There is a precedent for everything. . .

When it comes to arguing, you can find someone who held to your position before you -- no matter how wrong headed it might be.  Precedent does not prove much except that two or more people can agree on some aberration or another.

Liturgically, this has been a consistent argument in Missouri.  There is precedent for ditching the Divine Service.  There is precedent for rearranging the order of the ordinary.  There is precedent for wearing the full Eucharistic vestments or street clothes.  There is precedent for just about everything and it proves nothing.  Some of the worst liturgical practices in our Synod and in the history of Lutheranism are not one offs but complicit but wrongly held opinions.  We are supposed to believe that because you can find one who did what you want to do before you, it justifies your liturgical oddity.  Baloney.

Likewise, Lutherans have recently come to narrow down the rage of history they cite to include only Lutheran history with the mass.  The oddity here is that confessionally we do not claim Lutheran exclusivity but catholic consensus.  The confessors at Augsburg did not disavow what went before and insisted Rome was the innovator and fascinated by novelty and not the Lutherans.  In fact, at the end we went so far as to almost dare the Romans to show where our theology and practice deviated from the catholic and apostolic practice through the ages and pretty much said if they found an instance, we would change to reflect what went before and what was normed by the catholic consensus.

Somewhere alone the line, we conveniently forgot that.  We became institutionalized Lutherans who judged all things by Lutheran history, theology, and practice.  So we ended up with the Common Service which did not quite reflect any one line of liturgical tradition but was rather a meshing of the many, though not always the majority of sources.  That became the gold standard.  What was first considered a restoration and perhaps even a first big and important step in fuller restoration was essentially a liturgy to clear up a chaos across America.  After a time it then became the one and the only shape of Lutheran liturgy -- so much so that now you have Lutherans who would insist that the Divine Service 3 of LSB is the only authentically Lutheran worship tradition and everything else is either less Lutheran or even suspect.  Oddly enough, the whole argument from catholic consensus business seems to be conspicuously silent.  Check out the Eucharistic Prayer as but one example.  Or the salutary but distinctly Lutheran addition of the Nunc Dimittis to the ordinary.  Or the general confession which has pretty much killed private confession. Or the placement of the Our Father before the Verba Christi instead of after them.

It will not get us anywhere to cite precedent.  There is precedent for the full mass vestments of the West and for the black gown.  So what!  Precedent can be found for every foolish adiaphora that appeals to us but it is neither beneficial nor faithful.  It is time to give it a rest.  We should not be settling for whether something is Lutheran or not but is it catholic.  We should not be content to find precedent for every foolish thing we do on Sunday morning as if that justifies our sectarian practices.  We began by contending that we were the faithful and Rome the innovator but somewhere along the line we ceded what is catholic to Rome and contented ourselves with what was Lutheran.  That is not quite who we are or should be -- at least according to our Confession at Augsburg.  Again, either what we said at Augsburg was not what we meant or we only meant it at that moment OR we are catholic Christians guided by a catholic principle especially in things liturgical.

It is beneath us to allow such a foolish nod to an aberrant moment in the past as Lutheran.  Furthermore, if every error or novelty in our history is Lutheran, then nothing is.  Some, even perhaps many, Lutherans had confession and absolution after the sermon and as a bridge into the Eucharistic liturgy.  Yes, there may be precedent but it is a precedent to novelty that violates our confessional principle for faith and practice.  Lutheranism may have become some big umbrella to whatever people want to do but that is not how we began.  It is time to admit that.