The Confusion of the Confession of St. Peter and Unwitting Romanizing
The Lutheran liturgical calendar, like the Lutheran Reformation, is intrinsically conservative, retaining the inheritance of our forebears in Western Christendom. As such, it is comprised of both a temporal cycle, containing the seasonal offices from Advent through the end of Trinitytide, and a sanctoral cycle, which contains the feasts of Christ, of the Blessed Virgin Mary, of the apostles, and of other martyrs, confessors, and virgins.
The trouble, of course, is the uneven history of the Lutheran liturgical calendar, which has at various times suffered much violence at the hands of iconoclasts in various eras, whether pietists, rationalists, modernists, etc. As a result, there is, from time to time, a sense that something has been lost from view which should properly be a part of our liturgical life. Thus, restoration efforts ensue, but all too frequently lack a solid historical basis.
So, for example, as the successive waves of the twentieth century liturgical movement swept through the Lutheran churches of America, it seemed painfully obvious (and, no doubt, a little embarrassing to the perpetually self-conscious and self-loathing ecumenists) that the Lutheran sanctoral calendar of that era lacked a feast particularly in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the same way that it contained feasts in honor of the apostles, St. Mary Magdalene, and others. And so, in Lutheran Book of Worship (1978) and its heirs, one finds “Mary, Mother of Our Lord” commemorated on August 15th. Leaving aside the remarks that could be made about the anti-confessional nature of that title (FC Ep. VII.12), the pride of Nestorius at the reappearance of his theological heirs, or the way in which this foreshadowed the Christological heresies that have free course through the modern ELCA, if the powers-that-be had been slightly less concerned with proving themselves to the Roman Catholics and Episcopalians of their time, they might have looked back a couple of generations and noticed the common celebration of the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary on September 8th in the German-language hymnals of the Missouri and Wisconsin synods, and could have then taken up again a Lutheran custom rather than borrowing what was in vogue elsewhere. (NB: While Lutherans in a number of places continued celebrating the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on August 15th in the years following the Reformation, the observance in modern Lutheran books clearly stems from modern Roman usage, as evidenced by the prescribed liturgical texts.)
A similar story forms the background of the feast of the “Confession of St. Peter,” currently found on January 18th in Lutheran Service Book (2006), though this story, as you will see, is ironic in the extreme. In the some of the early lectionaries of western Christianity, two dates are given for the feast of the Chair of St. Peter: January 18th and February 22nd. By the latter part of the Middle Ages, the January 18th feast had almost entirely disappeared, appearing in only a small handful of diocesan uses, while the February 22nd feast, traditionally understood to commemorate the date on which Our Lord gave His apostle the name of Peter, was universally celebrated. It comes as no great surprise, then, that one finds in Dr. Luther’s Betbüchlein the feast of the Chair of St. Peter on February 22nd, and nothing at all on January 18th. Some twenty years after this particular edition of Dr. Luther’s prayer book was published, Pope Paul IV, directly in response to the Lutheran reformation, resurrected the January 18th feast of St. Peter’s Chair from virtual oblivion in 1558 to reassert papal supremacy over and against the Lutheran confession of faith. The two feasts continued side by side in Roman use until the General Roman Calendar of 1960, in which Pope John XXIII sought to eliminate duplicated feasts of saints, and so the February 22nd feast was altogether abolished, alongside a number of other ham-fisted mutilations. Thus the January 18th feast became the standard reference point for calendrical reforms and augmentations among the mainline Protestant bodies, which were at this point already rapidly liberalizing, losing hold of their confessional and Biblical identities, and grasping for some semblance of legitimacy and historical identity as their confession of the faith slowly withered and died.
Which feast, then, do we find in today’s Lutheran hymnals? Yes, dear reader, the explicitly anti-Lutheran January 18th date. The same date, of course, has now become associated with the “Week [Octave] of Prayer for Christian Unity” — a week begun with a feast that finds its origin in nothing more than a bare assertion of papal power, serving as a perpetual reminder that Roman “ecumenism” is only ever undertaken on Roman terms.
If you would like to celebrate the Chair/Confession of St. Peter, The Lutheran Missal is happy to provide you with propers — for February 22nd. Though, to be clear, the First Sunday in Lent this year will outrank the feast, which will only be commemorated by a second set of orations in the mass of that day.
P.S.: For the eager observers who are currently racing down to the comment section to inform the rest of the world that the whole discussion is moot for this year because “nothing ever trumps a Sunday”, I would remind these brilliant and astute bystanders that this is, in fact, a crock of fabricated 20th century Roman nonsense (cf. Divino afflatu [1911] and Abhinc duos annos [1913]) that was swallowed whole by the Lutheran liturgical movement, a matter which will receive attention at some other point in time.
P.P.S.: Pursuant to the postscript above, the Conversion of St. Paul on January 25th outranks the Last Sunday after Epiphany. Though this Sunday customarily commemorates the Transfiguration of Our Lord in Lutheran churches, it is really just the same in rank as the Fifth or Seventh or Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity.