Some thoughts on Liturgy and Doctrine from Hermann Sasse

"What causes me to write is rather an issue of the Confessional Lutheran (July-August 1956).... What [Burgdorf, the editor] and his friends fail to realize is the necessity of a liturgical movement within the Lutheran Church which would help to revive the great "Catholic" heritage of our fathers, the liturgical life of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was this liturgy that has prevented Lutheran Orthodoxy from becoming a mere system or rational theology.

"We cannot revive the theology of our fathers without realizing what theology meant to them: praise of God and doctrine at the same time. One has often the impression that the correct doctrine on the Sacraments is regarded as more important than their celebration. This is the danger for your church, though I must admit having read wonderful sermons on the Sacrament by your theologians, in which the full devotional content of the orthodox liturgy found an expression. But Pieper's Dogmatics is not satisfactory in this respect, due perhaps to the influence of the last stage of Orthodoxy in the later seventeenth century, when the Sacraments had lost their 'existential' meaning. We observe already with Melanchthon... a mere pedagogical understanding of the liturgy. This development went on. The two sides of orthodoxy, orthodoxy as 'pure doctrine' and orthodoxy as 'right worship,' still happily united with men like Johann Gerhard and Paul Gerhardt, were more and more separated which led to a decay of both. Whatever the causes of the development in your church may have been, ... the great task remains for you, as for all Lutheran churches, to regain that lost unity."

When "confessional churches" become "unliturgical", Sasse calls them "ineffective"; they may also fall off the horse in the other direction, when liturgical movements become "heretical or Romanistic". Sasse holds out the unity of the two as the goal, the task being to rediscover and maintain both without falling into tragedy on either side of the horse.

Source:
Hermann Sasse, "Letter to Arthur Carl Piepkorn (1956)," in The Lonely Way: Selected Letters and Essays, volume II (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2002), pp. 239-40.