Much ink and much of that digital has been spilled in the worship wars over the years. Whether you are talking about Rome and its Vetus vs Novus Ordo war or the battle for reverence against those who have tried to turn the mass into an amusement park or you are talking about Lutherans who deviate from the hymnal to omit the liturgy or restore elements not preserved in the hymnal, the battle wages on. Most of Protestantism has already declared a peace -- allowing anyone and everyone to do what seems right in their own eyes without official sanction or complaint. For them it was always about style and never even presumed to be about substance.
More than forty years of service as a pastor have left me with the conclusion that worship is merely the arena in which our differences our exposed and not the real differences themselves. I grew up as a bronzie in Missouri and there was little talk about baptism, the Sacrament of the Altar was about as invisible in piety as it was in practice (four times a year), and the hymnal preserved a practice that was followed but without any real understanding or interest in why. My argument with the identity of The Lutheran Hymnal and the period that produced it as some great epoch within Lutheran history and identity is not about the ceremonies that were or were not included but the fact that this practice preserved a Lutheranism that was and is at odds with our very Confessions. While there was discussion of the inerrancy of Scripture, there was no talk at all about Scripture as a means of grace, the efficacious Word that delivers what it says and does what it promises. It was a book preserving a record and not a life-giving Word that delivered faith to the individual and preserved the faith of a church.
My argument against contemporary Christian music and evangelical style worship is not an aesthetic which I reject but an alien and foreign doctrine that can no more reflect or embody the confessional Lutheran identity than it can preserve it. Let us at least be honest. Those who have abandoned the liturgy or omitted so much of it that it can hardly be recognized anymore are doing so not out of adiaphora or different stylistic preference but precisely because they confess a different truth and believe a different faith. Their seeker services or the substitution of events with appeal to the masses instead of a liturgy borne of the Lutheran identity or catholic tradition is exactly the rejection of what that confesses and not simply its practices. Such congregations have not simply abandoned the name Lutheran but the Lutheran faith as well. For the life of me I do not know why they want to stay officially Lutheran anymore than I can figure out why official Lutherans would want them to stay. Can we at least be honest enough to admit the obvious? Worship wars in early Lutheranism as well as in modern day Lutheranism were and are fought not over taste but over truth.
Those swimming the Tiber or the Bosporus are not exchanging an aesthetic but rejecting one faith in favor of another. It always troubles me when a Lutheran says that his conversion to Rome or Orthodoxy allows him to be the Lutheran he always was. No, it does not. The Roman Mass became an object of Lutheran reform not for an objectionable aesthetic but for doctrine that was unfaithful to Scripture. I am not sure that Rome has ever wanted to or even tried to reconcile what Luther challenged on the basis of Scripture. It was always an appeal to Roman authority, specifically that of council and pope. Can we be honest enough to admit that when you head to Rome or Constantinople you are doing so because you believe differently? Let us at least cast off the presumption that one can believe like a Lutheran and be a Roman priest or an Orthodox one or the other way around. These are not worship wars -- although the worship wars may be the triggers; they are doctrinal disputes. What does Scripture say?
My contention for the fuller ceremonial of the Divine Service and for NOT allowing the hymnal to be both the minimal expression of what must at least be as well as the sine qua non of Lutheran liturgical practice is not for or against an aesthetic. It is doctrinal. How can we say this is what we believe, teach, and confess as truth and then practice the minimum of the ceremonial that reflects that dogma? How can we preserve the fullness of doctrine while living it out within a series of minimalisms that are excused by a word that we use all the time without really understanding it -- adiaphora? If we cannot elevate or use the sacring bell or incense or historic vestments or chant or cross ourselves or kneel or genuflect, then is it merely a dispute over taste or are there elements of doctrine and truth that are also in dispute? If we should not do these things, is that not also a rejection of the reasons for these ceremonies?
Worship wars are probably not what we are fighting at all. We are battling for the faith -- the faith delivered to and by the saints and the piety that lives with that confession. I believe it is high time to admit that there are doctrinal connections to our controversies over style. Some greater than others -- to be sure but still more about what the truth is and how we live it out than what we like or find meaningful.
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Hermann Sasse famously warned the LCMS in the midst of the 20th century enthusiasm for union and ecumenism that doctrine must always define the liturgy and ceremony of the Lutheran Church, and not the other way around. The practical changes of the Reformation in liturgy and ceremony were always rooted in doctrine. True, we might find some of these changes anachronistic or even reversible today. The elevation was sanctioned (at first) by Luther and seems a fine practice, yet the Lutherans discontinued the practice to avoid the doctrinal misinterpretation that the Mass was a sacrifice being offered by the Church. Chasubles and Mass vestments were for a time laid aside, particularly by Gnesio Lutherans, for the exact same reason, to avoid the doctrinal impression that the priest was vested with a special status in confecting the Mass (this was the original function of the stole in Imperial Rome, to connote a special status or class). Censing the altar was problematic because incense is biblically associated with prayers and offerings of sacrifice. The closer one examines the consensus changes in ceremonies in the Lutheran Church in the 16th Century, the more doctrinally logical what was conservatively kept and what was discarded becomes.
We have since readopted the stole as simply a sign of ordination and the elevation as a hallmark of professing the sacramental union. All good. Yet I would balk at charging old Missouri with a lack of awareness of baptism, or devotion to the Sacrament, or the Word as a means of grace. All of these can be found in Pieper’s dogmatics, after all. The emphases were different, however. Baptism saves us and grants faith, but that faith must be nurtured and lived out through the Holy Spirit in holiness and good works. The Sacrament was the Gospel, an instituted preached sermon to the communicant if you will, signed and sealed by the body and blood of Christ, that Lutherans received by faith for the strengthening of their faith to life everlasting. The preached Word was always effective, not returning void, because it was accompanied by the work of the Holy Spirit, who works faith where and when He wills. Informing all of these is the doctrinal certainty that the grace given to us through means is the same, God’s abundant mercy and forgiveness already accomplished for the sake of Christ.
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