Spare Everything but the Word: Luther as Preacher

SPARE EVERYTHING BUT THE WORD:

LUTHER AS PREACHER

The Protestant Reformation would not have been possible without the sermon,” the historian Harold Grimm wrote. Reflecting on the importance of sermons during the Reformation period, Grimm continued: “Regardless of how the reformers gained their new theological insights, they used the sermon to bring their doctrines directly to their followers in the vernacular and to apply those doctrines to the immediate and practical religious needs of the people. Since the pulpit was one of the most important means of communicating information in the sixteenth century, the role of the sermon in making the Reformation a mass movement can scarcely be overestimated.”

By any standard, Martin Luther had a high view of sermons and preaching. 2 Reflecting Swiss “When the preacher speaks, God speaks,” he once wrote. views expressed in the 1560s by Heinrich Bullinger and others in the Second ³ Luther had something to say to those who did not share Helvetic Confession, this view of preaching: “So the pastor must be sure that God speaks through his ⁴ Elsewhere, Luther put it this mouth. Otherwise it is time for him to be quiet.” way: “The apostles wrote very little, but they spoke a lot…. Notice: it says let their voices be heard, not let their books be read. The ministry of the New Testament is not engraved on dead tablets of stone; rather it sounds in a living voice…. Through a living Word God accomplishes and fulfills his gospel.”

Luther’s high view of preaching must, of course, be set in the context of the Reformation as a movement of reform, or change—change both in the content and manner of preaching. In his massive seven-volume analysis of the history of preaching, Hughes Oliphant Old comments: “The classical Protestant Reformation produced a distinct school of preaching. It was a preaching of ⁶ Old points out that reform, to be sure, but it was also a reform of preaching.” the Reformation did not reintroduce preaching. The medieval church had a great deal of preaching, but “it was a bit like the churches in which it took place: flamboyant and gothic.” Old summarizes, “What happened was that with the Reformation came a refocusing of preaching, a rethinking of its purpose and reevaluation of its relation to the worship of the Church.”

Perhaps we do not think of Luther, first of all, as a preacher but as a stalwart teacher and defender of the doctrine of justification by faith alone. However, statistics concerning his lifelong preaching ministry reveal a very different perspective. Upon receiving his doctorate in 1512, Luther’s life was that of an academic. He was professor of biblical studies at the University of Wittenberg. 8 It is therefore As Garry Williams points out, “Luther was never a minister.” somewhat surprising that Luther preached as much as he did.

From the moment Johann von Staupitz assigned him to preach in the monastery in 1511, Luther preached about four thousand sermons (approximately 2,300 have survived) during the course of his life, most of them in the town church (Stadtkirche) in Wittenberg. Allowing for a two-year gap in preaching, Luther preached on average 120 sermons a year, or one sermon every three days. In 1528, he preached two hundred sermons. There were three preaching services in Wittenberg every Sunday, the first one starting at 5 a.m. In addition, there were sermons on weekdays and Saturdays. During the Passiontide of 1529, for example, Luther preached eighteen times in eleven days.

The Weimar edition of Luther’s works, also known as the WeimarerAusgabe, contains 122 volumes, of which twenty-two consist of Luther’s sermons translated into English (and in some cases, Latin). They are not in German—the language in which Luther preached all his sermons. The process of recording the sermons (shorthand taken down by a variety of scribes) and the translation process means that some of the rhetoric and flow of the spoken word has been lost. The sermons may read much more formally than they were delivered. Something of the passion of their delivery is perhaps absent.

In addition to his own sermons, Luther was also realistic concerning the needs of churches without trained preachers of the caliber he desired. To make up for this, he wrote several books (postils) for other preachers to preach or even read—“expository sermonettes for clergy who could not write sermons of their own.”

Reading these sermons (Luther’s own and the postils) may convey entirely the wrong impression. The Reformers, generally, did not write out their sermons and read them. Luther entered the pulpit with a Konzept(a short outline containing the “heads” of the sermon) that elaborated on the lectionary text for the day. Since there was little by way of precedent, his students referred to it as ¹⁰ They were studied and thought out beforehand for sure, “the heroic method.” but their delivery was extemporary and immediate, spoken in the common vernacular. Unlike Calvin’s Geneva, where one stenographer, Denis Raguenier, took down word-for-word what Calvin said in French (employing a shorthand system), Luther’s sermons were taken down by several stenographers. The number of stenographers probably varied. The notes, partly in German and partly in Latin, were then collated and written up in Latin only later to be retranslated into German. Getting a feel for the flow of words is therefore a difficult task. But some things are very clear, not least of which is Luther’s absolute commitment to the authority of Scripture.

Commitment to the Authority of Scripture

The theological commitments that Luther grasped in the turbulent years between 1512 and 1517, and maintained steadfastly thereafter, included a commitment to the authority of Scripture. For Luther, this meant denying the role given to ecclesiastical tradition, papal pronouncements, canon law, and allegorical ¹¹ This was, in effect, a commitment to the “literal” interpretations of Scripture. interpretation of Scripture. This meant interpreting Scripture according to the rules of literature—history as history, law as law, parable as parable, etc. Since all of Scripture is the Word of God—without contradiction, since Scripture is of divine origin—Luther viewed preaching as subject to Scripture’s authority. What right, after all, did any human being have to declare to another that he must conform to this or that, apart from divine authority? The only justification to exercise such control over the consciences of men and women is a divine authority based on the nature of Scripture as the Word of God.

Luther would have agreed with the English Calvinist theologian-preacher William Perkins, who, a half-century after Luther’s death, wrote in what might be the very first book on preaching, The Arte of Prophecying(1607): “The Word of God alone is to be preached, in its perfection, and inner consistency. Scripture is the exclusive subject of preaching, the only field in which the preacher is to labour.”

The preacher’s principal task, then, is to explain and apply the Scriptures. Not all Scripture is equally clear, and Luther told his students that the exegete/ preacher should treat a difficult passage no differently than Moses did the rock in the desert, which he smote with his rod until water gushed out for his thirsty people.

Keeping Things Simple

By far, the most extensive analysis of Luther’s preaching is by Fred Meuser in his marvelous summary Luther the Preacher(1983). According to Meuser, Luther was well liked as a preacher. He “spoke slowly but with great vigor and ¹⁴ Given what we know about his often had a moving effect upon the hearers.” convictions, it would be hard to imagine that Luther’s preaching was dull and devoid of rhetorical passion. It is equally hard to fathom, then, that Luther felt the need to chastise some who did not listen well, saying that some fell asleep and some even snored during the sermon, adding that they sometimes coughed whenever he preached on justification, only to wake up again whenever he told a ¹⁵ Times do not seem to have changed. All the more reason, then, for the story.

Reformer to keep his sermons relatively simple and straightforward.

Those who have studied Luther’s theological works find themselves in deep ¹⁶ Concepts such as his theology of waters. Luther’s theology is complex at best. the cross (theologia crucis), the doctrine of consubstantiation, and the exact distinction between law and gospel (did Luther advance in his understanding of the so-called third use of the law, as some have suggested?) continue to occupy scholars of Luther to this day. Is it surprising, then, that Luther’s preaching was essentially simple and plain? Not really. According to Hughes Oliphant Old, Luther “made no attempt to be a great orator.” Old expands, “[Luther] had none of the rhetorical culture that Basil, Chrysostom, or Augustine had. Luther was a popular preacher with a natural mastery of language. He taught preachers of the ¹⁷ Garry Williams cites a Reformation to preach in the language of the people.” similar statement that Luther makes in his Table Talk:

In the pulpit we are to lay bare the breasts and nourish the people with milk…. Complicated thoughts and issues we should discuss in private with the eggheads [Klueglinge]. I don’t think of Dr. Pomeraneus, Jonas, or Philip [Melanchthon] in my sermon. They know more about it than I do. So I don’t preach to them. I just preach to Hansie and Betsy.

Although Luther had been schooled in classical rhetoric as part of the awakening of the Renaissance movement in late-medieval Europe, the Reformer seemed deliberately to avoid its more elaborate affectations, employing in its ¹⁹ He was, for example, particularly scornful place a more conversational style. of the use of Hebrew in the pulpit. Though able to converse in both Greek and Hebrew with the best of Renaissance scholarship—scholarship that had triumphed in returning to the sources for meaning (ad fontes)— Luther did not employ Greek and Hebrew terms in his sermons. Williams cites Luther’s acerbic comment about Zwingli: “How I do hate people who lug in so many languages as Zwingli does; he spoke Greek and Hebrew in the pulpit at Marburg.”

Despite these warnings, Luther was firmly committed to the study of the original languages and urged that all preachers have the same passion:

Though the faith and the Gospel may be proclaimed by simple preachers without the languages, such preaching is flat and tame, men grow at last wearied and disgusted and it falls to the ground. But when the preacher is versed in the languages, his discourse has freshness and force, the whole of Scripture is treated, and faith finds itself constantly renewed by a continual variety of words and works.

On another occasion, Luther is even stronger in urging the use of the original languages:

It is a sin and shame not to know our own book or to understand the speech and words of our God; it is a still greater sin and loss that we do not study languages, especially in these days when God is offering and giving us men and books and every facility and inducement to this study, and desires his Bible to be an open book. O how happy the dear fathers would have been if they had our opportunity to study the languages and come thus prepared to the Holy Scriptures! What great toil and effort it cost them to gather up a few crumbs, while we with half the labor—yes, almost without any labor at all—can acquire the whole loaf! O how their effort puts our indolence to shame.

Commenting on these statements of Luther, John Piper makes the following deduction:

Now that is a discouraging overstatement for many pastors who have lost their Greek and Hebrew. What I would say is that knowing the languages can make any devoted preacher a better preacher—more fresh, more faithful, more confident, more penetrating. But it is possible to preach faithfully without them—at least for a season…. The test of our faithfulness to the Word, if we cannot read the languages, is this: Do we have a large enough concern for the church of Christ to promote their preservation and widespread teaching and use in the churches? Or do we, out of self-protection, minimize their importance because to do otherwise stings too badly?

Luther’s insistence upon simplicity of language is, in part at least, a byproduct of the free delivery of his sermons; his sermons were extemporaneous rather than read from a manuscript. This fact alone almost guarantees that the language employed is simpler, ensuring that if a complex thought is uttered, sufficient explanation is given to elucidate it, drawn from (among other things) eye contact with one’s listeners that often reveals understanding or perplexity. One puzzled look from a listener, or clear signs that no one is actually listening, will urge simplicity of language—repeating a thought in different language until the point is made clear.

Perhaps one way to get a grasp of Luther’s sermonic style is to attempt an 24 delivered on the outline of one of his sermons. A sermon on Luke 21:25–36, lectionary text for the second Sunday of Advent, 1522, reveals the following outline:

I. The signs of the day of judgment A. In general

1. Although manifold and great, the world pays no attention to these signs

2. Whether some will recognize these signs when they come B. In detail

1. The first class of these signs a. In the secular world, everything has reached its climax b. In spiritual things, everything has reached its climax, especially the abominations of the papacy

2. The second class of these signs a. The darkening of the sun b. The moon shall not give its light c. The fall of the stars d. The people on earth will be in distress and perplexity (further subdivided) e. The roaring of the sea (further subdivided) f. Men fainting for fear (further subdivided) g. The shaking of the powers of the heavens (further subdivided)

3. The third class of these signs II. The comfort Christians have when these signs appear A. How and why this comfort will be given to all true Christians

1. Why believers pray God for the coming of the day of judgment

2. What we are to think of those who fear before the day of judgment

3. The day of judgment will be welcome in the highest degree to believers, but to the godless it will be terrifying in the highest degree

4. What we are to answer those who fear the day of judgment, because they still have sin

5. Who are the best armed for the day of judgment B. The nature of this comfort C. What moved Christ to impart this comfort D. How the visionary preachers withhold their comfort from poor souls

1. Few people pray the Lord’s prayer aright

2. The right and the wrong use of the fear of the day of judgment

In the printed form, the sermon was divided into sixty-eight numbered paragraphs for simplicity of reading. The outline looks cumbersome, but in fact the structure is entirely an expositional commentary on the text, similar in many respects to Calvin’s preaching in Geneva. Like so many of Calvin’s sermons, Luther’s sermons were rarely delivered with obvious transitions from one point to another or the annunciation of a typical three-point form. Indeed, the outline above is not present in any apparent way in the text of the sermon. The distinction of “points” is an editorial imposition on the sermon. This is, possibly, the genius of an outline. Too often, its props and supports, looking and sounding as much out of place as an unfinished building that reveals its steel girders and masonry pillars, artificially distort the flow and sense of directness of a sermon. That such supports are necessary is all too clear. Sermons that have none do not go anywhere and achieve little. But perhaps, also, traditional sermons can be too dependent upon such devices. Three-point sermons with clever (but often artificial) alliteration, for example, can all too easily appeal to the architectural mind-set at the expense of the deeper level of the conscience and affections.

Expository Preaching

One central aspect of the Renaissance was a commitment to the study of the original text. To that end, the Renaissance commitment to ad fontes proved a marvelously providential encouragement for the Reformers to study the actual text of Scripture rather than engage in moral and ultimately legalistic outbursts. Preaching the Bible on its own terms as the inerrant Word of God meant that the Reformers refused to engage in sermons that consisted simply in the opinions of learned men; rather, preaching became an exercise in declaring the meaning and application of Scripture. This was, for Luther, the glory of preaching, for thereby God’s Word was declared. The commitment to expository preaching—opening up what the text of Scripture says according to a series of hermeneutical rules, chiefly that Scripture is self-interpreting and cannot contradict itself—was a necessary corollary of their understanding of what the Bible is and what the Bible is for.

If today’s preacher, having succumbed to postmodernity’s skepticism, can be caricatured as “one without authority,” Luther as preacher signified the opposite. Today’s preacher has all too often lost confidence in the authority of the Bible as the Word of God and is left with little to say and no authority for saying it apart from prejudice and personal conviction. Western society no longer recognizes the authority of a clergyman, or even the authority of a preacher. Still less does our society acknowledge the authority of Scripture. In a world of moral relativism, today’s preacher questions the right of any individual to deliver a monological address that requires repentance and points the way to an exclusive Savior who alone can save. Luther knew no such restrictions. The freedom and conviction he knew as a preacher lay in an unquestioned commitment to the binding nature of Scripture’s authority. Meuser cites Luther to this effect:

Some pastors and preachers are lazy and no good. They do not pray; they do not study; they do not read; they do not search the Scripture….

The call is: watch, study, attend to reading…. You cannot read too much in Scripture, what you read you cannot read too carefully, what you read carefully you cannot understand too well … what you understand well you cannot teach too well, what you teach well you cannot live too well…. Therefore dear…. pastors and preachers, pray, read, study, be diligent…. This evil, shameful time is no reason for being lazy, for sleeping, and snoring.

Expository preaching—allowing the text to govern the content and shape of the sermon—need not necessarily be a commitment to lectio continua preaching. Luther did undertake the latter, preaching almost two hundred sermons on the gospel of John on Saturdays while the Wittenberg minister, Johannes Bugenhagen of Pomerania (Dr. Pomeranus, as Luther called him), was away in Denmark. These are verse-by-verse expositions of the text of the gospel, sometimes taking only a few verses at a time.

However, Luther also preached catechetical and textual sermons, the former covering essential points of doctrine (particularly the Apostles’ Creed) and the latter committed to the lectionary reading for the day at hand.

Catechetical preaching was reintroduced at the Reformation in keeping with a similar practice in the fourth century, largely as a way of instructing those who were about to make a solemn commitment of public profession before the ²⁶ Luther’s catechetical sermons of 1528, for example, are the first such church. series recorded for us from the Reformation period and include ten expositions on weekdays over a two-week period. These sermons provided the basis for Luther’s Shorter and Larger Catechisms of 1529. The sermons included expositions of the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Apostles’ Creed and explanations of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Five sermons were devoted to the Ten Commandments while only one was given to the Apostles’ 27 Given the (false) accusations of antinomianism sometimes made about Creed.

Luther’s understanding of the place of the moral law in the Christian life, this sermonic ratio seems to suggest the very opposite. The fact is, however, that these sermons were given in a very specific context and (perhaps of greater importance) not during the Sunday services, when it was deemed more appropriate to expound Scripture rather than heads of doctrine.

Discouragement in Preaching

With the standards that Luther imposed upon preaching, his own as much as others’, it is not surprising that he was prone to discouragement. In 1530, in particular, he was disconsolate because of what he deemed as insufficient response by the congregation. In 1528, he warned the congregation at the Castle Church that he would stop preaching unless he saw more fruit of the gospel. In 1530, from January to September, Luther preached only three times, and two of those were at the express command of the prince. Employing some hyperbole, he declared that had he known in advance what a miserable calling preaching was, twenty-four horses would not have been enough to draw him into it. Preaching, he said, was hard work, “a rotten office, whose misery is such that a person ²⁸ In his New Year sermon in 1530, he complained would rather be a swineherd!” bitterly of the congregation’s selfishness. A short time later, he said he would rather preach to raving dogs than to them and that from then on, he would confine himself to the classroom. This gloomy Luther revived after a stay at Coburg and suddenly, without any apology or explanation, he resumed preaching in September 1530. The following year, he was back to his average of 180 sermons a year.

Luther believed that preaching was an essential part of his calling as a Reformer, and apart from this sense of calling, “I would not want to preach ²⁹ Despite misgivings he often felt and another sermon to the end of my days.” expressed about the effectiveness of preaching, Luther continued to preach. In the same sermon, Luther expressed himself this way:

God says, “You must do this regardless of the consequences to you, you must remain in your office.” If you are in the ministry and see that you have rascals and knaves, fornicators and adulterers, and robbers in your parish, you must say, “Since this is my duty, I will point sins to peasants, burghers, and noblemen, and rebuke them for these without paying attention to their complaints when they say: ‘Look here, you are defaming me!’” For if I held back, I would make myself guilty of your sin. And why should I go to hell for you? They might retort, “Well, I am not asking you to do this; I am not forcing you.” Yes, this may be true…. If I see adultery or other sins in people and neglect to take the sinners to task, God will visit their sins on me…. Do you consider it a good evangelical sermon if I keep silence and let you do as you please?

Luther was a direct preacher, engaging in a battery of rhetorical questioning that engaged his listeners motivationally as much as they did cerebrally. But most of all, it was the gospel of Jesus Christ that engaged him and his sermons. It is impossible to read his sermons today without hearing a man who loved Christ and understood the truth of the gospel and its relevance for his listeners. He paved the way for the importance of preaching as a distinctive mark of the Reformation.

If we are to see another reformation in our own time, we will need to preach with the conviction and zeal of Martin Luther. We will need to trust the Bible by the power of the Holy Spirit to do what we cannot—awaken dead hearts and transform lives.

Notes

Notes

1. Harold J.

Grimm, “The Human Element in Luther’s Sermons,” in ArchivfurReformationsgeschichte, 49 (1958), 50.

2. WA, 51:517. Cited by Fred W. Meuser, “Luther as Preacher of the Word of God,” in McKim, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther, 136. See also Meuser’s definitive volume Luther thePreacher, 11.

3. See chapter 1 of the Second Helvetic Confession’s statement, “The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.” Scholars have made much of this insistence that preaching is the Word of God. Heiko Oberman views it in connection with the Eucharistic “real presence” in Luther’s view of the supper, and David Steinmetz viewed preaching as Luther’s “third sacrament.” See Heiko A. Oberman, “The Preaching of the Word of God in the Reformation,”Harvard Divinity Bulletin 25 (October 1960): 16; David C. Steinmetz, Luther in Context, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2002), 134.

4. Bruno Jordan, “Die Auferstehung Christi von den Toten in Luthers Osterpredigten,”Luther:Mitteilungen der Luthergesellschaft 1995:13. Cited by Meuser, Luther the Preacher, 12.

5. WA, 5:537, as quoted in Arthur Skevington Wood, Captive to the Word: Martin Luther, Doctor ofSacred Scripture(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1969), 90.

6. Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the ChristianChurch, Vol. 4: The Age of the Reformation(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002), 1.

7. Ibid.

8. Garry J. Williams, Silent Witnesses: Lessons on Theology, Life, and the Church from Christians ofthe Past(Edinburgh, Scotland: Banner of Truth, 2013), 190. See especially the chapter “Preaching the Word: Martin Luther (1483–1546),” 189–203.

9. “Martin Luther,” in The Collected Shorter Writings of J.I. Packer, Vol. 4: Honouring the People ofGod(Carlisle, Pa.: Paternoster, 1999), 12. See also The Complete Sermons of Martin Luther.

10. Richard Lischer, preface to Faith and Freedom: An Invitation to the Writings of Martin Luther, eds. John F. Thornton and Susan B. Varenne (New York: Random House, 2002), xxiv.

11. Gary Williams somewhat controversially draws positive attention to Luther’s christological reading of Psalm 69, suggesting that it should give us pause to consider what he thinks of as the overemphasis given to grammatical-historical exegesis, or the plain reading of Scripture in our time. Williams, Silent Witnesses, 190f.

12. William Perkins, The Art of Prophesying(Edinburgh, Scotland: Banner of Truth, 1996), 9.

13. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil, 224.

14. Meuser, “Luther as Preacher of the Word of God,” 144.

15. Ibid.

16. For Crisp summaries of Luther’s central thought, see Carl R. Trueman, Luther’s Legacy:Salvation and English Reformers 1525–1556(Oxford, England: Clarendon, 1994), 54–80; Steven Paulson, Luther for Armchair Theologians(Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2004); Markus Wriedt, “Luther’s Theology,” trans. Katarina Gustavs, in McKim, ed., The Cambridge Companion toMartin Luther, 86–119.

17. Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures, 4:5–6.

18. WABr, 3:3421. Cited by Meuser, “Luther as Preacher of the Word of God,” 144–45. A slightly different rendition of this quotation is cited by Williams, Silent Witnesses, 194.

19. Old suggests that he avoided Aristotle and even Augustine in favor of Quintilian. The Readingand Preaching of the Scriptures, 6.

20. Williams, Silent Witnesses, 195.

21. Hugh T. Kerr, A Compend of Luther’s Theology(Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2010), 148.

22. Meuser, Luther the Preacher, 43.

23. John Piper, The Legacy of Sovereign Joy: God’s Triumphant Grace in the Lives of Augustine,Luther, and Calvin(Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2006), 99.

24. The sermon can be viewed online at http://www.martinluthersermons.com/sermons2.html.

25. WABr, 53, 218. Cited by Meuser, “Luther as Preacher of the Word of God,” 141.

26. What we tend to call “communicant membership” today.

27. Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures, 18–19.

28. Cited by Meuser in “Luther the Preacher of the Word of God,” 146.

29. In the thirty-second sermon on John, preached September 7, 1538. WA, 22:372.

30. Ibid., 372–73.