds degrees from Vassar College, the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, and the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Dr. Strohl was ordained in the Lutheran Church in America in 1979. She was on the faculty of Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN from 1985-1996 and was Professor of Reformation History and Theology at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary from 1996-2013. Dr. Strohl has served parishes in Connecticut and Pennsylvania. She is currently the pastor of Community Lutheran Church in Enfield, NH.