Who Do We Trust?: Liturgy

Today’s post is the final one in this ‘subseries’ on Tradition within the larger series about authority in Christian life, thought, and faith. And it’s going to be a bit of a bridge between de iure forms of authority — that is, what the rules say ‘should be’ authoritative — de facto sources of authority — things that are authoritative in actual fact, whether they ‘should be’ or not. And this bridge is going to be liturgy, essentially, corporate prayer and worship.

While few people today would think to list liturgy as a formal part of Christian authority, it has a long history of being considered so. Its most famous expression comes from the fifth-century writer Prosper of Aquitaine, who urged a consideration of the liturgy “so that the law of praying might establish the law of believing.” The Latin form of this (ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi) was later turned into the pithier, lex orandi lex credendi: ‘The rule of prayer is the rule of faith’, or more literally, ‘the rule of what is to be prayed is the rule of what is to be held in faith.’ (Latin is much better at pithiness than English!) This idea expresses the fact that to a great degree, we are what we pray — especially what we pray together, week after week and year after year.

As much as we may rightly disdain “vain repetition” in worship (cf. Matthew 6.7), there is no question that there is a lot of power in repetition. There’s a reason why repetition and refrain is an important part of the repertoire of everyone from songwriters to advertisers to politicians. A strange fact of how the human brain works is that if we hear something often enough, we’ll start to wonder if it’s true — no matter how outlandish it may be. This makes the words we surround ourselves with very important. If we sit around listening to cable news all day, with its words designed to stoke anger and fear, we’re likely to become convinced that the world is a fundamentally scary place and become angry and fearful in response. But, if we surround ourselves with words of faith, praise, joy, and love, we’re likely to become a bit more loving and joyful ourselves. All this is to say that the Torah was on to something when it commanded the Hebrews:

Recite [the words of the Law] to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates (Deuteronomy 6.4-9).

And for most of us, this is where liturgy comes in. I would hazard to guess that at least 80% of the Bible verses I have committed to memory are there because of their use in worship, whether through incorporation into larger prayers, set aside as psalms or canticles, or in used in hymns and praise songs. But that also means I’ve memorized a lot of stuff from these sources that isn’t from the Bible. Let’s take hymn lyrics, for example. As much as we tend to think of them as timeless, the hymns we sing have histories, and are written from within the theological perspectives and concerns of their times. And for most of us, it actually takes quite a bit of time to sift through what of the specifically Christian words and phrases circling around our minds actually comes from the Bible and what is from the pen of a liturgist or hymnographer. And whether they mean to or not, our communities of faith — whether by a central body or by your local worship pastor — sanction these words, which seep into our minds and hearts and shape what we believe, how we see the world, and how we interact with it.

This is probably the best case that can be made for a more uniform, monolithic approach to worship in churches. Far more than the words of a sermon or catechism, the words of the liturgy, the prayers, and the hymns, are going to shape how the faithful think and believe. So it makes sense for those entrusted with preserving and passing on the faith to want to have a greater control over them. Of course, that approach also hinders local expression and culture (often with colonizing overtones), minimizes the role of God-given creativity, often confuses aesthetics for substance, and can lead to a dead traditionalism (versus an expression of a living tradition). So I’m not advocating for uniformity, rather just saying why it’s an understandable temptation.

At any rate, liturgy, whether intentionally or accidentally, has a big influence on what we believe. And like for anything that influences us whether we know it or not, I’m a big advocate of making sure we do in fact know it and keep it where we can see it. Liturgy is a kind of story we tell and so we’d do well to make sure the story we’re telling is telling the story we want to tell. In our case as Christians, that story is the story of Jesus. In the ancient liturgies of the Church, this was done quite literally, with the various processions and motions in the service reinforcing the story of the Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection of Jesus. But, this can be done in less literal ways too. We would do well to think about what the story we’re telling in our worship and prayer is and how it meshes with the Gospel.

By way of an example, my own denomination, the Anglican Church of Canada, undertook some liturgical reforms in the 1970s and 80s, which led to having two ‘official’ sets of liturgies, the 1967 Book of Common Prayer (BCP), which follows the liturgy we inherited from the English Reformation, and the Book of Alternative  Services (BAS), which follows the basic structure of traditional Western liturgies, but allows for greater variation and brings together a greater variety of historical prayers and biblical motifs. To this day, the BCP still has many advocates; some simply love the aesthetic quality of its older language and find the BAS too prosaic to be worthy of liturgy, while others like the specificity of its Reformed Catholic theological vision and find the BAS too ‘wishy-washy’. But, far from being wishy-washy, the BAS’s expanded source material actually makes it more representative of both traditional Christian liturgical expression and the Bible itself. What this means is that the two liturgies tell slightly different stories, both still recognizable as the story of Jesus, but one focusing on one aspect of that story (what we might call the ‘you’re all horrible sinners but God loves you and died for you’ story), and the other zoomed out to a broader perspective (the ‘God made the world and loves it and sin is a big problem but is never bigger than that love’ story).

Once again, I’ll end this with some of the considerations that have become important to me over the years in thinking through the relationship between liturgy and authority. But this time around, they’re very simple:

• ‘We are what we pray’: Our prayers and the words we repeat shape how we act and understand the world.
• This means we should be intentional about these words and where they come from.