# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1863_S110
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

110 Luther as a Preacher.

...the analytical manner of Luther's, of explaining verse by verse without a great conception binding the whole text into a whole, would be dry and unsuited to the Church. But the dryness lies neither in the verse nor in its exposition, but every time in the man who preaches on it. We have heard sermons — for example, those of old Goßner in Berlin — which were very similar to Luther's in their analytical exposition of verses, and to which one might have objected everything, but by no means that they were dry. On the contrary: where the preacher stands so grounded in God's Word as Luther did, knows so exactly that the congregation is served only by the exposition of the Word, and holds fast that the great unity of all texts and of all sermons consists in the great theme of faith and of love — there is no fear, either that the unity of the sermon will be lacking, or that it will sink down into sterile exegeses and die out in dryness. As Paul charges Timothy, 2 Tim. 1:18, that he should hold to the pattern of the sound words which he had heard from him, and as Paul more closely describes these sound words as "in faith and love which is in Christ Jesus," as John, 1 Epistle 3:23, defines the commandment of the Lord thus: "that we should believe on the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another" — so faith and love were also the great theme with Luther. Just as the whole Bible, too, consists only of individual verses, which are nevertheless held together by the Holy Spirit, who works nothing but faith and love, so Luther's sermons are only expositions of verses, which nevertheless find their unity in the inexhaustible theme of faith and of love. Luther, to be sure, did not bind himself to this analytical exposition either; he also preached sermons, for example on the 16th Sunday after Trinity on Luke 7:11–17, K. P. [Kirchen-Postille], where he expounds no verse at all, but ties his thoughts quite freely, in an untroubled flow, to the text. But his rule is: to expound verse by verse analytically, and to tie the bond that faith and love carry within themselves. Luther wanted to preach nothing but these two words; he says: "have faith and love, remain therein, so you have and can do all things" — and: "our life and a Christian being consists in two things, in faith and in love." This Luther taught in all his sermons. Take a string of pearls: without the string the pearls, though they are pearls, are only atoms; the string alone binds them into an ornament. Luther's sermons would fall completely apart without this string of faith and love; if his textual expositions were nothing but expositions of the individual verses, without being held together by the great Scripture-and-Church copula of faith and love, then they might indeed still be pearls, as his marginal glosses are, but they would nevermore be sermons! The certainty of faith in the righteousness before God through Jesus Christ, the constant summons to love toward one's neighbor — these were the...