# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1856_S234
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

234 Sermon Preparation from Dr. Luther.

-ists and sectarians, especially also among the so-called denominations of the United States, of choosing a single verse — often merely a clause or subordinate clause — of Holy Scripture as a text, and then spinning a sermon from it according to the general rules of rhetoric, is by no means in keeping with the evangelical chief and fundamental principle, which makes the written Word, the Apostles and Prophets, the ground or foundation of all churchly building — this we have come to recognize. This is a preaching about the Word of God, not a preaching of the Word of God; it sets before the hearers not the Gospel, but the preacher's own thoughts about the Gospel, and it testifies that those who, out of indifference to the church's confession, profess to exalt the Bible are in truth not so obedient to the Bible as those who, holding to the confessions of the Church, thereby confess themselves to the Bible. We hold it to be a chief task of evangelical preaching to set forth the written Word of God itself in its fullness and vitality, and therefore gladly follow the true churchly order of pericopes, which offers us whole sections of Scripture, and these in a sequence conducive to edification; we likewise agree that the pericope itself should be proclaimed, or as it were painted, simply and plainly, rather than talked about. Would that we might now carry to completion this undeniable advance to which our gracious God has brought us, this flight out of the enchanted castle of Pietism and Rationalism! Predominant, and applied to the chief evangelical sermon, the synthetic form of preaching came into use in the Lutheran Church after the living faith of Christendom had, by and large, already vanished from the circles of scholarship and theology, in the second half of the seventeenth century. It first received its full development under Pietism and especially under Rationalism — the latter taken in its broadest extent to include Supranaturalism as well; its highest point it attained, no doubt, in Reinhard, whose own admissions give us important insight into the matter. This artificial form, which indeed in certain cases — for example in catechism sermons — has its own justification, hinders the simple exposition of the text passage. It is child's-play easy, as soon as one is willing to tear a little clause out of the text and then treat it according to its various members; but this our determination to preach the text itself no longer permits us to do. So then, in order to preserve the learned form, we must stretch the evangelical passage upon a main proposition or theme with the customary divisions and subdivisions — a laborious piece of work for ourselves, still more laborious in the end for our hearers, and good for nothing except to drum the outline of the sermon into our congregations instead of setting the Gospel before them. There is no pericope to which one would not have to do violence in order to force it into an analytic-synthetic sermon. In order to carry out our resolve to preach the Gospel, and not about the Gospel, we must entirely abandon the favorite form and nursling of Rationalism, from which we