# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1863_S87
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Luther as a Preacher. 87

still retained, even in its deepest decay, a certain likeness of the Father in
the Son, which distinguished it specifically from every kind of heathenism.
Luther’s Gospel did not resound beneath the green trees of heathenism,
but within the temple of God. That is why the evangelical message, as
Luther proclaimed it in such power, as the Church had never heard it before,
pierced through the whole temple: to the one a fragrance of life unto life,
to the other a fragrance of death unto death. As this is a historical truth
that must not be forgotten when one deals with the effectiveness of Luther’s
preaching, so it is likewise, at the same time, a comfort for the Church for
all ages: a man who has absorbed the learning of his time, who has died
and risen again in the death and resurrection of Christ, living in pure,
sound doctrine, equipped with the Spirit from on high — should he appear
at the right hour and in the right place, who can say it is impossible that
he too, today, in a Church that has retained even more truth than that
which Luther’s time possessed, might accomplish something as great as
Luther did then! Worldly learning and the power of the spirit of the age,
with their seeming omnipotence, rest before God on feet of clay: when he
breathes upon them, they sink away.

The preaching manner of Luther and his friends — especially of those
who lived with him and immediately after him — was plainly one of the
levers by which they cleared away the rubbish in the old Church and
brought the eternal truth of the Gospel again to light. The Word of
God has renewed the Church; that is unshakably certain: but that Luther
and his friends, in their sermons everywhere, let Scripture step so far
into the foreground and themselves vanish behind it, as was truly the
case, that was the creatively great thing in these their sermons. Read the
House Postil and the Church Postil, compare the manner of preaching so
closely akin to Luther’s in Urbanus Rhegius, in Brenz, in Cölius, in
Corvinus, Veit Dietrich, Matthesius, and others: they all preached not
merely God’s Word, but preached it in such a way that the Word alone
was the main thing and the art of preaching a mere side matter. Luther,
together with all these named and many other friends, was so taken up
with the Word of God that the form of the sermon appears almost
indifferent, provided only that the whole content of the Word might come
to full and unvarnished expression. Had the Reformers, in general,
preached God’s Word as Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and Chrysostom did —
setting aside their rationalizing worldview — had they merely taken the
Apostles’ Creed, say, as a heading over their sermons, as the Greek
Fathers did, but otherwise employed rhetoric as all the rhetoricians of
Greece and Rome did, the Reformation would never have come about. Who
would deny the Greek Fathers that they were convinced of the truth of the
Gospel? But what evangelical Christian will ever wish to read them for the
awakening and furthering of faith! The artistic form, the rhetorical flow,
the worldly eloquence is