# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1863_S117
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Luther as a Preacher. 117

...manner of preaching. Jenisch, in the funeral sermon on Polycarpus Leyser, says: "The blessed man could ill bear it when a preacher applied himself to a new, strange, unaccustomed manner of preaching, when men introduced, against the custom of Luther, Pomeranus, Brenz, Eber, Chemnitz, and other pure, good preachers taught for the kingdom of heaven, distinctionum distinctiones, partium particulas, particularum membra et scrupula. But the new world wants a new manner of preaching too, and many could bear it that a new Bible, new words, new preachers should arise — inasmuch as even D. Selnecker complained that under the new manner of preaching the pure Word of God would suffer a hard blow," see Beste II, XX. If one looks today even at the best sermons or sermon outlines (for reasons of our own we forbear to name names) and compares them with the preaching of Luther and of the Reformation period, one sees at first glance that a great difference exists between today and that time in preaching. What abstract themes, and what abstract divisions, one sees nowadays! We do not wish, however, to break the staff over the synthetic manner of preaching without further ado — with its often so contrived theme and its forced divisions, its arbitrary subdivisions, and its rhetorical train of thought that on the whole approaches the text more from without; but this much is quite certain: this manner of preaching, almost the only one now current, is not old-Lutheran. A preacher who preaches only synthetically, who is always in danger of walking alongside the text, of reading his own thoughts into the text, and of appearing with oratorical artfulness — such a preacher may know how to allege ever so much that is fine in favor of his manner of preaching, but one thing is certain: it is not the way of the old Church. But it is not even the way of the world. Where nowadays does a secular orator, in any parliament, deliver such a speech in which he displays the outward framework, the skeleton of his speech — introduction, transition to the theme, theme, solemn announcement of the parts, and so on — so openly on show, as is done in church almost always without the least scruple? Such speeches are found neither in the old Church, nor in the age of the Reformation — nor in the speeches of the world. Neither Cicero nor Demosthenes, neither the great English nor the great German parliamentary orators — Stahl, for example — hold the form up so sterile before the hearer's eyes as our synthetic preachers do. It is truly as if these men, alongside the content of their sermons, also demanded as an extra a compliment for their so strongly prominent, great artistic skill; one gets the impression that the poor Word of Scripture must first attain significance through the beautiful form of art — whereas in fact a sermon with so much form resembles only those animals that have grown unusually lean from hunger, and by no means, to the praise of their beauty—