Copyright: This article is reprinted on the Lift Up Your Hearts web site http://www.worship.ca/ with the permission of Currents in Theology and Mission where it first appeared.

Pneuma is a journal on spiritual direction and formation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada.

Let us begin by observing that words "create worlds." That thought is the governing theme for this lecture. Words create worlds.

On the basis of this governing theme, I want to define spirituality in a novel way: "Spirituality is the entire complex of words and signs in which we dwell and by which we appropriate the faith." I am thinking of Heidigger's notion that language is the house of being when I use this definition, but I want to expand it so I added the word "signs" to help us get an image of the total surrounding in which we grow up in faith. There is great power in this surrounding. Northrop Frye in his 1982 masterpiece "The Great Code" considers the Bible, especially in its English and German dress, to be central to the development of western consciousness and capable of enormous transformative power. Today I am searching for the particular Lutheran surroundings in which we grew up.

Lutheran piety cannot be defined as a set of religious practices. If we look at it from the viewpoint of the person who dwells in the complex of words and signs, then Lutheran piety is a perception or an attitude before it is a set of practices. One might say that we focus attention on the substructure of faith. Because the distinctively Lutheran slant on faith is attitudinal more than it is devotional, we tend to think of ourselves as not having a "spirituality." At the same time, because the distinctively Lutheran approach to faith is attitudinal and perpetual rather than expressed in devotional practice, we have always had a broad understanding of what's Lutheran, and thus have produced a wide variety of forms.

We may agree that the essence of the faith is the gift of God's grace, for which we return thanks. We offer our sacrifice of prayer, praise, and thanksgiving, but our attitude of thanksgiving is more important than the forms we use to express it. Melanchthon's commentary on Colossians is instructive here; Melanchthon goes on for pages at great pains to insure that we do not consider free will to be operative in matters of faith.(1) The natural side of our humanity is concerned with intellect, reason, and will; but in matters of faith, only the Holy Spirit can raise up new persons in Christ. Only the Holy Spirit can gather the community of the faithful. This leading can only be known within; to be a Christian is not bound up with piety and practice so much as it is a matter of mystery and calling.

The interiorization of faith, which had begun with Augustine, advances considerably in the Lutheran movement; external criteria by which to measure "faith" are eschewed, and so outward displays of piety are reduced to secondary status. In any case, there are no external criteria for whether or not one is Christian.

We would not define Lutheran spirituality as piety or devotion because we have emphasized the grace that flows from the cross and resurrection of Christ so that we feel awkward, if not guilty, talking about how we appropriate grace. To discuss spirituality as devotion or piety seems to diminish the gift of faith, which always comes by way of address through the gift of the Holy Spirit. "Faith," as Luther said, "is the empty hands by which we receive the gifts of God." If you focus on the shape or size of the hands, you diminish the gift.

We know the shape of evangelical Christianity; it is centred on faith and obedience. These are our hallmarks. Luther answers the implied question, "Why pray?" in his large catechism, with: "because God commanded it and promises to hear us." The conviction that God is bound to the promises of the gospel characterizes evangelical faith at its best, and stamps it with "robustness," "clarity," and "simplicity." To cite Luther again from the Large Catechism: "It is true that what has heretofore been offered as prayer -- wailing and chanting in the churches, etc. -- was really not prayer. Such external, ceremonial things, when properly observed, serve as an exercise for young children, pupils, and simple minds; while they may be called singing or reading exercises, they are not real prayer. To pray as the second commandment teaches is to call upon God in every need. This God requires of us and has not left it to our choice. We are under obligation to pray if we would be Christians. . . ."(2) Prayer arises in response to the promises which we discern and receive through our meditative reading of scripture, our common life in the body of Christ, and our daily lives. There is a blessed ordinariness to it all.

In the Lutheran movement there is no yearning after devotional methods or techniques, because such things may come to replace the pure address of the gospel. Any form of mysticism that places the initiative with the believer is ruled out of evangelical faith. This is both our freedom and our curse: "freedom" because it is radical and opens us up all the way, even toward the "religionless Christianity" of a Dietrich Bonhoeffer; "curse" because it leaves us with no markers or methods by which to identify spiritual growth -- except the passion and search for justice and righteous living .

At this point, recall the definition of spirituality as the complex of words and signs within which we dwell. Lutheran reformers and others like unto them, most notably the Calvinists English and Continental, judiciously pruned the tradition and liturgies of the church so as to display anew the gospel which they believed to be obscured in the overladen texts and devotions of the late middle ages. They did not receive the traditions "carte blanche" from the Roman church but, on the other hand, neither did they eschew them entirely in a radically biblicist movement as we find in the Anabaptist groups like the Mennonites or the Amish.

By staying on this middle ground, evangelical faith grew and developed on a humbler but clearly centralized basis, yet one which did not eschew the value of tradition. Text enough remained to make liturgy a school for prayer in the evangelical tradition, but underbrush enough was cut to bring to light the gospel of God's saving grace in Christ.

If we define spirituality as the complex of words and signs, it is important to note what is present, what absent in the religious complex handed down by the reformers. First, what is present.

Reforming churches retained a lectionary, historic collects, and the basic "ordo" of the mass. Reforming churches retained two events which they understood as sacraments, if not more. In some areas of reform, a eucharistic prayer was retained, in others the liturgy skipped from "sanctus" to "verba," but in all cases prayers were minimized with an eye toward gospel proclamation.

Translation of the Bible into local languages put evangelical faith into a linguistic frame and an historical tradition that promised depth, continuity, and longevity. In a very real sense, literacy replaced devotion as the key to piety. I'll return to this in a moment.

Absent in evangelical tradition were unusual accoutrements: pilgrimages, medals, novenas, rosaries, and other devotional aids. It is difficult for us, so much later, to realize how dramatically such changes affected the consciousness of the ordinary Christian believer. We can only sketch the outcome.

1. The heart of evangelical devotion became prayer, understood as response to the Word of God and in particular to the freeing Word of the gospel. Many generations of Lutherans have used resources for daily reading and meditation on scripture such as the "Losungen" ("Watchwords") of the Moravian church, since such resources sink us into the words of the Bible, in order to point to the presence of God in daily life.

2. Biblical literacy went hand in hand with prayerfulness, each one enhancing and deepening the other. The outcome of such prayer could not help but be the desire and the willingness to discover what it meant to be obedient to the call and the will of God. Prayer itself became a journey of discovery rather more than an assessment of need; prayer for "guidance" is common to the evangelical tradition.

3. At the same time, because prayer seeks to discern the presence and the will of God in daily life, and because the customary devotional aids are absent, "imagination" is a key to the experience of God in Lutheran piety. I am not now thinking of the imaginal world of a Jakob Boehme or the fantastic imagery of the spiritualists, who combined alchemical notions with biblical/philosophical thought to come up with whole world views. I'm thinking more of the pietist experience of faith which was nourished rather directly by the simple and homely images of scripture, apart from any speculation. There was a spurt of new religious art at the time of the Reformation; it was realistic and stark, for that was the religion itself: sparse, minimalist, and realistic. Yet the images that emerge for those who interact with scripture were powerful and nourishing. If the reform shifted the ground from devotional aids to literacy, it also shifted the ground from allegory and symbol to more concrete, one might say more Hebraic, patterns of imaginal work. In this kind of reading, the meaning of a text emerges in the historical and social context of a reader who understands the text itself in an historical and social context.

4. The historical and literal meaning of the text is to be preferred above all fanciful reading and, strange though it may seem, this gives way to a renewed use of the imagination, one that would lead us forth into obedience and loving actions. The analogies are practical, socketed into the reader's daily world, even as the biblical scenes depicted by Cranach and Durer woodcuts blur the line between biblical and contemporary life. To see this shift in imagination, one need only compare Luther's commentary on the Lord's Prayer in his booklet, "For Master Peter the Barber on how to pray"(3) with the allegorical imagery of Teresa of Avila's commentary.(4) These two contemporaries approach the same text with quite different sensibilities. The loss of symbolic readings of text, like the loss of symbolic discourse on sacrament, may render both of them more useful, practical, and proximate to the world of the reader.

The complex of words and signs which form a particular piety leads toward transformation, even as Frye remarked on the Bible's ability to transform consciousness through its peculiar language.

Transformation occurs when a gap is opened in one's consciousness, in which gap the usual way of perceiving reality is altered though either the conviction that a new perspective is more true or a previously-held "fact" becomes an inner truth. I am using a humble definition of transformation here; any connection with the reality of God is out of my hands. I am merely telling you what I think transformation means on an experiential level.

The Lutheran approach to the Christian faith, we have said, adopted a reduced complex of signs. Gone was the opulence of the medieval methodology. The focus henceforth was on the ability of words to convey the Word in such a way as to evoke faith and to work transformative patterns in the life of the hearer.

Proclaimed words open up space for transformation when they upend our customary understanding of faith and/or life. As an example of how the reforming movement created a renewed complex of words and signs capable of leading to transformation, I want to turn to the work of Veit Dietrich.

Veit Dietrich was born December 8, 1506, and died March 25, 1549. He was one of the lesser know reformers, but he served as Luther's scribe and then as pastor at St. Sebaldus Church in Nuremberg. Dietrich wrote prayers and liturgical materials for the church of the reform. In particular he was the author of the "Agend-buchlein" (1543) of Nuremberg and was known as the compiler of the collection of Luther's sermons known as the "Haus-Postil." Dietrich wrote many collects which came to America via the Muhlenberg liturgy and became part of the "complex of signs."(5) The Nuremberg Agenda was published by Christian Sauer in Philadelphia in 1762 along with the Muhlenberg liturgy, and it became basic to the textual resources for early American Lutherans.

Dietrich's systematic theology did not influence the reforming church, rather it was his practical theology, liturgical construction, and education for piety that would have impact. So, for example, it was he who recast the lessons for the last three Sundays after Pentecost from themes which emphasized eschatology, the coming of the kingdom through the Spirit of Christ. To him, also, we owe the restructuring of the church year so that the Festival of the Transfiguration, stuck on a weekday in August, was moved into place as the last Sunday after the Epiphany. These are strategic changes in the complex of words and signs.

Dietrich is an important figure, even if largely unknown to American audiences. His prayers are modelled on the collect-form, but they brought a new and evangelical spirit to the church which assisted in the shaping of a Lutheran piety that is hallmarked by faith-active-in-love. Luther Reed says of these reforming movement prayers: "Professor Althaus shows how, at the very beginning of the Reformation, the mystic-Augustinian type of prayer which had prevailed throughout the entire Middle Ages, stopped at one stroke. In its place entered a type of prayer based entirely upon scripture. The historic collects took on a new meaning as a preparation of the spirit for hearing the Word of God and a request for the blessing and the wholesome fruit of the Word. . . . While numerous prayer books of private preparation contained prayers reflecting the spirit of contemporary mystical or subjective groups, the prayers of the 16th-century agenda are noteworthy for their spiritual and objective character."(6) Dietrich's prayers thus help to construct the complex of words and signs that will be evangelical spirituality. In recent American use, his prayers were used until the time of the "Service Book and Hymnal." Doberstein included three of them in his "Lutheran Prayer Book" and five in the "Minister's Prayer Book," and the old collection of "Collects and Prayers" supplemental to the "Common Service Book" contained six.(7) Two collections are available, one in German and one in English, of his Gospel collects, which were intended to be read each Sunday in conjunction with the reading of the Gospel before the homily.(8)

Here is one of Dietrich's prayers often used in conjunction with a celebration of the reform of the church: "O Lord God, who in the time of the awakening of the Church didst graciously rekindle the light of thy saving Word and didst shine in our hearts to give us knowledge of thy beloved Son Jesus Christ: grant that we may always follow that blessed light and also adorn the pure doctrine of thy word with a godly life and conversation, through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord. Amen.(9) Note the careful construction of the prayer; in it Dietrich offers a linguistic model that balances between the faith which receives God's gifts of grace and the faith which steps out boldly in loving actions. This is instructive and exemplary of the peculiar reformation piety which is at the heart of our complex of words and signs that create a world. Note especially the closing phrase, adorning the doctrine of the Word with a godly life and conversation. Through spare phrases like this, Dietrich was able to convey both the simplicity of faith and that good works are a necessary outcome of faith and a sign of spiritual depth. So much for our look at Dietrich.

What conclusions can we draw form this study? There are four which emerge as we reflect on this historical data.

1. The tradition may be altered if it is done on the basis of clear evangelical criteria. Those criteria centre around the discernment of whether or not the tradition bears Christ's saving, grace-filled power to the community of faith.

2. Sometimes less means more. When devotional or liturgical materials were cleared away that seemed to obscure the gospel, the gospel shone forth more brightly than when it was supposedly highlighted. Spareness gives brighter detail to what remains.

3. A wide variety of forms can be used to express the Lutheran understanding that faith is active in love. There is an open-endedness to the tradition that can be richly inclusive.

4. This is not work for amateurs or dilettantes. If words create worlds, then it is crucial that those who function as myth- and ritual-makers have some sense of what's central, what's not, and act as gatekeepers as well as those who would invite innovation and change.

Now, to recall Northrop Frye at the conclusion, what have we in Lutheran spirituality is a "bricolage," a term used by the French anthropologist and philosopher Claude Levi-Strauss to refer to an assemblage of signs by which we create meaning. This assemblage of signs has been adequate for Lutherans of past generations. The question is whether or not it is capable of assisting in God's transformation of a broad and inclusive people today. Understood in accordance with my modest conclusions, I maintain that it is. The future structure is up to us.

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(1) Philip Melanchthon, "Paul's Letter to the Colossians," trans. D. C. Parker. (Sheffield, England: University of Sheffield Press, Almond Imprint, 1989), 46-56, commenting on Col. 2:8, esp. 49-51.

(2) Martin Luther, "The Large Catechism," trans. J. N. Lenker (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1953), 131.

(3) Appendix I in Doberstein, "Minister's Prayer Book" (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1959), 437-60, esp. 439-43.

(4) "Teresa of Avila, the Way of Perfection," trans. F. Benedict Zimmerman (London: Thomas Baker, 1911), chaps. XXVI-XLII.

(5) Cf. Bernard Klaus, "Veit Dietrich: Lebun und Werk" (Nurnberg: Selbstverlag des Vereins fur bayerische Kirchengeschichte, 1958).

(6) Luther D. Reed, "The Lutheran Liturgy" (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1947), 285. The reference is to Paul Althaus, "Zur Einfurung in die quellengeschichte der kirchlichen kollekten in den Lutherischen agenden des 16. Jahrhunderts" (Leipzig: Edelmann, 1991).

(7) John Doberstein, "A Lutheran Prayer book" (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1959); "Collects and Prayers for Use in Church," ed. Emil Fischer, Luther D. Reed, and Paul Zeller Strodach, authorized by the United Lutheran Church in America (Philadelphia: Board of Publications of the ULCA, 1935).

(8) Otto Dietz, "Die Evangelien-kollekten von Veit Dietrich" (Leipzig: Wallmann, 1930); Seigfrid Estborn, "A Church Year in Prayers -- The Gospel Collects of Veit Dietrich" (Guntur: Board of Publication of the Evangelical Lutheran Churches in India, 1937).

(9) From Doberstein, "A Lutheran Prayer Book," 96, collect #11.