# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1863_S116
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

116 Luther as a Preacher.

...so we find that all of them attached themselves, more or less, to Luther's manner of preaching. It is also unthinkable from the outset that in this time of spiritual visitation such synthetic-abstract sermons could have been delivered as one hears, say, nowadays. There, where everything was grounded on Scripture, where everyone moved only around it, everything had to depend, for all of them, on its being rightly recognized. They wanted to preach nothing but the Word — and in order to do this properly, they preached on the Bible biblically. We do not wish to dwell here on the hundred methods of preaching to which Carpzov eventually brought matters; we wish here only to call to mind the methods of preaching that emerged right after Luther's time. One may compare for this the book by Beste, The Most Eminent Pulpit-Orators of the Lutheran Church of the Reformation Era, in two volumes. There, alongside the short biographies of the various friends of Luther in the Reformation period and a characterization of their manner of preaching, one always finds some of their sermons as well. Since these sermons are seldom to be had, it is very interesting to become acquainted with them here. One sees how the men of this great period preached in their day. But they did not preach as one preaches today; rather, they preached wholly in keeping with Luther — that is the short of it. One may compare, alongside the characterization of each preacher in vol. I, especially the preface to vol. II of Beste's book, pp. XIV, XV, XVI; there one learns to know the various manners of preaching of these men. There was a local style of preaching, which treated individual doctrinal articles without a set theme; a paraphrastic style, otherwise quite akin to the local style, differing from it only in that it explicated and articulated the whole train of thought of the text. In the paraphrastic manner the text is broken down into the individual groups of which it actually consists. Alongside Luther's analytical manner of preaching, which was in almost universal use in the first period, we find in the second period, then, the local or articulated style (treating loci, articuli), the paraphrastic style, and, to be sure, by the end of this period already the beginnings of the subsequent synthetic style, which was introduced by Andreas Pancratius, superintendent in Hof.*) He demands, in scholastic fashion, an exordium, doctrina, applicatio, and conclusio, with a corresponding captatio benevolentiae, antithesis and concessio, refutatio and propositio, partium repetitio, affectuum commotio, and voti additio. What more could one want? Alongside the biblically simple sermons of this period, which immerse themselves in Scripture and explain it and expound it to the people, which build up and edify the congregation with the pure Word of God without the reflective doctrinairism of scholastic composition, we thus already find here the beginning of the decline of the preach-

*) Whether the synthetic manner of preaching is really to be traced back to Melanchthon — which, to judge from the examples of the preachers of Melanchthon's school, does not seem warranted — is a matter of indifference to us here. But it is already a sign against the synthetic manner of preaching, with its scholastic form, that people have generally come to believe it must be traced back to Melanchthon, who never preached at all.