ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CHURCH HISTORY 02 May 27, 2005 24 CH2 CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY: CAPTION FIRST, INC. P.O. BOX 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 1 800 825 7234 * * * * * This is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in Order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings * * * * >> I'll bet that Luther was not happy to learn of these changes. What did Luther do about these reform efforts when he returned to Wittenberg? >> When Luther returned, he began preaching a series of sermons in the church in Wittenberg in which he directly addressed what had been going on in his absence. And his main point was this: It was not acceptable to force people to change when they hadn't been properly instructed, when they hadn't had time to embrace the preaching of the Gospel and come to see that these changes were good and necessary. In fact, Luther told the Wittenbergers that they were acting the same way the Pope had previously, simply telling people "this is the way you have to do it" and forcing them to comply. He said "we can't operate that way. We have to be concerned about people's consciences. If you force people to change, if you tell them 'this is the way you have to do it now', you simply force them to be hypocrites, forcing them to do something that they don't believe." The time would come, of course, when Luther would simply make changes. But, again, the issue was the rate of change. Luther was very willing to be patient in this. He approached this really as a pastor, saying that it's a matter of teaching, it's a matter of talking to people and helping them to see what should be done and then doing it. Carlstadt tended to approach this as an apocalyptic, as a revolutionary, saying that we need to change, to usher in the kingdom of God; and if people don't like it, they just aren't ready, they won't be with us. Luther had a much longer term view of this. And that's reflected very much in this series of sermons he preached. Now, what he actually did was to quietly change the communion service to get rid of the most obvious mentions of sacrifice because, remember, the sacrifice of the Mass still was a problem. What Carlstadt and others had been doing hadn't been entirely removed from what Luther himself had suggested. So when he returned, he asked that preachers simply take out some parts of the service and otherwise continue as they had been. But above all, he said, they had to preach. They had to preach about the Lord's Supper. They had to preach about the meaning of the words of institution. And then people would understand what the supper really was. And then they would realize that the service needed to be changed to take that into account. In subsequent years, Luther did issue different orders of service to be used in Wittenberg and ultimately throughout electoral Saxony. The first was a revised Latin order of service, the formula missi. And if you look at that service in Luther's works, you'll see that it's actually very similar to the service that we have in both the Lutheran hymnal and Lutheran worship as sort of the standard communion service. There were people, though, who continued to ask Luther to write a German order of service. Luther was initially reluctant to do that, largely because he was afraid that if he were to write an order of service, it would become "the standard service", and everybody else would be afraid to come up with their own church order in different cities, in different territories. Finally, he agreed, though, and he wrote the German mass. You can find the German Mass as Divine Service 3 in Lutheran worship if you want to see what that looked like. But the point of it was simply to instruct people in the faith. As Luther wrote about what he intended in the German Mass, it's very clear that his goal was teaching. And every element of the service is meant to teach the people in German, in the language they understood, about the Gospel and about what God is doing for us when we gather for worship and hear His word and receive the Lord's Supper. * * * * * This is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in Order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings * * * *