According to Luther, worship was not exclusively a matter of forms. He regarded ceremonies as matters of indifference theologically, but he was not indifferent to ceremonies. Therefore, he not only composed the hymns that we have been examining, in his versions and Bach’s revisions, but he also published two orders of worship for the revised “evangelical” form of the Mass: the Latin Formula missae et communionis in 1523 and the German Deutsche Messe und Ordnung des Gottesdiensts of 1526. We shall be analyzing these two orders in more detail in Chapter 9 because of their bearing on the composite work of Bach now called the Mass in B Minor, but, for our purposes here, they stand as part of the musical heritage of the Reformation because of the limitations that Luther’s liturgical work placed on the church musician as both composer and performer, as well as because of the opportunities that it provided for the church musician.
From: Bach Among the Theologians by Jaroslav Pelikan (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), p. 27.
Jaroslav Pelikan (1923-2006) taught both history and ecclesiastical history at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut (1962-1996) and was a prolific author.
