Grace, Faith, Scripture, Spirit

The chapter examines the prolific quantity of writings on death and the afterlife that Lutheran authors produced in the second half of the sixteenth century, and argues that the constitutive presuppositions of their discourse came to be centered on four of Luther’s famous sola principles. Sola gratia, “by grace alone,” gave a new prominence among the last things to death, since it was through acknowledging the fact of her own finitude that a person came to realize that the present time was the kairos, the “time of grace” in which salvation is freely available to all believers. Sola fide, “by faith alone,” meant that elaborate regimes of spiritual exercise of the kind followed by Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits were regarded with suspicion by Lutherans, since exercise could easily become a self-justifying work. Sola scriptura held that “scripture alone” was the authoritative guide for faith, and that it required only to be heard and believed; meditation accordingly became reduced to the simple hearing and believing of God’s Word. The principle of solo spiritu, which states that the Word becomes effective in the believer “by the Spirit alone,” is reflected in exhortations to readers to let the Spirit enter their hearts and minds, and even take over their language, as they learn to replace their habitual words for death with the vocabulary of peaceful sleep and repose that the Spirit uses in the Bible.