# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1857_S353
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Jahrgang III.   December 1857.   No. 12.

(Communicated by the Southern Pastoral Conference of the Eastern District Synod.)

Preliminary remark. The following essay is a compilation of several reports which were sent in to the undersigned by the pastors of our conference as a conference assignment set at an earlier meeting, and to which he has added his own views on the subject in question. The purpose of this compilation was in the first place that we might become clear about it for ourselves, and not that it should be handed over to the public; after a longer discussion attached to it, however, the conference expressed the wish that it should also be communicated to our other brethren in office in "Lehre und Wehre." —

Compilation of the Reports on Exordia.

The content of the reports received turns chiefly on the following four questions: 1. Whether exordia (introductions) are necessary; 2. Whether by them what they are meant to accomplish is in fact achieved; 3. Whether they are therefore advisable; and 4. Whether we find any analogy for them in Scripture, or among the best Lutheran pulpit orators.

As to the first question, namely whether exordia are necessary, this is denied by the contributors of the reports, and that for this reason: that the sermon, or the treatment proper (peroratio), ought by right to be nothing other than an exposition of the text, and must not merely take in a subject that has the text more or less as its ground — for example, when one picks out a single verse and preaches exclusively upon it, or when one merely takes occasion from the text to speak about something else. But the text is already known to the hearers beforehand; hence it is unnecessary to prepare them further for its content. Moreover, the transitus is there for the purpose of setting forth the summary content of the text in compressed brevity and with marked features, from which the disposition readily follows.

One of the contributors says: "Exordia are unnecessary, for the grounds of the rhetoricians, thereby attentum, docilem et benevolum reddere the hearer, may well suit political or judicial speeches, but not the Christian sermon; for such hearers as do not come to the sermon as attenti and dociles, not even the best introduction will make them such (?). Most of what

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