Power to the People!
On this anniversary of Martin Luther’s scandalous introduction of a German language mass (“Deutsche Messe”) on October 29, 1525, we also remember that Thomas Cranmer did the same thing with a service in “Common Prayer” English in 1549. The Catholic Mass had been in Latin worldwide for many centuries even long after Latin fell out of common use. Why was it maintained? Because, Latin sounds pious even on the lips of Monty Python (traditions are hard to change), and it was the church’s way of maintaining its control and sacerdotal role in cultures where there was no real distinction like we have today between sacred and secular. If the church and its sacraments were required as the necessary intermediary between God and his people, then keeping the Latin rites and the authorized Latin Vulgate Bible meant that normal Christians were kept dependent on the church with keys to the Kingdom of God firmly in hand. They had a monopoly on righteousness. Sure there were pure-hearted self-forgetful priests and bishops who took their jobs as a holy obligation on behalf of Christians, but there were many others in the Medieval Catholic church whose greed and personal ambitions ruled over the people.
One of the results of the 16th century Reformation was what Alister McGrath calls “Christianity’s Dangerous Idea”: worship and the Bible, for the first time in 1,000 years, were returned to the people of God. “Protestantism took its stand on the right of individuals to interpret the Bible for themselves rather than be forced to submit to ‘official’ interpretations handed down by popes or other centralized religious authorities” (McGrath). And worship followed suit as “liturgy” - the work of the people - rather than the work of a holy man doing worship on behalf of the people.
The Reformation reminded us that we do not have classes of Christians that includes a priestly-intermediary-class whose job it is to bridge God and people - Jesus our Great High Priest is the one and only mediator (1 Tim 2:5). And God himself is the consecrator of the elements of Holy Communion, not a fancy-dressed holy man mumbling unintelligible words and raising a host at a high altar for the peasants to see. There is nothing in the Bible that suggests that the ordained are closer to God; they do not possess a special "priestly" measure of the Holy Spirit; and they do not have magic hands to make the bread and wine of holy communion into the body and blood of our Lord. And, although they are ‘called’ by God to lead worship (word and sacraments), they differ in function and not in status from every other member of the Body of Christ; they are no more important a part of the church than every other member (1 Cor 12:22-23). The 16th century Protestant reformers fought hard to return the liturgy to the people in their own languages. Our worship today is based on the belief that no one person stands closer to God than anyone else - this is called the universal priesthood (of all believers).
Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution, Alister McGrath