Three Marks of Reformation Preaching

In an important essay published in Theology Today in 1961, Heiko A. Oberman set forth the distinctive marks of Reformation preaching in terms of three interrelated aspects.

1. The sermon is an apocalyptic event.

Not quite in the sense of Savonarola’s preaching of impending doom to the people of Florence, but in the sense that the sermon unveils and makes present the last judgment here and now. Without demythologizing Christ’s future coming, gospel preaching existentializes the final will of God for every hearer by calling for a decisive response here and now. “In the sermon,” Oberman observed, “Christ and the Devil are revealed, Creator and creature, love and wrath, essence and existence, ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’”

2. The sermon is not an isolated speaking part in an otherwise sterile liturgy.

The sermon is a vital and integral part of corporate worship. Praying, singing, confessing sins, declaring forgiveness, baptizing, gathering around the Lord’s Table to receive in faith Christ’s body and blood “in, with, and under” (Luther) and “exhibited by” (Calvin) the earthly elements of bread and wine—all of these activities presuppose, and are supported by, the lively preaching of God’s Word. Woven into the texture of the whole worship event by the dynamic operation of the Spirit, the Reformation sermon, Oberman noted, is “not legalistic but redemptive; not only directed to individual souls but especially to the corporate existence of the congregation; not elevating but mobilizing; not a refuge but a starting point; and, finally, not holy and vertical, but secular and horizontal: time, space, and dust.”

3. The sermon is similar in one respect to the role of the eucharist in medieval Catholic theology.

The preaching event has an utterly objective character that transcends the weak and sinful status of the preacher himself. Whenever God’s Word is proclaimed, the Lord truly speaks and is truly present in judgment and in grace. There is, to say it boldly, an ex opere operato presence of God’s Word in the preached Word. For this reason, God has chosen what Paul called “the folly of preaching” to bring sinful men and women to new life in Christ, to nourish the flock of God, and to sustain the pilgrim church on its way to the heavenly city.

In the final analysis, the Reformation was a recovery of biblical preaching.