Reformed Worship in the Reformation Era

Calvin argued that only practices explicitly taught in Scripture could be used in worship. For this reason, churches influenced by Calvin have been less inclined to restore pre-Reformation practices of worship perceived as unbiblical or “Catholic.”

The Reformed tradition has several roots: Zurich, Basel, Strassburg, and Geneva. In some ways, it preserved more than its share of the penitential strain of late medieval piety. In other respects, however, it moved beyond the forms in which Lutheranism and Anglicanism were content to continue. In time it was largely seduced by the Puritan tradition (in Great Britain) and the frontier tradition (in America).

Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) began his reformation of Zurich heavily influenced by humanistic studies and a thorough biblicism. He was anxious to return worship to its biblical roots and eager to make it more spiritual, reflecting the gap he saw between the physical and the spiritual. Although a fine musician, he rejected music in worship as distracting one from spiritual worship. Iconoclasm in Zurich purified or devastated the churches, according to one’s viewpoint. Zwingli retained the four Sundays or festivals when his people were accustomed to receiving communion or the Eucharist, a preaching service being held on the other Sundays. These four occasions saw a drastically simplified rite that focused on the transubstantiation of the people, not the elements.

Martin Bucer in Strassburg and John Oecolampadius (1482–1531) in Basel began experimenting with vernacular services. At Strassburg, this included daily prayer services and a Sunday service derived from the Mass. Bucer’s influence was spread further by a visiting preacher out of a job, John Calvin (1509–1564). While serving temporarily a French-speaking congregation in Strassburg, Calvin adapted the German rite Bucer was using. Calvin brought this rite to Geneva, and from 1542 on it became the model for much of the Reformed tradition. Although deriving its structure from the Mass via Bucer, it had moved to highlight the penitential aspects of worship and was highly didactic and moralistic. Relief from this somber mood was wrought by encouraging the congregation to sing metrical paraphrases of the psalms, which they did with fervor. Such devotion to psalmody (and the exclusion of hymnody) marked Reformed worship for several centuries and still does in some churches.

Calvin’s low esteem for human nature was balanced by a high view of God’s Word and of the sacraments. (Although almost all Protestants considered baptism and the Eucharist as sacraments, Luther was willing to include penance, Calvin possibly ordination, and Zinzendorf marriage.) Calvin’s doctrine of eucharistic feeding on Christ through the operation of the Holy Spirit, although certainly not without problems, was the most sophisticated Reformation eucharistic doctrine but was largely lost by his heirs.

John Knox (c. 1505–1572) transmitted this tradition to Scotland as others brought it to France, the Netherlands, and the Germanic countries. Knox’s liturgy, renamed the Book of Common Order, flourished in Scotland for eighty years after 1564. Only then did the Scots yield to the Puritan effort to achieve national unity in worship through the Westminster Directory of 1645. This moved away from set forms to more permissive patterns, yet the Directory remained vaguely normative in later editions in America. On the American frontier, the newly emerging frontier patterns of worship tended to engulf the Reformed tradition.

A pattern of recovery slowly eventuated in America. Charles W. Baird (1828–1887) led the way in 1855 with a title many thought oxymoronic, Presbyterian Liturgies. German Reformed Christians experienced a recovery of both theology and liturgy in the so-called Mercersburg movement. Eventually, an American service book, the Book of Common Worship, followed in 1906, as did service books in the Kirk of Scotland. In recent years, Presbyterians have followed closely in the same post-Vatican II ecumenical mainstream as other traditions of the right and center, signified by the publication of their Supplemental Liturgical Resources.