Therefore, dear Lords, help here, save here, release here, stab, smite, strangle here, whoever can. And if you die in it, blessed are you; for you die in obedience to God's Word and command (Rom. 13) and in the service of love, to save your neighbor from hell and devil's fire.
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"The Christian's life is not a bed of roses, but a cross."
"The Pope is a mere tormentor of conscience."
"What is worse, the Jews, in their synagogues, curse our Lord Jesus Christ and Mary His mother, and call her a whore, and Christ a mamzer [bastard], that is, a son of a whore."
"Women should remain at home, sit still, keep house, and bear and bring up children...If a woman grows weary and, at last, dies from childbearing, it matters not. Let her die from bearing - she is ther…"
"Secondly, their homes also should be razed and destroyed. For they pursue the same aims in them as in their synagogues. Instead they might be lodged under a roof or in a barn, like the gypsies, in ord…"
German theologian whose 95 Theses (1517) launched the Protestant Reformation and broke the Catholic Church's monopoly on Western Christianity. Closely associated with Philipp Melanchthon (Lutheran systematizer) and John Calvin (later Reformer who built on Luther's break). For an intellectual contrast, see Pope Leo X, Renaissance pope (1513-1521) — Leo X's indulgence sales triggered Luther's break and Leo excommunicated him in 1521 — Luther's entire Reformation is structured as a direct answer to the indulgence-funded Vatican Leo represented.
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Luther is urging rulers to take violent, decisive action against a grave threat, framing killing as a moral duty. He promises that anyone who dies while fighting is blessed because they are obeying God's command and acting out of love for neighbors, rescuing them from damnation. The passage treats lethal force not as sin but as merciful protection, transforming soldiers and lords into instruments of salvation.
This comes from Luther's 1525 pamphlet against rebelling peasants, where he notoriously urged princes to slaughter them. It reveals his paradoxical alliance with secular authority: though he defied the Pope and Emperor, he insisted earthly rulers held God-given swords (Romans 13). His theology of two kingdoms, fierce polemical temperament, and belief that disorder served Satan all converge here, exposing how the Reformer of conscience could also sanction brutal state violence.
Written during the 1524-1525 German Peasants' War, when roughly 300,000 commoners revolted citing Luther's own gospel of Christian freedom. Early modern Europe was convulsing as the Reformation fractured Christendom, princes seized church lands, and apocalyptic expectation ran high. Luther, needing princely protection against Rome, sided decisively with the nobility. Around 100,000 peasants were massacred, cementing the Reformation as a top-down princely movement rather than a social revolution.
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