Chapter Four
Managing Worship
The features described in the previous chapters—both constitutional arrangements and social interactions—allowed Dutch Reformed to exist in the city and towns in our study. The distinct combination of these factors in each city or town, however, meant that the terms of their stay varied. How migrants worshipped in each asylum also differed. This chapter considers patterns in religious worship—focusing on baptisms, weddings, funerals, and communion—across host communities in the Empire. For each, the implications of specific theological views certainly shaped liturgical practice, as did the constitutional and demographic questions discussed in chapters 2 and 3. However, it also proves fruitful to distinguish those rituals that served as rites of passage—baptism, marriage, and funerals—from the Lord’s Supper, which served as a symbolic ritual that expressed an understanding of the communal nature of the church and the process of salvation.
1 Here, we are drawing on Luebke, Hometown Religion. See also Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe. Rites of passage involved a transition of an individual from one stage of life to another. They also have strong social implications in terms of, for instance, inheritance claims and civic status. The key factors shaping ritual practice with regard to rites of passage did not neatly align with totalizing confessional categories. Rather, the Protestant-Catholic divide—and for baptism, the believer’s baptism-pedobaptism divide—proved more important than distinctions between Lutherans and Reformed in places where the local church was Protestant. In situations where the local church was Catholic, Dutch Reformed migrants preferred to travel to nearby Protestant churches to marry and bury, though they always recognized the legitimacy of baptism, marriages, and funerals that took place in Catholic churches. Meanwhile, Dutch Reformed migrants baptized, married, and buried their loved ones in Protestant churches without issue, regardless of whether the church followed the Augsburg Confession
invariata or even whether Reformed Protestants were legally recognized in that community.
By contrast, the Lord’s Supper, as a rite of community, offered a symbolic expression of the body of the church (in the sense of
ecclesia), which played a role in communal and individual salvation. In all of the communities of our study, Reformed migrants only celebrated the Lord’s Supper within their own congregations. In situations when it became too dangerous to do so, they preferred to celebrate the sacrament in private or to forgo it altogether rather than cross over to a different territory or a different confession. While the stakes of rites of passage could be high—property claims, permission for residency, and social belonging—the stakes of the Lord’s Supper were purely soteriological: they involved how believers reconciled with Christ. As David M. Luebke helpfully put it, when it came to the Eucharist, “reciprocities between belief and ritual” were more difficult to evade than rites of passage.
2 Luebke, Hometown Religion, 78. As a result, while they often had to compromise on standards of worship in exile, these Reformed Protestants refused to compromise on ensuring that they only celebrated the Lord’s Supper with fellow believers within their own congregation.