The Significance of Luther's Earliest Extant Sermon

Abstract

The last few decades of research concerning Luther have been clearly characterized by the close attention paid to his early development. Aided by some remarkable discoveries of hitherto unknown early Luther material, scholars have investigated particularly the important period from roughly 1513 to 1517/18, during which the ‘new’ religion of Luther evolved and reached its first flowering. The largely uncharted years before 1513, however, still remain in comparative darkness, despite Otto Scheel's notable work which, for all its completeness, is peripheral rather than central so far as the figure of Luther himself is concerned. While Scheel has succeeded in recreating the environment, physical as well as intellectual, in which the boy and youth lived and moved, he has been able to tell us but little of Luther's early spiritual development. The sources available to us unfortunately do not permit our going much beyond what Scheel has so competently presented. A few early letters and the marginal notes of 1509/10 constitute practically the whole body of direct Luther records before 1513. This situation is most regrettable indeed since we do not really know, aside from the general religious background in which Luther grew up, the all-important specific and personal elements characteristic of his early religion. In other words, we do not actually know the individual and intimate features of the religion from which Luther developed into the ‘new’ religion so wholly and unmistakably his own.