The celebration of the 450th anniversary of the Reformation naturally prompted us to ask the question how Lutheranism has administered the heritage of the Reformation and how this heritage has been made use of and developed in the course of more than four centuries. Lutheranism has not remained unchanged for 400 years. Nor is it absolutely consistent, but it presents rather great variations in different parts of the Lutheran world. This applies above all to the external conditions of Lutheranism. There is no “Lutheran Church” in the same sense as there is a uniform Roman Catholic Church, but there are a fairly large number of Lutheran churches, or rather, churches with a Lutheran confession. Not all of them want the official name of their church to include the word “Lutheran.”

It is obvious that the splitting of Lutheranism into national churches and Landeskirchen has brought about a noticeably motley variety. This fact is connected with political and historical conditions and cannot be said to be founded on a principle or to be constitutive in Lutheranism, even if it goes very deep.

The internal unity of Lutheranism is, however, greater than the variety in organization indicates. If we ask what the strongest tie between the Lutheran churches is, the ready answer seems to be the common confession, principally the special confession of the Lutherans, the Augsburg Confession. This Confession can, however, only with a definite qualification be said to be a Lutheran characteristic. Like many, perhaps most, other corresponding articles of faith, the Confessio Augustana is not a spontaneous expression of Lutheran faith, but it was necessitated by external pressure in a time of crisis. For a genuine expression of the individuality of a Christian denomination, we should rather look where this is allowed to develop freely—in its worship.

With this in mind, I will therefore try to trace the path from Luther to Lutheranism, studying Lutheranism’s worship in principle and in practice.

There is no contradiction between Lutheran confession and Lutheran worship. When the Augsburg Confession wants to give the characteristics of the true church, it points, in fact, to the worship: the church is where the Word is preached in its purity and the sacraments are rightly administered. That is why it can be said that the church lives in the worship of its congregations. This is no specifically Lutheran doctrine, but something that is true of the Christian church in general, indeed even far beyond its boundaries. The heart of every religion beats in its worship, its cult.

We are therefore justified in looking at the history of the Lutheran Church in an effort to determine some decisive features in the development of Lutheran worship. What is the path of worship from Luther to Lutheranism?

Luther’s appearance as a reformer begins with an extremely sharp criticism of the contemporary church on fundamental points. This criticism is also aimed at Roman Catholic worship; it aims at what is most vital: the function of worship in man’s religious attitude. What does man expect from the worship service he arranges or takes part in? Here Luther attacks in a way that could not be more severe what he sees to be the function of the Roman Mass. He finds it to be an expression of man’s endeavor to gain merit before God. A service understood as a sacrifice he considered a fundamental distortion of the idea behind Christ’s institution of the Lord’s Supper, that is, an expression of God’s love towards sinners. The doctrine of the Mass as a sacrifice, on the other hand, expresses the desire of man to justify himself before God. Against worship understood as sacrificium Luther places worship as beneficium.

Luther’s criticism directed against the Roman Mass of his time from a theological point of view could hardly have been more radical. And yet this criticism did not lead Luther to reject the traditional Mass. What he disapproved of was not the Mass itself but the use made of it in the contemporary Roman Church. This use Luther regarded as an abuse. The reform of worship that was inevitable as soon as conditions were more settled proceeded therefore without any discussion from the Roman Mass. In spite of all later distortions, according to Luther, it goes back to the Last Supper of Jesus with His disciples in the Upper Room in Jerusalem. The closer one can get to this first celebration of the Lord’s Supper, the better the service will be.

What took place at the Lord’s Supper this first time was that Christ in word and act, through a meal of the simplest kind, took His disciples into His fellowship and told them that they were to experience this communion with Him through the same simple act of worship also in the future, when He had departed. Luther interprets the account of the institution of the Lord’s Supper in a manner that looks upon the circle of disciples as Christ’s congregation, His church, not an exclusive group of prospective administrators of the sacraments. When Jesus hands both bread and wine to the disciples, this form of administering the Sacrament is therefore binding for every Communion celebration; the administering of the Sacrament sub utraque specie is the only correct form.

Christ’s simple “Mass” with the words of institution and the distributing of bread and wine had in the course of the centuries changed radically, but it had not ceased to be the Lord’s Supper, and it could again be celebrated in accordance with the institution by Jesus. This was decisive for Luther in his liturgical reform. That is why the essential words and acts of the first Lord’s Supper, the words of institution and the administering of bread and wine, had to be the same in every true celebration of the Eucharist; on the other hand, the ceremony and adornment which in the course of history had been added to the Mass could be treated freely. To Luther it seemed natural to preserve the structure of the Communion service that was characteristic of the traditional Mass. As the service was no longer an act of sacrifice performed by the priest but a matter concerning the congregation, it had to be held in a language that the people understood.

It has often been thought that Luther’s demand that a sermon should always be part of the service was the core of his reform of worship. This is, however, not an adequate characterization of Luther’s attitude. In the first place, the sermon was not anything new as compared with the late Middle Ages, and for Luther the question was not only one of the need for more preaching but above all a question concerning what was preached and how the purpose of the sermon was to be determined. These questions we must here pass over. When Luther calls for a sermon in every service, it is a matter of course to him that the service in which one is to preach when the congregation gathers for worship on Sunday is simply the Mass. It is never a question of pitting the sermon and the Eucharist against each other, as there is no competitive relation between them. The main service on Sundays and festival days is, as before, the Mass, and it must also include a sermon. Thus Christ meets His congregation through the means to which He Himself has bound His presence: the Word and the Sacrament.

All Luther’s proposals for the shaping of the service are thus based on the tradition of the Mass. If there were a congregation of mature Christians only, it would be possible to celebrate the Lord’s Supper in a simple form as in the first congregation; Luther hints at this dream in his preface to the Deutsche Messe, but he admits that he did not have the people for such a congregation. So it was better to follow the historical Mass. As is well known, Luther outlined two forms of the Evangelical Mass, the richer Latin Formula Missae of 1523 and the simpler, popular Deutsche Messe of 1526. The earliest Lutheran tradition of worship followed one or the other of these Evangelical types of the Mass. A diverging tradition arose within Lutheranism only in southern Germany, where the preaching service, Pronaus, which had developed in the Middle Ages, separated from the Mass and became the pattern for the ordinary Sunday service, while a special Communion service independent of the Mass tradition was arranged for the days when Communion was celebrated. Here Lutheranism developed a type of service that otherwise became common in Reformed churches.

The starting point of the Lutheran liturgical development was thus predominantly a Communion service based on the traditional elements of the Mass, where the sermon had an established and emphasized position. This service was intended to be the regular form of main service every Sunday and festival day.

The path from Luther to Lutheranism, so far as worship is concerned, showed a departure from Luther’s own intentions and a development which in fact implies a peculiar novelty. But this development is so well concealed behind preserved liturgical forms that it has been surprisingly little observed not only in general knowledge but also in the scholarly expositions of the history of Lutheran worship.

Roman Catholic worship in the Middle Ages was characterized by a tremendous increase in the number of Masses. They were celebrated on workdays and Sundays, in large churches at many altars simultaneously. For this a numerous clergy was needed, but a congregation was not necessarily present. In the new practice of Lutheran worship, it was the congregation that determined the frequency of services. Without the presence of a congregation, no service could be held, as the congregation was considered the proper subject of the service, the minister serving the congregation. The workday Masses were in most cases dropped. But as every service was intended to be a Communion service, not only a congregation was required but also a communing congregation. Now the Sacrament was liberated from its “Babylonian Captivity,” now it was restored to the congregation, now Christ was really to be with His congregation and to meet each member precisely in the means to which He had given His presence, in the Word and in the Lord’s Supper.

It must, however, be admitted that reality did not especially well correspond to Lutheran intentions. There could be no question of an entire congregation communing at the new services. Instead one had to be content if some of those present at all times received the Sacrament. On principle one did not think it possible to hold Mass without communicants; the Communion of the minister alone was not considered sufficient, as the Lord’s Supper was understood to be a concern of the congregation.

Getting communicants to every service proved a difficult problem. People were of old used to going to Communion at the great festivals, above all at Easter, and it was not easy to break this custom and to distribute the communicants more evenly over the whole year. In the interest of the Evangelical faith, the full liberty in the use of the Communion had to be stressed. No one could be forced to commune, nor must the Communion be understood as a meritorious performance. An obstacle was also the shyness of people to the administering of the chalice.

When no one wished to take part in the Communion, it was not possible to hold Mass. So there arose the need for a quite new type of service that was not a Mass. Thus Lutheranism was forced out of necessity into a situation that the Reformed Church had voluntarily chosen: they arranged the normal service as a preaching service and reserved the celebration of the Lord’s Supper for a few special annual services. A stern reality thus prevented the realization of Luther’s ideal that an Evangelical Mass with the Communion of the congregation should be the regular Form of service on all Sundays and festival days.

Here we are in fact faced with a most interesting problem of liturgical history: the development of a specifically Lutheran form of service, determined by the traditional Mass but without that which made the Mass a Mass, the celebration of the Sacrament. The most common way to solve the liturgical problem of the service when Communion could not be held was simply to omit the Eucharistic act itself, but keep the other parts of the liturgy of the Mass. In this way Lutheranism created its own type of preaching service, where the sermon was framed in the traditional elements of the Mass—Introit, Kyrie, Gloria, Collect, Lessons, Creed, and a short final liturgy with Prayer of the Church, Lord’s Prayer, Benedicamus, and Benediction. We recognize this liturgical form as that which is commonly used in Lutheran churches today. It arose very early; we have it for instance in Bugenhagen’s 1528 church order for Brunswick, where also parts of the proper Communion liturgy are included (Preface, Sanctus, Agnus Dei). In the church order for Hamburg, Bugenhagen one year later abandoned the latter parts and prescribed some psalms after the sermon. In Denmark, Bugenhagen introduced the Mass-like liturgy for the service without Communion through the Kirkeordinansen of 1539. This liturgy for the service without Communion prevailed, even if at first it was not the only form; the church order of 1528 for the German town of Seida was an exception.

The most energetic champion of another solution of the problem of the service when Communion cannot be celebrated owing to the lack of communicants we find in the first Evangelical archbishop of Sweden, Laurentius Petri. His church order of 1571, which was completed in manuscript as early as 1561, says that if no one wants to partake of the Sacrament, no Mass is to be held. Instead the minister is to hold a simple preaching service with “some godly hymns” and the Litany. This is definitely an emergency solution; to abandon the Mass on a Sunday is to choose the lesser of two evils. That is why the minister is to admonish the people to go more frequently to Communion and to spread their Communions more evenly over the church year.

In another connection, Laurentius Petri expressed his opinion that the elements of the Mass, its prayers and thanksgiving, are mostly so intimately connected with the Sacrament itself that the whole liturgy has a meaning only if Communion is actually celebrated and if the gift offered there is received. This strict attitude concerning the integrity of the liturgy of the Mass thus leads to a marked asceticism in the shaping of such a preaching service. This asceticism has at the same time the pedagogical aim to make people aware of their lack of appreciation of the Communion.

Laurentius Petri made a temporary exception to his rule of not borrowing portions of the Mass for the preaching service and in special cases recommended such borrowing. A war between Sweden and Denmark in the middle of the 1560s led to a crisis in trade relations causing among other things a serious shortage of wine. If Mass could not be held owing to the lack of wine, one was not, according to the genuinely Lutheran conception, allowed to use any other beverage, but one had to abstain from celebrating Communion. This was a severe trial, and here the people could not be blamed. So the archbishop advised his clergy in a pastoral letter of 1564 above all to preach in such cases but, in addition, to read or sing to the people those parts of the Mass which usually precede the sermon, that is, Introit, Kyrie, Gloria, Collect, Epistle, Gradual, Gospel; after the sermon there were to follow Litany, Creed, and Benediction.

This was therefore an emergency solution in an exceptional situation, not, as has often been believed, a proposed reform of the liturgy of the Swedish Church. This is also proved by the later development in Sweden and Finland. The Church Law of 1686 has on the whole the same simple order for the service without Communion. It was only the Service Book of 1811 that adopted the order with liturgical excerpts from the Mass, which was commonly used by the other Lutheran churches.

We may easily be led to consider the position of Laurentius Petri to be a curiosity in the history of the liturgy. But seen in a wider connection, it is the other way around. The victorious Lutheran pseudo-Mass without Communion is the really radical novelty.

It is most interesting to listen to an observer representing Roman Catholic reaction when he is faced with the new form of Lutheran service. Luther’s well-known adversary, Dr. Johann Eck, has expressed his opinion on this point very clearly, and his reaction is violent.

The Lutherans have, according to him, invented a novelty that he calls ein Greuel und Gotteslästerung, “a horrible blasphemy,” the like of which has not been in the church since Christ suffered death. For they hold ein trockene Messe, a “dry Mass,” when no communicants attend the service on Sunday. Then the priest performs everything that is part of the Mass, with Introit, Collects, Epistle, Gospel, etc., but as there are no communicants, the priest does not want to communicate either, and he holds a dry Mass, without Eucharist, without the body and blood of Christ. Is this not ridiculing God, to blindfold Christ, as the Jews once did, and to spit on Him, to invent a spectacle that has no truth in it?

Here Johann Eck made a significant comparison that has otherwise been completely overlooked. Eck knew the dry mass (missa sicca) from Roman worship, which implied that the priest read the liturgy of the Mass with the exception of the Eucharistic portion, the passage beginning with offertorium and ending with communio. This was a peculiar liturgical form which the late medieval church knew as an emergency solution. Missa sicca could be used, for instance, at sea, where Mass was not allowed owing to the risk involved in handling the Eucharistic elements if the sea was rough. This liturgy could also be used on days when a special festival displaced the proper formula of the Sunday Mass. By the end of the Middle Ages, missa sicca was a well-known and fairly common form of devotion. Owing to certain tendencies of abuse, it was, however, opposed and went out of use.

What Eck criticized so violently was that the Lutherans made such a missa sicca their ordinary congregational service. He could not understand the Lutheran principle that the minister does not consecrate bread and wine to commune alone when there are no other communicants.

The Lutheran theologians cannot have failed to notice the obvious similarity between missa sicca and the Lutheran main service without Communion. They knew missa sicca, but they did not point out its similarity to the new Lutheran form of service. It cannot here be a question of a liturgical loan from Catholicism. There is no need for missa sicca in order to explain the analogous Lutheran service. The Mass that was the pattern was the full Eucharistic Mass, now in its theologically purged form. But just as missa sicca got its meaning in emergency and in exceptional situations, a Lutheran “emergency Mass” was also enforced when the condition to have communicants for every service could not be fulfilled. But while missa sicca remained an exception and soon went out of use, the Lutheran “emergency Mass” became a permanent form of service, which asserted its position as fully equal with the Communion service and which even became the most common form of Lutheran public service.

The path from Luther to Lutheranism has thus passed a decisive stage. We shall stop a moment and try to determine somewhat closer the significance of the development we have so far pursued.

Formally the new Lutheran service means a reinterpretation of the traditional elements of the Mass, or at least a new use of the liturgical parts of the Mass. Abandoned is the interpretation which was a matter of course to Luther and which we have heard Laurentius Petri express: the whole liturgy of the Mass has its center in the Lord’s Supper and derives its real meaning from it. The breach of the integrity of the liturgy of the Mass drives Johann Eck into a violent reaction on behalf of the Roman Church: such a service is conceivable as an exception, alongside of the normal Mass, in every church every day, but it is madness to allow the proper Mass to be replaced by eine kastrierte Messe, as another Catholic judges this Lutheran service. This is a breach of the sacrosanct character which the Mass had according to the Roman conception.

This latter argument must, however, have failed to impress the Lutheran reformers. They advocated full liberty as to the forms of worship. Also the adherence to the traditional Mass was altogether voluntary. But this attitude in favor of tradition had a strong motivation: for pedagogical reasons all breaches of an older tradition should be carried out with caution and based on well-founded theological reasons. Now the liturgical reform that the Mass-like service without Communion implied does not in fact appear to have been understood as a liturgical novelty. So far as is known, Laurentius Petri in Sweden was the only one to react consciously against it. Luther must have known this order and accepted it without any misgivings as an inevitable emergency solution. The fact that this service then became a more or less regular matter gave it the authority of habit. The stress laid on the sermon also led to its being more understood to be in the center of the liturgy; the sermon was never allowed to be missing in the service, but the Communion sometimes had to be left out. It was thus quite easy to look upon the former part of the liturgy as preaching liturgy, as a “service of the Word,” as distinguished from the proper sacramental liturgy. This way of looking at the matter has now been generally accepted by Lutheranism, nor is it in fact unfamiliar to Roman liturgists. In some Lutheran churches the preaching liturgy and the Communion liturgy have been completely isolated from each other—for instance in Denmark’s Order for Service, authorized in 1912, the Communion ritual is found among church offices, while den danske højmesse (“the Danish High Mass”) includes only the liturgy of the preaching service. Other churches, for instance, in Sweden and Finland, have continuously since the Reformation preserved the whole Mass order in one sequence as the theoretically complete order of the service. In practice, however, this complete Communion service has often been an exception.

The Lutheran missa sicca has thus not only been accepted and legitimized but has long been victorious over the original Evangelical Mass created by Luther. The explanation is of course that this order has been a practical liturgical form for the service that from necessity was created within Lutheranism. With this we arrive at the question of the theological structure of the Lutheran service, the content which the liturgical form was to serve. On the path from Luther to Lutheranism a change has here taken place, the significance of which has not been sufficiently established by research.

At the starting point of the Lutheran line of development, it is unquestionably clear that the service means the meeting of the congregation with its Lord, Christ, in the forms that He Himself has instituted, in the Word and in the Lord’s Supper. The original form and the ideal form of the service is Christ’s institution of the Lord’s Supper. The Mass was the traditional form for the Lord’s Supper, and it could still be used, if it were restored to its correct significance and became the Communion of the congregation and if there were guarantees that everybody used it in the right way. The sermon and teaching in various forms were to give these guarantees. Luther knew that to begin with one had to reckon with eyn wild, rho, tobend Volk (“a wild, rude, turbulent people”) that had to be fostered with patience. The extremely important and magnificent popular education that Lutheran Orthodoxy actually carried out did not, however, lead to the realization of Luther’s ideal of the worship service, a regular service every Sunday around the Word and Sacrament. Instead, Lutheranism voluntarily abandoned this ideal and arranged its worship essentially in the same manner as the Reformed churches, with a preaching service as the normal type every Sunday and festival day and Communion services on certain days at regular intervals. With the exception of some isolated annual services, for instance Maundy Thursday, Lutheranism did not even achieve the advantage that the order of the Reformed churches implies, that is, having the entire congregation commune when the Lord’s Supper is celebrated.

This is fundamentally a radical change of the structure of the Lutheran service, and it is remarkable that it could take place for so long without attracting the attention of Lutheran theology. This must be explained by the fact that the transformation of worship has gone hand in hand with other, perhaps more urgent developments in the life of the church. I will here confine myself to some suggestions of the most important stages on this path from Luther to Lutheranism.

We have already hinted at the difficulties to get a sufficient number of communicants in order to guarantee a regular Mass all the year round. Lutheranism could not overcome these difficulties. The remarkable thing is that Luther’s ideas could be realized to such a small extent that one very soon drifted into a practice that has great similarities with the use that the Reformation wanted to overcome, the late medieval Roman order. Luther maintained full liberty in the use of the Communion but still felt that the gift of the Communion would be accepted readily and often. Like the Catholic Church, Lutheranism contented itself to demand that every Christian should go to Communion once a year; thus the liberty in the use of the Communion was abandoned and the Gospe1 of the Sacrament made into law. At the same time the strong emphasis on preparation for Communion adopted a form that was bound to develop a restrictive character. While Luther thought it important that people should be invited to the Sacrament and be “prompted” to faith, the main interest later was to prevent the unworthy from going to Communion. At the same time everybody was under the obligation to receive the Sacrament in a worthy way once a year. The Communion was understood quite individualistically. Strictly speaking, it was not essential that the Eucharist be celebrated; the man thing was that the individual under control fulfill a church obligation. Consequently, private Communion outside the public service was commonly practiced, especially by the privileged higher classes.

Gradually and rather imperceptibly a very important change took place in the fundamental conception of what a Lutheran service should be. So far there was adherence, at least in theory, to the idea that the service was a Communion service and a mere preaching service was held only when the lack of communicants enforced this. Theoretically this viewpoint was held very long, even in spite of a quite different practice. Sweden’s Church Law of 1686, which is still in force, decrees that Communion is to be administered as often as the members of the congregation desire it, but this is no longer interpreted as it was at the time of the Reformation, namely, that the minister before each service should make sure whether there are any persons wanting to commune and only for lack of communicants should cancel the Communion. Swedish church law gives the interpretation that in large congregations Communion has to be celebrated at least every other, or every third, Sunday.

When in this way—in theory or in practice—one has begun to decide in advance that certain services are to be only preaching services without asking whether there would be communicants or not, then Lutheranism has in principle accepted the same practice of worship as the Reformed churches have had all the time. The fact that Lutheranism preserves a liturgical frame round the sermon borrowed from the Mass does not alter this.

When through the influence of the Age of Enlightenment compulsory church attendance and Communion were somewhat less strictly observed, the natural consequence was a disastrous decline with regard to Communion life and the number of communicants. Thus the need for Communion services was decreasing, and Lutheranism went into a period of marked decline with regard to its Communion life; in many places, for instance, in Sweden, the Communion of those who were confirmed was their only Communion of the year. The establishment of the liturgical preaching service, the Lutheran missa sicca, was nearly complete.

Today the situation has again changed. After the revivalist movements with their individualistic stamp, dominated by pietism, which had little interest in the congregational service, we have experienced a marked change in the interest in the worship service and the Eucharist. Liturgical renewal is a slogan that is alive in all denominations. This interest is expressed in a comprehensive effort to restore the forms of worship. To some extent this interest leads to a reconsideration of the solutions of the problems of liturgical forms from the time of the Reformation. But with regard to the content of the Lutheran main service, its character as Evangelical Mass, where the Word is preached and the Lord’s Supper is always celebrated, the Reformation as hardly been seen as a binding ideal. The influence of the intervening centuries cannot be so easily obliterated. The liturgical interest is, for instance, in Scandinavia expressed in the care bestowed on the so-called “High Mass” without Communion and its adornment, while the Communion is often banished to secondary services. One has to ask the serious question if this even benefits that which should be the center of this service without Communion, that is, the sermon. The sermon easily becomes insignificant, a detail among the other elements of the liturgy. If the Lutheran Mass liturgy is not allowed to serve its real purpose, to interpret and to frame the meeting of the congregation with its Lord at His table, it should by no means compete with the preaching.

Lutheranism of today should of course assert its right in every situation to make use of the most suitable of the liturgical forms it has inherited. But it must then also be ready to ask whether these forms, as found in the complete Lutheran Mass, could not be used as originally intended, in a complete Communion service. Experience from many quarters, especially Denmark, points in the direction that Communion service every Sunday can be a quite natural observance. In the light of the history of Lutheran worship, it is necessary to ask the question with what right one withholds from the congregation the opportunity to experience the wealth of the Gospel in Word and Sacrament, which Martin Luther wanted to liberate from all human bonds. When this question becomes a real, burning issue, then Lutheranism will begin to find the way to Luther and thus, on a very important point, to its own full realization.

From The Musical Heritage of the Church, Volume VII (St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia Publishing House, 1970). Copyright Concordia Publishing House. Printed by permission. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Concordia Publishing House.