Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  Even when giving his formal consent to the Visitation the Elector says, speaking of the “erection of parishes”: “We have considered and weighed the matter and have come to the conclusion that it becomes us as ruler of the land to see to the business.” Luther, moreover, for the sake of securing some order in the new Church by the only means at his command, outdid himself in assurances to the Elector, that, he, being the principal member of the Church, must take in hand the adjusting of the parishes and the appointment of suitable clergy; that his very love of his country obliged him to this, and, that, owing to the pressing needs of the time, he was a sort of “makeshift bishop” of the Church. This last title is significant of the reserve Luther still maintained; he was loath to see the Church’s authority simply merged in that of the State; he did, nevertheless, speak of the sovereign as the head of the new congregations and, little by little, allowed him so large a share in their government that, even in his own day, the secular sovereign was to all intents and purposes supreme head of the episcopate.

  9. Public Worship. Questions of Ritual

  The ordering of public worship, particularly at Wittenberg, was a source of much anxiety to Luther. He was not blind to the difficulties which his reformation had to face in this department.

  The soul of every religion must be sought in its public worship. Hence, in Catholicism, the bishops, from earliest times, had bestowed the most diligent and pious care on worship. A proof of this is to be found in the grand liturgies of antiquity and the prayers, lessons and outward rites with which they so lovingly surround the eucharistic sacrifice.

  To build up a new liturgy from the very foundation was far from Luther’s thoughts. He was not the “creator” of any new form of public worship. He preferred to make the best of the Roman Mass, for one reason, as he so often insists, because of the weak, i.e. so as not needlessly to alienate the people from the new Church by the introduction of novelties. From the ancient rite he merely eliminated all that had reference to the sacrificial character of the Mass, the Canon, for instance, and the preceding Offertory. He also thought it best to retain the word “Mass” in both the writings in which he embodied his adaptation: “Formula missæ et communionis pro ecclesia Wittenbergensi” 1523, and “Deudsche Messe und Ordnung Gottis Diensts” 1526.

  By the introduction of the German Mass in the latter year “the whole Pope was flung out of the Church,” to use Spalatin’s words. It is noteworthy that Luther, in announcing this latest innovation to the inhabitants of Wittenberg, admitted that he had been urged by the sovereign to make the change.

  In Luther’s “German Mass,” as in his even more traditional Latin one, we find at the beginning the Introit, Kyrie Eleison, Gloria and a Collect; then follows the Epistle for the Sunday together with a Gradual or Alleluia or both; then the Gospel and the Credo, followed by the sermon. “After the sermon the Our Father is to be publicly explained and an exhortation given to those intending to approach the Sacrament,” then comes the Consecration. The Secret was omitted with the Offertory. The Preface was shortened. Of the whole of the hated “Canon” the “priest” was merely to pronounce aloud over the Bread and Wine the words of consecration as given in 1 Cor. xi. 23-25, saying then the Sanctus and Benedictus. The Elevation came during the Benedictus. The Our Father and the Pax follow, then the communion of the officiating clergyman and the faithful, under both kinds. To conclude there was another collect and then the blessing.

  Some of the portions mentioned were sung by the congregation and great use was made of German hymns. Whatever had been retained in Latin till 1526 was after that date put into German. For the sake of the scholars who had to learn Latin Luther would have been in favour of continuing to say the Mass in that language. The old ecclesiastical order of the excerpts of the Epistles and Gospels read in church was retained, though the selection was not to Luther’s tastes; it seemed to him that the passages in Holy Scripture which taught saving faith were not sufficiently to the fore; he was convinced that the man who originally made the selection was an ignorant and superstitious admirer of works; his advice was that the deficiency should at any rate be made good by the sermon. The celebration of Saints’ days was abolished, saving the feasts of the Apostles and a few others, and of the feasts of the Virgin Mary only those were retained which bore on some mystery of Our Lord’s life. In addition to the Sunday service short daily services were introduced consisting of the reading and expounding of Holy Scripture; these were to be attended at least by the scholars and those preparing themselves for the preaching office. At these services Communion was not to be dispensed as a general rule but only to those who needed it.

  Alb and chasuble continued to be worn by the clergyman at the “Mass” in the parish church of Wittenberg, though no longer in the monastic church. The Swiss who visited Wittenberg were struck by this, and, in their reports, declared that Luther’s service was still half Popish. At Augsburg where Zwinglianism was rampant the “puppet show” of the Saxons, with their priestly vestments, candles, etc., seemed a “foolish” and scandalous thing. Luther wished the use of lights and incense to be neither enjoined nor abolished.

  As he frequently declared, the utmost freedom was to prevail in matters of ritual in order to avoid a relapse into the Popish practice of man-made ordinances. Even the adoption of the “Deudsche Messe, etc.,” was to be left to the decision of the congregations and the pastors. If they knew of anything better to set up in its place, this was not to be excluded; yet in every parish-congregation there must at least be uniformity. The chief thing is charity, edification and regard for the weak. Above all, the “Word must have free course and not be allowed to degenerate into singing and shouting, as was formerly the case.”

  Of the whole of the Wittenberg liturgical service, he says in his “Deudsche Messe” — to the surprise of his readers who expected to find in it a work for the believers — that it did not concern true believers at all: “In short we do not set up such a service for those who are already Christians.” He is thinking, of course, of the earnest, convinced Christians whom, as stated above ( f.), he had long planned to assemble in special congregations. They alone in his eyes constituted the true Church, however imperfect and sinful they might be, provided they displayed faith and good-will.

  “They” (the true believers), he here says of his regulations, “need none of these things, for which indeed we do not live, but rather they for the sake of us who are not yet Christians, in order that we may become Christian; true believers have their service in the spirit.” In the case of the particular assemblies he had in mind for the latter, they would have to “enter their names and meet in some house or other for prayer, reading, baptism, receiving of the Sacrament and other Christian works.” “Here there would be no need of loud or fine singing. They could descant a while on baptism and the Sacrament, and direct everything towards the Word and prayer and charity. All they would need would be a good, short catechism on faith, the Ten Commandments and the Our Father.” Amongst them ecclesiastical discipline and particularly excommunication would be introduced; such assemblies would also be well suited for “common almsgiving,” all the members helping in replenishing the poor-box.

  Until such “congregations apart” had come into being the service, and particularly the sermon, according to Luther, must needs be addressed to all. “Such a service there must be for the sake of those who are yet to become Christians, or need strengthening ... especially for the sake of the simple-minded and young ... on their account we must read, sing and preach ... and, where this helps at all, I would have all the bells rung and all the organs played.” He boasts of having been the first to impart to public worship this aim and character, “to exercise the young and to call and incite others to the faith”; the “popish services,” on the other hand, were “so reprehensible” because of the absence of any such character. — In his Churches he sees “many who do not yet believe and are no Christians; the greater part stand there gaping at the sight of something
new, just as though we were holding an open-air service among the Turks or heathen.” Hence it seems to him quite necessary to regard the worship in common as simply a public encouragement to faith and Christianity.

  As for those Christians who already believed, Luther cannot loudly enough assert their freedom.

  As his highest principle he sets up the following, which in reality is subversive of all liturgy: In Divine worship “it is a matter for each one’s conscience to decide how he is to make use of such freedom [the freedom of the Christian man given by the Evangel]; the right to use it is not to be refused or denied to any.... Our conscience is in no way bound before God by this outward order.” This has the true Lutheran ring. Beside this must be placed his frequently repeated assertion, that we can give God nothing that tends to His honour, and that every effort on our part to give Him anything is merely an attempt to make something of man and his works, which works are invariably sinful. He also teaches elsewhere that not only does real and true worship consist in a life of faith and love, but that the outward worship given in common is in reality a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving (a gift to God after all) made in common solely because of all people’s need to express their faith and love; he also calls it a “sacrificium,” naturally, not in the Catholic, but in the widest sense of the word. Even the expression “eucharistic sacrifice,” i.e. sacrifice of praise, is not inacceptable to him; but at least the sacrifice must be entirely free.

  With such a view the form of worship described above seems scarcely to tally. A well-defined outward order of worship was first proposed, and then prescribed; it would, according to Luther’s statement, have imposed itself even on the assemblies of true believers. It is true, he says, that only considerations of charity and public order compel such outward regulations, that it was not his doing nor that of any other evangelical authority. Still it is a fact that they were enjoined, that a service according to the choice of the individual was, even in Luther’s day, regarded with misgivings, and that even in the 16th century it fell to the secular prince to sanction the form of worship in church and to punish those who stayed away, those who failed to communicate and those who did not know their catechism. We have here another instance of the same contradiction apparent in matters of dogma, where Luther bound down the free religious convictions of the individual — supposed to be based on conscience and the Bible — in cast-iron strands in his catechism and theological hymns. The catechism, even in the matter of confession, and likewise the theology of the hymns, closely trenched on the regulations for Divine worship. The Ten Commandments, the Our Father, etc., were also put into verse and song. Moreover, those who presented themselves for communion had to submit at least to a formal examination into their faith and intentions, and also to a certain scrutiny of their morals — a strange limitation surely of Evangelical freedom and of the universal priesthood of all believers.

  According to Kawerau, the best Protestant liturgical writers agree, that a “false, pedagogic conception of worship” finds expression in Luther’s form of service. To make the aim of the public worship of the congregation — whatever elements the latter might comprise — a mere exercise for the young and a method of pressing “Christianity” on non-believers was in reality to drag down the sublime worship of God, the “sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” as Luther himself sometimes calls it, to an undeservedly low level.

  This degradation was, however, intimately bound up with the fact, that Luther had robbed worship of its most precious and essential portion, the eucharistic sacrifice, which, according to the Prophet Malachias, was to be offered to the Lord from the rising till the going down of the sun as a pure and acceptable oblation. To the Catholic observer his service of the Mass, owing to the absence of this all-important liturgical centre, appears like a blank ruin. As early as 1524 he was told at Wittenberg that his service was “dreary and all too sober.” Although it was his opposition to the Holy Sacrifice and its ceremonies which called forth this stricture, yet at the same time his objection to any veneration of the Saints also contributed to the lifeless character of the new worship. It was, however, above all, the omission of the sacrifice which rendered Luther’s clinging to the ancient service of the Mass so unwarrantable.

  Older Protestant liturgical writers like Kliefoth spoke of the profound, mystical value of Luther’s liturgy and even of certain elements as being quite original. Recourse to the old scheme of the Mass, duly expurgated, was, however, a much simpler process than they imagined. We must also bear in mind, that Luther himself was not so rigid in restricting the liturgy to the forms he himself had sketched out as they assumed. On the contrary, he left room for development, and allowed the claims of freedom. Hence it is not correct to say, that he curtailed the tendency towards “free liturgical development,” as has been asserted of him by Protestants in modern times. For it was no mere pretence on his part when he spoke of freedom to improve. The progress made in hymnology owing to this freedom is a proof that better results were actually arrived at.

  How easy it was, on the other hand, for liberty to lead to serious abuses is plain from the history of the Evangelical churches in Livonia. Melchior Hofmann, the preacher, had come from that country to Wittenberg complaining that the reformed service had given rise to the worst discord among both people and clergy. Luther composed a circular letter addressed to the inhabitants of Livonia, entitled “Eyne christliche Vormanung von eusserlichem Gottis Dienste unde Eyntracht an die yn Lieffland,” which was printed together with a letter from Bugenhagen and another from Hofmann. Therein he admits with praiseworthy frankness his embarrassment with regard to ceremonial uniformity.

  “As soon as a particular form is chosen and set up,” he says, “people fall upon it and make it binding, contrary to the freedom brought by faith.” “But if nothing be set up or appointed, the result is as many factions as there are heads.... One must, however, give the best advice one can, albeit everything is not at once carried out as we speak and teach.” He accordingly encourages those whom he is addressing to meet together amicably “in order that the devil may not slink in unawares, owing to this outward quarrel about ceremonies.” “Come to some agreement as to how you wish these external matters arranged, that harmony and uniformity may prevail among you in your region,” otherwise the people would grow “confused and discontented.” Beyond such general exhortations he does not go and thus refuses to face the real difficulty.

  When seeking to introduce uniformity nothing was to be imposed as “absolute command,” but merely to “ensure the unity of the Christian people in such external matters”; in other words, “because you see that the weak need and desire it.” The people, however, were “to inure themselves to the breaking out of factions and dissensions. For who is able to ward off the devil and his satellites?” “When you were Papists the devil, of course, left you in peace.... But now that you have the true seed of the divine Word he cannot refrain from sowing his own seed alongside.”

  The writing did no good, for the confusion continued. It was only in 1528 that the Königsberg preacher, Johann Briesmann, at the request of the authorities and with Luther’s help, established a new form of church government in Livonia.

  Were one to ask which was the principal point in Luther’s Mass, the Supper or the sermon, it would not be easy to answer.

  The term Mass and the adaptation of the olden ritual would seem to speak in favour of the Supper. If, however, the service was to consist principally of the celebration of the Supper it was necessary there should always be communicants. Without communions there was, according to Luther, no celebration of the Sacrament. Now at Wittenberg there were not always communicants, nor was there any prospect of the same presenting themselves at every Sunday service, or that things would always remain as in 1531 when Luther boasted, that “every Sunday the hundred or so communicants were always different people.”

  At the weekly services, communion in any case was very unusual. The custom had grown up under Luther�
��s eyes that, on Sundays, as soon as the sermon was over, the greater part of the congregation left the church. From this it is clear that the ritual involved a misunderstanding. In practice the celebration of the Supper became something merely supplementary, whereas, according to Luther himself, it ought to have constituted either the culmination of the service, or at least an organic part of Divine worship; under him, however, it was soon put on the same level with the sermon though the organic connection between the two is not clear. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that predominance was assigned to the sermon, which undoubtedly was only right if, as Luther maintains, worship was intended only for instruction.

  In our own day some have gone so far as to demand that the sermon should be completely sundered from the Supper; and also to admit, that the creation of a real Lutheran liturgy constitutes “a problem still to be solved.”

  It is a fact of great ethical importance, that, what was according to Luther the Sacrament of His Real Presence instituted by Christ Himself, had to make way for preaching and edification by means of prayers and hymns. Even the Elevation had to go. From the beginning its retention had aroused “misgivings,” and, to say the least, Luther’s reason for insisting on it, viz. to defy Carlstadt who had already abolished it, was but a poor one. It was abrogated at Wittenberg only in 1542; elsewhere, too, it was discontinued. Thus the Sacrament receded into the background as compared with other portions of the service. But, like prayer and hymn-singing, preaching too is human and subject to imperfections, whereas the Sacrament, even though it be no sacrifice, is, even according to Luther, the Body of Christ. Luther was, indeed, ready with an answer, viz. that the sermon was also the Word of God, and, that, by means of both Sacrament and sermon, God was working for the strengthening of faith. Whether this reply gets rid of the difficulty may here be left an open question. At any rate the ideal Word of God could not be placed on the same footing with the sermons as frequently delivered at that time by expounders of the new faith, capable or otherwise, sermons, which, according to Luther’s own loud complaints, contained anything but the rightful Word of God, and were anything but worthy of being classed together with the Sacrament as one of the two component parts of Divine worship.