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Martin Luther arrived in Wittenberg as an Augustinian friar and scholar, and his primary call was to the university. Yet from 1514 onward, he was also called by the Wittenberg town council to preach in the parish church, and periodically he was invited to preach in the Castle Church. Upon his return from the Wartburg in 1522, and for the next decade, Luther’s preaching—more than 1,000 sermons—was a central means of organizing and directing reform in Wittenberg. The sermons also served to extend his voice beyond Saxony, as Luther’s words from the pulpit were copied down and printed in Wittenberg and across Germany. The present volume offers a selection of Luther’s sermons from this exceptionally fruitful and important period of his preaching.
Luther used his sermons to inculcate the basic structures of Christian doctrine and life: the distinction between Law and Gospel and the use of Christian freedom and love for the neighbor. Unlike Karlstadt, Luther urged Christians who had been set free by the Gospel to show love for the weak in making changes. His sermons in these years particularly apply these principles to the administration of the Lord’s Supper and the remembrance of the saints. In addition to instruction in Christian doctrine from the pulpit over the course of the 1520s, Luther also sought to teach the Wittenberg congregation to understand and appreciate the “estate of marriage” and the “temporal sword” as God’s own appointed order for human life in the world. Luther extolled God’s institution and blessing of marriage and emphasized His forgiveness which covered any sin that might remain in the flesh therein while defending the regrettable possibility of divorce under certain circumstances.
