# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1863_S85
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Luther as a Preacher. 85

the historians too were the most useful people and the best teachers, so that
one can never thank, praise, or honor them enough.” To him, especially, the
history of the Old Testament is familiar; he cites it here and there in
his sermons, but then also profane history, like one who has come to know
it down to its smallest details. Luther was a man of history.
In the history of the Gospels he had experienced the whole of history in
his heart: the history of the fall from God, the history of dead,
insufficient works, and the history of redemption through Christ.
That is why he had an eye for everything historical. Nothing human
do I consider foreign to me, he could rightly say. But because he had himself
become a new man through the history of the Lord Jesus Christ,
this history was dearest to him, and therefore it takes precedence, with him,
over all other history — both that of the Old Testament and profane history
alike. Again and again he ties back to the New Testament.
From it he continually draws his examples and arguments.

Luther was also well versed in the Church Fathers. His relationship
to Augustine is well known. But he also knew Jerome and Chrysostom.
“I have spent many an hour on Jerome, Chrysostom, and others that I
would have spent to better use on Augustine.” He knew Gabriel and
Peter of Ailly almost by heart. He especially loved Saint Bernard of
Clairvaux, and calls him a “golden preacher” — where he is not disputing —
and even sets him above Augustine. But dearest to him were
Tauler’s writings. “If it delights you,” he says, “to become acquainted with
a solid theology in the German tongue, wholly like that of the ancients,
then get yourself Johannes Tauler’s sermons, for neither in Latin
nor in our own language have I ever seen a sounder theology, or one more
in agreement with the Gospel.” If we now sum all this
up, we must confess that Luther had absorbed into himself the whole —
admittedly still very deficient — body of learning of his time, both on
its humanistic and on its ecclesiastical side.

But if we wish to understand how it came about that Luther’s sermons
gained so great an influence, we must indeed hold fast to this: that it
was the Gospel itself that he proclaimed in power and spirit. The
ground was thirsting, and so it drank in the dew that trickled from the
Wittenberg Augustinian’s lips onto the parched field of the church. Not only
had the pulpit become almost profaned through the manner of preaching:
printed sermons, too, were almost entirely lacking. Apart from the books of
Tauler and of Geiler von Kaysersberg, there were scarcely any printed
sermons. And the sermons that were delivered were wholly without
exposition of God’s Word. The pericopes, to be sure, were read aloud,
but — says Erasmus — good God, how they gesticulate, how they change
their voice, how they throw themselves this way and that, how
time and again they put on ever new faces, how they fill everything
with their shouting! And this art of preaching is handed down like a
secret thing, one little brother to the next. They begin with