# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1863_S20
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

20 Luther as Preacher.

In more than one respect it is of significance to set that man, from whom the German Reformation proceeded, once again before our eyes as a preacher for the present day. He who exercised such influence through his confession, as Luther did, and who, particularly through his sermons, made so deep an impact and was able to call forth so great an epoch in the church, reaching down to our own days, well deserves that his sermons, too, should again and again be examined more closely anew. And precisely nowadays this seems to be important, when it is almost becoming a habit to complain of the insufficiency and ineffectiveness of our sermons, and to ponder new means with respect to preaching and to churchly activity in general. But this much is certain: if preaching no longer does its work, if it no longer draws and lifts up the congregation, if it no longer brings forth something new in the midst of the great decay, then it is altogether over with the healthy life of the church. Preaching has received the promise from the Lord to build His kingdom; everything else is either only a palliative and a substitute, or else possible and salutary only when true preaching goes along with it. Where preaching is ineffective, there the church's main artery is cut off; whatever churchly life may exist without it is weak and forever in the process of dying. Preaching alone builds up and keeps everything fresh and sound. A glance at lands and churches where the pulpit has become a side matter, or a mere "gossip-box," suffices to prove the point. Not even the printed Bible, nor the sacrament, will make good the damage.

Good will and gifts for preaching rightly are again present everywhere nowadays — and yet one after another raises the question: how must Christian preaching be constituted, if it is to be popular and to be effective? And how differently the answers sound! What wonderful proposals are made, what counsels given! Let us, instead of all these well-meant hints, set before our eyes for once the man who preached in his own time as no one else did, whose sermons are still read to this day and stand in power as none other.

But it is especially important in our days — these days of conflict and misunderstanding concerning what Luther preached — to become clear again and rightly conscious of the old truth of the church. Luther is not the man of formulas and abstractions which many nowadays hold to be the essence of the Lutheran church: in him, and especially in his sermons, there lives nothing but the full, original gospel. The certainty of the sonship of God is everything to him; this certainty, and the joyfulness flowing from it, is the inexhaustible source of his preaching and his remembering. This he preaches — after the struggles he had gone through — ever anew, as though he wished and had to proclaim only the one thing; everything else is subordinate and a side matter. The old Lutheran preaching, however, has, in its content, unfortunately disappeared among us far more than one would think, given the so loudly emerging orthodox