ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 66.LW2 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text 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. ******** >> PAUL: Please allow me to ask one more related question. What did Luther have in mind when he encouraged hymns to be written? >> DR. JAMES BRAUER: Good question. What we just discussed I think, it is the kind of thing Luther had in mind when he encouraged others to write hymns and when he put together more than thirty himself, many of them, when he started his work on the Mass and the reform of worship because he discovered that the congregation�s voice connected to music led by other voices in the choir, and so forth, could be a powerful tool for the gospel. So we can go back to one of his quotes. This is the preface to *Rau�s collection of music on Page 323 in Volume 53. Where he reminds us that next to the word of God, music deserves the highest praise. And we'll explore a little bit more what he had in mind. "For whether you wish," he says, "to comfort the sad, to terrify the happy, to encourage the despairing, to humble the proud, to call the passionate, to appease those full of hate, who could number all these masters of the human heart, namely, the emotions, inclinations and affections that impel men to evil or good. What more effective means than music could you find? The Holy Ghost himself honors her as an instrument for his proper work." And further on in the next paragraph, "We have so many hymns and psalms where message and music join to move the listener�s soul." There's your central idea. If we can harness the power of the artistic creation, music, with the word of God so that the spirit has an enculturated version of that text which speaks directly and helps people employee in a very fitting way then the message music tool becomes as powerful as we can make it, that which we artistically do and that which the Holy Spirit will use, that is the gospel message. And therefore it becomes a tool of the Holy Spirit, not just of culture, and the key line there would be what he says a little later in the same paragraph, "After all, the gift of language combined with the gift of song was only given to men to let him know that he should praise God with both word and music, namely, by proclaiming the word of God through music." So that's the central idea of it, proclaiming the word of God through music. Now, all of a sudden, music becomes a tool, a very direct tool of the Holy Spirit. It fits under our category of the word. And it's not just a cultural action.