Lutheran Saints #22: The Baltic Martyrs

April 11, 2023 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Hey, remember my Lutheran saints series? It’s been awhile, for which my apologies. But the long absence of this series is not due to neglect of the saints—far from it. In fact, I have taken a detour from writing up hagiographies for an eventual book of Lutheran saints to do the theological background work that I always knew I’d have to do as well.

This scholarly sidestep is not chiefly due to anticipated hostility from fellow Lutherans toward the very notion of a Lutheran sanctorale. If anything, I’d say my church community is positively longing for better acquaintance with its own saints. But there is certainly an ongoing sense that it is vaguely illegitimate. Good Lutherans that we are, we want solid theological arguments before plowing ahead…

Lutheran Saints #21: Nenilava

December 7, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Young Volohavana kept having dreams—powerful, moving dreams—but she could not understand them. Nothing in her small farming village along the southeastern coast of Madagascar could explain what she was seeing.

The dreams started when she was ten. A tall man placed her in a basin of water and washed her feet. After drying them, he rocked her gently to sleep. In another dream, he caught her in a net and then led her up to heaven. In yet another, he brought her to a church and up into the pulpit. He preached and told her that one day she would do the same.

Sometimes the dreams ceased altogether but then, during the day, she would hear a voice calling her name. At first she thought it was her parents, but they denied it and worried she might be losing her mind. She sensed somehow that the voice of the divine was calling out to her, but she didn’t know how to draw nearer to God. She gave up playing with other children and sat alone under a tree, weeping for want of God’s presence.

It wasn’t only the lack of God that troubled Volohavana. Her father Malady was a diviner with a widespread reputation. For pay he would consult with spirits through his oracle and offer wealth, zebus, children—whatever the heart desired. But Volohavana was not impressed. She doubted the power of the spirits; she mocked her father’s work, sometimes even in front of clients.

Worse yet, as her marriageable age came and went, she refused all the many qualified suitors asking for her hand. In desperation Malady turned again to his oracle, but this time the spirits gave him a very different kind of answer. “A superior Spirit, a God supreme dwells in her, and causes her indifference toward marriage,” they told him. “You, you are a slave, but Volahavana is a queen”…

Lutheran Saints #20: Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt

October 12, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Although Christoph grew up the son of the preacher of hope and healing Johann Christoph Blumhardt, he felt spiritually dry for much of his early life, even into young adulthood. Living at the center of an awakening had attuned him to spiritual realities, and the care to the point of exhaustion offered to the suffering turned his loving attention on the needy. But the bright confidence of his famous father did not break through to his own soul until the very linchpin of the awakening was taken from them.

Christoph was with Gottliebin Dittus on her deathbed. While her breaking free of the devil’s power had been the moment of truth for his father Johann Christoph, it was her death in Christ’s hands that changed everything for Christoph. But in both cases, the good news was the same: “Jesus is victor!” His victory was not a matter of the past—whether the distant past of prophets and apostles, or the more recent past of his own childhood and his father’s Möttlingen pastorate. Jesus is victor now, today, and into the future.

Johann Christoph saw with the joy the transformation in his son. On his own deathbed, his place his hand on Christoph’s head and spoke his final words: “I bless you for the victory.” Not the victory of career or success: the victory of Christ.

From then on Christoph took the mantle of Bad Boll, the institution founded by his parents to care for the sick and suffering. Like his father, he became a renowned preacher. But much more quickly than his father, Christoph became disenchanted not only with his renown, but with its effect…

Lutheran Saints #19: Johann Christoph Blumhardt and Gottliebin Dittus

September 28, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

In the spring of 1842 Pastor Johann Christoph Blumhardt was advised by his parishioners to investigate the strange goings-on at the home of the Dittus siblings. Orphaned and bereaved of several other siblings as well, four of them—Gottliebin, Anna Maria, Katharina, and Hansjörg—lived together in a tumbledown house under conditions of extreme poverty. But the poverty was not the primary target of concern. It was the noises, the strange lights, and above all the strange behavior of Gottliebin that called for further examination.

Gottliebin did not respond warmly to the pastor’s friendly overtures. He let her be, but neighbors complained again: Gottliebin fell down, she fell ill, the noises in the house were so loud as to keep them up at night. Johann Christoph dispatched the siblings to stay with a relative overnight while he and trusted members of the congregation searched the house. Therein they found strange objects, and thereby the fears of Johann Christoph were confirmed: dabbling in occult magic was a widespread spiritual disorder in his flock. Further inquiry revealed that Gottliebin’s early life had been filled with attempted initiations into such dark traffic at the behest of her elders.

Spiritualist studies were not unknown at the time. Reputable figures investigated reports of poltergeists, converse with the dead, and spirits of all kinds. Johann Christoph consulted with such experts of his acquaintance, but remained uneasy with their eager conclusions. Scripture forbade all forms of magic and attempts to communicate with the dead; the devil would deceive by any means necessary, including by lures of knowledge of the supposed beyond. Johann Christoph was resolute: he decided only to pray and place his trust in Jesus Christ…

Lutheran Saints #18: Robert Barnes

July 20, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

It was February of 1526 and Robert Barnes was on trial.

This was not where he expected to be. Before the age of twenty he’d joined a house of Augustinian friars and showed such great promise that he was sent first to Louvain on the continent to earn a Doctorate of Divinity and then, on his return to England, was made prior of the Augustinian friary in Cambridge and earned yet another Doctorate of Divinity. Finding in the famous university town other like-minded humanists, Robert gathered around him an intellectually and spiritually reform-minded community that met for lively debate at the White Horse Inn.

In time, they felt they had to go public with their concerns, and Robert was the obvious choice. On Christmas Eve 1525 he delivered a firebrand sermon, skewering the luxurious lifestyle of the high-ranking clergy. In no time at all accusations of heresy were flying, there’d been a student demonstration, and Robert—with a handful of others—found himself dragged to London and imprisoned.

At the end of his three-day trial before Cardinal Wolsey, Robert was forced to read aloud a recantation in front of the huge crowd, the alternative being death at the stake. He had to kneel before the bishop and beg for absolution, which was denied him until he agreed to whatever penance the bishop chose to impose. He agreed and discovered the next day what it was to be.

At an even bigger and more lavish gathering of clergy, a bishop railed from the pulpit against Robert as well as Martin Luther, made the accused men ask again for forgiveness, and then had them carry the firewood for the ceremonial burning of heretical books. Only then were the offenders absolved, at which point the crowd was granted an indulgence for having witnessed the whole affair, and Robert was sent to Fleet Prison for another six months.

When his time was up, Robert was transferred to the Augustinian friary in London for house arrest. But he evidently had not learned his lesson from the whole sorry debacle. Immediately on arrival he got involved in the sale of Tyndale Bibles—translations of the Scriptures into English—and when rumor circulated that this time Robert really was going to be burned for his troubles, he hatched a plan. He left his clothes at the edge of the Thames with a suicide note appended but actually escaped to Antwerp with the help of German merchants…

Lutheran Saints #17: Henry Melchior Muhlenberg

October 13, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

He was sure that God intended him for a life of missionary service in India. His theological studies at Göttingen and Halle, establishment of a school for poor children, oversight of a hospital—all of these were to prepare him for the trials of far-off Bengal and its people in need.

But when the call came, on his thirtieth birthday, it summoned him west, not east. German Lutherans had been migrating to the American colonies for decades, but they were like sheep without a shepherd. Would young Henry go and serve them?

He agreed—reluctantly. Three years, he said.

He stayed until his dying day…

Lutheran Saints #15: Jón Vídalín

August 18, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Earthquake. Volcanic eruptions. Pestilence. Famine. It could have been the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, but actually it was just Iceland at the turn of the eighteenth century.

It’s not as though Iceland has a mild or pleasant climate to begin with, but in the late 1600s and early 1700s it was worse than usual, with the result that nine thousand Icelanders starved to death between 1695 and 1702. Winter fishing claimed many men’s lives annually as well, and the unusually rough weather only increased the death toll. A smallpox epidemic in 1707 killed off a third of the population. Deforestation meant not enough firewood to heat through the brutal winters, and poor sanitation made the long enforced stay indoors that much unhealthier.

As if that weren’t bad enough, what little wealth the island did have was concentrated in the hands of a few. Landowners set exorbitant rents that peasants could never pay, leading to spiralling debt. The Danish crown imposed a trade monopoly on behalf of one of its own companies and heavily penalized those who took their business elsewhere.

Into this harsh environment Jón Vídalín was born in 1666…

Lutherans Saints #14: Maud Powlas

June 9, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Eleven-year-old Maud heard Jesus’ call to serve in Japan. For the next decade and a half she prayed and prepared for it, imagining herself walking through a rural village on the other side of the world, Bible in hand, telling “the boys and girls of Japan about Jesus their Savior.” Her sole wish was to evangelize, bringing hope of salvation to those who’d never heard the good news.

The other missionaries said no.

That was the rule “in the field”: decisions were made by a strict majority vote—democratic in nature, except for the not insignificant matter of excluding women—and the longer-term missionaries in Japan determined that what they needed was not more evangelism, but more works of mercy. Locals converts needed to see that service to the needy was part and parcel of the gospel. Besides that, the need was enormous: at the time, neither Japanese culture nor the Japanese state perceived any obligation to help the suffering. The Christians had their work cut out for them—and Maud, utterly unqualified for the task, was going to lead the way…

Lutheran Saints #13: Johann Friedrich Oberlin

May 26, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Johann Friedrich Oberlin is well-enough remembered to have an American college and a Japanese university named after him, not to mention countless streets in Alsace and a museum in his old home. But if any saint proves the point that no one can be a saint in isolation—that saintliness is a communal activity—it’s Oberlin. To remember this saint rightly is to bring back to remembrance the other less famous saints surrounding him as well.

It was not Oberlin but Jean-Georges Stuber who was a pioneer in the destitute parish of the Ban de la Roche, or “stone valley,” in a deep and isolated pocket of the Vosges mountains to the west of Strasbourg, France. Though these two pastors arrived more than a century after the Thirty Years’ War, the community still bore the scars of the devastating conflict and had never recovered. No road reached the village of Waldersbach or the other nearby hamlets, and no bridge crossed the fast-flowing Bruche River. The only schoolteacher was a man who had grown too old to look after his pigs anymore. The previous pastor hadn’t seen or used an actual Bible in more than twenty years. The soil was depleted, the yield of the farms was poor, and the people just barely managed not to starve.

Stuber took the post in the Ban de la Roche twice, serving a total of fourteen years, before he finally relented and accepted a more prestigious call to the St. Thomas Church in Strasbourg. He had laid the groundwork for the community’s renewal by finding a better schoolteacher, creating primers to instruct in reading, and preaching repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. But the Ban de la Roche was the last place anybody wanted to go; it was perceived more as a punishment than a parish. In the end, only one man was willing to take such a humiliating call as a worthy way to serve God: Johann Friedrich Oberlin…

Lutheran Saints #12: Albrecht Dürer

March 31, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

It would have been gift enough to the world if Albrecht Dürer had only been an artist.

The third of eighteen children, he was apprenticed first to his goldsmith father and later to the most highly regarded painter in his hometown of Nuremberg. From both Albrecht learned a variety of skills, artistic and technical: silver point, engraving, pen, brush, gouache and watercolor, woodcuts. As a young man he toured throughout Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, learning ever more in his field. After a return home for an arranged marriage to a woman named Agnes Frey—not a happy union—he set off again to see the great centers of the Renaissance in Italy: Venice, Padua, Mantua, and Cremona. The journey south made such an impact on young Albrecht that his return is credited with the birth of the Renaissance in northern Europe. When opportunity arose he returned to Italy and stayed from 1505 to 1507.

Once settled back again home in Nuremberg, Albrecht became extraordinarily productive and by the time of his death had produced “more than six dozen paintings, more than a hundred engravings, about two hundred and fifty woodcuts, more than a thousand drawings, and three printed books on geometry, fortification and the theory of human proportions.” His good friend Pirckheimer composed a epitaph befitting the high regard in which the artist was held: Quicquid Alberti Dureri mortale fuit sub hoc conditur tumulo, “Whatever was mortal of Albrecht Dürer is covered by this tomb”…