As someone who, personally, worships at a traditionally liturgical church, I’m happy to see a lot more Protestant denominations, many traditionally non-liturgical, starting to think about “liturgy.” Because liturgical worship has, for me, circumvented a great deal of my attempt to manage my own worship experience. Liturgy is something difficult to place, inhering as it does in the ambiguous space between sacrament and everyday experience, not fully definable as either.
But there’s something suspicious, too, about the trendiness and somewhat forced seriousness with which non-liturgical churches are talking about liturgy. I think of the biblical story of Uzzah, among others, who was given the gift of carrying the Ark. When he took responsibility for it – tried to keep it from touching the ground and thus managed it himself – he incurred divine disapproval. He was inevitably not viewing the Ark as gift, but as instrument, something requiring our management to help Israel flourish.
Treating graces, given from outside ourselves to be simply enjoyed, as instruments to be manipulated to our own (theologically justified) ends is an old problem. Moses being denied entry to the Promised Land for his complicity in scouting ahead is another example: some gifts are just not meant for us humans’ management and oversight. But managing stuff we shouldn’t, the urge to control, the libido dominandi, is our oldest line of business as humans.
Anyway, the trendy, buzzword-y status of “liturgy” now should make us skeptical: “liturgical theology”, “liturgical community practices”, etc. It’s always seemed to me that the benefit of liturgy is a sort of grace in encountering God: the grace not of having to use your own words, but someone else’s (better) words to address the divine. The great Catholic fiction writer Andre Dubus gives as good a definition/illustration as any of the meaning of liturgy:
Each morning [at Mass] I try, each morning I fail, and know that always I will be a creature who, looking at Father Paul and the altar, and uttering prayers, will be distracted by scrambled eggs, horses, the weather, and memories and daydreams that have nothing to do with the sacrament I am about to receive. I can receive, though: the Eucharist, and also, at Mass and at other times, moments and even minutes of contemplation. But I cannot achieve contemplation, as some can; and so, having to face and forgive my own failures, I have learned from them both the necessity and wonder of ritual. For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.
–Andre Dubus, “A Father’s Story”
![priests[1]](https://mbird.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/priests1.jpg)
There are instances when liturgy can serve as a good metaphor for using practices to create a certain environment: James K.A. Smith’s speeches articulating a vision for Calvin College are an example. But there are other times when it is less a valid metaphor. For example, evening prayer is a liturgy; morning quiet time is not. Liturgy is about participating, yes, but about participating in a role graciously assigned to us – not one we invent. I wonder if thinking of daily life (as Smith lends himself to in his “cultural liturgies” series) as liturgical changes anything at all, besides diluting the meaning of one of the Church’s oldest, most beautiful, and ideally most distinctive forms.
Liturgies have the peculiar identity of writings that achieve a perfect unity of literary form and spiritual content. They are not affective words, meant to engineer a certain emotional state, to be drawn up on pastoral whims. Anyone trying to write their own liturgy does the form discredit; writers as skilled and Spirit-visited as Thomas Cranmer, St. Theodore the Studite, or Tertullian don’t come around more than once every few centuries.
And whenever there’s a service (not uncommon now) mixing Cranmerian Collects, excerpts from the Heidelberg Confession and the Shorter Westminster Catechism and the Preface to the Barmen Declaration, the Prayers of John Chrysostom, etc, you have (several) beautiful, gracious liturgical forms being manipulated into something like a tool for spiritual formation. Seriously, my Episcopalian/Anglican friends dont’ know half as much about the Book of Common Prayer as my Evangelical ones, who will casually reference the differences between ’59, ’62, ’29, etc. Here again, the emphasis is on editing, mixing to get what I myself, personally, think is the best form of worship – the resurgence of the “I” in worship, the need to control the divine gratuity of worship.
That’s not to say that mixing is bad – far from it – but only that it applies a cafeteria method to something decidedly (and graciously) non-cafeterian, i.e. that these services may be beautiful, good, and charged with the Holy Spirit – but they cannot properly be called “liturgical” and, if they are, they manifest the anxiety for control, for personal determination of God’s Word (theo-logy not in the sense of “the word of God” but rather “the study of God”) that itself reveals a difficulty in resting in the gift.
At its best, liturgy is a received form of worship, exactly what Dubus described it to be. But the human heart excels at taking divine gifts and turning them into tools, to be crafted by us and used on others. We cannot engineer our encounters with God, however much we may want to.
The grace of this, of course, is that any prayer or writing carries the potential to instantiate the Church or give us a flash of attunement to God’s presence and love. But I wonder if there’s really such a thing as “liturgical theology.” Liturgy transcends theology; is above it and at once more fundamental to experience; it paradoxically utters the ineffable. Hans Urs von Balthasar’s language of theological-aesthetic form is helpful here:
The appearance of the form, as revelation in the depths, is an indissoluble union of two things. It is a real presence of the depths, of the whole of reality, and it is a real pointing beyond itself into those depths.
–The Glory of the Lord, vol 1
A liturgical form that both contains the depths of God’s splendor and points beyond itself to those depths is a difficult thing; in a liturgical context, the best analogy of this unity between form and content would be a masterful stylist like Hemingway, whose terse prose correlates perfectly with his repressed characters’ experience in the world, or a poet like Langston Hughes whose rhythm and meter in “The Weary Blues” sets his piano player’s mood perfectly. This is extraordinarily rare in fiction or poetry, and all the more difficult when it comes to the things of God. But the objectivity of the liturgical form, its givenness, relieves us from structuring our own doxological ascent to God. Again, non-liturgical worship has the same possibilities of the Spirit’s presence (thinking here especially of Gospel churches), but we cannot call something liturgical which rejects this relief, nor can we subsume liturgy under the category of spiritual formation.
Liturgy bypasses emotion; it is concerned with being passively in-formed in a beautiful way, a passive activity expressed by Eliot as “teach us to care and not to care/ Teach us to sit still” in his meditations on Ash Wednesday. “Be still and know that I am God” – the momentary stillness of my own irrepressible spiritual strivings, for the right words or impulses or feelings, is profoundly comforting. An active passivity, like one dancing but always as the one led.
A dancer cannot reinvent the form and follow the language of love simultaneously, and – to risk overdoing the metaphor – the Holy Spirit always leads. Harmony is easily lost when we move from our position of reading scripts to engineering them. The grace of God’s presence, of course, is unchanging, shining forth in-dependently of our religious machinations. And yet the freedom, in Christ, to be spiritual recipients could allow us to recognize it more clearly.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ruh7uQ9hSQk&w=600]
By Uriah the Hittite, you mean Uzzah, son of Abinadab (2 Samuel 6), right?
N –
Yes, thanks for the correction.
Liturgy, broadly conceived, is an attempt to get a handle on worship; to come to grips with the magnitude and the seriousness of the duty.
I appreciated this insight from the article: that eclectic appropriations of (alien) liturgy or liturgies is in most (all?) cases a masked form of will-worship. It was a Reformation insight that traditional and ancient liturgy could also be a form of will-worship. And those of us familiar with English Tudor ecclesiastical history are also acquainted with the contest over whose brand of uniformity would be imposed–Roman, Puritan, or the via media (which had it’s own range: Cranmerian, Laudian, etc.).
Modern ecclecticists are not concerned about uniformity, indeed, far from it. The practical side of uniformity (which is usually their beef with “traditional” worship) gives them an off-the-shelf product, handy to the utilitarian mindset, but overall represents restriction or repression, “quenching the Spirit,” and all that. Transience (evolution, Heraclitus) remains the dominant motif; the past is great, so long as I can choose my past, and not only once but over and over.
Genuine continuity with the past and a fixed point of reference are not the concern of the eccelcticists. Nor are they interested in a theological basis for uniformity (as opposed to practical benefits). Real solidarity in worship has as its goal not simply a familiar setting for worship, regardless of where I am in the world. But a desire to reflect, to prepare for, and existentially enter into (a foretaste), the eternal worship service where so many others are already participating, Heb.12:22-24.
The liturgical ecclecticist has set up his gathering in a side-chamber, willfully oblivious to the activity in the main room. Nevertheless, there is a constant stream of visitors out of that chamber, who passing by the tables snatch samples from the services there being presented whole. These “artifacts” are trooped back to the private gathering like cool archaeological finds.
When called on to defend the Reformation, Calvin identified the ultimate cause with the ultimate end–namely that the number one question needing an answer was the right way God should be worshiped, and as a close second the necessary means to that end: the way by which sinners might be allowed to fulfill that end, which (boiled down) is Justification. Justification has its own priority, because that which is last in order of the ends must be first in the order of execution.
“Experience” is the End for the ecclecticist. For the ecclecticist, Time is the Present, when it should be Eternity.
Since I am the grumpy old man around here, I will fulfill that role by naming the two things I dislike most in terms of “worship styles”:
1. a rock and/or acoustic band which serves as a “warm up” act for a 45 minute sermon;
2. non-liturgical churches which cobble together a liturgy and then have the preacher “explain” the meaning of every damn detail of it as the congregation plods through the thing.
As much as I find these things off-putting to the point of nausea, some Christians really love them and find them deeply meaningful and are worshiping God “in spirit and in truth” in participating in them. So, I know these things are a matter of Christian liberty, but I can’t help it if they send cold chills up my cranky old spine.
All this criticism of liturgical “eclecticists” just sounds like grumpy “get off my lawn” chatter. Cranmer himself was obviously an eclectic and so were most of the other heroes. The only difference is that most of recognize he did an especially good job, the kind that (as the post author wrote) only comes along every couple of centuries.
I know it’s not perfect and people steeped in traditional liturgy from their youth are going to roll their eyes, but I see the use and recovery of traditional elements by non-liturgical evangelicals as a net gain and an ongoing form of reformation. Who cares if they aren’t using the prayer book just right? Going to a non-denom church today and actually hearing a gospel reading, a psalm reading, a written prayer, and recitation of the creed is a huge step toward a more stable and less personality-driven form of worship than you would have found in nearly any of these places during the last half-century.
Despite the possibility for confusion and dilution, I think Jamie Smith is doing us a favor by getting people to think about liturgy more, especially those who see themselves as non-liturgical. It helps open the door wide for the reformation of their worship practices.
So y’all just be patient with us young punk evangelical posers, k? Thanks!
Upstarts FTW!
You had some terrific points for consideration here. We’ve recently changed churches and I’ve had a hard time with the “flexibility” taken with the words of consecration. I thought I was just getting old and grouchy, but I realize now that the consistency of those words was part of my ability to let go and engage, despite my thoughts or feelings on that particular day.
That being said, I often ponder how well our unique denominational practices mirror the origins/intent of the early church, or whether we had built beautiful rituals that reflected the cultural and historical needs of the people at the time.
There is a comfort and tendency for us to assume that which came before us is more legitimate than what we could make today. I value the unique practices of our faith a great deal. But at some point, many of them were brand new and an offense to those who practiced “traditionally”. I fear our need for comfort and ownership can diminish our ability to share the gospel going forward.
The legitimacy of the worship content for me is about whether the content is truly reverent, biblical, true to the gospel, and whether we are offering it to God earnestly and to the best of our abilities at the given moment. So perhaps if we are to mix the new with the old, the key would be to still offer a consistent scaffold within, so we are able to find our way at all times.
Thank you for your insights, really good stuff!
Thanks! Helpful blog and discussion.
“[Worship] is not merely a commemoration of the events of the Gospel or other events in the Church’s life, in an artistic form. It is also an actualization of these facts, their renewal upon earth. The Christmas service does not merely commemorate the birth of Christ. In it Christ is truly born in a mystery, as at Easter He rises again. So with the transfiguration, the entry into Jerusalem, the ascension of Christ….The life of the Church in her liturgy, discloses to our senses the continuing mystery of the Incarnation. The Lord still lives in the Church, under that same form in which He was once manifest on earth, and which exists eternally; and it is the function of that Church to make those sacred memories living, so that we again witness and take part in them.
– From Evelyn Underhill’s 1936 book, Worship, in a quote from S. Boulgakoff.
I am having trouble with the logic in this post. It seems just a matter of where you draw your line of defining exerting one’s will. Even in an Anglican setting, choices must be made within the liturgy that is used. They might be small changes but someone at the church, in the current week, chooses. It would seem these small adjustments within the broadly determined liturgy don’t affect the graciousness of it. But a bigger change, like adding a passage from the Heidelberg catechism, is engineering.
The same paradox seems to exist with the idea of “what I want from worship”. It’s still a matter of where to draw the line. If you choose an Anglican or Roman Catholic church then you have asserted which form of worship you think is best. That choice seems to not diminish the graciousness of what liturgy you accept but then changing elements of a liturgy does.
The same can be said with continuity with the past. How far back do I go to get to the past?
I don’t know. Maybe I am pushing this too far. I get some of the points but the accusation of a sudden turning point between graciousness and self managing seems a little harsh and even harder to define.
amen
I don’t think that the post argues that “picking and choosing” liturgical elements is per se an example of seeking to exert control, but that in some instances, it can be. It is true that Cranmer did his own “cobbling together” of various existing liturgical pieces, and added his own compositions as well, partly in order to exert a uniformity of worship within the Church of England that helped to teach a Reformation view of grace and the human condition. But he also worked within a received tradition, with others, and the language of the resulting liturgy is totally infused with Scriptural language, in addition to the actual Scripture readings. The problem comes when preachers who are not so steeped in liturgical worship become enthused about it, and learn a great deal about particular elements of it, but who retain for all that a belief that it is their job as preacher to tell their congregation everything that they need to do,say and think. This basic attitude of preacher hobby-horse bossiness then gets applied to liturgical worship selections by the preacher, based on his/her personal likes/dislikes of the moment. This is why when someone from a liturgical tradition goes to a non-liturgical evangelical church that has adopted this type of liturgical worship, they sometimes feel extremely put upon by a preacher who has not only decided to preach a very long sermon, but who has now decided to use the liturgy to voice what he has decided the congregation needs to say that particular Sunday, thereby effectively dominating the entire service. It is similar to when the preacher decided exactly which hymns/songs to sing based on his/her effort to “drive home” the point of the sermon. It is hard to define, but as a lay person, I can tell you that for me at least there is a real difference in feeling that I am actually participating in worship through liturgy, as opposed to the feeling that I am being manipulated into worship by liturgy.