When Martin Luther died on February 18, 1546, during a trip back to his hometown of Eisleben, Germany, it is said that plaster was made and spread over his lifeless face and hands. Lukas Furtenagel, who also composed several sketches of the deceased reformer, is named as one of two individuals who applied the wet paste to the cadaver, producing a mold for a death mask that preserved Luther’s features.
Such undertakings were not uncommon for the time. They were intended, typically, as artifacts that facilitated the work of memory and mourning, offering a tangible connection to a life that was otherwise lost.
The eventual fate of Luther’s death mask, however, is uncertain. Some historians have held that the mold was not created at Luther’s death but only days afterward—or even that it was never cast at all. The original is nevertheless claimed to be housed today at the Market Church in Halle, Germany, though it was altered throughout the centuries for a life-size wax statue of Luther that once stood in the city.
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Copies of the mask, original or not, were also made and gifted to places with strong associations to Luther’s life and thought, such as Wittenberg and Eisenach. One copy found its way out of Europe after the Second World War and is now located at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, on the third floor of Gullixson Hall.
Last summer, Luther Seminary announced that it would sell its 8.5-acre campus after 120 years at the site. President Robin Steinke said that the move will provide “a more nimble model” for the seminary going forward, bolstered by a sale that could fetch well over $9 million. Carlos Peña, chair of the seminary’s board of directors, framed the transition as an opportunity to lean “into our mission in new, exciting ways.” The result of this “bold” undertaking, Peña said, will be “high-quality online education experiences alongside strategic in-person learning.”
For those of us too young to have any significant memories of the 1988 merger that formed the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, it is difficult to appreciate these developments as exciting. Rather, the sale of Luther Seminary is indicative of a larger loss, not simply of buildings or land but of a world that is collapsing around us with astonishing speed. At its inception, the ELCA had more than 5 million members. The denomination’s Office of Research and Evaluation projects that by 2050, there may be fewer than 67,000.
Communities, including ecclesial ones, rise and fall, particularly in times of pronounced social upheaval. The ELCA is not alone among deteriorating church bodies, nor is my generation alone in the sense of loss it confronts. But what is unique to our experience is that as we watch the wreckage rise around us, holding the hand of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, we are told to understand such developments as nimble, strategic, and bold.
There is something more at work here than another denomination falling into dissolution. The overwhelming impression this moment conveys is that my generation has been cast as stewards of decline, our energies and resources used to stay the senescence that has taken hold of the body, devoted to prolonging its life, dutifully and without question, while our own lives slip gradually away. If we ask what the previous generation has handed down to us of what was safeguarded for them, the answer appears to be incapacitated institutions, their communities worn thin. Worse, the decay is concealed by marketing slogans designed to dull our sense of what is true and what is not.
Some of us refuse this potion. Our hands are occupied readying the plaster.
We are told that Luther’s body was placed in a casket and, over the course of three days, processed northeastward to Wittenberg. In his oration at Luther’s funeral, Philip Melanchthon remarked that those in the community were now “orphans bereft,” but in the time ahead they could return to Luther’s grave, buried beneath the Castle Church pulpit, take heart, and carry on the movement.
Something similar is expressed in book 2 of the Aeneid, in which Aeneas recounts to Dido the story of his frantic search for Creusa among the toppling ruins of Troy. Aeneas’s quest came to an end in a moment of paralyzing grief, he relates, when he encountered only her ghost. Though she appears as but a shadow, Creusa nevertheless instructs Aeneas to face the future and leave her and his city behind.
But we are not so fortunate as these. To those who visit Luther Seminary’s campus in the future, no monuments will be found to mourn, nor any ghosts that urge us on. So it is we who must set our faces to the sea and set sail.
