Reforming the Art of Dying

The Reformation forced Christians to reconsider virtually every aspect of their faith, and those who embraced Luther's teachings had to find new ways of dealing with the many aspects of their lives. Nowhere is this more true than with death. By the beginning of the sixteenth century the Catholic Chu [...]
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The Reformation forced Christians to reconsider virtually every aspect of their faith, and those who embraced Luther's teachings had to find new ways of dealing with the many aspects of their lives. Nowhere is this more true than with death. By the beginning of the sixteenth century the Catholic Church had an established and sophisticated mechanism for dealing with death and its consequences, all of which were rejected by the Protestant reformers. In order to fill this gap and offer comfort to the dying, they produced new church orders and published handbooks on dying. This study focuses on the earliest of these Protestant handbooks, beginning with Luther's "Sermon on Preparing to Die" in 1519 and ending with Jakob Otter's "Christlich leben vnd sterben" in 1528. It explores how Luther and his colleagues adopted traditional themes and motifs even as they transformed them to accord with their conviction that Christians could be certain of their salvation. It further shows how Luther's colleagues drew on his writings, not only his teaching on dying, but also other writings including his sermons on the sacraments.The study concludes that the assurance of salvation that these works offered represented a significant change from traditional teaching on death. By examining the ways in which the themes and teachings of the reformers differed from the late medieval ars moriendi, the book underlines many of the breaks as well as continuities that underpinned the early Reformation.