# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1863_S109
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Luther as a Preacher. 109

...reasons is one: that we retain the Epistles and Gospels as they stand arranged in the postils, because there are few preachers gifted enough to treat a whole Evangelist or other book powerfully and profitably." At the same time it must not be passed over in silence that Luther also delivered sermons that were founded neither on a pericope nor on any biblical text at all. Thus the extraordinarily effective eight sermons against Karlstadt were delivered quite freely and without reference to any text. One sees from this that Luther did not consider himself slavishly bound to his sermons. This was a manner of preaching by no means unknown in the Church. Thus Chrysostom, too, delivered sermons on no text whatsoever, and then again on some verse which he used as a heading for his sermons. Compare, for example, Chrysostom's twenty-one sermons on the statues, all of which are prefaced, as it were like a label, only by that one saying of the Apostle, 1 Tim. 5:23: "Drink a little wine for thy weak stomach's sake." This freedom the preaching office, too, will have to preserve for itself. As long as the confession of the Church is present, a sermon on a special occasion — such as an occasional address — cannot thereby be deprived of its dignity, even if it lacks a text from the Word of God, or is gone through neither verse by verse nor even only explained in its main articles. The latter can happen, and the sermon then has no effect, while sermons without a text can nevertheless come from the depth of Scripture and accomplish great things. Why should a mission sermon, for example, even if it had no particular text, not be able to be approximately as great in its effect as Chrysostom's sermons on the statues, or Luther's sermons against Karlstadt — both of which, Luther's and Chrysostom's, through these very sermons in part cast a revolution to the ground, and in part calmed it, although they laid no text as the foundation of these sermons. The talk, as though the Lutheran Church had bound itself slavishly to the pericopes to the great detriment of the exposition of the whole Word of God, ought accordingly to fall silent in shame before such freedom of Luther's, who preached, when it was necessary, without any text at all. That we nowadays regard it as a sin when someone preaches even once without a text is due solely to our own lack of freedom. The pericopes hold for the ordinary Sundays, and there they are of the very greatest importance; but otherwise no one is bound. Only let no one preach against Scripture! But that the text must every single time stand before the sermon, and every time be "exhausted," as the connoisseurs of the art call it — against that one will indeed have to guard oneself. Luther's manner, however, of preaching on the pericopes consisted in this, that he expounded verse by verse analytically and applied it to the congregation. The proper homily was as foreign to the Reformation sermons as the synthetic manner of preaching, although both forms occur here and there, in germ, among one preacher or another. It might seem, however, as though the...