Worshipping with the Reformers

Karin Maag
Worshiping with the Reformers.
Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2021.

By Rhys Bezzant

“Image arriving at church for worship during the Reformation era. You enter through the door, and then what?” (p. 30)

Truth be told, I thought this book would summarise theological debates about worship in the period of the Reformations of the sixteenth century, which I have read about before. But refreshingly it did so much more! Karin Maag is a dab hand in writing about this period and this topic, so I shouldn’t have worried. For her basic approach was to describe not in the first instance how theologians thought, but how rank and file Christians experienced worship on Sundays – and on other days of the week too. This easy-to-read volume is built around eye-witness accounts of the experience of church. Each chapter begins with such an account, often strange or complex, of worshipers somewhere in Europe finding their way in liturgical territory which was itself new or confronting.

Take, for instance, the Huguenot family in Paris, having to take a boat to church as Reformed worship was only permitted at a distance of at least ten miles from the city itself. When the barge capsized, they recited psalms to honour God’s protection as these were the staple of congregational singing. Or that moment in 1579 in St Andrew’s Scotland when two sailors with swords attacked a parishioner listening to a sermon! Feuds could be expressed during worship, so feuds needed to be resolved during worship too. The perpetrators “were made to participate in an atonement ritual in the very same spot during a worship service, sitting on the stools of repentance in front of the whole community” (p46). Protestants might believe that the church building did not have the same kind of sacredness as their medieval predecessors, but how space was used to promote the gospel still mattered. This book contains countless such provocative stories. The Reformers were not preaching into an ahistorical vacuum.

Of course, ideas do make a difference, and Maag gives useful summaries of theological opinions. Luther was prepared to go slow with liturgical reform in Wittenberg. Zwingli nowhere states that he is against music in church, though he is wanting to wean his people off a performance-oriented and musically complex choir repertoire, though it appears that Anabaptists did sing in services. Developments in the Book of Common Prayer from the 1540s are outlined, for instance, the more consistently Reformed theology expressed in the service of the baptism, where it became “a sign of adoption … and a seal of salvation” (p120). Of particular interest to me was the role of godparents in baptism services. The mother was rarely present, recuperating at home, and it took some work to make sure that the father was present at least, overturning late medieval assumptions!

Maag’s conclusion is worth noting. She has sought to explain how different denominations’ approaches to discipline in worship were so similar; how quickly new patterns of worship were internalized as identity markers; how powerfully social assumptions about hierarchy were carried into worship; and how much we learn not just from liturgical texts but from journals and letter too. An extraordinary synthesis in such an introductory book.

Rhys Bezzant is Dean of the Anglican Institute at Ridley College, Melbourne, Australia.