A Mighty Fortress

Ein feste Burg is Luther's free reworking of Psalm 46, God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble, and it shows exactly what he wanted congregational song to be, scripture translated not word for word but into the fighting idiom of his own people. The psalm's refuge becomes a fortress, the psalm's raging nations become the old evil enemy, armed with deep guile and great might, and the psalm's stillness becomes the Reformation's central doctrine, with our own strength nothing is accomplished, but for us fights the right man, whom God himself has chosen, named in the hymn as Jesus Christ, the Lord of hosts.

The final stanza stares down the worst, let them take body, goods, honour, child and wife, the kingdom must remain ours. Luther wrote both words and melody, probably in the late 1520s, years of plague in Wittenberg and mounting political danger, and though later legend pictured it sung at the Diet of Worms in 1521, the hymn did not yet exist, one of several romantic accretions the sober history has had to shed. What is true is its function, the chorale as Luther conceived it put doctrine into the congregation's own mouth in its own tongue, and no chorale did it more memorably. Heinrich Heine, no friend of churches, called it the Marseillaise of the Reformation.

The hymn became the anthem of Lutheran identity and then escaped denominational bounds altogether. Bach built his cantata Ein feste Burg on it and harmonized the melody in versions organists have played ever since. Mendelssohn wove the chorale through the finale of his Reformation Symphony, Meyerbeer threaded it through an opera, and Wagner, Raff and others quoted it as the instantly legible sound of German Protestantism, while Debussy quoted it hostilely in wartime.

English speaking congregations received it through dozens of translations, of which two dominate, Thomas Carlyle's A safe stronghold our God is still and Frederick Henry Hedge's 1853 A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing, the version most North American hymnals print. It is sung every Reformation Day, at church anniversaries and state occasions in Lutheran countries, and it is carved into the stone of the Luther memorials, including the tower of the Castle Church at Wittenberg, whose ring bears the first line in letters visible across the town. The hymn's afterlife has its shadows, it was conscripted into nationalist causes Luther could not have imagined, and postwar German Protestantism has handled its martial confidence with care, but the chorale itself has outlasted every use made of it, still doing its first job, giving a congregation one voice.