Gottesblog

That’s what some of my vicars called it aeons ago. Studying the way the Swedish Red Book of King John III (pictured below) adapted itself to the traditional language of the Roman Canon, it hit me: the Canon might be a lousy Eucharistic prayer (see Luther’s dismantling of it in AE 36:311ff), but separated from the Consecration it actually has the kernel of a fine intercession.

The following is from that book I praised a few days ago, The Chief Divine Service. This particular prayer fell between the Sanctus and the chanting of Our Father and then the Verba in the Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel Church Order of 1657. It rather supports something I have long suspected: that the Admonitions were in themselves “prayer forms” for they were spoken in the awareness of the presence of God. But this particular form actually makes this explicit. It’s on page 245, 246. There are distinct echoes here of the classic anaphorae of antiquity (including the Roman Canon):

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.