Reinhold Pieper's book on preaching: Adam Koontz "troubles Israel" (Another BTL book)

     As previously reported, there was recently a conference held in Denver on the age of the Earth and the Bible.  The final presenter, Dr. Adam Koontz, as reported in Christian News, caught my attention for his reporting, as a member of the LCMS, of the events of its history during the middle of the 20th century.  He started naming names which was refreshing since very little is heard from LCMS teachers today on this. So I decided to further research Dr. Koontz and found him to be quite active, and followed by those associated with the upcoming Luther Classical College.  I was surprised to find that he had been an Associate Professor at CTS-FW, but this was only for a period of about 2 years.  It is not known why he is no longer in that position. He was installed in his current Denver congregation after leaving Ft. Wayne.  (see future post on this U.A.C. congregation)

    While at Ft. Wayne, and now in lectures in Denver, he is promoting the preaching method of the Old Missouri Synod as opposed to the new method of the LC-MS. And his model for the teaching of preaching, or "homiletics", is Prof. Reinhold Pieper, an older brother of Franz Pieper. (See my recent blog on the importance of preaching in Old Missouri.) Since discovering this, I have read and watched many of Dr. Koontz's materials on this subject — something I rarely do for any modern LC-MS teacher or preacher.  He is aware that his thesis may be controversial among the teachers and leaders of today's LCMS when he states (CTQ, vol. 85:3, July/October 2021, p. 209):

"I do not want to trouble Israel [the LC-MS], but Israel is sometimes prone to forget things about its past."

Sometimes?  Even Dr. Koontz's own research, whether on the LC-MS's teaching on the age of the Earth or on Homiletics, would suggest that almost always the LC-MS wants to forget its past, if not to criticize it. I have demonstrated this repeatedly on this blog, ad nauseam. Dr. Koontz himself gives further evidence of this in his video on the Age of the Earth where he identifies where Prof. Theodore Graebner protested against a 1951 CPH book which taught a "young Earth".

     The CTQ essays and YouTube video lectures referencing Reinhold Pieper's book on preaching, Evangelisch-Lutherische Homiletik, reminded me of the work that I had done 3 years ago to get this book in the hands of the public, on the Internet Archive, instead of only on the restricted EBSCOhost.  Of course this book is in the German language and so I decided to finish my work of polishing the text for machine translation.  While I was working on this project, it was discovered during one of Dr. Koontz's YouTube videos that there is already an LCMS pastor in Iowa, Pastor Isaac Johnson, who is currently working on translating this into English.  After considering whether to abandon my work because of this, I decided to continue in the hopes that my machine translation, and polished German text, will aid Pastor Johnson in his professional work. Each page number is hyperlinked to the original German page image on the Internet Archive for ease of comparison.

For an overview, see the following Table of Contents:

Chapter I. Introduction 1-20

Chapter II The choice of the text 21-38

Chapter III: The study of the text and meditation on it 39-68

Chapter IV The subject 69-115

Chapter V. The disposition 116-260

Chapter VI: The Interpretation of the Dispositional Text 207-274

Chapter VII: The application of the interpreted text 275-337

Chapter VIII. The conclusion of the sermon 338-355

Chapter IX: The Style of Preaching 356-416

Chapter X. Physical Eloquence 417-455

Chapter XI: The personality of the preacher 456-474

Index 475-481

Another overview, can be had by reviewing the Index pages. Then I would suggest reading Dr. Koontz's CTQ essays here and here, and watching his 12-part lecture series on "Classical Lutheran Homiletics" beginning here, on Pieper beginning here. 

==>> The German text DOCX file (zipped) may be downloaded  >>  HERE  << .

A DeepL English machine translation, slightly polished, may be viewed below:

==>> Download the full 481-page DeepL machine translation (zipped) DOCX file   >> HERE  <<. 

The PDF version may be obtained on the Internet Archive  >> HERE <<.

This is one of the many books that Dr. Koontz's own LCMS was, and is, "prone to forget" (search my "BTL book" label on the right). I was glad that Dr. Koontz discovered and expounded it. May this machine translation aid in the effort to produce a professionally translated and published version. It would be a book worthy of purchasing!