Martin Luther (1483–1546), the great intellectual leader of the Protestant Reformation in Germany, viewed human existence as a spiritual battlefield, with each person’s eternal fate hanging in the balance. To properly equip individuals for the spiritual trials they will face, Luther believed that everyone has both a right and a need to direct access to Scripture. Desiring to make the Bible more accessible to his countrymen, he assumed the task of translating it into contemporary German. Luther’s translation includes Prefaces to the different Books of the Bible. In them, he offers his insights into a variety of textual and theological issues. Below are the opening paragraphs of Luther’s Preface to the Book of Job, which concerns the problem of evil.
Preface to the Book of Job (1524)
The book of Job deals with the question, whether misfortune can come to the righteous from God. Job stands fast, and holds that God chastises even the righteous without reason, to His praise, as Christ also says, in John 9:3, of the man who was born blind.
His friends take the other side and make a great, long talk, defending God’s justice, and saying that He punishes no righteous man; if He punishes, then the man who is punished must have sinned. They have a worldly and human idea of God and His righteousness, as though He were like a man and His law were like the world’s law.
Job, to be sure, when he is in danger of death, talks, in his human weakness, too much against God, and thus sins amidst his sufferings; nevertheless, he insists that he has not deserved this suffering more than others have; and that is true. But at last God decides that Job, by speaking against Him, has spoken wrongly, in his suffering; but that he spoke the truth in what he said, replying to his friends, about his innocence before the suffering came.
Thus this book leads the history up to this point, — God alone is righteous, and yet one man is more righteous than another, even before God. It is written for our comfort, in order that we may know that God allows even His great saints to stumble, especially in adversity. Before Job comes into fear of death, he praises God at the theft of his goods and the death of his children; but when death is in prospect and God withdraws Himself, his words show what kind of ideas a man, however holy he may be, has against God, when he gets the notion that God is not God, but only a judge and wrathful tyrant, who applies force and cares nothing about a good life. This is the finest part of this book. It is understood only by those who also experience and feel what it is to suffer the wrath and judgment of God, and to have His grace hidden…
Martin Luther, “Prefaces to the Books of the Bible,” trans. C. M. Jacobs.