Where I Stand on Liturgical Theology

Reflecting on several months of study and writing.

Mass at St. Stephen’s Cathedral by Jindřich Tomec (ca. 1928).

I have been tackling the matter of liturgical theology repeatedly on this blog throughout this year, and personally I don’t believe I’ll be stopping anytime soon. However, as I continue to do work on this and develop my thoughts I wanted to pause and reflect on where I’m at, and express this publicly so that others might benefit from it as well. In the monumental essay I wrote (which increasingly feels deserving of having been done in two or three installments in hindsight), “The Liturgical Nature of Christianity,” my argument primarily takes three forms: first, the early Christian church, as evidenced by Acts and the Pastoral Epistles (+ 1 Corinthians), had organized and formal practices for worship; second, a major theme in Scripture was the importance of tangibility, especially the (tangible) experience of the divine through ritual/corporate worship; third, liturgical worship is powerfully formative and is the best way to build people into being devoted to God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength (contra the deformative or weak structures of “low-” or “no-church” worship). This was followed mainly by two articles, “What a Biblical Liturgy Would Look Like” and “Aesthetics and the Worship of God.” What these established were, one, what were some commonsense principles the structure of liturgical worship should follow on the basis of what Scripture held to be important (such as delighting in God’s law, establishing a liturgical idiom that was biblically informed, or the ultimacy of Christ’s life and work in salvation history, justifying a Christotelic shape of worship), and, two, that beauty is an aspect of divinity and since a major theme in the scriptural tapestry is the participatory experience of divinity, mediated through worship of God, said worship should be cognizant of aesthetics. 

What I’ve come to realize in the time that has elapsed since I’ve started on the path of studying liturgical theology is the gulf that exists between what I’ve actually argued and what I accept in reality/practice. To put it simply, I was enamored by the worship of the Anglican Church, considering it and describing it to several as “exactly what’s needed.” It’s all the aesthetic and ritual glories of Catholic liturgy refined and informed by the bibliocentric currents of historic Protestantism, creating a perfect storm of elegance and high culture with faithfulness to Holy Writ. I was advised by a likeminded gentlemen from my own congregation that while I was certainly onto something, I should be wary of falling into a “liturgical fundamentalism.” As I’ve come to understand it, the negative connotation of “fundamentalism” is for there to be a gulf between what you understand to be true and what your principles actually say to you, devolving into a rigid mentality. It’s precisely the opposite of the dynamic vision of being principled and conservative that I’ve introduced in my article “What Does it Mean to be ‘Reactionary’?” After publishing “Aesthetics and the Worship of God” I realized the warning I had been given was legitimate, and my belief that this brother was of weaker constitution came around to bite me in the…nevermind.

I was desperately trying to legitimize the traditional worship of the Angelcynn who had, historically if not genealogically,¹ established the milieu of my worship and linguistic expression of the Faith. What I realized, however, is that I’d never established that in “The Liturgical Nature of Christianity” and actively refuted that in “What a Biblical Liturgy Would Look Like.” I seized onto a line I’d heard in a lecture by the Catholic apologist Scott Hahn about the scene of heavenly worship in Revelation 4-5, and how it reflected the shape of Catholic liturgy, which, combined with a lesson I’d learned that traditional Christian worship was commonly structured across denominations (a true lesson),² empowered me to believe that all Christian denominations had tapped into this basic fact, and so since Catholic and (in particular) Anglican worship had important structural harmonies and Hahn sourced the shape of Catholic worship in Revelation 4-5 (not exclusively, for sure) then, boom, I had my cudgel by which to justify Anglican worship.

It was a cudgel, however. That is unbefitting of the character I first went into my exhaustive study with, which was to simply pursue what Scripture, unfiltered, said about the worshipful approach of man before God instigated by a gnawing disillusionment with the bumbling disorder of “no-churchmanship” Christianity. This was exacerbated after I sat down to read Michael Heiser’s John’s Use of the Old Testament in the Book of Revelation, which glosses Revelation 4-5 as an example of, per Heiser’s paradigm, a divine council scene (see pp. 87-124). Does that necessarily mean that it’s not about worship? No, clearly the angelic (and perhaps human) beings depicted in this scene are worshiping God, but the thing is, as my growing emphasis on the cosmic kingship of God explains (see “Aesthetics and the Worship of God”), when you come before a king there are rituals that must be performed. When King David enters you don’t just say, “Hey, what’s up dude,” you perform a royal procession. Same thing with God: whether you come before Him in praise or in judgment the assembly must make ritual affirmation of His divinity and sovereignty. Revelation 4-5 isn’t a church scene, but it is a worship scene.³

This is a summary of the intellectual journey I’ve gone through over the past several weeks. I still believe that Anglican worship is great. I still think Evangelicalism (and neo-Evangelical appropriations of traditional worship) is grotesque. However, I’ve had to reapproach, reevaluate this conviction in light of me breaking from the spell of fundamentalism I was under. The best way to explain where I’m at and where I’m heading will be to explain the four schools of thought in liturgical theology as I see them.

There is, first, the low-church regulative principle of worship. This is what defines fundamentalist/Evangelical worship. The proposition is essentially identical to any standard formulation of the regulative principle, that the manners of Christian worship are regulated by whatever is explicitly handed down by the New Testament. However, the difference is that the low-church regulative principle asserts that the content of what the New Testament lays out for worship is empty and thin. Ostentation and splendor are “unbiblical excesses.” The problems with this position are the problems with the regulative principle in and of itself.⁴ For one, when Paul speaks about the public reading of Scripture in 1 Timothy or the proper handling of spiritual gifts in the assembly in 1 Corinthians, he only explains that and why these things are so, and to whatever extent a how may be attributed to what he says it’s not enough to avoid further problems under this model. For example, Paul says that Scripture should be publicly read. But how? Before or after the Lord’s Supper? Responsively, congregationally, or presbyterally?⁵ Short readings or long readings? None of this is specified. A regulative church must necessarily be damned to Hell on its own grounds, then, no matter how it worships God. A second issue, which builds on the first, is that in practice the regulative principle ignores a variety of biblical-theological realities that would/should shape the worship of God. For example, consider all that I discussed in “Aesthetics and the Worship of God.” This was to lay a foundation for the incorporation of aesthetic elements in worship on the basis that our worship is of a divine king and that the ancients/premoderns had a really good sense of what that practically signified. Of course, such a person could argue that this means Scripture regulates the church to have beauty, I’d have to say that misses my point and the rest of what I’ve explained concerning liturgy, but we’ll have to save this for later to more fully address it.

Secondly there is the open-ended normative principle. I struggled naming this because I’m not entirely sure what other term could best convey what I’m going for, but at least I can explain my intentions. This principle is a subunit of the normative principle itself, which says that Scripture provides norms for worship. Whereas the regulative principle says that only what is explicitly provided for by the precepts of Scripture is licit, the normative says only that which is explicitly prohibited by the precepts of Scripture is illicit. The normative principle is healthier, then, because it avoids the issue of impracticality that arises under the regulative principle. It’s also healthier because it does seem more biblical, and it’s essentially what lays behind my essay “What a Biblical Liturgy Would Look Like,” which doesn’t provide an exact scriptural model, but on the basis of biblical realities suggests what elements a liturgical tradition should have. We find this form of the normative principle more among neo-Evangelical churches and varieties of mainline Protestant churches. However, the open-ended normative principle is more so the belief that liturgy can be a hodgepodge of whatever elements a pastoral staff/eldership feel like throwing together. There’s no specific form or function to abide by, it can be a little bit of everything. I’ve considered also calling this the “Dawnian normative principe,” because the Evangelical Lutheran author Marva Dawn manifests a similar understanding of Christian worship and culture in her writings, such as in the following passage in which she discusses a workshop she did focusing on the arts (musical, visual, et al.) in Christian worship:

For the three-day course I had played more than a dozen audio recordings of music through the ages (including Hebrew psalm singing, Gregorian chant,⁶ the Latin mass, a Bach cantata, early American music, a contemporary setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, Russian Orthodox music, an African-American spiritual, and a contemporary organ and brass hymn setting); passed around various kinds of tangible fabric and visual arts, including a Trinitarian painting, symbols for banners, liturgical colors, historical crosses, and icons; utilized some dramatic readings of Scriptures, including one in which the entire class participated and one that imitated the style of a Greek chorus with ten readers in three different groups; led nine different short worship services all with different styles of music, especially from the world Church, which invited class members' physical movement; requested four seminary students to demonstrate liturgical dance; and lit a candle to bring fragrance and glow to the classroom.⁷

What struck me about this the first time I read it was how completely incompatible much of this was. Paralleling Russian Orthodox chants with the tune of African-American Spirituals? Those were two completely different worlds, and smashing them together only cheapens each. Yet, this is how many in the “open-ended normative principle” school think. Inasmuch as it parallels the worldly wisdom of multiculturalism and globalism I think this is why I hold it in disdain. The belief that people are completely interchangeable cogs and that X, Y, Z can be changed to X, B, Z without causing more than superficial alterations is a postmodern absurdity that ties into the industrialized dehumanization at the forefront of modernity.⁸ Here the open-ended/Dawnian normative principle shares a similar weakness with the low-church regulative principle: the value of nationality and tradition in the formation of liturgical practice. This is what the ending of “The Liturgical Nature of Christianity” and the beginning of “What a Biblical Liturgy Would Look Like” both sought to capture. I ended the former by explaining that “the New Testament itself contains very little explanation of what Christian worship is supposed to look like…[and] by not spelling out a specific way to do things I think Scripture is allowing us to be “creative” with our liturgies, acknowledging that we have differences, but acknowledging that we must still worship God through our differences.” This led into the latter, in which I recapitulate this and tie into the historical practice of the Church in inculturating itself wherever it spread⁹ and therefore identifying ethnocultural heritage and tradition as the formative core of liturgical practices, which I then further traced through the history of Angelcynn Christianity to establish where the formative core of English Christendom resided: the historic Anglican faith. What I hoped to warn against in supplying this framework was “flattening everything out through a sort of liturgical imperialism (as the regulative principle and Tridentine Mass enabled)” and rather encouraging “human diversity and creativity [being] recognized and enabled, with distinct cultural/national identities establishing unique Christian worldviews that are instantiated within liturgical practices (as happened, and as was discussed, with the Anglican churches).” Therefore, the open-ended normative principle, in being informed more by the liberal-democratic Zeitgeist than the traditionalist-identitarian ethos of Holy Writ, is flawed.¹⁰

The third school of thought is the high-church regulative principle. This is primarily what identifies Catholic worship. The Tridentine Mass is an excellent example of this, because it explicitly regulates all of Roman Catholic worship to a set, Latin-based form of worship that was enforced throughout the spiritual empire of the Pontiff. As we just established, however, this isn’t 100% kosher on the basis of the principles I set forth. The Catholics say that there is a uniform way of worship that God has established on the basis of the one supreme head of the Church He has instituted: the Successor of St. Peter. However, just like the low-church regulative principle the high-church regulative principle fails because it has no scriptural basis. While the Catholics tend to point out how the Old Testament priesthood and religion far more reflects the ritualistic and mystagogical contours of their own, which is true, they fail to ask what exactly the continuities or discontinuities between the Old Covenant and New Covenant systems are, since they most certainly exist (the OC priests burnt sacrifices before the ineffable Yahweh of Israel, the NC priests receive the once and for all sacrifice of the Incarnate Christ Jesus of Nazareth, for one). In the same way that low-church regulators can’t do anything because they only accept the scant testimony of the New Testament, the high-church regulators do too much because they overlook the scant testimony of the New Testament.¹¹

As I’ve certainly made clear by this point, the middleground I create between these two on the basis of Paul and the Apostles’ scant formulation of Christian worship is that they’ve provided us with fundamentals, with a framework, but not with an actual missal or step-by-step guide on what to do when Christians commune in worshipful assembly. As I mentioned earlier, Revelation 4-5 is an excellent window into the worship of God, but it’s not an ecclesial scene, it’s a judicial scene. How the angels assemble before the ineffable Godhead can inform us how we can, but Revelation 4-5 is not showing us what happens when the Church worships and thus joins in with the angelic liturgy the ancient Jews believed in. This, therefore, brings us to the fourth school of thought, which I’ve recommitted my allegiance to: the informed normative principle.

As is clear, we start with the normative principle; that which Scripture doesn’t explicitly prohibit is licit for the Church. However, there certainly are things that are illicit for the Church to do, and it’s also true that the Church is given positive instructions. “Do this,” “don’t do this,” “say this,” “don’t profess this,” these are biblical terms. What I hold is that whereas the apostolic testimony (Gospel, epistolary, and apocalyptic) doesn’t tell us how the Church worships in terms of a specific guidebook, it does inform us about specific principles, convictions, dispositions, and other elements that should constitute the Church of Christ and therefore manifest in its worship. Scripture informs us about the divine kingship of God, Who is resplendent in regal glory (“Aesthetics and the Worship of God”), Scripture informs us about the Church being an extension of the Triune life of God and a welcoming of God’s children to participate in it therefore effecting a Trinitarian shape and ethos to our worship (“The Unified Life of the Church”), and Scripture informs us about the grand story of the Eucharist as an expression of God’s covenantal promise to ever be amongst us as His children and our Father and thus the rushing source and soaring summit of our faith (“The Ark of the Cross”).

“The Ark of the Cross” is an excellent example of this, for while Paul does give us important things to think about in his discussions of the Eucharist he still doesn’t necessarily tell us how to partake of it. But, if we understand the Eucharist to be the antitype of the Ark of the Covenant, as I argue in that article, then we can begin to put things together, which I mention at the close: “In the same way the Israelites would fall before the Ark (Jos. 7:6), worshiped the divinity within (Ps. 98:5; 132:7-8), and understood it to be the place where they met their God (cf. Ex. 25:22), Christians have gone to their knees before the Eucharist, worshiped the divine Presence within, and have had profound experiences of the same in communicating both elements.” This is my defense, on the basis of the normative principle, of the traditional Christian way of communication: kneeling before the consecrated Host and Cup, receiving by faith the Paschal Lamb in reverence.

This is more so the informed part of my thinking, the normative is all that was laid out in “What a Biblical Liturgy Would Look Like.” The norms for worship should be biblically informed, scripturally symbolic, communal, Christotelic, Trinitarian, and traditional. What else would they possibly be? So, again, how does the Eucharistic typology, the Trinitarian theology, the divine kingship, and all these other biblical-theological elements I’ve explored hitherto on this blog inform those norms? The liturgy of the Eucharist I favor, and the attendant biblical-theological elements, hit all those marks, for example. Yet it doesn’t do so exclusively. Again, this is the point I made in “What a Biblical Liturgy Would Look Like”:

I think Scripture delineates the framework for Christian liturgy without explicitly defining what that is. This understanding that I'll advance I believe was, however implicitly, accepted by the historic Church. Anglicanism, for example, has notably incorporated the concept of “churchmanship” into its practices, tolerating and finding ways to include Anglicans who have different liturgical preferences and cultures, while some denominations, particularly the Catholic and Orthodox, have various rites/”ritual families” that have historically and organically risen up around specific communities [read: ethnocultural heritages] of these churches (e.g., Tridentine, Sarum, Antiochene, Byzantine, Latin, Chrysostom vs. James, etc.). To regain or establish a liturgical rite is an endeavor that many churches will have to figure out for themselves, something which I believe the Church Catholic itself undertook historically… 

So, when I witness the outstanding liturgy at an Anglo-Catholic church, for example, do I worry about proving every last facet of it is biblical? No, because what is biblical are the norms of it. God has granted to men creativity and a strong sense for beauty, why not seek after it? Vestments, incense, Gospel Books, altar rails, all these are only inadmissible if we errantly follow the regulative principle, if we flatten out the intricacies of human nature and deprive ourselves of beauty and tradition, not realizing what liberty the Lord has granted us in our faith, treating the whole Bible as a clearing house for understanding God and worship of Him (hence why traditional Christian worship is so in-tune with the rhythms and elements of Israelite religion). Altogether, then, this is certainly why, to give my prior fundamentalism some credit, Christian liturgies particularly in the West coalesced around a specific format: because, over centuries of practice and refinement, that shape came to be recognized as perfectly embodying all the norms of Christian worship, the biblically informed, scripturally symbolic, communal, Christotelic, Trinitarian, and traditional.¹² A perfect embodiment, but not an exclusive embodiment; the Eastern rites are structurally and idiomatically distinct and just as wonderful.

I hope to keep all this in mind as I continue my study and promotion of liturgical theology, seek to experience the fullness of communal life in the Church of God, and edify my brethren in all that the Lord brings to my mind. I hope too that, as you accompany me in this journey as readers, this too will move and guide you, and inspire you in your own contemplation of spiritual life and worship of God. God has mighty things in store for His Creation, and He has called us to labor together with Him in the consummation of His will, let us not miss out on the fullness of this calling.

1. I’m not of Anglo-Saxon descent (womp womp).

2. I first learned this from the wondrous work by J.K.A. Smith on liturgical worship and formation, You Are What You Love, which makes mention of this fact of the “catholicity” of traditional Christian worship’s testimony to the “narrative arc” of the Faith (p. 202n13). This claim is in reference to the magisterial study of Christian liturgy by the Evangelical Lutheran liturgist Frank Senn, Christian Liturgy (pp. 645-650).

3. The distinction is made clear when you remember the notion of the perichoresis of the angelic and human liturgies I outlined in “The Liturgical Nature of Christianity.” Revelation 4-5 as a church scene would mean it describes and clearly formulates the activity of this divine-human synergy in worshiping the Most High. This is not what John is revealing, per Heiser, but rather he is revealing the operation of the divine council, which does convene in the Name and Presence of the Most High.

4. James Jordan, the Presbyterian theologian who is fond of liturgical theology, wrote a short book called Liturgical Nestorianism and the Regulative Principle, and although this book seems to be out-of-print and I haven’t seen much of it in Jordan’s other writings, on the basis of what is recorded about it on the Internet (e.g., here) it critiques the biblicism and provincialism of the regulative principle in Reformed denominations. There are also discussions of liturgical theology built into the articles Jordan wrote for many years on his website Biblical Horizons.

5. That is, read by the officers/elders of the congregation. If you’re curious, my position is presbyterally led (cf. Acts 6:2, 4), but read in any of these fashions (perhaps the Gospel, for symbolism and hierarchy’s sake, will be presbyterally read, as is customary).

6. It’s interesting that Dawn paralleled Hebrew psalmody with Gregorian chant, for as several historians and Catholic liturgists have noted the ancient Gregorian chant most likely arose out of ancient Jewish psalmody, which should inform the behavior of the Church as it seeks to fulfill Paul’s explicit command to conduct psalmody (Eph. 5:19; Col. 3:16); see E. Werner, The Sacred Bridge; W. Apel, Gregorian Chant.

7. M. Dawn, A Royal “Waste” of Time, 71.

8. Rudyard Lynch of Whatifalthist has quickly risen to become my favorite social critic/scholar of civilization, paralleling much of the themes and rhetoric I employ in analyzing the phenomenon of civilization and its enemies. See, on “industrialized dehumanization,” his “The Anthropology of Real Life NPCs.”

9

Since each nation had a special purpose and respect from God, the ancient Christians respected this reality, and so they established and cultivated the church at Antioch (Acts 13:1), the church at Rome (1 Pet. 5:13), the church at Jerusalem (Acts 11:22), the church at Ephesus (Rev. 2:1; cf. 2:8, 12, 18; 3:1, 7, 14), and so on and so forth, throughout the known world”

10. Both this important section of “What a Biblical Liturgy Would Look Like” as well as the discussion here presume many important matters in biblical theology, despite the scriptural threads more explicitly woven in the former. As I promised then, a study of national/political theology is forthcoming.

11. Scant testimony” of an exact liturgical model, contra testimony of a liturgical framework, the point I’m trying to drive home.

12. One of the projects I have backlogged is a study of Anglican worship from the Book of Common Prayer as a demonstration of how it works and how it coheres with all the essentials I’ve identified.