Serious Liturgical Geekery: Part 1

I often post sections or entireties of presentations that I give for various groups—this is one of them.

I was invited to present at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Scholar-Priests this past month on the broad & general topic of the liturgy and formation. This gave me an opportunity to play around with a concept that has been bouncing around in my head for several years and to re-attack something that I had been previously from a new angle.  Because I’m reworking some stuff here that I originally wrote for the SCP conference in Detroit several years ago, there is material here that some long-time readers will likely recognize, particularly in the latter stages. However, there’s a lot of new things too and the new things make the old things more interesting! (I think so, at least…)

This is part 1 of 3; part 2 is looking at Xunzi’s arguments about what ritual is and how it functions; part 3 is looking at classical Anglican liturgy with Xunzi’s thoughts in mind.

So, without further ado…

Whenever I take on a big topic—and Liturgy and formation is a very big topic—I always like to try and get some outside perspective. We tend to get caught up with the usual authorities and in the usual takes on the situation as laid down by the usual authorities based on the usual stances and approaches. So my reflex is to go find somebody else. Somebody who does not share all of the fundamental assumptions that we start from and that isn’t locked into the philosophical constructs of late post/modernity and the combined academic and ecclesial culture of the Episcopal seminary. But yet—still has something interesting and compelling to offer. So, someone disconnected from our conversations but who still has a perspective worth engaging.

Our liturgy and its liturgical cycles are the product of a pre-industrial, pre-enlightenment world. Not pre-technological, not pre-philosophical, but thoroughly pre-modern but in no way does that mean primitive. So, in order to understand the motivations and spirit that had a hand in the construction of our liturgical cycles, I like to find interesting thinkers who were thinking about these topics—ritual, ceremonial, what it all means and why we do it—who are pre-industrial, pre-enlightenment, and pre-modern yet are dealing with these topics in interesting and sophisticated ways.

As a result, I’d like to introduce you to a thinker who will most likely be a new acquaintance to most of the folks here. Xunzi was a philosopher writing in the Confucian tradition right around the fall of the Zhou dynasty and the rise of the Qin. Born around 313 BC, he died in about 238 BC. We don’t have a lot of biographical data about him. He was born in the state of Zhao which is in the northern part of China up on Yellow River. Like many of the sages of the time he bounced around between the governments of the various warring states that existed before the rise of the dynasty that would unite China under a single Emperor, Shi Huangdi, in 221 BC. He was a teacher, a ritual specialist, and a magistrate before losing his position when his patron was assassinated in 238. He retired into obscurity before his own death. His writings are collected in a book known by his name, the Xunzi, divided into 32 essay-length chapters.

To put him in philosophical context, Confucian thought begins with the writings of Kongzi (Confucius) who died in 479 BC and whose writings focused on building a strong and virtuous society grounded in traditionalism, right relationships amongst and within a stratified society, ethical improvement that classified people on a spectrum from petty to gentleman to sage based on their investment in ethical progress. Much of the thought of Kongzi consists of reflection on older books of learning, histories, poetry, and ritual thought to be written by the philosopher kings of old. These are referred to collectively as the Five Classics. So references to the sage kings or the former kings refer to this body of traditional material that was seen as a quasi-divine revelation.

Around the same time as Xunzi, you have the philosopher Mengzi (or Mencius), also a Confucian thinker who advocated a human nature is essentially good and offered a moral and ethic program based on self-reflection. Since your nature is good, all you have to do is look inside yourself to know what is right. Mengzi becomes the central bearer of the Confucian tradition going forward and he is considered one of the four great sages of China along with Kongzi and two other later thinkers who will not appear in this paper.

Also at this same general time was Zhuangzi, whose book bearing his name would become one of the fundamental texts of the Daoist tradition. His basic concept is that there is a way (Dao) or fundamental pattern woven into the cosmos that can be discerned. The true sage is the one who conforms to this great Dao agreeing with Mengzi that human society is often responsible for people losing their way morally and ethically.

So—why is Xunzi interesting at all? Why bother going through all of this? Xunzi represents Confucian heterodoxy—his is the path not taken, and it’s because he fundamentally disagreed with Mengzi. Whereas Mengzi developed his moral thought based on the premise that human nature is good, Xunzi went in the opposite direction. He states clearly, repeatedly, that human nature is bad. I’m going to nuance that in a little bit—that’s his language, which is intended to be deliberately provocative, not mine. What Xunzi does believe is that because human nature is bad, it must be corrected and the ritual is the key. Of all the Confucian writers, he is the one who speaks the most and the most clearly about ritual and about Confucian metapraxis: why ritual should be done, why ritual is important, and how ritual functions as a formative tool to create virtuous individuals and a virtuous society. So here we have a 3rd century BC voice explaining what ritual is, how it functions, and how it creates virtue. He is thoroughly uninvested in our arguments and language games and in our philosophical constructions.

One other very important point about him: Xunzi denies any supernatural efficacy to ritual acts. As far as he is concerned either the gods and ancestors don’t exist or they do not care to intervene in human affairs—he’s kind of analogous to the Epicureans in that respect. Rather, he is arguing that ritual does what it does on its own terms and by its own means—not because a god or ancestor or spirit is functioning supernaturally through it. So, what I’d like to do is get a sense of where Xunzi is coming from, and then take a look at some components of Classical Anglican liturgy from the perspective that he shows us. I’m not proposing any sort of syncretism, of course; in fact, I disagree with Xunzi on some really important points. What I’m suggesting is that looking at how a pre-modern, pre-industrial, pre-enlightenment ethical thinker deeply invested in ritual and ceremony can break us out of our boxes and give us new eyes with which to look at our familiar practices.

Brief Thought on the Sanctoral Calendar

I just finished writing a brief history of the Episcopal sanctoral calendar for another blog (I’ll link when it goes up).

I’ll be the first to tell you that the evolution of our Calendar has been both crazy and problematic. However, I’ve been seeing recommendations on Facebook and in other places suggesting that we just get rid of our Calendar—cut it back to just the Holy Days and take time to think it out, or to not even bother thinking it out.

I have a negative reaction to this proposal. Let me play devil’s advocate and suggest that a flawed Calendar authorized by the church is better than no Calendar. The 1928 BCP, despite a late push at the 1928 General Convention to adopt a calendar, was published with just the vestigal kalendar of Holy Days in place since the 1789 BCP. To me, a New-Testament-figures-only calendar is a betrayal of our pneutmatology and therefore ecclesiology.

We believe in the Holy Spirit. We believe that the Holy Spirit has been at work since Pentecost guiding and directing the Church into all truth. (Obviously, the Spirit was around and active before Pentecost—my point is the Church, which wasn’t…) To skip over twenty centuries of human history is tantamount to a denial of the presence of the Spirit in the Church. Or, at the very least, a dangerous agnosticism about our ability to discern the movement of the Spirit in the past.

We need a Calendar to affirm fundamental Christological, pnematological, and ecclesiological truths: throughout the Church’s flawed and checkered history, the Spirit has been at work, saints have incarnated Christ in their times and places, and the Body of Christ has made Christ Really Present to the world through the members of the Church.

The question that we are faced with now is what exactly we want the Calendar to be. Is the Calendar a history of famous men who taught things we should know? Is the Calendar a representative picture of the kinds of people who make up the Church? or (spoiler alert) is the Calendar a depiction of the virtues of Christ and the gifts of the Spirit incarnated through the Body of Christ (in ways both representative and historical)?

Latest PC section up on Patreon

The latest section of Psalming Christ is up over on Patreon. I’m demonstrating what a close reading of the text looks like, informed by the methods assumed by Benedict and taught by Cassiodorus. It starts like this…

 

Cassiodorus, Benedict, and the anonymous Master are introducing their monks to a kind of reflective, ruminative reading of a text that occurs at the speed of memorization. That is, it is extremely slow and focuses on details of the text. Reading at this speed and level of attention is not something that modern people are used to—especially not those of us who have to take in large amounts of information every day. As a result, we have to relearn the skill of close reading: reading that pays attention to the grammatical and rhetorical features of a text and that pauses at points to ask questions and double-check our assumptions.

Let’s try a close reading of a psalm—one we know well—and start asking it some questions. Here is the beginning of Psalm 23, perhaps the best-known and best loved of them all:

1 The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
2 He makes me lie down in green pastures;
he leads me beside still waters;
3 he restores my soul.
He leads me in right paths
for his name’s sake.

4 Even though I walk through the darkest valley,
I fear no evil;
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff—
they comfort me. (Ps 23:1-4, NRSV)

Let’s notice a few things up front: first, this translation (like most of them) breaks the psalm into poetic lines. As we discussed before, lines are important sense-units in the psalms specifically because of parallelism; where the line begins and ends is an important part of the thought-structure because it helps us see which words and phrases and ideas are being put into parallel with one another. In the oldest surviving Hebrew manuscript of the psalms, the Great Psalms Scroll from Qumran, each verse is written out on its own line. While the scribe could have fit more words on each page if the words had been written continuously, the line breaks are deliberately retained precisely because they have meaning.

Second, this translation includes a gap between verses 3 and 4. Recognize this for what it is—an interpretive editorial insertion meant to tell us something about the text. That is, this silent decision on the part of the editors suggests that verses 1-3 and verse 4 belong together in a way that verses 3 and 4 don’t. An interpretive recommendation is being suggested by means of the white space. Is worth noting at this point how much leeway editors have in arranging a text. Most of the punctuation that we see in the Psalms is an editorial decision—it’s not in the original Hebrew.

Right up front, the first verse raises two basic questions. . . .

Read the whole post on Patreon.

First feasts of December

Kalendar Calculations

I’m thinking back to yesterday and the conjunction of two different feasts, Corpus Christi and the Feast of the Visitation. It’s worth commenting on why two different sites—like the St. Bede’s Breviary and Daily Prayer—would choose one over the other. How do we think through these decisions theologically and what are the practical logics involved in these kind of kalendar calculations?

Occurrence–It’s a Thing

First off, this kind of thing happens not infrequently. That is, two days of significance to the church will overlap with one another because we have two different ways of reckoning dates for liturgical occasions. One is a Temporal cycle that shifts with the seasons, goes by weeks, and is calculated by means of Sundays which do not maintain a consistent date on the calendar every year. (Hence the tables on pp. 880-885 of your ’79 BCP.) The other is the cycle of fixed Holy Days. These are a combination of days celebrating apostolic saints (like Peter, Paul, Mary Magdalene, etc.) and feasts of Our Lord either directly (like Feast of the Holy Name) or indirectly through events surrounding the Incarnation (like The Visitation, the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist, etc.). These are, clearly, fixed on certain calendar dates.

Thus, there always exists the possibility for Temporal occasions to land on the same day as fixed Holy Days. That’s what happened yesterday: Corpus Christi, a traditional feast of the Temporal cycle celebrated on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, fell on the same day as the Visitation, the feast fixed on May 31. The technical church geek name for this is “occurrence.” (The other related issue is “concurrence” which is what happens when Evening Prayer of two feasts tangle with one another—that’s a much longer and more technical discussion on why and how and what you do, so I’ll shelve that for now…)

There are a few different approaches to deal with occurrence. The first is to let one event supplant the other entirely. This is the simplest route. The second is transference. This is where one feast stays on its original day and the other gets bumped to the next open day. The third is commemoration. This is where both feasts stay on the day, one gets the spotlight and the other gets an honorable mention. The prayer book’s preferred option is the second, transference, and the mechanics of this process is discussed on pages 15-17 of your ’79 BCP.

Personally, I much prefer the third, commemoration. The reason is theological. This whole clashing of days is messy. How are we supposed to deal with the mess? Do we sanitize it, simplify it, or embrace it? This mess happens because these cycles are fundamentally incarnational—embracing the mess is embracing the inherent messiness of embodied life where things don’t always go the way you plan. And, in fact, amazing things can proceed out of the mess that you never would have expected. If you remember, just a couple of years ago in 2016, Good Friday fell on March 25th. Following the prayer book rules, all of us good Episcopalians dutifully transferred the Feast of the Annunciation to the Monday after the Second Sunday of Easter as directed on page 17. But—how much more powerful was that Holy Week considering the juxtaposition of the events: the death of Christ on the cross with his mother at its foot and the announcement of Christ’s conception to his mother by the angel Gabriel? Luckily, we even got a poem out of John Donne on it when this conjunction occurred in 1608.  Commemoration enables messy conjunctions like this to occur, allows us to wonder and revel in them rather trying to tidily confine God’s action to discrete days. (Which is why the image for yesterday’s post was Mary holding the Host—the best intersection of the two feasts I could think of!)

But—choosing one of the three options only determines your course of action, it doesn’t solve the problem of precedence: which feast stays and which goes (or gets the spotlight).

Determining Dignity

Old rules about which feast to celebrate when will sometimes make appeals to the “nobler” or the feast “of greater dignity” and such. This implies the existence of a theologically determined set of criteria to be used to

figure these things out—and these exist in spades! Here’s the problem with the traditional systems. Most of them begin with facts on the medieval ground and proceed by attempting to figure out logical rules that can be universally applied. Thus you have something like a calendar from a Book of Hours written around 1485 in Bruges following the Roman Use (Walters W.. September has three days written in red: September 1st for the Abbot Egidius, the Nativity of the BVM on the 8th, and the Exaltation of the Cross on the 14th. (And note the feast of Philip and James in black on the 13th!) What happens if a Sunday falls on one of these days? There’s no clear sense in this manuscript of how one would work it out or exactly what “red” means.

Now—to be perfectly fair, that’s from a Book of Hours. The function of a kalendar in Books of Hours was more general familiarity with where we are in the year and which saints are being celebrated than anything else. While you might use a certain collect or set of devotions based on the saint of the day, the prayer offices did not change. As a result if we really want to know what an actual medieval system for reckoning the Office looked like in the flesh we need to look at something like this kalendar from a breviary written around 1420 according to the Use of Liege (Walters W.83). If you look carefully here there are directions in red regarding what to do and how these various feasts ought to impact the Offices. Hence, in this use, the feast of Abbot Egidius is a feast of nine lessons (.ix.l.) meaning longer than normal. The feast of the holy virgin Magdalbert on the 7th is a “double” of a certain sort (dux) and is the primary feast of the day—the feast of Bishop Evortius is only commemorated with a collect (co[ll]). On the next day, the Nativity of the BVM is a double with all of the antiphons doubled (tot) with a collect commemorating the martyr Adrian (coll). The point I’m making is that books like these recorded what communities did and largely they had their own ideas about how things ought to be done. Systems grew up that attempted to systematize and regularize around these practices and that can lead to a confusing welter of gradations formalized at the Council of Trent and beyond that divides feasts in Greater Doubles of the First or Second Class as opposed to “normal” Greater Doubles or Lesser Doubles (leaving aside semidoubles and such entirely…).

These were the kinds of complexities that the Reformers pushed back against. Classically, Cranmer complained about these in the preface to the first Book of Common Prayer: “Moreover, the number and hardness of the Rules called the Pie, and the manifold changings of the service, was the cause, that to turn the Book only, was so hard and intricate a matter, that many times, there was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out” (BCP, p. 866). Honestly, the Sarum Pie isn’t that hard to follow, but you get his general gist.

My Ranking System

In the run up to Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church simplified their kalendar systems quite a bit. When we decided to adopt an expanded kalendar in the ’79 BCP we more or less modeled ours based on the Roman Catholic concepts produced in 1963 and 1964 that yielded a papal motu proprio on the kalendar in 1969. And, as I’ve said before, when trying to understand many aspects of the ’79 BCP we should look first to the liturgical reforms of Vatican II first (Point 4 at this link).  What the Calendar section of the BCP tries to do is to express something very much like the list from section 59 of Paul VI’s motu proprio Mysterii paschalis. What I don’t get is why they didn’t just put in the list (or a list)!

Because the St. Bede’s Breviary is based on a computer algorithm, I did compile a list. This list is rank by order of precedent so that you can see which feasts land where in relation to other feasts. I started with something like the Mysterii paschalis list and then re-ordered it as necessary to make sense of the directives in the Calendar section of the BCP:

I.

1. Easter Triduum [Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday]
2. Christmas, Ascension, Holy Trinity, All Saints’ Day, Epiphany and Pentecost
3. Sundays of Advent, Lent, and Easter
4. Ash Wednesday
5. Weekdays of Holy Week from Monday from Thursday inclusive
6. Days within the Octave of Easter
7. Local Feast of Dedication of a church, Local Feast of Title, Local Feast of Patron
8. Special Feasts, locally having a first class rank*
9. Proper Feasts, locally having a first class rank*

II.

10. Holy Days: Feasts of Our Lord
11. Sundays of the Christmas Season and Ordinary Time
12. Holy Days: Major Feasts
13. Special Feasts, locally having a second class rank*
14. Days of Optional Observance, locally having a second class rank*

III.

15. Special Feasts, locally having a third class rank*
16. Days of Optional Observance, locally having a third class rank*
17. Weekdays of Lent
18. Weekdays of Advent from December 16th through December 24th inclusive
19. Days of Optional Observance
20. Weekdays of Advent up to December 15th inclusive
21. Weekdays of the Easter season
22. [Saturday Office of the BVM]†
23. Weekdays of the Christmas season
24. Weekdays of Ordinary Time

* The starred categories reflect the freedoms given in the Days of Optional Observance section. Practically speaking, the Prayer Book allows the appointment of propers to any day that does not contravene the pre-existing rules. This allows feasts already in the Calendar to receive additional celebration or the addition of other feasts so long as the other rules are obeyed.

The Pay-Off

So—now we get down to brass tacks… The Visitation is listed on page 16 of the BCP as a Holy Day and a Feast of Our Lord. That gives it a pretty high ranking, a 10 on my scale. Corpus Christi doesn’t actually appear in the BCP. For some folks, that’s the end of the discussion right there. The Visitation is in the book, Corpus Christi isn’t, Visitation wins. But, Corpus Christi is of long-standing importance in certain communities in the church. For those communities, this remains a live issue. Looking back at older rules (that many of these communities base their reckonings on), Corpus Christi was considered a Primary Double of the First Class; the Visitation was a Primary Double of the Second Class. Under those rules, Corpus Christi wins.

But what about our current rules? The way I reckoned it for the St. Bede’s Breviary was to view Corpus Christi as a Feast of Our Lord (10). The Visitation is also a 10—so which 10 is more 10 than the other? This is where we apply the rule of dignity of persons. Which more directly displays to us who Jesus is and is for us in our experience? Based on my answer to this question, I argue that Corpus is more directly a Feast of Our Lord than the Visitation. That’s not to say the Visitation isn’t important at all. It’s just to say that in this particular match-up, the revelation of Christ in the Eucharist ranks ahead of the Visitation.

It’s a judgement call. And, again, I don’t disagree with those who point out that Corpus Christi isn’t in our BCP. But, if nothing else, this gives us an opportunity to think about the directives and principles by which we give spiritual expression to the incarnate collisions of our faith.

Brief Daily Office Programming Note

The St. Bede’s Breviary is celebrating today as Corpus Christi as a local Feast of Our Lord with a commemoration of the Visitation.

Forward Movement’s Daily Prayer is celebrating today as the Visitation.

This is one of the possible conjunctions that had never occurred to me but which the liturgical cycles throw together on occasion. The beauty of having two similar resources like this is that they split the difference and offer both options!

The Business of Heterodoxy

Setting the Scene

The girls and I attend a home parish different from Mother M’s. That’s only because we wanted a stable location for the girls that had a strong youth program before M became a rector. It’s a very diverse parish ethnically, theologically, and liturgically; in many ways, I see it as the kind of parish that the current leadership of the Episcopal Church wants itself to be composed of. So, it’s a fascinating look into one direction that the church is moving in.

The Adult Forums are a mix of things from the parish family; many connect to some form of social justice work in our local community, but we did a series on the hard work of forgiveness in Lent and on the Resurrection appearances of Jesus in Easter. On occasion and as my schedule allows, I’ll speak on a subject myself.

One fellow from the parish did a presentation on a weekend seminar that he and two other parishioners had attended: a “Jesus on the Road” seminar from the Westar Institute. If you’re not familiar with Westar, they’re the official name of the group running the Jesus Seminar, the group founded by Robert Funk et al. that kicked off the popular writing careers of Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan and others. This was in the early/mid ’90s; when I was a senior in college (1996) I heard J. D. Crossan speak at an RC church in Minneapolis. My doktorvater wrote a blistering takedown of the Jesus Seminar and interest in them largely waned from the public eye.

But apparently they’re on the road now and trying to be relevant again…

Key Points

The presentation given by my fellow parishioner was accompanied by a very slick PowerPoint presentation, well-branded with Westar information, containing embedded videos. While the presenter is a computer science guy, I don’t think he put it together—it looked like part of a professional marketing package.

I’m not going to rehearse everything in it, but I do want to emphasize some key take-aways that I found particularly pertinent…

Insistence on a “late” date for Christianity

One of the talking heads made the claim which is now axiomatic in certain circles that “while Jesus may have lived in the first century, Christianity wasn’t invented until the 4th century.”

This is a core talking point for a lot of folks and is widely believed both inside and outside of the church. I call it the Dan Brown School of Christian Origins. Indeed, I’ve said before that the single most influential source of pop-culture knowledge of Early Church history is The Da Vinci Code: and that should scare us. There are a variety of flavors of this from statements like the one I heard to the notion that Constantine was the guy who declared Jesus a god.

Here’s the truth: Early Christianity (and, if you want to be completely comprehensive, Early Christianities [acknowledging those that were considered heretical later]) was first and foremost a social phenomenon. It was a community of people. This organic body began with the apostles (the twelve guys in the inner circle of Jesus) and the disciples (the wider group of folks including the family of Jesus and many others who followed him around and listened to his teachings). Like most movements of this sort, Christianity spread through social networks—people who knew people who knew people. These groups started with the Old Testament (usually in its best known form, the Greek translation of Hebrew called the Septuagint) and verbal teaching about who Jesus was, what he did, and what happened to him at the hands of the authorities—and at the hands of God his Father who raised him from the dead. And it was through and for these networks that we begin to have the writings that would become the New Testament.

The Bible did not create the Church, the Church created the Bible to better transmit the faith that the baptized body believed.

Let me underscore this in the best way I know how to do so…the end of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Paul had never been to Rome; the Letter to the Romans was essentially a letter of introduction laying out his credentials and the kind of things he taught so the Romans could judge if he was the kind of teacher they wanted to bring to town. The last chapter is one of Paul’s strongest arguments:

I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae, so that you may welcome her in the Lord as is fitting for the saints, and help her in whatever she may require from you, for she has been a benefactor of many and of myself as well.  Greet Prisca and Aquila, who work with me in Christ Jesus, and who risked their necks for my life, to whom not only I give thanks, but also all the churches of the Gentiles.  Greet also the church in their house. Greet my beloved Epaenetus, who was the first convert in Asia for Christ.  Greet Mary, who has worked very hard among you.  Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives who were in prison with me; they are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was.  Greet Ampliatus, my beloved in the Lord.  Greet Urbanus, our co-worker in Christ, and my beloved Stachys.  Greet Apelles, who is approved in Christ. Greet those who belong to the family of Aristobulus.  Greet my relative Herodion. Greet those in the Lord who belong to the family of Narcissus.  Greet those workers in the Lord, Tryphaena and Tryphosa. Greet the beloved Persis, who has worked hard in the Lord.  Greet Rufus, chosen in the Lord; and greet his mother—a mother to me also.  Greet Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas, and the brothers and sisters who are with them.  Greet Philologus, Julia, Nereus and his sister, and Olympas, and all the saints who are with them. (Rom 16:1-15)

tl;dr: Paul knows people and they know him. At this point—we’re talking somewhere around the year 57 AD—there’s a significant set of people across Asia and in Rome that Paul is naming and demonstrating connections with.

People—this is Christianity! Christianity is not a drawn-up list of doctrines ratified by authorities but a collection of people who gather together to declare “the gospel concerning [God’s] Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord…” (Rom 1:3-4).

Now—some folks will try to wiggle out of this by asserting that saying that Jesus was “Son of God” is different than saying he was divine and that no one thought he was divine until Constantine said so. Again, this only works if you ignore the evidence. The clearest evidence that this is not the case is the confession of Thomas—yes, that Thomas—who gives us the most thorough confession of how Jesus was seen and understood: “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28). It’s kinda hard to hedge that one away…

Early Christianity believed a lot of different things and there were other writings than those in the Bible. The notion of “Orthodoxy” was simply a power play by powerful men to shut down dissension and to seize and maintain power for themselves.

The argument here is an emphasis on the diversity of Early Christianity. The thought process suggests that if various people thought various things, those other works may have value, either historical value or spiritual value. And, if these works could be valuable, then as enlightened modern people free from the prejudices of the ancient Mediterranean world we can do a better job of judging what is valuable than they could.

The undercurrent of the argument taps into suspicion around authorities and especially into authorities tied into imperial systems of power. I don’t forget if it was said explicitly but it was certainly heavily implied that Christianity became an ideological tool of the state and its doctrines were shaped by the state for the purpose of asserting imperial control.

Here’s how I see it: The Early Church was a body of people who believed that there was something special about Jesus. Some believed that he was God and shared a common divinity with the God of Israel; this is the group that would become the community we know as the orthodox Church. There were others who believed that Jesus was a man who was declaring the God of Israel in a new way. Some saw him as a quasi-divine spirit who proclaimed the God of Israel in a new way. Some saw him as a divine or divinized messenger of a purely spirit-based god who was opposed to the God of Israel and any god who might have anything to do with creation or materiality. All of these things were in the mix and some more besides.

Just because they were in the mix does not mean that they were (or are) all equally edifying.

Yes—there was diversity in Early Christianity. We can speak of Early Christianities. But we can also talk about an emerging orthodoxy that we can trace in the formative documents of the New Testament that testify to a system of sorting out who this particular community who shared these books understood to be inside of it and outside of it. Second and Third John (which we just read in the Office) represent a sample of ephemeral correspondence—most of which didn’t come down to us—about which teachers to trust, which teachers to support financially, and what are the tests to determine which teachers are teaching the same message that the apostles taught: “Many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh; any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist!” (2 John 1:7). It’s not that the community who would become the church didn’t know that there was diversity; they were well aware of it. The question was what range of diversity was tolerable. What could you believe and still fall within the body’s beliefs structures? Let’s remember what’s at stake here… 1 John teaches Jesus Incarnate. It also teaches a God of love. It combines those two notions in stark declarations like this one: “We know love by this, that he [Jesus] laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses to help?” (1 John 3:16-17). You see what’s going on here? The insistence on an incarnate Jesus leads to the truth of the real death of Jesus: this shows just how far our God is willing to go to demonstrate love! (Not a spirit who seemed to die but didn’t really, or a nice guy/dupe who followed God’s commands to a tragic end.) If this is how God operates, if this is what God expects, then we need to share our incarnate, material goods with the people who need them as an analogous demonstration that we are incarnating the same God who loved us in the incarnate Jesus.

The argument about materially helping others starts with an insistence on a material Jesus, an incarnate God. The social action is grounded in the belief about who and what Jesus is. Other christologies could not say this. If the real god is a spirit god and we’re all just trying to escape the material creation, then we don’t need to share material goods because these things don’t matter anyway and are simply the bars of our collective prisons. A gnostic spirit-focused christology is contrary to actually helping those in need.

Orthodoxy began organically as the community realized that it needed to create boundaries about what was true and false teaching because—as in the Johannine example—what the community believed had implications for how Christians acted.

Did this decision making process happen in an egalitarian way? No—it didn’t. Not all opinions were considered equally valid. An insistence on the apostolic faith—the set of teachings taught by the apostles and confirmed by the disciples (which included women)—carried more weight than other ideas. Again, 1 John:

“We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life–this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and revealed to us—we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:1-3).

The key points here are about community (fellowship) and where the beliefs came from that characterize this community (what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands).

Did the decision-making structures in a Mediterranean society of Antiquity settle into the hands of men and eventually men with wealth and social standing? Yes. That’s part of the incarnate reality of a belief system that has social expression in the world. Should we be somewhat skeptical of the ways these people came to their decisions? Yes, actually—I have no problem with that. How can we possibly do that? We follow the threads of the creeds.

Creedal affirmations about God, Jesus, and their relationship are found in the writings of the New Testament. Creedal affirmations  are found in the writings of the earliest Church Fathers. Irenaeus connects the dots between the canon, the creed as a set of interpretive guidelines for the canon, and the apostolic succession as a means of knowing who the teachers are who are teaching the creedal interpretations of the canon.

If something is getting suppressed that isn’t related to or contrary to the creeds, then maybe we need to re-examine if we’re talking orthodoxy or patriarchy… (The Montanists may be an example here, but that’s a discussion for another post.)

Did emerging orthodoxy suppress the power of women in the movement? It does look that way to me. The writings about Jesus and the letters of Paul do have women in important leadership roles, and we see less of this as we move in time away from the origins.Two things: First, some of this shift has to do with the kind of literature that survives. Second, another reason is because of the way that this surviving evidence has historically been read.

First, part of this has to do with who was writing to whom and for what purpose. As the church gained a more institutional structure, we see men in these roles and we see men writing to men about men. When we read narratives—acts of the early martyrs and such—we see a lot more women acting in important ways. This ties into the second piece.

Second, for the longest time we read church records assuming they were about men and that men were the important ones. We didn’t even look for women. In the last several decades, we’ve been doing  better job at this and learning more about how women were being active in the church. As I’ve written, the Church Father Jerome is only one of the doctors of the Church because Church Mothers told him what to write and paid him to do so. Let’s not fall into the trap of assuming that women then didn’t understand how to influence the power structures of their day… In fact, I intentionally started off Honey of Souls with stories about some influential women precisely because of this.

Did the faith get tied into the imperial power structure and were some declarations of the shape of the faith tied to imperial power politics? Yes, actually. I believe that I see evidence of this in some of the later Ecumenical councils where orthodoxy and heterodoxy were decisions consciously made in negotiating the power dynamics between peripherally Roman spaces and Constantinople, the commercial and political power of the Roman East, and the spiritual power of bishops who took orders from a highly-placed, politically appointed, patriarch in Constantinople.

There is a reason why the early medieval West in particular talked about four Ecumenical councils (Aelfric is an example of this), and why the Reformers went with that number as well.

The Early Church fled Jerusalem with the destruction of the Temple and went to Nag Hammadi, Egypt, and buried their texts there when Imperial Christianity came and started oppressing them.

The contention made was that the documents buried at Nag Hammadi and discovered in 1945 represent an authentic form of apostolic Christianity which was suppressed by the state version of Christianity.

On the contrary: The Nag Hammadi Library contains a mix of materials with a strong core of Gnostic texts. Some of the documents are not inherently gnostic, but generally do have a world-view congenial to gnostic readings. There are also some Platonic and Hermetic which also hold materiality in rather low regard. These are not the teachings of apostolic Christianity which insists on the goodness of creation and the incarnation of Jesus

The presence of books labelled “Gospels” can lead people unfamiliar with the topic to assume that these are writings contemporaneous with the canonical gospels that could provide new historical details about Jesus. This is not the case. The majority of these documents are from the 3rd century and later and contain no new historical information. They can’t give us new access to independent information about Jesus, they can only tell us what people thought about Jesus at the time in which they were written.

The presentation spoke enthusiastically about social justice, progressive causes, and the rights of  indigenous peoples, contrasting these with video clips of Jerry Falwell.

The implication here is that progressive social beliefs go hand in hand with the attempt to topple religious orthodoxies; that all movements in favor of Christian orthodoxy are contiguous with social conservatism.

On the contrary: This is not the case at all. The rhetorical play here is to connect orthodoxy to conservatism; if you are against the Religious Right than you should also be against the orthodox construal of the faith.  One of my big issues here is that I don’t see the Religious Right as being particularly orthodox (and certainly not catholic) in either the proclamation of their brand of Christianity or in the political implications they draw from it. But by this point we should know that this isn’t about argument and facts—it’s an appeal to an anti-establishment ethos.

Neither major American political party and their accompanying ideological movements are in line with the social and political teachings of the Gospel. This should be readily apparent to anyone who can read a Bible and pay attention. Just note the number of politically conservative American Roman Catholics who celebrate papal teaching on Right to Life issues and then act with shock, dismay, and amazement whenever the Pope (even the ones they do like)  starts talking about social and economic issues…

The Bottom Line: It’s About The Bottom Line

My main take-away from the slick presentation recapping the seminar is that it was about selling books. I don’t know if they sold tickets to the event as well, but several of the major talking points were plugging the most recent books of one of the speakers.

Now—living in a glass house compromises my ability to throw stones here to a certain degree. After all, I lead seminars on liturgical spirituality, and sell my books there! In a wide-open religious marketplace, how can I begrudge these folks an opportunity to make a living writing their stuff even if I don’t agree with it?

There’s a difference, though: I write my books based on historical facts that experts in the various fields would find non-controversial. These folks are peddling books based on a disingenuous construction of Christian history built on half-truths and untruths. Christianity was not “invented” by Constantine in the 4th century. Gnostic texts were not kicked out of the Bible—they were never in the Bible in the first place! (And there’s a whole discussion, too, of the simplistic notion and presentation of “Bible”—as if it were a book within covers—that was bandied about; if I get started on that, I’ll never get this post finished…) From what I’ve heard and seen, the writers proposing the reintroduction of these gnostic works don’t discuss the implications of this system of belief–why gnosticism was rejected by the church; why it is that gnosticism doesn’t live well.

This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen stuff like this, and it won’t be the last.  The key to addressing it is inoculation with facts. We need to be teaching people not just about the history of the Church, but why the heresies (especially Arianisms and Gnosticisms [plurals intentional; there were/are multiple stands of both]) were considered heresies. People need to know why these things don’t live well, how their logical implications compromise not just how we think but how we act.

My Take-Away

My final thought on the presentation was a sinking feeling of complicity by means of silence. Not because I teach or advocate for heresies, but because I’m one of the voices that knows better and ought to be part of the solution. More of our people in both pulpits and pews need to know why we teach what we teach, what the actual narrative of Christian origins is based on sound scholarship of the texts and archaeology and evolving social models. And the only way for this knowledge to get out there is to start producing it and circulating it.  Hopefully posts like this will do something in that direction.

And so, I’m going to end with a counter-sales pitch of my own… I’ve started a Patreon page. If you use the St. Bede’s Breviary, if you profit from the things that I write here, please consider supporting this endeavor. It will enable me to post better stuff more frequently, and expand the kind of teaching I can do. Because this stuff—authentic Christianity that lives well—is worth arguing about and fighting for.

Presentation on Trinitarian Theology

Back at the beginning of the year, the folks at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Baltimore asked me to give them a talk about the Trinity on Trinity Sunday. I said, sure, I’d be happy to—but that Trinity Sunday wasn’t going to work due to a conflict with the Society of Scholar-Priests meeting that I’d already agreed to. So, we agreed that I’d do it on Pentecost instead.

As I was putting together a slide deck for it, it occurred to me that I could do a run-through beforehand, make sure my presentation and slides worked as they should and that it would fall within the forty-five/fifty minute time-slot that I was shooting for. Not only that, I could record my little run-through and be able to upload it to the YouTube channel. Due to life intervening (as it is wont to do…), the recording didn’t happen beforehand. But—I did make a recording of it, and it now up on the channel.

Let me warn you ahead of time: it is 46 minutes long (!).

Long-time readers of the blog may recognize that I recycled my now twelve-year-old (!!) post Revelations of Divine Algebra for the initial section.

So, if you have an interest in boning up on the Trinity ahead of the Feast of the Holy Trinity this coming Sunday, set aside a block of time and give it a view:

New Liturgical Look Forward

This is the “Look, ma, no head!” version…

The technical tweak to this video is that I have not included any talking head shots. It occurred to me that it didn’t make sense to do a lot of editing work to overlay pictures of a presentation over top of talking head pictures—why not just record the presentation itself? So, that’s what I tried this week. Too, my digital strategist said that the video was “less cringey” this way.

Thus, without further ado, The Liturgical Look Forward for Proper 2: