# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1856_S199
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Sermon Preparation from Dr. Luther. 199

...dwelling on individual sins and pointing too little to the innermost essence of sin, of which transgressions are only the manifestations, and too little also to the fellowship with the world and the kingdom of the devil into which we fall through sin; our hearers are made it too easy to apply the sermon of the Law just heard to others — namely to such as sin in the manner described — and not to give a thought to themselves in the process. That a hearer should leave church and shake himself like a drenched poodle, shaking off the Law only to dump it upon his neighbor, without feeling so much as a single pang of conscience — that ought scarcely to occur among us; and does it not occur? Just as much, indeed perhaps still worse, is the case with the preaching of the Law insofar as it describes the conduct of the regenerate. The righteousness that the preachers of the present day seek in their hearers consists for the most part in a few fashionable good works, philanthropic endeavors, at which, incidentally, one may well be a heathen or a Jesuit, in general in all manner of external things — whereas it ought rather to be a righteousness truly from within, springing forth out of the deepest believing heart. To twist, falsify, or hold in contempt the doctrine of the faith is no longer reckoned a sin, or at least not so grave a sin as the forgery of a promissory note; whereas, on the other hand, whoever will hold no churchly fellowship with those of false belief passes far and wide for an unloving person. Now, to be sure, we have gradually learned not to let ourselves be dazzled by the appearance of pietistic piety, but the picking and tearing at the Law still clings to us as well even now, and from this there arises neither that knowledge of sin, piercing to the marrow and the bone, which grasps and presents sin in all its forms as wrong, as a reversal of the order of God, nor does the believing Christian receive guidance toward a godly walk that is, as it were, cut from a single piece and that accomplishes its individual good works out of the good treasure of the heart. We are in need of being taught to preach the Law rightly: is it not so?

Scarcely will any of my readers hold it against me if I call on them to take instruction in the preaching of Law and Gospel from Dr. Luther — that is, from a teacher who lived three centuries ago. Even the leaders of the theological scholarship of the present day will not presume to be able to guide especially well in this respect: they, like all of us, still suffer from the aftereffects of the rationalism scarcely yet overcome. The most recent past is that of rationalism and of pietism itself, and so can be of no use at all to us for the purpose named. Sharpness and precision of dogmatic development we may learn from the theologians of the seventeenth century, and, in particular, from those of about 1600, aptness for teaching and earnest, sure building upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets; the further back one goes from the age of the Reformation, the more comforting and mighty the evangelical preaching becomes — and this is noticeable not merely in the sermons themselves, but rather the preachers themselves confess it, men such as Johann Arndt, Scriver, Heinrich Müller,