As Lutherans consider what the most appropriate way is to arrange their worship services, we naturally turn to Augsburg Confession article 24 (hereafter AC 24). That article explains what the practice of the Lutheran reformers had been: they retained the traditional liturgy with great reverence, although they made some minor changes to it (AC 24.1-2). However, at least one person has objected that this is merely a description of the way that Lutherans were worshipping in 1530, when the Augsburg Confession was written, and is not necessarily normative for Lutheran worship in 2011. After all, AC 24.2 states that some vernacular hymns have been added to the Latin chants—a situation that no longer characterizes even the most conservative of liturgical circles, where little if any Latin is used. Thus, it seems as if AC 24 has little directly to say to us today.
This objection, however, overlooks one major truth, a truth that anyone who has studied literature of any kind ought to know. The descriptive is never merely descriptive. There is always something to be taken away—an attitude to be adopted, a lesson to be learned, a pattern to be emulated. And, thus, we should not expect the descriptive passages in the confessions (or, for that matter, in the Scriptures) to be merely trivial historical information to be quickly forgotten or dismissed as irrelevant. And this is doubly true when a description is part of an argument in a given work.
Lutherans were not describing their worship practices to Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire with idle intent. AC 24, like all of AC 22-28, is an explanation of Lutheran “innovations”: giving the laity the blood of Christ (AC 22), allowing priests to marry (AC 23), changing how the private confession of sins was handled (AC 25), changing the rules on fasting (AC 26), allowing monks and nuns to abandon their vocations (AC 27), and limiting the purview of bishops (AC 28). In each of these instances Philipp Melanchthon, the author of the Augsburg Confession, argued that Lutherans were following sound, biblical practices and were in agreement with the church fathers and the traditions of the church. This was not an argument made in a vacuum. In 1530 it wasn’t clear to most people—Protestant or Roman Catholic—who Lutherans were and what they believed. And since some hotheads were running around Germany at that time overturning civil society, engaging in revolt, and leading people into general debauchery, the Lutherans had to distinguish themselves from such people. And so throughout the Augsburg Confession, but especially in the section on the practices (AC 22-28), Lutherans insist that they are good catholics (small c) who are trying to correct Roman innovations by returning to an older, historical practice.
It is in this context that they explain their worship services. They are not schismatics or heretics, but follow the usual rites of the mass (AC 24.1; the references throughout this discussion are to the Latin version of AC 24). Based on an apostolic command, they have added elements in the vernacular so that people can understand the mass better (24.2-3). But this was not controversial since there were vernacular hymns used in the mass in pre-Reformation times.
Most of the article deals with two controversial “innovations”: encouraging frequent communion (24.5-9, 34-39) and stopping the buying and selling of private masses (24.10-33). In essence, the mass was being transformed: no longer was it a private mercantile transaction where a priest (often alone without a server, which even the Council of Trent would later recognize to be wrong) said a mass for someone’s benefit and no one communed; instead it was to be a communal worship service where people were expected to receive the sacrament.
At first glance, all this seemed contrary to church tradition and historical practice, but Melanchthon argues that the Roman practice is actually contrary to the longer history of the Christian church, as well as the church canons and the teachings of Scripture and the church fathers. Rome had come to teach that having a mass said for oneself was safer than communing. Thus, hardly anyone communed more than once or twice a year, even though masses were being celebrated practically hourly at every side altar in the church. The Lutherans responded that people were being communed only after due instruction and admonition (24.6-9). They were not distributing the sacrament irresponsibly. Moreover, the mass was to be a public celebration of the Lord’s Supper, with the distribution of the elements as the norm, as attested by church fathers such as Ambrose (24.33), Gregory (24.35), Chrysostom (24.36), canon law of the most ancient and revered kind (24.37-38), the Scriptures (24.39), and church history (24.41). In addition, private masses reflect a misunderstanding of sacrifice (24.21-27), justification (24.28-29), and the remembering of Christ (24.30-33). Thus, if anyone was to be faulted for violating church tradition and bringing in radical innovations, it was the bishops under Rome, who ignored both canon law and apostolic mandate (24.10-13) and permitted the abuses of the private masses that brought scandal to Christianity (24.14-20). Thus, Lutherans were the ones who maintained the tradition, and Rome was the one who innovated. It was precisely out of respect for not only Scripture but also the witness of the church throughout the ages that the ceremonies of the mass were largely kept, although the number of masses was reduced to those where people could actually attend (24.40).
This is a tightly argued article that uses catholic arguments—Scripture and tradition—to show that an alleged innovation (frequent communion) is actually historic practice and that an alleged established practice (private masses) is really a medieval innovation. But other than changing these two practices to follow more ancient usage, the Lutherans did not change the liturgy much. Why? They were catholics at heart—not Romanists, to be sure, but people who saw themselves in the continuity of church history.
Of course, one should not romanticize about what the historic liturgy was, as if it has always been the same in all places and eras. Church tradition has allowed variety and flexibility of customs while maintaining a common core. (That is a topic for a blog all of its own.) But AC 24 was never about how much Latin was or was not in a service or how many times people were to genuflect, but about whether or not Lutherans see themselves as schismatics. It powerfully warns Lutherans today not to follow the sectarianism of American Protestantism, which tends to believe that the church didn’t exist between the death of the Apostle John and the birth of Michael Card. It soundly rejects modern church-planting gurus who emphasize telling prospective members “We’re not your father’s church” and who poke fun at the stodgy saints of yesteryear. In short, it warns us against letting a truncated and schismatic ecclesiology shape our liturgy. And thus AC 24 retains its normative power today among serious Lutherans.
© 2011 James A. Kellerman
No comments:
Post a Comment