In constructing his evangelical family ethic, Luther placed emphasis on Genesis 1:28: “Be fruitful and multiply.”

How Protestants Learned to Love the Pill

by Allan Carlson

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In constructing his evangelical family ethic, Luther placed emphasis on Genesis 1:28: “Be fruitful and multiply.” This was more than a command; he called it “a divine ordinance [werck] which it is not our prerogative to hinder or ignore.” Indeed, Luther saw procreation as the very essence of the human life in Eden before the Fall. As he explained in his Lectures on Genesis: “truly in all nature there was no activity more excellent and more admirable than procreation. After the proclamation of the name of God it is the most important activity Adam and Eve in the state of innocence could carry on—as free from sin in doing this as they were in praising God.” The Fall brought sin into this pure, exuberant fertility. Even so, Luther praised each conception of a new child as an act of “wonderment…wholly beyond our understanding,” a miracle bearing the “lovely music of nature,” a faint reminder of life before the Fall:

This living-together of husband and wife—that they occupy the same home, that they take care of the household, that together they produce and bring up children—is a kind of faint image and a remnant, as it were, of that blessed living together [in Eden].

And so, Luther elevated marriage to “the highest religious order on earth,” concluding that “we may be assured that man and woman should and must come together in order to multiply.” He stressed that it was “not a matter of free choice…but a natural and necessary thing, that whatever is a man must have a woman and whatever is a woman must have a man.”

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