Fix the Mass. . . Fix Everything

Curiously, the two divergent liturgical groups within Rome, Lutheranism, and other denominations seem to have exactly the same idea -- fix the mass, fix the Church.  It is exactly this which gave birth to the post-Vatican II mass form.  Though perhaps not fully complicit in its origin but certainly responsible for its outcome, Paul VI accepted the ideas of Bugnini and others that what was inhibiting Rome was the old Latin Mass.  Get rid of it and everything will be fixed.  Of course, it was not.  Yet the other side seems to say the same thing except this time it is get rid of the New Mass and restore the Latin Mass of the ages and everything will be hunky dory.  Okay.  Maybe I am simplifying things a bit but probably not by that much.

Lutherans are also victims of the same oversimplification.  The evangelical wing of Lutheranism insists that fix worship by abandoning the liturgy in favor of a casual, seeker, entertainment form of worship will be the answer to all that ails us.  They continue to insist that this is the problem—not the doctrine but its practice.  Those on the other side insist that you cannot hold to doctrine in theory, especially if that doctrine cannot or does not inform practice.  The Church that once insisted that justification was the article on which the Church stands or falls cannot now make everything else adiaphora.  So they insist that you will fix everything that troubles us by returning to page 15 (in LSB form, of course).  Is that all that the problem is?

In the end it might seem like I am arguing against myself and my own well founded advancement of Prosper of Acquitane's maxim 'lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi'.  I am not.  The problem is that worship is not the only one of our many problems.  Modernism may encourage faulty worship practices that are out of keeping with our own past and our confession but that is not all that modernism does.  It begins not with worship but with the Word of God and how we have made relative what God meant to be final—finally making that Word merely one of many voices competing for our mind and our heart.  The problem is not only worship but our failure to hear and heed the voice of God has aided in the corruption of worship and made it difficult for us to speak of the Divine Service in any other terms but preference and desire.  With the loss of that anchor, worship has been adrift on the same sea of change as our morals and truth in general.

Rome cannot fix the Mass and solve the problem of doctrine no longer anchored in the unchanging Word of God and neither can we as Lutherans.  They go together but they are different problems requiring different solutions.  Our loss of marriage and the family is coupled with the way we have distanced ourselves from God's Word and truth.  Our willingness to cater to people's preferences and pet peeves about so many things has certainly led to the idea that they can treat the Scriptures in the same way.  It only stands to reason that if the voice of God is merely a suggestion, nothing can rein in the power of desire—whether in worship format or moral truth.  This is only the solemn admission that we have much to do and our work cut out for us.  If we equivocate on the core issue of God's Word, we will have lost every other battle as well.  It is certainly something to think about...