While the good Pastor Eckardt is probably more tuned into the details than I am, I would suspect that there is not a great deal of difference between us in terms of how we conduct the Divine Service. We tend to do the red and, when the red is lacking, do the red that was red before Lutheran Service Book was born. Sure, we have different takes on different rubrics but the most obvious difference between us is the Eucharistic Prayer. I use it. He does not. For the sake of the Synod and the many who come to us from various parts of the Synod, I have made the decision ordinarily to arrange the prayers of the LSB into a Lutheran canon. It works fine and in the way it was intended (as in the source from which it was borrowed). I have, in the past, used various forms, more typically the so-called Piepkorn Eucharistic Prayer, the Eucharistic Prayer of Hippolytus, the Eucharistic Prayer of El Culto Cristiano in English, a version of the Anaphora of St. Basil, and the Eucharistic Prayer proposed for inclusion in LSB but never included. Although we tend to use the same canon regularly no matter which setting of the Divine Service from LSB we use, I have also chanted the Words of Institution alone as Luther set them. All of this is to show that there are differences even among those who would be considered very liturgical.
That said, the vestments, the bowing, the genuflecting, the kneeling, the reverence, and the overall attention to conduct of the liturgy remains quite similar. This would be considered unique yet the reality is that this is more typical than the commenter chooses to admit. Whether he has had no experience of this liturgical practice or simply does not wish to admit it, I suspect that what happens at the parish served by Pastor Eckardt and what happens in my parish is far more typical -- dare I say ordinary -- in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod that he wants it to be. Survey the pages of District publications showing photos of installations and ordinations or look at the pictures in our flagship publications or check out the official LCMS social media or the posts by ordinary folks in ordinary parishes across the Synod and you will see more liturgy, reverence, vestments, and sacramental piety than the commenter would fine good, right, and salutary. But that is his problem and not mine.
It is not the wave of the future but the wave of the past catching up to the present and informing the path for the future. We are learning that Lutherans are not Methodists with a peculiar liturgy or Baptists who actually baptize infants and small children or Presbyterians who traded in their academic gown for some new duds. We are especially NOT Roman Catholic wannabes. We are simply who our confession claim we are -- the evangelical catholics in doctrine and practice who represent the good and faithful Church of the Ages. We are not content to be lumped in with the Protestants and we are not happy about being castigated as Romans. We are Lutheran. We are Lutherans. We take seriously what some of our forefathers forgot or ditched on purpose. We hearken to the voice of C. F. W. Walther who famously insisted that our old Lutheranism with its chanting, vestments, sacramental seriousness, crucifixes, and liturgy are only a scandal to those who are ill at ease for the reverence and devotion they betray to what we believe, teach, and confess. We rejoice to see that the devotion of the mission planters bore its fruit in the liturgical lives of our mission churches throughout the world but especially in Africa.
Strangely enough, there are those who find these things a threat. Odd. Look around you at our rainbow world and sparkle creeds and empty pews. If you think people who take how we worship as seriously as who we worship are the problem, maybe you have more in common with Pope Francis than with Luther or the Lutherans. He is the one who finds the past and the connection to the fathers a threat to the present and future. It is one of the ways that he shows us that he is not ready for prime time and is leading Rome further into sectarian faith and life -- all the while in Missouri we have a mighty army determined to say that this is not who we are or where we are headed. If you get hot and bothered by liturgical and confessional expressions of the Divine Service, perhaps you have not gotten out much since Covid and all. The most profound threat to Christianity remains those who find a disconnect between belief and practice, who turn up their nose at God's Word, who find reverence an outdated idea in our casual world of screens. This is not a fluke. What you see is closer to the REAL real world of Lutheranism than anything else on the tube.
1 comment:
Sorry I’m late to respond. The good folks at Gottesdienst do not publish all comments. I wish they did and that you could have those rambling long internet discussions of old. This isn’t done anymore because I suppose the understanding is that internet discussions generally don’t change minds and people can and do often resort to insults. My comment was instead isolated and used as a foil for the usual “this is what we think you really mean and here’s our better view instead.”
My point is that this instructional video is flawed by following a mindset supported by a handful of contemporary liturgical studies and points of reference (Zeeden, Piepkorn) that asserts that confessional worship should retain and resurrect as many medieval practices as possible to faithfully return to true Lutheran worship.
Zeeden frankly admits that his own study of the survival of certain medieval practices in various Lutheran churches, sometimes up to a century before being discarded, should not be used as justification for a reconstruction or reintroduction of such practices. It is rather simply to note, to no one’s surprise, that certain areas of the Lutheran Church were, usually due to the preferences of their territorial rulers, slow to embrace evangelical changes in worship, due to their association with political disruption. The Lutherans, however, were changing worship practices as early as the 1520s, and although Wittenberg retained the Latin Mass throughout Luther’s lifetime, the Duke Heinrich Agenda of 1539 created the Lutheran worship tradition that was the basis for the Lutheran tradition and Missouri Synod worship.
The Saxon Agenda has currency because it was written by a group of major Lutheran reformers connected to Luther, such as Jonas, and because it, unlike Luther’s German Mass, “had legs” that meant it practically took hold as the Lutheran liturgical agenda in Saxony, from which the Missouri Synod came. This agenda had chanting and liturgical music that is familiar through TLH. The rubrics for the sign of the cross was reduced to one instance. Rubrics for hand and finger holding, certain steps to be taken, genuflection, etc. are absent. In sum, evangelical worship was simplified to focus less on ritual and focus more on the Word of God and the congregational response of prayer and praise.
Lutheran worship can and does change. Jonas wrote that if anyone later on wants to write a better order of worship, go for it. But the current desire for a more highly ritualized practice seems to be based on assumptions about early Lutheran practice that diverge from the historic practices and worship resources of the church. It’s not about being Protestant or Methodist or opposing Catholicism. It’s about changing Lutheran worship practices without any solid reasoning beyond reverence or connecting with the universal church. Did the traditional Lutheran practices lack any of these?
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