Category Archives: Theology

SCP Presentation: Theology & Action in the Liturgy

[Note to the reader: This is the text of an oral presentation. Thus, there are no footnotes and the language is informal. The bold and the italics indicate some but not all of the things that I would emphasize verbally.]

 First, let me start off by thanking you for this opportunity to come back and speak to you. I really enjoyed being able to speak to you last year and am honored to come back and speak with you again. So—my thanks to Fr. Cobb, Fr. Hendrickson, and the other folks who were in on inviting me back.

When I was chatting with Father Cramer about this whole topic of the theological implications of liturgical ceremonial, he said: “Great, I’d love to hear something more about that, because I really hate it when people say to me things like, ‘When are we going to stop talking about copes and start talking about real ministry?’” The implication that you hear often times in our church is that ceremonial is something extra, it’s an add-on, it’s additional frippery, and is fundamentally something that can divert us from the work of real ministry. As a result we have to begin with the question of “what exactly is real ministry.” What is our purpose here? What is it that we are trying to accomplish in our work as clergy? Then once we have a sense of that, we can move on to the question of where copes and liturgies and ceremonial fit into the true work of ministry.

This is a really big topic to tackle. We’re only going to able to make a start on it. We’re not even going to be able to get to the “meaning” questions. Instead what I’m going to do is talk a bit about a theoretical framework that gives us a starting point: why all of this stuff matters, then make a practical turn and begin a conversation about only two of the many implications that this framework offers us. And it all starts with this basic question: what is real ministry?

The simplest answer about the work of real ministry has to be this: Proclaiming the good news of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. That is the real work of ministry. Now, that’s a pretty broad mandate. So how do we do this? We could attack this question by looking at all the specific activities the clergy do. However, I think a better direction is to get a sense of the big picture first. As I said last time I was with you, for me the center of our task is described in Ephesians chapter 4. Our purpose is to:

…equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. But, speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is our head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.

Equiping the saints for the work of ministry, growing into maturity, building up the body of Christ in love.

Now, how does Paul say that we accomplish this? Further on in the chapter he tells us:

You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and diluted by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

The transformation of the whole self according to the mind of Christ. The renewing of the spirit of our minds, and clothing ourselves with the new self. Paul is talking about a fundamental transformation here. He’s talking about a fundamental shift with the way that we perceive, interpret, and interact with the world.

However you fell about postmodernism, one of the things that it has brought to our attention is that human beings, as complex reasoning, thinking beings, simply cannot have a direct and unmediated experience of reality. There is no pure, objective, unfiltered, experience of the real. Instead, we have a lens, a layer, a model of interpretation that helps us make sense of our direct inputs and that help us conceptual make sense of what we experience.   Instead our cultures and our languages give us a prearranged system for how to comprehend things and how to fit things together. From the very ways that our mother tongue’s grammar is constructed—the very fact of breaking things into verbs, and nouns, and adjectives and the way that they relate to one another—shapes the way that we conceptualize what we encounter. For instance, the fact that a language has no grammatical future tense matters profoundly when we talk about how people from that frame of reference understand time. It’s not just that our experiences shape our languages; it’s that our languages shape what we experience and how we make sense of those experiences. This is our worldview. So, a worldview is a lens of interpretation that helps us make sense of the world. It’s an understanding of how things fit together that gives us a frame of reference for making sense of our experiences and encounters and relationships.

Now when we take this postmodern concept of a worldview, and we put it up alongside Paul’s language about the renewal of our minds, and putting on the new self in Christ, then we begin to realize that we’re entering familiar territory. One way of understanding what Paul is talking about here is that the goal of Christian maturity is inhabiting a fundamentally Christian worldview. Growth into maturity in Christ is a process of learning to perceive the world through the lens of the gospel. Through the transformation of the mind, worldly values are supplanted by gospel values, worldly priorities are challenged by God’s priorities.

In 1984 the Lutheran medievalist George Lindbeck wrote a short little book called The Nature of Doctrine. And in this book he makes the suggestion that faith and doctrine make a lot more sense when we come at them from the right angle. Instead of thinking about the faith as transmitting a set of thoughts that have to be properly thought, we need to start conceiving of the faith as a linguistic-cultural system. Just as our culture enculturates us into a worldview formed by things like our language and our deep cultural symbols, the Christian faith is best understood as a culture and a language that connect the dots to help us understand the relationships between God, the world, and ourselves.

What makes this both interesting and challenging is that we can’t even talk about “a” worldview. Instead, we have to talk about a variety of worldviews or parts of worldviews that press themselves upon us that we have to fit together in some way that seems to make sense. Even this central lens for how we see and experience things is composite construct of a bunch of direct ways of conceiving of and valuing the world. So—a “traditional American” worldview might tell us that family is important; and that in thinking about our decisions and priorities, family should be most important. We’re fed status-oriented worldviews that tell us that what is most important is how important we are, what our title is and the size of our take-home package. Advertisements feed us a consumerist worldview telling us that our worth is equivalent to what we have and that if we have less, we’re worth-less.

To all of these messages, the Gospel offers a word of challenge and critique. Trying to figure our way through incarnate life is hard, but the call of the Gospel is the call to transform how we see, experience, and value things. What does it mean to take seriously the call to the love of God and love of neighbor? “The old self” is Paul’s shorthand for those old ways of making sense of what’s really important, the lusts that we must suppress are much less about sex and much more about our needs and insecurities for those things like money, or status, or safety, that ultimately will not and cannot give us life. As we put on the new self into which we are baptized, we are challenged to revolutionize our experience of the world, to see as God sees, to love as God loves.

Rather than a collection of doctrinal thinking points, Lindbeck’s understanding of the faith as a linguistic-cultural endeavor most clearly engages with this notion of forming a Christian worldview within the body of Christ in order to bring the body to the maturity of Christ. Now, we are formed in many ways in many places, and at many times. However, as Christians who find our primary identity in our baptism, as members of the crucified and risen Christ, and branches of the same vine, our most important and paradigmatic experiences occur when we are together. You can’t be a Christian by yourself! Furthermore, our fullest identity is found when we gather for Eucharistic worship. In the Eucharist, the disparate and scattered members of the body of Christ are held together, are re-membered, forming a physical and literal body of Christ; in the Eucharist, we are most fully who we are baptized to be in community– and participate most deeply in the mystery and promise of baptism. Within our Eucharistic worship, we are given the extraordinary opportunity to participate within the interior life of the Trinity: as the body of Christ we join with Christ in his praise of and self-offering to the Father through the Holy Spirit. What we do in worship is not just to gather together as a community, it’s not just to praise God together, it’s not just to express our identity as the gathered body of Christ, it is to make present an eschatological reality where we foreshadow the full consummation of all in all. This is our moment when we enact most clearly what the kingdom of God is.

Our corporate worship is an icon of the kingdom of God. It’s not just a moment of supreme realization, it’s also practice of our most important paradigm. Our whole life ought to be an act of worship. And, if that’s the case, it’s this glimpse of the kingdom in our worship that gives us the fundamental tools for enacting that kingdom when we’re outside of worship too.

As a result, it’s in this most central experience for us, that the full Christian worldview is best expressed and communicated. The way that worship is constructed and conducted is a presentation of our perspective of what being in the kingdom is like and shall be like. As a result, what we do in worship matters. What we see, what we hear, what we smell, what we do, shapes our understanding of what it means to be a Christian people. The Book of Common Prayer gives us the words. But ceremonial is what gives us the rest.

No matter what else goes on, the first purpose of worship is always just that; our primary priority in worship is always the worship of God. We err when we let anything get in the way of that. Our secondary purpose in worship is the formation of the people of God. Fortunately, these two priorities rarely come into conflict with one another as long as we have the order right. When our worship becomes overly didactic or overly self-congratulatory or overly penitential, this is when we need to ask if we have our priorities reversed. Proper, reverent, intentional worship of God is always primary. Having said that upfront, we can turn now to the questions and issues of formation.

We have a gift in the Book of Common Prayer. It gives us the words and the rites which foreground the values of the kingdom. Our liturgy, standing in continuity the liturgy of the historic Western church, has been crafted carefully for its formative role as well as its central doxological role. What exactly do I mean by this? Perhaps one of the clearest indicators of what we mean by the liturgical transformation of our system of values is the repetition of the song of Zechariah in morning prayer and the repetition of the song of Mary in evening prayer. Zechariah’s words give us a fundamental mission by informing us of God’s gifts. God has given us the freedom “to worship him without fear” and therefore to remain “holy and righteous in his sight all the days of our life.” Mary’s words give us a fundamental mission by informing us of the value structure of God’s kingdom.

He has mercy on those who fear him in every generation. He has shown the strength of his arm, he has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent away empty.

Our Eucharistic service with its dual emphases on proclamation of the word and a celebration of the sacrament in combination offer the mystery of God’s presence in our midst. But there’s more to worship than just the words!

Whether we are conscious of it or not, whether we intended or not, our decisions about what else occurs in worship inform our congregations about the value structures and systems of the kingdom of God. As a result, we do our ministry best and we attend to a careful and deliberate proclamation of the gospel best, when we are intentional about the ways we worship and the vision of the kingdom that we incarnate there. And this is where careful attention to ceremonial comes into play.

So – that’s my first point. Christian ministry is fundamentally about enculturating the people of God into a worldview. The Christian worldview is a vision of the world and its relationships that are structured by God’s values. Because of the central role that worship plays in our corporate identity, worship in general and Eucharistic worship in particular, likewise occupy the central role in how our communities receive and perceive the gospel of the living God.

Now, whenever I start thinking and talking about Christian ceremonial, one of my favorite conversation partners is the Rev. Dr. Percy Dearmer. Dr. Dearmer wrote quite a lot on worship and ceremonial. And always wrote with a considerable amount of vigor and conviction. I don’t agree with everything that he wrote, but I always find him thought-provoking. Although his writings come from almost a century ago, much of it remains relevant and pertinent, partly because he stands removed from some of the immediate issues of our day. In the year 1919, Dr. Dearmer gave the Bohlen Lectures at the Philadelphia Divinity School. The next year these lectures along with some additional chapters, were produced as the art of public worship. At its heart, this book is a heartfelt plea for two key necessities in Christian worship. The first is realism. Worship has to be meaningful and sensible to the people of its age. The second is beauty.

Dearmer is known for being very direct. He doesn’t pull any punches. And one of the targets of his special ire in this book, are the founders of the Church Revival movement. He writes in particular of their approach towards ceremonial:

in our own Church Revival nothing made the ritualist (as they were rather absurdly called) so angry as to be told that they like things because they were pretty, or revived old customs because they were beautiful. We could hardly sum up that instinctive dislike of beauty better than in such unconscious sentences as these of the judicious historian of The Anglican Revival Dr. Overton: [and here Dearmer cites a passage from Overton]

The real question at issue between the most thoughtful on both sides was not one of ceremonial, but of doctrine. Ritual, apart from its symbolism, is a thing of nought. It was valued by the really earnest man, not for its intrinsic beauty, but for what it taught – taught through the eye rather than through the ear, and therefore, on the Horatian principal, taught more quickly and vividly, and that especially for the poor and unlearned. [end of his quote from Overton, and Dearmer continues…]

Precisely! Nothing could be more clearly put, and this was the defense consistently made.

This infuriated Dearmer! In fact, he saw it as nothing less than of the betrayal of the identity of God. In his theology, Dearmer understood God to be the very height of truth, goodness, and beauty. He writes:

Beauty is the manifestation of the Father; and this is precisely what modern Christianity has forgotten. Goodness is also the manifestation of God – the will to goodness is the Holy Spirit; but it is not the sole manifestation, as good people have imagined; for there is yet a third which the Word reveals, and that is truth. Within these three all religion is contained – must be contained.

Dearmer refers us to the wonders of creation, to the beauty inherent in the created order. He reminds us that art is not merely decoration and instead, the search for beauty is tied deeply into the search for truth and goodness. The arts of ministry—preaching, singing, architecture—are arts, Dearmer reminds us. We can either do them well or we can do them poorly; we can either choose beauty or we can settle for whatever comes out. However, should we choose to settle for whatever comes out, we are compromising the spirit of the God who created all things wonderfully.

Dearmer doesn’t come out and say this, but in his argument for the importance of beauty in worship, he is tapping into one of the deep themes of Western philosophy. Ever since Plato’s Symposium, thinkers have recognized the interrelation between beauty, goodness, and truth. Diotima’s speech to Socrates presents a pathway beginning with a human love of beauty that reaches to a divine love of the good enacted through the virtues. The wise woman of Athens presented a pattern that has informed philosophers, theologians, and mystics for generations and, as heirs of that company, we would do well to heed her words.

Beauty, then, should be a key concern as we craft our worship. Not simply an external or an add-on, beauty is part of our central witness to who God is and to what God is like. From the most minute details of creation we can discern that God cares for beauty, and that beauty through symmetry leads us into a deeper quest for other spiritual goods.

I have to confess, that in his critique of the church revival movement, Dearmer is likewise critiquing me. I, too, am guilty of backgrounding beauty in order to foreground doctrine. And I accept his critique. On the other hand, I have two critiques of my own to offer Dearmer’s words.

The first is to note that the situation has changed. In Dearmer’s day, his struggle was the acceptance of beauty at all. The Evangelical party was in ascendance, and the Broad Church party followed them in matters of vestiture and ceremonial. Our situation in the modern Episcopal Church is a little bit different. In our context, the Broad Church party has widely adopted a plentitude of colorful vestments. However, this ecclesiastical fashion statement may occur within a void; in some cases there seems to be no recognition that these beautiful things have any import beyond their beauty. If Dearmer’s struggle with the Church Revival was that they attended to doctrine with little concern for beauty, our struggle may well be an attention to beauty with little concern for doctrine. Dearmer rightly reminds us, however, that in such cases at least the beauty is present, and witnesses silently to the glories of God.

My second critique of Dearmer is a little more substantive. I see great value in his Trinity of characteristics of God: truth and goodness and beauty. However, I believe that one of these lacks a certain precision. And I’m looking at you, beauty. Beauty is an aesthetic experience and while I agree that beauty is intrinsic to God, I believe that there is another aesthetic category that more truly and properly leads us to the heart of God.

Before I go there, let me pause and restate my second point. Following Dearmer, I too see beauty as an essential witness to the identity of God. Beauty is not an add-on or an accessory to Christian worship. Rather, it needs to be an intentional and intrinsic part of what we do when we worship. We need to look for and craft beauty into our liturgies and our ceremonies, not as an extra, but as part and parcel of our proclamation of the gospel truth. That’s point 2.

Right around the same time that Dearmer was giving his Bohlen lecture, a German theologian and student of comparative religion was also working on a book. The name of this book was Das Heilige and it would be translated into English as the Idea of the Holy. The year was 1917 and the author was Rudolf Otto. One of the issues that was directly confronting Otto was rationalism. Liberal theology was in the ascendance and thanks to Ritschel and his students the proclamation of the Christian faith was in danger of being reduced to nothing more than “morality touched with emotion.” Otto pushed back against this tendency. Not that he wasn’t a rationalist himself, but he was able to realize that a purely rational religion is missing something fundamental. Instead, he argued that religion in general and Christianity in particular must hold together both rational and nonrational elements. The subject of his book, was the nonrational aspect.

Otto begins with the word “holy” but immediately turns around and states that the modern meaning has suffered semantic drift. That is, the word no longer means what it used to; it has acquired, through familiarity, a slightly different meaning than its original referent. It is this original referent that he tries to find. The word holy has acquired too much of an ethical sense. Conventionally, the term “holy” refers to a high standard of behavior. Holiness is how someone acts. What Otto argues is that there was a more primary and original meaning that lacks the ethical element which now predominates in the word. Instead of trying to reset our understanding of the word holy, Otto chooses to give us a new word, a word that is capable of recapturing the original meaning of holy. Thus he coins the word “numinous”.

This is a brand-new word, having at its basis the Latin word numen which in classical Latin means God or divinity or divine will. It sounds kind of like “luminous” and kind of like “ominous”, and in truth has something in common with both. The numinous for Otto, is an objective characteristic – it’s a special something that a being possesses – that can be recognized because of the subjective feeling it evokes in those who experience it. A key point here is that Otto is not talking about a feeling, he’s talking about thing that causes a feeling.

In his book, Otto works through the characteristics of the numinous by means of a brief Latin phrase: mysterium tremendum et fascinans. I don’t think that I need to go through everything that he says but a brief thought or two on each of these words may prove helpful.

First, mysterium. For him, this is what Karl Barth calls the “Wholly Other,” the Entirely Other. This is the recognition that we are in the presence of something that goes beyond our everyday existence and frames of reference. Second, tremendum. This has three basic aspects to it. The word tremendum comes from the Latin base tremor meaning fear, but not quite the same fear as being afraid. English has the word “awe” that used to lay at the heart of our words awful and awesome which hit closer to his meaning then fear. It’s the awe of awesome used properly that Otto is trying to point us to. Tremendum also contains a majesty, an overpoweringness that is the experience of being in the presence of immensity. It is a fullness of power and being. Tremendum also contains an energy, urgency, and vitality. This is not something dead or static, but living, moving, and active.

As a brief aside – one of the reasons that I love the horror author H. P. Lovecraft, is that he so faithfully evokes in the depiction of his horrific elder gods like Cthulu the mysterium tremendum. This sense of divinity quite apart from any ethical quality. In fact, his creations are actually either amoral or immoral, but in these descriptions he is able to capture and convey what Otto means by the numinous better than any other author I know.

Where Otto goes in a different direction from Lovecraft, is with that second descriptor fascinans. Otto doesn’t just stop at tremendum. Where Lovecraft’s elder gods are often described as repellent, Otto uses fascinans for that characteristic of the divine that draws us to itself. This is the attraction; wonder and rapture are all connected to this fascinans. Feelings of love and grace and compassion and mercy are mingled together with the elements of the mysterious and tremendous; there is that which pushes us away by means of its grandeur and its immensity, but at the same time we are impelled towards it by awe and wonder.

Yesterday, Mother Takacs’s presentation did a wonderful job of teasing out some of the particular aspects that Otto specifically points to. As we listened to the different interpretations of the Sanctus, you could almost pick out where certain ones championed certain aspects. Just sitting there listening to those, Byrd’s Sanctus gave such a feeling of mysterium. With the upward spiraling notes on “sanctus” itself, it literally lifts your consciousness to a different place and points to the transcendent. There’s no doubt that the Macmillan Sanctus was tremendum. It really did convey that sense of a vital immensity before which your best option is full prostration. And the warmth of the Faure and the adoration of the Palestrina gave us the fascinans.

Thus, Otto uses the word numinous to capture this aspect of God which we can identify and relate to by means of this feeling that experiencing it creates within us.

If we back up a second, we notice that Otto, while being a modern rationalist in a philosophical sense, is actually conducting a wildly postmodern exercise here. In essence, Otto is confirming exactly what Lindbeck is arguing. Otto is creating a new piece of language that, by its creation, enables us to have a discrete kind of experience. He introduces a new linguistic phenomenon that helps us to better comprehend the Triune Being at the heart of our gospel proclamation.

Now, what does our identification of the numinous add to our discussion of Christian worship? I would argue that much of our ritual action grows out of prescribing direction for the human encounter with the numinous. As we look through the holy Scriptures, we can identify certain times and places that are indelibly marked by a numinous character. It is almost impossible to read the sixth chapter of Isaiah, and not understand what we mean by the numinous.

There are also some descriptions of the numinous in the Old Testament where the mysterium tremendum definitely outweighs the mysterium fascinans. When the cloud with its lightnings overshadows the top of Mount Sinai, we see the numinous aspect; when we hear the warning that any person or animal who touches the mountain must die, we are confronted by the tremendum. When the ark of the covenant is carried around the walls of Jericho leading to their collapse, we see the numinous aspect of that artifact gained by its relation to the divine; when in the sixth chapter of second Samuel the ark of the covenant strikes Uzzah dead because he reached up a hand to steady it, we are confronted by the tremendum. In the original descriptions of the garments of the priesthood in Exodus, Scripture tells us that the vestments – beautiful as they may be – are not for the sake of adornment but for the protection of the priests. Chapter 28 tells us twice with the priest must wear them lest they die. The numinous is holy, but this does not mean that it is safe. Holiness, as understood by the Scriptures, is a vital and tangible power – like an electric current. It may provide unfathomable energy, or it can kill.

So, what specifically does the numinous have to do with Christian worship? Can we, should we expect a manifestation of the numinous at every Christian worship? Well, no. We can expect it, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. The numinous is not something that we can control; it’s an aspect of God. We don’t control God. What we want to do, though, is everything in our power not to hinder the potential for the congregation to experience the presence of God. We believe that God is omnipresent; God is everywhere. But most of us lack the faculties to experience the immediate presence of God on a regular basis. Worship well-crafted offers an opportunity par excellence for us to experience the face of God. Otto does well to remind us that the numinous is not a subjective emotion that we can manipulate. We cannot manipulate the presence of God. It’s when we try to manipulate that we most fully betray our primary purpose; manipulation cannot be praise. But prayerful worship can make us more receptive to the God who is already within our midst.

Furthermore, our tradition recognizes specific vessels of the numinous. That is, there are specific objects and places within our liturgies where we recognize the presence of God and the possibility of the numinous to be particularly potent. The sacrament of the altar, the altar itself, the cross, even—to a degree—the congregation are all places where the liturgy recognizes that we have the potential to encounter the numinous.

So, that is my third point. When we consider the central characteristics of God, we should consider God to be the height of truth, goodness, and the numinous. The numinous is the otherworldly sacral energy which both frightens us and draws us into the presence of a vital, vibrant God. And it is this last element that has such a defining effect upon Christian ceremonial.

————

From these three theoreticals: the faith as worldview, our central communication of the worldview in worship; the importance of beauty in worship; and the importance of our recognition of the numinous as central to understanding God, we can begin to make a turn to the practical. There are a lot of different directions that we could go in at this point; unfortunately being limited by time, we’ll only get to go in a few of them. I’m going to make two points as suggestions, as fruitful avenues for approach. We can’t go down them all the way, but I can at least show you where they are.

First off, in light of these principles, I think it’s useful to revisit some of the old arguments, and see where and how they make sense now. One of these is environment. When we come at the question of environment and the vestments by way of a worldview, and worldview as a way of proclaiming and enculturating the kingdom of God, we can see what we do and what the other choices are, in a new light. So for the sake of argument, let’s consider two options next one another. On one hand we have a stereotypical Anglo-Catholic setting and service; on the other hand we have a stereotypical evangelical mega-church setting and service. (My goal here isn’t to put down either one of them—it’s to draw some very big-brush comparisons…)

Our overall impression of the Anglo-Catholic service is that we are encountering things that are initially unfamiliar. In comparison with other buildings, the Gothic church has an odd shape and layout. The ministers are wearing strange clothes. The place is outfitted with crucifixes and candles and thuribles and a bunch of other things you normally only find in a goth shop. The music is played on old instruments. The language and terminology may be unfamiliar; the internal logic of the rite isn’t similar to other meetings were used to experiencing. By way of contrast, the evangelical mega-church does everything it can to feel familiar. The room looks like it may well be a regular auditorium with stadium style seating and potted plants. The ministers are dressed in street clothes and tattoos. They’ve got guitars and a drum kit. Both the language and internal logic of the rite are what you might find in a typical pop concert.

Now – what do these two environments communicate about the worldview that they are expressing? About the proclamation of the gospel in relation to the modern secular culture? The way I read it, the Anglo-Catholic service is foregrounding a theology of the transcendent. The environment is fundamentally and intentionally discontinuous from contemporary culture. The message is that the values and world of the gospel are likewise discontinuous from our everyday secular world. A transformation is required in order to cleave to the mind of Christ. To me, it’s a visual reminder of Isaiah’s words: my ways are not your ways, my thoughts are not your thoughts. Some people will tell us that we’re not being accessible. That’s not how I’d frame it. I’d rather say that we’re bearing witness to a mystery, and inviting people to come and learn about that mystery with us.

The way I read the evangelical mega-church environment, it foregrounds a theology of immanence. This environment is fundamentally continuous with contemporary culture – but with a twist. The message is that the values and world of the gospel can be seen from here, we just may not be there yet. A tweak is what’s needed. To me, it’s a reminder that God is in our very midst. This is accessible, it’s a kissing cousin with modern culture—but my concern is, where and how is the line being drawn? Where is the Gospel demand to something new, something radical?

Now, this is not to say that either one of them have a lock on transcendence or immanence. It’s a matter of emphasis, but also a legitimate difference of theology. We have chosen a different way.

Coming from the perspective of a worldview, understanding our church environment as a culture that is different from but in relation to the secular culture helps us frame some of our arguments in new ways. At one very simple level, you’re either doing things in line with contemporary secular culture, or you’re not. Take, for example, the classic vestments debate. If you’ve been anywhere around liturgical discussions in the church, then at some point or other you’ve no doubt heard one or more arguments about the place and nature of vestments. Should clergy wear street clothes, whether formal or not, or they should wear some sort of sacred vestiture. Personally, I see this as one of the – literally – most visible representations of the relationship between church culture and secular culture. I mean, it’s one of the first things I see and notice about a service after the building.

Especially since Vatican II and the liturgical renewal movement, there is been renewed interest in this discussion, especially as it relates to the fourth century, the 14th century, and the 17th century. As a result, you’ll hear people making arguments that we ought to be wearing fourth century street clothes instead of 14th century dress clothes, or 17th century church clothes. Because, “the fourth century is closer to the original; it’s a return to our origins”. From my perspective, this argument doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The street clothes question is a modern one: you are either wearing “normal” clothes, or you’re wearing “weird” clothes. Justifying weird clothes by insisting that they are historical street clothes misses the point! The street clothes ship has already sailed. You’ve already made the decision to look outwardly like the current culture, or you’ve made the decision to outwardly not look like the current culture. If the decision has been made to not look like the current culture, then other questions of aesthetics and simplicity versus ornamentation should come into play. Choosing to model yourself upon a particular century is a theological position, but it’s separate from the street clothes position.

So, seeing the construction of our religious culture as a deliberate response to our surrounding culture has important implications for the ways we proclaim the gospel and for what that gospel means. Classic Anglo-Catholic patterns suggest that God and God’s ways are something that have an identity and integrity. We are called to shape ourselves to fit the liturgy .If we try to do things the other way round, we risk missing or mistaking something very important.

We do have to be sensitivity to questions of accessibility. We do have to do everything in our power to assist the strangers and the newcomers to share in our vision of the kingdom. But is there only one way to do that? Do we welcome them as we were welcomed if our means of doing it is to offer them a diminished vision?

 

To head off in a different direction now, I’d like to return to the notion of the numinous and how our church culture relates itself to it. Let’s think about customaries for a moment. The customary is, at its simplest, the set of stage directions for who does what when. I tend to encounter customaries either as written documents, or sets of verbal instructions that I make into written documents. This way of looking at them and thinking about them is very linear. First we do this, then we do that, then we genuflect, then we stand up, then we head up the stairs and kiss the altar, and so on and so forth. It’s one thing then another thing than another thing. Learning a customary, I find myself ticking items off in my head as I go, and sometimes wondering if I forgot a genuflection, or a nod, or some other such thing.

What would happen if we changed our whole paradigm? What would happened if we were able to break out of list mode altogether?

The majority of liturgical actions performed by the congregation and the altar party in a Eucharist can be broken down by considering three questions:

  • How do we signify what is holy – that which has the capacity to contain and transmit the numinous?
  • How do we behave towards God in the presence of the holy—what are the gestures of respect that we use towards vessels of the numinous?
  • How do we behave towards one another in the presence of the holy—what are the gestures of respect that we use towards one another as we recognize one another as fellow creatures in the image of God and beloved of God?

What we took the list of what a certain person does, and we asked it this question: how does this set of actions and gestures line out for us a geography of the sacred? Liturgical actions and gestures tend to have triggers—they tend to be in response to moving to or through certain places, or when we hear or say certain words… What are the triggers? How do they define space as that participant moves through the physical space. What places and times are we identifying as particular potential for the presence of the numinous? How do our gestures or actions show respect to that numinous potential? If we were to look across all of the lists for a given altar party, do they all describe the same geography?

You know how these lists tend to be compiled—an idiosyncratic server may have picked up certain things from a certain former parish, or perhaps a past rector has left a strong stamp on the liturgy that is observed by some and not the others. Is there an internal consistency to the sacred geographies described by the different lists? To what degree has the congregation picked up on these geographies and participate within them?

Does our ceremonial send mixed messages about who and what we are and about how we act and react in the presence of the numinous? Is there a logic and a coherence to our proclamation that gives a vision for how we behave in the face of the numinous yet does not oversimply, dumb-down or otherwise squelch the rich and diverse ways that we experience and react to God in our midst?

When we start asking questions about sacred geography some practices make instinctive sense. I’m about to enter the nave—it’s a holy place. Perhaps a bit of purification might be nice—oh, look a holy water basin so that, as I cross myself with water, I remember the holiness infused within me at my Baptism…  What aspects of sacred geography are immediately obvious? What aspects are things that we have a responsibility to share with our congregations, place where we have an important teaching role in connecting the dots? What aspects are best left as mysteries to be experienced rather than problems to be explained?

Good ceremonial can do a lot. Good ceremonial can communicate a lot on its own about the vision of the kingdom of God that we are seeking to enculturate. But it can’t do it all. You have an obligation to name the values, to identify the practices, to proclaim with words what the liturgy teaches with deeds. At the end of the day, how we encounter the numinous within the liturgy, presents a paradigm for how we encounter the numinous outside the liturgy. It teaches what to look for, what to feel for, and the clues for recognize the sacred presence in things expected and unexpected.

That’s my final point: It’s not enough to be intentional about the way we design things. It’s not enough to be intentional about how we construct the environments of our liturgies. We have to connect the dots. We have to make sure that our messages and meanings about the gospel, the holy, are sinking in. Let me end by giving you two little exercises you can do at home to see how things are going:

First – it’s worth taking a look to see how your servers, your altar guild, yourself, and other folks treat the vessels after the services are over. Do they treat them like sacred things worthy of respect, or do they handle them carelessly, like something to be tossed around? It’s one thing to treat them with reverence during the service, when everyone’s watching, but what happens when it’s over?

Second – it’s worth taking a look to see how your servers, your altar guild, yourself, and other folks treat the people at coffee hour. Do they treat them like sacred things worthy of respect, or do they handle them carelessly, like something to be tossed around? The difference between the two is clear: the vessels no longer have the blessed sacrament within them. The people at coffee hour – do.

Dearmer’s Grand Rant

One of my chief conversation partners as I work on my presentation for the Society of Catholic Priests is Percy Dearmer’s Art of Public Worship. I’m about halfway through editing the text as a Kindle file and will be saying more about it as it becomes available. However, I couldn’t help but share this bit where Blessed Percy draws together the threads of ceremonial, theology, and denominational relations in one big argument. I wouldn’t go all the way with him, here, but he certainly makes a passionate case:

For the Church does need guidance, leadership, education; otherwise the silly people will continue to stamp the whole Church with their diverse follies, and the great mass of moderate men will continue to think that the safe and moderate thing is to combine the mistakes of both sides. We have never realized the seriousness of ceremonial, the need of sound knowledge, of aesthetic understanding, of careful thought. And ceremonial, as I have suggested, is of the utmost importance, because worship must express itself in action. You can carry off an almost unlimited amount of inadequate ritual by means of ceremonial, you can hide your ritual behind your ceremonial, as the Latin and Eastern Churches so largely do; but you cannot undo the harm of a bad ceremonial. If our Church is to be at one moment a weak imitation of Geneva or Berlin, at another of Cologne or Cork, or an illogical combination of such shadows, she can have no future. As it is, the Anglican Church is still regarded all over the Continent, from Vigo to Vladivostok, as a mere variety of Lutheranism; while a small section of her clergy are hated by the general public of America and Britain as imitators of Rome, and win the amused contempt of Roman Catholics for their pains. Yet what the Continent of Europe wants, what the whole world is blindly groping for, is what we can offer, what we have always stood for — a reasonable, free, and evangelical Catholicism. Mere Protestantism is shrivelling and weak in Europe, and its deep moral failure in the country of its birth at the very outset of the Great War will be difficult to survive; but Vaticanism, as Loisy has been explaining in France,[i] has also failed morally. Yet the people of Christendom do still want to be Christian, if only they could see that there is another way open to them besides those two alternatives: they think that they must either be Papist or Protestant, and the modern world will not be either; they do not know that it is possible to keep all that is true and beautiful in traditional Christianity, and that there is a more fruitful course open to intelligent men than anti-clericalism or indifferentism. It was the duty of the Anglican Church to make this clear to the whole world, standing, with the Churches of the East, for free, national, and federated Catholicism; and she has hitherto failed, mainly because she has not proclaimed her message in the only language that the whole world can read — a consistent, beautiful, and expressive ceremonial. She has not even been intelligible to her own children. Her ministers have disregarded her rules, and marred her beauty; her members have regarded her as a compromise or a dim reflection of something else. But people will never rally to an imitation, they will never be inspired by a compromise. The Anglican Church could not exist if she had no mind of her own, and would not deserve to exist. She has a mind of her own, and the principles which she has never ceased to maintain are those which alone can make Christianity possible in the future as anything more than a vague sentiment. If by the example of her public worship all over the world she can now show herself for what she is, she will win, and win, and win all along the line; and, proclaiming by her strenuous beauty the undying strength of the old Christian tradition, she will help the peoples of the other Churches to that reconstruction which must surely come if they also are to flourish in the new age.

[i] [Ed.: Alfred Loisy was a French Roman Catholic priest who argued on behalf of biblical criticism and a more modern approach to theology. He was excommunicated by Pius X in 1908 for Modernism.]

The Presence of God: Immanence and Transcendence

When we think about the “presence of God” or “the holy” or “the sacred” in the world, I think that there are two main directions from which we can approach it that generally fall under the rubrics of immanence and transcendence.

The transcendent tends to identify God as “out there” or normally distant and God reveals himself to us through big events and moments. The immanent tends to identify God as “in here” and intimately related to us, present in every moment and action, and thought—one of my mentors used to regularly weave into prayers Tennyson’s phrase “Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.”

Another way that this gets framed is where do we find God: in big church events or in the commonplace action of everyday life ( the second a view that heartily believes that ironic scare quotes are needed in the phrase “secular” life).

These two positions tended to be pitted against one another. I don’t think that you can authentically read Scripture and the Tradition without seeing that both revealed wisdom and spiritual learning affirm this to be both/and not an either/or. Heck–it’s hard to read far in the psalter without both things being affirmed.

The preferable way to see it is as a spectrum. Immanence and transcendence take their sides but there’s a healthy relationship between the two. On the ends of the spectrum would be pantheism and (a little closer in) panentheism for immanence and gnosticism and (a little closer in) docetism for transcendence.

At this point, however, is where I’ve got to stop or at least pause. This is as far as Ican go before I have to consider exactly what kind of discussion we’re having and why. Where I get irritated and edgy is when people try to make grand statements about these two terms on some sort of dogmatic level. As I’ve said before, I’m not a dogmatic or systematic theologian. I simply don’t have the tools to wrestle with these terms on an abstract basis. I have no choice but to come at it from the direction of ascetical theology. Thus, the way that I have to frame the issue is something like this:

God is both immanent and transcendent; to base a relationship with a too-exclusively immanent or transcendent deity is to mischaracterize the relationship. If one of the goals of the spiritual life is to cultivate a habitual awareness of the presence of God, what are the disciplines needed to cultivate an openness to the presence of God and what is the relationship between them? I.e., do we start with disciplines of transcendence to learn to recognize God in the big moments so that we can recognize him in the small? or do we begin with disciplines of immanence in order to comprehend and affirm the qualities of God that also appear in the transcendent moments? The true answer (once again) being a balance of the two, are there ways that the balance tends to shift through a “typical” spiritual life—and in recognizing that there’s little “typical” in a relationship with the Living God, to what degree is this balance informed by a given person’s temperament and dispositions?

I do believe that, largely speaking, some people are wired more towards an immanent understanding while others are wired for a transcendent understanding. In a marketplace of religions like we have now in post-Constantinian America, I suspect that some of our inter- and intra-denominational groupings may reflect certain preferences one way or another (among other sorting factors) and are reflected in certain worship styles and practices. Thus—as in this piece in an earlier attempt to fool around with these issues—I think that the guitars vs. chant debate is deeply related to this topic.

I think it’s fair to say that your standard Anglo-Catholic Mass foregrounds transcendence. The environment created by the vestments, the music, the candles, the odd liturgical objects we favor presents a cultural experience that is profoundly different from our everyday cultural experiences. (By contrast, a potted-plant concert hall with a guitar-wielding shirt-sleeved and goateed praise team leader presents a cultural experience that is profoundly familiar to our everyday life.) However, Anglo-Catholic spirituality doesn’t stop at the end of Mass, either. As Fr. Gerth always reminds his herd of servers in the sacristy on the really big feast days, these services have meaning not by themselves but in relation to all of the other, lower, simpler Masses and Offices that fill out our daily/weekly/monthly/yearly round.

So, to begin to head in the direction of an answer, I’m going to suggest that contemporary Anglo-Catholic practice foregrounds disciplines of transcendence through a focus on God’s particular presence in the sacraments, the deliberate cultivation of a transcendent religious culture, and emphasizing distinctions between sacred (space, objects, people [sometimes running to the crazy extreme]) and the secular.  A lively Anglo-Catholic spirituality needs to supplement this with disciplines of immanence like breath prayers and practices of the presence of God (a la Br. Lawrence and others).

I’m thinking out loud here—does this make sense? Thoughts?

I’m feeling the need to go back to Thornton and Underhill to see if/how they approach this…

 

Random Thought on Customaries

I had a random thought this morning at Mass concerning customaries (you know, the list of what a body does when during the service…).

Most customaries come at things from the “descriptive” perspective. That is, they list out what you see the person doing: “Walk from here to there in such a way. Genuflect. Then stand in that place…” In the past when I’ve worked on memorizing a new customary, one of the harder parts was remembering when to throw in various gestures or movements like genuflections, bowings, crossings, etc.

What tends to make this more difficult is that a lot of customaries were created in a descriptive fashion. That is, there was a way that things had “always” been done and in order to keep it that way and to train the newbies, someone wrote down a description what they did—often without reference to what the other folks on/around the altar were doing—and it became “official.”

What’s the problem with this?

Well, if the various versions for the various folks aren’t harmonized you can have different folks doing the same things at different times and, especially if they’re standing right next to each other, that can appear a bit odd… (For instance, if the deacon and the priest standing at the front side-by-side cross themselves at different times at the end of the Gloria.) The real issue, though, is that you’ve got a bigger and deeper problem if you having different folks doing the same things for different reasons.

From my perspective, ceremonial actions shouldn’t happen at random or happenstance; they should have specific “triggers.” The three key triggers that fire-off or initiate a ceremonial action should either be words, motion to or through a place, or an object.

If you look at a good descriptive customary, you should start to see patterns, an internal logic, that will lead you to prescriptive principles about when and why certain things are done. I.e., genuflect when entering or exiting the sanctuary (the space enclosed by the altar rail or rood screen), profound bow at mention of the three persons of the Trinity, and so forth.

Here’s the thing, though: if we start laying out the prescriptive principles, that’s when we start getting into the hard work of liturgical thinking. When we start laying out the prescriptive principles, we realize that we’re starting to bring to a conscious level a practical theology of the holy. That is,  ritual gestures are triggered when we hear holy words, when enter or leave holy space, or engage holy objects. If our prescriptive principles are clear and coherent then they inform us—or challenge us—to think about what we think about the nature of the sacred: what is holy and what is profane, how we show respect for the holy, how the holy is kept distinct from the profane.  Simple reflection on what things shouldn’t been done or brought into what parts of the church, how the altarware should be handled both in and out of the service (is there a difference? should there be?) has the potential to run us into some complicated spiritual and theological reflection about our beliefs on the imminence and transcendence of God, about how we think about orders of ministry, and such.

Is the nave of the church an innately more holy space than the narthex? Is the sanctuary inherently more holy than the nave? Who can handle the altarware and does what they wear when doing so matter?

When you get right down to it, this avenue of exploration will eventually lead us to the key root question: how does God who is fundamentally Other and distinct from creation choose to interact in and with our earthly reality—and how does that impact how we conduct our worship?

On Doxology

I wanted to spend a few moments considering the point at the end of the last post, specifically the model of liturgical professionalism that arose throughout the medieval period, its organization in cathedral structures in the Late Sarum period, and its continuation in some contemporary practices of regular but low-attendance parish services like daily masses or the public Daily Office.

I have to begin by identifying what I understand to be part of the reluctance or resistance to this system. Jumping back to my own “proper” field for a moment, I want to steal some theory from a recent work, Among the Gentiles by Luke Timothy Johnson. (If you are interested in the New Testament or in the Early Church this should definitely be on your reading list! This is Johnson the scholar at his best—taking his exhaustive knowledge of Greco-Roman religious literature and condensing it into a brilliant synthesis, then using it to shed new light on Jewish and early Christian texts.) Based on his work with the sources, Johnson identifies four main non-exclusive ways of being religious in the Greco-Roman milieu:

  • A: the way of participation in divine benefits
  • B: the way of moral transformation
  • C: the way of transcending the world
  • D: the way of stabilizing the world

In his application of this synthesis to the New Testament and early Christianity, he finds that the New Testament emphasizes most strongly types A and B. With legitimation of the Church, the post-Constantinian writings seem to make a shift to A and D. (Particularly in the sense that D can be seen as the “supply side” of A—the benefits come through the ritual process and priestcraft of D.) He suggests in a concluding chapter that many of the Reformation movements were strongly of type B and were reacting to the types A and D of late medieval Catholicism and that some of our own Anglican struggles between the Puritans and the High Churchmen concerned appropriate levels of B and D in our own body.

And that’s where I’d identify some of the current discomfort—my own and Isaac’s: the system of endowed choirs and certain groups of professionals doing liturgy without the conscious and active participation of the majority of the community (a definite type D way of doing religion) affronts some of our type B inclinations. That is, if we’re not being edified or transformed, is this system a legitimate expression of the faith we hold?

I want to argue that is legitimate, and worth doing and supporting in our present situation.

God does not need our prayers and liturgies. God is God without them. The prayers and liturgies are for our benefit—but benefit and edification are not always the same thing.

The Morning Offices of the Western Church are, to me, our clearest documents of purpose. Mat(t)ins begins thus: Open thou our lips, O Lord/And our mouth shall proclaim thy praise. Then the Venite itself issues a call to praise God as the One who holds all creation in being and the One who guides his people as a flock. The festal Te Deum offers us a doxological perspective of the created order, showing us our place as beings most fully alive when oriented with the rest of creation in its uncorrupt state towards and in praise of God. Finally the ultimate Lauds psalms (from which the Office earns its appellation) echo and expand the Te Deum.

There are two reasons that we praise. The first is because we are creatures offering the praise due our Creator. As made beings, we owe our existence to the One who made us and who should be praised for it. The second is thanks to our Baptism: in our Baptism we are consciously and intentionally joined to and made aware of our membership within the Body of Christ. We become conscious participants within the life of God. Within these our boundaries our praises take on a deeper and greater valence—we participate in the internal dialogue of the Trinity. Expressed most perfectly in the Eucharist, we as the divided members of the Body of Christ come together as part of the eschatological Body of Christ who offers his own self and praises to God the Father in and through the Holy Spirit.

Now—creation continues without our praise; the dialogue of the Trinity continues without us. However, we as individuals and as a community most clearly express our nature when we are oriented in praise towards God.

Paul calls us to “pray without ceasing.” To pray without ceasing is to be in constant awareness and embodiment of life in contact with God. It is to live the praise of God in all of our actions, proclaiming through daily virtues the victory of God in Christ and the triumph of love and light over darkness, hatred, and all the forces that seek to corrupt the works of God. It is for us to recall our right mind—for the Body of Christ to be directed by the Mind of Christ. (That there would be my own type B inclinations coming up to the surface…)

While this is our goal, we fall short of its embodiment. While Anglican spirituality as laid out by Martin Thornton in English Spirituality gives us the central tools to direct us in this way—formal periodic liturgies in combination with habitual prayer of recollection—as individuals in the world we will fail to reach our aspirations while on this side of the veil. Thanks be to God, however, that we are not alone in this task. I think not only of the Te Deum but of its paraphrase in the hymn “Holy God we praise thy name” where, in Walworth’s words, “And from morn to set of sun/Through the Church the song goes on.”

We are members of the Body of Christ. And one of the ways that this is expressed locally is that we are members of a liturgical community. In our corporate nature, the living organism in which we subsist can more completely embody prayer without ceasing than any of its constituent members apart from the whole. We are just starting up public daily Evening Prayer at our parish. Some days it’s just two of us. Other days it’s five or six (when M and I and the girls can be there; G insists on doing one of the Scripture readings; H’s task—since she’s still learning to read—is to start the Lord’s Prayer). As our priest said when announcing the effort at church, we’re doing corporately and publicly what the rest of us should be doing individually at home. When it may just be the two of us—or even one solitary person—standing in the choir of the cold sanctuary, we are indicating our community’s commitment to a corporate liturgical life and the hope and promise of a life turned towards God. It doesn’t mean that we’re succeeding, that we’re meeting Paul’s challenge of praying without ceasing. What it does means is that we are making a public proclamation that the effort is worth doing, that we recognize that a life of praise is one of the central aspects of the Christian life.

The medieval system with its endowed cathedral choirs was a corporate social expression of this ideal. Public monies supported public prayer which offered a public encouragement to a life of prayer. As members of a larger organism we can look to those edifices and to the services held at our own parishes in our absence and know that some are praying even when we cannot. The services are to and for our benefit—not solely through the edification of the words uttered and understood, but through the example they enact of the life to which we are called.

That’s where I’ll stop for now, but there’s more to be said here. In particular there’s quite a bit to be said about the early monastic concept of the resurrection life being patterned upon the angelic life, with the angelic life being primarily defined by the ceaseless praise of the beings around the throne as presented in Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Revelation, but at the moment I have neither the time nor the brain cells to give that topic the treatment it deserves.

American Sarum: Monday Morning

Session 7: Panel Discussion

This session was a discussion with four panelists and the occasional addition of a fifth. The panelists were:

  • Bishop Whitmore (BW)
  • Canon Jeremy Davies (JD)
  • Dr. Allan Doig (AD)
  • Dr. John Harper (JH)

Fr. Cody Unterseher (CU) also addressed a few of the questions. I sat with my laptop and typed like crazy. I won’t pretend to have recorded everything, but I think I hit the high points. So—here’s my record of the proceedings.

? (me): From my perspective, we’re looking at liturgy from the wrong way around if we don’t start with theology. That is, liturgy and ceremonial is the kinetic expression of a community’s theological commitments. How would you encapsulate the theology that drives an English/Sarum Use?

BW: Issue is not how has it gone, but what will you do next? The gap between the boomer generation and the next two is the biggest that has ever existed. Boomers want things to be free—Gen Xers and millennials are interested in order. They’re more traditional. They’re more interested in the experience of the worship. Statistics show us that the RC is the fastest growing church; the fastest growing liturgical movement there is the return to Latin movement.

AD: The sense of integration; the way that within the architecture everything has to go with the grain and be integrated. All of the symbolism coordinated allow a rich and dense and layered language with which to express the theology being working out in the congregation. The architecture, the deliberate use of what is there, adjustments can be made to employ that linguistic system you’re developing because there are some things you just can’t express.

JD: There are principles which are quite important—the principles cut across the party boundaries. One of things about John Harper’s presentation is that we’re moving away from text . The preparation and presentation are important as well, especially the use of the senses. That gets the liturgy off the page. What works for people in the performance/apprehension of worship is when all the senses are engaged. Tried to rediscover that at Salisbury. The cathedral had been turned into an auditorium, we’ve moved the chairs out as they weren’t there in the medieval period—the rite gave a structure to the shape. The experience of the ornamented space—the texture. The sense of moving across thresholds and mystery. There are places to go. Moving, being enticed, bit by bit beyond where we are—it’s a way of enfleshing the theology.

JH: The mere fact that we’re doing this research project with the *experience* of worship is critical. We may have a better shaping of the questions about the experience of medieval worship by doing it however inadequately. 20-30 years ago everyone was seeking authenticity. They realized pretty quickly that you couldn’t recapture historical authenticity. But readings of the texts grounded in historical principles is better than not. We are God’s people in the now. I’m conscious of how much my understanding changes of what’s going on—a pointer from yesterday: the distinction between a liturgy that uses the music of its time and a liturgy like Dearmer who was working with Ralph Van Williams in the English Hymnal . Plainsong was intended by those editors as the congregational music. In 1549 we inherit the liturgy as being simplified, our theology of liturgy and music is the least developed.

?: Do we sometimes presuppose a style of music when we envision a liturgy; what’s the place of guitar music and gospel?

JH: In designing the program that we conduct at the University, I wanted to put the underpinning principles back for leaders of worship and liturgy. We had three strands: ministry and worship, music and worship, and the applied. My starting point is that liturgy without a single note sounded is already music. It’s about the interplay between silence and sound. A said service still has the big rhythms. Without that underlying understanding of the liturgy as a whole you’ve missed something.  If it doesn’t make the people pray better, then you’re doing something wrong. Dropping things in to please certain groups is the wrong way to go.

?: The problem is not just the under 30s but the over 30s—they want to be entertained. How do we move them from there to this?

BW: People only do what they know how to do. We know entertainment. The way they unlearn it is that someone has to teach them. One of our difficulties is that we have not embraced our teaching role. In the ordination rite we ask only two things: pastors and teachers. We have yet to embrace that. The parish priest has to embrace the rabbinic role in the community. You have to start with the experience and then go to the theory. We desperately need to recapture the teaching ministry. What we do in worship has to be tied into the teaching ministry of the church. I don’t like how we separate music and liturgy into two different things—they’re two parts of the same thing.

? (Lizette Larson-Miller): The growing tendency in TEC is to minimize training of clergy. I come from the disestablished west coast where most clergy have only been Episcopalians for only a few years. We have to give them the ethos and training very quickly. Putting the Sarum use in the context of a pluralistic society and church; how do we take an adaptation of an inculturated tradition and put it in the place of a multicultural situation?

BW: We need to take the Dr. Phil approach to constructive theology—how’s that working for you? (thumbs down). The way to go forward is to go backward. We have to reach into our past to pull out what works and put it back in place. We have to ask some honest hard questions—for the young clergy in the room, in 10, 20 years, most of us will be dead—it’ll be your church. You’ll be the bishops. You have the opportunity starting now to transform the church and make it something that will help the religious experience of people all over. If we just keep doing what we’re doing we’ll be part of a small “emergent” church. We have to look past the latest theological fads and draw on the past in a reasoned way. This is about the incarnation. We have a core set of doctrines. For us it’s incarnation: the coming of flesh makes a difference. Bringing the tradition into the present and making it live makes all the difference.

AG: the liturgy and all that goes with it is language. If the liturgy is the embodied preaching of the church we’re never just saying one thing. We’re expressing and working towards a whole range of things. There will be a core that remains the same, but it reaches in a lot of … Sarum doesn’t just have one thing to provide.

JD: When I was being trained at Cambridge in my sermon class, a preacher said, “But I’m not a theologian…” The principal completely lost his temper—if you’re not a theologian you shouldn’t be a priest! There is a range of systematic theologies on the Continent and America—England doesn’t really have one and has to borrow it. We can’t escape from systematic to make it up as you go. Theology came alive when I went into an east end parish. Practicalities and aesthetics are part of it, but there’s an education formation that’s part of it. When we introduced Common Worship at Salisbury, we decided there was no point in a consultation—we did it for 6 months, then had a presentation on why and articulate the principles under the change. Then we reshaped the liturgy around the constructive ideas produced by that forum. It’s a theological process as much as anything else.

JH: I take a different take. Many musicians are involved with church because that’s how they’re part of church. As a practical thing, I live on Anglesey. It’s an island of 400 square miles, mostly smaller communities. We have 70 Anglican churches. The quota for stipendiary ministry is 9 as a foreseeable maximum. One thing that the church in Wales is trying to address is the priesthood of all believers and how the laity will have to be formed to keep the churches open if we’re going to. Where is the teaching that lay musicians are receiving? You may be lucky to have a liturgy teacher on staff and they’re usually scholarly rather than practical. To take the cultural thing, we face it because we’re a bilingual church. One of the most painful things for me is when a well-known hymn comes up in Welsh and I can’t understand it. Or I’m playing a hymn I can’t understand. We’ve gone overboard with the gathered community/circle thing. It doesn’t address the individual who wants to sit behind the pillar. Nor does it deal with the theology of where the choir belongs—and a choir is like its own church. When do you make church in the Thursday evening when you come together to practice? One of the things about the service this afternoon is the freedom you have to engage or not engage in the service. The choir and the priests take the responsibility of making sure the flow of the worship goes forward give the laity a freedom to engage in a variety of ways. People will come and go and be touched or not touched but we have the job to just keep doing it. Just sustaining it is important.

?: (Fr. Parker): There are several elephants in the room—one that Dearmer addressed was the lawlessness of the clergy and musicians and what they were doing in church. The Parson’s Handbook has a good deal to say about following the rubrics. Lizette’s question was the most pertinent. The answer has to relate to how we relate to authority and tradition in the church. That has to be sustained. In America the BCP is no longer Common Prayer—rubrics are generally disregarded except when it’s convenient. You do what seems best. To have common worship, you have to agree on what’s common. The other is the Reformation. The BCP is the filter through which Sarum had to come—we don’t have that. By what authority and how do we make a common life in a pluralistic society?

JD: Great question—no clear answer. One of the virtues of Common Worship is that it is fairly common. There has been an ecumenical drawing together within the COE. There was a huge change after Vatican II. There has been a convergence. How and whether one should deal with aberrant practice is a question. I always go to the bishop and ask him—that’s one way to deal with it. Bishops also have a responsibility for the commonality of the bishop. (Depending on the bishop…)

JH: I could have talked about the Reformation more. Last night we heard the musicians’ response to the Reformation. Mundy’s response—priest was the third son of the Duke of Northumbria. You see them responding and taking out the altars and reducing the spending on liturgy in 1551. The parish priest also made sure all the vestments had been put in Westminister and he collected them back at Mary’s reign. Worchester flip-flopped its chancel over the Marian reign. I think of our own recent changes. Last night was mostly chapel royal—the Byrd preces with the chant still there. The continuities are there. There was a respect for the theological things but you also see the syllabic setting of the evening hymn. As for what happens in 1559, there’s article by Robert Barrows—best musicologist alive—on the Elizabethan settlement . Every musician should know Queen Elizabeth’s injunctions on the place of music from 1559. Only words within the BCP should be sung or said at MP/EP; what sounded in the music should be plain and distinct. Respect for the authority of the book! That stays in the COE until the 19th century. When hymns are introduced in 1820 by the first priest who dared to do so, his congregation took him to court for it. I grew up in a MP/EP parish where you sing the hymns before and after the service and on either side of the sermon.

BW: Something about authority that I learned from the army. Once you’ve been given authority it has to be exercised properly. By virtue of ordination vows we’re under authority—if those who have it don’t exercise it, that’s their problem. Everything done here has the authority of the bishop. We still struggle with authority. If I’m not willing to be obedient it doesn’t matter how much authority is in the system.

? (Mark): Thinking again about words and language our Prayer Book offers two different linguistic rites. Should there be a place for the traditional liturgical language in our current idiom? What’s the place of traditional language going forward?

BW: Since we have one authorized BCP, yes. I don’t see prayer book revision anywhere on the horizon. [general applause at this point. It may have started somewhere near us…] Most people in the House of Bishops were priests who had to implement the 79 BCP. We don’t have the will to do it now. There has to be a generational turnover in the HOB. Resolution in 2003 to change the BCP was struck down by 80% in the HOB. We will eventually have to revise the prayer book. Liturgy lives by adapting it to where you are. Be a willing participant. But we’re safe for a while.

?: If the church is not at a point to revise the BCP, how can we revise the hymnal?

BW: I don’t know, I didn’t vote for it. Remember, we authorized a study to see if revision should go forward.  Whatever happen will happen in the HOB first. The HOB actually does understand the relation between liturgy and music.

? (BW): how do you recognize the difference between Sarum and Roman Rite?

JH: Speaking before 1500, I answer this way… In going to the Roman Mass, I know what’s going to happen in which order even if I don’t know the language. If you had travelled through Europe, you’d be able to follow just fine. I wonder if there’s some way that local practice can also share in the broader continuity.

?: Flannery O’ Conner critiques Southern Baptist culture in her letters—it’s [worship is] not about us. We all have to make choices in shaping liturgy and music. How do you make the choices to make sure it’s not about personal choice and preference?

JD: I’ve been there for 25 years and that helps. I’ve built up a rapport with the congregation and with wider congregations. Building up over time trust builds too. You get a way of listening to what people say Liturgy is also ministering on all sorts of levels. There’s a lot of formal but also informal discussion with the staff as music and liturgy work in the same space at the cathedral. We’ve also had to find ways through committees to widen that conversation. There’s partly the discipline; it’s not just about choosing an appropriate text but looking at the  texture as well. 16th century polyphony has a richness but is unaccompanied—it presents a texture about Advent, giving the feel of the season, feast. I like to have French music during Epiphany because the 20th century French had an extraordinary sense of liturgical sensibility in music. It captures the mystery.

CU: On the Sarum—after Trent there was a straightening process that put an Italian Baroque aesthetic on all of Europe. Medieval England was a pick and choose game. There are some practical aesthetic markers. Rome uses 6 candles; EU uses 2. Riddels and side-posts. These are found across  continental diocesan uses but Dearmer connected these with an EU in contrast to the Italian Baroque style.

?: Sarum blue—isn’t it just faded purple?

JH: No. One of the thing we’re currently doing is a searchable version of the Sarum medieval customary. There’ll be six Latin texts. With 6 English translations. In the register of St Osmund. There is a specification of color. Blue is signaled there as one of the colors. Purple is a royal dye.

?: What is characteristically different between the Roman and the Sarum Use?

JH: First a defensive question—liturgists and liturgical theologians are primarily interested in the first hundred years of liturgy. Not the Medieval. There’s a big hole about what we read. I wouldn’t dare to write that book that I wrote 20 years ago.  There’s a study of 400 churches over 400 years in one county to look at how the churches changed and how the theologies changed there that has to be grasped. Dick Pfaff’s book on late medieval feasts—do get it. One of our students is working on the theology of the late medieval Jesus Mass. Rededication of monastic cathedrals were to Jesus—Christchurch and then subsidiary saints.

?: Atonement theology has covered the Incarnation piece so heavily, when will Anglican teachers formulate liturgies that talk about and lift up the incarnation and tone down the Atonement?

BW: You did point out one of the theological difference between Sarum and Roman. One of the core doctrines of the Roman church is about the atonement. That’s not core for us (?) the way we worship doesn’t flow from the doctrine of the atonement. Being raised Roman and going through a Roman seminary, I don’t hear the strands of atonement sounding for us the way it does there. We hear the strands differently because we start from a different perspective. The uniqueness of our view flows from our particular perspective and history. I don’t know when we’ll get to our incarnational root but we’re going in the right direction.

JD: There isn’t just one doctrine of atonement. I don’t think we should think in terms of minimizing it, but putting it in context. In the Cranmer prayerbook, there’s no mention of the resurrection outside of the creed. The place of the Holy Spirit likewise. The atonement is in a different context.

? (Fr. Parker): How do we make the richness of the Sarum Rite/Use available in a Reformed context and with our current BCP? The object is to make people holy. That’s what our liturgy does. We survive and grow. We want to make the numinous more readily available. I want to know how to make that happen in my building with my people, being faithful to the question of one use.

CU: The use, properly speaking, is the externals. If we’re all using the prayer book must we be using the same externals?

BW: I think the fullness of that answer has yet to be unfolded. This is the first time a conference like this has been put on. This is a beginning. We can’t just lay it down now that it’s happened. What is the next step? How do we help you look at your building and go from there?

AD: Referring to something John said—the Sarum family—there have always been different inflections of the language of Sarum but a core of expression. Sometimes a dialect becomes a dominant form of a language because it’s been useful in a certain place. It makes sense to inflect it differently based on the needs of your position. Something it’s discovering something that was lost that will reinvigorate it.

JH: What we saw last night was not available to Percy Dearmer. We have so many more resources to enrich our understanding. I’m petrified to write a book because emy knowledge is so narrow—but if somebody doesn’t have the courage to have a go at it, it won’t happen. I found the liturgy comfortable and rich. Fr. Bird knows how to use technology as well. He can face east with a good microphone and good amplification. Note how different it’ll be this afternoon when Jeremy says the service without it.

Cafe Piece on Christ and Culture

I have a new piece up at the Cafe. I’ll be interested to see what kind of response it receives… Long-time readers here know my positions:

  • I don’t believe in an infallible church (where YF and I part ways) and thus the Church is responsible for remaining attentive to the Spirit and how the Gospel is working its way both in the church and in the culture (to the degree that these can be separated which is never completely as human institutions inevitably partake of the cultures in which they are embedded…)
  • I’m a firm believer in the ordination of women. I believe that, based on what I see in Scripture and what the tradition has taught on the nature of the Spirit, neither the presence or absence of a penis has anything to do with how the Holy Spirit is able to work through an individual for the up-building of the greater community.
  • I strongly believe that Christian morality is rooted in a virtue-based character ethic. That’s what I see in the New Testament—I see all of Paul’s arguments pointing that way and this is, in particular, his understanding of the now-abrogated Mosaic Law. This is also how significant strands of historic Christian thought—especially the western monastic ones—understood these texts. On the basis of that, I believe that clergy have a responsibility to model chastity to their communities in their household/family relationships. And that goes for M and myself as much as it does for anyone else. Gay and straight Christians all have a responsibility to demonstrate faithful love; of course it’s not easy—but it still has to be done.
  • In some ways our current American culture is moving in these directions as well—promoting equality for women and a wider acceptance of non-heterosexual relationships; there are things that the church has to and needs to learn from the culture about the nature of the Gospel. But it is just as certain that there are movements in the culture that directly contradict the Gospel and that, particularly in the realm of human sexuality, go against a Gospel-rooted virtue-based character ethic. The church doesn’t need to learn or teach these. Just because the church and culture agree on points doesn’t mean we agree in all points or—and this is key—agree for the same reason.
  • It frustrates me when I see public figures in the church not sufficiently distinguishing cultural movement from Gospel movement. There’s no doubt that our leadership is liberal and it moves along with the more liberal elements of the culture. But we must not elide the Gospel with the culture especially where there is insufficient overlap.
  • On the contrary side, it frustrates me when I hear conservatives talking about Gospel values and biblical models and the paradigms that they espouse are right out of white-bread 1950’s Americana. Yes, it’s what you may have been raised in but that doesn’t mean it fulfills the Gospel more purely than the current state of things.

Liturgical Change and Museum Religion

The post on the American Sarum conference got some comments that deserve a thread all their own. In many ways, this thread is a continuation of one of the long-standing themes that this blog has struggled with over its several years. Let me lay it out anew with major/axiomatic points in bold…

Liturgies change. Indeed, liturgical and ceremonial tinkering is inevitable across any significant group of folks whether there’s a set standard liturgy or not. Sometimes it’s because the liturgy needs a change, sometimes it’s because the tinkerers want a change.

No matter which way it goes, there’s no such thing as a liturgical change; rather there are theological changes that have liturgical implications. When a worshiping community of baptized Christians gather, they incarnate in a particular way the eschatological reality of the Body of Christ.  (This is most especially the case when they gather for a Eucharist where the whole intention is the making tangible and consumable the literal Body of Christ to be shared amongst them all.) You cannot separate the liturgy, the ceremonial, and the theology of such a gathering—they are inextricably bound up in one another. When the liturgy or the ceremonial gets changed, therefore, a theological change has necessarily occurred. When we say and do something different liturgically and ceremonially, we are just as surely saying and doing something different theologically as well. Sometimes these changes are minor—and sometimes they’re not. Sometimes these theological changes are intentional and conscious—and sometimes they’re not. Sometimes the tinkerers are aware of what they’re doing—and sometimes they’re not.

When liturgies change, my sense is that the motivation for the change and the direction in which the change occurs relate to two different axes: contemporary culture and historical practice. That is, when liturgies change it tends to be because the tinkers are trying to make a statement to the contemporary culture; history can be leveraged in a number of different ways:

  • Sometimes historical practices are jettisoned entirely because of a perceived disconnect with contemporary culture (this would be your praise & worship/Willow Creek type response).
  • Sometimes historical practices are resurrected because they represent a perceived correction to the current deplorable state of the contemporary culture—if the historical practice is maintained, the culture will be restored. (I see this as one of the motivations behind some who call for the ’28BCP & ’40 hymnal/Traditional Latin Mass: if we return to a pre-’60s liturgy, maybe we’ll return to a pre-’60s culture as well.)
  • Sometimes historical practices are resurrected because they represent a perceived connection to the contemporary culture–if the historical practice is maintained, this culture will be better able to hear, receive,  and embody the Gospel.

I’d suggest that this last approach has been behind most of the major shifts in liturgy within the Christian Church as a whole. Most of the major liturgical changes in Western Christendom have been attempts to re-engage/re-enliven contemporary practice based on historical precedents. This is not a new thing. Most of the monastic renewal movements in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were rooted in attempts to return to the True Practice whether that be the Desert Fathers, John Cassian, Benedict or a combination of the three. The Protestant Reformers attempted to return to Early Church practice. The first liturgical revival driven by the monks of Solesmes was an attempt to return to proper medieval practice. The Ritualists attempted to return to a High Medieval practice. Blessed Percy and the English Use tried to return to a Sarum standard. The most recent Liturgical Renewal encompassing Vatican II and the ’79 BCP tried to return to fourth century practice. Picking up a theme from the previous post, isolating one movement as “museum religion” is a bit disingenuous because utilizing historical precedence for contemporary practice has been a consistent habit in the West for a very long time.

Furthermore, we need to note that the exercise of identifying and utilizing historical materials is always a process thoroughly invested with contemporary meanings and limitations. The Protestant Reformers thought that they were returning to Early Church patterns of worship. Their historical reconstructions of Early Church worship didn’t have a whole lot to go on and look little like how we reconstruct Early Church worship today. We have better sources and better scholarship. (Would Luther or Calvin have used the Eucharist of the Didache had they known it?) Likewise, the work of the Ritualists and the Blessed Percy are properly understood as part of a broader English Gothic Revival rooted in English Nationalism and a political and social appropriation of the peculiarly English/British heritage over and against Continental expressions of nationalism. The work of Vatican II and attendant movements cannot be separated from the cultural and social movements of the ’60s. Historical work and even its excess—antiquarianism—are events that are contemporary in nature despite their focus on the past.

Now we tie these two threads together. The appropriation of historical practices always signals theological changes to the contemporary liturgy. Some of the theological changes are because of what the historical practice itself is or does. On the other hand, the very act of incorporating a certain practice from a certain time and place is a theological statement entirely apart from the content of the practice; the very selection of any time and place as an “ideal” is a major theological statement. The selections of the Early Church for the Reformers and the Fourth Century for Vatican II were attempts to achieve a purity that had been lost. The return to the High Medieval or Sarum reflected attempts to recapture a fullness that had been lost. None of these choices are theologically neutral—they all had and have an impact.

So what, what is a Renewal vs. a Revival vs. Musem Religion? Is it purely subjective or are there objective measures? When is a Renewal/Revival/Museum Moment an imposition into a contemporary practice and when does it represent a true enlivenment and enrichment?

For me the issue goes back to theology. As I’ve said before, we’re not the Christian Historical Society—we don’t do things because they’re old, we do them because they proclaim the Gospel. But some times the old ways proclaim the Gospel in new ways or media or avenues that our contemporary society needs to hear. Whenever we try to bring back an old practice, rite or time, my questions are these:

  • Why—to what end? Is it for the sake of nostalgia or fantasizing that the contemporary culture will go away and reformulate itself accord to the ideal pattern if we can sufficiently recall this past time? Or is it because we see a way here that the Gospel can be better communicated in this time and place?
  • Is there a coherence and an integrity between this historical practice and what the contemporary community is doing now? How radical or organic is this change?
  • Are the theological messages and intentions of this change in coherent relation with the theological trajectory of the community into which it is being introduced?

These are the kinds of questions that I see and here us asking about the Vatican II changes and the changes of the ’79 BCP. They’re also the questions that I will take with me to the American Sarum conference. Why a Sarum Revival? Why here—why now? Into what deep currents, culturally and theologically, is it tapping—or do we want to revive it because it seems “cool”? Why Sarum over some other time and place? As I’ve said before, I think there’s a case to be made for infusing as bit of the English early medieval monastic spirit into contemporary American Episcopalianism. Why is Sarum a better choice?

I don’t want to focus narrowly on Sarum here, though. Instead let me just say that this movement is raising for me—for us—a number of questions that I think are important now and may become even more important in the near future. Society is shifting. Technology and the evolving world situation are bring us into new opportunities and conflicts. Where, amongst the contemporary world and the faithful works of the past, is the Gospel best found and proclaimed?

More on the Trinity, Metaphors for God, and Devotion

The thread on M’s sermon has engaged some of the issues around the naming of God. If I may summarize what I read there, I think all participants are in agreement that “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is the normative means for naming the Trinity in our public worship; the discussion turns then to whether this is the only metaphor or whether others are to be used, in what settings, and to what degree.

Frequently during discussions of this topic, I’m reminded of the Anthropomorphite controversy. This is one of the spin-offs of the long-standing Origenist controversy that rocked Alexandria for quite a while. The basic question seems to be whether Origen had taken allegory too far—what, in descriptions of God, were metaphor and what were literal? When the Scriptures speak of “God’s outstretched arm” is this purely a metaphor or is there a physical divine member in view here? In particular, this controversy caused some real difficulties in the first few generations of the monastic movement among the monks who were wise and holy—but not particularly learned. While you get sprinkles of this controversy in a variety of places in the literature, my thoughts this morning turn especially to John Cassian’s Conferences 10.1-5.

I think this section is worth citing in full so here it is from the venerable NPNF:

Introduction.

Among the sublime customs of the anchorites which by God’s help have been set forth although in plain and unadorned style, the course of our narration compels us to insert and find a place for something, which may seem so to speak to cause a blemish on a fair body: although I have no doubt that by it no small instruction on the image of Almighty God of which we read in Genesis will be conferred on some of the simpler sort, especially when the grounds are considered of a doctrine so important that men cannot be ignorant of it without terrible blasphemy and serious harm to the Catholic faith.

Chapter 2

Of the custom which is kept up in the Province of Egypt for signifying the time of Easter.

In the country of Egypt this custom is by ancient tradition observed that— when Epiphany is past, which the priests of that province regard as the time, both of our Lord’s baptism and also of His birth in the flesh, and so celebrate the commemoration of either mystery not separately as in the Western provinces but on the single festival of this day, — letters are sent from the Bishop of Alexandria through all the Churches of Egypt, by which the beginning of Lent, and the day of Easter are pointed out not only in all the cities but also in all the monasteries. In accordance then with this custom, a very few days after the previous conference had been held with Abbot Isaac, there arrived the festal letters of Theophilus the Bishop of the aforesaid city, in which together with the announcement of Easter he considered as well the foolish heresy of the Anthropomorphites at great length, and abundantly refuted it. And this was received by almost all the body of monks residing in the whole province of Egypt with such bitterness owing to their simplicity and error, that the greater part of the Elders decreed that on the contrary the aforesaid Bishop ought to be abhorred by the whole body of the brethren as tainted with heresy of the worst kind, because he seemed to impugn the teaching of holy Scripture by the denial that Almighty God was formed in the fashion of a human figure, though Scripture teaches with perfect clearness that Adam was created in His image. Lastly this letter was rejected also by those who were living in the desert of Scete and who excelled all who were in the monasteries of Egypt, in perfection and in knowledge, so that except Abbot Paphnutius the presbyter of our congregation, not one of the other presbyters, who presided over the other three churches in the same desert, would suffer it to be even read or repeated at all in their meetings.

Chapter 3

Of Abbot Sarapion and the heresy of the Anthropomorphites into which he fell in the error of simplicity.

Among those then who were caught by this mistaken notion was one named Sarapion, a man of long-standing strictness of life, and one who was altogether perfect in actual discipline, whose ignorance with regard to the view of the doctrine first mentioned was so far a stumbling block to all who held the true faith, as he himself outstripped almost all the monks both in the merits of his life and in the length of time (he had been there). And when this man could not be brought back to the way of the right faith by many exhortations of the holy presbyter Paphnutius, because this view seemed to him a novelty, and one that was not ever known to or handed down by his predecessors, it chanced that a certain deacon, a man of very great learning, named Photinus, arrived from the region of Cappadocia with the desire of visiting the brethren living in the same desert: whom the blessed Paphnutius received with the warmest welcome, and in order to confirm the faith which had been stated in the letters of the aforesaid Bishop, placed him in the midst and asked him before all the brethren how the Catholic Churches throughout the East interpreted the passage in Genesis where it says, “Let us make man after our image and likeness” Genesis 1:26 And when he explained that the image and likeness of God was taken by all the leaders of the churches not according to the base sound of the letters, but spiritually, and supported this very fully and by many passages of Scripture, and showed that nothing of this sort could happen to that infinite and incomprehensible and invisible glory, so that it could be comprised in a human form and likeness, since its nature is incorporeal and uncompounded and simple, and what can neither be apprehended by the eyes nor conceived by the mind, at length the old man was shaken by the numerous and very weighty assertions of this most learned man, and was drawn to the faith of the Catholic tradition. And when both Abbot Paphnutius and all of us were filled with intense delight at his adhesion, for this reason; viz., that the Lord had not permitted a man of such age and crowned with such virtues, and one who erred only from ignorance and rustic simplicity, to wander from the path of the right faith up to the very last, and when we arose to give thanks, and were all together offering up our prayers to the Lord, the old man was so bewildered in mind during his prayer because he felt that the Anthropomorphic image of the Godhead which he used to set before himself in prayer, was banished from his heart, that on a sudden he burst into a flood of bitter tears and continual sobs, and cast himself down on the ground and exclaimed with strong groanings: “Alas! Wretched man that I am! They have taken away my God from me, and I have now none to lay hold of; and whom to worship and address I know not.” By which scene we were terribly disturbed, and moreover with the effect of the former Conference still remaining in our hearts, we returned to Abbot Isaac, whom when we saw close at hand, we addressed with these words.

Chapter 4

Of our return to Abbot Isaac and question concerning the error into which the aforesaid old man had fallen.

Although even besides the fresh matter which has lately arisen, our delight in the former conference which was held on the character of prayer would summon us to postpone everything else and return to your holiness, yet this grievous error of Abbot Sarapion, conceived, as we fancy, by the craft of most vile demons, adds somewhat to this desire of ours. For it is no small despair by which we are cast down when we consider that through the fault of this ignorance he has not only utterly lost all those labours which he has performed in so praiseworthy a manner for fifty years in this desert, but has also incurred the risk of eternal death. And so we want first to know why and wherefore so grievous an error has crept into him. And next we should like to be taught how we can arrive at that condition in prayer, of which you discoursed some time back not only fully but splendidly. For that admirable Conference has had this effect upon us, that it has only dazzled our minds and has not shown us how to perform or secure it.

Chapter 5

The answer on the heresy described above.

Isaac: We need not be surprised that a really simple man who had never received any instruction on the substance and nature of the Godhead could still be entangled and deceived by an error of simplicity and the habit of a longstanding mistake, and (to speak more truly) continue in the original error which is brought about, not as you suppose by a new illusion of the demons, but by the ignorance of the ancient heathen world, while in accordance with the custom of that erroneous notion, by which they used to worship devils formed in the figure of men, they even now think that the incomprehensible and ineffable glory of the true Deity should be worshipped under the limitations of some figure, as they believe that they can grasp and hold nothing if they have not some image set before them, which they can continually address while they are at their devotions, and which they can carry about in their mind and have always fixed before their eyes. And against this mistake of theirs this text may be used: “And they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of corruptible man.” Romans 1:23 Jeremiah also says: “My people have changed their glory for an idol.” Jeremiah 2:11 Which error although by this its origin, of which we have spoken, it is engrained in the notions of some, yet none the less is it contracted in the hearts also of those who have never been stained with the superstition of the heathen world, under the colour of this passage where it is said “Let us make man after our image and our likeness,” Genesis 1:26 ignorance and simplicity being its authors, so that actually there has arisen owing to this hateful interpretation a heresy called that of the Anthropomorphites, which maintains with obstinate perverseness that the infinite and simple substance of the Godhead is fashioned in our lineaments and human configuration. Which however any one who has been taught the Catholic doctrine will abhor as heathenish blasphemy, and so will arrive at that perfectly pure condition in prayer which will not only not connect with its prayers any figure of the Godhead or bodily lineaments (which it is a sin even to speak of), but will not even allow in itself even the memory of a name, or the appearance of an action, or an outline of any character.”

I’m struck by the narrative qualities of this passage—by how Cassian chooses to tell this story.Clearly, he considers himself to be orthodox and champions the position which was deemed orthodox. Yet he paints a very sympathetic picture of Abba Sarapion but, unlike many stories of this ilk, he decides to close the story in a rather ambiguous fashion. Instead of relating that henceforth Abba Sarapion lived in quietude and orthodox faith, our final glimpse of the anchorite is a burst of grief and a spiritual dilemma: “Alas! Wretched man that I am! They have taken away my God from me, and I have now none to lay hold of; and whom to worship and address I know not.”

Cassian does this deliberately and skillfully for he sets up his topic perfectly. Those who mine writings like these solely for their history of theological arguments miss quite a lot if they do not consider the context. The discussion of the controversy is not accidental; this whole conference is on prayer and, specifically, what images we should form in our mind as we pray. That is, as we pray, how do we conceive of the One with whom we communicate?

Cassian uses this episode to hammer home the ascetic implications of bad doctrine. The wise and holy ascetic risks losing his years of spiritual labor because he has thought wrongly and grounded his spirituality in a theologically deficient framework.

Abba Isaac goes on in the Conference to portray a spirituality grounded in the incomprehensible God who, nevertheless, reveals himself to those who seek him with diligence and earnestness. It seems to me—and I speak with less than perfect knowledge here—that what is described in this Conference dovetails nicely with what we find in On the Divine Names by Pseudo-Dionysius where he presents a brilliant introduction to God’s self-revelation that carefully balances the cataphatic and apophatic approaches to God.

So—bottom line—this theology stuff matters because of the way that our spiritual lives are shaped by it. We do well to not fall into the Anthropomorphite error and to take sufficient safeguards against it. God as beyond materiality is beyond gender. God is not “he”. I use “he” when I speak about God, and, no doubt, there are some seminaries where I would get into trouble for doing so. (Far too often the various ways around the male pronoun turn our language about God into a stilted mess rather than something beautiful, prayable, and singable. I have severe reactions against the seminary phrase “God God-self” for its horrible infelicities as an English expression.) I am no Anthropomorphite, and have no plans of becoming one—and yet casual use  becomes habitual formation. I don’t think that God is a dude. And yet, with frequent enough repetition and no checks in other directions, concepts of God-ness and dude-ness will become linked whether I’m intending it or not. And herein lies the danger, and therefore the need to remember and to utilize, when appropriate, alternate language for and about God.

This is another area of theology and public liturgical speech which has been negatively impacted by the incessant culture wars which swirl around and through the church. The rejection of masculine language has become a cause celebre for certain liberal types. This has prompted a backlash from certain conservative types who will then insist on nothing but masculine and sometime deliberately,  antagonistically patriarchal language for God. Both of these groups are distorting our theology to score political points. (And I kindly request them to stop now. There. We’ll see how far that gets me…)

I’d like to point back to Cassian and to Pseudo-Dionysius as both an appeal for a reason why a return to a more civilized discussion is needed. We cannot now God as God is. We only know God as God has been revealed in Scripture through metaphor and we then use these metaphors as keys to understanding our personal experiences of God and our glimpses of the divine life. One of the foremost ways God has chosen to reveal himself and his triune nature is as “Father, Son, and, Holy Ghost” and, as such, this is what our forebearers have enshrined in our liturgies. We do well to follow them.

But we must also be firmly reminded that in no way do these epithets exhaust both the potential and the edifying metaphors and names for God. No, Cassian and Pseudo-Dionysius are not collaborators in some devious feminist plot (despite what some choose to think…).  I don’t think that conscious Anthropomorphism is a danger in today’s world; subconscious Anthropomorphism is alive and well—and perhaps even promulgated by those who can only start prayer with “Father God…” In our teaching then and perhaps in our private prayers other names and metaphors should be cultivated and remembered not to displace other formulations, but to fill out a more robust understanding of the One of whom Dionysius says, “Mind beyond mind, word beyond speech, it is gathered up by no discourse, by no intuition, by no name. It is and it is as no other being is. Cause of all existence, and therefore transcending existence, it alone could give an authoritative account of what it really is.” (DN 588B 1).

On Auricular Confession in the Anglican Churches

This is a snippet from a forthcoming article that M and I wrote; feel free to pile on any other thoughts on Confession:

The Anglican Exhortation and its understanding of confession and reconciliation stand squarely within the tradition of Omnis utriusque sexus and the Augsburg Confession. Two Exhortations stand before the Eucharistic liturgy in the 1549 book. The first exhorts the congregation to search their souls and gauge their readiness before receiving the Eucharist. The second is to be used when the congregation is negligent to come and receive. Indeed, its very purpose is to encourage congregants to come and receive and to do anything necessary that would enable them to come. It states in part:

And yf there bee any of you, whose conscience is troubled and greved in any thing, lackyng comforte or counsaill, let him come to me, or to some other dyscrete and learned priest, taught in the law of God, and confesse and open his synne and griefe secretly, that he may receive suche ghostly counsaill, advyse, and comfort, that his conscience maye be releved, and that of us (as of the ministers of GOD and of the churche) he may receive comfort and absolucion, to the satisfaccion of his mynde, and avoyding of all scruple and doubtfulnes: requiryng suche as shalbe satisfied with a generall confession, not to be offended with them that doe use, to their further satisfiyng, the auriculer and secret confession to the Priest: nor those also whiche thinke nedefull or convenient, for the quietnes of their awne consciences, particuliarly to open their sinnes to the Priest: to bee offended with them that are satisfied, with their humble confession to GOD, and the generall confession to the churche. But in all thinges to folowe and kepe the rule of charitie, and every man to be satisfied with his owne conscience, not judgyng other mennes myndes or consciences; where as he hath no warrant of Goddes word to the same.[i]

Following both Omnis utriusque sexus and the Augsburg Confession, this exhortation connects the rite of reconciliation directly to purification for the reception of the Eucharist. Unlike Omnis utriusque sexus and in line with certain Reformation understandings, it considers a general confession and absolution sufficient for the church’s role in purification.[ii] Further, in line with Reformation teaching, aural confession is recommended in the case of the disquieted conscience. The definitive statement, then, is that none must undergo the rite, but it is available for those souls who require it for the quieting of the conscience.

[i] 1549 Book of Common Prayer. Online: http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1549/ Communion_1549.htm. Accessed Nov 28th, 2007.

[ii] Despite their insistences to the contrary, the Lutheran churches moved to general confessions rather than retaining individual examination and confession. While it has been revived in certain times and places, the practice of private absolution has fallen into disuse in Lutheran circles.