# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1863_S114
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

114 Luther as a Preacher.

...preaches, and there comes to speak of the last great battle, he throws himself so vividly into it, imagining a battle of nations, that on the pulpit he not only imitates the war-cry of the fighting soldiers, but even lets the sound of the trumpet ring out himself — Taratantara — and imitates the thunder with his own: Pummerlepumm. But to be sure, this same Luther also often preaches quite differently again, and indeed so speculatively high and deep that one no longer recognizes him at all. When, for example, he comes to speak of the depths of the Trinity and there begins to speak of the nature and person of God, then nothing is too high and too deep for him; every language must come to hand to express his thoughts, and he soars with his intuition and his dialectical thrusts out of the Word so high into the depth of God that surely many of his hearers have not been able to follow him. That, no doubt, was something even for the forty Masters of Arts present. We must repeat once more: Luther gives himself on the pulpit as he is; he speaks as he has it; he wants only to make the thoughts of his God clear, and to that end everything must serve him, and he uses all his gifts only for this one purpose; and as the text is, so is his exposition, as the hearers are, so is his presentation — he will be, and can be, all things to all people. And this giftedness, this desire, to make the Gospel clear with these gifts and to lay out its whole content to the populus Dei [people of God] out of his own innermost personality, let him always find the right words — and that was his popularity. Neither his Low German, nor his Latin, nor his not writing things down, nor his analytical manner, made up his popularity. All these were only expressions of the originality and primal, vigorous personality already present beforehand, which, penetrated through by the Gospel, could proclaim the Gospel in no way but an original one. And wherever personalities have appeared in this manner — that is, men who have let their giftedness be penetrated through by the Gospel — there they have also always preached popularly. Today, to be sure, it almost seems as if recipes must be invented to talk someone into popularity. Because here or there someone preaches this way or that — in Low German, say — because someone has had this or that success with his sermons, the gentlemen who have no success become uneasy and think that if they too appeared in Low German, or at least in a rustic manner, or told good stories, then they too would become popular. But every preacher, like every Christian, is his own personality, endowed with distinctive traits, in a manifold variety of different gifts (1 Corinthians 12), which the Holy Spirit wishes to bring to honor by not breaking the old nature but building it up and transfiguring it. On these his own gifts every man should reflect, on how he has them by nature and how the Holy Spirit wills to sanctify and increase them. And whoever so works himself out as a Christian from the indolence and perverseness of his old self, and also the...