How the use of the lectionary became a controversy

A study in the hardening of confessional divisions in the sixteenth century

One of the things that is interesting — if not infrequently depressing — to trace through the sixteenth century is the gradual articulation and then solidifying of confessional positions through theological conflict. For example, the initial dispute within the magisterial wing of the evangelical party between what would come to be called ‘Lutherans’ and ‘Reformed’ was over the question of the bodily presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. But this debate was soon recognized to have Christological implications, because the Reformed argued that the Lutheran view of the Supper was incompatible with the true humanity of Christ. And so in polemical writings and confessional documents, Christology along with sacramental theology proper came to define Lutheran-Reformed difference.

Now, this Christological controversy was indeed the logical outworking of the sacramental debate; questions about Christ’s presence in the Supper are going to lead to questions about the person and natures of Christ. But polemicizing can have its own logic, in which positions not entailed by the primary issues under dispute come nonetheless to function as markers of confessional difference. One might argue — and, indeed, some Reformed thinkers like Girolamo Zanchi did argue — that something like this happened with the doctrine of election, that the strong predestinarianism found in, say, Luther’s On the Bondage of the Will was downplayed by Lutherans eager to open another front in the struggle against the Reformed. But I want to look today at another, more inarguable example of this process in which both among the Lutherans and the Reformed the use or rejection of the traditional Sunday lectionary came to be seen as a confessional position when it originally was not.

It is true that from the beginning the Wittenberg reformation maintained the historic Western lectionary for Sundays and feast days, with its excerpted epistles and gospels, whereas the Zurich reformation and those following in its wake preferred instead the reading of whole books in course in Sunday worship. However, this difference in practice did not bear much theological or identity-defining weight. Luther himself did not put a great deal of weight on the retention of that lectionary, clearly viewing it as adiaphoral. In the 1523 Formula Missae, Luther argues that while the gospels in the lectionary are well-chosen, the epistles are mostly not. In fact, “the originator of the Epistles seems to have been a singularly unlearned and superstitious friend of works,” he complains. Thus he proposes a future revision when the mass is celebrated in the vernacular. By the time of the Deutsche Messe in 1526, Luther has apparently given up the plan to revise the lectionary. Wittenberg retains the traditional epistles and gospels, he writes, “because there is nothing specially censurable in this custom” and since Wittenberg trains ministers for many Lutheran churches which similarly retain them. It’s a matter of expediency, nothing more. Thus Luther makes clear that there is no requirement to use the lectionary: Wittenberg retains the old lectionary “without thereby implying any criticism of those who would take the complete books of the Evangelists in hand.” Indeed, in both his Latin and German liturgy Luther is at pains to declare that the use of any one external form or ordering of Christian worship must always be adiaphoral and not made a matter of faith.

But this would come to change in the second sacramental controversy kicked off by Joachim Westphal’s 1552 Farrago. The Farrago soon lands Westphal in a lengthy war of treatises with John Calvin. In Westphal’s 1555 Adversus ciuisdam Sacramentarii falsam criminationem, iusta defensio Ioachimi Vuestphali, ministri Ecclesiae Hamburgensis, in qua & Eucharistiae causa agitur (Just defense of Joachim Westphal, minister of the church of Hamburg, against the false accusation of certain Sacramentarians, in which also the case of the Eucharist is handled), Westphal launches a general attack on the Sacramentarians for disturbing the peace of the church by departing without cause from certain ecclesial practices. As part of this attack, he criticizes the Sacramentarians for their rejection of the traditional Eucharistic lectionary as well as the church calendar. He complains that some of his opponents “abrogate that ancient and most useful distinction of times and festivals, and also the customary readings of the Gospels and Epistles.” He suggests that the devil is pleased with this abrogation, because it functions to leave nothing concerning the Gospel, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper in the service. We have moved from Luther’s claim that the lectionary was adiaphoral and that Wittenberg’s retention of it does not mean that others need to do the same to Westphal’s assertion that the devil is pleased by the Sacramentarians’ departure from it!¹ No longer is the use of the Gospels in course instead of the historic lectionary an acceptable variation which need not lead to any mutual condemnation; it is now a sign of the villainy of the Reformed churches!

Indeed, Calvin accuses Westphal of somewhat overheated rhetoric on this point in his 1556 response, the Second Defense of the Pious and Orthodox Faith Concerning the Sacraments, in answer to the Calumnies of Joachim Westphal. He asserts that Christian communion does not require the use of the same calendar or readings. Westphal, Calvin thinks, is rather bizarrely contending for the the old lectionary “as it were for alters and hearths,” although the lectionary is imperfect and the reading of whole books in course is, Calvin thinks, apostolic precedent. The Lutherans can be left to use the old lectionary, but it should not be forced upon everyone. Calvin here seeks to uphold Luther’s old adiphorist line, arguing for the nonnecessity of maintaining or rejecting the lectionary (while clearly preferring its rejection), whereas Westphal makes the lectionary a point of Lutheran-Reformed contention.

But it is not only on the (Gnesio-)Lutheran side of the controversy that the use or abrogation of the old lectionary would come to have confessional weight. Rather, the same happens among Reformed in England, where the Puritan party came to see the Church of England’s retention of the traditional eucharistic lectionary as proof that it was insufficiently reformed. Thus, in his A replye to the answer made of M. Doctor Whitgifte Against the Admonition to the Parliament (don’t you love these 16th c. titles?), Thomas Cartwright takes aim at — among other things — the English’s church retention of the traditional Western lectionary. He complains about “the reading of the Epistles and Gospels so cutte & mangled” prescribed by the prayer book, arguing that it is inappropriate for the English church to share the lectionary (or much of anything else) with the papal church, and that its goal should be conformity with “the policy of other reformed churches.”

Here the issue is less an issue of Reformed vs Lutheran than of Reformed vs Papal confessional identity, but once again the retention or abrogation of the lectionary comes to be seen as a significant problem. And this even though Calvin himself, as we have seen, permitted its use and other continental Reformed churches (the Polish, I believe some of the German ones, and perhaps others) retained it as well! Perhaps it is small surprise, then, that the Directory for the Publick Worship of God (that is, the Westminster Directory imposed after the abolition of the prayer book during the English Civil War), while generally fairly nonprescriptive, requires a Scripture reading plan that disallows the old lectionary: “It is requisite that all the canonical books be read over in order, that the people may be better acquainted with the whole body of the scriptures; and ordinarily, where the reading in either Testament endeth on one Lord’s day, it is to begin the next.”

Now, to be sure, I a great fan of the old lectionary; I don’t share Luther’s and Calvin’s criticisms of it. I am glad that Anglicanism and Lutheranism retained it until recently, and I wish that its use would be restored. I suppose to that extent I am glad that people like Westphal went to bat for it, insofar as his making it a point of Lutheran-Reformed contention may have led to Lutheran determination to retain it. But I think this is also an instructive and rather sad story of how the fierceness of theological polemics can drag in extraneous issues and make them markers of adversarial confessional identity. There were serious and important controversies between Lutherans and Reformed in the sixteenth century (to say nothing of those between Protestants and Catholics!). My own leanings in a unionist direction do not blind me to this, although I’ll confess that I do think everyone should read Calvin’s 1561 The Best Method of Obtaining Concord, Provided the Truth Be Sought Without Contention. But these questions are difficult enough to resolve without unnecessary issues getting in the way. And I fear that this is exactly what happened, both in England and the Continent, when what should have been adiaphoral or prudential judgments about the shape of worship came to bear confessional weight.

And I suppose the question for us today is, in theological controversy, how to keep the focus on the genuine issues that divide us rather than dragging in extraneous questions. Fights about these secondary or tertiary issues may be effective indeed if the goal is firming up identity vis-a-vis the other side, but aren’t so helpful at furthering the mutual concord to which we are called as Christians. I think that we Anglicans in particular have a bad habit of not just dragging in nonessentials along with major points of internal or external controversy, but of ignoring the main thing altogether (admittedly part of the issue here is real disagreement over what is the ‘main thing’ and what is ‘nonessential’). I hope that thinking about some of the unhelpful ways that Christians argued in the sixteenth century can help us argue more helpfully today.

1. To be sure, this remains a fairly minor point of Westphal’s critique of Calvin, and I haven’t examined — though hope to in the future — the use to which Westphal’s criticism of the Reformed here is put by other Lutheran thinkers of the time. But it does seem that among at least some Lutherans this remained a significant marker of Reformed-Lutheran difference, and Westphal’s departure from Luther here is, I think, quite interesting.