Image: Right wing of the Altar Triptych in St. Peter und Paul, Weimar by Cranach - Lutheran princes of the House of Wettin in worship
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 amid tremendous social and theological upheaval, the church had to renew its understanding of what it means to worship God.
In this episode, Reformed Reformation scholar Karin Maag takes us 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.
Image: Right wing of the Altar Triptych in St. Peter und Paul, Weimar by Cranach - Lutheran princes of the House of Wettin in worship
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 amid tremendous social and theological upheaval, the church had to renew its understanding of what it means to worship God.
In this episode, Reformed Reformation scholar Karin Maag takes us 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.
Welcome to the Lutheran History podcast where we cover over 500 years of Luther history. We hear new stories examine old heroes of faith and dig into the who, how, what and why is history making. So whether you are a Lutheran, seeking to understand your fates, Richard's a history lover, or a person looking for stories of trials, tragedies or triumphs, you'll find what you're looking for right here. Today's guest let her introduce herself, but we're going to get a little bit broader into the realm of reformation history. But of course, we'll talk about Luther history, too. So, let our guests Introduce yourself. Great. Thank you so much for this invitation. My name is Corinne mog. I am a professor of history at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I am also the Director of a special collection, it is called the meter center for Calvin studies. And it's a special collection focused as it sounds like on John Calvin, and we collect everything we can buy, or about John Calvin in whatever language is available. We offer fellowships for people to come to research on our collection, we organize conferences, symposia, workshops, lectures, the whole nine yards. I've been the director here from the meter center now since 1997. So I'm in my 26th year, and I am from Canada, originally born and brought up in Montreal, did my undergraduate degree in Montreal, and then my graduate work in Scotland, I have my masters and my PhD from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and my own area of research. I'm a social historian of the Reformation. I am particularly interested in the lives of ordinary people. What was it like to live in the Reformation era? What was it like to be in a community that made a confessional switch from say, Catholic to Protestant? How do people actually live through that? So I am going to be talking today about my recent book, do it like this? There you go, worshiping with the reformers, and it's published by IVP InterVarsity. Press. And it was published in let me try to remember the date now, because I always forget the things I published in 2021. So reasonably recently. Yes, I think what I saw this book, I guess, to tell the story briefly, but I've already dipped into the IVP, press reformation commentary series. And I don't know much you have to do with that. But I know it was advertised your book is kind of a companion piece to that that commentary series. Do I speak anything about that? So the person who asked me to do this book was David McKnight, who was at the time working at IVP, as an editor, and very closely connected with the Reformation commentary in Scripture series. So that's a, that's a really interesting project. It's a multi year multi editor project, what they're doing is they go book with a Bible by book of the Bible. And they go chapter by chapter and verse by verse. And as they do that, they find commentaries or sermons or reflections from theologians, and reformers of the 16th, and into the 17th century. So you can read for instance, a section of the book of Acts. And then underneath, you're gonna have quotations fairly lengthy, not just like one sentence, quotations from various reformers all translated for you into English. It's just amazing resource. So if you want to know what reformers have to say, about specific parts of Scripture, is a wonderful resource all in one place. And then you could follow up by reading more about what musculus or maleng Fon or any of the other theologians happen to have said. And then my book, worshiping with the Reformers is one of these companion volumes to the series. And there's been several others done. And they're meant for a general audience who are interested in understanding more about the context in which the reformers were operating. Very good. So I was kind of working on a review of this or just a small pastors. I wouldn't call it a blog, but a small newsletter that we got to talk about the book that we're reading and I talked to him a little bit about the strengths and weaknesses of doing the block quote, thing and I want to hear your thoughts on that too. But I think one of the strengths of it is it helps you get in that immersive experience, which I know you you just said was really important. I agree to feel what is it like to be in their shoes from their their persona? Back to the commentary series, you can do that more about texts. But your book, you're actually taking people into the worship setting, which, for me, it's a little bit easier to at least imagine I'm there with them. Because I'm talking about life and Christian life and practices. Now up to me, one of the downsides of taking just a few quotes is, is a minor voice going to be inflated to something bigger than it really was? Or are we missing something? But I think you do a good job with your book. Now going way off script, I think you do a good job here. Because you use your secondary sources. And you really say, Okay, we know the context, you have anything to say about the use of small quotations to frame a big picture. So in my book, most of the time I've, I've introduced every chapter with when vignettes, which I'm calling vignettes, which are actual accounts from the time, sometimes it's a full text quotation from a primary source, often though, it's my paraphrase of something that happened, an event that happened, and that illustrates preaching or the use of art, music, or going to church or so on, and so forth. So these, these vignettes are there to bring people into the theme. So my book is organized thematically by different aspects of worship, I figured that was the most enjoyable way to organize it. And it works well, I think, both as a writer and as a reader, or it seemed to be the right way to conceptualize this particular project. And then I do have shorter quotations every so often from reformers, Luther, or Calvin or anyone else. And they're really the idea is to help people hear the words of the reformer theologian on that particular topic. And obviously, you can't go on and on, because it's not that kind of book. If people want the full source, then they look at the footnote, and they can follow that through. Yeah, so this is, you know, like I said, it's not that kind of book. But I think it's a good entry level for your everyday, you know, faithful Christian or your average pastor who maybe doesn't have a degree in history or isn't even looking for that. But as an interest in well, how did they do things back then, and but with you always have suggested readings at the end. So if you want to take it to the next level, that's a very useful guidebook for that as well. I think we got into how you got started on this topic and project part of the IVP series. So let's get into that and some of the content now. And sadly, we in an hour, we won't have enough time to regurgitate the entire book. But I suppose that's why people should buy the book. Right? That's, that's the idea. You'll give us some of the nice details. So big picture, this is a reformation book about the reformers and worship. What can you tell us about how the various reformers at least some of them developed a theology of worship? First of all? So it's an interesting question, what does a theology of worship and how was this developed, I would say there are very few reformers who have that sort of pre conceptualized in their head, I think it's something they work out as they go. And particularly in reaction to or in conversation with other ways of doing worship, that turned out not to be the ways they want to do worship. So I don't think we're going to find any reformer that comes up with a preconceived pre digested theology of worship, that they can line up and present in one text. And for many of these reformers, you have to look through a lot of different pieces of the writings. It could be sermons, it could be commentaries, it could be correspondence, it could be their work on a church order, right to try and figure out well, what is their theology of worship? There are some principles, clearly Protestant leaders, so you could be thinking, Lutheran, you could be thinking, reformed, are going to want to make their theology of worship grounded in Scripture. So That's principle number one, it needs to be grounded in Scripture. The reformers are very keen to say that what they do in worship is based on what Scripture says. Now, again, that's a bit of a flexible concept, depending on which reformer you are, right? Because, obviously, if you look at the whole sweep of Scripture, and you're reading the Old Testament versus the New Testament, things are done differently. And different reformers come up with different decisions as to what is normative, right, what should be done, what shouldn't be done, what's okay to continue from previous practice? What needs absolutely to change? And each time they will argue that it's done on the basis of faithfulness to Scripture. So that is kind of the principle number one is the faithfulness to Scripture. And then, as I said, a fair bit of the idea of what should or shouldn't be done worship is based on a strong sense that the other groups Within the Reformation story are not doing things right. And so the theology worship is often oppositional. In other words, we do the Lord's Supper this way. And we do it for this and this reason which are scriptural. And we also at the same time, tell you why this other way of doing it is completely wrong. Right. So there's this polemic that's kind of involved. As you look at the ology worship, it's never neutral. It's always articulated in the context of controversy. With our debates. This is a hotly debated topic in the 16th century, just like there are worship wars today, right? there was conflict over worship in the 16th century. So it's never a neutral topic engaged in without any contextual reference. It's always highly, highly contextual. So you talked about normative and of course, starting with scripture. For me, I want to hear your thoughts on this broad, sweeping oversimplification and generalizations. My view was coming up was more of okay, the reformed side of things, and of course, there's righty there within that branch, but within the reformed, there was a I don't know what the right word, there was a an appeal to really looking closely at the Old Testament patterns. And me, it seems like they were more willing to make old Old Testament ship normative and say the Lutherans is simple. This was an option, but we have maybe the Christian freedom application differently. What are your thoughts on that? In my opinion, right? Or? You know, it depends. It depends which area of worship you look at, right? If you're talking about images, for instance, in the place of it isn't worship? Yes, I would say your explanation holds. That's to say that the Lutheran church proved to be much more willing to consider images in church as an indifferent matter, as the offeror, you may keep them, you may not keep them. It's good to know the mind of the community. Luther actually is very pragmatic, and he knows that changing everything all at once, especially in just the outward appearance of worship is going to make things more difficult for believers to make this transition. He's a smart guy, he realizes this, Calvin, singly Bullinger, the Swiss reformed are very much more in favor of saying okay, no, the 10 commandments, say Thou shalt not have a graven image. And images in church to them are either signs of or vectors for possible idolatry, and hence, they all need to be removed, right? However, there are other aspects where you think, Wait a moment, they aren't very faithful to the Old Testament, and it's always made me laugh that Calvin, when it comes to music in church is very clear. It has to be we sing scriptural texts, and scriptural text only, that's fine. But as soon as you get to the Psalms, or the texts of the Old Testament that refer to people accompanying singing with liar and a harp, I keep wondering, Well, why don't we have liars and harps? Guys? I mean, this seems like it would be totally appropriate. Oh, no, no, no, no, that, according to Calvin is Jewish tradition. And that does not need to be replicated. So they they pick and choose, they are not consistent. Yeah, no, that is interesting. So one of the particular things you get into with, with worship. And it's a reflection of theology of worship, of course, is the varying views and practices of church attendance. And of course, as Americans, we need to be reminded, maybe there's a Church State relationship, it's totally different the way it is now, and that has something to do with that. But what would you like to share about church attendance? I find this is one of the points for church attendance often falls under the broader topic of church discipline. And that is actually a topic that modern audiences find their hard time to get their heads around. Because as you said, it's a different model of church right? Apart from the Anabaptist, who are like the exceptional group, because they're never a state church. Everybody else, so Anglicans, Lutherans, reformed folk, Catholics, and many places to it. These are state churches, right, the government and the church are working in sync. And, you know, you can get from 1555 with a peace of Augsburg, right? The faith of the rulers, the faith of the people, right, boom, that's just the way it's going to be and your two options are Lutheran or Catholic. But in the Swiss cities write the government chooses which confession group is going to be in their community. And that's then the case for everyone. And you can't be something else. You have to be exactly that. So there's a very close tie that modern audiences, especially in North America have a hard time wrapping their heads around, right. I mean, the fact that pastors are paid civil servants, it's just mind blowing to a modern audience. Right. And that at church, you would have not just the community of course, but also a magistrate you're sitting there 12345, your city council's right there in the front row. Right. So there's, there's a very interesting dynamic between church and state in these in these communities. And that shapes, especially the idea of church attendance, because the other point we need to understand is that church attendance in the 16th century is seen as a communal obligation. It's the, it's the role of the community to be present in the face of God at worship. So it's not more like individualism, where well you choose if you want to go and if you don't want to go, that's okay too. And, you know, you find your spirituality, wherever you find your spirituality, that's not a 16th century mindset, the 16th century mind says, we all do it the same way. And if we don't all do it the same way. And if we're not all in church together, honestly, bad things are going to happen. Right? God is going to be upset with the community, we may have thunderstorms, or floods or fires or, or, or drought or famine, you know, there's there's a very strong communal push. Hence, the authorities pushed very hard for mandates for church attendance. And again, it didn't matter if your Anglican reformed Lutheran Catholic, I found across the board, religious authorities and political authorities have the same aims in mind, everybody needs to be in church. And they enforce that in various ways. Through a system of church orders, which simply lay down the rules, this is what you shall do right? Through the use of finds for people who don't turn up through the power to shut down any alternative activities such as bars, or pubs or places to eat. Right, those will be closed during worship time. So they're trying to block out the alternatives. So in most instances, this is a very strong compulsion that everybody needs to be in church. The only exceptions tend to be either on border areas, or in communities where there is no one confessional group that's in the majority. So in border areas, yes, the ordinances say everybody needs to be in church. But if you live, say, on the Dutch German border, and you are on the Dutch side, but you're actually Catholic, on a Sunday morning, you'll get up and leave your little Protestant enclave and cross the border, and go into the German Catholic city. And from the German Catholic city, people who are reformed are doing the exact journey in reverse, right. So it's still a sense of obligation to attend worship, but not in your own community. In the community that matches your faith confession really only happens in border areas. And even then, those trips are dangerous because people throw stones at each other, they insult each other, they attack each other, it can get very, very violent. The work of Ben Kaplan, he his work primarily on the site of later period into the 17th century. And he really lays that Oh, beautifully. It's just amazing about the Dutch German border. And then the question is also what happens in an area where no one confession is dominant. And really, the best example probably is in the United Provinces in the Dutch provinces that went independent from Spain by the late 16th century. Officially, they are reformed. But there was a fairly strong minority of Catholics, Lutherans, and in fact, Anabaptist in the community, officially, therefore, the mandates were in place. But in reality, there's a lot of wiggle room. There are hidden churches, Catholic churches, for instance, they're known you can visit them yet in Amsterdam and places like that, which outwardly look like a just a plain building, but in fact, inside it's a Catholic church, right? So that was an option for people if they didn't do it publicly, and wave their arms around and say, hey, here I am, quietly to attend another option. And then the reformed pastors were consistently aggravated with the Dutch political authorities because they felt the Dutch political authorities were not strongly enough enforcing the rules for church attendance. We're not shutting down the bars, we're not shutting down the other options. So you get a lot of very stressed pastors who feel that their hopes for what the reformed community might look like are not realized because they don't in fact, have the full support of the government leaders in their in their areas. So that for the attendance thing now leads into participation in the worship, and there's already frustration and attendance not happening. But she had some pretty at least I thought they were funny, you know, 500 years later. I think if this happened at my church, I wouldn't find it funny, but that was The challenge is those people who actually did come to church, and what did that look like? So part of the problem is, okay, people are there, great, wonderful. Now you have to inculcate into them the kind of worship which you want to see happening. So for instance, in a reformed community like Geneva, there's been a huge shift, right from being Catholic and attending a mass to being reformed and listening to a sermon. And that's just not instinctive to people, right? There are folks who live through the change, but don't get the change, right. So they bring in people into the Consistory, the body that's in charge of church discipline in Geneva, and many of them are older, many of them are female, and they're brought into the Consistory and asked to explain themselves, because what they've been doing in church is muttering anything muttering what are they muttering about? Well, it turns out, they're not complaining about the service, what they're doing is reciting their Catholic prayers. They're doing what they always did in worship, right. And they don't get the idea that now they have to sit still and listen to the sermon. Or they're getting up and moving around the church building, because they're used to praying inside altars, and lighting candles. And now they're not supposed to do this. And they're not, they can't adjust to this, it's not easy. So you've got the confused, okay, that's one group, confused, you don't really get the change, don't understand the new way of doing things and haven't adapt. That's one, you get the disinterested, that's a whole nother group, right? Those are the ones most likely to fall asleep in church, or cause a ruckus or poke their neighbor or, you know, get into some kind of fight. They are there because they have to be there. But they're clearly not engaged. Let's put it that way. You also have the problem of everybody having to sit and listen to something. If there are children, it can get disruptive very quickly. There is no cry room. There's no Sunday school, right? So you have howling babies, you have children who are kind of less than quiet and peaceful. So there are some pretty funny stories of pastors. I mean, in Scotland, for instance, they finally decided that if families were bringing bringing their babies for baptism, could they please wait outside the church until the time of baptism, rather than bringing their howling infants into the church and the poor pastor sermon is just drowned out by the screaming babies. So there's, you know, the very human kind of aspects and even basic things like they have a problem with stray dogs, and these dogs are wandering in and out of church. And sometimes there's a dog fight going on in the middle of the service. And so now you have to have dog catchers involved to remove that. And so there's there's a lot more liveliness in the church services than we might be expected to hear. So how did pastors, church worship leaders? How do they respond to these challenges? Other than telling wait outside? Yeah, I think some of the pastors are often frustrated. And they tend to some of them at least, tend to use the pulpit to express their frustrations. So there are certainly cases from Geneva where the pastor essentially told off people from the pulpit, either for coming in late or for leaving early. And that did not go down. Well, the congregation did not appreciate that the person being targeted, definitely didn't appreciate that. So there are some tense moments where the pastor's use of the pulpit, the congregation does not appreciate that becoming a, a safe venue to deal with problems in behavior in church, that that's not an appropriate way to behave. So there's, there's, there's definitely some limits to what the pastor can do. But some of the pastors are clearly frustrated and easily frustrated with their congregation. So there, there's a sense in which for some of them, it's not very easy sometimes to be a pastor preaching in these circumstances. And then, okay, the other problem you've got is acoustics, right? There's no microphone, there's no sound system. So as a pastor, you have to be someone with a good loud voice. And in fact, there are cases in the 16th century, where someone who was otherwise a very good, very learned very knowledgeable person does not get to be a pastor and congregation because they just can't be heard. Their voice is too soft, that doesn't carry and that's not going to work. So we have to just think of like basic problems that you might face as a pastor. Being soft spoken is not a good attribute for a pastor in the 16th century. You'd better be a good loud, clear speaker. Yeah, that I guess you could send to the small parish chapel, a country where you could fill the room. Yeah. Well, interesting. Well, and so I'm picking up on the resistance to an improper use of preaching. Don't call us out in the middle of service. Don't turn it into your against your personal grievance airing of grievances platform And I've noticed that you know, obviously, Lutheran perspective, I've seen this in the Lutheran Reformation. Now I'm taking a course on reformed reformation. I've noticed both, like you said, both want to be very biblical, but both see preaching as almost, if not the primary one of the primary vehicles of reformation is preaching and remains important to the state across Christianity's Protestantism especially. So what specifically the What role did preaching play in the reformation of these churches? envisioned by the reformers and what did they come up with? As far as length or topic selections? What guidance do they develop over time? So Luther really saw preaching as the central way in which congregations would encounter the Word of God, that's both the Word of God understand the Scripture, and the Word of God understood as Christ Himself, right. And Christ is at the center of Luther is preaching right? There's a very famous altarpiece by Lucas cronic with Luther preaching, right? And the congregation is there and the pulpit is here. And in between what you see you see Christ on the cross, right. So what is the heart of preaching, it is preaching Christ, to preaching Christ crucified, preaching Christ risen, that is at the center of preaching for Luther. Luther, however, never laid out a real volume of homiletics. Right, he doesn't set out this is how you should preach. His sermons, however, were very valued, and were turned into exemplary sermons, pastels, that could be used by other pastors who have less knowledge less ability. And they can either use his model sort of structure to build their own sermon, or even just read something of his out to the congregation. maleng thon was more likely to have worked on homiletics, although not again, a very extensive work. And the whole question of how to preach is a really interesting one that is a developing field in the 16th century, really much by the end of the 16th century into the 17th century, you have much more works on how to preach and what to do when you're preaching. But there were different ways of approaching scripture. So before the Reformation, and in many places, such as in the Anglican Church, and among the Lutheran is also a lectionary was very common, right? It laid out the readings for a particular Sunday, week by week, year by year. And that was one way to organize what would be preached on it has the advantage of making sure that everybody's preaching on the same text at the same time, which is kind of nice to ensure consistency that way. The reformed tended, at least at first to favor continuous preaching, which means you start in Matthew one, verse one to six, and the next time you do Matthew one, verses seven to 12. And you just work your way through the whole of the gospel. And then you go to another book, and you do the same again. When Calvin preached on Isaiah, Sunday by Sunday in Geneva took him 18 months worth of sermons to get through all of that. Yep, it's a long book with lots. Right? So other different approaches in terms of how to do your sermons? Which how, what approach do you take? Do you take it through a whole book consecutively? Do you take a lectionary view. And all of these options are valid. And sometimes, in some areas, people would actually do a bit of both like one style in the morning and other style in the afternoon. And then of course, you have also catechism services where the text is not there is a scripture text. But the priority is to work through a particular section of the Catechism. And those were often in the afternoon often intended for youngsters servants, people have to learn more about the basics of their faith, although it was always harder to get people to come to the Catechism service than it was to get them to come even to the morning service on Sunday morning. Yeah, I know Luther, for sure. Definitely had those Kevin, chemical sermons in the afternoon. Yeah. So now there's the what's the purpose of preaching? You know, those definitely are primarily teaching, right. But again, for Luther, at least Christ at the center. There was interesting, I noticed in your book, you brought up that loser perspective on preaching. And I think you brought up a quote where he said in the past, no one ever heard a sermon. And he explained, well, no, they there were examples of preaching. I don't think it was very consistent across the board in the medieval Catholic Church. But his point was they weren't on point. They weren't focusing on that topic. Yeah. So saying this within a political context, right. He's trying to make a point at the point. He's not just really trying to give you historical accuracy here. It's more of a polemical This is what was before and now it's much better for this in this reason, right. And Luther would never be sarcastic or use hyperbole or anything like that. No, of course. Yeah. All right. Well, that was very interesting. And I know we've had other podcasts on preaching over history and this time I'm sure will interest many of our, our listeners. For the sake of time, though, I think we'll move on past past preaching, you do say some more in your book. But another major subject. And again, you mentioned earlier, a lot of this comes out of comparison, comparatively, we're not only making a positive statement, but what we do believe. But also, this is definitely what we don't believe in this comes down to the sacraments, both the doctrine and the practice, we could easily do, I'm sure several episodes just covering the doctrine and those differences. For the sake of time. I don't want to assume everyone knows what those differences are. But let's assume there are some differences. As you know, I think you'll see this particularly between Zwingli and Luthor, and another, like the reformed and Lutheran is probably get into this quite a bit over the decades. But what do those doctrinal differences look like as they are played out in practice in worship, which is what you focus on. So let's start with baptism. Because I think that's kind of important. Obviously, baptism is the one that is most different. When you look at the Anabaptist, who didn't think of themselves as real baptizing ever. They thought they were doing the one original baptism as believers baptism as adults, that is clearly a marker of distinction that led to horrific results for the Anabaptist because their death rates were just awful. They were condemned for that reason for other reasons very, very severely by Lutherans, reformed folks, Catholics, you know, it's just really difficult to be an Anabaptist. At this time, you do see a fairly interesting divergence in the practice of baptism based on theology, when it comes to whether it is okay or not to do emergency baptisms. So for Catholics, for Anglicans, and even for Lutherans, that option of doing an emergency baptism was going to be at least a possibility right? In the Catholic Church, it was totally understood emergency baptisms are okay, because the danger of a baby who is unbaptized, at least the Catholic doctrine, until very recently was that baby was not going to go ever to heaven, it was going to limbo as an unbaptized baby, and could not be buried in consecrated ground. There's a lot of very difficult pastoral realities in a time where infant mortality is very, very high. Right? So you find the biggest change there between, especially Catholic comparing, say Catholic to reformed is whether or not a midwife's baptism is allowed, right? And midwives Catholic midwives are trained to do we're trained to do emergency baptisms, right? And it had to be done in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and it had to be done with water. But after that, it counted. It was a valid baptism. In the Anglican Church, they accepted that and they would, if necessary, if they thought it wasn't done, right, like they could do if you had been conditionally baptized, you could be properly baptized in church, but they are willing to accept that the reformed have a different theology of baptism, right? For a reformed believer, the theology of baptism said baptism does not properly save you. It is not salvific baptism in itself is not salvific. It is a sign and seal of your salvation, but it does not save you. So parents of babies who were born and who died immediately afterwards and were not baptized are told that they should not feel that their baby is lost. their baby is safe, because they are the child of a believing family and covenant pally, they are within the family of God, whether or not they got baptized, but that's a really hard adjustment for parents, right. And so even after the Reformation came to Geneva or Zurich or other places, families with an infant that had been born dead or had not been baptized before it was before the baby died, there's still a very strong pull towards these sanctuary chapels were under Catholic practice. These chapels existed to essentially find ways to revive the baby long enough for the baby to be baptized. And it involves feathers and candles and hot air and you know, if the feather moved off the baby, it was assigned the baby drew breath, the baby was immediately baptized and then you know, so you can you can discuss that, you know, Is that Is that valid? Is that is that, taking advantage of someone's grief, but it was very important for parents to find a way to be assured of their baby's salvation. And you can just see pastorally why that was such a big deal. Right? So the theology has an impact. How you did the baptism varied somewhat. Most churches ended up going for sprinkling. I think that's mostly because it's awkward to undress a baby, put them underwater, pull them out again, dress them again. It's just complicated. The liturgies of baptism become much simpler, the more you go towards the reformed end of the spectrum, right? You don't have the anointing with oil, you don't have the blowing on the baby, you don't have the lit candle, you don't have any of those things. A reformed baptism is just very, very simple. It's the naming and the essentially, declaration that this infant is now part of the family of God. One interesting feature was that in medieval baptisms, largely, the parents were absent. Parents did not come to baptism, the godparents brought the baby to baptism and the midwife Calvin insisted that the father should come mothers are recovering, they're not coming usually, but the Father has to come. And then you get into problems as well over the naming of babies. What name shall the child get? Because that's where the child essentially gets the identity. It gets their name, and Geneva the big debate was, Are there names that should not be given to children? Right are their names that are not sufficiently Protestant? And you think well, okay, well, what's a Catholic name? Exactly. They make a list in Geneva of names you cannot give your baby. You cannot call your baby after the three wisemen you think okay, wait a moment. I didn't know the three wise men had names. Well, in the legends they did Caspar Melchior and Baltazar you may not call your baby any of those names. You may not call your baby Jesus, you may not call your baby angel. There's all sorts of names you may not give your baby. You may not call your baby in Geneva cloth, or Claudine or calidad, or any variety they're off, because there was a shrine to St. Claude in Catholic Savoy just outside Geneva. And so for the pastor's of Geneva, parents giving their babies these names was implicitly a sign of continued Catholic superstition, and they don't want that. But of course, the parents are trying to name their baby either after themselves, or after godparents and create kinship bonds, right. And in that first generation of the Reformation, there's tons of parents in Geneva tons of adults called Caspar and Melchior and Baltazar and Claude, right. So you get these scenes, and it literally happened. You've come to baptism, the father is there, he has the baby, the pastor takes the baby from the Father. He says, By what name shall this child be called? And the father who apparently hasn't read any of the edicts, says, Claude, but the pastor baptized as a baby Abraham. Okay, now think how you would feel as a father, if that happened to you? Right? There's almost riots that breakout in these baptism services. And what's happening is the two sides are talking past each other. Right? The pastors are worried about incipient or resurgent superstition, and the Geneva's are saying, wait a moment, choosing these names doesn't make us any less reformed, right? It's a sign of kinship, it's a sign of the bonds that we have in our community. These are the names of our community, we want to honor the legacy, the history, the continuation, the kinship, and they just can't find a way to talk to each other effectively about these things. So even baptism, there's, there's there are all sorts of issues around baptism, like how should it be done? What's an appropriate way of doing it? Is it okay to wait for a baptism? Often not, because that's a sign that you might be Anabaptist. So delaying a baptism is a problem, right? But there was very much a sense that baptism was what made you part of the community. So it's a really essential practice. And that doesn't make it the same wherever you look in reformation Europe. Now, when it comes to the Lord's Supper, it gets even more complicated, because as you said, there's different theologies that are then manifested in different practices. The reformed and the Lutherans and the Catholics end up on a sort of a spectrum of views. With the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation being front and center in the mass, you can't not have that doctrine if your capital, that's just front and center. Lutherans and the reformed fought badly over whether there is a real presence of Christ physically in the bread and the wine. How that then shows in the liturgy is Do you or do you not break the bread during the ceremony during the words of of Sacra of the sacrament? Do you actually break the brand? The reformed would break it, the Lutherans would not right. And so that this old debates called the debate over flexio Panties breaking of the bread, they actually have pretty big arguments about that, especially in areas that were Lutheran in the Go reformed, right? Is it okay to break the bread during the words of blessing of the bread and the wine? Is that Is that okay to do that or not? That's a big point of difference. How, sorry, go ahead. Yep, sorry. Just could you explain They theology or the idea behind breaking, and maybe why you would resist breaking, because I've heard that before. So the problem is that if you are Lutheran and you hold to the real presence of Christ in the bread or the wine, you do not want to break that until you get to the very part of distributing the host or whatever else you're doing. For the reformed with the emphasis on remembering what Christ did at the Last Supper, he took the bread, he broke it, he blessed it, he gave it to his disciples and said, right, so you kind of just redoing those actions line by line. He took the bread, he blessed it, he broke it. And he gave it to his disciples and said, right, so the emphasis on remembering allows you to essentially take the same steps, as you remember, as you recall, the Last Supper, you do those gestures. But for the Lutherans, that was not okay. That was not the way you did it. Because it's, it's the real presence of Christ in the bread and in the wine. And it also then affects what you do with leftovers, right? If you have leftover bread, leftover wine, how do you handle them? What do you do with them? In the Lutheran tradition, everything was much more considered holy, right? You have certain things you may do or may not do, but the bread and the wine, the reformed, I think they still are, you know, behaving properly, but they're not worried about the sacramental quality intrinsically of the bread and the wine. So there's more flexibility there in terms of what you do. Yeah. And of course, the Lutherans aren't doing a sacrifice either. They've Lutherans and reformed you know, they both I'm doing my readings, I think for me ugly and Calvin verse. Some of the strongest ones who really, really don't like the Corpus Christi concept, of course, Lutheran Lutheran is don't either, but like I said, they're kind of caught in the middle of both sides. Single, you're not doing it. Lutherans are caught in the middle, on that stone? Yeah. Yeah. And of course, the Catholics would have the whole tabernacle thing to where do you keep the bridge? Yeah, the elements afterwards, right? Yeah. Or even the ceremonies of Corpus Christi, right, where you actually have a festival and process through the town, with the consecrated host in a monstrance in this big sort of decorated thing with a coast inside of it and hold it up and you walk around the town, it's a way of blessing your town, blessing your community. And certainly, it was the case. In France, in the early years of the French reformation, the growing presence of French evangelicals are called these the voluntary leak in France in the 1530s 1540s 1550s. There's an attempt by some of these early French Protestants to disrupt the Corpus Christi processions, and to attack the consecrated host. And literally to tear it out of someone's hands out of the priests hand and stomp on the ground all over it. Okay, so that would be a way of physically declaring that this is not holy. This has just been stomped into the mud, right. And I tell this story to my students, and they sometimes sometimes think it's kind of comical, right that this procession would be disrupted by somebody rushing in and knocking something down and stomping all over it and running away again. But I tell them look, to a Catholic, it would be as serious as sacrilegious as if you were at a fourth of July parade. And someone rushed out in the middle of the parade, grabbed the US flag, tore it out of someone's hands, it's dumped on the ground all over it and then ran off again, it has that visceral kind of level of upset, right. And we've gotten away from that. But we have to think that for Catholics at the time, this is the body of Christ. And that's just about the worst thing you can do to that is just to go and desecrated literally in that way. Yeah, absolutely. So I also notice the practice so of course, Catholics would have mass every you know, what isn't really worship without mass basically. Lutherans very, but probably tend to have it more often than not, of course, big variance. But in Geneva, you noticed it was? We'll do it on rotation and may the several once a month or at least at different churches. Right. So yeah, of course. Yeah. Quarterly. Yeah, I think it was once a month for three churches that ended up being quarterly versus if I recall correctly. Yeah. So that was does that maybe reflect the importance of the view of the necessity of the sacrament maybe is more necessary? Yeah. It's an interesting question. If you have something more often does that make it more significant or less significant? Right? It Have you have it more often? Is it like this is the heart of what we do and is so important that we need to have it every time? Or if we have it less often. Does that mean we're actually less interested in that? And it's sort of a minor key? Or is it more important because you do it less often? Right? It's difficult to unpack that. Yeah. Certainly in in the reformed areas, the quarterly communions would be preceded the preceding Sunday by a Sunday of preparation, right? So you don't just leap into the Communion Sunday, and think, oh, here we go. Again, no, there's a Sunday preparation beforehand, where people are meant to examine their hearts, examine their lives, reconciled with their neighbors sort out any problems they're having, and then come to the table of the Lord in a proper and good frame of mind reconciled with God reconciled with their neighbor, the Geneva body of discipline, the Consistory was always busiest right before the quarterly communion, as everybody's trying to fix up any problems they're having before they actually come to the table. So it's, it's, um, these, these, these quarterly communions, they could be very significant events. And in Scotland, which went Presbyterian, they could have it practices as infrequently as twice a year, but then it's a really, really big deal, right. And even when churches had it more often, like in the Anglican Church, again, the the standard standard Sunday worship would include the celebration of the Eucharist, right? That people might not actually partake, right, they might be present for it, but not go up to receive it. So there's also different things going on here, even in the Catholic mass receiving was not common. Before the Reformation, right? You received once a year, likely you have to receive once a year, after doing a confession, most people did that at Easter time. But to be present during the moment of consecration when the bread and the wine are lifted up and become by miracle the body Blood of Christ. That's the holy moment. That's where everybody wants to be pleasant. That's when the bells ring. And that is for Catholics before the Reformation. partaking wasn't the deal, like partaking physically being present at the mass and witnessing that miracle. That was what was important. Right, carries over into the Anglican Church into the Lutheran church after the Reformation. Yeah, I'm more of a study more of the 19th century American context. And they're definitely Lutheran and Sue, we're probably down to quarterly maybe twice a year. And Lutheran studies, sometimes from certain corners of Lutheranism, look at that almost like with for like go yelling at it four times a year. But some of the only records we have for those churches was the everyone's registered and it was Lutherans have also been mixed history on do you do private confession or not? Sometimes? yes, sometimes no. Those kinds of things still have been playing out centuries after this even within these various traditions. So another thing I noticed, too, in the 1840s, in Baltimore, that guy study, he was kind of appalled when he found out his so called Lutheran congregation were breaking the bread for the sacrament. He says, No, what are you doing? What are you doing? We don't do that. Don't do that. But it will happen so often in America, who's a mixed congregation? Well, mostly of immigrants, right? We're all German, but you're reformed and Lutheran. We'll just do this together. And sometimes you got to mixed practice that, that, you know, this was all fun, foundational in the 1500s, with the Reformation, still affecting Christian worship centuries later. So that's, that's why this topic I find so fascinating, because it really is relevant to absolute the recent more recent history and current practices as well, no matter which tradition here you're part of this is all very foundational. Yeah. All right. Well, let's, he had a little bit of time left, I think we can tackle a couple more contents, discussion points. We talked about the some of the interaction between church and state authorities. And we also mentioned or you mentioned that the Church authorities were also state authorities by nature of their their office. But what were some of the challenges that the reformers and then the various Protestants faced when the governing authorities maybe got a little overzealous or over eager. I'm thinking of one story about kind of a mass communion episode. So it's, you know, it's a tricky thing, right, because the Reformers appealed to secular rulers in the early reformation as a counterweight to the power of the Catholic Church. Right. So the reasons why Luther or other reformers write to their governments to protect and guide the church because they need a counterweight. They need a counterweight to the force of the Catholic Church. Okay, the government is sometimes very eager, sometimes a little surprised. But sure, why not? We'll come in. And then having given authority to the civil authorities over the church, the Reformers then find that the civil authority sometimes decide, okay, fine. Yeah, we're in charge, we'll take care of everything. But then sometimes the Reformers find that they got more than they bargained for. Right. The civil authorities now want to be the deciders on these matters. So it's a bit like, you invite Group B into your house to get rid of problem a. And problem A is duly solved. But now the B group is sitting in your house in your living room and putting their feet on your sofa, and you can't get rid of them. Now, what do you do? Right? You've, you've countered one problem with another, but now you have a second problem. So it is the case that the government sometimes had a slightly different picture as to what should go on, compared to what the church leaders thought. And particularly church leaders tended to be very focused on our group and our way of doing things. And anywhere that was like the Dutch authorities, which I mentioned already, where there's perhaps different groups within the community that they have to bear in mind in some way. There's less unity between the government leaders on the one hand, and the church leaders on the other. And the church leaders tend to get frustrated because they feel that the government authorities aren't being sufficiently strict about those border areas. So one example, for instance, is the city of basil, which is a German city, and it had a mixed population. It had a majority Lutheran population. But it had a number of Dutch, originally, Dutch Calvinists who had come south from the Dutch lands out of because they were being persecuted. So they come into basil settle there. And then there are some continuing Catholic communities in Faisal, there's including a monastery with the Knights of St. John, which was actually a crusading order from the Catholic Church, and they're invasive. So you got the Lutheran majority, and a Catholic group and a reformed group. And so the authorities of civil authorities and basil decided that they needed to have communal unity, okay? They don't want people dividing, they want to have a unified community. So they say everybody in church together, and we'll do communion together, one church, and officially as Lutheran, but they want to leave room for other communities, so that the Knights of St. John are allowed to sing Latin hymns before the service starts, which upsets the Calvinists a lot. The Calvinists also don't like the fact that it's a Lutheran communion service. And the Lutheran pastor wants to put the bread on people's tongues and they don't want that they want it in their hand. So there's like back and forth over that there's the whole business of breaking it, not breaking it. The Lutherans, meanwhile, are upset because they don't think the reform should be present at their ceremony and it's not right to do that. It's a big, big, snarly mess, right. But the the authorities of basil persist, the political authorities of basil persist. And this joint operation continues for a good number of decades, right until the 17th century, the early 1600s. Were essentially they end up saying, Okay, no, this isn't working, you will have three different groups with three different communion services, a Catholic mass, a Lutheran Eucharist, and then a reformed community service as well. But before that, in the 1600s, from about the, in the 16th century, from about the 1570s. Through the end of the century, they try this really interesting model of everybody together in one church, because of the primary emphasis on unity because a divided community is not good, because we need to have everybody together. And we don't want people dividing up. Yeah. That makes a confessional Lutheran, soliciting cringe a bit to see the fellowship practices being enforced that when I'm sure, like I said, it was problematic on all sides, everyone had had an issue. But yeah, that's also a historical theme to have when suddenly unity, whether it's church or political unity becomes the highest priority. When everything else, there's a lot of needs to fall in line, and it's just a usually a mess. We see that with the Prussian union in the 19th century, as well, and just among many, many other examples, but found that fascinating, we normally think of at least I do, kind of an ecumenical joint worship as being a much more recent concept, but not not from a political point of view, value of unity, for the strength of your own society. Yeah, that's, I think that's true. I think that the, the church leaders of basil, I mean, especially the Lutherans had the majority, so they feel like their way should be the only way and everybody should do things their way kind of thing. But it's a bit like, it seems like the religious authorities at At Best would have preferred what they call for toddlers parallel play, you know, you have three little kids and each kid is playing beside the other, but they're all doing their own thing, much better than any cooperative playing that could be could be managed the, the basal authorities are quite advanced in their thinking in some ways and trying something that is, you know, really hard to achieve. But they felt that the benefits of that for the health of the community was more than having everyone go off in their own different and really the, the option of three different faith communities operating separately and publicly at the same time was not a concept that the 16th century was was very happy with. Yeah, very, very interesting anecdote was that I can't remember and someone's done a lot of work on that before. Jesse, Jesse spawn. Holtz Is this the scholar and he's a scholar out in Washington State. And he's done a lot of work on that. Okay. Very, very interesting little episode there. So maybe we could wrap up our content for today, talking about the immersive experience. And by the way, I just really, that's what got me into history as a kid, you go to surgical reenactment, you go to Colonial Williamsburg, or whatever. If you can imagine yourself being there, suddenly, history is a lot more relatable, it's honestly just a lot more fun. And that's, again, a big part of what your book was doing really pulling people into it. And one of the things people will notice, most of all, are first probably in a worship setting would be the arts, both the visual and the audible arts. So the time that we have left today, what were some of the various views of the Reformers on the arts? You mentioned it briefly earlier, what does it look like in practice? So it becomes an issue in places that are going to go reformed primarily because they are the ones who take that section of the 10 commandments, Thou shalt not have a graven image and apply it to the worship space. And from their point of view, what they are doing is purifying the space for appropriate worship. Obviously, for the Catholics whose churches are being smashed, that feels like desecration. And it's just a horrendous thing to live through. The end result is that you get Catholic and Lutheran churches that can actually look very, very similar, like there are Lutheran churches you can walk into in Germany today, and you're not sure. Is this a Lutheran church? Or is this a Catholic church? You can't tell it's just as ornamented The one is the other, the Lutheran tend to be much more comfortable with retaining a lot of the imagery, the altarpieces, the statues, the crucifix is the whole nine yards, then there, then the reformed counterparts, although it's not consistent, right there, Lutheran churches that are also very bare and very plain, right. So it's, there's a spectrum there within the Lutheran communities. The reformed you can tell, right, okay, no, this is not a Catholic church, we can tell right. And the interesting thing is when the reformed built their own churches, they tended to reconfigure the whole geography right to a Catholic church standard church will be shaped like a cross right. Now you've got the the name, you've got the transept, you've got the altar at the front. Reformed churches built independently tended to built in a square or in a round, and the focus is the pulpit. So there is no front with the altar to everything circling around the pulpit. And there's a beautiful example in Scotland, a little town in Fife called burnt Island has a church from the late 16th century. And it's got shaped essentially as a square, and beautiful. So just the church interior changes. They don't tend to get rid of stained glass windows, because smashing Windows is just dumb. They're expensive. And you might as well just keep it in people. They figured no one's going to worship a window. So that's probably okay. In some cases, the reformed put in biblical text as decoration. So the word of God becomes then what is on the whitewashed walls. So there's no image No, no fresco, no nothing. But there's the Word of God put on the wall. And everyone gets to look at that. There's a beautiful example in Zurich in the church of San Pedro. And that is interesting, because it's at the same time, visual work, and yet at the same time, also a teaching tool, right, in a way that replaces the art in a very different way, but also calls upon literacy, right calls upon the ability to read beyond the beautiful script, knowing what it says is going to be important for congregations. So the church interiors look very different. And depending on where you stand on the spectrum, you think, Oh, it's beautiful. It's austere, it's playing, or you think, ooh, this is cold, and this is barren, you know, so it really depends where you fit on that spectrum. And I think reaction you get the Catholic Church of the 17th century going for the Rococo movement, you know, everything, gilded golden and little angels everywhere. So it's, it's quite, it'll give you sort of a mental whiplash to go from a very austere, plain Reformed Church into a highly decorated, baroque Catholic Church of the 17th century. But yeah, it was a very different visual experience. And then when it comes to music, sorry, go ahead. No, I was just saying, it comes to music, then it's also there's a wide range. Obviously, Luther favored the singing of hymns, corrals, get congregation singing, words based on scripture, obviously, but not necessarily just paraphrases of scriptural texts. In other words, human or human written hymns were okay. The reformed either went for no music at all, which was the case in Zurich up till 5090. They had no music in their church. Or you had to only sing paraphrases of text of Scripture, mostly Psalms, but also other texts like the Lord's Prayer, the 10 commandments, the song of Simeon, and the singing of psalms really became the hallmark of Reformed worship. In the Anglican Church, you get a sort of a mixture, you get the tradition of high church anthems, right, beautiful compositions that need to train choir, and also some singing and stern hold in Hopkins, the English Psalter becomes very popular in England and also obviously Psalm singing in Scotland. They, they really embrace that, and congregations really get hold of that practice and develop it both in church and out of church as their standard preferred way of sharing in worship. Yeah, it's all very interesting, I just did a little research on the probably the most famous hymn tune across the board is the old 100th, right. And that's, that's set to a song tune. But then, you know, if there, you can kind of trace the line because I think Calvin, when he was in Strasburg, for that little bit, he picked up kind of the German influence from Luther, and then he kind of took his own way with it. So it almost comes full circle where everyone's still influencing each other, but also the same time being very distinct. And I, to me, that the at least the visual arts seems to be done on purpose. You know, we're very distinct on our doctrines on, you know, sacraments, for example. And now let's take maybe a guiding principle for visual arts and really just dive into it to make sure we even look more distinct from each other, too. And, but there's a reason behind it, too. It's not just to be different. There's a theological grounding for that. Oh, well, that was that was fun. I had fun going through. But I have your book, any other last thoughts, anecdotes, or points like to me? You know, I just, I really want people to get a better sense that the way we do things today, is rooted in past practices. And we can't really understand why we do things the way we do them now, or what the controversy today is all about. Unless we understand further back. Where does this come from? Right? Why do some churches have the bread and the wine passed along the pews and other people go forward to receive right? What's the deal? How is this what makes this distinction? So I think a lot of times, we tend to end up in arguments of a worship because we don't always remember just how visceral the experience of worship is for people, many folks who may not think much about theology, you know, they don't read theology. They don't discuss the ology, but boy, you start to change their hymns, they'll let you know about it, right? It's because we are formed by worship. It is the one thing of if you're a practicing Christian, every week, this is where you are. And this becomes inculcated from childhood on and it is operating at a deeper level than a lot of other things are. And so trying to be aware of that and knowing how important it is to people's identity of themselves. I think that's really what this project is all about. Yes, very well said. And with that, I encourage people to pick up the book, at least as a starter, an introduction to this, but you pull people deep into it with those primary sources, which, which I love. All right. Well, I think that's about enough time we have for our discussion today. Thank you so much, Dr. Mon for joining us. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.