Down with Ecclesiology!
I’m taking a class in liturgical theology starting next week, so I’ve been doing some of the reading in preparation. One of the texts for the course is On Liturgical Theology by Aidan Kavanaugh, a monk of the Archabbey of St. Meinrad and professor of liturgics at Yale.
Kavanaugh points to the fascinating reality that before the modern era, there was no such thing as ecclesiology per se, but this was not because premodern theologians did not care about the church. “Earlier theologians,” he writes, “did not ignore the Church any more than healthy people ignore health.” By implication he’s saying people who focus on the church to the point of creating an ecclesiology may be betraying an unhealthy deficit in their lives. We obsess over that which we do not have. His point, to frame it in my own words in the hope of coming into more ownership of the concept, is that the lives of earlier theologians were so firmly rooted within the church, it did not often occur to them to take up the church as an external object of study and reflection. They lived ecclesiology, so they had no need to build a conceptual framework about what the church is and should do. The church to them was a holistic enterprise that encompassed all of life. This was reflected in their Sunday worship, which was comprised by an all-day series of interlocking services that involved praise in the morning, a procession through city center, multiple sermons, litanies of prayer, and at the close of day lamplighting and vespers. Mind you, people were not expected to attend the whole shebang.
It was, perhaps, the length of worship as much as anything else that made worship an overall more human affair than we experience today. What I mean is that today, in most churches members sit quietly in their pews for an hour, standing to sing when appropriate, and so on, and then we leave. Kavanaugh writes, “Chrysostom sometimes preached for over two hours as his hearers wept, cheered, pounded their breasts, and applauded.” Sounds more like a football game than a church service! It had to be a more formative experience than is worship today.
Today, Christians live outside the church most of the time. Practically speaking the church today is a place we enter and exit; it is not an organism we embody at all times and in all places. It’s a garment we put on and take off at will, not a lens through which we see everything.
I long for a more holistic faith, and I applaud the efforts and vision behind such church communities as Quest and Monkfish Abbey in the Northwest—communities that are trying to practice whole-life faith, whereby faith is not cordoned off from the rest of life.
Kavanaugh points to the fascinating reality that before the modern era, there was no such thing as ecclesiology per se, but this was not because premodern theologians did not care about the church. “Earlier theologians,” he writes, “did not ignore the Church any more than healthy people ignore health.” By implication he’s saying people who focus on the church to the point of creating an ecclesiology may be betraying an unhealthy deficit in their lives. We obsess over that which we do not have. His point, to frame it in my own words in the hope of coming into more ownership of the concept, is that the lives of earlier theologians were so firmly rooted within the church, it did not often occur to them to take up the church as an external object of study and reflection. They lived ecclesiology, so they had no need to build a conceptual framework about what the church is and should do. The church to them was a holistic enterprise that encompassed all of life. This was reflected in their Sunday worship, which was comprised by an all-day series of interlocking services that involved praise in the morning, a procession through city center, multiple sermons, litanies of prayer, and at the close of day lamplighting and vespers. Mind you, people were not expected to attend the whole shebang.
It was, perhaps, the length of worship as much as anything else that made worship an overall more human affair than we experience today. What I mean is that today, in most churches members sit quietly in their pews for an hour, standing to sing when appropriate, and so on, and then we leave. Kavanaugh writes, “Chrysostom sometimes preached for over two hours as his hearers wept, cheered, pounded their breasts, and applauded.” Sounds more like a football game than a church service! It had to be a more formative experience than is worship today.
Today, Christians live outside the church most of the time. Practically speaking the church today is a place we enter and exit; it is not an organism we embody at all times and in all places. It’s a garment we put on and take off at will, not a lens through which we see everything.
I long for a more holistic faith, and I applaud the efforts and vision behind such church communities as Quest and Monkfish Abbey in the Northwest—communities that are trying to practice whole-life faith, whereby faith is not cordoned off from the rest of life.
posted by ChadRAllen @ 6:08 AM
1 Comments:
At June 16, 2005 ,
Anonymous said...
I think we put so much emphasis on "going to church" in our society that it becomes a measure of one's faith. A deeply spiritual person is one who attends church every Sunday. And we know of course that's not true. I am nourished by worshiping with a community of believers but sometimes I wonder whether my faith would grow more without that safety net of church every Sunday. Would I integrate my faith more into my life if I was forced to live without church every Sunday. I am reminded of the Amish, who worship every other Sunday, and on that day it is an all-day affair of four-hour worship, meals at noon, visiting in the afternoon, and supper in the evening. And it is in a different person's home each time. The Amish, of course, live their faith in very real ways day in and day out (even what they wear and drive), so perhaps Sunday worship is something different for them. A friend, the late Louise Stoltzfus, writes in her book "Traces of Wisdom": Leaving the Amish has changed everything for me. My search for a religious home has led me through many congregations, most of whom have had very different expectations from the Amish. In these various persuasions, I have been expected to go to church every Sunday. And to Sunday School. And sometimes even to Wednesday evening paryer meetings. I have often felt oppressed by this extraordinary emphasis on worship, and I have seldom wished to fullt engage in the high expectations of these groups, which always leaves me thankful for the more elastic structures of my childhood. Thankful for the wisdom of a tradition that supports balance around the questions of God and worship."
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