# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1863_S21
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Luther as Preacher. 21

Repristination of our own day! We now again have many Lutheran books and teachers at the universities, but the step out of the books and out of the lecture halls into the first Lutheran sermon in the pulpit seems too great to be assumed of all who read the books and attend the lectures. If one only looks around among the printed sermons about us, and also more often hears various sermons preached: the difference among the sermons is exactly the same as it is in the whole of present-day theology. If the gentlemen at the lectern would only always bear this well in mind: what they teach echoes again from the pulpits before the congregation, unless God should perhaps still take the preachers afterward into his own school and tell them things they had not thought of before. But this much is certain: on our pulpits we are still stuck far deeper in the supranaturalistic generalities which, proceeding well enough from the truth of the Gospel by way of speculation, nevertheless wish "at the same time to do justice to theological progress, to the objections of opponents, to the needs of the churchly present" far more than agrees with the simple Lutheran sermon. To this are added the common pietistic legalisms, falsely evangelical freedoms, eschatological hobby-horses, abstract orthodoxy, spirit-mongering lawlessness, political outbursts after the taste of the age, and alongside these the neglect of the great doctrines of Word and Sacrament, authority and marriage, together with a boorish disdain of all forms and of all culture in the one camp, and an excessive parading of the most artful design together with extraordinary wordiness in the other. Whoever knows the old witnesses of the Lutheran Church, and above all Luther himself, must often find this coming troublingly to meet him in today's sermons! The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau [Genesis 27:22]. Over against this it is good to look more closely at Luther's evangelical health. In Luther everything is sound as regards doctrine. He has the whole Gospel, Law and freedom, and knows how to impart everything to the congregation in the same sound manner in which he himself possessed it. And it is precisely in his sermons that one sees the full evangelical life pulsing, as nowhere else in him. If one reads his sermons across and beyond the dogmatics of the Church, and not merely now and then one of them, but studies his sermons so as to come to know and love the Gospel through his preached faith, only then does one gain an insight into the innermost essence of the Lutheran spirit. Here, where he builds up the congregation, here flows the source of his Gospel and — of the Reformation: from here alone are the forms and formulas to be understood which later crystallized in the Church. Whoever knows Luther only from his polemical writings, and the Lutheran Church in general only from the compendious formulas of the dogmaticians, will never come to know the divine comfort with which Luther was comforted and with which he so inexpressibly comforted others. It is here just as it is elsewhere, within the Church and outside it. Whoever, for example, has never himself read Chrysostom, or a homily of the Greek—