Gottesblog

"Nor is it necessary that human traditions, rites, or ceremonies instituted by men should be alike everywhere." So says AC VII - and we all say Amen. Uniformity in the ceremonies of the Mass that are neither commanded nor forbidden by God is certainly not necessary for the true unity of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.

I'm sure I'm late to the game in noticing this one – but just yesterday while confessing the Creed I realized what a bulwark of sola scriptura it is. In our confession of the Holy Spirit we say that he “spoke by the prophets” - not through a majority vote of bishops, or a supposed consensus of the faithful, or anything else. The Spirit speaks by the prophets. Best to listen to them.

Two years ago our district's pastoral conference dealt with worship. We had an excellent panel of pastors representing all sides of the divisions among us. At the end of it, putting on my best churchmanly behavior I asked if the panelists would each consider the following proposal. Use whatever instrumentation, whatever songs, whatever state of unvestedness, whatever PowerPoint slides you prefer in your congregation's worship: but for the actual words, the order of the service, use one of the services as printed in LSB, TLH, or LW.

What would we do without Acts 2? You can piece together a definition of the Church from other Scriptures, of course - but nowhere else is it all laid out so clearly and in such detail. The Church is the baptized people of God (who have been called to baptism through the preaching of the Word) now gathered around the apostles' teaching and fellowship, the Lord's Supper, and the liturgy.

I had the joy of authoring the text for CPH's new illustrated introduction to the Church's year, Ordering Our Days in His Peace. It's a sequel to Scot Kinnaman's Worshiping with Angels and Archangels, which focused on the Divine Service. A third volume by Pam Nielsen, Behold the Lamb, deals with the symbolism of the Church and is due out shortly.

This is the catholic faith: that we worship one God in three person and three person in one God. Everything comes back to our worship, our liturgy, our life together in Word and Sacrament, the one sent by the Lord bringing his gifts to the Lord's people and their praise sent back up to the throne of grace. That's the catholic faith.

In the comments to the previous post we reached a point where recourse to Luther's letter in the Wolferinus episode was necessary. Rather than post it down there in the comments, I thought it better to bring it up to its own post - which I had intended to do anyway, just a little sooner than I anticipated now.

OK, so we have our taxonomy below with two additions and one clarification.

In the Receptionism vs. Consecrationism debate we have an Agnostic option: We just don't know whether or not our Lord's Body and Blood are present after the consecration while the host remains on the paten before a communicant receives the host.

Gottesdienst is a journal of the Evangelical Lutheran Liturgy. We concern ourselves with the study of Christian worship in the Lutheran tradition. Therefore, we necessarily discuss theology and history - because what we say and do in worship should be determined by our theology, and most certainly is influenced by our history.