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Gottesdienst is the journal of Lutheran liturgy. We seek to be faithful to the Biblical tradition of the confessional and historic Lutheran faith.
In This Issue
Preaching and the Word of God, Part 2 – Burnell F. Eckardt Jr.
Why Rubrics? (Continued) – Mark P. Braden
Rolling Away the Stone – Karl F. Fabrizius
De Sacramento Altaris, Part 2 – John R. Stephenson
Extraordinary Essays:
God’s Way of Worship – Peter Berg
The Reverent Beauty of the Traditional Liturgy – Garrick S. Beckett
Ocular Aphorisms – Fritz the Penguin
On The GottesBlog
“You can’t mass produce pastors and theologians. They can only be produced one by one by the Holy Spirit in the agonizing school of experience, crunching with the Word of God and the Sacraments. They see that as a divine miracle that has life- and resurrection-bearing power.”
— The Rev. Professor Kurt Marquart, Concordia Theological Seminary
Pope Leo the Great’s epistle Nec hoc quoque (c. 443) was the first prohibition of all lending at interest for both clergy and laity issued with supreme ecclesiastical authority. Several centuries later, around 774, this text was incorporated into the Hadriana, the official collection of canon law presented by Pope Adrian I to Charlemagne. From that point onward, there emerged an ever-greater consensus among both church and state in Christian lands that all lending at interest is inherently sinful and thus forbidden. (Note: the capitularies of Charlemagne cited Nicaea in addition to Leo’s epistle.) And significantly, in Nec hoc quoque, Psalm 15 is cited as definitive proof of the universal moral prohibition against charging interest. It seems that for many in the first millennium of the church’s history, this psalm served as the most glaring evidence that the Old Testament prohibition was not just civil law, but moral, and is therefore still binding on the Christian.
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The Church of the Augsburg Confession is, historically speaking, very much a bilingual church. Well, there are rather more than two languages involved, but Lutheran worship is broadly unique for its embrace — from the beginning — of both the received Latin plainsong and choral repertoire as well as vernacular hymnody, whether that vernacular is German, Swedish, Hungarian, Slovak, or English. If you would like to claim that the Latin language has no place in Lutheran worship, I would direct you to Article XXIV of the Augustana: