Lochner’s The Chief Divine Service
In his Three Books on the Church, Loehe had pleaded that any who presumed to revise Lutheran liturgy ought first make a thorough and careful study of the great Church Orders. Apparently his student, Friedrich Lochner, author of this present volume, took the exhortation very much to heart. For what Friederich Lochner did in his original Der Hauptgottesdienst was to ingeniously bring together the chief sections of the great Church Orders with their music and rubrical instructions into a form accessible for any German speaker in the 19th century. It was an unrivaled liturgical ressourcement.
And now Matthew Carver (with assistance from Jon Vieker, Kevin Hildebrand, Sean Daenzer and Nathaniel Jensen) has done the same for us in English in the 21st century, giving us Lochner’s work in our native tongue and in modern musical notation, and even with ear toward the cadence of the English Standard Version.
I do not exaggerate: this is the book that I have been looking for in vain for years. It is the definitive book on the classic historic Lutheran liturgy, where that liturgy is grounded in complete continuity with what came in the centuries before, shows how it was purified at the Reformation, and then offered to the Church in the service of the Gospel. In Lochner, the liturgy lives and breathes; it is manifestly not some museum artifact, but a richly ordered way for the people of God to feast upon the twin gifts that constitute the Chief Divine Service: the Word and the Holy Sacrament.
All lovers of Lutheran doctrine and liturgy and music will want this book upon their shelves, and they will all be grateful to Matthew Carver, yet again. Buy it, folks! You won’t be sorry.