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Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism: Choir, Congregation, and Three Centuries of Conflict.

Article Excerpt
Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism: Choir, Congregation, and Three Centuries of Conflict. By Joseph Herl. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. [xi, 354 p. ISBN 0-19-5154398. $65.] Index, bibliography.

Joseph Herl, assistant professor of music at Concordia University, Seward, Nebraska, has done a masterful job of assembling and analyzing sources that relate to choral and congregational singing in Lutheran churches of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries (with some coverage of the nineteenth century). Many of us have longed for the kind of information this study supplies. (I wish, for example, it had been available before I finished the book I just completed on hymn tunes.)

After a preface that explains the topic and dates it from 1523 to about 1780, Worship Wars is divided into nine chapters and a conclusion. It begins with Luther and the liturgy in Wittenberg, then backs up to Catholic liturgical practices before the Reformation which are traced through the sixteenth century as a backdrop for Luther's changes. Luther is pictured as a conservative liturgical reformer who picked up on the congregational singing he inherited and was therefore "not so much an innovator as a popularizer of" it (p. 35). Lutheran church orders are analyzed for...