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Of Good Comfort: Martin Luther’s Letters to the Depressed and their Significance for Pastoral Care Today by Stephen Pietsch (review)

Stephen Pietsch, a lecturer in pastoral theology and counseling at the Australian Lutheran College in Adelaide, South Australia, has probed twenty-one of Luther’s letters to people suffering from depression, setting the Reformer into conversation with contemporary theorists, and suggesting ways in which Luther’s insights might serve pastors today. While Luther’s world is strange to us in many aspects, it is “strangely familiar” to use the language of Pietsch’s first chapter. What in the sixteenth century was called “melancholy” is now given the name “depression.” Luther himself experienced it and he became skilled in diagnosing and addressing it as a theologian who cared for souls. Drawing on the stellar work of Gerhard Ebeling (Luthers Seelsorge, 1997), Pietsch recognizes that Luther’s theology was not segregated from his pastoral care of Christians. Consolation is grounded in God’s justification of the ungodly through faith for the sake of Christ. Pietsch aptly sets Luther’s own pastoral writings in the context of the late medieval tradition of spiritual care. He demonstrates how Luther used the “art of the letter” as a means to enter into the sufferings of the depressed, anchoring them in Christ and his sure promises that draw them outside of morbid introspection into the crucified and risen Savior. Pietsch carefully examines Luther’s letters to Wittenberg student Jerome Weller and the young Prince Joachim of Anhalt showing how Luther used his evangelical doctrine for consolation while attending to their social situations in offering practical advice. From these and other individual cases, Pietsch demonstrates Luther’s pastoral hermeneutic of the Holy Scriptures as biblical texts are cited to give comfort and direction.