Festivals and Customs in the Lutheran and Catholic Church

Friedrich Lochner

A founder, pastor, and liturgical churchman

Friedrich Johann Carl Lochner (1822-1902) was a nineteenth-century Lutheran pastor and theologian who emigrated from Bavaria to America, took part in the preliminary meetings that led to the formation of the Missouri Synod, and became one of the founders of the teachers' seminary first established in Milwaukee. Later Lutheran reference works remembered him especially as an authority on liturgics.

That background matters for this little book. Lochner was not writing as a detached antiquarian. He wrote as a confessional Lutheran pastor who cared about how doctrine, worship, ceremonies, and churchly customs fit together. His significance in American Lutheranism lies partly in that combination: he helped shape pastors and teachers, and he argued that authentic Lutheranism should keep its liturgical and ceremonial inheritance in consciously evangelical form.

In Festivals and Customs in the Lutheran and Catholic Church, Lochner contrasts Roman usages with Lutheran practice in a way that is direct, catechetical, and polemical. It is a helpful window into how older confessional Lutherans explained the church year, the sacraments, and ceremonial life to ordinary laypeople.