December 12, 2025 Show with Angus Stewart on “How Katie Helped the Reformation”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron.

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And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth, who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this 12th day of December 2025.

I'm thrilled to have back a returning guest that I truly love interviewing. His name is Angus Stewart. He is pastor of Covenant Protestant Reform Church of Ballymena, Northern Ireland. And today, we're going to be addressing how Katie helped the Reformation, the unusual courtship and union of Martin Luther and Katie Luther, the most significant marriage of the Reformation, considered 500 years later.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, pastor Angus Stewart.

Lovely to be back with you again, Chris. We've got a great subject to discuss tonight.

Amen. First of all, tell our listeners about Covenant Protestant Reform Church of Ballymena, Northern.

Ireland.

The Covenant Protestant Reform Church, or the CPRC, or just Covenant Church, is a faithful congregation in Northern Ireland that holds to the Reformed confessions with some lovely godly saints. We're busy spreading the word and seeking to serve the Lord Jesus Christ.

We have a website, CPRC .co .uk, with lots on there, especially of late, Urdu, the official language of Pakistan. We're organizing a conference in a castle in Northern Ireland in connection with the British Reformed Fellowship.

The first week in August, the theme is Know Your God on the subject of the glory of God, his persons, his trinity. And we're going to welcome guests from all around the world. And if any of your listeners tonight are interested, they can look up the British Reformed Fellowship, do a search for it.

They'll come to the website. There are some details about this conference. And we'll be getting out the booking form, Lord willing, within the next month.

And you offer, if I'm not mistaken, on your website, the Three Forms of Unity in many different languages, absolutely free?

Yes. We give out free copies of the Three Forms of Unity and a little pink book. And then we have online copies in dozens of different languages. Some of them, we have the Heidelberg Catechism, Belgic Confession, and Cairns of Dort, all three in a particular language.

Some we've won or some were two. We've two. A friend from Pakistan, hopefully I was talking with him today, he hopes to get us fairly soon the Urdu translation of the Cairns of Dort. So it's continually growing.

It's a lovely resource.

Well, I've got to let a member of my own congregation here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, who is from Pakistan, I've got to let him know about that. So I will do so the next time I'm speaking with him, which will probably be this Lord's Day.

Very nice.

Alrighty. Well, I love the theme that you have chosen for today. I can't recall ever doing an entire program focusing on the marriage of Martin and Katie Luther, with special emphasis on Katie. And if you can tell us when this fascination of your own began with this couple.

That's a very good question. I could approach that one from several angles. My wife is in the room with me and she's just looked over and grinned. So that's made up my mind which angle. Mary and I got married on the 475th anniversary of Martin and Katie Luther.

He got married, they got married on Tuesday, the 13th of June, 1525. And Mary and I got married on the 13th of June, 2475 years later. And it was also a Tuesday. We didn't know it at the time. You may have realized, Chris, that I'm very interested in history.

So when I became a Christian, I was learning Christian history. I looked up my own birthday and was rather disappointed that nothing significant happened on that day. But Mary helped me again on this one.

When we got married, we had the same marriage day as Martin and Katie. So that was really special. And then, Chris, this one, you might think I'm stretching a point, but I assure you it's true. On the 500th anniversary, so we got married on the 475th anniversary, 13th of June.

On the 500th anniversary, a man in our church, Timothy Spence, and his wife from Singapore, Huiyi, they got married on the 13th of June, 2025. So they actually got the 500th anniversary, which was a rounder number than us, 475.

But they didn't get the right day of the week. They were married on a Friday. And there was a reason for that. Tim, like us, wasn't thinking of Martin Luther's wedding day. He was thinking, ah, Friday the 13th, I want to get married.

I need to book a hotel for the reception. And because of, sadly in Northern Ireland, we have superstitious people too, Friday the 13th being unlucky. So then he was, he could get the hotel of his choice on Friday the 13th, because they were all, they were all clear.

It was also very, very convenient for me personally, because then I could say to Mary that as a special treat on her 25th wedding anniversary, I'd take her somewhere special, to the hotel that my friend and church member was paying for, which would have been a whole lot nicer than the two of us would have made otherwise.

So we had a lovely day all round.

I've got to keep that in mind in case I could get a discount here sometime when I need to book a hotel, if it's going to be near Friday the 13th. I'm assuming that may be as similar as a case here in the United States, except I'm sure the hotels in Salem, Massachusetts will be booked.

Since it seems that a lot of witches and wannabes make pilgrimages to Salem, Massachusetts, and that might be a very popular day with them, I don't know. But one question that comes up every time I do a program on Martin Luther, and in this case, it's Martin and Katie, every time Lutherans who see that I am a Reformed Baptist, and that my guests very often are Calvinists, I do sometimes have Lutheran guests on the program as well.

But when my guest is a Calvinist, they are puzzled as to why I am giving honor to Martin Luther. Sometimes it's just a pleasant surprise, and sometimes I'm treated with an indignant, hostile attitude that I should be minding my own business and staying out of their history and their church, because they think that we manufacture false things about Luther to make him resemble Calvin more than, in their minds, than he actually did resemble Calvin.

But tell us why you, as a Reformed pastor, have a great admiration for Luther to begin with.

That's a good question. Before I answer it, I could give an interesting example of how a Lutheran body asked me to write a piece about Martin and Katie Luther. Wow. Unfortunately, Chris, you know how this goes.

Sometimes you get a request where you're just really, really busy. And that was one of the few requests in my life as a minister that I ever actually turned down. They wanted just a few words for quite a scholarly, prestigious Lutheran periodical, and quite a liberal one too, which really shocked me.

I don't get too many offers to write in scholarly theological journals from liberal Lutherans. I'd written a bit about that before, and I had some ideas as to why this marriage was important, but, as I say, I had to decline it.

With regard to Luther himself, there are so many ways we value Luther. One is at a purely human level, his amazing personality and courage. You've got to admire a man. He was so much fun, the personal struggles he went through.

Then, of course, there was the great discovery by God's grace of justification by faith alone. I've written a paper and given speeches on Luther, on his doctrine of God saving righteousness, which was a great blessing to me.

Of course, there's Martin Luther's bondage of the will, 1525, the 500th anniversary of which is also this year. And Katie Luther, she said to Martin, because Martin was wondering, should he respond to Erasmus, promoting the heresy of free will?

And sometimes he thought he shouldn't. He said, the book is so poor, it's hardly deserving of a response. And we as Christians all experience that. Someone writes something that's false and you say, boy, do I have to refute this one more time?

Even somebody who's spiritually blind could almost see through this nonsense that the guy's writing. But Katie was the one who pushed him to write that. So Luther himself, I love him to bits. Mary and I went to Germany in 2012.

12, and had a fantastic holiday in the eastern parts of Germany. We were in Eisleben where Luther was born and died. We went to the Wartburg, where he translated the New Testament to German. We walked through Wittenberg.

Mary and I would love to go back. So many good reasons, such a great figure. But I better stop there because I could eat up the whole two hours talking about how much we love Martin Luther. Maybe our Luther fans won't accept it or believe it, but we are genuine.

We have our differences with Luther, but we do admire him.

And a lot of these discoveries, as you referred to it, when he discovered justification by faith, a lot of these discoveries came about while he was translating the New Testament into German, having the freedom to do so, no longer being under the yoke of Rome, right?

Yes. And Luther, as he translated the Bible, as he preached, as he defended the truths, and in the early days, he expected the Pope and the leaders to come to agree with what he was saying in Scripture.

Think, for instance, of the priesthood of all believers. What a wonderful truth that is. And no one can write as persuasively and beautifully on such a theme as Luther. His courage in translating the Bible, getting it out to the people, and even this issue of marrying Mary and Katie, getting her out of the nunnery, that provoked him to look, and others coming out of the nunnery, to look at the issue of monastic vows, the third commandment.

Then marriage, he had to look at, is marriage a sacrament? One of the seven sacraments of Rome, as she has stated it in more recent times. One thing led to another thing. And in his views of eschatology, I mean, the whole package, a great struggle.

Fantastic, man.

Well, how did Martin and Katie meet?

How did they meet? Well, the day that they met is recorded in history. She escaped from a Cistercian monastery of Nimshin. She and 11 other ladies had embraced the Reformation gospel, wanted to get out of the convent.

And Luther had a friend, a Torgau merchant called Leonhard Koppa. And Koppa came to deliver herring to the nunnery. He'd gotten a message somehow or other to these ladies. And on the Saturday, the day before Easter in 1523, they managed to climb inside or around or behind the empty, the now empty herring barrels on the back of the cart of Leonhard Koppa.

And this was sort of like the Reformation's great escape. Right. Kolditz Castle, where a number of Allied prisoners escaped in World War II, isn't that far away. So there was the great escape from World War II camps, but there was also the great escape 400 years before World War II.

And the to-be Mrs. Luther was one of the 12. And then later on, just a few days there, she made it to Wittenberg. Three of the 12 then left, but nine of the 12 made it there. And then Luther met these nine ladies when they were brought to Wittenberg, and he met her, and then he wrote a defense of this great escape.

Luther realized that the Roman Catholic Church would have made hay of this. And he wanted to, well, we would say in the 21st century, he wanted to get ahead of the news. So he wanted to get out there first, a track defending the escape of these ladies.

And in there, we have his first reference to her, because he lists her among the ladies who had escaped from the monastery.

And so, but we don't know definitively whether or not she was actually in the herring barrel. She may have just been hiding behind some barrels.

Yes. One of the more recent biographers, I think it was Eric McTaxis, he reckons that there's been a certain amount of embellishing about putting him in the herring barrels. But it's hard to be definitive on a question like that.

There was a big risk to it, escaping from this monastery, because it was a criminal offense for the ladies to escape, and for anyone to aid and abet. And then this cart, or its passage from Nimshin Monastery to Torgau, where Capa lived, they had to go through the territory of Duke George, who hated Luther with a passion.

And had they been caught on that part of the journey, there would have been a great deal of grief for all parties concerned.

Do you think they would have been executed? Or how severely would it have been?

It's very possible that various things could have been done. Capa would have been in trouble. He had a couple of men who helped him and helped the ladies get down from the wall. The ladies themselves.

I mean, the least that would have happened would have, I suppose, they'd have been sent back. But who knows what way the judges would have decided. Maybe they wanted to make an example of it. There really had been monks escaping.

But this was the first, from the monasteries, but this was the first recorded instance we have of nuns. And Martin Luther was a great man for firsts. That he had had the first great escape of a bunch of nuns.

And then the students, they said, we've got 12 Vestal Virgins escaped from the nunnery, and they're all keen to get married.

Now, how quickly did Katie and Luther acknowledge some kind of an attraction to each other? And who was the first to reveal that truth to the other one?

That's interesting. When the nine ladies came to Wittenberg, they made to find homes for them, jobs, spouses. And eventually, Katie was the only one left. After two years, she was the only one left. And then the question is, you know, who's this lady going to marry?

And then there were a couple of men who wanted to marry her. One was an alumni at the university. And another one was a Christian pastor at Dr. Glatz. And neither of these worked out. And then she said to Nicholas von Amsdorff that she would be open to a marriage proposal from either Amsdorff himself or Dr. Luther.

So as far as we know, she was the one who started it. So Martin Luther, he can initiate the Reformation under the grace of God and his good problems. But he wasn't the first or pride mover in his own marriage.

Do you know what his initial reaction to this was? It is learning this.

Luther's own attitude towards marriage, in general, was sort of ambivalent. He thought it would be a good idea to marry to be a good example. But it may bring the Reformation to disrepute because the papacy and the ardent Roman Catholics are just going to claim, oh, here we go again.

They discovered these doctrines in order to get out of their vows, in order to get married because they wanted a woman. And then there was the issue of the peasants' revolt. So this was a bad time. But then Luther thought that his position, see, I'm giving you the pros and cons.

His position was a bit contradictory because he was saying that these women should marry. And he was saying to his friends that they should marry. And then they were saying to him, well, why don't you get married yourself?

But their marriage union was very, very unusual because some people marry, or people marry for different reasons. And these reasons vary over the ages. Like some people get married for money or to maintain their social standards or to form alliances between one country and another country.

But Luther himself mentions that he get married to annoy the Pope, confuse the devil, and to make good on his father's desire that Martin have children so that his father could be a grandfather by him.

Because when Luther went into the Augustinian Monastery in the first place, his father had spent a lot of money on his education. He was going to be a lawyer. Then Luther was almost struck by lightning in Stotterheim in 1505.

He took an oath, a sinful oath as it turns out, in the name of St. Anne, that if he was spared, he would go to a monastery. And his father was furious. I spent all that money on you. Now you're going to be a poor monk.

You're never going to get married. I'm not going to have any grandchildren. And then as Luther began to understand the scriptures, he thought, well, if I get married and if God gives us children, my father, Hans, will be delighted.

Luther himself tells us that he didn't love Katie when they got married. He cherished her. But he married her because she thought she needed a wife. He respected, valued her. But the two of them, we would say, grew into love.

And they really loved each other very, very deep. It was a wonderful union.

Yeah, that is very reminiscent of a very dear personal friend of mine, Richard Bennett. I don't know if you're familiar with the late Richard Bennett.

Yes.

He was a Roman Catholic priest who was saved after an automobile accident. I think it was a Jeep accident. And eventually became a Reformed Baptist evangelist and author, founder of Berean Beacon Ministries.

But he also, when he got married, said that his wife and he did not initially love each other. But they just thought it was a wise thing to do. And that's what they did. And do you know if Katie was at all insulted by the fact that a primary reason Luther was marrying her was to infuriate the Pope?

Well, there are worse reasons for getting married than that. Katie herself was a very spirited lady. And I think it was as well, because Martin had such a big personality. If she'd have been a wallflower, she could have been completely overpowered by him.

She also had a sense of humor. And Martin Luther had such a hold on people's hearts that I really don't think she was or even would have been annoyed.

By the way, we have a listener already in Moundsville, Alabama. And he says, and I don't know what particular time reference he's talking about, but Ted in Moundsville, Alabama says, I thought Luther fell down some steps.

I don't know what he's referring to.

I'm not sure either. I'm wondering, is he talking about Luther's conversion? I do have a story involving the two of them that I'm for sure involves falling down. And it ties in a little bit with what you mentioned about Richard Bennett.

Katie Luther herself actually had a sort of car accident that led to her death. Obviously didn't have cars in the 16th century. But when she was moving to Torgau, where Leonard Coppa was from, the guy that brought her out of the nunnery, her coach hit a rut or something.

And then she was thrown from the carriage into some sort of shuck or trench. She got wet. It was in December or at least late in the year. She died in the 10th of December of that year. And then she caught pneumonia and died.

So that's at least a fall on that title a little bit Richard Bennett. But since I don't know exactly what the question means, it's always hard to come up with an answer to it.

Yes. Ted just clarified that he was talking about Richard Bennett, not Martin Luther. Well, Ted, how am I supposed to know that unless you put that in the comment? Okay. Don't get snippy with me, pal.

As far as I remember, Richard Bennett was in an automobile accident. But you may want to verify that yourself. There is no doubt an article and a video of him giving his testimony. And perhaps I'm wrong.

Perhaps my memory is faulty. It won't be the first time. But I thought for sure it was a Jeep accident. But like I said, I could be wrong. Anyway, we are going to our first commercial break. When we return, we'll get some more details from you about their marriage.

And then we will try to focus more on how Katie blessed the Reformation. This may be entirely new information for me. And I'm dying to hear it with bated breath. But if anybody else has a question for us, send it to ChrisArnzen at gmail .com.

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That's royaldiadem .com. Make sure you mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. And we're now back with our guest today, Pastor Angus Stewart of Covenant Protestant Reformed Church in Ballymena, Northern Ireland.

And we are talking about how Katie helped the Reformation, the unusual courtship and marriage of Martin and Katie Luther. And this is, according to my guest, the most significant marriage in the Protestant Reformation.

If you have any questions of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence. You may have said this already, but how long after their meeting when she either climbed out of the herring barrel or out from amongst the barrels, how long after that did they get married?

It was two years and about two months.

Okay. And tell us something interesting about their actual marriage, some things that our listeners might not know about them, how they interacted and how their gifts came to blend together in that sacred union.

Of theirs.

There's so many things I could say there. But what I'll begin with, Chris, if you permit, is some features to how they came together. And I want to add for the sake of our listeners, especially for parents and parents with youngish children, is that though Martin Luther was a great example in so many things, he is atypical in other things.

And I'm quite happy with Martin Luther doing it, but I wouldn't recommend that other people do this. For instance, the two of them had a very short courtship. Now, when you're as godly and busy as Martin Luther, that's permissible.

But for most mortals, that's not a good idea. Another thing is that Katie's parents didn't approve of the wedding. Katie's parents, the ones who put her in the monastery in the first place, were, so far as all I've been able to read, ardent Roman Catholics.

Wow. Did they remain that way?

They were really upset that she left the monastery, that she became a Protestant Christian, and then that she married Martin Luther. I mean, Martin Luther to 16th century Roman Catholics was probably worse than Arius, the heretic.

From their perspective, this is what you do not want your daughter to do. Ordinarily, we would say to young people that you want your parents' approval. Well, she emphatically didn't have the approval.

Then Martin Luther himself, his friends didn't really approve of it either. Katie had a strong personality. When it got out that he was going to marry her or had married her, out of the nine that had made it there, his friends uniformly said, oh no, not that one.

They were.

Pushing him to get married, but just.

Not her. Yes. And then when he got married on the 13th of June, he didn't tell Melanchthon, his co-laborer at the university, his main co-laborer and quite possibly his best friend. So he got married without even letting his best friend know.

But Luther knew Melanchthon, and Melanchthon was more timid and cautious. And so what Luther did, and there's a time for this, for wise, mature people to do it, sometimes you do something that you know is right and you present people with a fait accompli.

And that's what he did with Melanchthon. And then he basically said to Melanchthon, well, I got married, I had my reasons, and they were good reasons. Now we're married, you can't stop it anyway. Now get used to it.

Now, did he not invite Melanchthon because it was a very, very tiny gathering for his wedding ceremony, or what was the reasoning?

Well, that was part of it. But he kept the thing close under wraps. They were just, besides him and Katie, there were five others there. And one of them was the pastor who performed the ceremony, Johannes Bougenhaven.

And then two others were the people, Lucas Cranach, the famous portrait painter, and his wife, with whom Katie was staying at the time. But he didn't invite Melanchthon to that meeting because he thought Melanchthon was just too cautious and Melanchthon would have urged don't do it.

And especially Melanchthon would have said, look, we're in the midst of the Peasants' Revolt. It was 1525. It was in the midst of the Peasants' Revolt. Now is not a good time. Now you mean... And the other thing is, the two of them got engaged and married in one day.

We don't recommend that for our Christian young people either.

So.

That was a pretty short courtship, and then they engaged and they got married and it was all over.

So those two years after they met, they were not courting?

No, no, they were not. They were not courting. They got to know each other more in the latter days. Once she was interested in him and then he changed his mind, they would have bumped into each other.

He knew her name. She was staying with people. She stayed in two different homes that Luther knew, and especially the Cranachs, he would have visited them. But yeah, it wasn't a long courtship, and then of course, she also sort of made the first move.

Normally, that isn't a good thing, but there are some men out there who are perhaps so slow, dim-witted, that sometimes a girl might need to, you know, give him a hint. So unusual, but not altogether outside the boundaries.

And the Luther's in-laws, Katie's parents, who hated this marriage because they were devout Roman Catholics, did they ever come to the truth of the gospel and the Reformation?