# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1863_S90
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

90 Luther as Preacher.

Luther, of course, will not always have been able to prepare for his sermons in the way that a pastor living in settled circumstances can — that is certain. But that is how it has gone with other overburdened preachers too — Chrysostom delivered many sermons for which he had no preparation at all, and Schleiermacher prepared himself differently than Reinhard and Theremin did; so Luther, too, certainly prepared himself for his preaching, only in his own way and according to time and circumstance. That he certainly did not write out all his sermons the way he did the first part of the Kirchenpostille is certain. When he arrived in a town in the evening and preached the next morning, it is plain that he will not have written out his sermon, but he thought through all his sermons, only, as has been said, in his own way. He himself says in the Table Talk that he often, after a sermon, felt he had "spat it out" — that he had kept no manuscript — and adds: "yet the people praised that very sermon to the skies," and added that "in a long time he had not preached so good, so fine a sermon." "When," he goes on, "I have come down from the pulpit, I have reflected and found that I had preached little or nothing of what I had thought through and considered beforehand. So that I hold it for certain that preaching is quite another thing than we reckon it to be; for our Lord God often gives a man something quite different; one preaches quite differently when he gets up there than he had intended or considered to himself beforehand. It is all good, if only a man preaches rightly, in keeping with the faith and agreeable to holy Scripture." Of course we do not mean to say by this that the greatness in Luther's preaching consisted in his having, perhaps somewhat like Schleiermacher, thought out the ideas of the sermon — that is, "considered" them — as though that were the ideal to be striven after; rather, we must say, with the old Eberlin in Löhe's ev. Geistl., vol. 2, p. 30: "if you have first been led by God, with the aforementioned teachers, into the hell of trial and out again toward heaven, so that the world, and the devil too, perceive God's power in you, then you may bear yourself like Luther and others." In such outward things the power does not lie; there each man should act, according to a conscientious estimate of his own gifts and powers, as befits him and as is good for the congregation to which he preaches the word of God. Such imitators of Luther as fancy that Luther's freedom and greatness can be copied like a craftsman's trick, and who now suppose they may preach freely without needing to think it through, or who likewise confine their "thinking through" to mere "considering," because Luther and other heroes thought it through only in that way — these are nothing but chatterers and caricatures of the great men. One must, as Luther says, make no commandment out of freedom.

(To be continued.)