Dr. Eric W. Gritsch

The Reformation and Liturgical Reform
Ecumenical Perspectives

Dr. Gordon Laythrop

Photos  - Video

Thank you for welcoming me to this symposium held in memory of Eric Gritsch. Through the years — not least when Eric taught at Gettysburg and I was at Philadelphia — I held him in the highest regard for what he taught me about Luther and Lutheranism, for his help to us all in avoiding the toxins of antisemitism, fundamentalism, triumphalism and moralism, and for his own remarkable wit. I am sure you join me in saying that we miss him still. I am honored to join you here.  And I am honored to stand side-by-side with Susan Wood in doing so.

            Here is my thesis: the liturgical developments in the early years of the Lutheran Reformation were marked by both an attentive conservation of the catholic liturgical and sacramental tradition and, at the same time, a critique of that tradition and a willingness to rearrange, omit and reemphasize elements of that tradition when doing so would serve the clarity of the gospel of Jesus Christ in a participating assembly. Conservation and critique. Both. Always. At the same time. This pair forms, thus, yet another of the paradoxes beloved among Lutherans: law and gospel, simul justus et peccator, “this man is my God,” “this bread is the body of Christ,” evangelical catholic, conservative reformation, and perhaps — with Jaroslav Pelikan — obedient rebellion. Indeed, the liturgical paradox — the actual practice in our assemblies of tradition and gospel paired— may be the primary way we experience those other pairs and find that by their tensions, indeed amid their tensions, those very pairs call us again and again to faith in the living and merciful God. And here is the further point: liturgical conservation and liturgical critique, together, remain an important ecumenical gift. We rightly rejoice wherever we find them practiced together; we rightly call each other to their use; we rightly are asked ourselves if they are alive among us, in our assemblies. To use the phrase applied by the Lutherans and the Reformed in their Formula of Agreement, liturgical conservation and critique can be a matter for mutual affirmation and admonition between the churches

           But let me begin with several images, to put the idea more clearly before us.

            In the mid-fifteenth century, the remarkable Flemish painter Roger de la Pasture or Rogier van der Weyden, to use his Flemish name, painted this diptych for a monastic community of contemplatives in what is now Belgium. It hangs now in the Philadelphia Art Museum, just up the road, and it remains very dear to me. I used to go to see it all the time.  Those red textiles, for one thing, abstract the blood of the historic cross and suggest that it covers the world — that it is found not only in the cross-event itself but also covers or provides background to those who contemplate the cross with emotion or with mutual care. But then that fluttering loin cloth suggests that there is something more than tragedy to consider here. Remember that loin cloth! Still, note also that this is an image for largely solitary, silent contemplation. Mary and John are both dressed as contemplatives, in something like the habit of the community where the image originally hung.

  Earlier in the same fifteenth century, van der Weyden painted another image, this one more directly related to liturgical practice. Originally in a church, his triptych of the seven sacraments, as it is called, belongs now to the collection of the Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, though it is currently on display in St. Peter’s Church in Leuven. Note that the cross now — together with the Marys and John — is in the center of the represented church: van der Weyden suggests that all of the sacraments have their source and center there, though that cross still seems to be primarily the object of solitary contemplation, even in the church. But around it flow the sacraments: you can find them by noting the angel and the banner above the practice of each one: around the church, starting at your left, they are: baptism, confirmation, penance, eucharist, ordination, marriage, and extreme unction (and viaticum). Only note something quite important: the sacraments are largely clerical events exercised for the sake of individuals. The church building is presented as if it were a kind of marketplace with sacrament stalls. And there is only one person — the server — at mass besides the priest, and that priest is facing east, offering the host to God.

            Please do not misunderstand me. I really like van der Weyden!  A lot. I show you these images to present a relatively sympathetic view — and probably even a beautifully idealized view — of piety and liturgical practice on the eve of the Reformation.     

            Then more or less a century later, in April 1547, a little more than a year after Martin Luther’s death, the altarpiece that still stands in St. Mary’s Church—the “City Church”—in Wittenberg, Germany, was dedicated. The piece was most likely painted by both Lucas Cranach the Elder and his son, Lucas Cranach the Younger. As one stands in the room, facing the altar, the whole altarpiece presents a Lutheran view of the sacraments: the Lord’s Supper in the center — a meal where Jesus is the host and where Junker Georg, Luther as he looked when he returned from the Wartburg Castle to this very church to fight the iconoclasm and tradition-destruction of Andreas Carlstadt and the mob, is being given to drink from the chalice. The supper is flanked by baptism, with Philip Melanchthon immersing the child in the huge font, and by confession and absolution, with Johannes Bugenhagen hearing the penitent while a person who is not penitent stalks away. Confession and absolution involves one person with the pastor, of course, but note that otherwise there are assemblies at these events.

           Baptism and the Lutheran version of penance look a lot like van der Weyden’s painting.  Tradition.  Conservation.  The eucharist does not.  The practice is rooted in the biblical story and made to be about the gift of Christ, not sacrifice by the priest.  Critique.  Though conservation still has the eucharist there and at the center!  Confirmation, ordination, marriage, prayer for the dying and anointing the sick are all practiced by sixteenth century Lutherans, too.  Conservation.  Only, they do not have biblical promises associated with them.  Critique.  And the sacrament market is gone.

            But beneath these and just above the altar table, the predella of the altarpiece presents an image of an assembly gathered for preaching, for the word in worship.  It, too, has sacramental force.  The people in the imaged assembly include known figures from Wittenberg: Cranach the Elder himself with his great beard and the obvious hands of his painterly vocation, Katerina von Bora holding the arm of her young son Hans in her lap, perhaps also—behind her and looking toward us—her too-early-dead daughter Magdalena, and of course, in the pulpit, Luther. Real people are here. The time and place are Sunday in the present town. The people of the assembly stand or sit (perhaps on stools they have brought along to the otherwise empty room), men separate from women and children as would have been sixteenth century custom, and they are crowded at one side of the image, as if to suggest that there are more people—real people—beyond the frame of the picture who may be part of this assembly of the living and the dead. The preacher has entered the painting from a dark door on the other side of the frame. Luther may be dead, as this door is probably meant to recall, but his conviction about the deep responsibility of the preacher is still quite alive and present here in this church where he was pastor. He stands in the pulpit, an open book before him, and gestures toward the image that holds the entire composition into unity: the crucified and bleeding Christ.

            Here is a painted image meant to represent speech.  But the particular way this painted image stands as a metaphor for speech is especially important: “we proclaim Christ crucified,” Paul said (1 Cor. 1:23), and Luther here is clearly presented as following suit. The Bible is open on the pulpit and the speaker is finding its center in the cross, pointing out that center to the assembly, making that center available to awaken the faith of the hearers. His pointing stands for his speaking; the cross stands for what he says. Indeed, according to the image, such is the purpose of preaching. I would argue that all of the texts of the Bible are being brought to this purpose: the preacher is reading and then speaking from all the texts. The book on the pulpit suggests as much. The texts may change, the pages of the book may be turned; the names and reborn images may be rich and various; but gathering all these texts and images together to speak the meaning of the cross remains the same.

            This crucified Christ is actually in the room, but in a unique way.  That is, he is there in the word and its images just as he is also there, giving himself away, on the altar table immediately below this predella, an altar table for which this painted image was intended to serve as altar crucifix.  But the blood on the cross, the blood from the historical event of Jesus’ execution, does not drip onto the floor here, a floor where the cross-wood abruptly ends: rather, this blood is present in the spoken word filling the room and in the cup to be shared with the assembly from the table below.  More: a strong wind that otherwise seems unlikely in the room blows the oversize loin-cloth of Christ into huge billows, both left and right of the cross, toward the painted assembly, toward the preacher, and toward us.  Remember van der Weyden?  Scholars think Cranach got this blowing loincloth from him.  Only now what was there present in contemplation is given to us in assembly around word and sacrament.  That loin-cloth suggests again that there is more than tragedy here, but — even more profoundly — that hidden in this death is the very life-giving presence of God, that the speaking of the biblical word reveals what is otherwise hidden, and that the Spirit of God blows toward us all from its source in the cross.  The scripture read here, the songs the assembly has sung, the preacher’s words, and the distributed bread and cup all say what cannot be seen except by faith: this is the Lamb of God; this is your savior; this is your exodus to freedom; this is the new creation; this is the source of the Spirit that enlivens your bones. That wind blows from the cross.

            The center of the assembly is thus seen to be the crucified and risen Christ, found in the biblical images made alive in preaching and in the supper as also in baptism and baptism recalled through absolution.  The preacher is not the center. Neither is the Bible. Neither is the assembly itself.  The crucified and risen Christ, by the power of the Spirit present in word and sacrament, is. A painted image and the spoken images thus flow into and out of each other, support each other, and both represent the time of Jesus’ death but also the time of the resurrection and the current time of assembly, the time of the Spirit. We in the room, in the current assembly, are joined to that gathering.  The real people there, pressing to the very edge of the painting and beyond, gather us in as well. Or, rather, they join us in a single assembly, bridging time.  The center of the painting is made the center of our meeting: the crucified-risen one present in the Bible opened to become the word of the cross, in the meal of Christ’s gift at the center of the room, and in the believing assembly. The wind carrying the loin-cloth thus also touches our faces, our eyes, our ears.

            Other 16th century Lutheran altarpieces and altar frontals, painted or inspired by Cranach, continued this tradition of imaging what was going on in the room as a way of interpreting liturgical meaning—painted images that thus represented spoken and ritually enacted biblical images.  A preeminent example is the Torslunde altar frontal of 1561, found today in the Danish National Museum.  In that image a congregation also stands or sits on the floor, spilling beyond the frame to include us, while a preacher with Bible in hand points to the crucifix, and the crucifix, which provided the visual center of both the painting and church room where the painting originally hung, is seen to flow out to us in communion and baptism, all occurring at once, at the same time as the preaching. Here the sacraments take the place of the blowing loin-cloth.  The word and sacraments are presented as the crucified Christ giving himself away to us, not us—or the priest—giving Christ to God.  Conservation and critique.

            Note also the diversity of liturgical clothing in the painting—some traditional eucharistic and ecclesiastical vestments; some academic—and the diversity of postures.  The whole painting would be a mess without the unity given by the cross — and the painting can thus stand for unity in diversity.

            Though the Torslunde painter is clearly not as skilled as Cranach and certainly not as skilled as van der Weyden, I regard this painting as a clear presentation of the liturgical reform of the Lutheran Reformation and as a kind of admonition to us.  It would be even more so if it included a matter difficult to image: the Christ who goes out to the assembly in word and sacrament also send us out to our neighbor and our neighbor’s needs.  As Luther says, “When you have partaken of this sacrament . . .you must in turn share the misfortunes of the fellowship . . . As love and support are given to you, you in turn must render love and support to Christ in his needy ones.”  And, of course, in our time we would ned to rethink the gender roles played in the image, not to mention the exclusive presence of Europeans! In any case, let this image from Denmark be before us for a bit as a sign of word and sacrament alive in a participating community, as what the Augsburg Confession says “church” is, and perhaps as an invitation to think of the ecumenical significance of liturgical reform.  Perhaps, indeed, in our day Roman Catholic congregations affected by the liturgical reforms and the liturgical ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council may have more in common with this image than have too many Lutheran congregations through history!

            Now, with this image before us, let me come back to my thesis, to conservation and critique.  You will have noticed both in the paintings we have seen from Wittenberg and from Torslunde: continuity with van der Weyden’s crosses and with his church full of sacraments, yet also a radical reform, with the gospel of the crucified risen one and the participation of the assembly at the heart of the reform.  (These, by the way, are some of the very ways that contemporary Roman Catholic practice would relate in conservation and critique to van der Weyden’s images.  We need to know that.  That, too, belongs to the ecumenical significance of liturgical reform.

            But what can we actually say about Luther?  Luther himself seems to have been a reluctant liturgist. He took a long time to respond to the request of Nicholas Hausmann, pastor in Zwickau, that he write out and publish help for the evangelical practice of the mass. And when he did so, in his Formula Missae et Communionis of 1523, he explicitly labelled the work simply “for the church at Wittenberg,” that is for the local congregation of which he was pastor. And he begged others to correct him if they could see a better way, hoping for a common effort at reform. He did this, of course, because he did not want his own work to be turned into a new law, by means of which people would think that they could please God if they followed exactly what Luther said. But, as we will see, this refusal of compulsion—this refusal of liturgical legalism—is actually part of his reform.

            Both conservation and critique can be seen in the earliest Lutheran sources. It is not simply so, for example, that Lutherans confessed in the Augsburg Confession that they “retain the mass” (AC xxiv), but that Luther himself actually did such retaining. For Luther, the liturgy of the congregations that were adopting evangelical practice had no separate existence apart from the historic, catholic tradition. There was no “Lutheran liturgy.”  As his liturgical essays show, Luther presumed that congregations would celebrate mass, hold the daily office, keep the liturgical year, follow the received lectionary, baptize, absolve sins in both private and public rituals, and have ministers ordained by the laying on of hands. This retention of tradition continued for centuries. The liturgical practice of Lutheran churches in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had considerable pre-Reformation roots, in texts, in music, in vestments, in ceremony.  We have seen a little of those roots in the van der Weyden paintings!

            Luther himself established this conservatism. The most influential books in early Lutheran liturgical formation were Luther’s own reluctant contributions: Formula missae et communionis pro ecclesia Wittembergensi (1523) and Deutsche Messe (1526). As Eric would tell us, Luther himself, in contrast, for example, to Thomas Müntzer, resisted publishing extensive liturgical materials or a full missal. What he did publish was not a set of liturgical books, not a universal requirement, certainly not a “new liturgy.”  Rather, he wrote two essays on the use of the tradition in a reformed and evangelical way, as that way was being attempted in Wittenberg.

            So Luther did not write a liturgy. He made available two examples of an evangelical way to celebrate the traditional mass. And, one should note, there were two such examples, differing in details, not just one, thereby avoiding that one should be regarded as the “authoritative” proposal. There were two proposals, united in the common, great outline of the classic ordo missae, diverging in questions of contextualization and address to culture. There was also, on the edges of the Deutsche Messe, a third, unrealizable idea that could also have the function of undercutting any absolute character being attributed to either of the other two. But in both of these booklets —and in all three of his proposals—the outline of the mass—the ordo —and the counsel about the use of available traditions were exceptionally conservative. We retain the mass.

            For Luther and for Lutherans such conservatism meant not only that the mass and its lectionary and its chants — its Kyrie and Gloria and Sanctus and Agnus Dei — were retained, but also and especially the very shape of word and sacrament on Sunday and with it all of the things that Luther would later call “the marks of the church:” preached word, holy supper, baptism, communal prayer, private and public absolution, ordination, and what he called “the holy possession of the cross,” an awareness of and a participation in suffering.

            But anyone who knows those core liturgical essays of Luther knows that they were also exceptionally critical.  Against widespread late-medieval practice and in ways that were sometimes even humorous and irreverent, they sought change. They moved steadily toward the full celebration of the mass in the vernacular.  They urged popular participation and frequent communion. They encouraged participatory hymnody in the mass itself, with Luther himself providing some new words for old tunes and some new translations for old texts. They evaluated classical collects, choir texts, and feast days according to an evangelical understanding of the gospel. They suppressed any mention of our offering “sacrifice” to God by urging the elimination of the silently prayed offertory prayers and the silently prayed Roman Canon. They experimented with a variety of ways to rearrange the traditional materials of eucharistic consecration into a new-yet-old sort of prayer and proclamation at the altar-table. They encouraged preaching.

           The central concern of these essays seems to have been to take the old, traditional mass and make it newly the place where the word of God is heard in clarity in the midst of a fully participating congregation.

            Those two principles — the clarity of the word of God and the importance of participation — remain two of the most basic critical principles in Luther’s ongoing legacy. They have driven the deep Lutheran interest in congregational hymn singing as an essential part of liturgy. They have been behind the Lutheran interest in preaching, the Lutheran interest in using a beautiful form of the local vernacular language in worship, and the early and current Lutheran interest in increasing the frequency with which people commune. The fascinating thing is that these two critical principles also had a traditional and conservative effect: they resulted sometimes in Lutheran congregations approximating very early Christian traditions in liturgy. Large city churches and schools began to sing congregational forms of morning and evening prayer, just as had ancient churches in Jerusalem and Rome. Preachers actually preached on the Scripture readings in the Sunday liturgy, just as had Ambrose and Chrysostom. And the people increasingly understood what was going on.

            But there was also a third basic principle of liturgical critique. Reform must not be forced. For Luther, no liturgical practice benefits from compulsion. His own central liturgical essays were reluctantly published and were full of warnings: “do not make a required law out of this!”  Luther’s own path to these reforms was full of such counsel. When he returned to Wittenberg from the Wartburg Castle in 1522 — remember Junker Georg? — it was because of the required and mob-enforced reforms in worship brought about by Andreas Carlstadt.  Luther the pastor defied the mob and restored communion in one kind, the Latin mass, and the use of images.  He then preached, in his eight Invocavit sermons of that year, that change must come about by teaching and with love, not by force.  And he later argued, in his Wider die himmlischen Propheten (“Against the Heavenly Prophets”) of 1525, that Christians should be free to celebrate the mass in simplicity or with full ceremony, vestments, incense and the like, but that neither practice should be required.  “We do both,” he said, “but we require neither.”  Look at the Torslunde vestments.

            The Lutheran heritage has continued to contain in its best sources a profound criticism of compulsion in matters of worship and a call for change to occur by means of teaching and love. This is a heritage newly important in an ecumenical, multicultural time: retain the mass, we say, and with it all the great liturgical tradition of the church. But realize that the ordo of the mass can be done faithfully in a great variety of ways. Luther’s heritage here is also an ecumenical treasure.

            The great hesitancy about liturgical constraint, this third principle of criticism, has meant historically for Lutherans that there has never been a generally approved missal, a universal Book of Common Prayer, a set of standard texts for Lutheran churches. There have been local church documents — “church orders” and local liturgical books — for the peaceful organization of worship in given areas and countries. Some of these books have followed one or the other of Luther’s essays on the mass as their main liturgical guide. And sometimes these books have been enforced by local national laws. But there has also been an international discussion whereby we have reminded each other of the principles: retain the ordo; know that already with Luther there were different ways to do that retaining; let word and sacrament stand forth in clarity; encourage participation; and continue to teach and love.

            There was also a fourth critical principle in Luther’s liturgical heritage. It is not so clearly stated in Formula Missae or Deutsche Messe, though it is indicated by the critique of sacrifice in those essays. It is also suggested by his inclusion of “the holy possession of the cross” in his list of the marks of the church. But it comes to clearest expression in works like his 1519 essay “On the Blessed Sacrament of the Holy and True Body of Christ” and his 1523 preface to the Leisnig parish ordinance for a community chest. For Luther, to receive Christ in word and sacrament meant also to be turned by him toward our hungry and needy neighbors. Money should cease being paid for masses to be said as sacrifices. Rather, collections should be made at mass to be distributed to those in need. Instead of our having anxiously to earn God’s favor, we are gathered by word and sacrament into God’s own mission toward a needy world.  So, again, Luther wrote: “When you have partaken of this sacrament your heart must go out in love . . . You must feel with sorrow . . . all the unjust suffering of the innocent, with which the world is everywhere filled to overflowing. You must fight, work, pray, and — if you cannot do more — have heartfelt sympathy.”  Mass, in Luther’s reform, leads to mission.

            I think that this legacy is a stunning gift. Conservation and critique:  Retain the great catholic tradition, the mass and all the marks of the church. Know that all Christian liturgical history is your history. Yet, continually ask if the gospel of Jesus Christ is standing forth in clarity and if the assembly is participating. Proceed without compulsion and by teaching and love. And continually discover how our liturgical practice turns us toward the needs of our neighbor. Such is the liturgical reform of the Reformation. I think that legacy belongs to all Christians, not only Lutherans.

           Of course, we have forgotten it. Or we have turned one part or another of it into a new law, exactly in the ways that Luther feared. Or we have done fairly well with conservation and not so well with critique of ourselves. Or we have idealized Luther and not continued the conversation he began.  So, this two-sided approach among us may fail. The reception of the great catholic tradition in Lutheran hands has sometimes simply become an unthinking and narrow-minded local practice: this is the way we do it and that is all there is to say. And criticism can be turned into its own new conservatism: the critique was accomplished in the early Reformation by a strong reemphasis on the word of God read and preached in catholic liturgical context. But then Lutheran liturgies have all too often turned into long, didactic exercises, with the preacher in charge. Then conservation is only about what we have recently done, and criticism is only about what other people do, and the paradox is lost. These are common Lutheran dangers.

            Still, the legacy stands. Only it does not stand statically, as if nothing ever changes. To say the same things the same way in a new situation is inevitably to get those things wrong. The heritage of the Reformation is in the principles, not in the exact results of the sixteenth century. Thus, the reception of the catholic tradition today cannot be simply the continuous reception of what the late middle ages in western Europe thought was “catholic.”  There are, after all, continuing historical studies of Christian liturgies, and there has been an important ecumenical discussion about what is actually to be regarded as “catholic,” as those things that Christians of every time and place have as their heritage. Lutherans who take “tradition” seriously need to participate in those studies and discussions. For us today, being “conservative” will include our own local reception of the fruits of the international, ecumenical liturgical movement. Those fruits include such matters as this: the importance of baptism for daily living and for church identity; the congregational use of a catechumenal process in baptizing; the recovery of the full eucharist as the principal service in every congregation, every Sunday; the use of the ecumenical three-year lectionary; the recovery of rich and full eucharistic praying; and the restoration of the liturgies of the Three Days. None of these things would have been stated quite like that in the sixteenth century, but they do rightly belong now to the reception of “catholic tradition” today. They do belong to the heritage of conservation.

            But the Lutheran heritage of principles of critique must also continue, expressed also in new ways. The clarity of the gospel-word, the participation of the whole assembly, the absence of compulsion, and the turn toward the needs of our neighbor will all carry new and serious resonances in our time. Critique of ourselves for the sake of the gospel and for the sake of the participation of all of those baptized in Christ still matters immensely. For example, I thus think that it profoundly belongs to the Reformation liturgical heritage that we should work on the contextualization of our liturgies — on the ordo missae done faithfully and done here, locally, in ways appropriate to the vernacular language and the cultural dignity of each local place. I also think that it belongs to Luther’s liturgical heritage of criticism that we work more clearly and invite more graciously the liturgical leadership and participation of women in our assemblies. Such leadership and participation accords with what the gospel says about baptism. I also think that the welcome of all the baptized to communion in our churches — and yet the gracious provision of an opportunity for those who cannot commune to receive a blessing arises from accurate ecumenical liturgical criticism in our time.  Furthermore, I also think that deepened work on the “sending” part of our Sunday liturgies — on the sending of help to the hungry and the sending of ourselves, the very body of Christ, to our neighbors — belongs to the liturgical heritage of criticism. And, you will know, I think all of these things can and must occur in our liturgical lives by teaching and teaching and love. That, too, is the reform we treasure: Conservation and critique, still alive, still mattering.

            And here again is the ecumenical proposal that arises from these reflections: let the churches throughout the world share with each other the best of their liturgical experience and the depth of their current insight into what is catholic.  Let us talk together about what is catholic.  That catholic reality will inevitable include the ways that word and sacrament are being made the center of participating assemblies and turning them toward a needy world, the ways in which those assemblies are at the heart of what we consider “church” — thus, a liturgical ecclesiology.  Let the churches affirm and admonish each other toward the ongoing conservative reception of this catholic liturgical tradition.  At the same time, let the churches affirm and admonish each other toward the exercise of critique about their own practice: Is the gospel of Jesus Christ clear?  Is participation in those central catholic matters encouraged and is the door open?  Is compulsion avoided?  Here is how a Lutheran would say it: liturgical full-communion among the churches will be assisted by such affirmation and admonition, by such conservation and critique.  It will not be assisted by any sort of hierarchical centralism or by a determination to just let each other alone.

            Luther comes out of the dark door and speaks.  We gather with the others and listen.  But Luther isn’t central.  Neither are we.  Neither are any of our most excellent traditions.  Jesus Christ, crucified and risen and by the power of the Spirit present in word and sacrament — God whose name is mercy, as the Bishop of Rome says — he is.  And he is at the heart of what needs to be conserved as he is the ground and source of the critique.

Dr. Gordon Laythrop

Pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and retired Professor of Liturgy, former President of both the North American Academy of Liturgy and of Societas Liturgica.