In The Reformation of Suffering Ronald Rittgers argues that Christian attempts to understand suffering and provide consolation for it changed profoundly during the Reformation. Furthermore, as the response to a fundamental and universal human experience, these changes constitute a crucial component of both the innovation and the legacy of the Reformation. The book’s first three chapters establish the late medieval context for the Reformation’s revolution in the understanding of suffering. Chapter 1 focuses on essential pastoral resources, primarily sacramental, available to minister to suffering Christians, especially in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Rittgers concludes that the late medieval identification of suffering as a form of penance, and thus as a manifestation of divine grace and not just punishment for sin, was “a significant and novel contribution to the history of suffering in the Christian West” (24). Chapter 2 investigates the parallel development of a ministry of verbal solace from its roots in the consolation literature of the ancient world to its full development in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance; chapter 3 analyzes the creation by late medieval German mystics of a spirituality that identified suffering as a means of union with the Godhead and highlighted the connections between the suffering of the individual Christian and the Passion of Christ.

The rest of the book is dedicated to how the Reformation changed Christian teaching on suffering and the implications of that change for pastoral theology and practice into the confessional age. Chapters 4 and 5 investigate the roots of the reformation of suffering in Luther’s developing understanding of salvation: as Luther’s soteriology changed, he came to reject the identification of suffering as penance and emphasized instead its role in testing and strengthening faith. Chapters 6 through 10 then investigate the pastoral implications of this theological breakthrough in the Wittenberg Reformation and beyond through analyses of evangelical church ordinances, consolation literature written by the evangelical clergy, and echoes of these in works written by members of the laity. These establish the Wittenberg message as a via media between the relative neglect of this topic by Zwingli and the much more intensive engagement with it of the Reformation radicals, which echoed throughout the evangelical universe.

In his introduction, Rittgers claims that “this is not a book about early modern confessionalization, at least not in the first place, which is something of a novelty in German Reformation Studies” (6). In fact, his book is neither as divorced from studies of confessionalization nor as novel as he claims. Describing the response to suffering as a battlefield on which the confessions fought, he concludes: “This reformation of suffering, in turn, played an extremely important role in the confessionalization of early modern Germany” (191). At the center of Rittgers’s enterprise is, in fact, a redefinition of confessionalization that includes consolation as well as discipline, and he openly challenges what he regards as the implicit value judgments denigrating evangelical piety in most studies of confessionalization. He argues instead that “the Wittenberg religion was more human, more embodied, more communal, and more affirming of emotion than much recent scholarship has appreciated” (231). In this way, The Reformation of Suffering provides a valuable corrective to our understanding of the confessionalization process and the piety it produced in evangelical areas. However, its implications are not as broad as they initially appear. As Rittgers himself acknowledges, his reliance in the last chapter on “ego-documents” — private letters, family chronicles, diaries, private works of devotion, and autobiographies — risks returning our understanding of the popular response to the Reformation into an urban event limited to a small, elite group with the time, resources, and education to record their thoughts and feelings. More importantly, this discussion occurs without reference to the growing body of literature that both critiques and adapts the confessionalization thesis to new contexts, especially those in which the role of the state is absent or seriously curtailed, and social regulation within the community instead of social discipline from without is recognized as an important part of the confessionalization process.