"still today the members of Christ are damp with blood": The Body in Sixteenth-Century Lutheran Passion Piety

Abstract

This article examines an aspect of early Lutheran passion piety overlooked in present scholarship: namely, how believers were taught to discern Christ's suffering body in the present and to identify themselves with it. It shows how the fear of persecution shaped the unfolding Lutheran Passion tradition, while arguing that authors aimed to heighten fear of the other by setting the Roman party outside the bounds of Christianity and to assure the faithful of their invulnerability to genuine harm and death as members of Christ's body. William R. Reddy's concept of "emotives"is employed to show how readers were encouraged to engage in self-examination and self-alteration through meditation on the thoughts and feelings of Christ and his friends and enemies, scriptural and present. Lutheran Passion books depict self and society as a battleground between God and Satan and their respective human allies, thus setting the reader in God's "emotional regime."

Department(s)

Language, Cultures and Religions

Document Type

Article

DOI

10.1086/727955

Publication Date

3-1-2023

Journal Title

Sixteenth Century Journal

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