Three Quick Book Reviews

It's been a while since I've posted on here – largely because of the summer. Here are some reviews of non-fiction books I've read recently...

Celebration of Discipline – Richard Foster

This book is far far better than its title! One of the huge dangers facing any book on spiritual disciplines is legalism, which Foster avoids well. It is easy to see how this book became a classic, and was one of the key influences in helping evangelicals learn from some of the riches of other traditions. Lots of wise practical advice about fasting and so on as well.

In some ways, Christian culture in the 2010s might be even more compromised by seeking after comfort than it was in the 1980s when the book was written, and hence even more in need of the spiritual disciplines.

There aren't many books which I'd say are a “must read” for modern Christians. This might well be one!

Liturgical Worship – Mark Earey

This is the recommended textbook for a course I'm teaching in the Autumn on liturgy. It's a really good book for giving an introduction to the shape and nature of Anglican liturgy.

There are a couple of places where I felt he missed important points – for example he sees the options with deciding what to preach on as either following a lectionary or having the danger of going for the preachers' pet topics – ignoring the pattern I've come across many times of systematic preaching through chunks of Scripture, but varying the genre regularly. But by and large, I thought that Earey gives a fair representation of most of the breadth of Anglican positions on various topics.

There are quite a few grand-sounding statements about liturgy – that it is the “Corporate drama of being the people of God” and “a public symbolic shaping of space and time in order that our hearts and lives might be shaped in the image of Christ”, but at times I felt it could do with a lot more fleshing out.

I don't think we covered liturgy very well at theological college at all. I'd have found this a really helpful introduction to the topic, but it's not more than that.

The Breeze of the Centuries – Michael Reeves

This is an introduction to a handful of great Christian thinkers from before the Reformation period – the Apostolic Fathers, Irenaeus, Athanasius, Anselm, Aquinas.

With each of them, Reeves gives a short biography, complete with humorous anecdotes, and a summary of their major works, theology and influence.

There's a lot of good stuff there. It's certainly helpful to see the people in their wider context. Reeves doesn't let people slip into their own stereotypes – he doesn't let them always be right and points out some of Anselm's theological weirdnesses (for example). It's certainly a good introduction to the theologians he covers, but it's the weakest of the three Michael Reeves books I've read.

Here's one of the high points of the book:

Augustine provides a prime example of what it is like to read a great theologian from the past: both grand and alien, both profoundly right and profoundly wrong (often in the same sentence), he challenges in every way. His great temporal distance from us dares our comfortable and well-worn formulas. Even the mistakes we recognise as characteristic of his age force us to ask what mistakes are characteristic of ours. (p.100)

There are a couple of things I found difficult or unhelpful. One is the selection of theologians – they're almost all Westerners (Justin Martyr and Athanasius are the only exceptions), and it seems odd not to mention Origen or the Cappadocians. Reeves also seems to say that there weren't any significant theologians between Augustine and Anselm, which seems a little unfair to John of Damascus and co. Maybe it would have been better as two books – one on patristic theologians and one on medieval ones, with people like Bernard of Clairvaux, Tauler, Catherine of Siena, etc.

Communion Services in the Early Church

In the early church, there were three main types of service – the agape meal, the synaxis (similar to Service of the Word), and the eucharist (Greek for “thanksgiving”). Over the years, the agape meal largely faded out, and the synaxis and eucharist merged to make the modern Communion Service. In this post, I'll trace very briefly how we got from the Early Church (pre-325) to the modern situation in the Church of England.

Synaxis

The structure of the synaxis was as follows: Greeting, Bible Reading, Sung Worship, Bible Reading, Sermon, Outsiders Leave, Prayers, Dismissal. I've already written about how some of the elements worked, but one development it's worth noting is that the “traditional” pattern of Epistle, Psalm and Gospel readings developed from the earlier practice of one reading at the start of the service, then a time of sung worship (usually using Psalms), then a second reading which was the basis for the sermon. Outsiders were welcome to attend the service, but were expected to leave after the sermon and before the prayers. Catechumens (people who were preparing for baptism) were welcome to stay for the prayers but were expected to leave before the Eucharist, at what is now the Peace.

Eucharist

Dix identifies four key stages in the Eucharist service, which are reflected in the gospels – Jesus took bread (1), he gave thanks (2), he broke it (3) and gave it to the disciples (4).

Offertory - “he took bread”

Originally there was just one loaf (1 Cor 10:17), but in the 100s AD, members of the congregation brought their own bread to church to share, and it was brought forwards at this point, like the wave offering or the grain offering in the OT. People offering their own bread for the Communion came to be seen as symbolic of offering their lives to God and having them transformed; after people started believing that the bread became Jesus during the prayer, it eventually got confused into the idea of us offering Jesus' sacrifice on the cross. To make it clear that we can only offer ourselves to God because of what God has done in giving Jesus as a sacrifice in our place, Cranmer moved the language of offering ourselves to after the Communion. Sometimes (e.g. 1662) the offertory gets confused with the money offering too. (Wafers are a much later innovation, and in my opinion a wrong one.)

Eucharist - “he gave thanks”

A prayer was said over the bread and wine, thanking God. The prayer typically followed the pattern: blessing God, thanks for creation, thanks for redemption, thanks for the new covenant (and our place in it), institution narrative (i.e. the story of the Last Supper), prayer for us as we receive communion, praising God again. Later on, the Sanctus came to replace or be integrated into the Thanksgiving sections. The key phrase in this whole section is Jesus' command to “do this in remembrance of me” - reminding us that we are sharing communion to remember Jesus. The Prayer of Humble Access is descended from the minister's prayer for the people as we receive communion.

Sometimes other prayers were inserted after the Eucharistic Prayer, largely because of the 4th century idea that the prayer of thanksgiving “consecrated” the bread and the wine, and that somehow God was therefore more present then, and so prayer was more likely to be heard. We see remnants of this in the use of the Lord's Prayer in Common Worship Order 1. Sometimes it even went far enough that the prayers during the Synaxis ceased to be used – we don't need two periods of intercession during the service. Of course, originally, the prayers of intercession were in the Synaxis rather than the Eucharist, and I think that's the best place for them.

Fraction - “he broke it”

The bread is broken so that it can be distributed. Originally this may well have used 1 Cor 10:17, but after the church stopped using just one loaf they switched to using words like “God's holy gifts for God's holy people” or “the body of Christ, broken for you.” Sometimes people today use 1 Cor 10:17 "though we are many, we are one body, for we all share in the one bread", but do it without using one loaf. That seems silly to me. In the medieval church, the Fraction came to be seen as the point at which Jesus' body was actually broken, so Cranmer dropped it altogether. 1662 re-introduced it during the Institution Narrative, which is historically odd.

Communion - “he gave it to them”

Distribution of the bread and wine was usually done with the ministers standing, and the people walking between them. Afterwards, there was just a short dismissal and the service ended.

(This is part of an irregular series spinning off Gregory Dix's On the Shape of the Liturgy. The data is almost all from Dix, but I've reworked it in the light of a rather different theology.)

How did the Early Christians Worship?

One of the pleasant surprises in reading The Shape of the Liturgy was finding a summary of how "church services" worked in about 200AD. There were two main types of service, a non-communion service (called the Synaxis - being led together), and a communion service (called the Eucharist - giving thanks). They sometimes happened separately, sometimes one after another with the synaxis first. This is roughly what the synaxis service looked like:

1. Greeting: the minister would welcome the people, often saying "the Lord be with you", and they'd reply "And also with you".
   
2. Bible Reading
   
3. Time of Sung Worship: they then sung a selection of (mostly) Psalms in the then-contemporary style, which was kind of like chanting led from the front by special singers with choruses for everyone to join in on. These were in response to the first Bible reading.
   
4. Bible Reading: or sometimes more than one
   
5. Sermon: It was always the senior minister (episkopos) preaching - in fact, it was seen as a scandal if the minister was there and not preaching. The sermon was clearly based on the passage that had just been read, not on the preacher's own opinion. The minister preached while sitting on his seat, which was in the middle at the front, facing the congregation. That's the origin of the phrase "ex cathedra".
   
6. Outsiders leave: Outsiders were asked to leave at that point - folk who were on the way in but hadn't been welcomed into full memmbership yet (catechumens) were allowed to stay.
   
7. Prayers: A deacon would read a topic for prayer; the people would pray in silence while kneeling; the minister would say a prayer to sum it up; loop.
   
8. Dismissal

The meetings were usually in the large central area of the house of a well-off member of the church. The minister wore normal clothes for the service (which might look rather like today's robes...)

What struck me as encouraging about that service pattern is how similar it is to a lot of contemporary evangelical services. Dix always over-interprets in a Catholic and ceremonial direction, so it was especially encouraging to find this as his summary of a church service. I guess what's striking comparing it to the first century is that there's a lot more scope for spontaneity. Paul writes in 1 Cor 14:26.

When you come together, each of you has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation.

I guess if services had the same pattern, the most natural place for these would be in the time of sung worship, especially since Paul sees the possibility of outsiders being there (e.g. v22). It's possible that sort of thing is still going on in AD 200, but either that it isn't clearly recorded or that Dix ignored it. As I said, he always over-interprets in a Catholic and ceremonial direction.

The Shape of the Liturgy - Gregory Dix

I've recently been reading one of the classic works of 20th century Anglican theology - The Shape of the Liturgy by Dom Gregory Dix. It's spurred quite a bit of thinking, both in agreement and disagreement with Dix himself and with the way his work has been appropriated or not.

Who was Dix?

Dom Gregory Dix was an English monk and historian. As far as I can tell, he is just about the greatest English-language expert ever on early liturgical texts – what Christians from AD150 to 500 or so wrote about how they worshipped. He was the kind of scholar who could not just quote the 3rd Century Syriac Liturgy of Addai and Mari, but would also know if there was a manuscript in Coptic which put it differently, and whether that might be because they were both translations of a Greek original which said something slightly different.

What was his book?

His magnum opus was The Shape of the Liturgy, written during WW2, in which he shows how the Communion Service has come to take the shape it has. It was written primarily to argue that the BCP communion service (1662, but mostly dating back to Cranmer's work in 1549/1552) had got it all wrong. At the time, 1662 was the only service permitted in the Church of England, and most of the revisions to it, including Common Worship, have been strongly influenced by Dix's work.

What did he think of the Reformation?

Dix hated the Reformation, though he wasn't a great fan of late medieval Catholicism either. For example, he spends a couple of pages considering whether Luther was equivalent to Hitler. To be fair to Dix, he does conclude “no”, but even asking the question seems a little excessive.

Why did you read this book?

I grew up with the BCP liturgy, and I still use it now some of the time. I also use some of the modern liturgies, and I wanted to understand why they've made some of the changes, and to understand some of the oddities of Anglican communion liturgy.

Such as?

Why the Lord's Prayer isn't used during the prayers, but interrupts the middle of Communion instead.

It turns out that the Communion bit used to be (sometimes) a separate service, with only one prayer in. In AD348, a chap called Cyril of Jerusalem came up with the idea that God is present in the bread and wine after they've been prayed over in a way that he wasn't beforehand, and so praying after that makes the prayers more effective. So he tagged lots of prayers (Lord's Prayer included) onto the end of the Communion prayer. Cyril was seen as being at the cutting edge of new liturgies in the 4th century, and by 600AD, everyone was doing it. Cranmer disagreed, and put it after the people had received communion, but the modern liturgies have moved it back.

I'm content that Cyril's theology of communion is wrong, and if that's the reason for the Lord's Prayer being there, then I'm happy to move it back to the prayers where it belongs. I like to tinker with stuff, but I want to understand why things are where they are in the first place so that I don't break anything important by my tinkering.

It's worth mentioning that I've found reading the book a really interesting experience, and will probably be writing more thoughts spinning off it in the near future. For what it's worth, I think Dix makes some really good points that haven't been properly taken on board properly in Common Worship and some spectacular mistakes too.

Advent and Prayer H

There's a tension in the Church between Advent as a time for looking forwards to Christmas and Advent as a time for looking forwards to Jesus coming again. I notice in the Daily Prayer that there's a shift from one to the other on 16th/17th December, which I assume is chosen to be a week before Christmas.

Part of the problem is that whoever put the Church calendar together made a silly mistake. In the official church calendar, the season of Christmas starts on Christmas Day, and then runs for a few weeks. But that's exactly opposite to how festivals work in the Old Testament and in common sense. In the OT, if festivals run for a week, the big event is at the end of the festival, not the start. Otherwise everything else is anti-climactic.

So by trying to say that the holiday starts with Christmas (as some rule-following liturgical purists claim), if we're going to avoid all the rest of the season being an anti-climax, we need something at least as big to end it. Some people try doing that with Epiphany, but it doesn't really work. Not in the West, anyway. So what happens is that New Year gets seen as the end of the festival, and then becomes the natural place to transfer the real celebrations too. Which is probably why New Year is getting bigger and bigger, partly at the expense of Christmas.

The obvious solution is to allow a decent period of time before Christmas - say 2 weeks or so - as a build-up to Christmas, with Christmas as then the climax of the festivities. Which makes Advent difficult again...

Advent is traditionally a time for thinking about the "four last things" - death, judgement, heaven and hell. As such, last Sunday fit fairly well with the end of our series on the Creed - thinking about Jesus coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom having no end.

I was preaching on this on Sunday, and made reference to Communion being a foretaste of the eschatological feast, except I said it in English. And I quoted "until he comes again" from 1 Cor 11:26 and the Anglican liturgy. And then, in the rest of the service, I noticed that those references were completely missing from the liturgy, because we were using Prayer H, which is the one normally used in Anglican Charismatic circles. I'm normally a fan of prayer H, because it misses out so much of the waffle that characterises the other prayers, which means it's more family-friendly and so on. But it also misses out all reference to Jesus' coming in glory. Why couldn't they just have put in "until he comes again" somewhere?

Paganism

Paganism... is also a sort of permanent and natural magnetic pole of religion, and in this sense a constant threat for every religion. Christianity demands unceasing effort, continual filling of its forms with content, self-testing, and a "trial of the spirit". Any divergence between form and content, or the emergence of form as a value and goal in itself, is paganism. It is a return to natural religion, to belief in form, ceremony, and sacred objects without regard to their content and spiritual meaning. In this sense even Christian rites and sacred objects may themselves become centers of pagan veneration and may overshadow what they solely exist for: the liberating force of truth.
Alexander Schmemann, The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy

Beauty and Creativity

One of the things I've been thinking about a bit recently is the important place that beauty and creativity should have in the Christian life. I'll give some theological justification for that later. In the meantime, here's a (not especially good) creative thing I did based on the opening of the Te Deum.

And yes, my girlfriend is away on mission. Can you tell from the fact I'm blogging a lot more?

Couldn't Script It...

I was meant to be leading and preaching at 10 o'clock this morning at a prep school chapel service.

I've been quite busy lately, so I only actually started writing my sermon while waiting for the train back from Durham yesterday at around 5pm. I never actually finished writing it, because the train got quite noisy with drunk people and I didn't get back to my room until after 11, by which point sleep mattered far more than more detailed preparation.

This morning, I woke up at about 6am. I knew I had plenty of time, so allowed myself to snooze for a bit, then woke up again at 8, which was somewhat too late.

I'd only been there once before, and that was via a friend's house which was quite out of the way, and seemed to remember it took about 30 mins. I was therefore aiming to leave at 9am, but got slightly distracted in a conversation after breakfast and then struggled to get all my props together. I left at 9:30.

After driving "slightly" too fast while trying to read a map (but only when there was no traffic around me so that it didn't matter when I swerved across the road a bit), I managed to get there at about 9:45, at which point I realised that I had a) left my sermon in my room somewhere and b) forgotten to bring a Bible, and the only Bibles evident in the church were good old-fashioned KJVs. I had, however, remembered my props and the passage I was to preach on.

I believe at that point I may have prayed something along the lines of "help!!" I then remembered some of the best arguments for the traditional way the C of E does things - robes mean that people don't focus on the person leading but on the office and liturgy makes it a lot harder to mess up. So I donned my robes (which I hadn't forgotten - the person there usually wears robes, but I'd been given a free choice) and decided to use quite a bit of the printed liturgy. As I sat down, I also found a Good News Bible in the shelf in front of my seat (no others in the church). I've never been so grateful to find a Good News Bible in my life!

Given all of that, the sermon seemed to go pretty well and the service to go very well. God is so gracious...

Exodus 20:2

One of the things that annoyed me about St Mary's (and the Book of Common Prayer) was how the Bible is misused in the Communion Service. I haven't yet checked with Catholics to see whether this was an abuse carried over from them at the time of the Reformation, or whether it is an abuse invented by Cranmer or someone.

One of the big emphases in the Communion Service (and rightly so) is on the fact that we don't deserve what Jesus did for us in dying for us, and we don't deserve what he is doing for us and in us as we participate in Communion. As part of that, the 10 Commandments are read out near the start of the service, to remind us of some of God's standards. This is what is said:

God spake these words and said:
I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have none other gods but me...

It's a quote from some old translation of Exodus 20. Except it isn't. It's a corruption. Exodus 20 reads:

And God spoke all these words, saying,
"I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me...."
Exodus 20:1-3, ESV

The difference is significant. In the first one, it looks like God demands that kind of loyalty simply because he exists, and therefore that obeying God might somehow get us right with him.

But in the real Bible passage, God makes it clear that he has already saved the people and brought them out of slavery. The 10 Commandments are then telling Israel how they should respond to that rescue. It makes it clear that obeying the 10 Commandments isn't about trying to be saved - it's about responding to being saved and responding to God's revelation of himself.

It's a difference between two views of what living as a Christian is about. The first view says:

Be good -> God will be nice to you

That's not what the 10 Commandments are saying. They're much more like this:

God has saved you -> Follow Him -> God will keep on blessing you

That's why there are links in the 10 Commandments to future blessing, and they are all blessings in terms of what God has already done for his people.

It's the same kind of idea in the New Testament. God has done the decisive action to save us - sending Jesus to die in our place so that we can be united with him. Our response is then to follow Jesus, to live as people who are in him. And if we do that, it shows that we really are in him and he will keep on blessing us by bringing us into closer and closer union with Christ that will one day be perfected in heaven.

But that's not what we say if we misuse the 10 Commandments by missing out Ex 20:2. It's not just in the Prayer Book either - churches that have the 10 Commandments on the walls often miss it off too. I'm glad to see that the newer version of that service includes v2, even if it is in brackets. It makes it look as if they've realised it was a mistake to miss it out, but they're kind of scared to mess about with it. But it really doesn't explain why we still missed Ex 20:2 out when using the modern langauge service at St Mary's....

For what it's worth, I've taken this up publically and privately with the leadership at St Mary's. They agree with me, but haven't changed anything.

Zwingli again

This morning, I was visiting a church which some friends go to, and it was communion.

The church was a Baptist church, and I was very encouraged that they allowed me to receive communion - there are some baptist churches which exclude me for reasons that seem spurious and unbiblical to say the least.

I was slightly less encouraged by the following:

Jesus took bread, and after breaking it, he gave you thanks and said "Take, eat, this is a symbol of my body, which is given for you."

It saddens me when evangelicals change what the Bible says to fit their preconceptions about communion (or anything else, for that matter!). It also saddens me at the huge loss in symbolism by using the word "symbol". If the bread is just a symbol, then we are not really participating in Jesus' sacrifice for us on the cross. If the wine is just a symbol of his blood, then how are we purified? It needs the sprinkling of blood....