Katie Luther, First Lady of the Reformation by Ruth A. Tucker

Katie Luther, First Lady of the Reformation by Ruth A. Tucker

Author:Ruth A. Tucker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2017-05-01T04:00:00+00:00


To you, this night, is born a child

Of Mary, chosen mother mild;

This little child, of lowly birth,

Shall be the joy of all your earth . . .

Ah, dearest Jesus, holy child,

Make thee a bed, soft, undefiled,

Within my heart, that it may be

A quiet chamber kept for thee.18

Speaking for both Katie and himself, he wrote in his “Preface to the German Mass” that discipline and playfulness should go hand in hand. A child psychologist of sorts, he challenged parents to get down on the floor and be one with them.19

That Katie revered marriage, family, and home to the degree her husband did can only be inferred. Both emphasized the critical importance of child rearing and good works. Martin repeated the saying that parents could attain eternal life in heaven by doing no more than properly training their children.20 Caring for children is, in his mind, serving the least of these—as it were, the hungry, thirsty, naked, imprisoned, and sick. “O what a blessed marriage and home . . . where such parents were to be found! Truly it would be a real church, a chosen cloister, yea, a paradise.”21 Salvation, paradise, marriage, home.

The most painful sorrow Martin and Katie shared together was the death of Magdalena on September 20, 1542, having celebrated her thirteenth birthday the previous May. If we can trust Lucas Cranach the Elder in his portrait of the girl, she looks like her mother. Although her expression is serious, we can imagine her having inherited her father’s quick wit. Yet we know so very little about her, despite all the letters and “table talk” of her famous father. And she seems almost absent in the scenes of sorrow as she nears death. She responds to her father that she is prepared to die and go to heaven, but who was this delightful girl when she was bouncing a little brother in her lap or singing in the family choir as her father played the lute? Who was she when her mother talked to her about her menstrual periods or showed her for the first time how to mend her stockings or bake a batch of strudel?

Apart from the sorrowful death scene, we know very little about this teenage girl from old Wittenberg. Thirteen years earlier, when Luther had asked his friend and pastor Nicolaus von Amsdorf to be her godfather, he endearingly spoke of her as a “little heathen” who needed Nicolaus “to help her [enter] holy Christendom through the heavenly, precious sacrament of baptism.”22

Here as elsewhere, the biographer of Katharina longs for some insight from her own pen. What were her words—or was she not even able to formulate them—during that time of deep despair when their dear child was dying? As it was, Lenchen breathed her last in her father’s arms.

Even in his deepest sorrow, he reportedly prayed and rose above the inevitable loss. If it were God’s will, then she should die. Indeed, he told God he would “gladly give her up” to him. And



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