# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1863_S89
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Luther as Preacher. 89

The best sermons of today betray only too plainly what is doctrinaire, reflective, a straining after art, and all too often they are a contrived thing, made to satisfy everything that the art of composition and exegesis demands: only they must not be set in one line with the living testimonies of Luther and the Reformers, whose sole concern was to preach the Gospel, come what may. By this, of course, it is not meant that Luther and his friends preached in a wholly formless way. Nor is it meant that Luther, say, climbed into the pulpit without any preparation whatever and preached simply as the Spirit gave it to him. Further on we shall occupy ourselves more closely with the form of Luther's sermons, and although we shall say that his method was, as the ancients put it, the methodus heroica, one not to be imitated without more ado, it was nevertheless always a method. Here it need only be recalled that Luther was thoroughly prepared for his sermons. Whoever lived at all times as fully in Scripture as he did, was as much occupied and preoccupied with "prayer, meditation, and temptation," studied as much, had the Church so much at heart as was the case with him, was at all times prepared to preach. Look at his sermons from their learned side: he knows the exposition of Augustine, Jerome, Gerson, and others; he knows and cites the various interpretations of the Church Fathers; he cites, for instance, in the Hauspostille — where after all he was preaching only to his own children and household — Josephus, both his Antiquities and the Jewish War, and quotes the book to which he refers; in that same Hauspostille he comes to speak of Herod and tells, in passing, the history of Herod's family; he cites Ennius and Virgil, he cites church history and relates the legends: in short, the whole territory his preaching ranges over is so vast, and so rich through knowledge of the text and a far-reaching, specialized apparatus of learning, that no one can possibly suppose that Luther preached unprepared and did not have text and sermon fully in hand. And had Luther had to go directly from some ordinary occupation, even straight from the table, up into the pulpit, he would still have been prepared. He was a preacher in the eminent sense of the word; he lived in the sermon, which held the word of his soul at all times — he needed only to speak of the word that lay ever in his soul and upon his heart, and the sermon was there. But we also know that he even wrote his sermons down. He wrote, at the Wartburg, the Kirchenpostille, namely the exposition of the epistles and Gospels from Advent to Epiphany. "I also intend hereby to serve up the postils to my dear Germans, straight from the cask, although so far I have carried them no further than from Advent to Epiphany, and, in the midst of the work, must for the slanderers' sake break off the order — yet that matters nothing, it will come right again in the end." That