Ceremonial Highs & Lows
Over at Gottesblog, Fr. Eckardt has proffered a very useful & insightful posting on the role of ceremony in church, entitled Why ceremony?.
There is no doubt that Fr. Eckardt is “high-church” — something to which anyone who has read his fine journal Gottesdienst could easily attest. High-church ceremony has been under assault ever since the Radical Reformation. (Way to go, Karlstadt! :mad:)
I’m more of a high-church kind of guy, in case you were wondering… 
-ghp
Who Does What In Worship
Over at the Cranach Blog, Dr. Veith helps start the week off right, with a great post, and a lively discussion on the always-in-play topic of the theology of worship.
In particular, Dr. Veith does a nice job of concisely defining the three possibilities regarding who acts & who receives in/during the worship service.
MAN acts and MAN receives. This is the Arminian approach to worship.
MAN acts and GOD receives. This is the Calvinist approach.
GOD acts and MAN receives. This is the Lutheran approach.
You’ll need to go over to Cranach to see what Dr. Veith means by each of these statements, but suffice it to say that he’s correct.
In the end, this all just goes to prove that there really is no way to divorce doctrine from practice. What you believe will impact how you carry out that belief, and vice versa. We might not always like to hear it, but our reticence doesn’t negate the truth.
-ghp�
On Change in the Church
I’ve just finished reading The Fire and the Staff by Rev. Klemet Preus. It’s an outstanding examination of the relationship between doctrine and practice. Rev. Preus lays things out in a very cogent, witty, and easy to read way, both in assessing where Lutheranism has fallen away from orthodoxy, and in showing how that orthodoxy can be reclaimed by coming “back to the ways that have characterized Lutheranism and much of Christendom for centuries.”
It’s a great book — Get it. Read it. Now. 
Of particular note, at least for the purposes of this posting, is the focus of Chapter 12 - The Fire Stoked: Change in the Church - i.e., change. The meat of this chapter is encapsulated in the five fundamental principles of change in the church, as outlined by Luther in his Invocavit Sermons of March 9-16, 1522. These sermons were given by Luther upon his return to Wittenberg from his post-Diet of Worms safekeeping at the Wartburg Castle. This return to Wittenberg was necessitated by the radical, and almost anarchical, change set off and encouraged by Carlstadt. The city council of Wittenberg beseechingly invited Luther back to speak to this wave of change, which Luther accepted despite the misgivings of Duke Frederick of Saxony, Luther’s elector and protector.
In these eight sermons, Luther gives us a bold blueprint for approaching churchly change from a Gospel, theology-of-the-cross, -based perspective. He did not fan the flames of radical, anti-Romanist change. Rather, he laid out these five fundamental principals:
- Change must be required by the Gospel.
- The Word, not force, should effect change.
- If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.
- Don’t let yourself get pushed around.
- Always yield to the weak.
Now, I’m not going to go into an in-depth discussion of these fundamentals, at least in this posting. I hope to do so over the coming days, but I’ve got to be honest and admit that I might not get to it as quickly as I might like…
These five fundamentals, however, are quite deserving of great consideration. I must admit that, even after reading Rev. Preus’s wonderful explanations, I have have had trouble with these principles, especially #2 & #4. And I probably will continue to have trouble in the future. I’m impatient, and more than a little too confident in my own abilities.
Rev. Preus, however, has done me a great service in that his book has helped me understand where some of my weaknesses lie, and what I need to ask God to help me out with. It’s nothing the Bible doesn’t tell me, mind you, but I can be a bit thick sometimes. In any event, it certainly helps to have a framework upon which to base Scriptural studies.
There’s a lot more I’d like to say about all of this, but I think I’ll cut it short for now, and leave the rest for future posts…
-ghp
Misc (Melancholy) Musings
This has been, not to sound too dramatic, a tough last couple of days. I’ve been in a bit of a funk, even more than usual (as I can quite the moody so-and-so…). A friend & co-worker passed away last week after a 3 year battle with cancer, and another friend (mostly online, but I have met her & her husband twice in person) has just been diagnosed with cancer. Perhaps it’s not the wisest thing, to blog about this, but blogging is cheaper than therapy, right? Read more
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