Childhood and youth

Katharina Schütz was born in late 1497 or early 1498, probably the fifth child and third daughter of Jakob Schütz, a comfortably situated craftsman and citizen of Strasbourg, and his wife, Elisabeth Gerster.Footnote ⁹ The young Katharina seems to have given a practical training in weaving tapestries (the so-called ‘Heidnischwerck’),Footnote ¹⁰ but she was also taught to read and to write fluent and grammatically correct German. Her education seems not to have been explicitly humanist, for her writings are devoid of the rhetorical figures or classical allusions of humanist teaching;Footnote ¹¹ indeed Katharina herself described her language as ‘rough but honest’ in contrast to what she scorned as ‘the hypocritical little clever, good words of Beguines, nuns, dissemblers and noble women’.Footnote ¹²

Most important, Katharina was given a religious education. As a small child, she developed ‘a special religious earnestness’ which led her to dedicate herself to a religious life.Footnote ¹³ Looking back at this time, she would write in 1557:

Two of her maternal relatives seem to have been Beguines in Strasbourg; however Katharina chose a different means of expressing her religious commitment. Very much in the mould of the devotio moderna, she gathered a small group of women around her with whom she sought to work out a disciplined religious practice in the context of their daily lives. As a child, Katharina must have heard many sermons by the cathedral preacher, Geiler von Kaysersberg (†1510), which were critical of the Church, whilst emphasising the need ‘to do whatever one can’ (‘facere quod in se est’) in order to reach salvation.Footnote ¹⁵ Katharina Schütz and her group of companions sought to do what they could: they went to confession and to mass; they read religious books and pamphlets; and they engaged in acts of charity.Footnote ¹⁶ However, as Schütz Zell later recounted, they discovered that their religious efforts did not give them any confidence in the fact of their salvation. For Katharina Schütz, her salvation came when she encountered the new Lutheran preaching of the Gospel.

Thirty-five years later she described – in terms reminiscent of those used by Luther – how she was delivered by the Gospel from the hopelessness and fear of her original approach to the religious life:

Through the new preaching, Schütz began to comprehend the true message of the Gospel, which had previously been obscure:

Although her description of her conversion is most likely influenced by accounts of Luther's conversion, Schütz clearly did experience Luther's teachings and the introduction of the Reformation into Strasbourg as a new beginning to her faith.

It is not known when Schütz was introduced to reforming ideas. Matthias Zell had been appointed priest and preacher at the city church of St Laurence in 1518; from 1521, or at the latest 1522, he was preaching ‘biblically’, or ‘according to the Gospel’. Zell himself reported that he had begun to read Luther's writings because so many members of his congregation were doing so. Katharina Schütz may have belonged to this group in which case she would have encountered Luther's ideas even before her future husband.Footnote ¹⁹

Schütz understood her encounter with the Gospel to offer a new understanding of salvation, not only to herself, but also to her companions. From the beginning, she felt herself called to help others understand the true way to salvation:

For Schütz Zell, to know the Gospel was at the same time to feel a call to confess and disseminate the Gospel, or at least to support its confession and dissemination.Footnote ²¹ The problem for a young woman in sixteenth-century Strasbourg was to discover what opportunity she might have to do so.

Clerical marriage: a witness to the Gospel

One possibility for expressing and proclaiming her new-found faith emerged from the preaching of the new Gospel by the Strasbourg priest and Reformer Matthias Zell, who in 1523 was joined by Wolfgang Capito, Caspar Hedio and Martin Bucer. As a young woman, influenced by the medieval ideals of celibacy and virginity, Katharina Schütz had chosen not to marry but to dedicate her life to the service of God. In the new preaching, however, she encountered a different ideal: not celibacy, but marriage was offered as the highest form of divinely approved life.

Strasbourg had seen a number of conflicts over the question of clerical celibacy. Geiler von Kaysersberg had in his preaching praised celibacy as the highest form of life, but had also emphasised marriage as a biblically founded way of life, valued and blessed by God.Footnote ²² After some unfortunate incidents, a number of prominent Strasbourg citizens claimed that clerical celibacy led to a double morality amongst priests and religious, and that such ‘celibate’ clergy and male religious had insulted, or even abused, some of Strasbourg's young women. In 1519 and 1520 these claims resulted in violent encounters and subsequently legal proceedings between citizens and clergy.Footnote ²³ The Reformers' teaching that legalising clerical marriage would result in an improvement of clerical morals must have seemed highly attractive.

In the summer of 1522 Martin Bucer, priest and Augustinian monk, married Elisabeth Silbereisen, who had been placed in a convent as a young girl.Footnote ²⁴ In May 1523 they arrived in Strasbourg, having been excommunicated and expelled from Wissembourg, where Bucer had been preaching the evangelical Gospel.Footnote ²⁵ The city council offered Bucer, who was the son of a Strasbourg citizen, refuge, appointed him as city preacher, and defended his decision to marry to Strasbourg's bishop.Footnote ²⁶ The city of Strasbourg had acquired its first married priest. Others soon followed. Martin Enderlin married on 18 October 1523, and was immediately dismissed from his post. Three weeks later, Antonius Firn, priest at St Nicolaus, and his long-term housekeeper, Katharina, were married by Martin Enderlin. Matthias Zell preached the wedding sermon, outlining the many advantages of marriage for a priest.Footnote ²⁷ Six weeks later, on 3 December, Katharina Schütz and Matthias Zell were married by Martin Bucer and Katharina, now Schütz Zell, took up her residence in her husband's clergy house, apparently to the surprise and dismay of many members of his congregation.

For many priests in the 1520s, the decision to marry was a clear affirmation of their conversion to the reforming teachings of Martin Luther, not least because it disqualified them from holding a church post under papal or episcopal jurisdiction. For some of the women who married those priests, marriage probably simply represented a legitimisation of a long-term but previously technically illicit relationship.Footnote ²⁸ For others, however, it will have been a conscious decision. In the case of Schütz Zell, a young woman and the daughter of a citizen of Strasbourg, this step is certainly to be understood as a confessional statement.

Clerical marriage was a statement which was not accepted or understood by everyone in Strasbourg, and Schütz Zell and her husband soon found themselves the victims of rumours about the state of their marriage. In September 1524, nine months after her marriage, Schütz Zell published ‘Katharina Schütz's Apologia for Master Matthew Zell, her husband, who is a pastor and servant of the word of God in Strasbourg, because of the great lies invented about him’. Here she explained why she had decided to marry Matthias Zell and defended her marriage against public criticism as both a moral relationship and one that was appropriate to her social standing. She wanted to write the truth about her marriage, she wrote, in order to correct the insulting rumours that were spreading, and which were making some citizens shrink from accepting the Gospel preached by the reformers.Footnote ²⁹ By correcting these rumours, she hoped to make it possible for the Gospel to be more clearly heard.

It was clear to Schütz Zell that a successful introduction of clerical marriage depended not only on the articulation of theological arguments in its favour, but also upon the behaviour and witness of clerical couples. In her Apologia, she described her marriage to Matthias Zell in terms intended to still the fears of her fellow citizens; she offered theological and ecclesiastical arguments in favour of the marriage; and she concluded with defence of her right, as a woman, to write such a theological assessment. Her arguments in support of these decisions – both to marry and to write the treatise – indicate that she believed herself to share responsibility for the proclaiming of the Gospel and for the souls of the citizens of Strasbourg. Indeed, in her view her marriage to Matthias Zell, and with it her treatise explaining that marriage, were important aspects of her contribution to the saving of souls in the city, for the introduction of clerical marriage was a means of opposing the ‘harlotry’ of priests; however Schütz Zell recognised that it could only succeed if such marriages were seen to be respectable and an authentic expression of Christian life:

Matthias and Katharina Zell had a responsibility to use their marriage to witness to the Gospel and reduce the concerns and anxieties of their parishioners. In explaining her decision to marry, Schütz Zell already saw the proclamation of the Gospel as essentially related to the well-being of the people.

Welcoming strangers: the care of refugees

For Schütz Zell, the decision to marry Matthias Zell was to be understood as a means of proclaiming the Gospel as preached by the reformers. This meant that her marriage must make it possible for her to live her life as she had planned it: in the service of God and the Gospel. From the beginning of her married life, she took this aspect very seriously, caring for her neighbours, offering hospitality to refugees and visiting the sick, the dying and those in prison:

Schütz Zell saw this caritative work as the response to God's command: ‘as God teaches in the Prophets: support and strengthen the tired knees’.Footnote ³² As the wife of a pastor, it was her responsibility to seek out and assist the weak, the tired or those in any kind of trouble.

The Zells' home soon became a refuge for Strasbourg's religious refugees and for those who sought refuge from the farmers' uprising.Footnote ³³ Over the years that followed, the Zells continued to host refugees, including in 1528 a group from Baden, five of whom stayed the whole winter:

Even after her husband's death in January 1548, Schütz Zell continued to take refugees into her home and to offer care to all who needed it: ‘I remained in the pastor's house two years and eleven weeks after his death. I took in refugees and the poor, helped to maintain the church and did good to them all at my own expense without taxes from anyone.’Footnote ³⁵ She continued to offer such hospitality until the city council demanded that she vacate the house to make room for Matthias Zell's successor, Ludwig Rabus.Footnote ³⁶

This was not simply a private initiative. Katharina's work with refugees was a public ministry, recognised by the city council. According to the 1523 Strasbourg poor law, refugees in Strasbourg were ‘strangers’ to the city and had no right to any official support.Footnote ³⁷ However, the city recognised that they had to be looked after, and in 1523 Lukas Hackfurt was appointed ‘conductor’ of poor relief in Strasbourg. Hackfurt initially organised support for the ‘poor strangers’ from private persons, encouraging others to follow the example set by Matthias and Katharina Zell and take people into their own homes. In 1525 these arrangements gave way to a public support fund which paid for refugees to be housed in the former Franciscan friary, the ‘barefoot monastery’, which had been taken over by the city.

Schütz Zell took a leading role in this work, both in its practical organisation and in the search for financial support. As she later reported

Schütz Zell's leading role in the care of refugees and strangers was recognised by the city. Lukas Hackfurt, Alexander Berner, Bartholomäus Cun and Schütz Zell were referred to as ‘deacons to the exiles’ (‘diaconi exili’),Footnote ³⁹ and for a time Schütz Zell was regarded as the main organiser of support for refugees and strangers; after the death of Lukas Hackfurt in 1554, she held all the papers relating to it.Footnote ⁴⁰ When in 1556 she had to move into the Poor House with her nephew, she discovered that it was much in need of reform, and the Board requested her to make suggestions for improvements, which were at least partially implemented.Footnote ⁴¹ Her interest and knowledge in this area were clearly recognised and respected by Strasbourg's magistrates.

During Matthias Zell's lifetime, Schütz Zell had understood her caritative and diaconal work as a ministry complementing that of her husband. In her address at his funeral, she explained that in the twenty-four years of their marriage she had always been ‘his assistant according to my means and ability: in his house and in his ministry and office and in his service’.Footnote ⁴² Later, responding to the criticism of her behaviour put forward by Ludwig Rabus, initially Matthias Zell's curate or assistant, and subsequently his successor, she claimed that she had done as much for the cause of the Gospel as many of those who preached from the pulpit:

Schütz Zell clearly wants to stake her claim above that of Rabus, who claimed to have been Zell's assistant. None the less, and despite the polemical tone, her account is revealing of her understanding of her ministry. Schütz Zell did not feel called to – and would not have been allowed to – preach from the pulpit. However, this did not mean that she could not proclaim the Gospel. As Miriam Christmann has noted, ‘the pulpit was reserved for Matthias … An analysis of her work shows, however, that she preached nonetheless’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Schütz Zell's preaching took place in action: her caritative, diaconal work was her way of responding to God's command to proclaim the Gospel, and was an important complement to her husband's ministry of preaching and sacraments.

Visits to the sick were part of the traditional sphere of women's work, as Schütz Zell acknowledged somewhat sarcastically in a letter to Caspar Schwenkfeld: ‘I am now a poor solitary woman, fit only (as many say) to spin or wait on the sick.’Footnote ⁴⁵ However, she understood her own work to be of a different order, and believed that she was not simply doing what any other woman could do: ‘It will be seen that I have not acted according to the measure of a woman, but have done faithfully and simply according to the measure of the gifts that God through his Spirit has given me, with great joy and effort, day and night.’Footnote ⁴⁶

To her husband she had been ‘a faithful help in his ministry and household, to the honour of Christ’;Footnote ⁴⁷ however, her work was of benefit to the whole city: ‘with all good will, and great joy and work, have I day and night given my body, strength, honour and goods for you, dear Strasbourg’.Footnote ⁴⁸ After Matthias Zell's death, she claimed for herself the office of the widow as described in 1 Timothy v: ‘Honour the widows who have offered hospitality and who have washed the feet of the apostles.’Footnote ⁴⁹ Her use of this model may have been influenced by – or may even have influenced – the thinking of John Calvin, whom she had met during his time in Strasbourg.Footnote ⁵⁰ Calvin viewed ‘the widows whom Paul mentions to Timothy’ as offering a model for the diaconal work which he believed to be proper to women: ‘Women could fulfil no other public office than to devote themselves to the care of the poor.’Footnote ⁵¹

There is a striking parallel between Schütz Zell's account of her ministry and Peter Martyr Vermigli's interpretation of the ministry of the deacon Phoebe in his commentary on Romans xvi.1–2:

Vermigli believes that other women mentioned in Romans xvi had a similar ministry to that of Phoebe: ‘When [Paul] says that these women Tryphena, Tryphosa, Persis, & Maria laboured, he probably meant that they had such a ministry as we said above that Phoebe had.’Footnote ⁵³ The work of Schütz Zell also follows this description, and may even have provided the model for it, since Vermigli certainly met her during his two periods in Strasbourg (c. 1543–7, 1553–6). Schütz Zell had done much more than simply visit the sick; her activities were not a private matter, but a public ministry on behalf of the Gospel, which contributed to the good of the whole community through the spreading of the fruits of gospel faith.

Schütz Zell's ministry is an example of the Reformation shift from a ‘liturgical’ diaconate to a ‘communal’ or ‘community’ diaconate. Although this emphasis would become more formalised in the Reformed tradition, it is present in Luther's in his early writings, and particularly in his belief that the lord's supper was a means by which the community could offer love and support: those who went to the supper should ‘lay their suffering in the community, and seek help in the whole crowd of the spiritual body’ – i.e. the congregation – in order to experience true ‘brotherly Christian unity’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Later he would make less of the communal aspect of the supper, but he remained convinced that ‘as God helped us for nothing through Christ, so too we … should do nothing other than help our neighbour’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Indeed, his conviction that love of neighbour is the true fruit of faith is central to the final section of On the freedom of a Christian, a text which Schütz Zell had surely read.

Give strength to those who suffer: a theology of pastoral support

Schütz Zell did not only engage in caritative and diaconal work, but made a conscious effort to reflect theologically on her work and to understand the gospel meaning of the suffering with which she was so often confronted. In her letter to the women of Kentzingen, written and published during the first year of her marriage, even before the Apologia, Schütz Zell explored the relationship between pastoral care and the care of souls, suffering and gospel life.

In 1524, under threat of an approaching army of soldiers of the old faith, around 150 men had fled the town of Kentzingen in Breisgau with their evangelical preacher, Jakob Otter from Speyer. The town was occupied, and the refugees found their way to Strasbourg, the closest city to have introduced the Reformation, where they received a warm welcome.Footnote ⁵⁶ Schütz Zell later recalled that she took eighty men into her home that night, and that for the next four weeks she never fed less than fifty or sixty each day.Footnote ⁵⁷ The men were very concerned about the wives and children who had been left behind, and rightly so, for the women were mistreated by the occupying soldiers.Footnote ⁵⁸ As a gesture of her support, Schütz Zell wrote an open letter to ‘the suffering women of the town of Kentzingen …, sisters with me in Jesus Christ’, intended to strengthen and give them courage in ‘the great distress that you suffer for Christ's sake’.Footnote ⁵⁹

Schütz Zell's letter draws on a range of biblical descriptions of suffering and fear. In particular, she turns to the story of Abraham and Isaac and the gospel accounts of the crucifixion. The women of Kentzingen should look to Abraham, who was ready to sacrifice his own son, as their model:

Schütz Zell's message seems to be that the women of Kentzingen should be inspired by Abraham's readiness to give up Isaac, his beloved son, and by the experience of Isaac himself. Unlike Ishmael, who ‘signifies the children of this world who will undoubtedly be excluded from the inheritance of the eternal Father’, the legitimate son Isaac received nothing but the threat of being sacrificed to God by his father, and ‘in the opinion of the world that was truly an unfatherly thing to do’.Footnote ⁶¹ The women should take on Abraham's ‘manly disposition’, which includes his grief and sufferings as he followed God's command: ‘Do you not think that Abraham also suffered when God told him to kill his only son?’ she asks.Footnote ⁶² The important point to grasp is that Abraham was sustained in his actions by his faith that God could save Isaac's life; so too the women of Kentzingen should be sustained by God's promises of eternal life.

Ultimately, Schütz Zell assures the women, their suffering for the faith will bring them blessings. As Christ said, ‘Whoever confesses me before this adulterous and wicked generation, that one I will also confess before my Father and his angels.’Footnote ⁶³ She realises that such experiences can give the impression that God has withdrawn from those who suffer, but emphasises none the less that the reality is in fact another. Their sufferings should be understood as ‘special fatherly gifts sent from God which he does not give to any but His best loved children’.Footnote ⁶⁴ At the same time God continues to care for the women like their mother: ‘His mercy and covenant of eternal peace will not depart from you in such storms; … he will not abandon you, nor forget you, as he says in the prophet “As little as a mother may forget her suckling child, so little may I forget you.”’Footnote ⁶⁵ The love of God is thus both challenging – fatherly – and sustaining – motherly. Response to that love requires the people of God to remain faithful in adversity, and the ‘blessed battle’ to do so is a true proclamation of the work of God:

For Schütz Zell, then, suffering – and in particular the way that suffering is borne – can be an important witness to the Gospel, which proclaim's the benefits of Christ's suffering on the cross.

Schütz Zell's letter to the women in Kentzingen demonstrates her deep conviction that a believer's whole life must be understood as a proclamation of Christ. It also shows her awareness of herself as an interpreter of such experience and her confidence in her ability to take on that role. Her words to the women in Kentzingen do not simply offer encouragement; rather, she wants to help the women to understand the deeper theological meaning of their terrible experiences, so that they too can see their response to their situation as an opportunity to proclaim the Gospel of Christ. For Schütz Zell, then, service to others included not only practical help and support in difficult times, but also the offer of theological assistance in reflection and interpretation of those times.

In 1524, in the course of its conflict with the bishop, the Strasbourg city council forbade Schütz Zell to publish any further polemical or controversial writings. Despite the council's prohibition, Schütz Zell continued to seek ways to support the faith of the ‘common folk’ and to publish these when she felt it appropriate. Her efforts clearly found readers enough to be interesting for the Strasbourg printers. A new hymn book was produced in Bohemia in 1531, and in 1534 Schütz Zell had Weisse's German translations of a number of these Bohemian hymns printed for the edification of the laity of Strasbourg. She saw the collection both as a means of propagating true faith and doctrine and as an encouragement to the praise of God:

Singing is part of the joys of life, as Schütz Zell emphasises in her preface, but she believes that the right sort of songs must be sung. Rather than singing ‘so many scandalous songs … in which all slander, coquetry and other scandalous things are spread through the world’, divine songs should be sung which ‘convey the whole work of Christ and our salvation’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Therefore, Schütz Zell exhorts her readers, ‘encourage your children and relatives to sing godly songs in which they are exhorted to seek knowledge of their salvation’.Footnote ⁶⁹

Schütz Zell is careful to emphasise that singing must not be understood as a work or action which could in any way contribute to a person's salvation. None the less, in contrast to the ‘incomprehensible choir songs’ and ‘foolish devotions’ of the Roman Church,Footnote ⁷⁰ she is convinced that singing which is rooted in the teachings of the Gospel and which springs from faith can offer help and encouragement in any situation of life and cannot be anything but pleasing to God:

Although she may not have been consciously aware of it, there are echoes here of Erasmus' vision of the Scriptures accompanying people in their ordinary lives:

Whether or not she was familiar with Erasmus' preface to the New Testament, Schütz Zell's preface to the Bohemian songbook encapsulates a similar vision: herself a woman who read the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul, she encouraged others to offer praises to God. The words she suggests, however, are those, not of Scripture, but of evangelical hymns.

Schütz Zell's approach may have been more immediately inspired by Luther's emphasis that the proper way for a woman to praise God is for her to understand ‘rocking the cradle, washing nappies, making beds, … staying awake all night waiting for the baby's crying’ as the proper, God-given work of women, expressed in his treatise ‘On married life’,Footnote ⁷³ which Schütz Zell is likely to have known. In his exegesis of the Magnificat, Luther contrasts the music of noise of ‘singing, preaching, organs and pipes’ and the liturgical singing of the Magnificat with the true praise of God;Footnote ⁷⁴ Schütz Zell could have known and drawn upon this work in giving her own interpretation of ‘true praise of God’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Although the preface to the Bohemian hymns does not include any explicit theological reflection on Schütz Zell's diaconal and caritative practice, it does reveal her deep concern that the faith of every Christian must be strengthened and supported in all that they do, and her insistence that all are called to proclaim the Gospel in their own way in their own lives.

Schütz Zell's understanding of the essential relationship between faith and diaconal work is much more explicit in her exposition of the Lord's Prayer, written in 1532 for two women in Speyer, but published only in 1558, as a part of the work dedicated to Felix Ambruster. Here the theme of comfort is illustrated by a reflection on the motherhood of Christ: ‘[Christ] gives a parable of bitter labour and says, “A woman when she bears a child has anguish and sorrow,” and he applies all of this to his suffering, in which he bore us with such effort and pain, nourished us and made us alive, gave us to drink from his breast and side with water and blood, as a mother nurses her child.’Footnote ⁷⁶ For Schütz Zell God's love has both fatherly and motherly aspects, and, she reiterates, ‘As [God] himself says in the prophet, “As little as the mother forgets her sucking child, so little can I forget you.”’Footnote ⁷⁷ The Lord's Prayer is a response to God's love, expressing both a recognition that every human being is a child of God and the willingness to be always obedient to God. It is also a statement of the human need of nourishment and forgiveness:

The preachers and stewards of the word of God who help to fulfil this hunger should lead ‘an honourable, disciplined, responsible life ornamented with faith, humility, patience, chastity, mercy, peace and all godliness, so that they do not hide their faith, teaching and life under a bushel, but set them openly in the house as a light by which we all can see’.Footnote ⁷⁹ This life is shaped and formed by the Word of God, which is at the same time the foundation of the community of the body of Christ, expressed through baptism into this death: ‘Grant that we may make our election firm by showing whether the death of Christ Jesus lives in us and we are dead to sin, whether we also want to drink the cup with Christ and with Him be baptized in the cross, in his death, and whether we love our neighbours as he loved us.’Footnote ⁸⁰

By entering into this community of shared suffering and love of neighbour, ‘we show that we discern the body of the Lord, we show what the power and nature of his fellowship are, and then we eat the fellowship of this bread’.Footnote ⁸¹ To be fed and strengthened by the word of God is to experience community and communion, also in suffering. Mutual forgiveness is important in this community – ‘O God of all good, grant that we may so forgive and be reconciled with our enemies in the depths of our hearts’Footnote ⁸² – as is also the strength to resist temptation in times of poverty, sickness or persecution.Footnote ⁸³

Schütz Zell's exposition of the Lord's Prayer was published together with the profoundly pastoral theological letter to the Knight Felix Ambruster in 1558. Schütz Zell's responsibilities for her nephew meant that it was rarely possible for her to visit Ambruster. Instead, she wrote to him to assure him of her encouragement and prayers. Such support, ‘our office and ministry (commended to us by God) of care and love’, was, she reiterated, the duty of every Christian.Footnote ⁸⁴

For Schütz Zell, such a caring community formed the essential foundation for Christian discipleship. In the 1550s her criticism of Ludwig Rabus included the claim that he had failed in his duty to love his neighbours, and had thus neglected the Church's diaconal ministry. This accusation is made in the context of a presentation of her understanding of the sacraments, in which she argues, with striking echoes of Luther's 1519 treatise on the lord's supper, that in baptism and the lord's supper the congregation should experience what it truly means to be Christ's disciples:

Schütz Zell is clear that no human being can participate in the actual work of redemption, which is exclusively Christ's: ‘in the work of redemption God and Christ do not want to have anyone alongside and do not leave their glory to anyone else’.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, the message that redemption is possible and that all are called to receive it must be spread, and everyone can and should participate in this aspect of Christ's work: ‘in the work of calling he wants to have many servants and messengers … Therefore, he also sent out the apostles to preach repentance and forgiveness’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Schütz Zell took this calling very seriously, reflected on it theologically and understood it as her service of God.

Diaconal service: an office and ministry of the Gospel in the service of God

Schütz Zell's conviction that a caritative and diaconal ministry formed an essential part of the preaching of the Gospel was shared by many early reformers and integrated into many church orders in the 1520s and '30s. Care for the sick and the invalid, although not for strangers and travellers unless they were ill, was enshrined in the Protestant Church Orders of Hamburg (1528) and of Lübeck (1531); Lübeck, like Strasbourg, appointed deacons for this work.Footnote ⁸⁸ The Reformation in Strasbourg, which was shaped by the conviction that ecclesiastical life must take account of the practical consequences of reforming beliefs, was an early representative of this later trend.Footnote ⁸⁹ Indeed, at least in the 1520s and '30s, Strasbourg's city council seems to have been more concerned with the ethical consequences of reform than with any attempt to establish confessional clarity, and at least as interested in ethics as in doctrinal questions.Footnote ⁹⁰ Bucer emphasised the ‘double service’ of the Church: ‘the care of the needy [both] through the ministry of the cure of souls and through the ministry of physical care’.Footnote ⁹¹ The conviction that the physical care of the needy was a central aspect of the preaching of the Gospel was exemplified in the theology and ministry of Schütz Zell.

Despite her claiming this public role for herself, Schütz Zell's life and ministry were defined by the possibilities for and expectations of women of her time. As a woman she was not allowed to preach, to teach or to study theology in any formal way.Footnote ⁹² She published her writings – and in particular her earlier apologetic treatises – in the face of criticism from members of the city council and her husband's fellow Reformers, although opposition to devotional writings from her pen seems to have been less strong than to writings in which she sought explicitly to defend the teachings and lifestyle taught by the Reformation. She had a reputation for learning, but this was not necessarily viewed as a positive attribute, especially in a woman who was inclined to speak her own mind. In later life she commented ruefully, ‘ I well believe that if I agreed that everything said on the preachers’ side was right and pleased me, they would account me the most devout and learned woman in Germany. But since I do not do that, they regard me as a presumptuous spirit and (as some mockingly say) “Doctor Katharina”.'Footnote ⁹³

Few options were open to a woman who wished to proclaim the liberating Gospel which she had encountered in Reformation, and not every woman in the Reformation had the inclination to engage with theological questions in the way that Schütz Zell did, although she was by no means the only one to do so.Footnote ⁹⁴ Not all those who shared her theological interests had the time or opportunity to write.Footnote ⁹⁵ Katharina Schütz Zell certainly made the most of the opportunities available to her, exploring how she could best respond to God's call to proclaim the Gospel through the diaconal, caritative and devotional engagement which was open to her. In responding to that call, she demonstrated great competence both in carrying out her diaconal work and in sharing her theological reflection on the implications of that work for understanding the Gospel.

Katharina Schütz Zell did not view her pastoral and diaconal service as ‘women's work’, although she was aware that this was traditionally a sphere in which women were allowed and expected to be active. She understood her work rather as an important public ministry, an office or Amt. As ‘church mother’ she felt herself called to fulfil this representative role and to exercise her role, not only in her work with individual cases of poverty or need, but in planning and carrying out the work with the exiles, and in offering a theological interpretation of her own life and the life of others. Her role as ‘church mother’ involved her in playing an important part in the organisation and leadership of the public, ecclesiastical household,Footnote ⁹⁶ and particularly in the care of the needy and in the theological interpretation of their sufferings. Katharina Schütz Zell deserves to be remembered as a deacon; as a pastor; and as one of the foremost pastoral theologians of the sixteenth century.