Worshiping with the Reformers

Karin Maag

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780830853038
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Worship of the triune God has always stood at the center of the Christian life. That was certainly the case during the sixteenth-century Reformation as well. Yet in the midst of tremendous social and theological upheaval, the church had to renew its understanding of what it means to worship God.In this volume, which serves as a companion to IVP Academic's Reformation Commentary on Scripture series, Reformation scholar Karin Maag takes readers inside the worshiping life of the church during this era. Drawing from sources across theological traditions, she explores several aspects of the church's worship, including what it was like to attend church, reforms in preaching, the function of prayer, how Christians experienced the sacraments, and the roles of both visual art and music in worship.With Maag as your guide, you can go to church—with the Reformers.

ONE

GOING TO CHURCH

Meetings of the Church are enjoined upon us by God’s Word; and from our everyday experience we well know how we need them.

JOHN CALVIN, INSTITUTES OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION1

PICTURE THE SCENE: IT IS SUNDAY MORNING in your community. Some people are getting up and getting ready for church. Depending on their denomination and its worship practices, they are collecting their Bibles, making sure they have a contribution for the offering, wearing their best clothes (or perhaps just ordinary clothes), looking over the Scripture readings for the day, or ensuring they have their choir folder or praise band music to hand. Or perhaps, as during the pandemic, families and individuals are gathering around their laptops for a streaming worship service led from their pastor’s living room. Non-churchgoing neighbors, meanwhile, are sleeping in, getting groceries, having a leisurely breakfast, or taking care of the thousand and one household tasks that have accumulated over the week. For them, Sunday is like any other day. Within any one community, the range of practices and activities on any given Sunday is immense.

When we turn to the sixteenth century, the picture is very different. Whether Reformed, Anglican, Lutheran, or Catholic, the emphasis on going to church on Sunday (and often on other days of the week as well) was strong and was mandated by religious and political authorities across the whole of the community. In Anabaptist circles, the focus on gathering for worship was equally strong but did not have the force of political authorities behind it. Community pressures might shape expectations that everyone would come together for worship, but attendance at Anabaptist worship gatherings was not mandated by government leaders. Anabaptist worship in the early modern era meant gatherings in private homes, barns, or even in fields or forest clearings.2 The pressure of persecution also often meant that the time and place of worship was not set but was passed on by word of mouth, making enforcement of attendance very challenging. Hence this chapter will focus more on the other confessional groups, leaving the Anabaptists aside for now.

From a theological perspective, church attendance on Sundays was part of the Sabbath observance as laid out in the Ten Commandments (Ex 20:8; Deut 5:12). Church leaders from across the confessional spectrum emphasized the importance of Sunday church attendance to honor God both individually and as a community of believers. In this chapter, we will explore both the theology and the practice of going to church in the Reformation era. Most of the information on the practice of church attendance in this chapter comes from church orders, which were texts that laid out how worship should take place for a given confessional group. These documents are prescriptive: they lay out what is supposed to happen. One cannot, however, conclude that these texts match the reality of what actually took place. The church orders therefore need to be paired with other documents, including church court and consistory records, which shed light on the challenges religious leaders faced in getting individuals and populations to go to church. The practice of going to church also raises a number of questions: In an era before people had watches, how did believers know when it was time to gather for worship? Who went to church? Was anyone excused from attendance? What happened to those who failed to attend? Did participation vary depending on gender or age? How often did people go to church over the course of a week: Only on Sunday mornings or at other times as well? What were the worship-attendance expectations for an average layperson in different confessional groups? Was strict Sabbath observance a reality for sixteenth-century Christians? Were there special times of year or particular days in the church year when church attendance was more important or more prevalent than at other times? Readers are encouraged to read and reflect on this chapter alongside the next one, “At Church,” to gain a fuller understanding of what churchgoing meant in the sixteenth century.

THE CHALLENGES SURROUNDING CHURCH ATTENDANCE

To many twenty-first-century people, the idea of coercing faith practice by compelling individuals to attend communal worship services seems both counterproductive and wrong. Yet the sixteenth-century approach was different. Because faith commitments were understood as applying to the community as a whole, rather than to individuals, religious and political authorities were in agreement that everyone in a given community should go to church and should practice corporate worship in the same way. To allow for variations or disregard individual nonattendance was dangerous and would lead to God’s anger against the whole community.

Our first account sheds light both on communal expectations and on individuals’ responses to the mandate to go to church.

On March 12, 1582, a woman named Bessie Glass appeared before the kirk session in the Scottish city of Perth. The kirk session was the body of pastors, elders, and deacons charged with church discipline in Presbyterian Scotland, equivalent to a consistory in Reformed France, the Netherlands, or Geneva. Bessie Glass, wife of William Duncan, was in trouble for a number of reasons, including her fundamental lack of knowledge of the Christian faith, her propensity to spend time in taverns, her vulgar talk, and her absence from Sunday worship. The fact that the kirk session knew she was skipping worship highlights a strong neighborhood or community awareness as to who was or was not in attendance on any given Sunday, a fairly impressive feat given that the town had five thousand to six thousand inhabitants.3 In subsequent appearances before the kirk session, after she was widowed, she faced charges of begging, vagrancy, and causing a public scandal.4 The records also suggest Bessie Glass was a woman who ended up living on the margins of her community, causing upset to her seemingly more respectable neighbors. Yet in March 1582, at least, the kirk session seemed to have no qualms about her participation and presence at worship. In fact, they demanded it. She was ordered to come daily to church to be instructed in the faith, steer clear of taverns, and attend church twice every Sunday, under penalty of public repentance and a fine (or an hour in the public stocks if she was unable to pay).5 Here we have a woman whose outward behavior at least suggests little interest in communal worship, yet because she lived in Perth and the community as a whole was meant to live according to the teachings of the Reformed faith, Bessie Glass, too, was to come to church, and even attend more frequently.

The second vignette stems from a very different confessional context— namely, early seventeenth-century Catholic France, where Reformed Protestants were an officially tolerated but hardly welcome minority. The Edict of Nantes of 1598 had brought peace to France after years of religious civil wars. Under the terms of the edict, French Huguenots had the right to worship in a number of French cities, but crucially not any closer than five leagues (ten miles) from Paris. Parisian Huguenots thus had to travel by water or by road to attend worship in Ablon or later in Charenton, as described in the diary of the leading Huguenot classical scholar Isaac Casaubon, who lived in Paris between 1604 and 1610. He recounted how one Sunday he and his wife, his sister, and two sons planned to take a boat to attend the two Sunday worship services at the Reformed church in Charenton. However, even though they got to the dock in Paris at seven in the morning, nearly all the available boats were full, and they ended up in a small and leaky vessel, hauled by a man trudging along the riverbank. The boat was in such poor shape that they hesitated and wondered about staying home, but their eagerness to hear the sermons and be part of the worshiping community overcame their anxiety. As they neared their destination, however, their craft was accidentally rammed by a larger boat. The smaller vessel began taking on water and the whole family risked drowning. Although everyone was eventually rescued, Casaubon did lose the psalter he had been holding at the time of the crash. The psalter had been his wedding gift to his wife some twenty-two years earlier. His wife, as was her usual practice, had begun singing two psalms, one after the other, as soon as they left the dock. Casaubon recalled that they had finished Psalm 91 and were on the seventh verse of Psalm 92 when the accident occurred.6 Here we have a family so eager to attend worship that they were willing to make use of substandard transportation to get there. We also have a picture of families preparing for worship along the way, in this instance by singing psalms.

Clearly, early modern church attendance met with varying levels of enthusiasm, apathy, or active resistance. Some members of the various confessional groups eagerly looked forward to going to church and were profoundly shaped by their attendance practice, even including the journey to church. In fact, going to church could be a risky business, particularly for those who were part of minority religious groups within a larger, often hostile, community that held to a different understanding of the Christian faith. Some had to cross political borders, traveling every Sunday from a Lutheran to a Catholic area (or vice versa) to attend church.7 Others, as indicated in the second vignette, had to travel considerable distances through hazardous conditions within their own country to find the closest place of worship that matched their confessional outlook.

These two accounts from very different ends of the spectrum in terms of a person’s response to going to church underscore the importance of bearing in mind how wide-ranging the response to church attendance could be, from disaffection to enthusiasm. As we consider various facets of the experience of going to church in the Reformation era, we should remember that the difference between authorities’ expectations and the lived reality of ordinary people could be significant.

THE THEOLOGICAL CASE FOR GATHERING FOR WORSHIP

The bulk of early modern theological reflections on why Christians should come together for worship is rooted in discussions and debates about the nature of the Sabbath and the importance of Sabbath observance.8

In his 1529 Large Catechism, Martin Luther laid out the reasons for Sabbath observance in his presentation of the (for Lutherans) third commandment.9 His entire discussion was framed by his emphasis on the centrality of the Word of God. The Word preached, explained, or meditated on sanctified the Sabbath. For Luther, the Sabbath was definitely not a human-centered observance. At the same time, he noted the importance of a regular recurrence of rest for human beings, especially for manual workers, servants, and others who otherwise had no opportunity to take a break from their labors. He highlighted the importance of Sabbath in proving an opportunity for the faithful to gather for worship. Since Sunday was traditionally the day for this rest and worship, Luther advocated keeping to this practice. He observed that while any day of the week would do for this rest and worship opportunity, it was fitting to select one day so that everyone would follow the same pattern, and “so no disorder be caused by unnecessary innovations.”10

In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, as well as his commentaries and sermons, John Calvin also addressed the issue of Sabbath observance.11 In the Institutes, he highlighted the importance of the Sabbath as an opportunity for humans to rest from their sins, allowing room for God’s grace to work in their lives, b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Going to Church
• 2 At Church
• 3 Preaching
• 4 Prayer
• 5 Baptism
• 6 Communion
• 7 The Visual Arts and Music
• 8 Worship Outside Church
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Praise for Worshiping with the Reformers
• About the Author
• Reformation Commentary on Scripture
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright