Sixteenth-century Lutherans maintained a vibrant practice of writing “postils,” model sermons on the Gospel texts of the Sundays and principal Feast Days of the church calendar. (The word “postil” comes from the Latin post illa verba textus, “after the words of the text.”) One thinks of Martin Luther’s Church Postil and House Postil, for instance, as well as the collections of Philip Melanchthon and Martin Chemnitz. Niels Hemmingsen, too—the Danish Melanchthon, as it were—authored a set of postil homilies, published first in the early 1560s and frequently thereafter, which was soon translated into both English and German. His homily on the Gospel text for the recently-observed sixth Sunday after Trinity, has much to teach us about the theological meaning of the term “justice” or righteousness.
But first, a general word about Hemmingsen’s homilies, which all follow a set structure.
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