# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1863_S88
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

88 Luther as a Preacher.

with the Greek bishops, who before they became Christians had been
rhetoricians and lawyers, and after their conversion remained rhetoricians,
that rhetoric always remained the main thing. Rhetoric, however, along
with the Apostles’ Creed on the side, would never have brought about a
Reformation. Indeed, had Luther and his friends preached in that later,
synthetic artistic manner which, since the decline of the original Lutheran
way of preaching, became customary in the Lutheran Church — where
production had vanished and artistic form held the government — how
would their preaching ever have struck the people’s heart, as the
Reformation preaching did! Reinhard declares, in his confessions, that
whenever he delivered a sermon he already had the next one lying
finished in his desk. Marezoll worked out his sermons even months in
advance. To imagine the Reformers as preachers of that sort is well-nigh
impossible. Their manner of preaching was of a wholly different kind; it
almost seems as if it has fallen into oblivion in our day. The Reformers,
and Luther in particular, had come to the peace of their souls through
nothing but the Word of God. No monastery and no bishop, no hermitage
and no church as in the old time, no formula of the church or of the
world as in the more recent time, had given them peace of soul. God’s
whole Word alone had led them to peace and had renewed them. That is
why they also lived in nothing else but this Word. From it came to them
all comfort and all theology. When Luther spoke, at table or in the pulpit,
with friends or with foes, he spoke out of the life that God’s Word had
planted in him. “I nothing, the Word everything” — that was the content
of his life. That is why his sermons, too, are composed in such a way that
no form binds him; his only concern is that nothing of the Word be lost,
and that the congregation receive the Word in its truth and effect
welling up directly out of Scripture. Of all the homiletic display of later
times, nothing is to be found in him or his friends. Let one lay the
demands of artistic form, as the homileticians of our own and of earlier
times have set them before preachers, alongside Luther; let one compare
any notable sermon of Luther’s with a homiletic art-product of the kind
regularly turned out nowadays: let one look at the carefully thought-out
introduction of one of our standard sermons, how it works its way, in
textbook fashion, from some point of sacred or profane history, an
abstraction of the moral law, or some chance idea, toward its text; let
one consider such a sermon’s artfully arranged theme with its various
divisions and subdivisions; let one consider the reflective discourse that
moves on continually, in a contrived, artistic manner, far from the
biblical word, along its own chains of thought, and only when it feels
itself exhausted swings back, by some happy turn, to some word of the
text — and compare with that the preaching manner of Luther and his
friends: one will truly get the impression that one is dealing here with a
totally different manner of preaching.