Reformation worship

I recently read a fascinating book by Karin Maag, Worshiping With the Reformers, published by IVP Academic in 2021. Maag is Director of the H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies at Calvin University and was one of my hosts two years ago when I lectured there on the Genevan Psalter. Those of us who are heir to the Reformation may be tempted to think of the 16th century as a golden era when Christians were keen on worshipping the Triune God in spirit and in truth, readily discarding the unbiblical accretions of the mediaeval church. Reading Maag will quickly lay this notion to rest. She reminds us that in many if not most places reformation was a movement spearheaded by ecclesiastical and political elites, often compelling reluctant parishioners accustomed to the old ways to conform to the newer and less familiar practices.

Maag organizes the book by treating the five major confessional communities that developed during this era, including Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, Reformed, and Anabaptists. She divides the book into chapters arranged topically, treating in order going to church, what took place at church, preaching, prayer, baptism, the Lord's Supper, visual arts and music, and daily worship in other settings outside the formal ecclesial assembly. Her account is filled with fascinating anecdotes from the primary sources that tell the story of a turbulent time in the history of the church.

By the late Middle Ages, European Christians were accustomed to attending church services in which the clergy presided while parishioners undertook private devotions in the pews, including praying the rosary and murmuring the devotional texts in books of hours. The high point of the Mass was not the consumption of the consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist but the elevation of the host for public adoration. In those places where the Reformation took hold, church-goers were suddenly expected to abandon these usages, to sit up straight, and attend to a sermon of greater length than the brief homilies of the past. Liturgies were reworked to conform to the new emphases, and traditional practices suppressed, including eucharistic adoration.

In the 21st century we are accustomed to think of church-going as a voluntary activity, but in the 16th century city officials in Geneva and elsewhere compelled everyone to attend their local parish church. This is an element that many readers may find surprising and disturbing, but it should be recalled that our individualistic approach to the faith would have been foreign to virtually everyone five centuries ago, no matter to which of the five communities they belonged. If you lived in a particular locality, you followed the faith practices of this locality, as the notion of religious liberty was still in its infancy. Maag commendably avoids the temptation to criticize our forebears in this respect and helps us to see through the eyes of the people living then.

Maag's treatment of psalm-singing comes in chapter 7, titled, "The Visual Arts and Music." The first part of the title is somewhat ironic in that many of the Reformers were hostile to the use of visual aids in worship, viewing them at most as idolatrous and at least as distracting from the proclamation of the word. Ulrich Zwingli even prohibited singing in his liturgy: "As a result no congregational singing or music of any kind was included in public worship in Zurich from 1525 through 1598" (177). Among the Reformers, Martin Luther was most enthusiastic about the use of music in worship, while Calvin took a mediating position, favouring the singing of metrical psalms but without instrumental accompaniment. "For Calvin, the musical instruments mentioned so frequently in the Old Testament were part of the old dispensation—they did not apply to Christian churches, where the accent was on making sure that everyone could understand the words being sung" (181). To this day some churches still sing a cappella, most notably the Reformed Presbyterians, the Churches of Christ, and the Orthodox. To be sure, there is something beautiful about the unaccompanied human voice singing God's praises.

However, one of the unintended consequences of a cappella singing is that, without an instrument to keep up the pace, congregational singing slowed down considerably.

By the early seventeenth century, the problem of slowed-down psalm-singing was so serious that Pastor Patroclus Römeling submitted a formal complaint to the Synod of Dordt in 1618. He noted that it was no longer possible to sing an entire psalm during a worship service because everything was being sung so slowly. Instead, congregations could barely squeeze in a couple of verses of the metrical paraphrase, where previously they had been able to sing through the whole thing. Furthermore, he pointed out that the slow rate of singing was distorting the words and exaggerating the syllables, so that no one could make out what was actually being sung (187).

Here an ostensibly purer approach to worship had the unexpected side effect of diminishing the length of the psalms sung in the liturgy.

In chapter 8 Maag introduces us to daily worship outside the formal ecclesial assembly, including school and home. In Geneva's Latin School, for example, the day was organized so that students would have time to pray together and worship morning and afternoon. "All pupils also joined in an hour of psalm-singing daily, thus anchoring the Psalms in their hearts and minds but also preparing them to serve as worship leaders when these same metrical psalms were sung during church services" (214). Indeed because of their very youth, the children more easily served the cause of Reformation and could be entrusted with teaching the metrical psalms to their elders, thus facilitating family worship as well and anchoring the Reformation in people's hearts over the long term.

I enjoyed my visit to the Meeter Center in 2022, and I also enjoyed reading this informative and evocative book by the Center's director.