An Elusive Luther Quote in the Römerbrief March 9, 2025

This is not particularly important, but it was kind of fun and the original Reddit post that inspired this is now archived (so I can’t comment there), so I’ve produced a mini-post here.

So recently, I’ve been slowly reading through Karl Barth’s Der Römerbrief, his celebrated commentary on Romans. It’s been an interesting journey; I’ll probably publish some thoughts when (if) I finish. But one slightly annoying thing: Barth tends to throw in lots of quotes and references¹ while mentioning only the author, and not the cited work. So, it is only with some difficulty that one can actually track down the works he references.

The other day, I was reading the commentary on Romans 4:20, which contains extended quotations from Calvin and Luther. I thought the quote from Luther—on the relationship between faith and reason—was especially interesting. Reason cannot attain unto it, only faith can achieve it…²

Just one question: where, exactly, is this Luther quote from? After lots of Internet searching, I found a post on r/academicbiblical asking about the source for precisely this quote, specifically the following section of it:

And in the same fashion do all other believers who have entered the dark recesses of faith, throttle reason, saying: “Listen, Reason, thou blind and stupid fool that understandest nought of the things of God. Cease thy tricks and chattering; hold thy tongue and be still! Venture no more to criticize the Word of God. Sit thee down; listen to His words; and believe in Him.” So do the faithful strangle the beast. Thus do they achieve what the whole world is incompetent to achieve. And thereby they do our Lord God supreme and notable service.

Luther, quoted by Barth in The Epistle to the Romans, Oxford University Press (1968), p. 143

Sadly, the post received no answer to this. But now that it was a proper mystery, I just had to figure it out, right? After scanning through lots of works on Luther, I finally found³ the source for the quote, in Luther’s commentary on Galatians 3:6. That commentary was based on his 1531 lectures and published in Latin in 1535; the original text, as found in the 1911 Weimar critical edition of Luther’s works, is available on the Internet Archive and copied below for your convenience:

Sic omnes pii, ingredientes cum Abraham tenebras fidei, mortificant rationem dicentes: Tu ratio stulta es, non sapis quae Dei sunt, itaque ne obstrepas mihi, sed tace, non iudica, sed audi verbum Dei et crede. Ibi pii fide mactant bestiam maiorem mundo Atque ita Deo gratissimum sacrificium et cultum exhibent.

D. Martin Luthers Werke: kritische Gesammtausgabe, vol. 40, part 1, Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, Weimar (1911), p. 362

But the mystery was not quite resolved yet. Why was this so hard to find? I looked at the corresponding passage in the 1949 abridged translation by Theodore Graebner,⁴ probably the most common translation available online. I realized that the abridging process had not been particularly kind to this quote; the only part that really survived intact was this: “Everyone who by faith slays reason, the world’s biggest monster, renders God a real service.”

Now I do not mean here to criticize Graebner’s translation; it was made with the express purpose of abridging Luther and presenting him in plain language to the modern American. The popularity of this translation, however, has had the effect of obscuring the original quote that Barth used. Some older translations preserve the original more fully; Fallowes’s edition of Middleton’s nineteenth-century translation⁵ has it as this:

So all the godly entering with Abraham into the darkness of Faith, do kill reason, saying: reason, thou art foolish; thou dost not savour those things that be of God; therefore speak not against me, but hold thy peace; judge not, but hear the Word of God, and believe it. So the godly by faith kill such a beast as is greater than the whole world, and thereby do offer to God a most acceptable sacrifice and service.

Commentary on Galatians, Kregel Publications, Grand Rapids (1979, reprinted 1980), p. 127

Anyway, the moral of the story is that it’s shockingly hard to track down obscure editions of theological works, even by major authors like Luther.⁶ The Internet Archive is actually a marvelous resource and your only real fighting chance; it also helps to know a little bit of Latin. And getting nerd-sniped to hunt down a quote is very bad for your sleep schedule.