All The Fulness

A Question For My Fellow Lutherans

I am a subscriber to the Lutheran liturgical quarterly Gottesdienst, which I recommend to all.  The journal's epigram is Leitourgia Divina adiaphora non est, which translates to "The Divine Liturgy is not indifferent things."  The journal's editors explain this aphorism as follows:

The principle expressed here is that the historic Divine Service of the Western Christian Church is more than Christian antiquity.  It is a theological treasure which can and should be used in today's Christian Church.  It has well served our Mother Church and our fathers in the faith for the past centuries and there is no reason to believe that it will not continue to do so in the future.

This is a sentiment with which I entirely concur.  But the editors have not quite shown that the liturgy is not an adiaphoron.  It is my understanding that "adiaphoron," in Lutheran theology, is a technical term with a precise definition:  a practice neither commanded nor forbidden by God in Holy Scripture, which may therefore may neither be required nor prohibited in the Church.  Thus to claim that something is not an adiaphoron is to claim that it is indeed commanded by God in Holy Scripture.

The editors are aware of this; for they go on to say:

Moreover, to say that liturgy is something not commanded by God is to reject the clear words of our Lord, who indeed has given specific commands which are quite liturgical in nature; for example, This do, pertaining to the Sacrament, and When ye pray, say, pertaining to the Our Father.

It is true that the Scriptures provide some instructions of a liturgical nature, such as the examples just cited.  But to say that the liturgical instructions contained in the New Testament are sketchy would be something of an understatement.  All of the liturgical instructions in the New Testament, taken together, fall very far short of even a minimal liturgical ordo.  For example, the Lord does tell us "This do in remembrance of Me," but there is no indication that it is necessary to make that remembrance in the liturgical assembly.  If I should decide to celebrate the Lord's Supper at my kitchen table with my family (or even by myself alone), there is nothing in Scripture that forbids me to do so.

It would seem that by the strict definition of an adiaphoron, the elements of the liturgy which are truly not adiaphora (because they have an explicit Scriptural command) form a very small subset of the Church's traditional liturgical praxis; and by trying to include all of the historic Divine Service of the Western Christian Church as non-adiaphora by reference to the fact that a small subset of it has divine sanction, the Gottesdienst editors are stealing a base.

I have a twofold question for my fellow Lutherans:  are the Gottesdienst editors right to claim that the Church's liturgical ordo is not an adiaphoron?  and if so, is that consistent with a properly Lutheran understanding of Sola Scriptura?  (Non-Lutheran readers are certainly welcome to chime in as well, of course.)

My own view on this question can be found (implicitly, at least) in an earlier post here.  Dix dixit.

The Catholic Christ

The word "Catholic" is one of the most difficult and troublesome in the Christian vocabulary.  It's one of those words which, by accumulating so many meanings, runs the risk of finally having no meaning.  At the very least it is  necessary to specify which sense of the word is meant almost every time one uses it.

But amongst all the various senses of this important term there is a core meaning from which all of the others are derived.  LCMS pastor Father Rick Stuckwisch explores this core meaning in a marvelous post on his weblog entitled Preaching the Catholic Christ.

I commend, of course, the whole challenging post, but here are a few teasers.  Fr Stuckwisch begins:

The catholicity of the Church, as confessed in the Creeds, is not simply its universal spread throughout the whole world. It is especially the gracious and glorious presence of Christ — in all His fullness and with all His gifts and benefits — in each and every parish of His Church on earth, wherever His Gospel is preached and administered in His Name.

Here Fr Stuckwisch makes two important points:  that catholicity is about fulness, not extensiveness in space (or even time); and that each local Church itself has that fulness, not by virtue of being a "piece of the whole" but by virtue of the divinely-promised presence of Christ.

With that foundation Fr Stuckwisch goes on to an in-depth discussion of preaching, showing how in the preaching of repentance and forgiveness the fulness of Christ is manifest and delivered.  He devotes several paragraphs to explicating the kerygmatic, catechetical, liturgical, and sacramental character of proper preaching.  He shows particularly forcefully that in preaching, just as in the administration of the sacraments, the pastor is acting in the stead and by the command of the Saviour:

This preaching of the catholic Christ is not simply preaching "about" Him (although it's always good to be talking about Jesus), but, better still, it is really His own preaching. The pastor preaches in the Name of Jesus, in His stead, from within His Office. The pastor preaches in the same way that he baptizes and absolves, as the one who has been called and ordained to speak with the voice of Christ Himself. In preaching, therefore, it is Christ Jesus who is speaking to His people, calling them to repentance, forgiving their sins, giving them His life and salvation.

In other words, Christ Jesus is the proper Subject of the preaching in a two-fold sense: both as the One who is "doing the verb" (i.e. He is the Preacher), and as the Content of the preaching. Christ is the One who preaches, and Christ is the One who is preached.

For me, there is an echo in that last sentence of some language that occurs in the priest's prayer during the Cherubikon in the Byzantine rite:  For Thou, O Christ our God, art the Offerer and Thou art the One offered; it is Thou Who receivest the offering and Thou art Thyself the offering which is distributed.  That language reflects the fact that even though it is the priest who stands at the altar, it is Christ Who performs the action.  But the priest is just as much in persona Christi in the pulpit as he is at the altar.

Finally, Fr Stuckwisch tells us that sound preaching is always liturgical; not because its subject is the liturgy, but because the sermon has its own structural and functional role to play in the liturgical action, which is to explicate the witness to Christ which has been made by the appointed readings, and to point the people of God to the delivery of forgiveness in the sacrament of the altar:

The sermon is "liturgical" when it proclaims what has been read in the appointed Lections as fulfilled in the hearing of the people, and when it brings them by that particular Word to the Altar of Christ in repentance and faith

There was a time (not so long ago) when such emphasis on preaching would have sounded too "Protestant"; I thought that a Catholic Christian should value the sacraments more highly than preaching.  But I have come to appreciate that when a sermon fulfills its role within the liturgy, applying the canon of truth to the Scriptures which are proclaimed in the liturgical assembly, there is nothing more "Catholic."

I have included a lot of excerpts, but there is a whole lot more goodness where that came from.  As they say, read the whole thing.

Irenaeus's Existential Moment

Irenaeus at Retractiones made a challenging post last week on Sola Scriptura that I think is worthy of comment.  Here is his lede:

Driving this morning running an errand, I had a weird, terrifying existential moment. I realized -- deep, deep in the gut -- that most Prot Christians in this country simply have their English Bibles, and they're actually trying to base what they believe on it, even though I would guarantee you that the vast majority of them have NO CLUE what the texts mean.

(Read, of course, the whole thing.)

He goes on to attribute ordinary Protestants' cluelessness to a lack of understanding of the "Jewish and Greco-Roman" historical and cultural context, and to suggest that their understanding of the faith comes not from Scripture directly but is mediated through various Protestant traditions and magisteria (none of which, of course, self-identifies as a magisterium).

The cluelessness that Irenaeus recognizes would be no mystery whatever to his namesake (patron?) St Irenaeus of Lyons.  But I would suggest that St Irenaeus would have a different view of the cause and cure of this problem.  The problem is not a lack of sufficient historical understanding of the context of Scripture, nor is the cure to repair to an intellectual tradition and a magisterium of more intellectual and historical and theological heft and gravitas (as "our" Irenaeus puts it).  No, for St Irenaeus, the problem is the absence of the canon of Truth -- the Church's rule of faith -- as the hermeneutical key to the Scriptures.  The canon of Truth, which we know best in its form as the Church's Creed, is not something derived from Scripture by human intellection.  It is itself the key to the Scriptures, without which the Scriptures cannot be rightly understood.  And (again as St Irenaeus explains) the canon of Truth comes to us not by human derivation from the Scriptures themselves, but by Tradition from the Apostles (to whom it was given by the Saviour Himself). Such is the cause. 

The cure is left as an exercise for the reader.

A Housekeeping Note

One of my readers noted that folks who have dial-up Internet access are not in a position to read weblogs in a leisurely fashion.  An e-mail discussion group is better for this situation.

I wouldn't know how to set up such a group, but to enable access to All The Fulness via e-mail, I have set up a "Subscribe" box at the bottom of the left-hand column.  To subscribe, enter your e-mail address into the box and click the Subscribe button; then reply to the confirmation e-mail that you will receive.

Every time there's a new post at All The Fulness (that's once a year or so, for those of you keeping score), subscribers will receive the post in  their e-mail inbox.  If you want to comment on the post, e-mail me the comment and I will add it to the comments here on the weblog.

I'm using the Google Feedburner service for this, which I have never tried before.  So I can't guarantee that it will work.  We'll see.

Tap, Tap ... Is This Thing On?

Well, it may be "on" but the chances of anyone listening after a year of silence are pretty slim.  Nevertheless, I am going to try to resurrect All The Fulness.  There's no point in having a weblog just to let it lie fallow.

It's not that I haven't been active in the blogosphere.  I have my "usual suspects" that I read faithfully, and often comment; but for some reason I have always been more comfortable commenting elsewhere than writing here.  Let's see if I can change that.

Lex Orandi Lex Est Credendi

This aphorism is very popular among "liturgically-minded" Christians, who rely on it to emphasize the importance of liturgy and (sometimes) to justify their interest in liturgical minutiae.  And as an Anglo-Catholic "bells and smells" man from the beginning, it is an important principle for me as well.  (I would note in passing that the aphorism is, if anything, more important for "liturgical Protestants" (Anglo-Catholics and Lutherans) than for Catholics and Orthodox.  For Catholics and (especially) Orthodox, the centrality of the liturgy is simply a given, not something that must be continually argued for and justified.)

So what does this old saw actually mean?

For many the meaning is simply that the liturgy is important because the liturgy expresses what we believe; that we ought to be careful about how we worship because of what it says about our faith.  Sloppy and irreverent worship reveals sloppy theological thinking, and heretical worship certainly indicates heretical doctrine.  A stronger form of this attitude says that we must edit our forms of worship to conform to correct theology.  We are to sit at our editor's desk with our liturgical texts at one hand and our confessional documents and systematic theology textbook at the other hand, wielding the editor's pen to ensure that the former conforms strictly to the latter.

For others it means that liturgical texts serve as a source-book for theologizing.  The texts themselves are a doctrinal authority; subordinate to the Scriptures, perhaps, but an authority just the same.  The extreme form of this attitude would picture the same editor's desk as I did in the last paragraph, only this time we are to conform the confessions to the liturgical texts, not the other way around.

I think there is some truth in both of the views I have just outlined. But I think the most important word in the saying is the one that is usually left out when it is quoted.  Usually we say simply "lex orandi, lex credendi", as if to say "there's some relationship between belief and prayer, but we're not saying exactly what it is."  But the aphorism is Lex Orandi Lex EST Credendi -- the rule of what is to be prayed IS the rule of what is to be believed.  It is not a statement of the way things ought to be, but a statement of the way things are.

And in fact it is in our worship that we are taught, and receive, and take to heart the faith that we hold.  Our Lutheran Fathers express that clearly when they note (AC V) that "that we may obtain this faith, the ministry of teaching the Gospel and administering the sacraments was instituted."  They did not say that we obtain our faith by reading the Bible, going to Sunday School, or even at our mother's knee.  It is through the Church's ministry of Word and Sacrament that we are given the faith that saves us -- and that means liturgically.  All other ways by which we learn our faith are (at best) extensions of and secondary to what happens in the liturgical assembly.  Because extra-liturgical ways of appropriating our faith have no divine promise attached to them -- unlike the liturgical ministry of Word and Sacrament, they are not covenanted means of grace.

A Church body may say that its rule of faith is found in its confessional books; but the faith which is actually imparted to the folks in the pews is what they hear and experience when they are actually sitting in those pews:  lex orandi lex est credendi.