This article is part 2 of a 10 part series written for my church newsletter. Go here for the intro, and here for Part I.

Surely such an odd response would produce blank stares of consternation. And yet, the underlying point is valid, even if unsettling: we don’t go to church on the weekend! We go to church on Sunday, the first day of the week.

About 10 years ago I started asking my nephew (around 5 years old at the time), “Why do we go to church on Sunday?” The programmed response (taught to him by me!) came back, “Because that’s the day Jesus rose from the dead!”

And so it is. In chapter 20 of St. John’s Gospel, the risen Christ makes three appearances to his discouraged and confused followers, and each time, the writer is at pains to stress that the risen Lord comes to his people on the first day of the week. (See verses 1, 19, and 26 of John 20.) In precisely the same way, and for the same reason, the earliest church we know of - the apostolic church of the Book of Acts - gathered to break bread together not on the “weekend” but on the first day of the week (Acts 20:7).

There are some powerful implications here upon which to meditate, especially during this season of Lent. First, as Christians we enter in to joyful worship and rest before we work. This is to show that all of our work, indeed all of our lives, should and can be permeated by rest and worship and joy.

Second, as theologians down through the ages have pointed out, the first day of the week is also the eighth day of the week. (It is significant here that circumcision in the old covenant took place on the eighth day, which is one reason many baptismal fonts are octagonal in shape.) That is, the first day of the week, Sunday, is the day of new creation. Now that Jesus has risen from the dead, there is a new creation in which we live and work and love. God has triumphed! This is his world. As reigning Lord, he is bringing his purposes to fruition in his own time. Hence, we worship on Sunday, the first day of the week, the day Jesus rose from the dead, conquering all our enemies and dysfunctions and sins and fears.

For me, this so often means that I must “rest by faith” or “feast by faith.” Which is to say that Sunday worship, setting apart this one day of the week for this “royal waste of time” (to borrow a phrase from theologian Marva Dawn), is actually a kind of discipline (both for me individually and for my family). Even when I am all burdened with stress or anxiety, I am called - especially on Sunday - to “let go” and to rest in God, knowing that it is his job (and not mine) to make everything right. Indeed, knowing that I am not God is a great relief, and this fact makes it possible truly to rest! 

Now, for a over-scheduled person in our hypermodern world, this is a very strange mindset, is it not? Indeed, it is. Maybe that’s why the New Testament describes us as “strangers and aliens.” Perhaps that is why St. Paul exhorts us to “be transformed by the renewing of our mind” into radically different ways of thinking and living.

And as our frenetic, volatile, violent, unsustainable culture teeters along the precipice of its own decline, God’s faithful people are quietly and compellingly modeling a better way to live. A way of rest and peace. A way of faith and festive joy. A way which begins not on the weekend, but on Sunday, the Lord’s Day, the first day of the week. 

By going to church on Sunday, we are not “ruining our weekend.” We are, in fact, saving the world.

Aidan Kavanagh on the continuity between God’s gracious and revelatory act in the liturgy and his gracious and revelatory acts in the old covenant as well as the person and work of Jesus (from his On Liturgical Theology):

It was a Presence, not faith, which drew Moses to the burning bush, and what happened there was a revelation, not seminar. It was a Presence, not faith, which drew the disciples to Jesus, and what happened then was not an educational program but his revelation to them of himself as the long-promised Anointed One, the redeeming because reconciling Messiah-Christos. Their lives, like that of Moses, were changed radically by that encounter with a Presence which upended all their ordinary expectations. Their descendants in faith have been adjusting to that change ever since, drawn into assembly by that same Presence, finding there always the same troublesome upset of change in their lives of faith to which they must adjust still. Here is where their lives are regularly being constituted and reconstituted under grace. Which is why lex supplicandi legem statuat credendi.

This article is part of a larger series, the introduction to which is here.

I recently had a conversation with a neighbor of mine about going to church on Sunday.

When he found out that I am a “pastor type” he apparently felt the need to justify why he does not really believe in going to church on Sunday. “I can have ‘church’ at home,” he said. “Don’t you agree?”

“Well,” I responded, “certainly lots of people feel that way, and it kind of makes sense, I guess. But I think it is important to consider what the Bible says about things like that.” I went on to allude to I Peter chapter 2 by saying, “One of the images that the Bible gives us of God’s people is that of living stones.”

I continued by saying that if you look at a stone wall of a building one of the interesting things is that the stones are resting upon one another. That is, the stones need each other. A single stone cannot make a wall.

A similar dynamic comes into play when we consider the biblical image of “many members, one body.” Here the many members come together to form a whole organic unity, a complete body. An eye, or a spleen, cannot hope to constitute a healthy human body in all its complexity, as St. Paul teaches in places like I Corinthians 12.

It is the same way with “going to church” and the Christian life. In general is not possible for only one person to worship God by herself, if she never gathers with the community. Our private devotion and meditation (“in your prayer closet”) flows out from the worship of the gathered community, from the “work of the people” (which, as we saw last month, is what “liturgy” literally is).

The bottom line here is that in the Christian life, we need each other. “There are no ‘lone ranger’ Christians.”

I want to bring out, however, a second aspect to all this. There is another reason why staying at home on Sunday to read our Bible (or to watch a “televangelist” on TV) is not full Christian worship in the way the Bible describes it.

What are we doing when we worship God? The collects in our Prayer Book which we say over and over every Sunday give us a strong hint. Almost every one of them ends with some version of “through Jesus Christ … who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit….” You see, worship, at its heart, at its core essence, is a participation in the life and love of the Holy Trinity. It is as if in worship we are entering into a stimulating conversation or a beautiful dance which has already been going on between three Persons who deeply love each other. This loving community hospitably invites us into their joy, into their peace, into their glorious life.

But reading the Bible in my armchair at home, as important as that is, is not conducive to this kind of fellowship with the Divine community, if separated from the worshipping life of the people of God. When I read words on a page in my armchair at home, there is no conversation there: it is just “me, myself, and I” with static words on a page. But in worship on Sunday it is all about conversation, dialogue with God in and through other people. In the responsive psalm the people dialogue with the choir. In the confession and absolution we dialogue with Christ. After Jesus summons us by his Word in the sermon, we respond in conversation in the word of the Creed.

In this way, we are caught up into a Great Conversation with the Divine Community in a way that just cannot happen in my armchair at home. The real purpose of my armchair at home, and the real purpose of my Bible reading, is to re-member and to extend the Great Conversation in which I was caught up last Sunday.

In a sense, then, worship is prior to Scripture in that worship provides the context for Scripture. This makes sense historically, as well, when we realize that the continuous worship of the new covenant church actually predates the writings of the New Testament Scriptures.

The Bible is tremendously important, but its true home, if you will, is not primarily my armchair at home or my home office or study, but rather in the liturgical worship of the church. Out of this fountain, the rest of our Christian life flows.

See here for ++ Rowan’s explanation of the Covenant, and its final form which is now being disseminated to all provinces in the Communion.

See here to read my bishop’s comments in support of the Covenant and the Windsor Process.

The following is an article I wrote for the people of my church.

As a relative newcomer to the “Anglican Way” and the Episcopal Church, I have lots of friends and loved ones who view the liturgical worship of the Episcopal Church with puzzlement and confusion (sometimes mixed with boredom). “Why all the pomp and circumstance?” they often ask, with glazed over eyes, perhaps in not so many words. Some of these friends are still in more “evangelical” churches such as non-denominational “megachurches” or the Baptist church like the one just around the corner from your house. Some of them, quite frankly, are not in any church at all (hence I think of them as more “secular types”).

Perhaps you can relate to this experience of mine. Perhaps you have brought friends to St. Richard’s and they have been confounded by (what they perceive to be) the lofty pageantry our worship. Whether it is the bishop’s mitre (one friend at my ordination service exclaimed, “I can’t believe bishops nowadays really wear those hat thingies!”) or the procession of the choir and altar party at the beginning of the service, the liturgical aspects of our worship can seem deeply foreign to modern people.

So why do we persist in doing these strange things? After all, perhaps our church would grow faster if we focused more on entertaining people. Maybe if we stopped fussing about all this liturgical stuff, we could get busy doing “real work” like feeding the hungry or assisting the poor.

Good questions, all. And I think that if we are not asking them and struggling with the answers, then our Baptist and megachurch friends might actually be in a more healthy place spiritually than we are!

In light of all this, I want to introduce you to a series on liturgical worship which I will be doing in The Rock during 2010, called “Questioning our Worship” (see below). I hope that you will take the time to engage in these and other questions you have about our worship at St. Richard’s.

1. Question #1: Why come on Sunday if I can read my Bible at home? (The role of community in worship.)
2. Question #2: Why ruin my weekend (I need to sleep in on Sunday morning!)? (Sunday as Day of Resurrection.)
3. Question #3: Why is Worship so boring sometimes? (The role of discipline in an entertainment culture.)
4. Question #4: Why all the standing & kneeling? (Worshipping with our Bodies).
5. Question #5: Why all the Words, Scripture, & Creeds? (Anamnesis as re-membering the Story.)
6. Question #6: Does the Bible tell us to worship this way? (Worship as prior to Scripture.)
7. Question #7: Why Sacraments? (The Importance of Christology in Worship.)
8. Question #8: C’mon, is the Bread really the Body of Christ? (Anglicanism on the Eucharist).
9. Question #9: Why water in baptism, and why babies? (Anglicanism on Baptism.)
10. Question #10: Why so much repetition? (Worship as the development of habits which train us in virtue.)

For now, though, I wanted simply to discuss this strange word “liturgy.” What exactly does this word mean, and where does it come from?

The word “liturgy” comes from two Greek roots. The “lit” part comes from a Greek word that means “people.” The “urgy” part derives from the Greek ergon (think of an “ergonomic chair” which helps one perform work more effectively). So “liturgy” means, literally, “the work of the people.”

This idea reminds us of the words of I Peter 2:9: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood.” When St. Peter wrote these words, he was not writing to some elite class of “super spiritual” people, and he was not writing only to priests or bishops. He was writing to “ordinary” Christians just like you, who have been baptized into Christ, and who are members of his body by virtue of that baptism and your faithful participation in the Gospel.

As priests, as a priestly people, our primary work or service, then, is to worship God, and this is why we worship the way we do.

Why is it that Advent is not merely a time of mirthful exuberance? After all, the event we are anticipating and waiting for – the birth of Jesus – is a happy event.

Advent is, to be sure, a time of joyful expectation, but it is not just that. It is much, much more. It is tinged, it is colored with a certain sense of “Lord, have mercy on me.” Why?

To realize why this is, consider the attitudes of the two main figures which Christians have associated with Advent for the last 1600 years. First, consider John the Baptist, known in the Eastern tradition as “John the Forerunner.”

Was John exuberantly excited about Jesus? I am sure that at one level he was, but the impression we get is that John was also deeply shaken by the coming of this Jesus. He said, “When he comes, I will not even to worthy to relate to him as a slave would to his master: I will not even be worthy to untie his sandals.” He echoed the cataclysmic picture painted by Isaiah, a picture which is breathless in its anticipation of justice and salvation, but which also senses the shaking of the foundations of everything we think we know. When this Messiah comes, he will turn our worlds upside down; he will cut us to the quick.

Profound joy, mixed with deep and sober penitence.

Consider the Virgin Mary. Was Mary excited about the Redeemer of her people whose arrival was imminent? I am sure that at one level she was. But she was also barreled over with penitent humility. “How can these things be? … Here I am, your slave; have your way with me, according to your word.” Sure Mary was prostrate as she uttered these words to St. Gabriel.

Why this sober aspect of Advent? Because, to paraphrase Rowan Williams, when Jesus comes into the world it is unplanned, overwhelming, making a colossal difference. It satisfies out deepest longings, but we don’t know what it will involve, other than risk and pain, along with the restoration.

And so we can respond to Jesus by saying “No, thanks. I prefer my own darkness,” or we can say “Yes, I will take you, along with the risk and the pain.”

Either way, this is sobering if not scary stuff.

During Advent at St. Richard’s we will be using the hauntingly beautiful words and melody of the Trisagion (”Thrice Holy”) during the first portion of the service of the Word (ie, during the synaxis)  in our Eucharistic services.

Quoting from Howard Galley’s The Ceremonies of the Eucharist (p. 81):

The Trisagion is a text drawn from the entrance rite of the Byzantine liturgy. It became widely popular, and was taken into regular use by many other liturgies, both eastern and western. The chief exception is the Roman rite, in which it is used only on Good Friday. The present Prayer Book is the first Anglican liturgy to include it. The rubrics (p. 406) provide that it may be sung three times, which is recommended here, or antiphonally, which is the traditional western method….

This, below, is a piece I wrote for the monthly newsletter of St. Richard’s Episcopal Church, where I am currently serving as Assistant (to the) Rector.

At the center of our insanely hectic lives, there must be leisure. In the middle of our mechanistic, frenetic modern world there must be festivity. At the heart of our active church, at the foundation of our busy families, there must be deep rest. There must be, that is, if we are going to survive.

We must, individually and corporately, renew the festive center, by which I mean that, instead of allowing the “microwave culture” (a phrase of Rev. Mary’s which I heard her utter within five minutes of meeting her) in which we live to crowd out life as it was meant to be lived, we must put “first things first.” We must “begin with the end in mind.” (Yes, I am appealing to all you Stephen Covey types.)

And what is our end? The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) describes it as “enjoying God forever.” Does that sound restful to you? If not, if it sounds boring or scary, then you might be misunderstanding the nature of the God we worship.

The classical Christian tradition of virtue (which baptizes and builds upon the life and practice of the likes of Plato and Aristotle, who lived in 5^th century Athens) puts this same idea in terms of the beatific vision, in which humanity will one day participate in the very life of the Trinity in ways that we cannot now begin to imagine. (Remember that, even though “God does not have a body,” this does not mean that God is less than embodied, but rather infinitely more: God so radically transcends our material world and existence (since they cannot begin to contain God) that it is accurate to say that he does not have a body.

The divine, infinite life of that community of persons called Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is described by theologians as a dance. (Sounds festive, does it not?) This dance is not just movement (though it does include something like that) but rather all kinds of loving, relational dynamics that we cannot imagine. Suffice to say that they greatest party you have ever experienced (complete with all the “fun stuff” you experienced at that party) pales in comparison.

What’s crazy about this picture is that, according to classical Christian theology, this dance is what we are invited into, and we are invited into it now.

Learning this divine dance is what we are doing in the liturgy. To quote Peter Leithart (from Against Christianity),

Worship trains us in the steps for walking, for dancing rightly through life. Christian cult trains us I the protocols of life in the presence of God, and thereby, since all life is in the presence of God, acclimates the worship to Christian culture…. Christian ritual displays the world how we believe and hope it will be one day. Ritual displays to public view who goes where, how each of us fits into the whole, how the members of the body are knit into one while remaining many, how the melodic lines of each individual life harmonize into a communal symphony…. Through the rituals of worship, we begin to realize together who we are together: of course we are a sinful people who needs to break away from the world, to make a weekly Exodus from Egypt; of course we are an ignorant people who needs to be instructed and reminded each week of our language and our story; of course we are the children of the Heavenly Father, who has given all things freely in Hin Son and displays that gift in the gift of food; of course, we have been ingrafted into the community of the Trinity, for each worship service begins and ends in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and ends with the triune name spoken over us.

Is this how you imagine and understand what we do every Sunday morning at St. Richard’s? Here is true festivity and true rest.

“O Lord, you know all my desires,

and my sighing is not hidden from you.” (Ps 38:9)

“God is not the kind of father who casts off sick and erring children; if he were, he would have no children.” - Martin Luther.

Peter Leithart, in Against Christianity (p 89), writes

… Calvin was fatally wrong in suggesting that [the Roman Church's] Galatianism was found wherever there is an emphasis on ritual per se. Calvin notwithstanding, the redemptive-historical move that the New Testament announces is not from ritual to non-ritual, from an Old Covenant economy of signs to a New Covenant economy beyond signs. The movement instead is from rituals and signs of distance and exclusion (the temple veil, cutting of the flesh, sacrificial smoke ascending to heaven, laws of cleanliness) to signs and rituals of inclusion and incorporation (the rent veil, the common baptismal bath, the common meal)…. Rituals are as essential to the New Covenant order as to the Old; they are simply different rituals.

For years I have been saying that “Prayer is God reaching forth to God” and drawing us up into that process within the Trinity. This is a quotation of someone, though I can’t remember whom (maybe Kallistos Ware?).

Fr. Robert Barron, Catholic Priest and director of Word on Fire, says (in this video) that prayer is quieting ourselves to the point where we can overhear the conversation that the Son and the Father, through the Spirit, are having, about you.

“Bishop Stephen Sykes once gave a crisp account of why he feels both attracted to and repelled by Anglicanism. On the positive side, he listed four chief strengths: a ‘quiet and confident Catholicism,’ an openness to a range of spiritual traditions, the exercise of authority with consent, and a developing baptismal ecclesiology. His dislikes included ‘the triviality an superficiality into which our eclectic openness can fall,’ the proneness of Anglicanism to fashionable causes and ‘the all-consuming ruthlessness of the campaigners, for whom politics is all.” – Rupert Shortt, Rowan’s Rule: the Biography of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

I was particularly interested in this comment about “baptismal ecclesiology,” since the absence of such a thing is one of the main reasons (you might say “the efficient cause”) of why I finally left Presbtyerianism.

This past Saturday I had the joy of attending an ordination service at (beautiful) Christ Cathedral in Houston, at which several good friends were ordained to the diaconate. (I myself am supposed to be ordained to the diaconate sometime this fall.)

There were several strking ocurrances during the service, but one of the most poignant for me was when Bishop Doyle asked each ordinand, one by one,

Will you be loyal to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of Christ as this Church has received them? And will you, in accordance with the canons of this Church, obey your bishop and other ministers who may have authority over you and your work?

After which each individual ordinand responded,

I am willing and ready to do so; and I solemnly declare that I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation; and I do solemnly engage to conform to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Episcopal Church.

In his article about the Church of Scotland’s recent decision to “appoint” its first openly practicing homosexual minister, Westminster Seminary’s Carl Trueman argues that the decision of some evangelical churches to remain in the C of S but not to associate (including financially) with the denominiation or with non-orthodox parishes is “strange ecclesiology.” And I agree.

However, Truman’s own ecclesiology, it seems to me, is just as strange, in its advocacy of separating from denominations when they don’t conform to one’s own idea of “orthodoxy.”

It seems to me that this approach (inscribed into the history of Protestantism, and, in its own way, post-Tridentine Romanism) is problematic on three levels:

First, who gets to say what orthodoxy is? Some arbitrary conglomeration of individuals and congregations who band together on the basis of agreement? On the contrary, orthodoxy is the rule of faith, which is concretely embodied in the creeds of the church in her liturgy. Beyond this, we are called to engage in an ongoing, open-ended discussion of real listening and give and take. This discussion has a name: tradition.

Second, and related, the very idea of a denomination is fatally problematic. That is to say, efforts to organize the church on the basis of any doctrinal content other than what all Christians believe amounts to ideological gnosticism, and not the witness of proclamation of the Christian church. It guts the church of her primary way of imaging the God of which she is an icon: unity. (Within this unity of God and analogously of the church there is of course great diversity. Hence the presence of various interlocutors in the ongoing dialogue.)

Third, as NT scholar (and friend) Daniel Kirk points out here, denomination wars aggravate and encourage Gentile-like (and Pharisee-like) conflict before a watching world. This is the very kind of division and power-play that Jesus and Paul rail against. (Of course the church has always been full of sinners, but denominationalism raises this kind of conflict to a new level.)

What binds the church together in unity is her eucharistic liturgy, which necessarily involves Scripture, bishops, and creeds (among other things). I do believe in something called “church discipline” (as I have posted on here) but this is quite different than breaking the unity of the church at a structural level. (What I mean by “unity,” by the way, is eucharistic unity: sharing the eucharist around the same table.)

I have a great deal of respect for Peter Rollins. Both of his two recent books are provocative and stimulating. What I appreciate about him is that he brings his knowledge of “postmodern” theory (Zizek, Derrida, Levinas, and others) to bear on Christian theology. Rightly so.

However, when it comes to what I regard as “the great divide” in the Church and in Christianity, Peter Rollins falls clearly on one side.

One side says that our worship is an expression of our theology and our convictions. The other side says that worship is something that we simply inherit from the past (as tradition or in Greek paradosis, ie, “handing down”) and then (yes, critically) reflect on that received tradition and ask questions like “In light of this way of worshiping, what can we realize about God and creation?”

Rollins clearly lands of the former side. Which means that he, along with, perhaps, the rest of the “emergent movement,” thinks that worship is, at the end of the day, an expression of our theology.

I disagree. I, along with the bulk of the catholic tradition in both the east and the west, think that “the law of worship is the law belief.” Lex orandi, lex credendi. Our theology flows from our worship, and not vice-versa.

In his Theology, Rhetoric, and Manuduction, Peter Candler “defines” participation and representation (p. 34):

By ‘participation’ I refer to an ontological principle by which creatures ‘are’ by analogy to the way in which God ‘is,’ but also the notion that sacra doctrina is a kind of scientia which participates in God’s knowledge of himself, and is therefore not something superadded to God.

And again,

Representation … is a matter of immediate apprehension by virtue of an exterior sign, and is removed from the variables of time and human communities. As such, representation is the fundamental philosophical and theological strategy of modernity.

Many people who keep up with me will know that, in my new role as candidate for Holy Orders in the Episcopal Diocese of Texas, I am in the process (it will surely be a life long process) of trying to think more deeply about issues surrounding human sexuality.

Talking about this recently with a fellow seminarian (actually, a friend in the Lutheran program here at my seminary) I was confronted with a really good point.

Many conservative types (such as myself) who perhaps have a more “traditional” opinion regarding homosexuality become quite silent when the topic of divorce comes up. My friend suggested (though I don’t think I agree with him) that the Scriptures are more clear on this issue than on homosexuality.

What is true, however, is that Jesus explicitly addresses divorce, and not homosexuality, in the gospel narratives (Matt 19). Why is this important? Because, as another friend pointed out, Anglicanism has always followed “the catholic tradition” of seeing the Gospels as having a certain priority over other parts of the Christian Bible, and this view is embodied in our liturgy. For the classic statement of this by Origen, see here.

Joel at Living Text has a post on divorce which I find quite compelling.

For the introduction to this series, go here.

What is the point of all this? Maybe it is this. Have you ever wondered why it is only modern “protestant types” (liberal and evangelical: really two sides of the same coin, in that they both reject all of the above) who get all hot & bothered over biblical “contradictions?” It is not a coincidence.

“Catholic types” (read: historical traditions who have always known that Scripture is a time bound practice in the bosom of the church) don’t really get too hung up about it, and for good reason.

Another way of saying all of this is that Scripture is mediated through the church and her liturgy. And if that is the case, then the messy details which might seem like an outsider to be earth shattering differences, are in fact part of a larger conversation and development.

Intro to series. Part I. Part II. Part III.

Finally, NT Scripture itself teaches that there is another stream of “revelation” or “teaching” or something that comes to the church (this is ecclesiology) from God other than just Scripture: see the following:
•    2 Thess 2:15. Here the verbal and written apostolic instruction is subsumed under the heading of the ‘traditions’, suggesting not a two source revelation paradigm, but rather one source -  God, who uses two unified means, namely written and oral which are harmonious rather than contradictory.
•    Luke 1:1-4. Here we find the oral tradition (v.2) preceding Scripture as a source of catechesis (the word used in v.4).
•    John 20:30 and 21:25.
•    There is Paul in I Cor 11:23: “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you….”
•    There is 2 Tim 2:2: “Entrust the things which you heard from me to faithful men.”

Conclusion to this series.

Intro to this series. Part I. Part II.

Now for some history.

Another anecdote. In a liturgy class here we were discussing the Didache. Modern scholarship now dates it at 100 CE. Now, what is interesting about the Didache (among other things) is that the Eucharistic liturgy it gives us is in certain very important ways continuous with the way that the church (many branches of it) continued to celebrate the Eucharist down through the centuries. The Didache has the same shape or structure (in important respects) as both the Eastern Orthodox Church has always had as well as the Roman Catholic Church. It is this shape or structure which is then recovered in the 19th and 20th century “liturgical renewal movement” (eg, Dom Gregory Dix) and then imported back into many Protestant churches (including Anglicanism).

The preceding paragraph allows us to say that the liturgy of the church predates (at least much of) the NT documents. We know that if they were worshiping in a particular way in the year 100, then (because liturgy is inherently conservative) they were worshipping that way in the year AD 60.

Hence, liturgy is older than Scripture. Now what, exactly, does that “prove?” I am not quite sure, but this realization has had the effect on me of opening my mind to the possibility that Scripture is something which somehow belongs “within” the liturgy. And I think one could develop this in many ways, including the very liturgy of the didache which is consistent with “the Great tradition” (alluded to above) in which the reading of the Scriptures is decidedly a liturgical act or a liturgical reality. Hence the liturgy provides the context for Scripture.

Now we finally come to the Paschal Mystery, or “the death and resurrection of Christ.” What is the liturgy? One could say that it simply is the Paschal Mystery. It is the death and resurrection of Christ ritually enacted (important phrase) in so many ways and on so many levels. This is true for the Anaphora of the Eucharist; it is true for the rite of Holy Baptism; it is true for the Great Vigil of Easter, out of which and around which developed the entire liturgical year. (BTW, we know about that from another of these ancient historical documents: the reconstructed liturgy of the Roman presbyter Hippolytus.)

Next article: Part IV.

Intro to this series

Previous article (part I)

Here is another reason why the differences in Scripture aren’t such a huge deal: time. This is one of Rowan William’s main Leitworts. The church is in the process of a grand conversation which is leading somewhere. It is leading, ultimately, to the new heavens and the new earth.

Conversations take time. This fits perfectly with my Vosian understanding of Pauline eschatology. Conservatives look at this posture within Anglicanism and call it “neverending indeterminacy” because they want something given, something spatialized, something fixed, static and stable, some kind of original autographa. Over and against that, what liturgical traditions are really showing is that our life (which is liturgical), that is, our reading of Scripture, takes place in a temporality which is analogous to the temporality of the biblical narrative (as Rowan Williams argues here).

If you want to understand the deep theology of liturgy, you must see that it is about God’s actions taking place in and through time (which Plato says is a moving image of eternity).

This, too — liturgical theology — is ecclesiology.

Next article (part III)

Here is the introduction to this series.

Here is Part II.

I have spoken to some friends about how the liturgy has transformed my attitude toward a feminist person at my seminary. Experiencing this person (let’s call her “Jane”) in the liturgy, interacting with her in the liturgy, prompted the realization that, although she may hold many views which I find objectionable, she is a member of the body of Christ, and is clearly worshipping Jesus. I think that this is a powerful anecdote which begins to show how liturgy can transform the way we deal or cope with biblical messiness and interbiblical “conflict” (what some people call “contradictions in the Bible”).

I am drawing an analogy here between myself & Jane, on the one hand, and, say, Joshua and Judges (vis a vis the conquest), or the Old Testament’s portrayal of harem warfare, or whatever biblical conflict (“contradiction”) you like. By the way, one implication here is that it is not the case that “Israel has misreprented YHWH” (say, in the affirmation and committing of harem warfare) but rather that we, the people of God, have (possibly) misrepresented YHWH. Huge difference there, one which (in some ways) is less traumatic or fatal or disturbing. (By the way, and I hope to come back to this at some point, Anglicanism has never affirmed that Scripture is inerrant…. For that matter, I don’t think that classical Presbyterianism has either, at least until our isolated modern denominations did so, has it?)

But because of this analogy, because Jane and I are not just in the same family as each other (and — within the liturgy — we find a way to live peacefully with our differences) but also in the same family as whoever it was who “wrote” or spoke or passed down the Old Testament (on principle I don’t use the phrase “Hebrew Bible” anymore except in limited situations. That phrase contradicts one of my basic points here.), these differences are worth discussing and struggling with, but they don’t cause some crisis in the church. They neither prompt us nervously to rush to Scripture’s defense, nor do they prompt us to jettison Scripture as something which is hopelessly flawed.

This, by the way, is ecclesiology.

This little series is an attempt to flesh out my understanding of Scripture. It is like my own personal “doctrine of Scripture.” It might be called “a liturgical understanding of Scripture,” and I think it is right down the center of classical Anglicanism (including Cranmer and Hooker), but postmodernized (that is, perhaps, filtered through the theology of Rowan Williams and Radical Orthodoxy).

I am trying to challenge (what I perceive as) some basic ways that modern Protestant Christians (including biblical scholars), both more conservative ones such as those associated with Westminster Theological Seminary, as well as more revisionist ones such as Bart Ehrman, are thinking about the Bible. I think this approach helps to explain the anxiety over “inter-biblical conflict” which causes, on the one hand, Westminster Seminary types defensively to freak out over “liberal” views of the Bible, and, on the other hand, the (proto-) Bart Ehrman types to want to jettison Scripture (at least in terms of a norm or rule for the Christian faith and life).

Here’s my  outline:

1. Communion of Saints
2. Philosophy (time)
3. History
4. Scripture Itself (NT)

For the first article in this series, go here.

I just read Rowan’s article “The Body’s Grace.” I am glad I did. It is a wonderful article in almost every respect. I had already read — and profited from — Michel Foucault on human sexuality as always-already socially constructed, and so Rowan’s points about “the hermeneutics of sexual desire” (my term) made complete sense.

When built upon by Christian anthropology (specifically, our theological understanding of body), this is powerful stuff, and compellingly shows why (among other reasons) we don’t agree with (the supposed view of) Rome of procreation as sex’s sole purpose.

However, none of that theology actually challenged the “default posture” in my thinking about human sexuality (ie, same sex erotic desire).

The one sentence that did so challenge, me, however, was: “In a church that accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely … on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous biblical texts….”

OK, I have blogged on Richard Hays’ (Duke Divinity School NT scholar) work on homosexuality here.

Hays addresses, very profoundly, the relevant Biblical material on homosexual relations, and I find it very compelling. He comes down at a place that is, I think, utterly responsible and charitable, and yet pretty “traditional,” especially by the standards of The Episcopal Church. (BTW, I am 99% sure that NT Wright basically agrees with Hays’ on this issue completely.)

Hays, who takes the authority of Scripture quite seriously (as does historic Anglicanism), ends up saying that, on the basis of Scripture, the church ought not to be ordaining practicing homosexuals to the presbyterate and the episcopate.

Apparently Rowan sees this as fundamentalist. I have spent many years thinking about fundamentalism, and it is not clear to me that this is the case.

I would love to discuss these biblical texts — and how and why they do or don’t matter — in greater depth.

Having said all this, however, here are three ways in which Rowan challenged me:

• He forced me to go back to the three NT texts (other than Rom 1) which are regularly brought out for the traditional position (Acts 15:28-29;I Cor 6:9-11; I Tim 1:10). I can now see that the Acts passage (with its use of pornea) is probably irrelevant to this issue.

• He forced me to think more deeply about our Reformed understanding that “Scripture interprets Scripture.” In this understanding, we elucidate relatively obscure passages by use of relatively clear ones. My question is now: “Which are the clear doctrines: the three passages listed above, or all the biblical contexts Rowan brings out in his article (what God’s instructions to Hosea imply about human sexual desire, risk, and reciprocity; Paul’s instructions on giving our bodies to the other; etc.)?

• While it is pretty clear to me that Hays’ work in this area is not fundamentalist, I do need to consider whether it is abstract. His material on his friend Gary, however, strongly suggests to me that it is not. (But I want to make sure.)

In our study of the book of Acts (which meets on Sunday afternoons at St. Mark’s in Austin) we have waded through many details. We have “gotten down and dirty” and delved into the gritty particulars of the story.

Because we have engaged in this hard work, I think we are now in a position to begin to discern some larger patterns in the narrative (what Alfred North Whitehead called “a simplicity on the far side of complexity”).  One of these patterns which we have seen and discussed repeatedly is the outward expansion of the Jesus movement from Jerusalem, through “Judea and Samaria” (1:8), to Rome, a city which embodies “the ends of the earth” or the outer reaches of the realm of the Gentiles or the “Greeks.”

Presupposed by this theme is the more basic one of “Jewish versus Gentile,” which, again, we have discussed deeply and widely.

But these two themes (outward expansion to the ends of the earth and the cultural tensions between Jew and Greek) are connected to a third: revision of the predecessor religion of the people of the God of the Jewish Scriptures.

The church today is full of people who advocate revision of various kinds. (One thinks of the issue of “open communion” as well as the ordination / consecration of openly homosexual presbyters and bishops.)

There are, however, two kinds of revisionists (at least potentially or in theory): there are those who, in their advocacy for change, are motivated by and rely upon sources external to the tradition (for example, the values of our Western, secular, post-Enlightenment culture) and those who are motivated by and rely upon sources within the tradition of Christianity or, within that, of Anglicanism.

While it does seem to me that revisionists of the first kind are fundamentally misguided right from the start, it nevertheless remains the case that there is a place for revision within the Christian tradition. In fact, the case can be stated much more strongly: the religion of the New Covenant in Christ is itself a drastic, radical, and shocking revision of something prior.  The process of this revision, in fact, lies at the heart of the story told in the book of the Acts of the Apostles.

Given this, it seems that a revisionist can rightly analogize from the revision narrated in Acts to other revisions which might be needed today. (Henry de Lubac, in fact, thinks this way in chapter VII  of his Catholicism. See here.) This would be the second kind of revision, motivated by and relying upon sources inherent to the tradition. Unlike secular revision, this kind should be respected and deeply engaged with.

The book of Acts, in fact, provides us with a set of criteria for revision in the Church. How did it come about that the Gentiles were included in the New Covenant of the God of the Hebrew Scriptures without having to become Jewish (ie, without having to be circumcised and having to observe the other ceremonial and cultic practices of the Jewish people such as festival keeping and various food laws)?

There are several factors which hold in the narrative, and which the text is at pains to emphasize, in the developments narrated in Acts:

1.    Confirmation by the larger body.
2.    Confrontation by undeniable phenomena (ie, Gentiles speaking in tongues).
3.    Scandalous, uncontrollable surprise.

These three factors will be elaborated upon in upcoming posts.