Lutheran Missal Presentation

A couple of weeks ago, Fr. Mark Braden was kind enough to invite representatives from the Lutheran Missal editorial board to speak at the St. Michael Liturgical Conference. In the presentation video, you will hear myself and the Rev. Evan Scamman speak about our ongoing work of researching and editing, including some of the challenges of the primary source material and the mechanics of our ever-expanding database. In addition, I’ve included below the video the text of some of the quotations referenced in the presentation, as well as others that were omitted for the sake of time - it is astounding how quickly half an hour can fly. Many thanks to Fr. Braden for the invitation, and to Gene Wilken for his audio visual expertise in recording so many conferences and presentations over the years and across the country. Do subscribe to his Youtube channel, FlaneurRecord, if you haven’t already.

“The Reformers are familiar with the Greek rite and with the liturgical pronouncements of the Fathers of the undivided Church, and they cite both in support of their doctrinal position where appropriate. The basis of their liturgical rites and ceremonies, however, is the medieval Western rite as the Church in northern Europe observed it at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Unlike the Anglican Reformers, the Lutheran Reformers are not concerned about conforming their rite either to the Eastern or to the Primitive Church.

”The sixteenth century saw the beginning of extensive innovations in Roman ritual and ceremonial. In general, these had not reached northern Europe by the Reformation began. Consequently they exerted only slight influence on the historic Lutheran rite. Where the historic Lutheran rite has been retained or restored, it generally reveals a purer and older form of the Western rite than the reformed Roman Catholic rite of today exhibits. [note: these words were published in 1952, before the 1955 Holy Week reforms and long before the 1969 promulgation of the Mass of Paul VI] This is significant. It gives us a denominationally and confessionally distinctive rite to which we have historic title and which we have not lately borrowed from alien sources. It gives us a rite which is an invaluable symbol of the antiquity, the historic continuity, and the thorough Catholicity of the Church of the Augsburg Confession. At the same time it gives us a rite which is both older than, and significantly and recognizably different from, the present Roman Catholic rite.”

- Piepkorn, A.C., What the Symbolical Books of the Lutheran Church Have to Say About Worship and the Sacraments, (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1952), 11-12.

“The Common Service here presented is intended to reproduce in English the consensus of these pure Lutheran Liturgies. It is therefore no new Service, such as the personal tastes of those who have prepared it would have selected and arranged; but it is the old Lutheran Service, prepared by the men whom God raised up to reform the Service, as well as the doctrine and life of the Church, and whom He plenteously endowed with the gifts of the Holy Ghost.

“The Lutheran Liturgies of the Sixteenth Century were not new and original works, created by the Reformers, but they were chiefly revisions of the Services of the Latin Church, with some additions, all however in the language of the people.”

- Preface to The Common Service for the use of Evangelical Lutheran Congregations (Columbia, SC: W. J. Duffie, 1888), xiii-ix.

“Your medieval parson had not an agenda or a service book, but a library. He had his missal, his breviary, his antiphoner, his sacramentary, his Book of the Gospels, his manuale, his benedictional, his hymnary, his matutinale, his martyrology, his lectionary, and a dozen other formidably titled volumes. His liturgical life was thoroughly ordered by immemorial custom and by written directions, however much some of the rules may have been honored in the breach more than in the observance and to whatever degree the variations in use between one diocese and another and even one parish and another may have approximated the patchwork lack of unity that characterizes our liturgical practice today.

“Much of the material in this multiplicity of books was good, whether judged by the criterion of the Blessed Reformers or by the standards of the ages that produced it. A great part of the contents of these books was in the words of Holy Scripture, the pure Fathers of the early centuries had contributed a large part, the hymns were the slow accretion of centuries, and most of the remainder—at least that part which antedated the two or three hundred years before the Reformation—was sufficiently in harmony with the analogy of the Faith that only the stark and militant Biblicism of the Protestant Reformers of England, Switzerland, France, and South Germany was affronted by it.

“The Blessed Reformers lacked both the inclination and the time to revise this overwhelming mass of material. They were content to lay down general principles, at most to issue summary agendas, and to urge the retention of the old wherever it did not conflict with a clear command of or an inevitable deduction from the Holy Norma of their Faith.”

- Piepkorn, A. C., “Lutheran Rubrics of the Sixteenth Century,” Pro Ecclesia Lutherana 1, no. 1 (1933): 68.

If you would like to know more, feel free to follow our progress at the Lutheran Missal blog.