A church member asked Luther “Why do you preach the Gospel to us week after week?” Luther replied, “Because week after week you forget it.”

I’ve seen that quote float around several places and in a few different forms. There is a longer version that I often see shared as well:

Martin Luther was asked, “Pastor, why is it that week after week after week all you ever preach to us is the gospel?”

Luther responded, “Well, because week after week you forget it, because week after week you walk in here looking like a people who don’t believe the gospel. And until you walk in looking like people who are truly liberated by the truth of the gospel, I’m going to continue to preach it to you.”

This is a great little story. The problem is, I can’t verify it. In fact I can’t find any such quote until Derek Webb’s House Show, which was recorded in 2004. Prior to that I can’t find this quote anywhere.

Of course it is possible that my Googler Machine is just broken and someone else can find it. I’d really like to know the source if you’ve got it. But what I think has happened is that Derek Webb put a bit of a story to an actual Luther quote…or better an actual Luther quote which was jazzed up a bit. Here is the quote from the beginning of Luther’s commentary on Galatians:

The law is divine and holy. Let the law have his glory, but yet no law, be it never so divine and holy, ought to teach me that I am justified, and shall live through it. I grant it may teach me that I ought to love God and my neighbour; also to live in chastity, soberness, patience, etc., but it ought not to show me, how I should be delivered from sin, the devil, death, and hell.

Here I must take counsel of the gospel. I must hearken to the gospel, which teacheth me, not what I ought to do, (for that is the proper office of the law,) but what Jesus Christ the Son of God hath done for me : to wit, that He suffered and died to deliver me from sin and death. The gospel willeth me to receive this, and to believe it. And this is the truth of the gospel. It is also the principal article of all Christian doctrine, wherein the knowledge of all godliness consisteth.

Most necessary it is, therefore, that we should know this article well, teach it unto others, and beat it into their heads continually.

It’s that last sentence that I think Webb might have just ran with. And here is more what Luther actually wrote in his introduction to Galatians:

“It is, therefore, extremely necessary that we come to know this doctrine [the Gospel] well and constantly inculcate it.”

Somehow, I believe, that little quote has morphed into our present story of Luther saying that he is going to keep preaching the gospel until people start looking like they’ve gotten it into their heads.

A great story but I’m not confident it ever actually happened.

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