# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1863_S111
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Luther as a Preacher. 111

...hinges on which Luther's life turned. And these two words are the firm cement that holds his sermons together, that makes a structure out of the exposition of the individual verses, a structure that gathered and protected the Church. Without this grasp of them, the Lutheran sermons — a few exceptions perhaps excepted — are simply not to be understood in their formlessness. For, looked at in their bare outward form, they are nothing but artless products. He has very long introductions, and again none at all; without any transition whatever the text simply stands there and his exposition begins with a few words, something like: "let us now go into the text in particular," or: "so the epistle teaches two points once more: to believe and to love." One sermon begins: "This epistle is easy; let us run quickly over it." Indeed he has introductions which, according to the Erlangen edition, run fourteen pages long, while, to be sure, the sermon that follows runs to thirty-one pages. And the sermons generally are just as artless as the introductions. When he has said enough about one verse, he moves on to the next, and when it seems enough to him — he suddenly breaks off and says something like: "let this be enough walking about for this time," or: "it is getting to be too much for us now, we have no time for it," or: "whatever else there is to say, we will leave commended to the very learned and the leisured; it is enough that we have the sum of the Gospel." Besides this there is much else that does not suit our taste, for example his secret [allegorical] interpretation, and the fact that he occasionally speaks Low German, which, however, he does only when he brings in ordinary people speaking, for example in the House Postil, where the unbelievers say: "what good is heaven, if only I had flour here" [in the original Low German: "wat Himmel, hätt' ick hie Mehl"], or where he brings in the drunken burghers and peasants: "well, what do I care about God, what do I care about death? What, should I listen to the priest? Bring the beer here, let's drink, I've still got two pennies to spend" — or when he speaks Latin and cites Greek words. Latin, however — apart from the great use of Latin in that age — he speaks only the way the Greek tragedians use Doric forms on solemn occasions: when he becomes solemn, that is, when he speaks of kings and princes, or of the heights of the mysteries of the faith, or speaks of the depths of the moral law. If one gathers this and the like together and puts it under the homiletical magnifying glass, then Luther would find no favor before any homiletical tribunal today; the most favorable verdict will run: well, yes, that was fine for that age! We will let that stand undecided for now; our concern here was first of all to show Luther as he preaches. And here we must say: he was a whole man as a preacher; what he was as a preacher, that he was himself, and was it wholly. Homiletics, to be sure, he had never heard taught, just as his friends could not have heard it either, since there were as yet no professors of the so-called practical theology — perhaps because the age and its men were all practical.

Of that homiletical polish which nowadays is breathed into us by the theorists among the "practical" professors in their last semester, there could be no talk with Luther. He was like a tree standing in the...