CHAPTER 1
Supplemental LiturgicalMaterials:THEOLOGICAL, BIBLICAL, ANDHISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
Contributors To Part I
Ellen K. Wondra is Assistant Professor of Theological Studies at Colgate-Rochester Divinity School/Bexley Hall/Crozer Theological Seminary in Rochester,New York.
L. William Countryman is Professor of New Testament at the Church DivinitySchool of the Pacific in Berkeley, California.
Richard Norris is Professor of Church History at Union Theological Seminary inNew York City.
Paula S. Datsko Barker is Assistant Professor of Historical Theology atSeabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois.
Jean Campbell, O.S.H., is Vice-Chair of the Standing Liturgical Commission andSister-in-Charge of the Convent of St. Helena in Vails Gate, New York.
"O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing ..."
Ellen K. Wondra
Corporate worship presumes first and foremost that God is self-disclosing,accessible, and involved in human life and history. Because of this, thelanguage of worship focuses on the presence of God, and it uses images thatconvey what human persons know of God and how our lives may be brought intogreater harmony with God's intentions for us. At the same time, it is God thatwe worship; that is, one who is ultimately incomprehensible to us, beyond bothour encompassing and our complete understanding. There is, then, a tensionbetween the knowability of God and the mystery of God; and this tension must bemaintained in worship, in reflection, and in holy living, if our faith is to beboth authentic and effective.
Corporate worship, theological reflection, and contemplative prayer all havetheir own appropriate languages, which inform but are not identical with eachother. In theological reflection and in contemplative prayer, the tensionbetween the knowability and the mystery of God may be maintained by disciplinedattention to the "negative moment" of our naming God, in which we recognize thatGod is hidden from us as well as revealed, in which we recognize that everythingwe say of God is partial and limited and therefore not-true as well as true.Such recognition of God's incomprehensibility is imperative. Without it, wereadily forget the majesty, power, and sheer graciousness of the living God.Such forgetfulness leads to that overreliance on human capacity and knowledgewhich is part of idolatry.
Corporate worship, by contrast, focuses on expressing and evoking what we knowand experience of God's presence. How, then, can liturgical language help usrecognize the incomprehensibility of God? One way is through the multiplicationof names, images, and forms through which we address and contemplate God incorporate worship. The Supplemental Liturgical Texts and Materials (along withthe process of development, use, evaluation, and reception of these materials)provide just such a multiplication when they are seen in conjunction with TheBook of Common Prayer which they explicitly supplement. The rest of this paperwill explain what I mean and why I think it is important that this processcontinue.
The shape, forms, and language (words, images, gestures) of liturgy mattergreatly because our praying shapes our believing and our living. Particularlyfor members of liturgical traditions such as Anglicanism, corporate worship isthe forming ground for Christian belief. It is in corporate worship that we cometo know the God with whom we desire closer union. It is there that we encounterthe ongoing story of our faith through scriptural and liturgical texts, and itis there that we become part of that story through sacramental participation. Itis there that we gain the strength, will, and disposition to live that faith inour daily lives. Our individual prayers and lives are embedded in this corporateworship which spans time and place, joining individuals and congregationstogether as members of one Body.
And yet we can pray, individually or corporately, only in the images andsymbols and gestures—the language—available to us. Much of this language isconveyed through corporate worship and its use of scripture, hymnody, prayer,and so on. But our spiritual formation is accomplished not only in church. Theworld in which we live is also part of the formative context of our faith, andthe language of faith derives its meaning not only from our prayer but also fromour everyday lives. The Reformation liturgical principle of worship in thevernacular recognizes not only that this is true, but that it has positivevalue. The basis of that positive value is the fundamental Christian convictionthat God meets us in the midst of our history, that is, in the midst of ourhistorical particularities and conditions, and in ways that are accommodated toour contexts and limitations. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us; throughthat incarnation in human history is our fullest encountering of God.
So it is of great importance that our corporate worship be shaped to recognizethe presence of both God and the faithful in particular historical contexts. Therevisions leading to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer made great strides in thisdirection, but more are needed. Some of these are undertaken by the SupplementalLiturgical Texts and Materials, for example, in recognizing that human sininvolves violation of self and of all creation, as well as of other humanpersons and relationship with God.
The contextual nature of human life is also reflected in the scriptural andliturgical traditions whose continuous use knits together the Body of Christacross both time and space. The fact that these texts and traditions have ahistorical character may, however, be masked by our conviction that they areimportant revelations of God who is sovereign over all the elements of time andspace. But to say that something is revealed does not mean it cannot behistorically shaped, nor does saying that something is historically shaped meanthat it may not also be revealed. Indeed, because of the Incarnation—the Wordbecome flesh and living in human history—we can both recognize and embrace thefact that, whatever else our sacred texts may be, they are also the work ofhuman persons living in concrete history and responding to the presence of Godin that history.
I have already said that God accommodates divine revelation to our conditionsand limitations. This is to say that God makes Herself known in ways that areaccessible to our recognizing and available to our understanding. God freelylimits what He will make known on the basis of what we are able to glimpse andto grasp. God's accommodation is a manifestation of Her own graciousdetermination that we be able to delight in the one who made us, to know the onewho redeems us, and to love God with the love with which He loves us. Again, itis part and parcel of belief in the Incarnation to affirm that our knowledge ofGod is historically shaped.
It also must be recognized and embraced that all human works, no matter howdivinely inspired and guided, are also both limited and fallible, simply becausethey are human. What it means to be human is that we are finite creatures livingin a created world. We are capable of only partial perception, articulation, andreflection, but we are also capable of growth. In our biblical tradition, forexample, this reality is reflected in the two different narratives of thecreation of the world, each of which reflects a different understanding of thenature of creation, and both of which differ from other understandings withwhich we are familiar. This does not mean that we recognize these narratives asany the less true.
In addition to this, there is also sin, that human propensity to turn awayfrom God and each other, to distort our own importance, and to suppress our needof others and our reliance on God. These propensities are reflected in texts andtraditions as well, and not just in ways that the Bible itself presents andcondemns as negative examples. For example, biblical accounts of divine commandsto slaughter conquered non-combatants and scriptural warrants for slavery have,in our context, lost all credibility and are even considered abhorrentlycontrary to "the Word of God"—even though they are found in something that werecognize as the Word of God overall.
So to say that even the most sacred of texts and traditions is humanly shaped(whatever else they may be) is to say that all such texts and traditions may beaffected both by human limitation and by human sin. This does not mean that theyare no longer sacred; rather, it means that they are not inerrant andinfallible. And so they must be read critically, with an eye both to thecontexts in which they were formed and to the One to whom they testify. Thefacts that the church is continuously engaged in reform of its life and beliefand that some scriptural materials are given relatively little or no weight inour ecclesial life are age-old recognitions of the human shaping of sacred textsand traditions.
There are a number of ways to proceed once one has said that revelation isboth accommodated (or relative) and uncompromisedly true. One way is to say thata new revelation has come which modifies, corrects, supplements, or evensupersedes the old. The problem here, of course, is one of discernment: how dowe know which new "truths" are in fact true? Clearly, continuity with alreadygiven-and-received truth is necessary. But continuity does not mean identity; itmeans both similarity and difference. The prophets, for example, reclaimed afaithful God by representing that God in a recast form and in new images. Tothem, and to those who contributed to the making of the canon, this newlyrepresented God was recognizable as the same God. (To others, let us remember,it was not a god, but a new idol, one to be rejected.) The early church, ofcourse, finally went even further in the same process in its separation fromJudaism. Our contemporary processes of discernment and reception are basicallythe same.
Worship, then, makes use of the various elements of our blessed historicalnessto articulate the praise of God and to knit together the Body of Christ. It doesso by bringing together multiple materials (word, reading, music, silence,prayer) of different genres (narrative, teaching, exposition, vision, poetry,exhortation, song, gesture) from many times and places (ancient andcontemporary, near and far). This bringing together is, and should be,polyphonic. It should have the character of a rich symphony whose harmonies areproduced by complex arrangements of individual elements and movements and whosediscords serve to increase the abundance of the whole.
Worship should be polyphonic because our human ability to articulate thefullness of God's graciousness, glory, mystery, and presence is so limited. Nosingle word, image, concept, or story that we have can encompass or convey thefull reality of the divine or the wonder of God's coming among us. In part thisis so because of our inherent creaturely limitations and the distorting andfalsifying effects of sin.
But even more, it is so because of the grandeur and mystery of the divine lifeitself. Our God is a living, active God who is first and foremost always muchmore than what we can know or express, and whois always creating, always revealing, always saving, always inspiring. Thereforeour relationship with God is not reducible to single or immutable theological orliturgical or pastoral or spiritual formulas and narratives. The diversity ofour texts and traditions reflects this conviction as much as it does ourrecognition that our own ability to give voice to the reality of God is bound bythe limits of creatureliness and distorted and perverted by sin.
So the language of praise, entreaty, repentance, conversion, and thanksgivingis polyphonic language. It is also figurative. That is, it identifies God withsomething with which God is not identical—with a rock, for example, orsupporting hands; or with wisdom, goodness, or love. It is readily evident tomost that God is not identical with any concrete, inanimate object. It isperhaps less immediately clear that God is not identical with more abstractcharacteristics, like wisdom, goodness, or love. But even when we say that Godis the ultimate exemplar of these or other qualities, we are still speakingfiguratively. For we know these characteristics most directly and immediatelythrough their human exemplars with all their flaws and failings, flaws andfailings that are not, we believe, found in God. Further, while we may say thatGod is the ultimate exemplar of these qualities, we do not know that ultimacyexcept in partial forms which are mediated through our historical experiencewith all its particularities and limitations.
Second, figurative language is both positive and negative. It makes astatement about what something is, but also about what it is not (the latteroften silently): to say that God is like a raging fire, for example,alsoimplies that God is not like that. Sometimes the negation is expressed moredirectly: God is infinite—that is, not finite—or immutable—not changeable.
In figurative language, then, there is a tension between positive andnegative, between affirmation and negation. There is also a play, a give andtake, an interaction, between similarity and difference, between like and not-like. With this interaction, this play, also comes a temptation to resolve thetension by overemphasizing the positive, stated similarity: to say, for example,that God is love without qualifying the meaning of the term so that it movesbeyond what is associated with its human exemplars. In this way, figurativeimages are taken to be literal statements.
Theologians, spiritual directors, and mystics have long recognized theimportance of this tension-laden play of similarity and difference. It conveysto us something of the incomprehensibility of God, the beyond-ness of God whonevertheless freely chooses to be self-disclosing to our perception andunderstanding with all its limitations and faults.
The play of difference is, in some instances, a play of conjunction, of sayingthat God is at one and the same time two opposite things; for example, God isthe supreme ruler of all and the servant who suffers for the sake of all. Thisconjunction encourages—even forces—language to expand, to signify more than itmight otherwise. The conjunction of the images of ruler and servant recasts themeaning of both, not only in relation to divine activity but also in the contextof human society. Such expansion encourages the human imagination, challengingus constantly to envision how things might be true and not true at the sametime, how apparent contradictories or opposites might coincide in one harmoniousunity. Our reflection is moved beyond the primarily rational to a morecontemplative stage where rationality and imagination combine to generateinsight and resolution for action.
The play of similarity and difference also guards against idolatry, theexaltation of something less than God into the place that only God may rightlyoccupy. For if we recognize that any image or language we use about God is bothtrue and not true at the same time, then no image can become absolute. We maysay truthfully that God is our King, but we also must say truthfully that God'sway of ruling is most unkingly, in that God is neither temporally bound norreliant on force or coercion for obedience. When we recognize this, we cannotsee any king as divine.
In all, then, the fact that our liturgy is polyphonic helps us worship Godmore fully and truthfully and also turns our attention more accurately to thewell-being of all creatures in this created world. The Supplemental LiturgicalTexts and Materials enter into the play of polyphony by deliberately increasingand enriching the type of images used to give praise to God and to foster ourcompanionship with one another. All of this takes place, it should beremembered, within the normative context of The Book of Common Prayer, whoseprimary imagery is quite different from that of the supplemental materials.
The expansions of imagery in the Supplemental LiturgicalTexts and Materials have been undertaken to recognize specific changes in thecontext in which our corporate worship is set. The changes most evident to manyhave to do with gender. But others, at least as important, are also present. Theaffirmation that Christ's self-offering is made "for all" rather than "formany," the recognition that human social organization is by "tribe and language"as well as by "nation and people," the acknowledgement of the fragility ofcreation, and the inclusion of reference to the eschatological "heavenlybanquet": all these recognize important theological and historical elements thatare underplayed even in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. Indeed, our process ofPrayer Book revision should go further in incorporating imagery, forms, andtraditions familiar to members of African, Asian, Latin, and indigenous cultureswho now constitute the majority of the Anglican Communion worldwide.
So far, however, most of the expansions of imagery have focused on correctingthe gender imagery of The Book of Common Prayer and, indeed, the bulk of theChristian liturgical tradition. The expansion of imagery goes beyond attentionto language about humans and to pronouns referring to God. However, both ofthese are of great importance.
