Proclaimer Blog
Luther, preaching and the Universal Preaching Question
Mention "Luther" and "preaching" and the chances are you may be drawn into the debate about whether Luther believed in mediate regeneration. In particular it's this quote that gets people wondering:
I opposed indulgences and all papists, but never by force. I simply taught, preached, wrote God’s Word: otherwise I did nothing. And then, while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my Philip of Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that never a prince or emperor did such damage to it. I did nothing: the Word did it all. Had I wanted to start trouble . . . I could have started such a little game at Worms that even the emperor wouldn’t have been safe. But what would it have been? A mug’s game. I did nothing: I left it to the Word.
Mediate regeneration is, essentially, that the word converts rather than the Spirit. Guy Davies has answered this critique here, here and here. It's not actually what I want to post on. Rather, I wanted to make the point that so much of the good stuff Luther believed about preaching has been lost in the cloud because of this worthy debate.
It was joyful, therefore, to hear Carl Trueman last week at New Word Alive. He took the church history stream and taught on four fairly eclectic characters: Athanasius, Luther, Pascal and J Gresham Machen. I was very struck by what he said about Luther – and here I paraphrase: "Justification by faith is about a key exchange between us and Christ. We receive Christ's life. He gets our death. But how does that exchange come to us? Through God's voice – through preaching. It's what makes preaching so critical. Preaching is powerful because it brings the very presence of God. That's a key idea in the Old Testament where the absence of God mirrored the absence of his words."
This preaching – a declaration that God has done certain things in Christ – is at the heart of Christian ministry. And it's why, at the end of every sermon, Luther wanted to ask himself the question, "Have I taken people to the Lord Jesus Christ?"
And it doesn't matter what you think about mediate regeneration, or if you even understand it, that is surely the Universal Preaching Question.
More like this: