WORSHIP NOTES
Volume 20, No. 1 (January 2025)
Welcome to the 20th year of Worship Notes!
After jumping ahead in our survey of Worship in Church History, in order to deal with the Protestant Reformation in October, and then focusing on Christmas after that, we go back to deal with the Middle Ages.
Rise of Priesthood, Saints, Mariology
The Patristic-Age debates concerning the true nature of Christ and the need to defend His full deity led to an emphasis on His divine nature at the expense of an appreciation of His full humanity. This neglect led the church to look to other means of mediation than “the one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim 2:5). And so an understanding arose that one had to go through a priest as a conduit in order to approach God’s presence, and that prayer had to be directed to and through one of the saints or to Mary in order for that prayer to reach God:
The medieval Church had tended to substitute the priesthood, the sacrifice, the merits, the intercession of the Church—the vicarious humanity of the ecclesia (Mary and the saints)—for the vicarious humanity of the Christ, in a way which obscured the Gospel of grace, the Good the News of what God has done for us in Christ” (J. Torrance, “Christ in Our Place,” in T. Torrance et al., A Passion for Christ, 37).
This is sort of a return to an Old Testament sort of thinking concerning access to God: the people of Israel could not go directly into God’s presence; they had to go through the mediation of the priests, who offered sacrifices to God on their behalf. Throughout the Patristic Age and the Middle Ages we see a continuing rise of institutionalism overshadowing the possibility of a personal relationship with God through Christ.
Ascendance of the Mass, Decline of Preaching
The Mass became increasingly more central in the worship service, and the idea of transubstantiation took hold (though not declared official church dogma until 1551): the teaching that in the Mass the elements are miraculously transformed in their essence (though not in their appearance) into the actual body and blood of Christ.
As the Mass became the central point and focus of the gathering of the church, preaching took on less and less of a role, until by the end of the Middle Ages it had virtually disappeared from services. The Mass became the sole focus.
Non-participation
The services, again hearkening back to an Old Testament model, became more what people watched, not what people did or participated in. “Mass was offered for the people . . . not celebrated by the people.” (Geoffrey Wainwright, “Periods of Liturgical History,” in Jones et al., The Study of Liturgy, 64)
A large part of this was that the Mass continued to be celebrated in Latin only, which was no longer a language that most people understood (except the priests). Also, the priest would conduct most of the
celebration facing the altar with his back to the people (so that the people could hardly hear him, even if they had understood the Latin).
No Vernacular Bible
The Bible itself was generally not available to individuals; and was allowed to be only in Latin anyway (which only the priests learned), instead of in the vernacular (the language of the people).
Church Tradition
The traditions and teaching of the institutional church became increasingly important and eventually came to be held as having equal authority with the Scriptures. That would come to be a central issue in the Reformation.
The Great Schism
In AD 1054 the Western and Eastern Churches split (leading to what are now known as the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church). There were some theological issues involved, but the primary cause for the schism was the West’s insistence that the bishop of Rome had authority over the entire church, superseding that of the bishop of Constantinople in the East. The bishop of Rome came to be called the pope by the Western Church.
Corruption in the Church
The supposedly spiritual institution of the church was wracked more and more by controversies and corruption through this period. At times there were two or three rival popes vying for power, each claiming to be the true pope and being favored by one city or another.
Along with the desire for power and influence came the potential for financial gain, and many priests succumbed to the temptation to use their position in this way. A very worldly clergy often were characterized by immorality and commercialism. The sale of “indulgences” (whereby one could supposedly buy a relative’s release from purgatory) was one practice decried by Luther and the other Reformers.
Need for Reformation
Because of all the excesses, theological aberrations, corruption, and worldliness surrounding the institutional church, by the end of the Middle Ages there was a widespread feeling that the church was badly in need of reformation. (See Worship Notes 19.10)