This month’s preaching article is the first in a series that gives readers a taste of several different aspects of preaching. Articles will discuss preaching’s purpose (why we preach), content (what we say), form (how we arrange what we say), context (where and to whom we preach), and the person of the preacher (the preacher’s relationships with his listeners and with God and his Word).

Defining the purpose of preaching can be tricky. It’s not that we lack aims for our preaching. It’s that there are so many potential purposes that it’s difficult to clarify and crystallize why we preach.

Many a preacher has found Paul’s words to Timothy helpful in identifying a purpose for preaching. Since we preach the Word of God, preaching’s purposes could be expressed as those of the Word itself: teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness (2 Tim 3:16). Other preachers have used the old axiom that our preaching means to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” Preachers serving in mission settings, looking out and seeing new faces each Sunday, sense that while they may aim their preaching primarily at believers, they need to think more broadly. They preach not only to edify believers but also to evangelize those who don’t yet know Christ. We could go on. The purpose of preaching can be hard to define because there are so many godly purposes for preaching. Is there a way to define the purpose of preaching in a comprehensive but concise way?

Martin Luther may be able to help us. More specifically, Luther’s concept of the two kinds of righteousness can help us clarify the purpose of preaching. With his article “The Purpose of Preaching,”¹ Joshua Pfeiffer, a Lutheran pastor from Australia and a PhD candidate at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, offers a way to do this.

First, what are “the two kinds of righteousness” of which Luther writes? The first is the righteousness that we receive from Christ:

The first is alien righteousness, that is the righteousness of another, instilled from without. This is the righteousness of Christ by which he justifies through faith, as it is written in I Cor. 1 [:30] “Whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption.” … This righteousness, then, is given to men in baptism and whenever they are truly repentant. Therefore a man can with confidence boast in Christ and say: “Mine are Christ’s living, doing, and speaking, his suffering and dying, mine as much as if I had lived, done, spoken, suffered, and died as he did.”²

This “alien righteousness” (“alien” here from the Latin “belonging to another”) is received in a purely passive way. We do nothing; God does it all. Christ provides the righteousness, and the Spirit delivers it to us via the means of grace.

Without any merit or work of our own, we must first be justified by Christian righteousness, which has nothing to do with the righteousness of the Law or with earthly and active righteousness. But this righteousness is heavenly and passive. We do not have it of ourselves; we receive it from heaven. We do not perform it; we accept it by faith, through which we ascend beyond all laws and works.³

This passive righteousness gives us a new identity. We are children of God, loved, forgiven, and righteous in the sight of God.

The second kind of righteousness flows from the first: “The second kind of righteousness is our proper righteousness, not because we alone work it, but because we work with that first and alien righteousness. This is that manner of life spent profitably in good works.”⁴

This proper righteousness (“proper” here from the Latin “belonging to oneself”) exists only because the other kind of righteousness produced it. First comes Christ’s righteousness that makes us God’s righteous children, and then comes our living the righteous status he’s given to us. Luther says about our active righteousness, “This righteousness is the product of the righteousness of the first type, actually its fruit and consequence.”⁵

Luther portrays the relationship between the two kinds of righteousness memorably using the bride-and-groom imagery so common in his day: “Therefore through the first righteousness arises the voice of the bridegroom who says to the soul, ‘I am yours,’ but through the second comes the voice of the bride who answers, ‘I am yours.’”⁶ When Jesus pledges himself to a person and gives that person his righteousness, not only is a new identity created but also a new freedom—a freedom to look away from self to others. “Then the soul no longer seeks to be righteous in and for itself, but it has Christ as its righteousness and therefore seeks only the welfare of others.”⁷

That last quote may have familiar ring to it. It is similar to Luther’s famous paradoxical dictum from “The Freedom of a Christian”: a Christian is a free lord, subject to no one; a Christian is a dutiful servant, subject to everyone.” The righteousness we receive passively from Christ frees us. As we live in this righteousness actively, we serve others as he has served us.

Pfeiffer, echoing Robert Kolb and Timothy Saleska, brings together the purpose of preaching and the two kinds of righteousness. Kolb has argued that Luther, as he writes of the two kinds of righteousness, is depicting how God in his grace makes people truly human again. God created people to be rightly oriented toward him and toward one another. Through passive righteousness, God restores a right relationship between people and himself—a relationship based on faith. Through active righteousness, God restores a right relationship between the righteous ones and the people around them—a relationship based on love.

What does this mean as we write and preach sermons? Pfeiffer explains how the first kind of righteousness establishes part of the purpose for preaching:

As the faithful preacher proclaims God’s word of law and gospel, bringing hearers to repentance and faith in Christ, the hearers receive again the righteousness of Christ first given in baptism, and so their identity as children of God is reaffirmed. The core of who they were always intended to be as human beings is reestablished in the preaching of the gospel.⁸

This priority extends beyond preaching to believers. For our worship guests and non-Christian listeners, we proclaim law and gospel so that the Spirit can impart the righteousness of Jesus to them. The Spirit has the power to reaffirm believers’ identity as God’s children; the Spirit has the power also to create a new identity in those who are not yet God’s children.

The other part of preaching’s purpose—you’ve guessed it already—relates to the second kind of righteousness. First, we preach first so that through our words the Spirit may create or reaffirm the righteousness we receive passively from God. Second, we preach to those who are now righteous by faith, “toward a life that loves and serves the neighbor and walks according to the life in which God created human beings to flourish.”⁹ The preacher can demonstrate from Scripture what it looks like when people rightly aligned with God (by righteousness passively received) live their lives in a right alignment with the people around them (by righteousness actively lived).

One example of what this can look like is the preacher helping his listeners understand their vocation. Pfeiffer explains:

One further element of preaching that has as its purpose the fully human life for people in a secular age is to develop what David Lose calls a “vocational imagination” for preaching. Here Lose is drawing on Luther’s emphasis on vocation from the Reformation. In this tradition the emphasis on holy work being carried out only by monks and priests is challenged, and the everyday work of the Christian is understood as an arena for sanctified living. This fits very nicely with the theology of the two kinds of righteousness. Vocation is the further defined location and shape of the active righteousness the Christian pursues in the world.¹⁰

In other words, part of preaching’s purpose is to make listeners aware of how the Spirit is already active as they live the righteous status they’ve been given. We may often put this under the heading “application” in a sermon, but it’s more than that—it’s helping hearers see their lives in the day-to-day world for what they truly are in Christ’s righteousness.

The purpose of preaching may still be difficult to define. But Luther’s two kinds of righteousness may help: the purpose of preaching is to impart God’s righteousness to hearers and to help them live out their righteous status in Christ.

This article in Devote Yourself was contributed by the team that previously created and distributed Preach the Word. View past preaching-related articles at worship.welsrc.net/downloads-worship/preach-the-word.

¹ Joshua Pfeiffer, “The Purpose of Preaching,” Logia: A Journal of Lutheran Theology, Reformation 2024, 4–8.
² Martin Luther, “Two Kinds of Righteousness,” in Luther’s Works (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1957), 31:297.
³ Martin Luther, “Lectures on Galatians 1535, Chapters 1-4,” in Luther’s Works (St. Louis: Concordia, 1963), 26:8.
⁴ LW 31:299.
⁵ LW 31:300.
⁶ LW 31:300.
⁷ LW 31:300.
⁸ Pfeiffer, “Purpose of Preaching,” 8.
⁹ Pfeiffer, “Purpose of Preaching,” 8.
¹⁰ Pfeiffer, “Purpose of Preaching,” 8, citing David Lose, Preaching at the Crossroads: How the World—and Our Preaching—Is Changing (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013).