Why the Lutheran Confessions Recommended Doing Away With the Mass
And what we can still learn about "private" faith today
Let’s start with a bit of disambiguation: Roman Catholics tend to say they are “going to Mass.” It’s the term they use for the primary worship service at which the Eucharist (Holy Communion) is offered to the assembly.
Lutherans do not tend to use this term, even though they host worship services that take essentially the same shape. Instead we call it “worship”, or “church” or “Sunday service.”
At the time of the Reformation, the Lutheran Reformers took umbrage with the Mass because, as they argued, “it runs into direct and violent conflict with the fundamental article of faith” (Smalcald Article II [The Mass], that “Jesus Christ was put to death for our trespass and raised again for our justification” (Romans 4:25).
The issue seems to have been twofold. The primary issue: Roman Catholics treated the “Mass” as itself a sacrifice or work that accomplishes something in or before God. “Saying Masses” could deliver people from sin or stays in purgatory. A secondary issue, though crucial, was the development of “private’ Mass where priests would say Mass on behalf of others and commune themselves, thus removing the meal of Christ as a communal activity of the assembly and making it a propitiatory rite priests could conduct.
In the Smalcald Articles, Luther offers some rather radical theses. The most austere was simply, “The Mass is unnecessary, and so it can be omitted without sin and danger.”
Imagine actually proposing this. It’s so stark. It’d be like telling churches they don’t need pastors, or football fans that you could drop the football game and just watch the half-time show, or bakers that they needn’t use flour in their bread. The Mass was so crucial to Roman Catholic practice (and to the wider economy both of salvation and ecclesiastical function) as to be absolutely necessary.
But here Luther rolls in and says it is unnecessary. Actually, he goes further and says it “must be regarded as the greatest and most horrible abomination.”
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