From the October 2021 issue of Worship.
This year marks the centennial anniversary of the birth of Orthodox theologian Father Alexander Schmemann. In the broader Christian community, encompassing East and West, liturgical theologians remain grateful to Schmemann for reminding us that the liturgy is the primary source of theology. Schmemann famously described liturgical theology as “lex orandi est lex credendi;” the rule of prayer establishes the rule of faith. His abbreviation of Prosper of Aquitaine’s longer phrase invited theologians to view liturgy as the primary theological act and event. This act functions as the inspiration for all secondary theology. Schmemann boldly claims:
The Church’s leitourgia, a term incidentally much more comprehensive and adequate than “worship” or “cult” is the full and adequate epiphany-expression, manifestation, fulfillment of that in which the Church believes, or what constitutes her faith.1
To put it simply: when we gather as a community and encounter the living God in liturgy, that event is what capacitates us to say something theological, to put our experience into words. Yes, there is always a gap between the unspeakable liturgical experience of God and our feeble words, but it is that very event that inspires us to speak, or at least try.
Schmemann represents a cohort of figures of the liturgical movement whose teachings and efforts effectively liberated liturgical theology from subordination to systematics. Sacrosanctum Concilium 15 went so far as to call upon Catholic schools and departments of theology to appoint experts in liturgical studies to their faculties. Multiple generations of students learned at the feet of masters like Schmemann, Kavanagh, Weil, Bradshaw, Johnson, Irwin, Taft, Winkler, and Piepkorn, along with many others. Undergraduate and graduate courses in liturgy became fixtures of curricula. Students learned that liturgy is much more than a published text, and were instructed to learn from the experience of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with others in an assembly.
They heard prayers and words proclaimed, moved with the music, smelled the incense, and allowed their eyes to be taken into the icons and designs that communicate “God with us.”
At some point-I’m not sure exactly when-the liturgical wave began to recede. Liturgy faculty retired, and faculty lines went with them. Courses on liturgy and worship gave way to more vogue offerings. Professors of systematics began to offer courses on liturgy. I recently viewed an invitation to a virtual panel on post-pandemic liturgy – offered by a first-rate Catholic university – featuring a panel consisting of ecclesiologists and sociologists. Not a liturgist in sight.
The liturgical movement is experiencing a serious decline. A revival of the movement is possible, but this can begin only with some reckoning on the part of liturgists-both academic and pastoral.
Numerous factors converged to create this crisis, and I will address two of them here: the academy’s alienation from liturgy and a resurgence of liturgiolatry among pastors.
ALIENATION FROM LITURGY
In its current composition, higher education is market driven. Christian universities and colleges depend on tuition for their viability. As the world has endured financial crises, demographic changes, and the pandemic, schools find themselves competing for a diminishing supply of students. The demographic changes in the churches are also having an impact on Christian higher education. Schools can no longer depend on children attending their parents’ alma mater. The competition for students stiffens when one considers the cost of higher education, with parents seeking more affordable options, and students occasionally delaying college indefinitely. Liturgy programs also suffer from economic adversity suffered in dioceses and parishes. Dwindling funds force parishes to eliminate positions, a reality chat limits the number of positions available after graduation.
At the departmental level, a smaller supply of students leads co difficult discussions about program viability. Under-enrolled classes are cancelled. Departments need more majors and minors to make compelling arguments for new lines and retaining existing ones. Departments compete with one another for students, and liturgy can be a hard sell in comparison with courses on topics like race and gender, Latinx theology, and religion in America, among others. Occasionally, theology programs seek to make liturgical studies interdisciplinary (or multidisciplinary) by fusing liturgy with ritual studies or sociology, or by examining liturgy through a particular hermeneutical lens.
To be sure, all of these approaches are legitimate and necessary. Liturgy is neither a field of study nor a Christian practice chat is confined to itself with no concern for the cosmos and humankind. For liturgy to truly be theologia prima, the primary source of theology, its representatives in the Christian academy must be ready and willing to demonstrate its witness to all matters. It is therefore both legitimate and necessary to bring liturgy and art, politics, race, gender, and science into dialogue with one another.
The pitfall of inter-, multi-disciplinarity is the absence of a solid foundation in liturgy. Liturgical studies is the ultimate field for the practice of slow reading and the method of studying texts in contexts (and vice versa). No secondary text can replace the process of reading and hearing the recitation of an anaphora or the examination of a complete liturgical unit. Excellent classes in liturgy feature engaged learning through participation and observation in the liturgy. Students examine liturgical components in their native setting, the liturgy celebrated by a local community.
Two examples from liturgy courses I have offered at the graduate and undergraduate levels reveal the learning potential of class time devoted to the method of liturgical theology. In a graduate survey course offered on the rites, the class examined multiple examples of liturgical units to develop an understanding of how one can glean liturgical theology from the components that proclaim a message or reveal an image of God together. We then turned to a close examination of the prayer of the blessing of baptismal waters in the Roman rite. Students read the prayer on their own and the class session compiled detailed notes on scriptural and theological motifs embedded in the prayer along with its structure.
More recently an undergraduate class assigned students the task of composing a liturgical prayer or work of art. The assignment required students-and their professor!-to consider the liturgy from another perspective. For whom is this prayer composed? Where and on what occasion will the prayer be recited? Where will this work of sacred art be placed or performed?
In both classes, students recognized the power of the challenge confronting them. One does not arrive at an understanding of a prayer immediately, even after multiple readings. The process of creating prayers and sacred art has numerous considerations. The outcomes of both exercises were diverse in their themes, length, and sophistication, as one would imagine. The point, however, is the appreciation students gained for the method of liturgical theology.
The lessons they learned about liturgy’s capacity to form communities and express theology were worth the time invested in engaging the tasks and completing the assignments.
The method and contribution of liturgical theology are lost when liturgy is one of many topics covered in a theology course. Many professors of systematic theology can explain the theology of liturgy, especially if they are familiar with the history of liturgical commentaries. A solid historian can fold examples of eucharistic controversies or the history of penance into their classes. Ritual studies experts can explain the organic development and cultural formation of communal rites. None of these can unleash the potential of studying liturgy in its native texts and contexts and learning the method of liturgical theology.
Schmemann, and Fagerberg more recently, have illuminated the gap between theologies of (and from) liturgy and liturgical theology. The liturgy itself is the primary source of theology because of God’s active participation in the rite.
Limiting curricular coverage of liturgy might be convenient for departments and schools fighting to retain theology as a required field of study. Unfortunately, the loss of the value of engaging the method of liturgical theology is steep, even at the introductory level. This aspect of the crisis may have appeared somewhat accidentally, as an unintended consequence of converging events. Teachers of liturgy are familiar with the challenges of creating courses that inspire student interest and engagement while meeting departmental and university learning objectives. It is not always possible to devote the time required to learn the method of liturgical theology.
The current challenges confronting Christian higher education, then, are one of the two causes of the new alienation of liturgy from theology.
PASTORAL LITURGY AND LITURGIOLATRY
Another source for the general alienation of liturgy from theology is pastoral liturgy. One simply cannot account for all of the variations of pastoral liturgy in contemporary Christianity, so I will briefly comment on what I know here. The problem is essentially twofold: First is the tendency for pastors to reduce Christian life to liturgy, to attendance at the appointed services. Second is the unwillingness of some Christians to update liturgy so that it is truly accessible and comprehensible to the laity.
Pastors tend to practice a form of liturgiolatry in the way they explain liturgy to the people. Public messaging that depicts the liturgy as a requirement to be fulfilled at the risk of divine penalty is one symptom of liturgiolatry.
More often than not, pastors have good intentions-they’re simply trying to persuade people that they should come and participate in the liturgy.
Encouraging people to attend is both good and understandable-so, when does it cross the threshold into liturgiolatry?
The cycle of offices appointed to Holy Week and Easter helps us understand the threshold. The Byzantine tradition has numerous services appointed to Holy Week. If one observed the cycle to its fullness, one would be in church almost all day, every day of the week. Few parishes appoint all of the services mentioned in the Typikon, but there is a parish version of the pattern that would bring people to church every day of the week, Monday through Easter Sunday. This full version includes two services on Holy Thursday, three on Holy Friday, a long paschal liturgy on Holy Saturday, a series of services beginning at midnight on Sunday, all completed by Vespers sometime in the afternoon on Sunday.
For parishes observing a full cycle like this one described here, a small group of people attend most to all of the services. Most people select from the offices appointed to Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The service cycle itself is conducive to choice and convenience: if you miss the passion gospels on Thursday evening, you can still hear most of them on Friday morning at Royal Hours.
And even if your parish doesn’t have Royal Hours, the composite gospel reading appointed to Vespers includes the critical core of the gospels of Holy Friday.
The process of picking and choosing the services one can attend is as long a tradition as the services themselves. This process crosses the threshold into liturgiolatry when encouragement becomes coercion and pastors use guilt to try to persuade people to attend all of the services. Some pastors ask parishioners to take vacation time so that they can increase the number of services they attend. A joke has gone viral among Orthodox priests: “Christ is risen, but the priest is dead!” It has become common to describe Lent and Holy Week as a journey to Easter, with the Easter services themselves the end-all, be-all.
Has maximal attendance at services become the destiny of the Christian journey? If so, then the church has replaced the altar designed to honor God with an altar glorifying the human contribution to liturgy. It is misleading to describe Lent and Holy Week as a journey to Easter. First of all, Christian living and liturgical assemblies continue after Easter, and quite richly-not to Ascension, or to Pentecost, but in and with these feasts. Peter Phan’s explanation of the true meaning of Sacrosanctum Concilium was spot-on: salvation and the glory of God are the destiny of the liturgical cycle, not the liturgy itself.2
The reduction of Christian life to the services themselves perpetuates a problem that continues to confound Christians. It transforms the process of observing appointed liturgies into a transaction of going through the motions to receive a reward that will arrive later. A new sense of sanctity defines the services we demand the people attend; we bestow so much sanctity upon the services that we become unworthy of revising them, if and when the need arises. This approach ignores the warnings about the reduction of covenantal life with God announced from the prophets to the peoples of Israel and Judah: God will reject the most aesthetically solemn liturgies if they are not organically connected to the liturgy of everyday life, the one that results in loving one’s neighbor.
A liturgy that is confined to itself is dead, even if it is aesthetically pleasing. It is dead because the humans who organized and led its celebration transformed the liturgy itself into a god.
There is no single or easily accessible solution to the new liturgical crisis confronting Christianity today. It seems reasonable, however, to express confidence in pursuing the renewal of liturgy as an act that leads to an eternal communion with God and the living out of the covenant of God’s reign in the present. Attempts to detach communion from the living out of the covenant pose a grave danger to the enterprise of liturgical theology.
Students enrolled in institutions of Christian higher education and faithful Christians will gain a new love and appreciation of Christian liturgy if scholars and pastors work together to restore liturgy as the act par excellence of theologia. This process can begin if we recognize and begin to resist liturgiolatry and regain an appreciation for the fullness of liturgical celebration and study.
Pray Tell will be publishing a response to this Amen Corner piece.
1 Alexander Schmemann, “Liturgical Theology, Theology of Liturgy, and Liturgical Reform,” in Liturgy and Tradition: Theological Reflections of Alexander Schmemann, ed. Thomas Fisch (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990), 39.
2 Peter Phan, “Liturgy of Life as the ‘Summit and Source’ of the Eucharistic Liturgy: Church Worship as Symbolization of the Liturgy of Life?,” in Incongruities: Who We Are and How We Pray, ed. Timothy Fitzgerald and David A. Lysik (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2000), 8-9.
Please leave a reply.