The Liturgy is the Gold Standard
In an earlier post, I gave some background regarding the economics of the gold standard. There is a lot of debate about whether or not our seminaries are the gold standard of pastoral formation. I argue that they are in this earlier post, and in others. But in this article, I want to speak of the liturgy as the gold standard of authentic Lutheran worship.
How did the monetary gold standard come about? There was no central authority that imposed it, no king of the world that mandated it. The global standard of using precious metals for trade developed organically, millennia ago. It was simply the best way to get the job done (the job being effecting trade). A common currency eliminated the problem of buyers and sellers finding a coincidental commodity that they both simultaneously wanted to acquire and wanted to trade away (the economic problem of the “coincidence of wants”). Metal is malleable and can be easily cut and fashioned - and even divided into smaller units. It can be assayed for genuineness and weighed for value. It can be standardized. It can be made into coins and certified by some authority. It can be melted down and used for jewelry or other uses. It is fungible, portable, and doesn’t spoil. And it is (or was until recently) accepted all over the world. It is scarce, and thus the money supply can’t be added to without the hard labor of mining. And traditional metals provided three ranges of currency: copper for small purchases, silver for ordinary commerce, and gold for savings or for major trade. And as I pointed out in the earlier article, the gold standard assured the ongoing quality of wealth preservation, preventing inflation and the degradation of stored value. The gold standard was a standard. It provided consistency. Hence we still speak metaphorically of “the gold standard” even decades after the literal gold standard has been abolished.
Similarly, the liturgy is the gold standard of authentic Lutheran worship.
It too developed organically in ancient times. There was no central bishop who commanded its use. Like the use of monetary metals, it just naturally became how things worked. Liturgical Christian worship was universal around the world. Whether one belonged to the Latin, Greek, or Arabic church, there was a liturgy. Though there were different rites (even within the West), there were common elements across the borders. At the same time, just like a British pound, a South African rand or an American dollar may reflect national and local preferences, the similarities between them (when they were actual metal currencies) created a universal way to trade across borders.
A modern-day Lutheran can cross borders. He can travel to any continent, he can experience Lutheran worship in any language - and know what is happening. The familiar pattern is there. He can participate even if he doesn’t speak the language. Likewise, he can even visit a historic Roman Catholic, Anglican,. or Eastern liturgy, and even these will have the familiar and overarching pattern that Christendom has come to know and love, to be familiar with, and to hold as a mutual treasure that confesses and proclaims Christ and the cross.
Until now.
For in the 20th century, all the nations of the world ditched the monetary gold standard, replacing it with paper (fiat) currency backed by nothing - which makes it easier for governments to avoid fiscal discipline. And as a result, we have seen runaway debt, spiraling inflation, and the madness of the business cycle. We have also seen continuous warfare, as governments can now just print money. In short, abandoning the gold standard has led to chaos, manipulation, and disunity.
It was only seven years after the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 that the US faced a major depression. It ended within a year because the government did nothing, and allowed the economy to reset itself naturally. But nine years after that, following the massive artificial monetary boom in the 1920s (fueled by Federal Reserve monetary manipulation), the bottom fell out again. This time, beginning in 1929, the government intervened and tried to “fix” the problem - and merely made it worse. As a result of the “crash,” FDR seized gold from Americans and made owning gold coins a crime. That too made everything worse. The Great Depression would not end until the end of World War II, when genuine economic growth (not monetary inflation) got things moving again. In 1971, Nixon put the final nail in the coffin of the gold standard, removing the loophole that foreigners could still redeem their paper for gold. The result was that the 1970s saw what economists said could never happen: simultaneous recession and inflation (“stagflation”). And since that time, the US has augured deeper and deeper into debt. Inflation is simply a fact of life, and the dollar plummets in value with each passing year.
You can print a graph of the value of the dollar from 1790 to 1913, and you will see what is essentially a flat line. There are blips due to mainly to wars (which often meant short-term paper money), but the line is essentially straight. After 1913, the value of the dollar plunges so rapidly, that when we speak of the costs of something, we now have to translate this year’s dollars into that year’s dollars. For example, a 2025 dollar is worth about three cents in 1913 dollars. Since the Federal Reserve was created, the dollar has degraded by 97%. If my parents had given me a dollar the year I was born, it would be worth about $10.50 now because of the inflation of the paper money supply. But since there were still silver dollars back then, the metal in the dollar coin would today be worth about $75.
Throughout the centuries, the liturgy preserved God’s Word in worship - even when people had no access to the Bible, and when the church hierarchy allowed false doctrine to creep in, even with bad preaching or no sermon at all. It was the liturgy that preserved the kernel of the Gospel. The monks still chanted the Psalms. They still sang biblical canticles and read readings as part of the liturgy every day. They kept the memory of the major events in the life of our Lord and of the saints by means of the church calendar. The lectionary assured that the most important parts of Scripture for people to hear and understand the work of Christ remained part of the church’s worship. The ordinaries of the Mass provided the consistency of the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Credo, the Sanctus, and the Agnus Dei, not to mention the Lord’s Prayer and the Preface/Proper Preface. They heard the Trinitarian Invocation and Benediction.
Of course, the language barrier was a problem as Latin evolved into the Romance languages, and became the worldwide second language only of the educated. Our Lutheran forbears addressed this issue in two ways: first, by creating classical schools where all children would learn to read both in the vernacular and in Latin, and second, by translating the liturgy into the vernacular tongues.
Through thick and thin, the liturgy maintained the value of the Gospel, even when the church was devaluing it through false teaching and political corruption. The constancy of the liturgy continued to serve the church by preserving the Good News of Jesus, as revealed in the Word, by bringing the Word to life in worship - even in spite of everything else.
This is why it was so important to our Lutheran fathers to retain the Mass, as we have all promised to do with them, in Article 24.
For like the radical change to fiat currency in the 20th century, we see what happens to churches that ditch the gold standard of the liturgy in our own day and age. We see LCMS congregations abolishing the holy places of the altar, the font and the pulpit, replacing them with phony playacting stages, complete with little tape marks on the floor telling the performers where to stand, fake living room sets with couches and bar stools and lamps made to simulate the ordinary in places of holiness. Gone are the sacred vestments that signal that we are engaging in that which is sacred and transcendent, replaced by pedestrian street clothing. The vulgar and common have replaced the beautiful and the sacrosanct. The Lord’s Supper is profaned by “consecrations” where nobody can tell what has been consecrated and what hasn’t, with changing words and phony affectations, with props, with even the elements themselves being monkeyed with. Such congregations begin to look and sound more and more like non-denominational sacramentarians and enthusiasts who deny the Real Presence. Their words may confess it (if they are pressed), but their actions belie their confessions.
The guardrails are gone and the cars are ending up smashed in the ditch.
Among the CoWo church-growth crowd, the “Lutheran” worship service has been changed and devalued so radically so that it is no longer universal or understandable to visitors. They are reduced to being passive spectators of a spectacle. Words have to be projected on a jumbotron so that attendees even have a clue about what is happening. And the preservation of the treasure of the Gospel is traded away for the false deity of numbers, of the worship of the very people who are attending. The worship at these congregations is as fake as a Zimbabwe banknote. It really is analogous to paper money, backed by nothing, and easily inflated to worthlessness. And no matter how many zeroes one adds to the piece of paper, it never becomes the equivalent of the gold that it replaced. It is rather a kind of officially-sanctioned counterfeiting.
One podcaster-pastor recently admitted that his 2,500 members makes it impossible for him to do things like hear confessions. How in the world does one develop any kind of meaningful relationship (a word these guys love to use) when your parishioners are merely anonymous dots in a sea of faces, perhaps even only watching you on a screen from a “satellite campus,” sheer numbers of people that you can’t possibly get to know. Visiting 2,500 members - visiting one person every day, seven days a week, 365 days a year to this endeavor - would require the pastor taking just shy of seven years to visit everyone. Even allowing for visiting family groups, is this realistic? How does anyone in such a congregation actually get to know his pastor?
And since big numbers are the key, they don’t want to be held back and kept under the discipline of the liturgy - which they see as an enemy to numerical growth.
One of these podcasters recently repeated the liberal canard that Jesus was corrected by the Canaanite woman, and that she changed His mind. Is it any surprise that he also thinks that LCMS pastors should be trained in a pan-Lutheran (sic) “house of studies” headed up by a lady “pastor,” and that we need more women in “leadership” in the LCMS? It is little wonder that he is an advocate of finding ways to “raise up leaders in the local context” by short-circuiting our seminaries. Another such megachurch church-growth CoWo congregation - now thankfully no longer LCMS - had not only open communion and non-Lutheran preachers at their services - but also fortune tellers doing readings on stage. If you follow the traditional liturgy, there just isn’t a rubric for that.
The medieval church saw its share of false doctrine, but the liturgy kept the faith alive through corruption - both in morals and in doctrine.
The inevitable argument is that the liturgy doesn’t preserve correct doctrine, because the ELCA has the liturgy, and it is apostate.
First of all, there is another economics concept called “ceteris paribus.” This is sometimes translated as “all things being equal.” If you are going to compare two things (and economics does a lot of comparisons), you have to compare, as they say, apples to apples and oranges to oranges.
So what would have been better for the Reformation? Would it have been better for the Roman Church to have had false doctrine and the liturgy, or false doctrine without the liturgy? Would it have been better for Luther to have been raised in a Roman Church that still had the Psalter and the canticles and the lectionary, that still sang and chanted the doctrine of the Trinity and the Two natures of Christ, of Word and Sacrament, or would it have been better if they had completely lost all of these things?
For the remnant of Christians left in the ELCA, is it better for them to have the liturgy, or would it be better for them if the liturgy were also abolished? Ceteris paribus, it is always better to have the liturgy than not. And I argue that cutting yourself off from the Lutheran liturgy and the doctrine that it confesses, will eventually draw you away from Lutheran doctrine and toward what your worship “style” confesses. We saw that very thing with one of the Lutheran founders of the church growth movement who converted to Pentecostalism. Clearly, the theology of glory changed his theology of the Holy Spirit.
Secondly, the ELCA and those in fellowship with it are known for their own goofy worship practices, such as the Beatles Mass and the U2charist, not to mention services featuring goddess worship and feminist drumming circles. This is not the traditional Lutheran liturgy. In fact, the gimmicky pop worship services are really just the same thing that our own liturgy-ditchers are up to. And here is a recent example from the Church (sic) of England (sic) - a beautiful sanctuary ruined not only with a jumbotron, but by their clown of a priest clad in a Superman costume swinging around on a cable. Deo gratias that our own stable of clergytainers has yet to pull off this particular schrecklich Scheißschau of tights, red briefs, and a zipline. No. Just no.
The best of both worlds is, of course, to be committed to both the doctrine of the Book of Concord and the authentic liturgical service from the Book of Concord: the authentically biblical and Lutheran Gottesdienst which indeed confesses our Evangelical faith in both Word and Sacrament, with dignity befitting our King, and focused on the cross for our good.
Of course, you can still drive off the side of a mountain even if there are guardrails, but it is better to have them than not, ceteris paribus. The gold standard in monetary matters used to provide a guardrail against inflation, wars, and the corruption of the value of people’s savings. The gold standard of the liturgy provides a guardrail against the rapid and radical changing of doctrine, the profanation of the holy, and the conversion of worship into a spectacle. Going off the gold standard means anything goes. And that is exactly what we are seeing in real time.
Congregations in the LCMS that are on the gold standard can be found here.