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I. TWO DAUGHTERS OF THE REFORMATION
In his "Preface" to the 1888 Common Service [CS], Beale Melanchthon Schmucker described the genesis of the service, which was the product of four years of effort by representatives of the General Council, the General Synod, and the General Synod of the South,1 and which remains a central document in the history of Lutheran liturgical renewal, and of the drive toward unity which produced the contemporary Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Schmucker made a number of audacious claims. First, he claimed that the Common Service was not a new creation, but the English translation of an almost Platonic "form" of pure liturgical expression, previously revealed by Lutherans of the sixteenth century:
The Order of Service here presented is not new. Its newest portions of any consequence are as old as the time of the Reformation. In the order of its parts, and in the great body of its contents, it gives the pure Service of the Christian Church of the West, dating back to very early times...It can lay claim, as no other order of Service now in use can, to be the completest embodiment of the Common Service of the pure Christian Church of all ages, and may be tendered to all Christians who use a fixed Order, as the Service of the future as it has been of the past.2
Second, he drew direct comparison to the Book of Common Prayer [BCP], a masterpiece of Reformation liturgy, and not incidentally a central criterion in the definition of Anglican identity:
The Lutheran revision of the Communion Service...had been fully tested by more than twenty years of continuous use before the revision of the Service made by the Anglican Church, first issued in the Prayer Book of Edward VL, 1549.
Between this first Prayer Book of the Church of England and the Lutheran Service, there is an extremely close agreement. The causes whence this resulted are clearly traceable. The Sarum, and other Anglican Missals, from which translations were made, agreed almost entirely with the Bamberg, Mainz, and other German missals, all alike differing from the Roman use.3
He went on to sketch out, briefly, the many connections between Lutheran and Anglican theologians of the Reformation era: Cranmer's travel...