Martin Luther

Thoughts on Marriage and Childbearing

It seems life was not so different in 1522. I found the paragraph about how to encourage women in childbirth particularly challenging/troubling, given that death was a very real possibility for women of that age.

Work with all your might to bring forth the child. Should it mean your death, then depart happily, for you will die in a noble deed and in subservience to God. If you were not a woman you should now wish to be one for the sake of this very work alone, that you might thus gloriously suffer and even die in the performance of God’s work and will.

Those are tough words for a woman or husband of any century to say or swallow. It takes a pretty incredible faith to believe what you are doing (bearing children) is within the will of God and pleasing to him even when things go catastrophically wrong. I think folks of that time had much less perceived control over their lives health wise than we do. Due to this, they had a much greater sense of God's providence and sovereignty. Essentially they were forced to trust in God alone rather than all the scientific medical doo-dads we have now a days. Guess what though, we still all die, just usually not so young.

More exerpts:

But he who recognises the estate of marriage will find therein delight, love, and joy without end; as Solomon says, “He who finds a wife finds a good thing,” etc. [Prov. 18:22].

Now the ones who recognise the estate of marriage are those who firmly believe that God himself instituted it, brought husband and wife together, and ordained that they should beget children and care for them. For this they have God’s word, Genesis 1 [:28], and they can be certain that he does not lie. They can therefore also be certain that the estate of marriage and everything that goes with it in the way of conduct, works, and suffering is pleasing to God. Now tell me, how can the heart have greater good, joy, and delight than in God, when one is certain that his estate, conduct, and work is pleasing to God?

I say these things in order that we may learn how honourable a thing it is to live in that estate which God has ordained. In it we find God’s word and good pleasure, by which all the works, conduct, and sufferings of that estate become holy, godly, and precious so that Solomon even congratulates such a man and says in Proverbs 5 [:18], “Rejoice in the wife of your youth,” and again in Ecclesiastes 11 [9:9], “Enjoy life with the wife whom you love all the days of your vain life.”