Martin Luther on the Word of God

David Lotz, in his brilliant essay "The Proclamation of the Word in Luther’s Thought", makes 13 points about Luther's understanding of the Word of God and its proclamation (all points are quotations and italics are original):

1. For Luther the “Word of God” is first and foremost God himself, since God is Deus loquens, the God who speaks.
2. Holy Scripture shows that God’s Word also takes the form of concrete historical acts of redemption and revelation, since according to the Hebrew idiom a word (dabar) is also a deed.
3. All God’s words and works find their ultimate purpose and meaning in the incarnate Word. Yet even God’s speaking and acting in Christ would remain meaningless and ineffectual without the oral witness to the Word made flesh, namely, the apostolic preaching or publishing of Christ to the world, the gospel or “good news” of Christ as “God for us.”
4. The Word of God as gospel is found throughout the Old Testament, chiefly in the form of promises of the coming Christ, but no less in God’s gracious dealings with his covenant people for the sake of the coming Christ.
5. The Old Testament Scriptures are precious because they are “the swaddling cloths and the manger in which Christ lies” (LW 35.236). Thus the gospel is at once contained and concealed in the Old Testament, and this “manger” remains shrouded in darkness unless illumined by the “star of Bethlehem,” namely, “the new light, preaching and the gospel, oral and public preaching,” whereby the living voice “produce[s] in speech and hearing what prior to this lay hidden in the letter and in secret vision” (LW 52.205).
6. The Holy Scriptures are, for Luther, rightly understood when they are seen as the record of past proclamation, and are rightly used when the preaching there recorded is continuously transposed into the modality of present proclamation.
7. The Holy Scriptures are justly called Word of God, the written Word, because they have God the Holy Spirit as their ultimate author: the prophets and apostles all spoke and wrote under the inspiration of the Spirit. Yet the Scriptures are Word of God in a secondary or derivative sense because they always point beyond themselves to Jesus Christ
8. The preceding considerations clearly show that for Luther the Word of God as gospel, the oral proclamation of Christ and his benefits, is the basic form of the Word.
9. The preached Word as gospel is the basic form of the Word of God and the creator of the church because it is nothing less than the real presence of the exalted Christ. The gospel is “of Christ” not only because true evangelical preaching has Christ as its object, but above all because the risen Christ himself is the acting subject of this proclamation.
10. To say that the gospel is the real presence of the exalted Christ is to say that salvation is a present event of preaching, and is thus a “Word event.”
11. Central to [the "Word event"] is the assertion that faith in the gospel effects a personal union between Christ and the Christian, and that this union is the sole ground of the believer’s acceptance before God.
12. The preached Word that is the occasion of salvation is the Word of law and gospel... the gospel must be preached together with the law.
13. The church is the daughter of the Word and the creation of the gospel.