eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
A significant collection of articles on expanding our language about God, compiled by Ruth A. Meyers for the Standing Liturgical Commission. Topics discussed include: theological, biblical, and historical perspectives on Supplemental Liturgical Materials; biblical origins of inclusive language; historical and theological perspectives on expanding liturgical language; and gender and trinitarian language.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780898699098 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Church Publishing |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2000 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 178 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Ruth A. Meyers is Dean of Academic Affairs and Hodges-Haynes Professor of Liturgics at Church Divinity School of the Pacific. She served as chair of The Episcopal Churchs Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music through the conclusion of the 2012–2015 triennium and teaches throughout the Anglican Communion. She lives outside Berkeley CA.
Read an Excerpt
HOW SHALL WE PRAY?
Expanding Our Language about God
By Ruth A. Meyers
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 1994 The Church Pension FundAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-89869-909-8
CHAPTER 1
Supplemental Liturgical Materials: THEOLOGICAL, BIBLICAL, AND HISTORICAL 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 Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California.
Richard Norris is Professor of Church History at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.
Paula S. Datsko Barker is Assistant Professor of Historical Theology at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois.
Jean Campbell, O.S.H., is Vice-Chair of the Standing Liturgical Commission and Sister-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, the language of worship focuses on the presence of God, and it uses images that convey what human persons know of God and how our lives may be brought into greater harmony with God's intentions for us. At the same time, it is God that we worship; that is, one who is ultimately incomprehensible to us, beyond both our encompassing and our complete understanding. There is, then, a tension between the knowability of God and the mystery of God; and this tension must be maintained in worship, in reflection, and in holy living, if our faith is to be both authentic and effective.
Corporate worship, theological reflection, and contemplative prayer all have their own appropriate languages, which inform but are not identical with each other. In theological reflection and in contemplative prayer, the tension between the knowability and the mystery of God may be maintained by disciplined attention to the "negative moment" of our naming God, in which we recognize that God is hidden from us as well as revealed, in which we recognize that everything we 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, we readily forget the majesty, power, and sheer graciousness of the living God. Such forgetfulness leads to that overreliance on human capacity and knowledge which is part of idolatry.
Corporate worship, by contrast, focuses on expressing and evoking what we know and experience of God's presence. How, then, can liturgical language help us recognize the incomprehensibility of God? One way is through the multiplication of names, images, and forms through which we address and contemplate God in corporate worship. The Supplemental Liturgical Texts and Materials (along with the process of development, use, evaluation, and reception of these materials) provide just such a multiplication when they are seen in conjunction with The Book of Common Prayer which they explicitly supplement. The rest of this paper will explain what I mean and why I think it is important that this process continue.
The shape, forms, and language (words, images, gestures) of liturgy matter greatly because our praying shapes our believing and our living. Particularly for members of liturgical traditions such as Anglicanism, corporate worship is the forming ground for Christian belief. It is in corporate worship that we come to know the God with whom we desire closer union. It is there that we encounter the ongoing story of our faith through scriptural and liturgical texts, and it is there that we become part of that story through sacramental participation. It is there that we gain the strength, will, and disposition to live that faith in our daily lives. Our individual prayers and lives are embedded in this corporate worship which spans time and place, joining individuals and congregations together as members of one Body.
And yet we can pray, individually or corporately, only in the images and symbols and gestures—the language—available to us. Much of this language is conveyed through corporate worship and its use of scripture, hymnody, prayer, and so on. But our spiritual formation is accomplished not only in church. The world in which we live is also part of the formative context of our faith, and the language of faith derives its meaning not only from our prayer but also from our everyday lives. The Reformation liturgical principle of worship in the vernacular recognizes not only that this is true, but that it has positive value. The basis of that positive value is the fundamental Christian conviction that God meets us in the midst of our history, that is, in the midst of our historical particularities and conditions, and in ways that are accommodated to our contexts and limitations. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us; through that incarnation in human history is our fullest encountering of God.
So it is of great importance that our corporate worship be shaped to recognize the presence of both God and the faithful in particular historical contexts. The revisions leading to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer made great strides in this direction, but more are needed. Some of these are undertaken by the Supplemental Liturgical Texts and Materials, for example, in recognizing that human sin involves violation of self and of all creation, as well as of other human persons and relationship with God.
The contextual nature of human life is also reflected in the scriptural and liturgical traditions whose continuous use knits together the Body of Christ across both time and space. The fact that these texts and traditions have a historical character may, however, be masked by our conviction that they are important revelations of God who is sovereign over all the elements of time and space. But to say that something is revealed does not mean it cannot be historically shaped, nor does saying that something is historically shaped mean that it may not also be revealed. Indeed, because of the Incarnation—the Word become flesh and living in human history—we can both recognize and embrace the fact that, whatever else our sacred texts may be, they are also the work of human persons living in concrete history and responding to the presence of God in that history.
I have already said that God accommodates divine revelation to our conditions and limitations. This is to say that God makes Herself known in ways that are accessible to our recognizing and available to our understanding. God freely limits what He will make known on the basis of what we are able to glimpse and to grasp. God's accommodation is a manifestation of Her own gracious determination that we be able to delight in the one who made us, to know the one who redeems us, and to love God with the love with which He loves us. Again, it is part and parcel of belief in the Incarnation to affirm that our knowledge of God is historically shaped.
It also must be recognized and embraced that all human works, no matter how divinely inspired and guided, are also both limited and fallible, simply because they are human. What it means to be human is that we are finite creatures living in a created world. We are capable of only partial perception, articulation, and reflection, but we are also capable of growth. In our biblical tradition, for example, this reality is reflected in the two different narratives of the creation of the world, each of which reflects a different understanding of the nature of creation, and both of which differ from other understandings with which we are familiar. This does not mean that we recognize these narratives as any the less true.
In addition to this, there is also sin, that human propensity to turn away from God and each other, to distort our own importance, and to suppress our need of others and our reliance on God. These propensities are reflected in texts and traditions as well, and not just in ways that the Bible itself presents and condemns as negative examples. For example, biblical accounts of divine commands to slaughter conquered non-combatants and scriptural warrants for slavery have, in our context, lost all credibility and are even considered abhorrently contrary to "the Word of God"—even though they are found in something that we recognize 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 be affected both by human limitation and by human sin. This does not mean that they are no longer sacred; rather, it means that they are not inerrant and infallible. And so they must be read critically, with an eye both to the contexts in which they were formed and to the One to whom they testify. The facts that the church is continuously engaged in reform of its life and belief and that some scriptural materials are given relatively little or no weight in our ecclesial life are age-old recognitions of the human shaping of sacred texts and traditions.
There are a number of ways to proceed once one has said that revelation is both accommodated (or relative) and uncompromisedly true. One way is to say that a new revelation has come which modifies, corrects, supplements, or even supersedes the old. The problem here, of course, is one of discernment: how do we know which new "truths" are in fact true? Clearly, continuity with already given-and-received truth is necessary. But continuity does not mean identity; it means both similarity and difference. The prophets, for example, reclaimed a faithful God by representing that God in a recast form and in new images. To them, and to those who contributed to the making of the canon, this newly represented 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, of course, finally went even further in the same process in its separation from Judaism. Our contemporary processes of discernment and reception are basically the same.
Worship, then, makes use of the various elements of our blessed historicalness to articulate the praise of God and to knit together the Body of Christ. It does so 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 and contemporary, near and far). This bringing together is, and should be, polyphonic. It should have the character of a rich symphony whose harmonies are produced by complex arrangements of individual elements and movements and whose discords serve to increase the abundance of the whole.
Worship should be polyphonic because our human ability to articulate the fullness of God's graciousness, glory, mystery, and presence is so limited. No single word, image, concept, or story that we have can encompass or convey the full reality of the divine or the wonder of God's coming among us. In part this is so because of our inherent creaturely limitations and the distorting and falsifying effects of sin.
But even more, it is so because of the grandeur and mystery of the divine life itself. Our God is a living, active God who is first and foremost always much more than what we can know or express, and who is always creating, always revealing, always saving, always inspiring. Therefore our relationship with God is not reducible to single or immutable theological or liturgical or pastoral or spiritual formulas and narratives. The diversity of our texts and traditions reflects this conviction as much as it does our recognition that our own ability to give voice to the reality of God is bound by the limits of creatureliness and distorted and perverted by sin.
So the language of praise, entreaty, repentance, conversion, and thanksgiving is polyphonic language. It is also figurative. That is, it identifies God with something with which God is not identical—with a rock, for example, or supporting hands; or with wisdom, goodness, or love. It is readily evident to most that God is not identical with any concrete, inanimate object. It is perhaps less immediately clear that God is not identical with more abstract characteristics, like wisdom, goodness, or love. But even when we say that God is the ultimate exemplar of these or other qualities, we are still speaking figuratively. For we know these characteristics most directly and immediately through their human exemplars with all their flaws and failings, flaws and failings that are not, we believe, found in God. Further, while we may say that God is the ultimate exemplar of these qualities, we do not know that ultimacy except in partial forms which are mediated through our historical experience with all its particularities and limitations.
Second, figurative language is both positive and negative. It makes a statement about what something is, but also about what it is not (the latter often silently): to say that God is like a raging fire, for example, alsoimplies that God is not like that. Sometimes the negation is expressed more directly: God is infinite—that is, not finite—or immutable—not changeable.
In figurative language, then, there is a tension between positive and negative, between affirmation and negation. There is also a play, a give and take, an interaction, between similarity and difference, between like and not- like. With this interaction, this play, also comes a temptation to resolve the tension by overemphasizing the positive, stated similarity: to say, for example, that God is love without qualifying the meaning of the term so that it moves beyond what is associated with its human exemplars. In this way, figurative images are taken to be literal statements.
Theologians, spiritual directors, and mystics have long recognized the importance of this tension-laden play of similarity and difference. It conveys to us something of the incomprehensibility of God, the beyond-ness of God who nevertheless freely chooses to be self-disclosing to our perception and understanding with all its limitations and faults.
The play of difference is, in some instances, a play of conjunction, of saying that God is at one and the same time two opposite things; for example, God is the supreme ruler of all and the servant who suffers for the sake of all. This conjunction encourages—even forces—language to expand, to signify more than it might otherwise. The conjunction of the images of ruler and servant recasts the meaning of both, not only in relation to divine activity but also in the context of human society. Such expansion encourages the human imagination, challenging us constantly to envision how things might be true and not true at the same time, how apparent contradictories or opposites might coincide in one harmonious unity. Our reflection is moved beyond the primarily rational to a more contemplative stage where rationality and imagination combine to generate insight and resolution for action.
The play of similarity and difference also guards against idolatry, the exaltation of something less than God into the place that only God may rightly occupy. For if we recognize that any image or language we use about God is both true and not true at the same time, then no image can become absolute. We may say truthfully that God is our King, but we also must say truthfully that God's way of ruling is most unkingly, in that God is neither temporally bound nor reliant on force or coercion for obedience. When we recognize this, we cannot see any king as divine.
In all, then, the fact that our liturgy is polyphonic helps us worship God more fully and truthfully and also turns our attention more accurately to the well-being of all creatures in this created world. The Supplemental Liturgical Texts and Materials enter into the play of polyphony by deliberately increasing and enriching the type of images used to give praise to God and to foster our companionship with one another. All of this takes place, it should be remembered, within the normative context of The Book of Common Prayer, whose primary imagery is quite different from that of the supplemental materials.
The expansions of imagery in the Supplemental Liturgical Texts and Materials have been undertaken to recognize specific changes in the context in which our corporate worship is set. The changes most evident to many have to do with gender. But others, at least as important, are also present. The affirmation that Christ's self-offering is made "for all" rather than "for many," the recognition that human social organization is by "tribe and language" as well as by "nation and people," the acknowledgement of the fragility of creation, and the inclusion of reference to the eschatological "heavenly banquet": all these recognize important theological and historical elements that are underplayed even in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. Indeed, our process of Prayer Book revision should go further in incorporating imagery, forms, and traditions familiar to members of African, Asian, Latin, and indigenous cultures who now constitute the majority of the Anglican Communion worldwide.
So far, however, most of the expansions of imagery have focused on correcting the gender imagery of The Book of Common Prayer and, indeed, the bulk of the Christian liturgical tradition. The expansion of imagery goes beyond attention to language about humans and to pronouns referring to God. However, both of these are of great importance.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from HOW SHALL WE PRAY? by Ruth A. Meyers. Copyright © 1994 The Church Pension Fund. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface Frank T. Griswold
Introduction Ruth A. Meyers
I. Supplemental Liturgical Materials: Theological, Biblical, and
Historical Perspectives
II. A Theological Consultation on Language and Liturgy
Session One: Focus Questions
Session Two: Focus Questions
Session Three: Focus Questions
Session Four: Focus Questions