Martin Luther's Christmas Book
by Martin Luther
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Book Summary Information
Author: Martin LutherEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1997-09-01
ISBN: 0806635770
Number of pages: 72
Publisher: Augsburg Books
Book Reviews of Martin Luther's Christmas Book
Book Review: Delightful Selection of Luther's Sermons and Contemporary Art
Summary: 5 Stars
`Martin Luther's Christmas Book', edited by Luther biographer, Roland H. Bainton, is a delightful assemblage of Luther's Christmas sermons, songs, and visual arts' collaborators' woodcuts, primarily from the great Medieval artist, Albrecht Durer.
When I purchased the book, I expected the sermons, was delighted by the artistry, and was really surprised by the music. It turns out that Luther wrote many more hymns than his famous `A Mighty Fortress', which is not too surprising, since his dedication to music in services was one of his greatest contributions to the Protestant church, if only through his influence on the world's greatest composer, Bach.
The selection of sermons is but a small sampling of Luther's enormous output, when you consider that he preached for about 30 years, often with three or four sermons a week. When you multiply the six weeks of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, this comes to over 200 sermons just for the Christmas season. Editor Bainton has selected for us the most interesting of all this material and joined it into seven (7) representative sermons for the Annunciation, the Visitation, Nativity, the Shepherds, Herod, the Wise Men, and Presentation.
These sermons should work well with modern thinking, primarily due to Luther's faithfulness to his most important doctrine, being true to the scriptures and only the scriptures. Bainton's introduction describes how Medieval traditions piled an enormous amount of speculation on top of the Christmas story. The scriptures, for example, don't even say there were only three wise men. This is inferred from the three gifts. And, the traditional three names don't appear in the Gospels either, so Luther never uses them. He even goes out of his way to point out that the scripture says nothing about the wise men being `kings' as the popular hymn would have it. Rather, they were simple `professors', probably of astrology, whose star was a conjunction of planets.
Luther even goes further than many modern preachers in pointing out from the pulpit that there are disagreements between the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.
This is a great resource for any Christmas worship, especially in those churches which honor Luther's name. To the reviewer who said this is Luther's worst book, I must point out that the book contains barely 1/20 of what Luther wrote on Christmas, and any problems are probably more due to the editor than the Reformer.
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