What this is about
This page isn’t an argument. It is a record of what one old Christian tradition, the Lutheran church, says about death, in its own words.
The question
What does the Lutheran church teach about death? What it is, what Christ did about it, where a Christian is after dying, what he is still waiting for, what he can hold on to, and whether he is allowed to grieve. And if that is true, how seriously should you take someone who uses death to threaten you?
The reason for asking is the last part. Death is sometimes used in church as a threat: give, or see what God takes; question the pastor, and remember what happened to the last person who did. But everybody dies, the loyal and the awkward alike. People who hear that sort of preaching are seldom told what the historic church has said about death itself.
Those four words are the Lutheran teaching. Leave out the first two and you end up telling widows not to cry. Leave out the last two and you have a religion that can be run on fear.
What this page is not doing
It doesn’t compare Lutherans with other churches or say who is right. It isn’t advice for a particular illness or bereavement; for that, talk to a pastor who knows you. It names no living person and describes no real church or sermon. Every modern example is made up and labelled that way.
The short answer
- Death is an enemy. “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). It came into the world through sin (Romans 5:12). Nobody has to call it beautiful, and Luther didn’t: he called it “that dreadful enemy.”
- Christ has beaten it. Luther’s catechism says Christ “has redeemed me … from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil,” and that when he rose he “swallowed up and devoured death.” The comfort rests on what he did, not on how strong your faith feels.
- A Christian who dies is with Christ straight away. “To day shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). The body rests in the grave. The soul is with the Lord, and awake. Lutherans don’t teach purgatory, and they don’t teach that the soul is unconscious.
- The body will be raised. Christ “at the last day will raise up me and all the dead” (Small Catechism). Heaven after death is real, and it isn’t the end of the story.
- Baptism is what you hold on to. When your conscience accuses you, the catechism tells you to say: “Nevertheless I am baptized.” It is something God did to you, and it doesn’t change with your mood.
- You are allowed to grieve. “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). When Luther’s thirteen-year-old daughter died, he wrote that he couldn’t think of her “without sobs and sighs.” Christians sorrow, only not “as others which have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13).
- So the threat doesn’t work any more. Christ died to free people “who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” (Hebrews 2:15). “Fear not them which kill the body” (Matthew 10:28).
Death is a real enemy and Christ has already beaten it. You may be frightened, and you may grieve. What you needn’t be is controlled by anyone who holds death over you.
What Luther actually said
Luther’s sentence about the plague is often quoted as if he were shrugging. He wasn’t. Just before it he says he will ask God for protection, fumigate, take medicine, and keep away from places where he isn’t needed, so that he doesn’t catch the plague and pass it on. Then: “If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me.” And then he adds that if his neighbour needs him, he will go.
He also said, in the same letter, that most of the saints have been afraid of death. He didn’t scold them for it.
Luther gets misquoted a lot. Here are five sentences. Which are really his?
0 of 5 sorted.
Where you are, and what you’re waiting for
Lutheran teaching on what happens after death is short, because the Bible’s is.
The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, a present-day Lutheran body, puts the middle step in one line: “at the moment of death the souls of believers enter the joy of heaven.” Luther liked to call death a sleep, as the New Testament does. But when he explained what he meant, he said the soul “does not sleep in the same manner. It is awake.”
The last step is the one people forget. The Christian hope isn’t only going to heaven. It is “the resurrection of the body.” Job said it long before: “in my flesh shall I see God” (Job 19:26). That is why Paul calls death the last enemy: there is a day coming when it is gone.
With Christ at once. Raised in the body at the end. Heaven after death is real, and it isn’t the last chapter.
What to hold on to at three in the morning
Suppose you are very ill, and the thought comes: how do you know you are really a Christian? You’ve doubted. You’ve done things you’re ashamed of. You’re scared, and real believers aren’t scared.
Many churches would tell you to look inside: did you really mean it? do you feel peace? The Lutheran answer is to look outside, at something that happened. Luther’s Large Catechism says it this way:
… when our sins and conscience oppress us, we strengthen ourselves and take comfort and say: Nevertheless I am baptized; but if I am baptized, it is promised me that I shall be saved and have eternal life, both in soul and body.
Martin Luther, Large Catechism (1529), on Baptism. Paul makes the connection in Romans 6:3–5: those who were baptized into Christ were baptized into his death, and will share his resurrection.
It doesn’t argue with the accusations. It changes the subject, from you to Christ. A Lutheran funeral begins the same way: the first thing said over the coffin is that this person was baptized.
Try it. Five things a person might say on a sickbed, all made up for this page. Is the speaker looking outside, to Christ, or inside, to himself?
0 of 5 sorted.
You may grieve
If the dead are with Christ, should a Christian cry at a funeral? Jesus did. He stood at the grave of his friend Lazarus, knowing he was about to raise him, and wept. When Stephen was killed, “devout men carried Stephen to his burial, and made great lamentation over him” (Acts 8:2).
Luther buried two daughters. When Magdalena died in 1542, aged thirteen, he wrote to a friend three days later:
Although my wife and I ought to rejoice on account of her happy end, still the tenderness of the father’s heart is so great that we cannot think of it without sobs and sighs, which tear asunder the heart.
Martin Luther to Justus Jonas, 23 September 1542 (trans. M. A. Currie, 1908).
He didn’t decide his faith had failed. He was heartbroken and he was sure she was safe, both at once.
That same year he rewrote the funeral service. He took out everything that was done to help the dead person, because Christ had already done it. In its place he put “comforting songs of the forgiveness of sins, of rest, sleep, life and resurrection.” The funeral remembers the person and preaches Christ, so that the people who are grieving have something to hold.
Tears at a grave are not a failure of faith. The Bible forbids only one kind of sorrow: the kind that has no hope in it.
When death is used as a threat
Luther lived his last twenty-five years as an outlaw. The Emperor declared him one in 1521, and the sentence was never lifted. A year later he wrote that he had walked into that trial ready for “as many devils … as there were tiles on the house-roofs,” and that God has made Christians “joyous lords over all the devils and death itself.” His best-known hymn ends: “The body they may kill: God’s truth abideth still.”
He also said where the terror of death comes from. It is the devil, he wrote, who makes people stare at sudden deaths and at the anger of God until they are too frightened to think.
To be fair, Lutherans do preach about death and judgement. They call that the Law: God’s honest word about sin and what it leads to. But it has a purpose, which is to send people to Christ, and it is always followed by the Gospel: what Christ has done about it. Three questions tell the Law from a threat.
Five sentences a congregation might hear, all made up for this page. Sort them.
0 of 5 sorted.
If the worst that can be done to you has already been answered, the person holding it over you is holding nothing. That doesn’t make a Christian reckless. Luther took his medicine. It makes him hard to frighten.
Check it yourself
Five things. The first takes ten minutes. The last is the one that matters.
- 1. Read 1 Corinthians 15, the whole chapter. Christ raised, the dead raised, the last enemy, and “O death, where is thy sting?”
- 2. Read John 11:1–44 and 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18. Jesus weeping at a grave, and grief with hope.
- 3. Read Luther’s Small Catechism on the Creed and on Baptism (free at bookofconcord.org). Fifteen minutes. It was written for children.
- 4. Read Romans 6:1–11 and Hebrews 2:14–15. Baptism and Christ’s death; freedom from the fear of death.
- 5. Write down what you’d want read and sung at your own funeral, and give it to someone. Do this one. Luther’s advice was to think about death while it is still a long way off.
Want the whole thing?
The full dossier has every source dated and cited, Luther’s letters to his dying mother and about his daughter, what the Lutheran documents say about purgatory and the sleep of the soul, the funeral service, eight things said at gravesides to sort, Luther’s own list for preparing in time, and the full prompt so you can run it yourself.
Read the full dossier → Simple English →