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Liturgy and Ethics: New Contributions from Reformed Perspectives
Vos, P.H.
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Liturgy and Ethics
Studies in Reformed Theology
Editor-in-chief
Eddy van der Borght (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Editorial Board
Abraham van de Beek (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Martien Brinkman (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
George Harinck (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Dirk van Keulen (Theological University Kampen)
Daniel Migliore (Princeton Theological Seminary)
Richard Mouw (Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena)
Emanuel Gerrit Singgih (Duta Wacana Christian University, Yogjakarta)
Pieter Vos (Protestant Theological University, Amsterdam)
Conrad Wethmar (University of Pretoria)
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/srt
Liturgy and Ethics
New Contributions from Reformed Perspectives
Edited by
Pieter Vos
leiden | boston
Cover illustration: Fresco, Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter, Rome, Italy, th century, photo by
DEA/V. Pirozzi/Di Agostini/Getty Images.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Vos, Pieter, - editor.
Title: Liturgy and ethics : New Contributions from Reformed Perspectives /
edited by Pieter Vos.
Description: Boston : Brill, . | Series: Studies in reformed theology,
ISSN - ; VOLUME | Includes bibliographical references and index.
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Subjects: LCSH: Reformed Church–Liturgy. | Reformed Church–Doctrines. |
Christian ethics–Reformed authors.
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Contents
List of Contributors
Introduction
Pieter Vos
Liturgy as Ethics
What Makes Worship Good?
Dirkie Smit
“God Waits for and Responds to Sincere Prayer and Responsible
Actions”
Liturgy and Ethics in Dietrich Bonhoefer
Gerard den Hertog
Catholic Reformed Ethics
Bavinck’s Concept of Catholicity and Its Implications for Ethics
Willem van Vlastuin
Theatricality of Liturgy and Its Relevance to Ethics
Rehearsal, Performance, and Hypocrisy
Jaeseung Cha
Liturgy in Practices
Liturgy and Justice
Nicholas Wolterstorf
Eucharist and the Ethics of Sacrice and Self-Giving
Ofertory Exemplied
Bernd Wannenwetsch
vi
Weekly at the Lord’s Table
Calvin’s Motives for a Frequent Celebration of the Holy Communion
Herman Speelman
“Do This in Remembrance of Me”
On the Lord’s Supper, Performative Memory, and the Christian
Moral Life
Robert Vosloo
Celebrating the Lord’s Supper as Act of Moral Formation
A Qualitative Research Report
Jasper Bosman and Hans Schaefer
Liturgy and Cultures
Cutting, Binding, and Re-Membering
A Covenantal Approach to Christian Liturgy and Ethics
Hak Joon Lee
Celebrating God’s Works
The Day of Worship and the Ethics of Work
Pieter Vos
A Day to Remember
A Community-Based Understanding of the Wedding Liturgy
Almatine Leene
The Priestly Liturgy of Creation in the Book of Leviticus
An Indonesian Contextual-Theological Consideration
Emanuel Gerrit Singgih
Liturgical Formation and Practical Ecclesiology
Relections on the Quest of a Local Church
Hans Schaefer
Index
List of Contributors
Jasper Bosman
is PhD researcher in Practical Theology at the Theological University Kampen,
the Netherlands. His research focusses on the experience of the Lord’s Sup-
per in the Christian Reformed Churches in the Netherlands and the Reformed
Churches in the Netherlands (Liberated). His publications include: Charles:
Een praktisch-theologische doordenking van Charles Taylors ‘A Secular Age’
(Charles: A Practical-Theological Reection on Charles Taylor’s ‘A Secular Age’)
(Kampen , edited with Berdien Wijnalda) and “A New Calvinist Approach
to the Visual Arts in Contemporary Europe” (book chapter, forthcoming).
Jaeseung Cha
is associate professor in Foundational and Constructive Theology at New
Brunswick Theological Seminary and General Synod Professor of the Reformed
Church in America. He received his Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit (,
Amsterdam). In his research, Cha concentrates on the atonement, Daoistic,
mystical, and patristic Christology, and theological method. His publications
include The Mystery and Paradox of the Cross: Jesus’ Proclamation of the Cru-
cixion in his Five Statements (Seoul ), Doctrine of the Atonement in Seven
Theologians: The Cross as Such and the Cross Overlowing (Seoul ) and
articles in Journal of Reformed Theology, Korean Journal of Christian Studies,
and Faith and Scholarship.
Gerard den Hertog
studied theology in Utrecht, Apeldoorn and Kampen, where he obtained his
doctorate with a dissertation on the doctrine of the bound will in the theology
of Hans Joachim Iwand. From till he was professor in Systematic
Theology at the Theological University of Apeldoorn. His publications in En-
glish include Mercy: Theories, Concepts, Practices (Berlin, forthcoming ,
coedited); “The Heidelberg Catechism and the Art of Dying and Living,” in
Arnold Huijgen (ed.), The Spirituality of the Heidelberg Catechism (Göttingen
), -, and articles in Calvin Theological Journal, Zeitschrift für dialek-
tische Theologie, and Theologia Reformata.
Hak Joon Lee
is Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary.
He has published several books, four in English, including Covenant and Com-
munication: A Christian Moral Conversation with Jürgen Habermas (Lanham
viii
), We Will Get to the Promised Land: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Communal-
Political Spirituality (Cleveland ), The Great World House: Martin Luther
King, Jr. and Global Ethics (Cleveland ), and Shaping Public Theology: The
Max L. Stackhouse Reader (coedited, Grand Rapids ), as well as numer-
ous articles and two books in Korean, Bridge Builders and A Paradigm Shift in
Korean Churches, which was awarded one of the most outstanding books in
religion in the year by the Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Sports of
South Korea.
Almatine Leene
is an ordained minister in the Dutch Reformed Church Stellenbosch-Wes and
aliated researcher at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. She also
lectures Dogmatics and Church History at Viaa University Zwolle, The Neth-
erlands. In she obtained her PhD from the University of Stellenbosch.
In her research Leene concentrates on the Trinity, gender and ecclesiology.
Her publications include: Flirten met Rome: Protestanten naderen katholieken
(Flirting with Rome: Protestants approaching Catholics) (Amsterdam ),
Dogmatiek voor iedereen: Weten wat je gelooft (Dogmatics for everyone: Know-
ing what you believe) (Zoetermeer ), Zonen en dochters profeteren: Man,
vrouw & kerk (Sons and daughters prophesizing: Man, woman & church)
(Zoetermeer , edited with Henk Folkers, Maaike Harmsen, and Maarten
Verkerk).
Hans Schaefer
is Associate Professor of Practical Theology at the Theological University
Kampen, the Netherlands and Senior Researcher at Praktijkcentrum (Prac-
tice Centre) of the Gereformeerde Kerken (vrijgemaakt) (Reformed Churches
(Liberated)). Among his publications are Ethics of Createdness: The Doctrine of
Creation and Theological Ethics in the Theology of Colin E. Gunton and Oswald
Bayer (Berlin ); Mercy: Theories, Concepts, Practices (Berlin, forthcoming
, coedited); “Reconstructing Reformed Identity: Experiences from Church
Planting in the Netherlands,” Journal of Reformed Theology () – together
with Stefan Paas). Many of his (Dutch) articles and research-reports are avail-
able through www.praktijkcentrum.org.
Emanuel Gerrit Singgih
is Professor of Biblical Hermeneutics and Contextual Studies at the Theological
Faculty, Duta Wacana Christian University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and at the
Indonesian Consortium of Religious Studies (), Yogyakarta. He received
his PhD from the University of Glasgow () and an honorary doctorate
ix
from the Protestant Theological University (, Kampen). He has written
commentaries on Genesis -, Isaiah - and Ecclesiastes, all in Indone-
sian. Some of his articles in English can be found in Exchange and Asia Journal
of Theology.
Dirkie Smit
is Extraordinary Professor of Systematic Theology at the Theology Faculty of
Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He is from a Reformed background and
has in many ways been actively involved in the life of the church—as theo-
logian, teaching and supervising students; as minister, regularly preaching in
local congregations; as author of both academic and popular writing; as speak-
er during synods and conferences; as member of church commissions, writ-
ing studies and reports; as participant in several ecumenical dialogues. Some
of his writings are being edited by colleagues and published in a series called
Collected Essays (by Sun Press, Stellenbosch), including for example Essays in
Public Theology (Vol ), Essays on Being Reformed (Vol ), and Remembering
Theologians – Doing Theology (Vol ).
Herman Speelman
is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Early Modern Reformed Theology at the
Theological University Kampen, the Netherlands. He received his PhD in
from the Free University in Amsterdam. In his recent research, he focuses on
church history and church law. Recently published books are: Melanchthon
and Calvin on Confession and Communion: Early Modern Protestant Penitential
and Eucharistic Piety (Göttingen ) and Calvin and the Independence of
the Church (Göttingen ). Some recent articles are: “Man, Freedom, and
the Church: Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin on How to Serve God Freely,
within or outside the Power of the Church,” in: Anne Eusterschulte, Hannah
Wälzholz (eds), Anthropological Reformations – Anthropology in the Era of Ref-
ormation (Göttingen ), - and “Calvin on Confession: His Strug-
gle for a New Form of Discipline and our Struggle to Understand his View,”
in: Herman J. Selderhuis and Arnold Huijgen (eds), Calvinus Pastor Ecclesiae
(Göttingen ).
Willem van Vlastuin
studied Technical Physics at Delft Technical University and Theology at Utrecht
University. In he was ordained as a pastor of the Reformed Church of
the Netherlands and served several congregations until his appointment as
professor of theology and spirituality of Reformed Protestantism at the Free
University Amsterdam. At this university he is also the dean of the seminary
x
of the Restored Reformed Church (Hersteld Hervormd Seminarium, ) and
director of the Jonathan Edwards Centre Benelux. Recently he nished a book
on personal renewal: Be Renewed: A Theology of Personal Renewal (Göttingen
).
Pieter Vos
is Lecturer in Ethics at the Protestant Theological University (Amsterdam)
and Director of the International Reformed Theological Institute (). He
received his PhD from the Protestant Theological University (, Kampen).
In his research Vos concentrates on virtue ethics, moral formation, profession-
al practices, and Søren Kierkegaard. His publications include De troost van het
ogenblik: Kierkegaard over God en het lijden (The Solace of the Moment: Kier-
kegaard on God and Sufering) (Baarn ), Søren Kierkegaard lezen (Read-
ing Søren Kierkegaard) (Kampen ), The Law of God: Exploring God and
Civilization (Leiden , edited with Onno Zijlstra) and articles in Studies in
Christian Ethics, Journal of Reformed Theology, Journal of Beliefs and Values,
Christian Higher Education, International Journal of Systematic Theology and
Faith and Philosophy.
Robert Vosloo
is Professor of Systematic Theology at Stellenbosch University, South Africa.
In he received his doctoral degree from the University of Western Cape.
Among his publications are Die ligtheid van die lig: Morele oriëntasie in ‘n post-
moderne tyd (The lightness of light: Moral orientation in a postmodern era)
(with Nico Koopman, ), which was awarded with the Andrew Murray
Prize for theological literature, and his book Engele as gaste? In gesprek oor
gasvryheid teenoor ‘die ander’ (Angels as guests: In dialogue on hospitality to-
wards ‘the other’) (), which is published (in ) in Dutch translation.
Many of his articles have been published in peer-reviewed academic journals
and books. His research interests include Reformed theology, South African
church and theological history, hospitality, and Dietrich Bonhoefer.
Bernd Wannenwetsch
studied at the Universities of Munich and Erlangen-Nuremberg, where he re-
ceived his doctorate and a second doctoral degree (Habilitation). He was or-
dained in the Lutheran Church of Bavaria. Wannenwetsch taught at the Uni-
versities of Erlangen-Nuremberg and Mainz in Germany and was Professor of
Systematic Theology and Ethics at the Universities of Oxford and Aberdeen.
He is currently a Research Associate at the University of Zurich and lectures for
a number of theological institutions in Switzerland and Germany. His research
xi
focuses on the nature and sources of Christian ethics (Scripture, tradition, lit-
urgy), on political ethics, the ethics of work and labour, theological anthropol-
ogy and Christian cultural criticism. His book publications include: Political
Worship (Oxford ), Guter schneller Tod? Von der Kunst, menschenwürdig
zu sterben (with Robert Spaemann; Basel ), Verlangen: Een theologische
peiling (Desire: A theological investigation) (Zoetermeer ), The Malady of
the Christian Body: A Theological Exposition of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthi-
ans, Vol. (with Brian Brock; Eugene ), The Therapy of the Christian Body:
A Theological Exposition of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Vol. (with Bri-
an Brock; Eugene , forthcoming)
Nicholas Wolterstorf
is Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale University.
Previously, he taught at Calvin College, the Free University of Amsterdam, and
the University of Notre Dame and has been visiting professor at several insti-
tutions. He has received many fellowships, is past President of the American
Philosophical Association. He has written inuential books on subjects varying
from political philosophy to art, philosophy of education and epistemology,
philosophy of religion and liturgy. His works include Reason within the Bounds
of Religion (Grand Rapids ), Works and Worlds of Art (Oxford ), Un-
til Justice and Peace Embrace (Grand Rapids ), Lament for a Son (Grand
Rapids ), Educating for Shalom (Grand Rapids ), Justice: Rights and
Wrongs (Princeton ), Justice in Love (Grand Rapids ) and The Mighty
and the Almighty: An Essay in Political Theology (Cambridge ).
© Koninklijke Brill NV, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004356528_002
Introduction
Pieter Vos
In the past decades, important contributions have been ofered to rethink
the connection between Christian ethics and liturgy. In the wake of liturgi-
cal movements and ecumenical convergences between traditions throughout
the twentieth century, several liturgists put forward the interconnectedness of
prayer, belief and morality. Through prayer and worship, believers are formed
over time in the deep afections that mark the Christian life (Don E. Saliers).
Systematic theologians showed remarkable interest in the relation between lit-
urgy, theology and morality. Karl Barth had already expounded the Christian
moral life through a clause-by-clause analysis of the Lord’s prayer. More re-
cently, representatives of Radical Orthodoxy considered that Christ is present
through the text of the Word, the sacrament, and in the liturgical practice of
the Church in which we participate, and that this is the way to understand
the world. The Church does not have a particular ethic because the Church is
itself ethic. Similarly, Christian ethicists like Stanley Hauerwas, Samuel Wells,
This development can be traced back to . See Don E. Saliers, “Liturgy and Ethics: Some
New Beginnings,” Journal of Religious Ethics / (), –, and Paul Ramsey, “Liturgy
and Ethics,” Journal of Religious Ethics / (), –. This special issue of also
contains contributions by liturgists Ron Green and Martin Yafe. In fact, the interest in ‘litur-
gy and ethics’ of scholars in liturgical theology or liturgics, especially from Roman Catholic
perspective and with a focus on social justice, precedes that of those in the discipline of eth-
ics. See for an overview Mark Searle, “Liturgy and Social Ethics: An Annotated Bibliography,”
Studia Liturgica (), –.
See, e.g., World Council of Churches, Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry ().
See, e.g., Don E. Saliers, Worship as Theology: Foretaste of Divine Glory (Nashville: Abingdon
Press, ); E. Byron Anderson and Bruce T. Morrill (eds), Liturgy and the Moral Self: Hu-
manity at Full Stretch Before God, Essays in Honor of Don E. Saliers (Collegeville: The Liturgi-
cal Press, ).
Karl Barth, Das christliche Leben, Gesamtausgabe , Hgg. Hans A. Drewes, Eberhard Jüngel,
Hinrich Stoevesandt, Anton Drewes (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, ).
See, e.g., John Milbank, Graham Ward and Catherine Pickstock (eds), Radical Orthodoxy: A
New Theology (London: Routledge, ).
Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, Sec-
ond edition (Oxford: Blackwell, ). Former important works of Wells are Improvisation:
The Drama of Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, ) and God’s Companions:
Reimagining Christian Ethics (Malden: Blackwell, ). Hauerwas’ considerations of the
and many others have challenged conventional approaches to ethics as an au-
tonomous discipline, arguing that it is Christian worship that shapes the moral
life of Christians, making them part of a community of character. Liturgy is
not just enriched by ethical explorations and vice versa. Liturgy becomes the
locus par excellence of the theological ethicist’s work. A complete alteration of
Christian ethics may take place through the exploration of the liturgy.
Whereas the relation between liturgy and ethics has often been conceived
as external and causal, all these contributions emphasize the internal and
conceptual relation between the two. As in the Early Church, liturgy is itself
an act of discipleship, and as such it shapes the moral life. How we pray and
worship is intrinsically linked to how we believe and how we live, and vice
versa: lex orandi—lex credendi—lex vivendi. Christians can only understand
their life properly in light of the liturgy, where the Christian life is both formed
and expressed, and more or less put in opposition to the ‘cultural liturgies’ of
a secular world.
During the eleventh biannual international conference of the International
Reformed Theological Institute (), held from June till , at New
Brunswick Theological Seminary, , these dimensions in current theologi-
cal reection were explored and discussed against the backdrop of Reformed
theological conceptions of liturgy, ethics and doctrine. This volume contains a
signicant part of the papers presented at the conference in their elaborated
and extended form. Some other essays are added that have not been presented
intrinsic relation between liturgy and ethics can be traced back to The Peaceable Kingdom: A
Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, ). Close to Hau-
erwas are William Willimon, The Service of God: How Worship and Ethics are Related (Nash-
ville: Abingdon, ) and Harmon L. Smith, Where Two or Three Are Gathered: Liturgy and
the Moral Life (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, ).
Prime examples are Geofrey Wainwright, Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine,
and Life (New York: Oxford University Press, ); Oliver O’Donovan, Liturgy and Ethics
(Bramcote: Gove Books ); Bernd Wannenwetsch, Gottesdienst als Lebensform: Ethik für
Christenbürger (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, ), trans. as Political Worship, trans. Margaret
Kohl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); Brian Brock, Singing the Ethos of God: On the
Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ). Another remarkable
contribution is the collection of Oswald Bayer and Alan M. Suggate (eds), Worship and Ethics:
Lutherans and Anglicans in Dialogue (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, ), based on a series of
German-British theological consultations.
The term ‘cultural liturgies’ stems from James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship,
Worldview, and Cultural Formation, Cultural Liturgies, Vol. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic,
) and Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works, Cultural Liturgies, Vol. (Grand Rap-
ids: Baker Academic, ).
in New Brunswick but contribute excellently to the theme and complement
the volume.
This volume can be seen as complementary to the well-known volume The
Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics from and with a second edition
in , edited by Hauerwas and Wells. Diferent from that volume, which is
ground-breaking in addressing the whole range of topics concerning liturgy
and ethics but remains unclear about the particular liturgical traditions and
practices to which it refers (the Anglican tradition seems to be the unac-
knowledged point of unity), the present collection of essays departs explicitly
from the particularity of the Reformed tradition and its potential for thinking
through the theme. This starting point enables both to ofer in-depth studies
of how to understand God’s acting in worship, the centrality of justice, the for-
mative meaning of the liturgy and other themes, and to relate these reec-
tions to various concrete moral issues and contemporary liturgical practices.
Moreover, this volume covers a whole range of relevant disciplines including
empirical research, varying from liturgy to historical theology, from systematic
theology to ritual studies, from ethics to practical ecclesiology. In combining a
specic theological approach with a broad disciplinary treatment of the topics
this volume aims to push forward the scholarly discussion on liturgy and ethics
in signicant ways.
Liturgy and Ethics in the Reformed Tradition
In the Reformed tradition, liturgy is seen both as God’s action (God speaks and
acts) and as our faithful reception of that action (we respond). Over against
the clericalization of the church and the shift to the Eucharist as the core of
the liturgy in the days of the Reformation, the Reformers returned to the Early
Church’s view of liturgy as work of the community as a whole and reempha-
sized the service of the Word as the other main part next to the service of the
Eucharist. To participate in the liturgy is not only to enter the sphere of God’s
speaking and redemptive acting, but also to respond to that speaking and act-
ing in the celebration of the liturgy: in adoration, praise, thanksgiving, confes-
sion, blessing, intercession.
Nicholas Wolterstorf, “The Reformed Liturgy,” in Donald K. McKim (ed.), Major Themes in
the Reformed Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), –.
LindaJo H. McKim, “Reections on Liturgy and Worship in the Reformed Tradition,” in
McKim, Major Themes, –.
As an obedient response in gratitude to God, Reformed liturgy is narrowly
tied up with the moral life, which touches all aspects of daily practice. John
Calvin, for instance, links participation in the Lord’s Supper to doing justice:
We shall benet very much from the Sacrament if this thought is im-
pressed and engraved upon our minds: that none of the brethren can be
injured, despised, rejected, abused, or in any way ofended by us, without
at the same time, injuring, despising, and abusing Christ by the wrongs
we do.
We could even say that the Reformers held a sacramental view of the service of
the Word: in the sermon God himself speaks to us. And when God speaks, he
often speaks of justice.
In Reformed views, the response in daily life generally is seen as a continua-
tion of the response in the liturgy. This also means that doing our work faithful-
ly is not inferior to our response in worshipping. As a result, in some Reformed
accounts the connection to liturgy as a whole was weakened: Work in the world
became the predominant outward response to God’s action in liturgy. Others
emphasized personal piety (praxis pietatis), encompassing the scrutinization
of daily life and diligent study of the Scriptures with particular reference to its
moral teachings, but without paying much attention to the broader formative
and communal meaning of liturgy in all its aspects.
Against the backdrop of this short overview, several important questions
arise, both from the perspective of this particular tradition and in relation
to contemporary developments. Several of these questions were addressed
during the conference. They are divided into three subthemes that order
the essays collected in this volume: Liturgy as Ethics, Liturgy in Practices, Lit-
urgy and Cultures successively.
Liturgy as Ethics
The rst cluster concerns fundamental questions about the ethical meaning
of liturgy and systematic theological questions related to the doctrines of God,
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vols., trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John
T. McNeill (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, ), ...
Nicolas Wolterstorf, “Worship and Justice,” in McKim, Major Themes, –.
See Nicholas Wolterstorf, Hearing the Call: Liturgy, Justice, Church, and World, ed. Mark R.
Gornik and Gregory Thompson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), –.
creation, the sacraments as well as Christology and ecclesiology. How are,
theologically speaking, liturgy and the moral life related? What precisely is or
should be the connection between the liturgy of the church, doctrinal issues
concerning divine and human agency and Christian ethics? May the under-
standing of liturgical practices become a way in which the good for the com-
mon life is to be discerned? Is the church, as communion and in its catholicity,
itself an ethos? How is the strong emphasis on liturgy as the locus of Christian
ethics to be evaluated? How is the understanding of liturgy and worship as
theatricality related to the Reformed conviction that God is the prime actor in
liturgy?
In the rst contribution, entitled “What Makes Worship Good?,” Dirkie
Smit ofers a broad overview of the most important fundamental questions
concerning the relation between liturgy and the good as well as the most im-
portant and inuential answers given by liturgists, systematic theologians and
ethicists from various theological and cultural backgrounds. First, he deals
with an understanding of worship as response to human needs and desires.
In this approach the human being is basically seen as a praying animal or a
homo liturgicus (James K.A. Smith and others). In a second discourse the au-
thor distinguishes, ‘good’ is understood in the sense of important to the moral
formation and implying a morally just, good and devoted life, as advocated in
various ways by Hauerwas, O’Donovan, Wolterstorf and others. Since in this
approach not so much is said about good liturgy itself, recourse is had to a third
approach, in which ‘good’ is taken in the sense of proper. In this understanding,
worship is not good because of its implications, but because it is good in itself,
as Karl Barth emphasizes in his Giford Lectures. In a fourth discourse ‘good’
is understood in the sense of performing worship, addressing the multiple
processes that may take place in worship. With all these possibilities making
worship good the nal question is whether our worship is indeed meaningful,
worthwhile, faithful and performative. Reminded by biblical warnings, Smit
argues that not all worship is good and that we should be deeply self-critical
when it comes to worship.
After this overview, a second contribution is devoted to a reconstruction of
the relation between ethics and liturgy in the work of one of the most import-
ant, authentic and inuential theological voices of the past century in this re-
spect: Dietrich Bonhoefer. In his essay “God Waits for and Responds to Sincere
Prayer and Responsible Actions,” Gerard den Hertog rst of all analyzes how
liturgy and ethics are related in Bonhoefer’s life, in particular in relation to his
societal and political commitment. Next, the author focuses on Bonhoefer’s
works, more precisely on his practice of singing Psalms in daily liturgy and
his sermons on the Psalms. Bonhoefer’s reading and understanding of three
Psalms in particular is investigated in relation to his ethical reections. The au-
thor concludes that in Bonhoefer the connection between liturgy and ethics
is not so much a theory as a foundational practice.
In “Catholic Reformed Ethics: Bavinck’s Concept of Catholicity and its Im-
plications for Ethics” Willem van Vlastuin addresses the confession of catholic-
ity as an essential aspect of Christian liturgy. The concept of catholicity is used
as a lens through which we may understand the world with moral implications
for the Christian life. In particular, van Vlastuin analyzes Herman Bavinck’s
unique concept of cosmic catholicity and compares it with John Calvin’s so-
teriological, ecclesiological and eschatological concept. The outcome of this
comparison is used to integrate Bavinck’s cosmic catholicity with his Reformed
ethics in a broader proposal for a constructive cosmic ethics. Furthermore, this
cosmic understanding is integrated in an eschatological concept of catholicity.
The author concludes that the cosmic understanding of catholicity provides a
valuable and necessary contribution in a fragmented world, and all the more
testies to the importance of confessing the church’s catholicity in liturgy.
The nal essay in this part of the volume deals with theatricality of litur-
gy from a Reformed theological perspective. In a critical dialogue with Sam-
uel Wells’s concepts of liturgy as improvisation and rehearsal, and Shannon
Craigo-Snell’s notions of emptiness and liturgy as performance, Jaeseung Cha
argues that liturgy cannot be fully understood as human theatricality. For in
liturgy it is not primarily human beings that act in improvisation or perfor-
mance, but God who is the actor, in whose performance we perform our vir-
tuous lives as an expression of our gratitude to God. Cha addresses the risks
of self-deceptive hypocrisy in ‘theatre theology’ and develops a more critical
view drawing on Calvin’s image of God as the true actor in the theatre of both
the world and the church. In the liturgy it is primarily God who acts in Christ
through the Spirit. Our actions in worship are only limited commemorations
and reections of God’s action. The ethical implication is that we are formed
in humility in the image of the crucied Christ and are lifted up by God’s pow-
erful love.
Liturgy in Practices
The second series of essays is devoted to the potential and actual meaning of
liturgical practice in its various parts and theological underlying principles for
the moral formation of the Christian community and its individual members.
If the ethical meaning of liturgy encompasses more than that the command of
God simply reaches persons through the sermon and the Ten Commandments,
how do worship and prayer, sacrament and ritual practices actually shape the
moral life of Christians, both as individuals and as a community? What is the
implication of systematic theological conceptions of, e.g., the nature of Christ’s
presence in the Lord’s Supper for how liturgy is conceived? What may be the
ethical impact of the various aspects of liturgy such as saying grace, reading
and preaching the Word, the ofertory, celebrating the Lord’s Supper, singing
hymns and Psalms, confession and praying? How is the formative meaning of
liturgy actually perceived by church participants? Is the Reformed tradition
particularly preoccupied with justice?
In this part of the volume special attention is paid to justice, self-giving and
remembrance as ‘ethical’ core elements in the celebration of the Lord’s Sup-
per. These aspects are derived from practices and understandings of the Ear-
ly Church and the Reformed tradition extending from Calvin’s Geneva to the
context of post-apartheid South Africa, and perceptions of church attenders in
a secularized Dutch context. Rich and profound understandings of the Eucha-
rist do not close our eyes to the potential tension between what the Eucharistic
celebration could be or should be and what it may be in actuality as investigat-
ed in empirical research.
In the rst essay of this part of the volume, Nicholas Wolterstorf explores
the presence of justice and injustice within Christian liturgical enactments,
especially the striking fact that one of the most appalling episodes of injustice
is at the heart of the Christian narrative (James Cone). Whenever the Eucharist
is celebrated in accordance with Paul’s instructions, the participants are con-
fronted with this episode of lynching by crucixion of the one they worship.
Yet, the author observes how veiled the presentation of Christ’s sufering and
death are in most of the mainline present-day Eucharistic liturgies. Exceptions
are found in some of the hymns sung while the people receive the Eucharistic
elements in African-American liturgies, in which black people identify with Je-
sus in his sufering, humiliation, and victimization. The author analyzes what
it means to identify with Jesus in this sense and observes the one-sidedness of
liturgies that only express an atonement Christology, neglecting a liberation
Christology in which Jesus’ death as an oppressed victim and the resurrection
as liberation from the powers of injustice is expressed.
In the next essay Bernd Wannenwetsch explores the theological and ethical
signicance of a constitutive part of the Early Church’s Eucharistic celebra-
tion: the ancient ofertory procession as it has been described by Gregory Dix
and other liturgical scholars. By way of analyzing the rite according to the logic
of a twofold act of identication—rst, of the faithful with the oblations, and
second, of Christ with the faithful as represented in the oblations—the author
demonstrates the signicance of the ofertory for understanding the distinct
economy of divine and human action that characterizes the Eucharist as a
whole. After explaining why the Early Church’s theology of the communicants’
self-giving into Eucharistic transformation cannot be subjected to the criticism
that medieval accounts of the Messopfer attracted, Wannenwetsch moves on
to exploring key aspects of the moral signicance that the ofertory conveys:
a distinct Eucharistic ‘egalitarianism,’ in which everyone brings something, a
politically ripe account of the church as corporate agent, the “consecration of
the community” and its transformation into the Body of Christ.
In the next contribution we move from the Early Church to Calvin’s Geneva.
Herman Speelman identies and discusses the motives for Calvin’s persistent
plea for a weekly lay participation in communion, by which he opposed the
church’s long-standing custom of less frequent celebration in his days that
would continue for centuries after him. A number of good reasons for cele-
brating the Lord’s Supper, for example its community-shaping or unifying
efect, the sanctication of church and society, and the valuable ethical and
social-civil fruits of communion, do not suciently explain why Calvin fa-
vored a weekly or even a daily communion. On the basis of Calvin’s theology
of the Lord’s Supper Speelman arrives at four groups of motives that plead
for a frequent celebration, namely the Christological motive of purication
and sanctication through Christ, the pneumatological-mystical motive, the
ecclesiastical-liturgical motive and, nally, the heavenward directed eschato-
logical motive.
In his paper entitled “‘Do This in Remembrance of Me’: On the Lord’s Sup-
per, Performative Memory, and the Christian Moral Life,” Robert Vosloo links
the celebration of the Lord’s Supper to the notion of “performative memory,”
drawing on Calvin and contemporary scholars. Calvin’s argument for the fre-
quent celebration is put within the framework of his view of participation in
the Lord’s Supper, i.e., as a “return in memory to the passion of Christ.” From
this perspective, the Lord’s Supper is interpreted as a sustaining, kerygmatic,
Eucharistic, and ecclesiological-ethical remembrance. The author argues that
such an understanding of performative remembrance suggests that the cele-
bration of the Lord’s Supper is not a mere repetition of a past event, but an em-
bodied non-identical performative re-enactment marked by representation
and anticipation, with particular implications for the Christian moral life in
general, and in the context of post-apartheid South Africa in particular.
In the nal contribution on the sub-theme ‘Liturgy in Practices,’ Jasper Bos-
man and Hans Schaefer present a valuable Ritual Studies perspective on the
practice of the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. In their article “Celebrating
the Lord’s Supper as Act of Moral Formation,” literature review and qualitative
research are combined in order to answer the question whether participation
in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper fosters the unity of the communion of
the saints in three Reformed congregations in the Netherlands. The authors
claim that the experience of the Eucharistic celebration falls short in compar-
ison with claims in theological literature. According to some respondents, this
is due to a lack of personal encounter when celebrating the Lord’s Supper. Ad-
ditionally, considerable diferences in Eucharistic experience between minis-
ters and congregants are presented.
Liturgy and Cultures
The third theme, to which the nal part of this volume is devoted, covers both
questions of cultural context and variety of liturgy (liturgical cultures) and
questions of the relation of the Christian ethos to the secular and post-secular
world and its quasi-liturgies (cultural liturgies). What are the implications of
local and global cultural contexts for how worship is conceived, including the
way in which the good for common and individual life is discerned? Whereas ‘li-
turgical cultures’ implies a view on liturgy as dened by cultural performances,
the notion of ‘cultural liturgies’ rather encompasses a reading of culture
through the lens of worship. It is in particular James K.A. Smith who has devel-
oped this view of cultural liturgies. In this part of the volume central questions
concern the impact of formation in liturgy. What are the implications of the
shaping of our vision of the good life in Christian worship and liturgy for how
we perceive dominant cultural features? How is this vision related to cultural
phenomena and life views we experience in daily life, such as the perception
of work and the understanding of romantic love and marriage? How may the
church provide for a counter-cultural formation and how can this take place
concretely in the local congregation?
The rst essay on the sub-theme of ‘Liturgy and Cultures’ critically engages
with James K.A. Smith’s concept of homo liturgicus because of his unintend-
ed marginalization of God’s agency in liturgy, correlated with a low view of
sin on the one hand, and an optimistic view of the church, liturgy, and their
formative power on the other hand. Hak Joon Lee claims that a covenantal
approach of Christian liturgy and ethics, with its balanced attention to both
divine and human agency, is not only more faithful to the Scriptural ethos
surrounding liturgy and ethics, but is also just as transformative as Smith’s neo-
Aristotelian/ Augustinian approach toward shaping Christian moral agency in
a post- industrial society. The author develops a covenantal approach by con-
ceptualizing the concept of covenant in light of communicative action theo-
ry. This contribution addresses in particular the cultural attitude adopted by
many young Americans in which the function and role of institutional religion
is devalued. Religion is privatized and basically conceived in a moralistic, ther-
apeutic, and deistic way.
The next essay, by Pieter Vos, entitled “Celebrating God’s Works,” concerns
the relationship between work and worship. It starts from recent concep-
tions of liturgy as a formative moral practice, in which Christian ethics is seen
through the lens of Christian worship. The author argues that in these con-
ceptions, as represented by Wells, Hauerwas and others, the relationship be-
tween work and worship is not convincingly developed because these authors
prioritize the vita contemplativa over the vita activa. As an alternative a theo-
logical approach is developed in which the two are related in a diferent, non-
instrumental way. Core elements in this approach are a conception of the
Sabbath that centers on the celebration of God’s work ofering a particular
perspective on human work, a biblical view of the intrinsic relation between
Sabbath and justice, and an understanding of liturgy as formative and transfor-
mative practice with particular implications for how work may be understood
and carried out.
In “A Day to Remember,” Almatine Leene discusses the inuence of the pri-
vatization and romanticizing of marriage and wedding days. After a discussion
of various theological understandings of marriage and liturgies in present and
past, the author argues for a community-based understanding of both marriage
and the wedding liturgy. Only when marriage is seen in the broader context of
the ecclesial community and as blessed by a divine promise, will it be neither
privatized nor over-romanticized. Leene claries the practical implications of
a community-based conception of marriage by applying it to the preparation,
celebration and remembrance of the wedding, with an open consideration of
contemporary developments like wedding celebrations in the woods or at the
beach, and the increasing popularity of renewing one’s wedding vows in par-
ticular rituals.
In the next essay, Emanuel Gerrit Singgih explores the relation between rit-
ual and liturgy from two examples in the Indonesian context of local Christian
worship and relates this exploration to the book of Leviticus. The author re-
considers the anti-ritual heritage of Protestantism, including a reconsideration
of the missionary heritage of Christian churches in Indonesia. With the help of
the work of Old Testament scholars Frank Gorman and Samuel Balentine on
the book of Leviticus, the author explains how liturgy and ethics can be seen
as an integral unity. Leviticus points to the ‘world’ of ritual in close relationship
to ethics. The book contains ten toroth that may be regarded as the ‘Decalogue
of ritual life.’ Priestly rituals also seek to criticize ways of seeing and living in
the world and alter them according to God’s abiding vision. This interpretation
provides biblical ground for a valuation of rituals with important and useful
implications for the Indonesian context.
In the nal contribution, Hans Schaefer relates systematic theological con-
ceptualizations to practical theological considerations and vice versa. In par-
ticular, it ofers an examination of the place of liturgy in Reformed Practical
Ecclesiology. The main question on which this article focusses is how the lit-
urgy and its community-building capacity may function in practical ecclesiol-
ogy, and what practical implications this could entail for community-building
processes in concrete congregations. Starting from a particular case of a local
church struggling with decreasing membership and asking for advice from
practical theologians, Schaefer describes practical ecclesiological and system-
atic theological aspects that are at stake, with a focus on the role of liturgical
formation as developed by James K.A. Smith and others. The author argues
that the relation between liturgy and ecclesiology should be understood in
terms of Bonhoefer’s conception of the church as a community sui generis.
Epilogue
This collection of essays not only puts forward a wide variety of aspects related
to the theme, but also reects a diversity of views. Although the authors show
a deep commitment to Reformed theology and a Reformed approach to liturgy,
this does not mean that all reach the same conclusions and evaluations. Yet, it
appears that several important theological aspects that characterize Reformed
theology are more or less shared. One core element of a Reformed account of
the relation between liturgy and ethics seems to be the conviction that the
primary actor in liturgy is neither the human subject nor the community that
gathers, but God who calls his people, engages in a covenantal relationship and
then gathers them as a community. This starting point may be an alternative
to views in which the acting of individual believers or the community is the
central focus, although the authors of this volume disagree about how leading
voices like those of Samuel Wells and James K.A. Smith are to be valued in
this respect. Whereas Lee is rather critical about Smith and Cha about the-
atricality in the work of Wells and others, Bosman, Schaefer, Vosloo, Vos and
others adopt the work of these thinkers as a fruitful entrance to reecting on
the formative meaning of worship from Reformed perspectives. Yet all share
the position that a Reformed view opens our eyes to the divine initiative that
may provide an important critical moment in all liturgical performances. The
Word of God is never fully identical with what is said and done in worship, but
speaks through and beyond the words spoken and acts performed.
Second, from a Reformed theological perspective, the relation between lit-
urgy and ethics is not conceived in terms of identication, as if liturgy itself
is ethics. Liturgy is rst of all a good in itself and only from that perspective
formative for the moral self. Ethics, on the other hand, is also to be seen as
more or less independent, i.e., as based on a rereading and rehearing of the
Word, the tradition, human experience, rationality etc., which even may func-
tion as a critical voice towards potential forms of injustice cultivated in liturgy.
Ethics is not exclusively based on liturgy, but has also to do with, for instance,
experiences of injustice, normativity inherent in social practices, imperatives
given with worldly structures or laws. In this respect, Reformed theology is not
only critical towards modern culture, but also values its benets. On the other
hand, the recent theological interest in the intrinsic relation between liturgy
and ethics has been a real impetus to rethink liturgy as fundamental source
and perspective for ethics. It also reveals tendencies in the Reformed tradition
to undervalue the importance of liturgy in the shaping of moral vision and
character as well as the formative meaning of the community. This may make
all kinds of practices, patterns and activities in daily life vulnerable to biases of
given cultural patterns and their implied ‘liturgies.’ Therefore, the community
of believers is needed as a place where the moral self is formed, where cultural
and other biases are unveiled and even potentially self-misleading interpreta-
tions of Scripture are lovingly criticized.
Third, it seems that from a Reformed view justice indeed is to be seen as piv-
otal. It has become clear that justice should not be limited to the justication
of the sinner, but has many more connotations, for instance as rooted in the of-
fertory as a practice of self-giving and as existing in meaningful identications
with Christ of people sufering from injustices. The implications are wide-rang-
ing, extending not only to the church worldwide in its various local forms and
cultural contexts, but also to the world as God’s creation (a broad concept of
catholicity). Further questions concern how justice is to be conceptualized
ethically. Justice is not just a core principle or a key concept, but also and pri-
marily requires the formation of a particular kind of people. How is the virtue
of justice—as well as other virtues—to be cultivated in worship? How can
Reformed social thought be made fruitful in thinking through the way liturgy
shapes a just moral life? In this respect, one could wonder whether Reformed
theology hasn’t overemphasized the cognitive and volitional, neglecting too
much of the afective, as is reected in the emphasis on instruction in the cel-
ebration of the Lord’s Supper. On the other hand, several contributions in this
volume exemplify how in a Reformed conception and practice of the Lord’s
Supper the Eucharistic remembrance can indeed lead to an active experience
and transformative practice of hopeful justice in the present.
Some other remaining questions are about how character formation and
cultivation of the virtues may be intrinsically part of what happens when the
community gathers to hear God’s Word and respond in faithfulness. First of all,
this concerns a reection on the various aspects of liturgy. In this volume, as in
many other reections on liturgy and ethics, the focus has been in particular on
the Eucharist. In addition, this volume contains some relevant reections on
greeting, singing Psalms and prayer, confession, and some other topics. More
investigation is needed with regard to the ethical meaning of other elements
of the liturgy, such as saying grace, Kyrie and Gloria, reading and preaching the
Word, intercession, singing, baptism, confession etc. Contributions in this vol-
ume demonstrate what we can learn from original understandings of the ofer-
tory in the Early Church, black theological understandings of Christ’s sufering
of injustice or Indonesian understandings of rituality in biblical perspective.
Much work is still to be done in investigating the ethical impact of other litur-
gical practices, from historical, empirical, liturgical and systematic-theological
perspectives. Moreover, several contributions exemplify how liturgy afects
various moral domains like work and marriage, but more work has to be done
in investigating potential meanings in other moral domains. How can liturgi-
cal practices be informative to moral domains such as education, politics and
economics, care and medicine, family life and civil society?
Further questions concern the relation of Reformed emphases to other li-
turgical traditions. It should be kept in mind that the Swiss Reformers meant
not to begin over but to reform the tradition to which they belonged. Therefore,
ecumenical openness is intrinsically part of a Reformed approach. Nowadays a
wide variety of liturgical practices can be observed in local churches belonging
to the Reformed denomination, in which adherence to the Reformed tradition
is easily combined with all kinds of inuences from diferent traditions like
Evangelicalism and Monasticism. Against this backdrop, what precisely is the
viability of particular Reformed liturgical aspects? How may vital elements of
this tradition, like the primacy of God’s Word, the importance of the sermon,
the active partaking of the community as a whole and the centrality of justice,
be actualized in today’s liturgical practices of Reformed churches in various
contexts? Furthermore, Protestantism in general and the Reformed tradition
in particular show some weakness if not fear when it comes to performing
rituals that may be meaningful to various groups of people both inside and
outside the church.
Finally, from an ethical perspective an important challenge is how a liturgi-
cally informed Christian ethics communicates in plural and secular contexts. It
appears that according to some leading voices, such as Hauerwas’s and Wells’s,
Christian ethics is primarily counter-cultural. From a Reformed perspective,
one should indeed say that worship is a unique, specic practice where peo-
ple are gathered around the Word of God, which shapes them as a particular
people in contrast to the world. On the other hand, it should be emphasized
that the world is still God’s creation and that God wants to redeem not just his
people but the whole of his creation. Though the gospel is proclaimed in the
church and people are shaped in worship in a particular way, the whole world
in its secular and/or pluralist outlook is related to Christ, as Bonhoefer states,
with the implication that the good is not limited to the church, but can be ex-
perienced wherever justice is kept and works of mercy are done. Nevertheless,
it is the task of the church to be truthful to her Lord and to continue worship
as arcani disciplina from which she lives.
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Liturgy as Ethics
© Koninklijke Brill NV, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004356528_003
What Makes Worship Good?
Dirkie Smit
Introduction
What makes worship good? The aim of this essay is to distinguish and brief-
ly consider diferent ways in which worship is actually described as good in
popular discourses and according to widespread perceptions, in other words
to discern diferent criteria according to which worship—including particu-
larly Reformed worship—is perhaps experienced and evaluated both by those
planning and leading as well as those participating in the worship.
Four possible approaches will be considered, based on well-known litera-
ture. A rst approach would be to ask whether worship is pleasant, popular,
and successful, for example by drawing worshippers, fullling their needs and
making them feel good and blessed. A second approach would be to consider
whether worship as an activity serves any good or useful purpose, in the ethical
sense of the word, so that it should be regarded as a valuable and important en-
deavor, and if indeed, why and for whom. A third approach would be to ques-
tion whether forms of worship properly fulll their own internal purpose(s),
which again involves the theological question what the inherent purpose(s) or
logic of worship are, also according to Reformed understanding. A fourth and
nal approach would be to ask whether worship is successful in what it actu-
ally intends to perform and bring about, for example by means of the diverse
liturgical practices at work during worship, from singing to prayer to preaching
to the celebration of the sacraments. The essay will be concluded by approach-
ing the original question in yet another way when it considers in which case
and under which circumstances worship would not be good.
Good in the Sense of Pleasant?
A rst and obvious way to understand the question ‘What makes worship
good?’ would be to inquire what makes worship work. What makes it pleasant
and popular? What makes people enjoy worship, ock there in large numbers,
attend regularly, bring others with them, recommend the services to friends
and family? What makes worship inspirational, moving, attractive, powerful
and empowering? What makes worship appealing, successful, meaningful, en-
joyable, nice, in short, what makes worship feel good? What makes people like
worship? What makes worship appealing?
This question indeed seems not to be unimportant. After all, the biblical
Psalms are full of longing to be in God’s presence, to participate in the worship
of the people of God, in the gathered assembly. They express a human desire
to be before the face of God and to be able to call on God and cry to God, to
lament and to praise, to weep and to give thanks. The Psalms are full of the
cries of absence of those deserted in the deserts of loneliness, away from the
temple, experiencing the emptiness and darkness of death, where God is no
longer praised. It seems as if these expressions remind us of a deep human
need and longing for worship and for heartfelt joy and experiences of goodness
whenever worshippers are privileged to come together as God’s people. Ask-
ing whether this need is indeed fullled in our worship services and whether
believers indeed experience these occasions with joy as goodness is not a ques-
tion to be taken lightly.
It would certainly arm the work of scholars like Robert Jenson, who de-
scribes human beings as “praying animals,” or James K.A. Smith, who develops
a philosophical anthropology in which human beings are seen as “desiring the
kingdom,” or even those evolutionary anthropologists like Augustine Fuentes
See for example the detailed reections on the functions of prayer and worship in the Old
Testament by Patrick D. Miller, They Cried to the Lord (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, ).
Originally published as “The Praying Animal,” Zygon (), -, but also in Robert
W. Jenson, Essays in Theology of Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), -. In his lat-
er Systematic Theology, Vol. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), he develops the same
conviction when he deals with created in God’s image: “That is: our specicity in comparison
with the other animals is that we are the ones addressed by God’s moral word and so enabled
to respond—that we are called to pray. If we will, the odd creature of the sixth day can after
all be classied: we are the praying animals,” -. For him, this does not have to be good
prayer in any sense, also “blasphemies, deliberately stopped ears, mindless oaths, decisions
to eschew prayer, and so on are all in their perverse ways prayers, together with the multi-
tudinous prayers of religions that misidentify the addressee.” This even includes for him the
cursing of God, all of which merely illustrates how human beings are ontologically speaking
praying animals.
See James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation,
Cultural Liturgies, Vol. (Grand Rapids: Baker, ), for his well-known description of hu-
man beings as “desiring, imaginative animals” who “are what we love,” with important conse-
quences for life within our “secular liturgies,” leading to his argument for teaching believers
to “desire the kingdom,” moving from worship to worldview to “practices for the
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and Wentzel van Huyssteen, who argue for the seemingly pervasive religious
inclination in both our becoming and our being human. If worship is to fulll
fundamental human needs and desires, then it certainly makes sense to ask
whether our worship is indeed good in the sense that it corresponds to and
fullls these needs and desires.
It is therefore not surprising that many of our contemporary attempts to rethink
ecclesiology and the place and role of the church in contemporary societies very
specically ask how worship can be good in this sense. How can worship help to
make the church meaningful, credible, relevant, popular, perhaps even needed
and inuential in often challenging circumstances and crises?
The well-known study document of the Evangelical Church in Germany
called Kirche der Freiheit provides an important illustration. The authors ex-
plicitly and in careful and nuanced detail reect on what could be done to
keep—and in many cases to make—local worship meaningful, in diferent
regions, some more secular than others, in rural villages, in large cities, for
kingdom.” In order to develop the latter, he describes a complex “social imaginary embedded
in Christian worship” by considering a wide variety of aspects of the liturgy. See also his
following volume (the second of three), Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works, Cul-
tural Liturgies, Vol. (Grand Rapids: Baker, ), in which he begins by arguing for the
signicance of the bodily in order to move on to what he calls “sanctied perception” made
possible by how worship works, namely by helping us “to tell ourselves stories in order to live”
and by helping us “to re-story,” which is also to restore the world.
See for example the discussion of the development of complex human behavior by the bi-
ological anthropologist Augustine Fuentes, Evolution of Human Behavior (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, ) and the discussion of the development of early ritual according to
the evolutionary epistemological approach of Wentzel van Huyssteen, for example in his
ground-breaking Alone in the World? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ).
An important kind of literature to include would be the voices of those who witness to the
role which worship and liturgy, music and prayer, mystery, imagination and silence, have
played in sustaining them and in informing their lives and humanity, for example—to men-
tion only one account amongst many—the writings of the British philosopher Roger Scru-
ton, for example his autobiographical Gentle Regrets (London: Continuum, ), particu-
larly the nal chapter, “Regaining my Religion,” –. There are even some who describe
themselves as atheist who acknowledge the importance of participating in the church’s wor-
ship, not only in their childhood and formative years, but indeed still today, although they
are of the opinion that they do not really believe in any traditional sense of the word. In these
cases, worship is understood as good, not so much because it is pleasant in any supercial
sense, but seemingly because it fullls deep human needs in ways that other cultural practic-
es may fail to do.
See “Kirche der Freiheit—Perspektiven für die evangelische Kirche im . Jahrhundert,” Ein
Impulspapier des Rates der , epd Dokumentation Nr , . Juli .
diferent publics. These seem like important ways of framing the question of
what makes worship good.
It seems almost self-evident today that churches should reect on “wel-
coming the stranger” in the words of Pat Keifert, on the self-critical question
whether worship services are such that those who attend by chance would
want to return, in the words of the former Bishop of Berlin-Brandenburg, Wolf-
gang Huber. Do people experience the services as welcoming, inviting, plea-
surable, meaningful, good experiences for them?
Perhaps it could even be interesting to reect how much these motives also
played a role in the inuential Liturgical Movement of the previous century, in
addition to the obvious motives of recovery and rediscovery. It most certain-
ly informed and inspired Friedrich Schleiermacher’s major contributions, not
only to the renewal and dramatic popularization of worship during his own
time in Berlin at the beginning of the modern period, but indeed to modern
theology itself.
Understanding worship as response to human needs and desires, of course,
raises questions about the nature of these needs and desires—and with that
things become more dicult, even complicated, if not to say controversial
and contested. As soon as our answers become specic, pointing to particular
needs and desires, others may begin to disagree.
One is reminded, for example, of Karl Rahner, who famously foresaw that
the church of the future will involve two fundamentally diferent forms of spir-
ituality, namely “an enthusiastic and charismatic type of piety with an almost
naïve immediacy to God, bordering on a naïve faith in the power of the Holy
Spirit” and “a wintry spirituality … closely allied with the torment of atheists.”
Rahner hoped that the pastoral theology of the church will not be conned
only to the rst type, but also “earnestly deal with the demands of the wintry
spirituality as well … (of) those … who are going through the purgatory and
Patrick R. Keifert, Welcoming the Stranger (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, ).
See the interviews conducted by Stefan Berg, published as Wolfgang Huber, Meine Hof-
nung ist grösser als meine Angst (Berlin: Wichern, ), –, especially –.
See for example the helpful essays describing diverse aspects of these renewal move-
ments in John Fenwick & Bryan Spinks, Worship in Transition (Edinburgh: T & T Clark,
).
See for example Nicholas Adams, “F.D.E. Schleiermacher,” in Alister E. McGrath and Dar-
ren C. Marks (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Protestantism (Oxford: Blackwell Publish-
ing, ), –, : “For Schleiermacher, worship and ethics are two aspects of one
church life, and while they can be distinguished from each other, for analytical purposes,
they belong together.”
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hell of modern rationalism … those people of a willing but troubled faith.”
It was these comments that inspired the Lutheran historian Martin Marty to
write his moving thoughts called A Cry of Absence: Relections for the Winter of
the Heart. But what would be the implications of such an enormous spectrum
of human needs and desires for good worship—in the sense of meaningful?
In his insightful study called Leisure: The Basis of Culture, the Catholic phi-
losopher Josef Pieper reminded us of the integral link between cult and cul-
ture, between divine worship and the human world of work and leisure—but
what exactly is the link, or how diverse and complex may these reciprocal
links perhaps need to be? Should our cult adopt, mirror, strengthen our cul-
tures—becoming increasingly tailored after our cultural garb? Or should our
cult rather critique, unmask, oppose—increasingly resisting and undermining
the assumptions and values of our cultures? Or are both kinds of links possi-
ble—and how do we then discern what is good for worship?
Over the years the liturgical scholar Don Saliers has helped us to see some
of the tensions and contradictions between our cultural needs and desires on
the one hand and the intended nature of our worship on the other hand. His
moving Worship as Theology for example asked how Christian worship can sur-
vive in a North American culture of exaggeration and forgetfulness, but similar
self-critical questions could and probably should be asked in all other cultural
contexts too.
One could of course take many diferent approaches, for example follow
another liturgical scholar, namely Geofrey Wainwright, and use the classi-
cal threefold typology of “the true, the good and the beautiful” to capture the
range of human needs and desires. This is indeed what many liturgists are
attempting—continuously making use of whatever is available and popular
in contemporary culture concerning knowledge, morality, and beauty to make
See the interview with Karl Rahner called “A ‘Wintry’ Church and the Opportunities for
Christianity,” -, in the volume Faith in a Wintry Season, ed. Paul Imhof and Hubert
Biallowons, trans. Harvey D. Egan (New York: Crossroad, ).
Martin Marty, A Cry of Absence: Relections for the Winter of the Heart (Eugene: Wipf &
Stock, ). He also based his reections on an exposition of some biblical Psalms and
on their mood and spirit of worship.
Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, trans. by Alexander Dru, introduction T.S. Eliot
(New York: Pantheon, ).
Don E. Saliers, Worship as Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, ).
Geofrey Wainwright, “The True, the Good and the Beautiful: The Other Story,” Journal
of Theology for Southern Africa (), –; also in Embracing Purpose (Peterbor-
ough: Epworth, ), –.
their worship better—or good. In that case, however, Wainwright’s intention is
precisely to remind us of “the other story,” namely “the foolishness of grace that
both confounds and fulls the human aspirations.”
In the same way, yet another liturgical scholar, Awet Andemicael from Yale,
argues that our notions of beauty—particularly the beauty of music—should
be “broken” before they can become useful, appropriate, and meaningful in
worship.
In his study called Worship: Reformed according to Scripture, Hughes
Oliphant Old tells a moving story. A well-known Protestant liturgist held a
workshop in liturgy at an ecumenical study conference center. With all sorts of
credentials in music and the arts, he instructed the workshop in the creation
of liturgies. Finally, each one had to create their own. The assignment greatly
confused a woman from the Orthodox Church in Ethiopia. How could she write
a new liturgy? The liturgy developed over centuries? The liturgist felt sorry for
her, seeing her as someone from a very primitive culture, and patiently helped
her, by explaining again, and in fact writing one for her. The next day, since he
was responsible for the service, he decided to use the liturgy he developed for
her. Afterwards, and pleased, he asked her what she thought of it. She shook
her head, “The liturgy can only come from many tears,” she responded. She
understood, says Old.
Good in the Sense of Important?
The question could however also mean something diferent, namely: Why is
worship good?—for those who take part, for the community, for societies, for
the world itself? What happens in worship that makes it needed, necessary,
worthwhile, important, valuable for ourselves and for our world? Why do our
communities depend on worship, why can we not aford to be without wor-
ship, what would go wrong in our world if there had been no worship?
Once again, this is indeed a common way to understand the intentions be-
hind the question. In its most direct form one probably encounters this idea
in the popular bumper stickers that claim, in the spirit of Chronicles :, “If
my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face,
and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive
See Awet Andemicael, “The ‘Broken’ Music of ‘Humanity at Full Stretch’,” Worship /
(),–.
Hughes Oliphant Old, Worship: Reformed according to Scripture (Louisville: Westminster
John Knox, ), .
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their sin and heal their land” (). The conviction behind such a view is ob-
vious. God approves of worship and will bless those who worship. In fact, God
will bless and heal the whole land.
This crude form should not blind us to more subtle expressions of similar
sentiments. There have been manifold traditions throughout the history of
Christendom in which altar and throne were regarded as intimately related,
church and empire, state, nation, culture, community, and therefore worship
and the public cause and the public good. We only have to recall well-known
churches and cathedrals with their liturgical spaces, their pictures, paintings,
names, ags, monuments, seals and symbols; or their hymns and prayers, their
saints, calendars, names, crypts, treasures, commemorative plaques. It is easy
yet important to remember the function of public worship and civil religion,
the way worship blesses queens, countries, continents, parliaments, universi-
ties, sports teams, armies at war and their bloody battles, to acknowledge what
makes worship good in this sense.
We are, amongst other things, reminded of the many forms of what
sociologists since Durkheim—for example Charles Taylor in his account of
the historical development of a so-called secular age—describe as periods of
mobilization, of “religiously-dened political identity-mobilization,” situations
in which belonging is more fundamental than believing, and the church with
its worship serves political, social and cultural purposes, in the process gaining
respect and inuence and being regarded as good—as useful, important and
valuable. “God bless Africa” can be said and meant in diferent ways.
An even more subtle variation of this appreciative view of worship is found
in the typically modern view of religion, well-known since Immanuel Kant.
For a discussion of the notion of civil religion and its diverse, complex and contested ap-
plication to South African developments and realities, see Dirk J. Smit, “Civil Religion—in
South Africa?,” Ernst Conradie (ed.), Essays in Public Theology: Collected Essays, Vol.
(Stellenbosch: Sun Press, ), –.
See the inuential account of the historical development of secularism in Charles Taylor,
A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard, ), in particular his “Narratives of Secularization,”
including “The Age of Mobilization” and “The Age of Authenticity,” –.
“Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika” is a well-known and popular pan-African liberation song and was
and remains in some or other form the national anthem of several African countries. It
was however originally composed as a hymn in by Enoch Sontonga, a Xhosa cleric
at a Methodist school near Johannesburg. It literally means “Lord, Bless Africa” in Xhosa
and provides a powerful demonstration of how hymns and prayers can work efectively
in diferent ways in diferent social locations. It is still sung as a hymn and prayer in many
churches and at the same time it is sung as a national anthem during public events, in-
cluding political rallies, major sport events, and graduation ceremonies.
On this view, religion is valuable in the service of morality, of ethical, social,
and political ideals, and therefore worship can also be valuable, since it can
(perhaps, hopefully) contribute to moral formation, ethical discernment, and
political transformation. In short, worship can (perhaps, hopefully) play an ed-
ucational and motivational role and in this way contribute to public life and
political morality—which of course makes it good (even if it is only necessary
for those not yet of age who still lack their own ethical insight and moral mo-
tivation).
This view again comes in many forms and shapes. The abundant literature
available today on worship and moral formation, on liturgy and life, and on
prayer and ethics speaks for itself. There are even attempts to demonstrate
empirically that this is indeed the case, and that those who worship regularly
difer morally and ethically from those who do not, at least in some places and
traditions and respects.
However, the issue is once again perhaps more complicated and contested
than it may seem on the surface. There are, after all, those who deny that such
correlations can be found and demonstrated. In fact, there are many who claim
the opposite, and try their best to argue, and sometimes to demonstrate, that
religion and therefore worship is dangerous, making people intolerant and vi-
olent, judgmental, without love and therefore immoral, and actual threats to
public life, peace, and order. After all, many of the most religious countries in
our world today are precisely those countries where most of us would proba-
bly prefer not to live, especially women and children. There are therefore also
widely respected sociologists, like Hans Joas in his Faith as an Option, who ar-
gue that secular societies do not lead to a loss of values and that we do not nec-
essarily need religion and worship for the formation of values and for ethical
convictions and commitments.
Those who have made signicant progress in what is good no longer need to pray, accord-
ing to Immanuel Kant, “Vom Gebet,” Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. (Leipzig: De Gruyter,
), .
See for example recent empirical and sociological investigations into churchgoing and its
possible efects by scholars like Robin Gill, Churchgoing and Christian Ethics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, ).
He pursues the question concerning the relation between religion and morality, ethics
and values in several studies, including Hans Joas, Faith as an Option (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, ). He also ofers his own constructive versions of the development
of values and morality in several studies, including the two complementary works on
The Genesis of Values (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ) and The Sacredness of the
Person (Washington: Georgetown University Press, ).
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In fact, there are many who would argue strongly against this link between
worship and the good life—both in the sense of a happy, ourishing life and in
the sense of a moral and ethical life—precisely because they want to protect the
integrity of worship itself, because they are convinced that worship should not
be instrumentalized in any way out of ulterior motives and for ulterior reasons.
However, there does seem to be a sense in which Christian worship
should—hopefully—contribute to the Christian life, and therefore to ethical
discernment, moral formation, and social and public transformation. After all,
already Tertullian was convinced that the Lord’s Prayer involves everything we
should believe as well as be and do. In Romans Paul calls believers in the
light of the mercies of God to their logike latreia, their true service, the liturgy
after the liturgy, the dedication of their whole lives to service and love. For the
Reformed tradition of Calvin and the Heidelberg Catechism it seems almost
self-evident that prayer, including the life that ows from prayer, is at the heart
of faith and gratitude. They can appreciate why Barth eventually chose to
summarize the whole ethics of reconciliation in the notion of invocation, call-
ing on God.
For an instructive illustration of such an objection, see the argument of Bernd Wannen-
wetsch, Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens (New York: Oxford University Press,
). Also see Geofrey Wainwright’s instructive inaugural lecture at Union Seminary in
New York, “Towards God,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review (Supplement) (), –.
The Lord’s Prayer is a “compendium of the whole gospel (breviarium totius evangelii),”
Tertullian, De Orat., cap. , Patrologia Latina, , . For more recent discussions of the
Lord’s Prayer as way of life, see the well-known theologians David J. Bosch, The Lord’s
Prayer: Paradigm for a Christian Lifestyle (Pretoria: Christian Medical Fellowship, );
Donald W. Shriver, The Lord’s Prayer: A Way of Life (Louisville: John Knox, ).
John Calvin, Institutes ., Prayer is “the chief exercise (praecipuum exercitium) of faith”;
according to Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day , Answer , prayer is “the chief part of
the thankfulness which God requires of us.” For an authoritative account of the controversial
relationship between grace, faith, and gratitude, see J. Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and
the Gift (New York: Oxford University Press, ); for an instructive earlier study of this re-
lation in Calvin, see Brian A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, ). For
an interesting historical overview of notions of gratitude and ingratitude, including Calvin,
see Peter J. Leithart, Gratitude: An Intellectual History (Waco: Baylor University Press, ).
Karl Barth, The Christian Life (Church Dogmatics, Vol. /) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
). For instructive interpretations, see for example John Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Rec-
onciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); John Webster, Barth’s Moral
Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ); also Nigel Biggar, The Hastening that Waits
(Oxford: Clarendon, ); David Haddorf, Christian Ethics as Witness: Barth’s Ethics for
a World at Risk (Eugene: Cascade, ); Alexander Massmann, Citizenship in Heaven and
on Earth (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, ).
One may therefore appreciate the widely diverse projects of gures like the for-
mer Calvin College philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorf relating worship, holiness,
and justice; or the Methodist ethicist Stanley Hauerwas teaching liturgy and eth-
ics as one module since we learn in worship to see and to prioritize; or the ecu-
menical theologian Geofrey Wainwright, who links worship, doctrine, and ethics
in his Doxology, and explains Faith, Hope and Love as “the ecumenical trio of
virtues,” owing from baptism, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Lord’s Supper, respec-
tively; or the volume with essays dedicated to Don Saliers called Liturgy and the
Moral Self: Humanity at Full Stretch Before God; or the Anglican theologian Oli-
ver O’Donovan’s popular explications in Liturgy and Ethics; or the Stellenbosch
Dean of Theology Nico Koopman writing on Cries for a Humane Life: Relections
on the Lord’s Prayer, as well as in many ecumenical documents. In all these and
many other ways the links between worship and ethics are convincingly clear.
See for example already Nicholas Wolterstorf, Until Justice and Peace Embrace (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, ) ; and also later essays like “Liturgy, Justice, and Holi-
ness,” The Reformed Journal (Dec ), –; “Justice as a Condition of Authentic Lit-
urgy,” Theology Today / (), –; and “Worship and justice,” in Donald McKim
(ed.), Major Themes in the Reformed Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), –.
Many of his essays on worship and ethics are available in Hearing the Call: Liturgy, Justice,
Church and World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ).
See for example Stanley Hauerwas, “The Liturgical Shape of the Christian Life: Teaching
Christian Ethics as Worship,” in idem, In Good Company: The Church as Polis (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, ), –, also –.
Geofrey Wainwright, Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine, and Life (New
York: Oxford University Press, ); also several contributions in his Festschrift, David S.
Cunningham, Ralph del Colle and Lucas Lamadrid (eds), Ecumenical Theology in Worship,
Doctrine, and Life (New York: Oxford University Press, ).
Geofrey Wainwright, Faith, Hope, and Love: The Ecumenical Trio of Virtues (Waco: Baylor
University Press, ).
E. Byron Anderson, Bruce T. Morrill, SJ (eds), Liturgy and the Moral Self: Humanity at Full
Stretch Before God (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, ). For Saliers’ own account of the
relationships between liturgy and ethics, see for example his essay in the Festschrift com-
memorating the liturgical contribution of Josef A. Jungmann, SJ, namely “Pastoral Liturgy
and Character Ethics: As We Worship So We Shall Be,” in Joanne M. Pierce and Michael
Downey (eds), Source and Summit (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, ), –.
Oliver O’Donovan, Liturgy and Ethics (Nottingham: Grove Books Limited, ).
Nico Koopman, Cries for a Humane Life: Relections on the Lord’s Prayer (Wellington: Bible-
cor, ).
The link between liturgy and life has been stressed in recent ecumenical documents.
Reformed churches, theologians, and theology have made important contributions.
Best and Heller claim that there still is a “need to develop more fully the relationship of
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Yet, the nagging question remains whether this really makes worship good?
Is worship really justied by these efects and implications, or do they merely
belong together with worship as an integral part of what is happening there,
but without being the purpose behind worship and therefore not being the
reason why worship should be called good?
One remembers the surprise when Karl Barth gave his Giford Lectures in
/ on the Scottish Confession, called the Knowledge of God and the
Service of God. He described the worship of the gathered congregation as “the
most important, momentous and majestic thing which can possibly take place
on earth”—yet precisely not because it has such an important ethical or po-
litical impact, but simply because it happens. In fact, Duncan Forrester later
commented how surprised the audience and later readers were, because they
indeed expected him to speak about the ethical and political nature of wor-
ship, given the historical moment and the context of crisis. For Barth, one
could say, as for so many others, worship is good not because of its efects, but
because of its inner telos and logic, its own nature and purpose, because of
what worship is all about.
Good in the Sense of Proper?
So, if worship is good when it is true to its own inner telos and logic, when it
is faithful to its own nature and purpose, when it fullls its own aims—what
is this purpose? When worship is good when it is what worship is supposed to
be—then what is it supposed to be? When is worship proper worship—and
therefore good?
Now things really become complex and contested. One could of course de-
cide to start with the ocial confessional answers given by the Reformation.
After all, the Augsburg Confession was deliberately attempting to answer this
question when it claimed in Article that proper preaching and correct ad-
ministration of the sacraments together constitute all that is necessary for the
worship to work for justice, witness and service, to the Christian commitment that God’s
will be done ‘on earth as it is in heaven,’” Thomas F. Best and Dagmar Heller, So We Believe,
So We Pray (Geneva: Publications, ) p. . See also Thomas F. Best and Martin
Robra (eds), Ecclesiology and Ethics (Geneva: , ), –.
Karl Barth, The Knowledge of God and the Service of God (London: Hodder and Stoughton,
).
Duncan Forrester, “Ecclesiology and Ethics: A Reformed perspective,” The Ecumenical Re-
view / (), –, .
church’s worship, in fact, for the church’s being. This is sucient, it famously
said, satis est, nothing more is possible, everything else is arbitrary, adiaphora,
non-essential. What makes worship good? Proper preaching and proper cel-
ebration of the sacraments, so would the Reformation answer the question.
Or rather, the Lutheran Reformation would answer like that, since Calvin
deliberately took over this expression but added, on several occasions, the
phrase “and heard”—the church is there where the gospel is purely preached
and heard, and the sacraments administered properly.
For Reformed people this raises the further question what “and hearing” the
gospel exactly means, since this should also happen in order for worship to be
good. What is even more, what do “proper” preaching of the gospel and “prop-
er” administration of the sacraments in any case mean? How do we measure
that, how do we determine that, since both the Lutheran World Federation and
the (then) World Alliance of Reformed Churches judged that a status confessio-
nis, a moment of truth, arrived in South African church circles when adiapho-
ra were no longer innocent, the credibility of the gospel was at stake and the
church’s worship was no longer good?
Perhaps one could make the picture of Reformed worship even richer by
taking Calvin’s own views regarding prayer and worship into account—for
example adoration, trust, invocation and thanksgiving. Perhaps one could
Dirk J. Smit, “En ook gehoor? Vrae rondom die Gereformeerde siening van die kerk (And
heard? Questions concerning the Reformed view of the church),” in Len Hansen (ed.), Op-
stelle oor Gereformeerd Wees Vandag: Versamelde Opstelle . Dirk J. Smit (Essays on being
Reformed today: Collected Essays: Dirk J. Smit) (Stellenbosch: Sun Press, ), –.
See Dirk J. Smit, “What does status confessionis mean?,” in Gerhard D. Cloete and Dirk J.
Smit, A Moment of Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), –.
For Calvin’s discussion of prayer in the Institutes, see /. For instructive discus-
sions of his views on prayer and on the development of his thought in this regard, see for
example the contributions of well-known Calvin scholars like Elsie McKee, “John Calvin’s
Teaching on the Lord’s Prayer,” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, Supplement (),
–, reprinted in Daniel L. Migliore (ed.), The Lord’s Prayer (Grand Rapids; Eerdmans,
), –; I. John Hesselink, Calvin’s First Catechism: A Commentary (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox, ), –; Peter Opitz, “‘Dein Reich komme’—Variationen
reformierter Unservater-Auslegung,” in idem (Hrsg.), Calvin im Kontext der Schweizer Re-
formation (Zürich: , ), –. For collections of Calvin’s own prayers, several
with interpretation, see for example Calvijn, Gebeden (Prayers) (Kampen: De Groot Gou-
driaan, ); I. John Hesselink, John Calvin: On Prayer, Conversation with God (Louisville:
John Knox, ); Rudolf Bohren, Beten mit Paulus und Calvin (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, ). For studies on his views on worship and liturgy, see for example the
still informative Hans Scholl, Der Dienst des Gebetes nach Johannes Calvin (Zürich: Zwingli
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consider Calvin’s emphasis on the sursum corda, the lifting up of our hearts
to God, in worship, and the fullness of what that entails. Perhaps we could
learn something from reconsidering Calvin’s own views on the real presence
of the living Jesus Christ in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. Perhaps
one could take those characteristics into account that have traditionally
been ascribed to early Reformed views of worship—for example Bucer’s
fourfold emphasis on the preaching and teaching of the Word; the practice
of fellowship, compassion, and service; the breaking of the bread and its
implications for our everyday life; the comprehensive understanding of a
life of prayer.
When one remembers, however, that the church did not originate with the
Reformation, and that Reformed worship is not the only form of worship—in
fact, according to many other Christian traditions the Reformed way is hardly a
proper form of worship!—then the question obviously becomes much more
dicult.
One only has to come under the impression of the history of Christian wor-
ship and of its enormous diversity, variety, and complexity, to realize how al-
most futile and at least presumptuous it may be to isolate some elements and
to take them as constituting the heart of Christian worship. One only has to
take note of the overview in Martin Stringer’s A Sociological History of Christian
Verlag, ); Teunis Brienen, De liturgie bij Johannes Calvijn (Liturgy with John Calvin)
(Kampen: De Groot Goudriaan, ); also John Calvin, Writings on Pastoral Piety: The
Classics of Western Spirituality, ed. and trans. Elsie McKee (New York: Paulist, ).
See for example the well-documented essay by Mirjam G.K. van Veen, “Sursum corda:
Calvijns polemiek tegen nicodemieten, in het bijzonder tegen Coornhert,” Nederlands
Archief Voor Kerkgeschiedenis/Dutch Review of Church History / (), –.
Dirk J. Smit, ““… wahrhafte Teilhaber an der wahren Substanz des Leibes und Blutes Jesu
Christi …’ —Calvins Verständnis von Eucharistie als ökumenisches Angebot?,” in André
Birmele and Wolfgang Thönissen (Hrsg.), Johannes Calvin ökumenisch gelesen (Leipzig:
Evangelische Verlagsanstalt/Bonifatius, ), –.
See for example Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the
Worship of the Christian Church, Vol. .: The Age of the Reformation (Grand Rapids: Eerd-
mans, ), f.
In addition to literature mentioned elsewhere, see for example for Reformed worship,
David Fergusson, “The Theology of Worship within the Reformed Tradition,” in Michael
Welker and Cynthia A. Jarvis (eds), Loving God with Our Minds (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
), –; also D.G. Hart and John R. Muether, With Reverence and Awe (Phillips-
burg: P&R Publishing, ); as well as the instructive historical essays collected in Lukas
Vischer (ed.), Christian Worship in Reformed Churches Past and Present (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, ).
Worship or of the more detailed case studies in Geofrey Wainwright and Kar-
en Westereld Tucker’s The Oxford History of Christian Worship to become con-
vinced of the almost impossible task of dening the nature and purpose of
Christian worship, unless only vaguely and abstractly.
It is therefore not surprising that many scholars have attempted to nd and
to discern—or perhaps to construct and to ofer—some order behind and
within this seeming chaos of historical developments and practices.
It is for example with good reason that scholars of the history of worship,
like Geofrey Wainwright, were trying to nd so-called “classical patterns” be-
hind all the multiplicity of liturgical developments, as it was patterns that truly
belong to Christian worship, patterns that should always be present in order to
keep worship proper worship, to make worship—in this sense—good.
A related attempt was for example made by Bernhard Lang in his Sacred
Games: A History of Christian Worship, in which he reconstructed this history
as six diferent stories about six diferent kinds of “holy games” being played
in diferent forms and traditions of Christian worship—the stories of praise,
prayer, preaching, sacrice, sacrament, and spiritual ecstasy.
Yet another similar attempt was more recently undertaken by the German
systematic theologian Gregor Etzelmüller in his Habilitationsschrift called … zu
schauen die schönen Gottesdienste des Herrn: Eine biblische Theologie der christli-
chen Liturgiefamilien. He looked for some ecumenical unity in and behind all
the seemingly incoherent liturgical diversity of what he calls “the Christian
liturgical families” and found that in their respective biblical backgrounds. He
Martin D. Stringer, A Sociological History of Christian Worship (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, ).
Geofrey Wainwright and Karen B. Westereld Tucker (eds), The Oxford History of Chris-
tian Worship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).
Hence there is no shortage of both historical and systematic accounts of the origins and pur-
poses of Christian worship. In recent years the New Testament scholar Larry W. Hurtado, to
mention only one, has contributed helpful studies on the Early Church’s worship, for exam-
ple in One God, One Lord (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, ); At the Origins of Christian Wor-
ship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ); Lord Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ); and
his collected essays How On Earth did Jesus Become God? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ).
Geofrey Wainwright, “Renewing Worship: The Recovery of Classical Patterns,” in idem,
Worship with One Accord: Where Liturgy and Ecumenism Embrace (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, ), –.
Bernhard Lang, Sacred Games: A History of Christian Worship (New Haven: Yale University
Press, ).
Gregor Etzelmüller, … zu schauen die schönen Gottesdienste des Herrn: Eine biblische The-
ologie der christlichen Liturgiefamilien (Frankfurt: Lembeck, ).
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therefore proposes a “structured plurality” of confessional worship purposes
and styles based on the common albeit rich and diverse biblical roots of all
these ways of worship within the ecumenical church. What makes them good
is not that they are similar but that they all show something of the rich biblical
reasons for and styles of worship.
What may be interesting in this regard is the question whether worship is re-
ally so important, so good and so necessary, for the church, and whether the em-
phasis on the worshipping congregation does not perhaps lead to the neglect
of other, perhaps even more important, forms and activities of being church?
In some of the literature today in the circles of the so-called missional church
movement this seems to be an important issue, at least for certain leading g-
ures and authors. Many even prefer to construe a form of tension between the
so-called gathered community and the so-called sent community, between the
worshipping community and the witnessing community, and then seem to ar-
gue that too strong an interest in the gathered community and its worship may
lead to a decient ecclesiology, with too little emphasis on the missional life
and witness of the church. Criticism against too much interest in the church
itself as an institution and too much emphasis on its self- preservation has be-
come common in these circles, from scholarly works to ocial church state-
ments and study documents, even in ecumenical circles.
This language is of course not new, and similar emphases were popular in the
time of the theology of the church’s apostolate in the middle of the th century,
with Anton Hoekendijk’s inuential call for “the church inside out” and the
“political evening prayers” of Dorothee Sölle and others or also the popular cry
“the church on the streets” during the time of the struggle against apartheid in
South Africa. Ecclesiologies with the emphasis on witness, service, discipleship,
activity were already quite rightly described separately by Avery Dulles as specif-
ic “models of the church”—including models in which the important question
is somehow rather how the church could be a good church “out there making
a diference in the world” than being so much of a worshipping church only.
Johannes C. Hoekendijk, The Church Inside Out (Louisville: Westminster, ).
Dorothee Sölle became well known for the group called “political evening prayer”
(politisches Nachtgebet) in Cologne during the s, in which she participated, see her
autobiographical Political Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, ).
These and similar claims were often heard in the circles of the anti-apartheid struggle in
South Africa, when many people contrasted these diferent models of being church with
one another and complained that the worshipping church could become an alibi for not
being more actively involved in the social and political struggles of the day. For the inu-
ential analysis by Avery Dulles, see his Models of the Church (New York: Doubleday, ).
Etzelmüller popularized the ndings of his second thesis in a small book-
let called Was geschieht beim Gottesdienst? Die eine Bibel und die Vielfalt der
Konfessionen, and with this title he points toward a fourth and again very im-
portant way of understanding our original question. If we can discern and
describe more closely what actually happens during worship, would we per-
haps not be in a better position to determine what about this event and these
processes may be good, and why?
Good in the Sense of Performing?
So, what actually happens during worship, what is taking place? Again, there
are many ways to respond to this question, from more general to very specic.
Many books already reveal their particular answers to this question in their
titles—take again Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom and Imagining the Kingdom,
Wainwright’s Embracing Purpose, John de Gruchy’s Seeing Things Diferently,
Douglas John Hall’s Thinking Your Way into God’s World, yet also many others.
Gregor Etzelmüller, Was geschieht beim Gottesdienst? Die eine Bibel und die Vielfalt der
Konfessionen (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, ).
John W. de Gruchy, Seeing Things Diferently (Cape Town: Mercer Books, ).
Douglas John Hall, When You Pray: Thinking Your Way into God’s World (Valley Forge: Jud-
son Press, ), amongst others, he explicitly considers the question “Are There Inappro-
priate Prayers?,” –; also his essay “The Theology and Ethics of the Lord’s Prayer,” in
Migliore, The Lord’s Prayer, –.
See for example F. Gerrit Immink, The Touch of the Sacred (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
). He describes the developments within Protestant liturgy and worship and an-
alyzes both the practices and the underlying theological convictions regarding prayer,
preaching, and celebrating the sacraments. See also Samuel Wells, God’s Companions:
Reimagining Christian Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, ). From an ecumen-
ical perspective, Emilio Castro described developments, practices, and challenges of
common worship in the ecumenical movement in his When We Pray Together (Ge-
neva: World Council of Churches, ). He begins his discussion with the question
regarding the “ecumenical significance” of prayer, –. In an instructive view on
prayer and worship from the perspective of linguistic theory and speech-act anal-
ysis, the philosopher of religion Richard Schaeffler argued for the meaningfulness
and significance of worship in his Kleine Sprachlehre des Gebets (Einsiedeln: Johannes
Verlag, ). The examples of studies from a variety of perspectives and theoretical
backgrounds that attempt to describe what is actually taking place in prayer and wor-
ship and why it could be meaningful, significant, and in that way “good” are simply
endless.
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Michael Welker wrote his popular What happens in Holy Communion?, his
former student Günter Thomas similarly wrote Was geschieht in der Taufe?
and their colleague Jochen Arnold wrote Was geschieht im Gottesdienst?
Many years ago, James Gustafson described the worshipping congregation
from a sociological perspective as “a community of memory and understand-
ing,” in his ground-breaking ecclesiological work called Treasure in Earthen
Vessels: The Church as a Human Community. With that emphasis on time, on
memory, interpretation, and anticipation, he captured something central to
what is happening in Christian worship. Many others would make similar
contributions, helping us to understand something of the importance of time
for worship, of the complex interplay between past, future, and present.
In Germany, then still social ethicist Wolfgang Huber would follow Georg
Picht and speak about “Die Ungleichzeitigkeit der Religion,” in Die Erfahrung
der Zeit, developing an argument with major implications for what happens
in worship. In South Africa, several theologians and ethicists would follow
Michael Welker, What happens in Holy Communion? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), trans-
lated by John F. Hofmeyer from the original Was geht vor beim Abendmahl? (Stuttgart: Quell
Verlag, , completely revised edition Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, ). Welker
indirectly opens his discussion with the question of what makes worship good, by asking
whether Immanuel Kant was correct when he described the celebration of the Lord’s Sup-
per in his time as “a sad colloquy” or whether it is indeed “a high point of Christian life,” –.
Günter Thomas, Was geschieht in der Taufe? (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Theologie,
). Similar to Welker, he begins with the question whether the celebration of baptism is
experienced as a success story or as a case whether the solution harbors the problem, –.
Jochen Arnold, Was geschieht im Gottesdienst? Zur theologischen Bedeutung des Gottes-
dienstes und seiner Formen (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, ), with an explicit
discussion of the question when is worship good, in the section “Gottesdienst und Qual-
ität—Was ist ein gutter Gottesdienst?,” –.
James M. Gustafson, Treasure in Earthen Vessels: The Church as a Human Community (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, , Midway reprint ). In this ground-breaking
study he described from a variety of perspectives what actually is happening during wor-
ship and therefore when and how it functions efectively. He rst described the church
as a human, a natural, and a political community, and then he analyzed the processes at
work in the church as a community of language, of interpretation, of memory and un-
derstanding, and nally of belief and action. Such an approach obviously lends itself to
pursue questions about what makes worship good.
Wolfgang Huber, “Erinnerung, Erfahrung, Erwartung: Die Ungleichzeitigkeit der Religion
und die Aufgabe theologische Ethik,” in Christian Link (Hrsg.), Die Erfahrung der Zeit
(Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, ), –, : “Theologische Ethik hat ihre besondere Auf-
gabe darin, die schöpferische Ungleichzeitigkeit des Glaubens im Blick auf die ethische
Probleme der Gegenwart zur Geltung zu bringen.”
similar arguments about worship and life, for example Robin Petersen in his
doctoral dissertation with David Tracy and the Comarofs on the religious ex-
perience of African Independent Churches and its relation to their everyday
life, Time, Resistance and Reconstruction, as well as Andrew Phillips in his
doctoral dissertation on The Lord’s Supper as Paradigm for Christian Ethos.
Through the lenses of such a “non-contemporaneity between worship time
and everyday time” it becomes possible to distinguish and name in more spe-
cic detail several processes at work in Christian worship.
There are for example processes of subversion and undermining, of chal-
lenge, critique, resistance, and suggesting alternative realities, indeed, pro-
cesses of desiring and imagination and Dreaming a diferent world. There are
processes of calling on God, of weeping and tears, of need, anguish, sufering,
longing, terror, cries of absence and lament from the depths of darkness, in-
deed They Cried to the Lord. There are processes of liberation, of setting free
from—for example from guilt, anxiety, fear, powers—and setting free for—for
service, love, the neighbor, others, new life, in short, it is indeed A Liturgy of
Liberation. There are processes of koinonia, the formation of community and
fellowship, of acceptance and being accepted, of solidarity, belonging and mu-
tual care, of collective identity formation. There are processes of articulation,
Robin M. Petersen, Time, Resistance, and Reconstruction: Rethinking Kairos Theology
(Chicago: The University of Chicago, unpublished dissertation, ).
Andrew P. Phillips, Die Nagmaal as Paradigma vir die Christelike Etos (Bellville: University
of the Western Cape, , unpublished doctoral dissertation, title in English: The Lord’s
Supper as Paradigm for Christian Ethos).
Michael H. Crosby , Thy Will Be Done: Praying the Our Father as Subversive Activity
(Maryknoll: Orbis, ). An illustration could be found in the report of a joint study proj-
ect between Reformed churches from Germany and South Africa on the implications of
the Accra Declaration of the (then) World Alliance of Reformed Churches on economic
globalization and ecological destruction. The report included a press release in the form
of a litany, praying for a diferent world, see Allan Boesak, Johann Weusmann and Charles
Amjad-Ali (eds), Dreaming a Diferent World (Stellenbosch: & Urcsa, ), especial-
ly –.
See again Miller, They Cried to the Lord, but also for example the discussion of the nature
and causes of prayer and worship by the liberation theologian Leonardo Bof, in his The
Lord’s Prayer (Maryknoll: Orbis, ).
Theodore W. Jennings Jr, Liturgy of Liberation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, ).
See for example the still inspiring account by Dietrich Bonhoefer of the role of spiritual-
ity, prayer, and common worship in the theological training of the Confessing Church at
Finkenwalde, in his Life Together (London: Press, ).
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clarication, and deliberation, teaching and learning, discernment and insight,
understanding and communication.
There are processes of recognition, of self-knowledge and self- understanding,
of looking in mirrors and recognizing what has been suppressed, of becoming
conscious of the unconscious. There are processes of calling and vocation,
appeal, motivation, and inspiration, being claimed and being commissioned.
There are processes of formation and therefore also transformation, of per-
sonal and collective faith and moral formation, but also of personal and col-
lective conversion, remorse, confession of guilt, breaking with past practices,
nding new orientation and alternative ways, processes of renewal, forma-
tion, and transformation. There are processes of empowerment, of encour-
agement, support, strengthening, providing new vision, seeing new options,
raising new hope. There are processes of being lifted up, to new glory, to
praise, to gratitude and thanksgiving and joy and happiness and ecstasy, in-
deed sursum corda. There are processes of commitment, of dedication, even
submission and sacrice, of reguring priorities, sensing what truly counts,
See for example Johannes A. van der Ven, Formation of the Moral Self (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, ) for the importance of clarication—explanation, reection, inter-
pretation, argument, deliberation, conceptual analysis, theoretical consideration, in
short, discursive communication—as one of the important processes involved in moral
formation.
On the role of the metaphor of the mirror in Calvin and the Reformed tradition, see for
example Cornelis van der Kooi, As in a Mirror: John Calvin and Karl Barth on Knowing God
(Leiden: Brill, ), with a chapter on the supper and the knowledge of God.
On the role of notions of vocation and calling in the Reformed tradition, see for example
Douglas J. Schuurman, Vocation: Discerning Our Callings in Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
); on the link between prayer and calling, between worship and work, see for ex-
ample Johan Botha (ed.), Work as Calling and Worship (Wellington: Lux Verbi., ),
with an essay by Wainwright, “Liturgy and Labour—Prayer and Work in the Christian
Tradition,” –.
On the role of formation and transformation in faith and ethics, see for example H. Russel
Botman, Discipleship as Transformation? Towards a Theology of Transformation (Bellville:
University of the Western Cape, unpublished dissertation, ).
On the role of hope in worship, see Geofrey Wainwright, Eucharist and Eschatology
(London: Epworth, ).
On the role of doxology in worship and life, see for example Hughes Oliphant Old, Themes
and Variations for a Christian Doxology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ); also Daniel W.
Hardy and David F. Ford, Jubilate (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, ); Theodore W.
Jennings Jr, Life as Worship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ).
accepting a new commandment, following new footsteps, yes, of Embracing
Purpose.
In the literature, these varied processes have all been described in many
ways and in great detail—it is impossible but also unnecessary to recall names.
For many, these processes are what make worship good, or not. Perhaps only
one remarkable study could be mentioned, namely the Dutch theologian A.A.
van Ruler’s meditations Waarom zou ik naar de kerk gaan? (Why should I go to
church?) He considered twenty-two such reasons—with deeply moving reec-
tions. Recently, the South African theologian Christo Lombard commented
again on these reasons when writing on the relevance of the church.
When Would Worship Not be Good?
Remembering all these possibilities making worship good, one is faced with
the nal question whether this is actually the case—whether our worship is
indeed meaningful, worthwhile, faithful, performative. Is all worship always
good—or when would worship not be good?
Thinking about the Bible, I was almost surprised to realize how often the
biblical traditions and documents do talk about worship that is not good.
Wainwright, Embracing Purpose; also William H. Willimon, The Service of God: How Wor-
ship and Ethics Are Related (Nashville: Abingdon Press, ); Harmon L. Smith, Where
Two or Three Are Gathered: Liturgy and the Moral Life (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press,
).
One remarkable case would be the argument of William J. Everett, in his The Politics of
Worship (Cleveland, Pilgrim Press, ). He agrees that these processes in worship are
in many ways formative for ethics, but he regards this as problematic in many ways, since
the monarchical, authoritarian, and non-republican traditions of Christian worship may
in reality reinforce bad habits, practices, language, and convictions. He therefore suggests
that our ethics should rather critique and hopefully reform our worship practices, in or-
der to contribute to moral formation and transformation. Feminist theology and ethics of
course make similar claims very powerfully and persuasively.
Arnold A. van Ruler, Waarom zou ik naar de kerk gaan? (Why should I go to church?) (Nij-
kerk: Callenbach, ).
Christo Lombard, “Waarom sou ek nog kerk toe gaan? (Why should I go to church?)” in
Willie Jonker, Die relevansie van die kerk (The church’s relevance) (Wellington: Bybel-
Media, ), –; the North American Van Ruler scholar and member of who
helped to organize the Conference in New Brunswick in June , Allan Jansen, is doing
an English translation of the Van Ruler study on the signicance of participating in the
worship service.
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Think of Paul and his harsh comments on what is happening in the congrega-
tion in Corinth—to the point that he does not even regard what they are doing
as the Lord’s Supper, since they disrespect the poor members of the congrega-
tion and fail to understand that they are dealing with the body of Christ. Cor-
inthians reminds readers of the preceding grave warnings in Corinthians
against misunderstanding baptism and the warnings following in Corin-
thians to against malpractices during worship, even against speaking like
angels but without having love, in Corinthians .
These warnings, again, remind one of the extreme warnings against destruc-
tive ways of worship in almost every chapter of James, but also in Hebrews,
in the Letters of John, in the Book of Revelation—not to mention the Book
of Acts, and the Gospels, concerning prayer, concerning sacrice, concerning
saying Lord, Lord. It is as if the whole New Testament is one serious warning
against false forms of prayer and worship—which of course then reminds one
of the Old Testament.
One does not even have to mention the prophets—Isaiah, Jeremia, Amos—
with their accusations of injustice crying out against the singing of hymns
and prophets falsely speaking of peace when there is no peace; but so too the
narrative traditions, full of warnings against false altars and false worship and
false service and false gods, simply recall Judges, Chronicles, Kings, back into
Genesis with the story of Cain and Abel and their ways of worship and life;
and so too, of course, the books of the law and even the commandments of
the covenant. It actually seems as if the whole Bible, from beginning to end, is
one long tradition of warning against ways of worship that are not good and
not pleasing to God.
It should be obvious that not all worship is good, that not all religion is good,
and that we should be deeply critical and self-critical when it comes to wor-
ship. But how?
One is reminded of Michael Welker’s explanation of the critical and
self-critical function of Old Testament law. The law is about justice, mercy
and knowledge of God, he made clear, in the way Jesus also summarized
the law in Matthew :. The law calls for justice, but since justice is not
always able to protect the weak and vulnerable, mercy is necessary to care
for the marginalized and to bring them back into situations where justice
again protects them too. Worship, truth, the knowledge of God together
are necessary to remind the people of justice and to call them to practise
mercy. Since worship and the knowledge of God can also go wrong, howev-
er, there are many situations in which worship itself must be reminded of
and called back to justice and to mercy. This means that all three can and
should serve as correctives to one another, sometimes the one, sometimes
the other, depending on what is missing and what needs to be critiqued and
corrected.
One is reminded of the church’s similar attempt to develop such critical and
self-critical criteria in the adage lex orandi—lex credendi, nowadays often ex-
tended to something like lex orandi—lex credenda—lex (con)vivendi. Basically,
this means that the way we pray (or worship) should inform and if necessary
critique the way we think (or believe) and the way we think (or believe) should
inform and if necessary critique the way we live (and behave). Again, however,
all three can go wrong, the way we worship, the way we think, and the way we
live. Whenever that happens, the other aspects should hopefully critique and
correct whatever has gone wrong, and sometimes the way we worship should
therefore inform the way we think and live, but sometimes the way we think
and/or the way we live can critically engage with the way we worship, in order
to remind us that there are contradictions and betrayals.
As South Africans we are painfully aware of the role of worship in our apart-
heid past—since , but also during the apartheid years themselves. John
de Gruchy therefore movingly reected on ways in which “liturgy has been
used to prevent the gospel from taking hold” in his essay called “Prayer, Poli-
tics, and False Piety.” The betrayal of the gospel in the form of worship can take
on many forms, he argued. At the time he pointed to two such forms, namely
the privatization and the politicization of worship, but there are obviously also
many other ways in which worship can fail to be good.
See for example Michael Welker, “Security of Expectations: Reformulating the Theolo-
gy of Law and Gospel,” Journal of Religion (), –; also “Gesetz und Geist,”
Jahrbuch für Biblische Theologie (), –; and “Righteousness and God’s Righ-
teousness,” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin (), –; more recently, “The Power
of Mercy in Biblical Law,” Journal of Law and Religion / (), –; as well as
“Gottes Gerechtigkeit,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie / (), –.
See for example Geofrey Wainwright, Doxology, –; “Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi”,
in idem, Nicholas Lossky et al., Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement (Geneva: ,
), –; “Liturgy and Doctrine,” in Alisdair E McGrath (ed.), The Blackwell Ency-
clopedia of Modern Christian Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –.
See for example Dirk J. Smit, “Apartheid,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Ethics,
ed. Robert L. Brawley (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –.
John W. de Gruchy, “Prayer, Politics, and False Piety,” in Allan A. Boesak and Charles
Villa-Vicencio (eds), When Prayer Makes News (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press,
), –. The occasion that led to this publication was the call by ecumenical lead-
ers in South Africa to publicly pray for the fall of the apartheid system and state. From de
Gruchy, see also the introductory essay, “Christian spirituality and social transformation”
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One is therefore also reminded of the Reformed intuition that the ultimate
betrayal of the gospel is idolatry, serving and worshipping idols, other gods,
trusting, adoring, loving, and dedicating ourselves to other priorities, needs,
and desires. As Reformed people we should also self-critically inquire to what
extent our own ways of worship remain free of such idolatries. After all, for Cal-
vin, his criticism of idolatry was an integral part of his thoughts on the nature
of worship and on The Necessity of Reforming the Church ().
One is also reminded of Karl Rahner’s warning against spirituality, piety,
and one could add worship that seeks to serve human beings and their hap-
piness and fulllment, their so-called self-realization, he said. He once spoke
about “the uselessness of transcendence” and argued that “God is not there for
us but we for God.” He therefore called these contemporary forms of spirituali-
ty a new heresy, the heresy of our times, and the most dangerous heresy of all.
This in turn reminds one of another Catholic thinker, Charles Taylor, who
in his Dilemmas and Connections, essays published since A Secular Age, argues
that Reformation spirituality was partly to blame for the shift to the contempo-
rary focus on human ourishing and no longer on transcendence and Godself,
which according to Taylor’s account eventually contributed to the secular spir-
it of our times and one could add to the expectations that even worship itself
must be good in these popular and self-evident senses of our times. Perhaps
our question is therefore not such an innocent one after all. And perhaps one’s
nal comment should be that worship can only be good when it is not bad.
Bibiography
Adams, Nicholas, “F.D.E. Schleiermacher,” in Alister E. McGrath and Darren C. Marks
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in his edited volume Cry Justice! (London: Collins Liturgical Publications, ), –.
For de Gruchy, see Dirk J. Smit, “‘Seeing Things Diferently’—On Prayer and Politics,” in
Lynn Holness and Ralf K. Wüstenberg (eds), Theology in Dialogue (Grand Rapids: Eerd-
mans, ), –.
See John Calvin, “The Necessity of Reforming the Church,” in Tracts and Treatises, Vol.
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See for example Karl Rahner, “The Importance of Thomas Aquinas,” Faith in a Wintry Sea-
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Charles Taylor, Dilemmas and Connections (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ).
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(2010),328–344.
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© Koninklijke Brill NV, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004356528_004
“God Waits for and Responds to Sincere Prayer
andResponsible Actions”
Liturgy and Ethics in Dietrich Bonhoefer
Gerard den Hertog
Introduction
One of the most well-known words of Dietrich Bonhoefer is that “only those
who cry out for the Jews may also sing Gregorian chants.” This statement pre-
sumably dates from , the time characterized by the heat of the German
Church struggle. Since we only have it at our disposal in oral tradition, it is
dicult to determine what Bonhoefer’s front was and what he exactly meant
by it. He probably had the ‘Berneuchener Bewegung’ in mind, a Lutheran litur-
gical renewal movement which came into existence after the First World War.
Dietrich Bonhoefer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. John W. de Gruchy, trans. Lisa E.
Dahill, Isabel Best, Reinhard Krauss, Nancy Lukens, Barbara Rumscheidt, and Martin Rum-
scheidt, with Douglas W. Stott ( ) (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, ), .
Cf. Eberhard Bethge, “Der Ort des Gebets in Leben und Theologie Dietrich Bonhoef-
fers (),” in Eberhard Bethge, Bekennen und Widerstehen: Aufsätze, Reden, Gespräche
(München: Chr. Kaiser, ), –, ; Eberhard Bethge, “Dietrich Bonhoefer und die
Juden,” in Ernst Feil, Ilse Tödt (Hgg.), Konsequenzen: Dietrich Bonhoefers Kirchenverständnis
heute (Internationales Bonhoefer-Forum. Forschung und Praxis ) (München: Chr. Kaiser
), –, ; Eberhard Bethge, “Das Erbe des Getöteten,” in Christian Gremmels, Ilse
Tödt (Hgg.), Die Präsenz des verdrängten Gottes: Glaube, Religionslosigkeit und Weltverantwor-
tung nach Dietrich Bonhoefer (Internationales Bonhoefer-Forum. Forschung und Praxis )
(München: Chr. Kaiser, ), –, f. See for the interpretation of this dictum: Hol-
ger Roggelin, Andreas Pangritz, “Wer singt gregorianisch? These und Kommentar,” in Dietrich
Bonhoefer Jahrbuch : / (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, ), –.
In the “Dreizehnter Brief aus Finkenwalde” (Date October th, ) Eberhard Bethge
mentions that he nally gave his lecture about the Gregorian Choral, albeit just half of it
(Die Finkenwalder Rundbriefe: Briefe und Texte von Dietrich Bonhoefer und seinen Predigerse-
minaristen -, Hgg. Eberhard Bethge, Ilse Tödt, Otto Berendts ( ) (Gütersloh:
Gütersloher Verlagshaus, ), f: “Ich selbst wurde endlich meinen Vortrag über den
Gregorianischen Choral los, aber auch nur zur Hälfte; zu allem reichte die Zeit nicht aus”).
During the Third Reich, however, the most prominent representatives of this
movement did not take a rm position in the Church struggle. In other words,
they demonstrated no intrinsic connection between liturgy and social engage-
ment for the oppressed, especially the Jews. The essence of what Bonhoefer
opposes by his statement is clear: He rejects the division of the Christian entity
and regards it to be unthinkable that the Christian community forgets or ne-
glects the social reality with its moral challenge during worship. However, his
saying leaves the question open what the positive relation between liturgy and
social action is and should be.
In the so-called Baptism letter of May for Dietrich Rüdiger Bethge, the
new-born son of his niece Renate Schleicher and his friend Eberhard Bethge,
he complains that the church—and here he undoubtedly means the Confess-
ing Church!— has only had its self-preservation in mind and was therefore
incapable of bringing the word of atonement and redemption to humankind
and the world. Consequently, being a Christian can merely be described as
pertaining to prayer, to doing justice and waiting for God’s own time. Again
this raises the question: What is the intrinsic relation and interaction between
prayer and doing right? In his Prison letters in the same period, Spring ,
Bonhoefer again pleads —like he did previously— in favor of arcani discipli-
na: the custom of the Early Church, in which access to the intimate mysteries
of the Christian belief was not only denied to non-Christians, but also to the
catechumens. The editors of Gemeinsames Leben and Das Gebetbuch der Bibel
emphasize that it can hardly be overlooked that in the connection between
‘prayer’ and ‘doing right’ Bonhoefer alludes to the arcani disciplina of the Early
Church and thereby takes up the basic theme of Gemeinsames Leben. Still, the
inner relation between liturgy and ethics, both fundamentally and practically,
is not worked out. As a result, it was possible that the positive relation between
these two was ignored in the early times of Bonhoefer’s reception, in which
the dominant perception was that there was an obvious development in his
Since Bonhoefer himself was responsible for the course in Finkenwalde the saying that “only
those who cry out for the Jews may also sing Gregorian chants” is not directed against the
Gregorian Chorals as such.
Dietrich Bonhoefer, Letters and Papers from Prison ( ), .
Gerhard L. Müller and Albrecht Schönherr, “Editor’s Afterword to the German Edition,” in
Dietrich Bonhoefer, Life Together / Prayerbook of the Bible, ed. Geofry B. Kelly, trans. Daniel
W. Bloesch and James H. Burtness ( ) (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, ), : “How
could one overlook the fact that the basic concern of Life Together was found again in the
words about ‘prayer and action for justice on behalf of people’ and in remembering the ‘dis-
cipline of the secret’ [Arkandisziplin] of the Early Church!”
life and thought, namely from the church to the world, or: from liturgy in his
Finkenwalde time to worldliness in the prison period.
Nowadays it is widely acknowledged in Bonhoefer research that liturgy and
ethics are not only very important topics, both in his biography and his theol-
ogy, but that they also remain intrinsically connected. However, the question
how they are linked still needs some clarication and research.
In this essay I will rst sketch how liturgy and ethics—especially social and
political commitment—go together from a biographical perspective. In the
next paragraph I focus on the relation between Bonhoefer’s reading and un-
derstanding of the Psalms on the one hand and his ethical reection on the
other hand. I will end with some concluding remarks.
Biography
The period Bonhoefer spent in the United States—September till June
—was crucial for his formation. Here he met fellow students like the Swiss
Reformed theologian Erwin Sutz and the French—also Reformed—student
Jean Lasserre, a pacist who took the Sermon on the Mount seriously. During
his stay in New York Bonhoefer is intensely confronted with his own German
nature, including his perception of what Christendom is about. Whereas World
War still was an all too real trauma in Germany in , Dietrich Bonhoefer
received a new and diferent point of perspective when he came into contact
with fellow students from Europe. It helped him to escape from the dead end
into which the German culture had landed, which would lead to the coercion
of a breakthrough in the form of the legitimate Nazi revolution in .
However, he does not only become friends with Lasserre and Sutz, but also
with a black American student, Frank Fisher. Bonhoefer sees himself directly
confronted with the racial problem in this friendship. Fisher introduces him to
the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where Bonhoefer since then contin-
ues to attend the services and participates in the activities of the community.
In the sermons in this Church he realizes for the rst time that Jesus Christ is
the living Lord, who is present in worship. In his report to the Kirchenbundes-
amt, his own Church, he writes:
Cf. the title of Hanfried Müller, Von der Kirche zur Welt: Ein Beitrag zu der Beziehung des
Wortes Gottes auf die Societas in Dietrich Bonhoefers theologischer Entwicklung (Leipzig: Koe-
hler & Amelang, ).
First, I heard the gospel preached in the Negro churches. … Here one
really could still hear someone talk in a Christian sense about sin and
grace and the love of God and ultimate hope, albeit in a form diferent
from that to which we are accustomed. In contrast to the often lecture-
like character of the “white” sermon, the “black Christ” is preached with
captivating passion and imaginative power.
His stay in New York results in nothing less than a ‘conversion,’ from theologian
to Christian. It is worth noting that in this ‘conversion’ both liturgy—Bonhoef-
fer was not only struck by the sermons, but also by the Gospel music and the en-
tire services—as well as ethics—his engagement with the racial problem—are
not only prominently present, but intrinsically linked from the very start.
When Bonhoefer starts working as a minister and at the same time as a
university teacher after his return from America in , he immediately tries
to establish real forms of community, especially by forming groups of catechu-
mens and students which gather regularly and make trips together, including
the practice of praying, singing and studying the Bible. In the way in which
Bonhoefer brings this into practice we can already recognize the liturgical
pattern of the Predigerseminar, as Albrecht Schönherr observed from his very
own experience: “In the form taken by these retreats one can nd an outline of
the basic community life in Finkenwalde: daily morning and evening worship,
quiet time, much singing, and lots of theological conversation.”
Dietrich Bonhoefer, “Report on His Year of Study Prepared for the Church Federation Of-
ce,” in Dietrich Bonhoefer, Barcelona, Berlin, New York: –, ed. Cliford J. Green,
trans. Douglas W. Stott ( ) (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, ), .
This change in Bonhoefer’s life is expressed in the subtitle of Eberhard Bethge’s great Bi-
ography: rst “Theologian,” then “Christian” (Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoefer: Theo-
loge – Christ – Zeitgenosse: Eine Biographie (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus ). Cf.
Cliford J. Green, “Bonhoefer am Union Theological Seminary in New York: Neue Erkennt-
nisse,” in Dietrich Bonhoefer Jahrbuch / Dietrich Bonhoefer Yearbook : /
(Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, ), –, –.
Cf. Hans Pfeifer, “Die Bedeutung der Jugendbewegung für Dietrich Bonhoefer,” in Chris-
tian Gremmels, Hans Pfeifer (Hgg.), Dietrich Bonhoefer Jahrbuch (Gütersloh: Güters-
loher Verlagshaus, ), –; Hans Pfeifer, “Learning Faith and Ethical Commitment
in the Context of Spiritual Training Groups: Consequences of Dietrich Bonhoefer’s Post
Doctoral Year in New York City /,” in Cliford J. Green, Kirsten Busch Nielsen, Hans
Pfeifer, Christiane Tietz (Hgg.), Dietrich Bonhoefer Jahrbuch / Dietrich Bonhoefer Year-
book : / (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, ), –.
Gerhard L. Müller and Albrecht Schönherr, “Editor’s Afterword to the German Edition,”
in Bonhoefer, Life Together / Prayerbook of the Bible, ed. Geofry B. Kelly, trans. Daniel W.
Bloesch and James H. Burtness ( ) (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, ), .
Though we miss ethics in this characterization, the moral and the social
realm is indeed aimed at. From the very start of Bonhoefer’s new orien-
tation on the Sermon on the Mount, liturgy—especially the singing of the
Psalms—and social engagement go together, though the emphasis is not al-
ways equal.
In Bonhoefer, disappointed by the half-hearted opposition against
Nazi-ideology within the German Protestant Church, accepts a post as a pastor
of the German congregation in London (Great Britain). This move might seem
like a desertion from the battleeld, but Bonhoefer is far from resigning. In the
German Church in London where Bonhoefer served as a pastor, it was no re-
alistic option to build communities, namely concrete forms of living together,
since the members of his congregation lived widely spread over the city and
the surrounding area. Nevertheless, Bonhoefer did not give up the idea of a
Christian community, where prayer, studying the Bible and social engagement
form a living unity, but kept striving after it, even the more in view of the ac-
tual challenge of the Nazi-dictatorship. On April th, Bonhoefer wrote
to Hardy E. Arnold, whose father tried to build a Christian community in Ger-
many in which a kind of monastic life was to be combined with the practice
of nonviolent resistance—named Bruderhof—that he together with some of
his students wanted to establish a brotherhood, which was founded on the
Sermon on the Mount. He demanded an introduction and recommendation
to Gandhi from bishop George Bell of Chichester, in order to become familiar
with his strategy to disturb the English colonial authorities in a non-violent
way. Bonhoefer already was fascinated by this in New York. On the Ecumen-
ical Conference in Fanø August th, Bonhoefer asks: “Which of us can
say he knows what it might mean for the world if one nation should meet the
According to the letter Hardy E. Arnold sent to his father Eberhard Arnold on June th,
(“Bruderhof-Korrespondenz ,” in Dietrich Bonhoefer Jahrbuch : /
(Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, ), –, . See in addition to the literature in
note : Hardy Arnold, “Begegnung mit Dietrich Bonhoefer: Ein Bericht ()” and Lar-
ry Rasmussen, “Interview mit Herbert Jehle (..),” in Dietrich Bonhoefer Jahrbuch :
/, resp. – and –.
Dietrich Bonhoefer, “Letter to Helmut Rössler from October th, ,” in Dietrich
Bonhoefer, Ecumenical, Academic and Pastoral Work: –, ed. Victoria J. Barnett,
Mark S. Brocker, and Michael B., trans. Anne Schmidt-Lange, with Isabel Best, Nicholas
Humphrey, and Marion Pauck. Supplementary material trans. Douglas W. Stott ( )
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, ), ; see for Bonhoefer and Gandhi: Josef Ackermann,
Dietrich Bonhoefer—Freiheit hat ofene Augen: Eine Biographie (Gütersloh: Gütersloher
Verlagshaus, ), –.
aggressor, not with weapons in hand, but praying, defenseless, and for that very
reason protected by ‘a bulwark never failing’?”
Against this background we can understand why a few weeks later, on
September th, , Bonhoefer wrote to his Swiss friend Erwin Sutz from
London, that he had come to the conviction that the complete education of
theological candidates should take place in Church-cloistral seminaries. There
pure doctrine, the Sermon on the Mount and liturgy must be taken seriously,
since none of these things was a realistic possibility on the nazi-controlled
universities of that time. It may be clear that spirituality and engagement
completely go together in the community which Bonhoefer has in mind.
In the Confessing Church calls Bonhoefer to become a director of a Pre-
digerseminar, a recently revitalized institution, where the students of theology
were trained after their scientic-theological education at university. There they
were trained in good reformed theology and equipped for the oce of pastors,
while keeping themselves free from German-Christian heretic thoughts. Before
Bonhoefer leaves his post in London, he visits together with his colleague in the
German Protestant Church in London, dr. Julius Rieger, a few Anglican monas-
teries in Great Britain, in order to receive inspiration for the Predigerseminar.
Here he participates in the practice of the liturgical reading of the Psalms.
Dietrich Bonhoefer, “The Church and the Peoples of the World” (..), in Dietrich
Bonhoefer, London, –, ed. Keith Clements, trans. Isabel Best. Supplementary
material trans. Douglas W. Stott ( ) (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, ), .
Bonhoefer, “To the Council of the Evangelical Church of the Old Prussian Union, Finken-
walde / Stettin, September ,” in Dietrich Bonhoefer, Theological Education at Fink-
enwalde: -, ed. H. Gaylon Barker and Mark S. Brocker, trans. Douglas W. Stott
( ) (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, ), –, ; cf. Bonhoefer’s letter to Er-
win Sutz, London September , Bonhoefer, Theological Education at Finkenwalde,
: “The next generation of pastors, these days, ought to be trained entirely in church-
monastic schools, where the pure doctrine, the Sermon on the Mount, and worship are
taken seriously—which for all three of these things is simply not the case at the university
and under the present circumstances is impossible.”
Bonhoefer, London, - ( ), ; cf. f. Cf. Julius Rieger, Dietrich Bonhoef-
fer in England (Berlin: Lettner, ), – and Wolf-Dieter Zimmermann, Wir nann-
ten ihn Bruder Bonhoefer: Einblicke in ein hofnungsvolles Leben (Berlin: Wichern-Verlag,
), . In his introduction to a number of in new published letters of Bonhoef-
fer of his London time Stephen J. Plant presents some background information on the
monasteries Bonhoefer and his colleague Julius Rieger visited March (“A friendship
to be grateful for: Bonhoefer’s letters to Ernst Cromwell,” in Stephen J. Plant and Toni
Burrowes-Cromwell (eds), Letters to London: Bonhoefer’s Previously Unpublished Corre-
spondence with Ernst Cromwell, - (London: Cascade Books, ), –).
Bonhoefer’s idea is to create a small kind of Protestant monastery inside
the Predigerseminar, as its spiritual center, of about ve semi-permanent res-
idents. The board of the Old-Prussian Confessing Church, however, still had
to be won over for this idea. In his plea Bonhoefer describes his purpose as:
“The goal is not monastic isolation but rather the most intense concentration
for ministry to the world.” The permission is granted and in the years
till this Bruderhaus exists as a community which forms the heart of the
Predigerseminar and the think tank for an opposition against the German
Christians—and more and more also against the Third Reich and its measures
against the Jews in particular.
Where is the ethical element in the Predigerseminar and especially in its
liturgy? The basic answer is that they themselves were a form of nonviolent
opposition. The Third Reich manifested itself more and more as a totalitari-
an state. In such a context the claim of the decisive authority of the Word of
God, as confessed in Barmen, May , is as such already a restriction of the
obedience regarding the nazi-state and consequently an act of refusal of un-
conditional submission. Bonhoefer’s disappointment with the German Prot-
estant Church, which at least contributed to his decision to accept a place as
a minister of the German Protestant Church in London, was in fact that they
not only denied this inner relationship between liturgy and ethical-political
responsibility, but even tried to extinguish it. Whereas a large part of the Con-
fessing Church stuck to a neo-Lutheran Two Kingdom-theory, which separated
and disconnected liturgy and ethics up to a large extent, Bonhoefer had learnt
his lessons in the struggle of the black people in the United States and stood up
for the indissolubility and integrity of the Christian existence.
After all, there is clear evidence for the inner relationship of liturgy and eth-
ics in Bonhoefer’s life, but the question remains what the ‘praxis’ was—and
what this means for the ‘theory.’ This is indeed an interesting and promising
topic in his work. In his paper on the theological foundations of ecumenical
work at an Ecumenical Youth Conference in Ciernohorské Kúpele, the th of
July , Bonhoefer draws a direct parallel between the signicance of the
sacraments for preaching—embodiment—and the understanding of the ac-
tual moral reality for the proclamation of God’s commandment. The fact that
Bonhoefer, “To the Council of the Evangelical Church of the Old Prussian Union, Finken-
walde / Stettin, September ,” in Bonhoefer, Theological Education at Finkenwalde
( ), .
“The assurance of the validity of the proclamation of the forgiveness of sins is the sacra-
ment. Here is the universal statement: ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ bound to water, wine, and
bread; here it comes to its own peculiar concretion, which is understood by the believing
Bonhoefer speaks about ethics in terms of sacramental language is not only
theologically interesting, but also an indication that there was an intrinsic link
in his mind between liturgy and ethics. However, he does not continue this fur-
ther in his later work, let alone that he elaborates on it. So, if he meant it to be
a theological experiment to link liturgy and ethics at that time, he afterwards
did not consider it to be the proper approach.
Considering this result, I follow a diferent line and examine how Bonhoefer’s
practice of praying, preaching and singing the Psalms is related to his ethics.
The Psalms
During the period of the Predigerseminar of Finkenwalde, Dietrich Bonhoef-
fer not only sang the Psalms in daily liturgy, but also preached on the Psalms
and gave a lecture about the Christological hermeneutics of the Psalms. After
this period had come to an end he meditated on Psalm and published a
small book on the Psalms as the biblical prayer book. Therefore, we can easily
conclude that the Psalms were the heart of his understanding of the Scriptures
and of the Christian liturgy. Thus, if we wish to get a picture of the relation be-
tween liturgy and ethics in Bonhoefer it is necessary to examine Bonhoefer’s
dealing with the Psalms. I give three examples of how Bonhoefer’s reading and
singing of the Psalms in daily liturgy inuenced his ethical awareness, engage-
ment and reection.
Psalm
In February , the unity of the Confessing Church is broken down, which
enables the Nazi-regime to take measures against those who remained faithful
to the Gospel and refused to compromise. In the Summer of the Third Re-
ich declares the institutions of the Confessing Church as illegal. In that critical
listeners as the concrete here and now of the word of God. What the sacrament is for
the proclamation of the gospel, the knowledge of concrete reality is for the proclama-
tion of the commandment. Reality is the sacrament of the commandment.” (Dietrich Bon-
hoefer, “Zur theologischen Begründung der Weltbundarbeit,” in Bonhoefer, Ecumenical,
Academic and Pastoral Work ( ), (italics in the text)). Cf. Stephen J. Plant,
“The Sacrament of Ethical Reality: Dietrich Bonhoefer on Ethics for Christan Citizens,”
in Stephen J. Plant, Taking Stock of Bonhoefer: Studies in Biblical Interpretation and Ethics
(Franham/Burlington: Ashgate, ), –.
Dietrich Bonhoefer, “Lecture on Christ in the Psalms,” in Bonhoefer, Theological Educa-
tion at Finkenwalde ( ), –.
situation Bonhoefer preaches for his students in Finkenwalde on Psalm , a
so called Psalm of wrath. Facing the immoral and brutal behavior of the Na-
zi-government the moral conclusion obviously would be to call for God’s wrath
upon Adolf Hitler and his willful accomplices.
Surprisingly, this is not what Bonhoefer does. On the contrary, he starts by
stressing that the community of Finkenwalde can’t pray this Psalm, “because
we are too sinful ourselves, too evil.” Aren’t they Christians and aren’t they on
the right way? Yes, they are Christians and they tried to practice true disciple-
ship. However, this does not imply that they are entitled to call for God’s wrath.
I make two observations about the point of diference which is at stake
here. First, the critical point in this sermon is addressed to people who have
seduced themselves by keeping silent in the face of injustice and comforting
themselves with the consideration that it is better to cooperate and therefore
collaborate, since there are possibilities left for improvement within the sys-
tem. Bonhoefer refers to verse of the Psalm, where the wicked make the ears
of the people of God deaf for the voice of God. However, the emphasis is not
on Hitler, who was like a rat catcher who plays his ddle and pulls the people
behind him, but on those who might consider to cooperate: the Confessing
Church, also the seminarians and Bonhoefer himself.
My second observation is related to the rst one. Here Bonhoefer displays
an apocalyptic-eschatological tongue, like in Revelation :-: There are
people who hear the Word of God, but also others who close their ears. Bon-
hoefer: “Yet because their ears are deaf to God’s grace, their mouths are also
silent when God’s justice is at stake.” Even a Confessing Church, if she does
not realize she can only sing the Psalms in communion with Christ and there-
fore out of grace, won’t speak for the mute (Proverbs :). This is not only
a warning, but also contains a promise: Especially an understanding of this
Dietrich Bonhoefer, “Sermon on Psalm ,” in Bonhoefer, Theological Education at Fink-
enwalde ( ), .
Cf. Bonhoefer, “Sermon on Psalm ,” f. In his letter of September th, to
Erwin Sutz Bonhoefer writes in the same line about the “obdurationmotif” and refers
directly to Hitler: “Hitler is not in a position to listen to us; he is obdurate, and as such he
must compel us to listen—it’s that way round. The Oxford movement was naive enough
to try and convert Hitler—a ridiculous failure to recognize what is going on. We are the
ones to be converted, not Hitler” (Bonhoefer, London, - ( ), (italics
in text)).
Bonhoefer, “Sermon on Psalm ,” .
Bonhoefer quotes Proverbs , in his letter of September th, to Erwin Sutz (Lon-
don - ( ), ).
Psalm in Christ makes us aware of what is at stake and in Christ bestows us
with the courage and the power to stand up for those who don’t have someone
to help them.
Psalm
Quite a diferent example is the reference to Psalm : in November . Af-
ter the Reichskristallnacht or Reichspogromnacht Bonhoefer marks the date of
November th in the margin of Psalm : of his personal Bible—the only
place in the margins of his Bible where a date occurs. Psalm : complains
that God’s sanctuaries in the country have been burned by the enemies: “They
said in their hearts, ‘Let us destroy them altogether.’ They have burned up all
the meeting places of God in the land.” Bonhoefer underlined the last sen-
tence and put in the margin of the next verse—“We do not see our signs; There
is no longer any prophet; Nor is there any among us who knows how long”—a
vertical line and an exclamation mark. In a way Bonhoefer explained this
himself in the “Sechster ‘persönlicher’ Brief” (sixth personal letter) he writes
on November th, —in fact a circular letter for all his former students
but in a disguised form, since circular letters were forbidden by the Nazi-
authorities. This letter contains the following concealed but nevertheless clear
passage: “During the former days I’ve thought a lot about Psalm , Zechariah
:, Romans :- and :-. This leads very much to prayer.”
The last words are remarkable. Isn’t this rst organized attack on the Jews
a wakeup call for action? It is. Already in November Dietrich Bonhoefer
had become involved in the plans for a plot against Hitler, by assuring Canaris
and Oster that an assault was not principally out of the question. However, he
writes here: “This leads very much to prayer.” It clearly shows how he related
the liturgical singing of the Psalms with what was actually at stake in society.
Again, like in the sermon on Psalm , Christian worship—singing Psalms,
preaching the Psalms—is not a function of ethical-political action. Bonhoef-
fer’s reference to prayer shows that according to him God is the living God,
who is not a “timeless fate,” but “waits for and responds to sincere prayer and
responsible actions.” And—as he mentioned in his “Sechster ‘persönlicher’
Brief”—in Zechariah : it is said: “for he who touches you [Sion] touches the
Cf. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoefer, f.
Die Finkenwalder Rundbriefe ( ), : “In den letzten Tagen habe ich viel über
Psalm , Sacharja ,, Römer ,f und ,– nachgedacht. Das führt sehr ins Ge-
bet.” Sacharja , (Lutherbible) = Zechariah ,: “he who touches you, touches the apple
of His eye.”
See note .
apple of His eye.” As a Lutheran theologian Bonhoefer knew about God’s mys-
teriousness, which, however, does not mean that He stands by doing nothing.
No, the receiver of Bonhoefer’s “Sechster ‘persönlicher’ Brief,” who looked up
the Bible references, would soon have found out that Zechariah , continues:
“For surely I will shake My hand against them, and they shall become spoil for
their servants.”
Psalm
We now come to the third and last example. Before Bonhoefer starts working
on his Ethics he rst writes a long and deep theological meditation on Psalm
:-, and from and onwards, he repeatedly tried to obtain a copy of
Richard Meux Benson’s “analytical and devotional” explanation of Psalm :
The Way of Holiness. On May th, , Bonhoefer writes to Father Paul Bull
of the Community of the Resurrection in Mireld, an Anglican community he
visited in March , with the request to send him a copy of this book. In
, Benson had been one of the founding fathers of another community
which Bonhoefer also visited in March , namely the Society of St. John
the Evangelist in Oxford. The fact that he makes such a great efort to get
hold of this devotional book, which has its origin in the united prayer of the
communion, is signicant. It again shows that ethics and liturgy—singing the
Psalms—are intrinsically related with Bonhoefer.
In the winter of , Bonhoefer nally nds the time and peace to work
on his meditation on Psalm . Later that year he publishes Das Gebetbuch
der Bibel, an introduction on the Psalms. It is at least remarkable that a theo-
logian like Bonhoefer, who was by then already actively involved in a conspir-
acy, while preparing for his Ethics, studies the Psalms and publishes a small
introductory book.
The rst pages of Bonhoefer’s meditation are an extended praise of God,
who made the decisive beginning in His Word, in Jesus Christ, which brought
the believer within the law of God and made his life a walk in the ways of the
Richard Meux Benson, The Way of Holiness: An Exposition of Psalm , Analytical and
Devotional (London: Methuen & Co, ).
Bonhoefer, Theological Education at Finkenwalde ( ), .
Cf. Rieger, Dietrich Bonhoefer in England, f.
Charles Marsh mistakenly dates Bonhoefers’ working on this meditation on Winter
(Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoefer (New York / London: , ), ).
Dietrich Bonhoefer, Prayerbook of the Bible, in Bonhoefer, Life Together / Prayerbook of
the Bible, Edited by Geofry B. Kelly. Translated by Daniel W. Bloesch and James H. Burt-
ness ( ) (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, ), –.
Lord. Bonhoefer stresses that it requires serious attention, indefatigable ask-
ing and learning, in order to hear the right commandment and in that manner
understand the inexhaustible goodness of God in all His commandments.
Because God spoke His Word to us in history, in the past, therefore the daily
remembrance and recapitulation is required, which is common practice in the
monasteries and to Bonhoefer himself. We can only move forward by return-
ing to God’s deeds of salvation day by day. Here we see how the daily liturgical
praxis of reading the Psalms frees and recreates the ethical life.
In Das Gebetbuch der Bibel, Bonhoefer’s last publication during his lifetime,
just before he got a banning order both for speaking and writing, he calls it
grace to know God’s commandments.
It is grace to know God’s commands. They free us from self-made plans
and conicts. They make our steps certain and our way joyful. We are
given God’s commands so that we may fulll them, and ‘[God’s] com-
mandments are not burdensome’ (I John :) for those who have found
all salvation in Jesus Christ.
Only some insiders had by that time been informed that Bonhoefer was work-
ing on an ethics, and still fewer people knew he was involved in conspiracy,
but once we know, it’s obvious that he discloses here how liturgy and ethics
were linked in his theological existence. Brian Brock is certainly right, when
he puts: “One easily misreads some of the central moves in his ethical writings
without understanding how his love of the Psalms and his daily meditation in
them shaped his mature method in Christian ethics.” I can only assert that
the intense study of Psalm forms an indispensable bridge to go from Dis-
cipleship to Ethics.
Dietrich Bonhoefer, “Meditation on Psalm ,” in Dietrich Bonhoefer, Theological Ed-
ucation Underground: –, Edited by Victoria J. Barnett. Translated by Claudia D.
Bergmann ( ) (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, ), –.
Bonhoefer, “Meditation on Psalm ,” : “But serious attention, tireless asking, and
learning are necessary to recognize the right commandment and to recognize the inex-
haustible kindness of God in all his commandments.”
Bonhoefer, “Meditation on Psalm ,” : “Because God’s word has spoken to us in
history, that is, in the past, remembering and the repetition of what has been learned is
a daily, necessary exercise. Every day we need to return once again to the saving deeds of
God in order to move forward.”
Bonhoefer, Prayerbook of the Bible ( ), .
See Brian Brock, Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture
(Grand Rapids Michigan: Eerdmans, ), –.
Concluding Remarks
When we consider the three presented examples, a pattern becomes visible.
Psalm helped Bonhoefer to avoid self-justication and moralism by bring-
ing the Finkenwalde community to the living Christ, who criticizes, comforts
and leads his ock. Christ Himself as the true reality of this world is the insight
Bonhoefer needed for his Ethics. Bonhoefer’s reference to Psalm shows
that this way of reading the Psalms does not imply that God remains within the
realm of a liturgical setting. The discipline of reading the Psalms, which Bon-
hoefer practiced, ofers us eyes to see what happens in the world from God’s
perspective and unfolds a way to cope with it. Psalm helped Bonhoefer
to understand that ethics doesn’t start with us, but with God who already pre-
pared the good works for us to walk in and in that way do what is right among
the people.
Internal Coherence between Liturgy and Ethics in Bonhoefer?
My brief overview of Bonhoefer’s praying and singing the Psalms—the core
of Christian liturgy!—in relation to his moral engagement does not produce
clear results concerning the question if there is an internal coherence between
liturgy and ethics in Bonhoefer. I close of with a few observations and recom-
mendations for further research.
First, Bonhoefer’s emphasis on the arcani disciplina is already present in his
lectures in Berlin and in the Predigerseminar. The heart of the Christian liturgy
is the presence of God, which we cannot catch in words. From this perspective
it is striking that Bonhoefer writes Gemeinsames Leben in the thrilling days of
and publishes Das Gebetbuch der Bibel in —after the Blitzkrieg in
Western-Europe. Is the publication of these devotional books urgent? Yes, it
is. “Whenever the Psalm is abandoned, an incomparable treasure is lost to the
Christian church. With its recovery will come unexpected power.”
Secondly, before Bonhoefer starts working on his Ethics in Autumn ,
he wrote an extensive, but unnished theological meditation on Psalm .
Who reads the meditation on Psalm —but also sermons from earlier times
like the one on Psalm —soon discovers trains of thought which are elab-
orated on in the Ethics. It shows that his reading and singing of the Psalms,
which he performed in daily liturgy, even in prison, was an important source
of nding the way and will of God.
Bonhoefer, Prayerbook of the Bible ( ), .
Finally, the relationship between prayer and doing what is right, as Bonhoef-
fer states in the Baptism letter, is therefore not merely a theoretical question,
but makes a diference within a living reality. Only a Christian community that
cherishes and celebrates the mysteries of the Christian faith and protects them
from profanation will nd the actual good works which God has already pre-
pared for us to walk in and to do what is right amongst the people.
My conclusion is that—as far as I can see—Bonhoefer had no theory.
We put a too great demand on him, so to speak, when we confront him with
questions which have come up with a new urgency in our times (the ‘ecclesial
turn’). However, what Bonhoefer shows very clearly is, that life—i.e., the lived
interaction between liturgy and ethics—precedes theory. And this is why it
was fundamental to him that these two go hand in hand.
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© Koninklijke Brill NV, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004356528_005
Catholic Reformed Ethics
Bavinck’s Concept of Catholicity and Its Implications for Ethics
Willem van Vlastuin
Participating in the liturgy of the church is not a neutral act as the complete
personality is involved. Therefore, reading the Scriptures, listening to the ser-
mon, praying, singing, participating in the sacraments and confessing faith has
a formative inuence on our moral character and understanding. This implies
that participating in liturgy increases our conformity to God’s acts and plans
and our desire to do so.
Also participation in the public confession of the apostolic faith is an es-
sential part of Christian liturgy. The text of this confession is not a dogmatic
text but, as it was originally, a liturgical text. This means that confessing and
praying the creed is a true existential act in which the believer expresses his
union as the bride of Christ with Him as bridegroom. Therefore, it is also a
performative act in which believers express their desire to change the world
by presenting the world as already changed. In this illocutionary speech-act
Christians promise and commit themselves to serve the confessed reality. This
implies that liturgy and ethics are intrinsically related.
In Christian liturgy, believers all over the world confess their belief every
Sunday in the holy Catholic Church of Christ. Given the fact that confessing
catholicity is not merely a ritual, but an expression of the deepest convic-
tions and commitment of the heart, the practice of confession claries that
catholicity is interwoven with an understanding of the life of the church.
The existential attitude of confessing catholicity implies that there is a rela-
tionship between catholicity on the one hand, and ethics on the other. This
means that confessing catholicity in liturgy is a lens through which we can
Oliver O’Donovan, Liturgy and Ethics (Nottingham: Grove, ), –, , .
Compare for the treatment of this metaphor, Arnold A. van Ruler, “Perspectieven voor de
gereformeerde theologie” (Perspectives for Reformed theology), in Theologisch Werk (Theo-
logical Works), Vol. (Nijkerk: Callenbach, ), –, here .
Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God: A Reading of the Apostles’ Creed (London:
Press, ), –.
understand the world and that Christian worship shapes the moral life of
Christians.
In this article I want to focus on Bavinck’s concept of catholicity, because he
is explicit about his concept of catholicity and developed a new understanding
of catholicity. A striking feature of Bavinck’s concept of catholicity is his
inclusion of creation and his understanding of the relationship between
church and cosmos. This feature of his concept of catholicity raises an
intriguing question: What does this concept mean for Christian ethics? This
question will not be overtaxing for Bavinck, because the approach he adopted
in his PhD dissertation on the ethics of Zwingli gives us a clear indication
of his special interest in, and focus on, ethics. If further conrmation were
needed, he also wrote—besides several booklets—an unpublished treatise
entitled Reformed Ethics.
This essay investigates the implications of Herman Bavinck’s understanding
of catholicity and what this means for ethics. It begins by describing and
analyzing Bavinck’s concept of catholicity and then evaluates the concept by
comparing it with Calvin’s concept (a concept which Bavinck himself explicitly
refers to). A creative application of Bavinck’s concept of catholicity to ethics
follows and the article closes with a conclusion.
Brian Brock has showed how worship in Augustine relates to participating in the dynamics
of God’s working in the world, Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in
Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), . In this study are several points where the
relationship between liturgy and ethics is apparent, see , , . For the relationship
between the Lord’s Supper and the understanding the world, see –.
Brian Brock underlines his conviction that God transforms believers by worship, not that ethics
is to be understood as a human response to the Word, Singing the Ethos of God, , .
Herman Bavinck, De ethiek van Ulrich Zwingli (The Ethics of Ulrich Zwingli) (Kampen: Zals-
man, ).
Compare Dirk van Keulen, “Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Ethics: Some Remarks about Un-
published Manuscripts in the Libraries of Amsterdam and Kampen,” The Bavinck Review
(), –. See also John Bolt, “Christ and the Law in the Ethics of Herman Bavinck,”
Calvin Theological Journal (), –; A Theological Analysis of Herman Bavinck’s Two
Essays on the Imitatio Christi (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, ); James Eglinton, “Bavinck,
Dogmatics and Ethics,” Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology (), –; “On Bavinck’s
Theology of Sanctication-as-Ethics,” in K.M. Kapic (ed.), Sanctication: Explorations in The-
ology and Practice (Downers Grove: Academic, ), –; Dirk van Keulen, “Her-
man Bavinck on the Imitation of Christ,” Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology (),
–.
Bavinck’s Concept of Catholicity Described
In his rst rectorial speech for the Theological School of Kampen, which he
made on December , , Bavinck spoke about the catholicity of Christi-
anity and the church. As early as the introduction, Bavinck explained that the
concept of catholicity could be used in three ways: To denote the diference
between the catholic church and the local congregation, to make a distinction
between the Old Testament nationalistic dispensation and the universal char-
acter of the New Testament church, and lastly, to refer to the most complete
historical tradition of the church and the complete riches of spiritual gifts. The
last description was central for Bavinck’s rectorial speech.
This is apparent in the rst chapter in which Bavinck treats catholicity from
a biblical perspective. He starts his treatment with the understanding that
God’s revelation comprehends civil, social and political life. In this way, the
Old Testament theocracy was a type of Christ’s kingdom in which everything
true, good and beautiful is included. On the one hand, this implies that the
Old Testament theocracy has a prophetic character which is fullled in Christ,
on the other, it also implies that God’s saving acts cover the complete cosmos.
In this context we can speak of Christ as the Mediator of creation. However,
Bavinck qualies this somewhat in his remark about the religion of the cross
as an aspect of Christ as Mediator of redemption; a qualication that is not
essential to his central view.
This universal understanding of catholicity relates primarily to the catholic-
ity of the church. The universal perspective is a framework used to interpret
decisive moments in the history of the church. In this context the reformed
professor reviews the apostle convent, the judaistic, gnostic, nomistic and
antinomistic errors which again and again threaten the unity of the church.
The version in the original language that I use is the edition which has an introduction
by George Puchinger: Herman Bavinck, De Katholiciteit van Christendom en Kerk (Kampen:
Kok, ). For this article I use and refer to the translation made by John Bolt which was
published in Calvin Theological Journal (), –. Compare this description of
Bavinck’s concept of catholicity with Willem van Vlastuin, “Katholiciteit en Credo” (Catho-
licity and Credo), in Hans Burger, Ad de Bruijne and Dolf te Velde (eds), Weergaloze kennis:
Opstellen over Jezus Christus, Openbaring en Schrift, Katholiciteit en Kerk aangeboden aan prof.
dr. Barend Kamphuis (Amazing Knowledge: Essays on Jesus Christ, Revelation and Scripure,
Catholicity and Church, honoring prof. dr. Barend Kamphuis) (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum
), –.
Cf. Martien E. Brinkman, “Bavinck en de katholiciteit van de kerk” (Bavinck and the Catho-
licity of the Church), in George Harinck and Gerrit Neven (eds), Ontmoetingen met Bavinck
(Encounters with Bavinck) (Barneveld: De Vuurbaak, ), –, .
When Bavinck treats the historical development of catholicity, he continues
in this track and he describes a small, defenseless Christian church in antithe-
sis with the great surrounding world. Despite the temptation of ascetism, do-
natism and separatism, the church retained its catholicity; this is the focus of
Bavinck’s speech. According to a letter sent to Snouck Hurgronje, this speech
was intended to redress the separatist and sectarian tendencies in the church.
Bavinck saw much narrowness and parochialism in his denomination, which
was defended as piety.
It is vital that catholicity is understood in the right way; the following
sentence is important to this understanding: “… the original qualitative dis-
tinction between the church and the world was turned into a quantitative
one.” The rector of the theological school made this remark in relation to
the genesis of a Roman Catholic theology in which the world was no longer
antithetically qualied, but was viewed as the neutral natural domain. The
Christian faith acquired a dualistic character because it was dened as a
donum superadditum (supernatural gift), implying that transcendent Chris-
tianity no longer acted upon created reality in a transforming, recreating
and sanctifying way. Because the supernatural realm had a higher quality
than the natural realm, the tendency of the church to rule the natural life
was self-evident. But this tendency had several consequences. First, the cos-
mic understanding of catholicity was profaned. Next, this was a source of
an exclusive concept of the church, and third, because the church rules in
the world, it is understandable that it used inquisitions to ban heretics from
church.
Bavinck’s cosmic concept of catholicity functioned as a normative instru-
ment for criticizing this development in the church of the Middle Ages. In this
context, he did not qualify the conict between Rome and the Reformation
as an ecclesiological one, but as a conict concerning the totality of Chris-
tian faith. Therefore, the conict between Rome and the Reformation piv-
oted around how the rst article of faith was interpreted. As opposed to the
dualism of Rome, the Reformation recovered and re-instated this article by
The speech was “vooral bestemd … als eenige medicijn voor de separatistische en sec-
tarische neigingen, die soms in onze kerk zich vertoonen. Er is zooveel enghartigheid,
zooveel bekrompenheid onder ons, en ’t ergste is dat dat nog voor vroomheid geldt,” ac-
cording to Brinkman, “Bavinck en de katholiciteit van de kerk,” .
Catholicity, .
“Conventionally, the Reformation of the sixteenth century is seen exclusively as a refor-
mation of the church. In fact, however, it was much more than that; it was a radically new
way of conceiving Christianity itself,” Catholicity, .
liberating natural life from the pressure of the church. This implied on the
one hand thatthe protestant religion acknowledged how deep sin is situated
in natural life, and on the other, that this religion could appreciate natural life
intrinsically.
Bavinck used the same cosmic concept of catholicity to distinguish between
the Lutheran and the Calvinistic wings of Protestantism. Because Luther fo-
cused solely on the renewal of the heart instead of the renewal of structures,
dualism was not completely conquered in his theology, which meant that he
did not reach the full depths of catholic Christianity. Calvin, however, did. De-
spite his accent on negative virtues such as self-denial, cross-bearing, patience
and temperance, the reformer from Geneva was sensitive to the inuence of
grace on the totality of the creaturely existence.
In the third chapter, Bavinck dealt with the impact of this concept of catho-
licity in his own context. He observed that dualism in art, science, philosophy,
politics and social life subsisted in post-Reformation Protestantism, because
the principles of the Reformation did not inuence the complete life in his de-
nomination and culture. The efect of this limited understanding of catholicity
was that the spiritual power of the Reformation was broken and that spiritu-
alized life continued beneath the surface in several frames of internalization
without a cosmic catholic perception. Bavinck perceived the church, politics,
culture and science fragmenting enormously and lacking any coherence.
For the church, this implies that sectarianism exerts inuence in several
ways: the unity in doctrine is broken, the communion of the saints is inter-
rupted, the Gifts of the Spirit disappear and people feel happy in complacent
ecclesiastical isolation. Bavinck’s conclusion is important: “Each sect that con-
siders its own circle as the only church of Christ and makes exclusive claims to
truth will wither and die, like a branch severed from its vine.” One can detect
a self-critical aspect here when he ascertained that the protestant principle
implied an aspect of church-decomposition.
It is remarkable that Van Ruler applied this movement to himself and supposed a lack
of the Reformation, Verzameld Werk (Collected Works) (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum,
), Vol. , . Compare his De vervulling der wet: Een dogmatische studie over de
verhouding van openbaring en existentie (The Fulllment of the Law: A dogmatic study
about the relationship between revelation and existence) (Nijkerk: Callenbach, ), ,
, , –. For an evaluation, see Willem van Vlastuin, “The Estimation of the World:
A Comparison between Calvin and Van Ruler,” Calvin Theological Journal / (),
–.
Catholicity, –.
In this context, his judgment of pietism demands extra attention. Bavinck
spoke in a positive way about pietism several times, because it remains, for
him: “One of the most important forms in which the Christian faith comes to
expression.” Nevertheless, something is lacking in this form of Christianity:
One misses the genuine catholicity of the Christian faith … what is miss-
ing here is reformation in the genuine, true, full sense of the word. In-
stead, individuals are rescued and snatched out of the world—the world
that lies in wickedness—there is never a methodic, organic reformation
of the whole cosmos, of nation and country. Thus the periphery is at-
tacked but never the center; the bulwarks but never the fortress itself.
It is not a mighty, imposing conict between the entire church militant
and the world in the entirety of its organization as a kingdom under its
own master, but rather a guerilla war that weakens the enemy here and
there but never triumphs. This is an individualistic battle where everyone
ghts on their own and in their own way rather than in an organized
campaign. For this reason the current of life itself is not redirected. The
conict is characterized by a struggle against individual sins while the
root of all sins is often left untouched. The unbelieving results of science
are rejected, but there is no inner reformation of the sciences on the ba-
sis of a diferent principle. Public life is ignored and rejected—often as
intrinsically “worldly”—while no efort is made to reform it according to
the demands of God’s Word. Satised with the ability to worship God in
their own houses of worship, or to engage in evangelism, many left na-
tion, state and society, art and science to their own devices … It is a denial
of the truth that God loves the world. It is dedicated to conict with and
even rejection of the world but not to “the victory that overcomes it” in
faith.
We have to be conscious that Bavinck’s spiritual roots were in the pietistic
Calvinistic circles of the Separation (Afscheiding) of . This implies that
his acceptance of the calling of the Christian in this world was, for him, a
Catholicity, .
Catholicity, –.
Ronald N. Gleason describes the spiritual roots of Bavinck in the rst chapter of Her-
man Bavinck: Pastor, Churchman, Statesman and Theologian (Phillipsburg: P&R, ),
–. In the second chapter Bavinck’s youth is described, and in the third, Bavinck’s con-
frontation with the liberal university is dealt with, –. Compare James Eglinton, “On
Bavinck’s Theology of Sanctication-as-Ethics,” –.
conscious spiritual and theological movement. It is conceivable that his stud-
ies in Leiden brought him to this broader understanding of Christianity, an
understanding which meant that he did not have to relinquish the spiritual
warmth of pietism in his piety.
This critical judgment of pietism raises the question: Did Bavinck revoke it
later on? In he wrote positively in an introduction to the Works of the Scot-
tish brothers, Ralph and Ebenezer Erskine, that these theologians had an aspect
that he missed in his own church. He described this lack in his day as the spiri-
tual knowledge of souls. He conjectured about whether pastors in his own de-
nomination really understood sin and grace, guilt and forgiveness, regeneration
and conversion. Undoubtedly, the theologians understood these concepts theo-
retically, but were not sensitive to the immense realities of life. This expression
could possibly be a correction of the views he expounded in his rectorial speech.
An investigation into catholicity which he made in his earlier publication
Reformed Dogmatics claries this issue. It is remarkable that the concept of
catholicity in his dogmatic work is more ecclesiastical than it is in his rectorial
speech. Moreover, he underlines that unity is a spiritual category, determined
by Christ as the Head of the body, although this unity does not remain invis-
ible. What this means for his judgment of pietism needs more research, but
these notions do indicate that his subsequent concept of catholicity was going
to be structured more ecclesiastically.
Bavinck’s Concept of Catholicity Evaluated
Before applying Bavinck’s concept of catholicity to ethics, we need an evalu-
ation of this concept that leads to a sharper and ner understanding of the
exactness of Bavinck’s approach.
Compare James Eglinton, “On Bavinck’s Theology of Sanctication-as-Ethics,” .
Eglinton gives an example of Bavinck’s personal prayer, “On Bavinck’s Theology of
Sanctication-as-Ethics,” .
“Er is hier een belangrijk element dat ons veelszins ontbreekt. Wij missen de geestelijke
zielekennis. Het is of wij niet meer weten, wat zonde en genade, wat schuld en vergeving,
wat wedergeboorte en bekering is. In theorie kennen wij ze wel; maar wij kennen ze niet
meer in de ontzaggelijke realiteit van het leven,” according Jan van der Haar, “Inleidend
woord” (Introduction), in Leven en dagboek van Ralph Erskine (Ralph Erskine’s life and
notebook) (Veenendaal: Kool, ), –.
Vgl. Gereformeerde Dogmatiek (Reformed Dogmatics) (Kampen: Kok, ), Vol. , –
.
Gereformeerde Dogmatiek, Vol. , .
In this context one has to correct Bavinck’s appeal to Calvin. There are sev-
eral reasons for interpreting Calvin’s concept of catholicity as a strictly ecclesi-
astical concept, in which the ecclesiastical aspect is determined by the church
as the body of Christ (corpus Christi).
By the unity of the Church we must understand a unity into which we
feel persuaded that we are truly ingrafted. For unless we are united with
all the other members under Christ our head, no hope of the future in-
heritance awaits us. Hence the Church is called Catholic or Universal,
for two or three cannot be invented without dividing Christ; and this is
impossible. All the elect of God are so joined together in Christ, that as
they depend on one head, so they are as it were compacted into one body,
being knit together like its diferent members; made truly one by living
together under the same Spirit of God in one faith, hope, and charity,
called not only to the same inheritance of eternal life, but to participa-
tion in one God and Christ.
In Calvin’s theology and practice of the church, the Christological dimension
of the church gave the locus of the church its weight. According to Calvin,
there was no eternal life outside the church and the people who withdrew from
the Christian community were deemed by God to be “deserters of religion.”
For this same reason, we can also understand Calvin’s zeal for the unity of
the church. He participated in the religious debates in Hagenau, Worms and Re-
gensburg, he came to a consensus with Bullinger about the Lord’s Supper and
to Archbishop Cranmer he wrote that he longed for an ecumenical- protestant
meeting to be held at which a confession could be devised that would be ac-
ceptable to all protestants. In this letter he wrote the well-known sentence
that he was willing to cross ten seas to promote unity.
Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles; vols;
Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, ), ... The title of
Book refers also to the communion with Christ. A subtle detail is that this confession
is also included in the Catechism of Geneva, question and answer , an indication that
having a catholic spirit was important for all people in the congregation.
I. John Hesselink remarks: “His commitment to the unity of the church was not despite
his high view of the church, but precisely because of it!” “Calvinus Oecumenicus: Calvin’s
Vision of the Unity and Catholicity of the Church,” in Eddy A.J.G. Van der Borght, The Unity
of the Church: A Theological State of the Art and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, ), –, .
Institutes ...
Joannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia (ed. G. Baum et al.; Brunsvigae: apud C.A.
Schwetschke et lium, -), abbreviated as (= Calvini Opera), , –.
These enormous eforts to unify the church also demonstrate that unity was
not unqualied, but qualied. The unity which Calvin sought was qualied by
the doctrina which implied that it was a unity in truth. In his answer to Cardi-
nal Sadoleto he stressed the central place of the Christian doctrine:
Now, if you can bear to receive a truer denition of the Church than your
own, say, in future, that it is the society of all the saints, a society which,
spread over the whole world, and existing in all ages, yet bound together
by the one doctrine, and the one Spirit of Christ, cultivates and observes
unity of faith and brotherly concord.
This citation claries the point that the unity in Christ is determined by the
doctrine of Christ. What the soul is for the physical body, the doctrine is for
the spiritual body of Christ. Without understanding this unity in Christ, the
church is open to heresy and schism. In his own context, Calvin applied the
confession of doctrine to the doctrine of justication by faith in particular be-
cause, in this doctrine, the glory of Christ appears.
The understanding of Calvin’s concept of catholicity reveals that Bavinck’s
reference to “this new concept of the catholicity of the Christian religion”
was incorrect. Calvin did not intend to innovate the understanding of the
church, but “all we have attempted has been to renew that ancient form of the
Church.” This means that catholicity implies historicity and apostolicity, and
that the reformation movement intended to restore the original understand-
ing of the church.
Willem Nijenhuis, Calvinus oecumenicus: Calvijn en de eenheid der kerk in het licht van zijn
briefwisseling (Calvinus oecumenicus: Calvin and the unity of the church according to his
correspondence) (’s Gravenhage: Nijhof, ), , .
“Reply by John Calvin to a Letter by Cardinal Sadolet to the Senate and People of Geneva,”
in John Calvin, Calvin’s Tracts relating to the Reformation, trans. H. Beveridge (Eugene:
Wipf and Stock ), Vol. , –, here –.
Comm. Acts : ( , ). Compare Institutes ...
Institutes ...
“You, in the rst place, touch upon justication by faith, the rst and keenest subject of
controversy between us. Is this a knotty and useless question? Wherever the knowledge
of it is taken away, the glory of Christ is extinguished, religion abolished, the Church de-
stroyed, and the hope of salvation utterly overthrown” (“Reply to Sadoleto,” ).
Catholicity, .
“Reply to Sadoleto,” –, .
Cf. Nijenhuis, Calvinus oecumenicus, .
Moreover, one can also question whether the aspects of the denial of the
self and the world were not more important to Calvin than Bavinck suggests.
In Calvin’s estimation of creation there are several distinctions. First, Calvin
appreciated creation in a positive sense. He calls on us to admire the little ow-
ers so frequently that our hearts are deeply touched, he acknowledges the
positive opportunities created in culture such as art, science and jurisdiction,
he accepts the (moderate) enjoyment of the gifts of creation, he underlines
the responsibility for our calling in this life on earth and the calling to care
for creation.
Second, creation can be relativized in relation to the eschatological new
heaven and the new earth. The fact that believers have communion with the
heavenly Christ emphasizes this relativization. In the context of this compari-
son between eschatological reality and life in this world, Calvin can stress con-
temptus mundi (denial of the world). Although there is the theological space
to speak about the enjoyment of this earth, there still remains a qualitative dif-
ference between the enjoyment of the Creator and the enjoyment of creation.
Perhaps this is the reason that the renewal of this earth is not an explicit locus
in his theology which is strongly characterized by being a stranger on earth.
It can be concluded that Calvin relativized this world and its history in rela-
tion to the eschatological reality in Christ, without denying this world in abso-
lute terms or our calling in this life. His conviction that the purpose of our life
is to honor God transcends and connects this world and the coming world.
This investigation of Calvin’s understanding of creation in the context of
his concept of catholicity highlights how diferent it is compared to Bavinck’s
Compare Willem van Vlastuin, “The Estimation of the World.”
Institutes ... These aspects are worked out by Belden C. Lane, Ravished by Beauty:
The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ),
–.
Institutes ..; Comm. Gen. : and ( , – and –), Comm. Cor.
: ( , –). The wisdom of the classics if from the Holy Spirit, Institutes ..
–. In his commentary on Gen. : ( , –) Calvin mentions also music.
According to Alister E. McGrath, Calvin contributed positively to modern science, A Life
of John Calvin (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –.
Compare Institutes ..; ..; Comm. Hab. : ( , –).
Compare Comm. Gen. : ( , ).
Heiko A. Oberman, “De katholieke kerkvader: de hele waarheid voor de gehele wereld”
(The catholic church father: the whole truth for the whole world), in William den Boer
and Herman J. Selderhuis, Opnieuw Calvijn: Verzameling Nederlandse Calvijnstudies
(Calvin Again: Dutch Collection of Calvin Studies) (Apeldoorn: Instituut voor Refor-
matieonderzoek, ), Vol. , –, –.
concept; it also claries the specic details of the latter. While Calvin’s concept
of catholicity is characterized by its ecclesiastical structure of the union with
Christ, expressed in the doctrine of Christ, Bavinck uses a cosmic concept of
catholicity instead. Although later, in his Reformed Dogmatics, he developed
in the direction of Calvin, it cannot be concluded that the soteriological union
with Christ was decisive in Bavinck’s structure of catholicity. His elaboration
of the doctrine of catholicity is not without Christ and his doctrine, but the to-
tality of his concept is more universal and cosmic. His universal understanding
of catholicity means that art, science, techniques and politics are, for him, ex-
pressions of a ‘theocratic’ authority as the direct and ultimate aim of God’s sov-
ereignty in this world. Bavinck, however, also acknowledged that this earth had
a future in which it would be transformed into a transcendent heavenly reality
in the eschaton, but stressed that this did not imply any such relativization
of earthly life as appears in Calvin’s concept, because, according to Bavinck’s
understanding, culture would share in this future transformation. Christianity
and culture, faith and science are directly related, and the distinction between
church and culture in Bavinck’s concept is less than it is in Calvin’s, so Calvin’s
meditatio vitae futurae is weakened. Bavinck’s sensitivity to this world, and
history, is evidenced by the special chapter in his Reformed Dogmatics which
he dedicated to the consummation of the ages; compare this to Calvin who
only wrote a chapter on the resurrection of the body. While Calvin valued cre-
ation as secondary in light of re-creation, the Neo-Calvinist Bavinck gave this
created order a higher value because of his fear that common grace and gen-
eral revelation was disappearing in the background. Or, to state this in another
way: In Calvin’s theology, the relationship between creation and re-creation
is characterized by a duality, whilst Bavinck, fearing dualism, neglected this
duality.
A remarkable phenomenon appears here. While Bavinck suggested there
was a cosmic concept of catholicity in Calvin, it was actually more his inven-
tion than Calvin’s. While Bavinck wrote about Calvin’s renewal of theology to
a cosmic dimension, in reality Calvin renewed theology to a lack of this cos-
mic dimension. Bavinck also suggested that Calvin’s concept of catholicity
was classic catholicism, but, in reality, Bavinck was more classical than Calvin,
Compare Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), –.
Compare the analysis of Oepke Noordmans, “Kritieke spanningen in de gereformeerde
theologie” (Critical tensions in Reformed theology), Verzamelde werken (Collected Works)
(Kampen: Kok, ), Vol. , –, –.
because Calvin participated in a process in which the unity of the natural and
the supernatural realm weakened in relation to the Platonic-Christian tradi-
tion.
What is characteristic of the Platonic-Christian tradition is its ‘sacramental’
understanding of created reality, a reality in which both the close relationship
of Creator and creation function on the one hand and the distinction between
Creator and creation function on the other. Reality assures God’s presence,
while at the same time God transcends every created reality. As opposed to
platonic philosophy, the confession of creation ex nihilo, the trinity and the
incarnation are pivotal points in the Christian tradition, but, in accordance
with the platonic tradition, the early Christians understood the union between
God and his world and the unity of reality as a consequence.
Bavinck developed his theology within this framework which implied that
creation should be interpreted as a reection of God’s essence, that incarna-
tion could not be isolated from creation, and that sin and evil should be under-
stood as privatio boni and could not be viewed as determining the essence of
theology. It can also be concluded that Bavinck’s Christ was a cosmic Christ or
that he understood Christ as the mediator of creation.
We can guess why Bavinck ascribed his Christological-cosmic concept of
catholicity to Calvin. Perhaps it was included in his understanding of the re-
newal of the Reformation? We could also envisage Neo-Calvinists being eager
to attribute their thoughts to the ‘great’ Calvin, because it gave authority to
their views. Albeit, against the background of Bavinck’s appeal to the concept
of catholicity in Calvin, we can perceive the diferences which highlight the
specics of Bavinck and which help us to develop ethics in the framework of
Bavinck’s theology.
Compare Boersma, Heavenly Participation, –, –. See also Wolter Huttinga, Par-
ticipation and Communicability: Herman Bavinck and John Milbank on the Relation be-
tween God and the World (Amsterdam: Buijten & Schipperheijn, ), –.
Compare Huttinga, Participation and Communicability, –.
See Huttinga, Participation and Communicability, –. James K.A Smith understands
liturgy as conrmation of the goodness of creation, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, World-
view, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker, ), –. It is remarkable that
he understands the Platonic tradition as being opposite to the sacramental understand-
ing of reality, , , while the Platonic tradition included the awareness that God is
greater than his creation, the point he makes on page .
Bavinck’s Concept of Catholicity Applied
There are several reasons that explain how contemporary theology and ethics
are determined, or at least inuenced, by thinking from new creation rather
than by reasoning from creation. One of the reasons given for this focus on
the new creation is the generally acknowledged eschatological character of the
New Testament. Another reason is the development of a decreasing Christian
population in the Western world which stimulates recognition of the eschato-
logical theology and ethics of the Christian minorities of the Early Church and
the conviction that we cannot reason from a corpus christianum. A third rea-
son is the tendency to understand the new creation in terms of this creation, so
that the radical new character of re-creation disappears. This reminds us of the
necessity of being aware of the transcendent and transformed character of the
new earth, the neglect of which weakens the acuity that Christians can utilize
to identify and understand the unrighteousness in this world.
The potential disadvantage of such a theological development is the neglect
of any theological reection on creation and structures in the world, because
these small theological deviations can have huge practical, spiritual and eth-
ical implications. Bavinck’s approach reminds us of the rst article of the ap-
ostolic creed which confesses God the Father as Creator of heaven and earth,
sometimes understood as the primary article of Christian faith. This leads
to some reections concerning the structure of ethics, ecological ethics and
eschatological ethics.
Two examples are Samuel Wells, God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics (Oxford:
Blackwell, ), and Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for
Evangelical Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ). Illustrative for politics is also Ad
L.Th. de Bruijne, “A Banner That Flies Across This Land: An Interpretation and Evaluation
of Dutch Evangelical Political Awareness Since the End of the Twentieth Century,”
in Cornelis van der Kooi, Eveline van Staalduine-Sulman and Arie W. Zwiep (eds),
Evangelical Theology in Transition: Essays under the Auspices of the Center of Evangelical
and Reformation Theology () (Amsterdam: University Press, ), –.
Compare James D.G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
), ; Martin Hengel, Paulus und Jakobus: Kleine Schriften (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck
), Vol. , –; N. Tom Wright, Christian Origins and the Question of God : The
Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, ), –, : “The
eschaton has arrived.”
Clive S. Lewis observed that the Christian orientation to the other world gives them a
great advantage in this world, Mere Christianity (London: G. Bless, ), –.
Martin Luther in his Great Catechism, http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/
luther/catechism/web/cat-.html (accessed June ).
The Structure of Ethics
The rst reection concerns the structure of ethics as a theological discipline.
Due to the investigations of Dirk van Keulen we have a detailed impression of
Bavinck’s Reformed Ethics. Van Keulen explains that Bavinck’s Reformed Eth-
ics is constructed in four parts. In the rst, Bavinck deals with man before sin,
the second concerns the spiritual life of man, the third looks at man after his
conversion, and the fourth elaborates on the social spheres in which moral life
has to reveal itself, such as family, occupation, society, nation and church. It is
notable that Bavinck organized his ethics around the personal lives of Chris-
tians who are tasked with reforming the world. This is, according to Bavinck’s
own denition of ethics: “to describe the birth, growth and revelation of spiri-
tual life in reborn man.”
Bavinck used the metaphor of leaven. As leaven multiplies and grows, so
the spiritual life of regenerated people afects not only the personal life of the
believer, but also the wider circles of family, church and society. This emphasis
on the worth of the world coheres with the emphasis placed on the ‘theocratic’
claim of Christ on this world in Kuyper’s Neo-Calvinism. It is remarkable that
Kuyper also used military metaphors to describe the Christians war waged to
conquer the world for Christ. It is clear that this understanding of the world
and the task of Christians in this world implies that believers should have a
very active attitude and a heavy understanding of their responsibility together
with an optimistic perspective for society.
This approach from personal ethics implies that ethics remains at the level
of basic moral categories, without developing into the higher level of a mor-
al vision in which basic moral categories are united in a broader and more
abstract framework of ethical understanding for interpreting the world.
Van Keulen, “Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Ethics.”
Compare Van Keulen, “The Imitation of Christ,” –.
According Van Keulen, “Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Ethics,” .
Abraham Kuyper in his explanation of Lord’s Day , E Voto Dordraceno: Toelichting op
den Heidelbergschen Catechismus (E Voto Dordraceno: Explanation of the Heidelberg Cate-
chism) (Kampen: Kok, s.d.), Vol. , –. Illustratively is: “Bij elke overwinning die deze
kerke Christi behaalt, is er iets van dat Godsrijk te aanschouwen. Er is een begin van stich-
ting. Die beginselen breiden zich uit. Steeds breeder strekt het terrein, waarop de banier
des Heeren geplant zal worden. En zoo gaat, onder nederlaag en triomf, de strijd
voort en verder, om eens te reiken tot aan het einde der wereld en tot aan den jongsten dag
… Hij vergadert zijn kerk, om door haar als zijn leger het Godsrijk te stichten” ().
The distinction between basic moral categories, moral vision and world interpretation, I
derive from Oliver O’Donovan, Liturgy and Ethics, . If I understand Brian Brock correctly,
he isolates ethics from personal ethics, Singing the Ethos of God, –, , .
This raises the question as to whether Bavinck had an interest in developing a
framework to understand and interpret the great issues in the world. Consider-
ing Bavinck’s interest in the great issues in the world of politics, society, social
questions, war, apologetics, education, economics, philosophical foundations
and science, we can presume he had such a commitment. There are also mo-
ments in Bavinck’s writings when he does not reason from the perspective of
the individual Christian, but from that of ‘cosmic’ ethics, for example in his
unpublished booklet Als Bavinck nu maar eens kleur bekende which he wrote
during a meeting of the senate. In this booklet, he dealt with issues as slav-
ery and the relationship of man and woman in society, concluding that these
issues had to be understood from the historical context of Scripture. These
facts are indications that Bavinck was interested in employing a broader moral
framework to understand developments and issues in world history.
This conclusion leads one to the question as to whether Bavink has the po-
tential to reach a higher level of a moral framework. I would argue that he has.
His concept of cosmic catholicity provides the theological tools for developing
his ethical theory into a more abstract level—creating a moral vision to use to
interpret the world, because his cosmic catholicity respects creation and its
order. Integrating creation and its order into basic moral categories leads to the
creation of an ethical framework of understanding which transcends individ-
ualistic ethics and which can be developed into an ethical concept within the
Christian framework of creation, sin and redemption.
Ecological Ethics
Second, a remark that relates to a contemporary ethical issue. Bavinck’s ap-
proach ofers a positive and necessary addition, or even correction, to the
current tendency to reason from re-creation to understand creation. One can
imagine Bavinck’s concept providing a helpful framework in the contempo-
rary ethical reection taking place on ecological issues. In a culture in which
Herman Bavinck, Als Bavinck nu maar eens kleur bekende: Aantekeningen van H. Bavinck
over de zaak-Netelenbos, het Schriftgezag en de situatie van de Gereformeerde Kerken
(November ) (If Bavinck would express himself: Notes of H. Bavinck about the case
Netelenbos, the authority of Scripture and the situation of the Reformed Churches), ed.
by George Harinck, Cornelis van der Kooi and Jasper Vree (Amsterdam: University
Press, ).
Bavinck, Als Bavinck nu maar eens kleur bekende, . Compare Niels van Driel, “The Sta-
tus of Women in Contemporary Society: Principles and Practice in Herman Bavinck’s
Socio-Political Thought,” in John Bolt (ed.),Five Studies in the Thought of Herman Bavinck,
A Creator of Modern Dutch Theology (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, ), –.
creation sufers under the load of human exploration because biodiversity is
decreasing, seeds are poisoned, resources are exhausted, the earth is warming
up, oceans are polluted, refugees move in large ows across the face of the
earth, women and girls are exploited as if they are only physical bodies without
emotions, slavery is more rife now than it was at the peak of the slave trade and
the freedom of religion is under pressure, theological reection upon creation
and its structures is indispensable.
This need is underlined by Max Weber’s book The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism (); a book in which Weber accused Protestants of ex-
ploiting earth until “the last ton of fossil fuel has been consumed.” The truth
of this accusation may be discussed, but apparently there is an occasion or rea-
son that Protestant Christians are suspected of not having enough interest in
the welfare of this globe and its population. It is striking that it can be said that
Christians were the catalysts of the critique on slavery, but Christians were not
the rst to criticize the current misuse of creation, which raises the question:
How was this possible?
Perhaps Hans Boersma’s insight helps us to answer this question. Boersma
argued that the Reformation was not able to analyze and withstand the devel-
opment of the late Middle Ages which saw the Platonist-Christian synthesis
decline with the result that nature and the supernatural were separated in a
nominalist division. Without discussing Boersma’s analysis we can agree that,
since the late Middle Ages, creation has been reduced to nature. This develop-
ment was reinforced by scientic discoveries and technical developments in
later ages, so that it is not strange that God disappeared from the public arena.
Christians still sought God in church, but one can understand that they were
inuenced by these cultural developments so much that, in reality, they un-
derstood creation in a deistic way. The consequences of this attitude are enor-
mous: It leaves Christians living a dualistic life, one in which they recognize
God in the private spiritual life, but not in public life. Is it also understandable
that the lack of a theological framework for understanding God in public life
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism (and Other Writings), ed.
and trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (London: Penguin Books, ), . For a
recent biography, see D. Kaesler, Max Weber: Preusse, Denker, Muttersohn, eine Biographie
(Max Weber: Prussian, Thinker, Motherson) (München: C.H. Beck, ). The Interna-
tional Martin Luther Stiftung organizes an annual conference on the relevance of the
Reformation for contemporary society and economic life with an emphasis on entrepre-
neurship. In Max Weber’s book was discussed, see www.luther-stiftung.org (last ac-
cessed September ).
Boersma, Heavenly Participation, , –.
would lead to a secularization of the Christian life, even within the church?
In the context of this article, the disappearance of the functioning of a theo-
logical framework of creation in the Christian church explains that Christians
were not the rst to criticize the current misuse of creation.
In this context Bavinck’s cosmic catholicity ofers us a framework for re-
appreciating creation from a theological point of view; a view which can func-
tion as a theological tool for observing and ascertaining the misuse of creation,
creatures and structures in creation and, in this way return to a society in
which Christians hold a key position vis a vis the ethics of the world.
This line of argumentation can be used for several ethical issues. Two exam-
ples: First, in the present fragmentation and individualization of society, the
key-place of marriage and family in creation has to be re-appreciated in Chris-
tian theology. The revaluation of creation implies revaluating the key-place of
the relational aspects of human life which can lead to a new understanding of
responsibility, self-denial, love, sharing with each other, defending each other
and the value of a godly calling in this life.
Second, another theme coheres with Bavinck’s acceptance of the classic pri-
vatio boni which reminds theology and church of the goodness of existence
and the diference between being and sin. This means that life can be ac-
cepted and that the Creator wanted each individual life, however much the
opposite seems true. In this way Bavinck’s positive approach to the created
world criticizes pessimistic tendencies which imply that life and history are
meaningless. Just how important Bavinck’s positive worldview is, not only in
pastoral settings, but also in the great issue of understanding this world and its
destination is inestimable. This positive understanding of life can function as
a framework for developing a contemporary theology of Christian self-love and
self-respect which does not feed into a narrow hedonistic self-interest.
Eschatological Ethics
Third and last, a critical reection on whether theological thinking which ar-
gues from a re-creation point of view is no more important than one which
argues from creation. There are several indications in Scripture which refer to
the new eschatological reality in Christ. The apostle Paul writes that Christians
On June , , Pope Francis published the encyclical Laudato Si which was dedicated
to an “ecological conversion.”
One could ask whether an empty universe would be preferable to one which had Hitler in
it, or whether a couple who had no interaction is not to be preferred to a couple with bad
interaction. For a philosophical critique, see http://www.stonehill.edu/les/resources/
heidegger-and-the-critique.pdf (accessed, June , ).
are a new creation in Christ, and the apostle John teaches us that we already
have eternal life in Christ. Because of this new reality in Christ, the citizen-
ship of believers is in heaven. Therefore, members of Christ’s church should
expect their help not from within the history of this world, but from Christ in
his transcendent reality. It is also understandable that life in this transcen-
dent reality of Christ makes one sensitive to the brokenness of, and the unrigh-
teousness in, this reality.
This attitude is also present in the gospels. Samuel Wells has told us that the
miracles during Jesus’ life bear an important message concerning the escha-
tological reality of Christ’s kingdom. The lack of water in Cana is a reference
to the brokenness and exhaustion of this world. The six (as number of human
beings) jars of water in this story indicate that redemption does not come
from within this history or human possibilities; Jesus’s miracle, meanwhile,
makes clear that in his kingdom all the shortages are made good and trans-
formed. In a comparable way, he explains the story of the Samaritan woman
whose sixth husband had not brought any real happiness. By confronting sin,
Jesus brought real deliverance by breaking through existing social and polit-
ical structures.
Beside the exegetical decisions in these parts of the Bible, the message of
the eschatological character of these histories is underlined by Wells who
stresses that Christian faith cannot be isolated from its eschatological charac-
ter. It seems that the reformer Calvin, by thinking catholicity from the church,
does more justice to this eschatological character of Christianity. Furthermore,
the theological concepts that are derived from the eschatological character of
Christianity imply, in reverse, that there is a possibility of doing justice to the
reality of sin and its deep-rooted existence in human life.
But how should we evaluate these considerations? Some remarks can be
made. First, the eschatological dimension of Christian life has to be consid-
ered and accounted for in Christian theology. It is not overstating the case to
say that this dimension of Christian faith is the most fundamental perspec-
tive in Christian theology, because belonging to Christ implies belonging to
the eschatological Christ. Christian Baptism means that we are sharing Christ’s
Cor. :.
John :. Compare John :, .
Phil. :.
Col. :–.
Rm. :.
Wells, God’s Companions, –.
Wells, God’s Companions, –.
death, and rising from the water indicates that our lives are restored in Christ.
This teaches us that Bavinck’s concept of cosmic catholicity cannot be a com-
plete concept which we can use to understand catholicity or ethics. But we
can say that although the Reformation did not analyze the ontological crisis
in the late Middle Ages, the soteriological insights of this movement are unre-
linquishable.
This observation brings us to the second point—the importance of the rela-
tionship between the rst and the second creation. When we think of the new
creation as being completely separated and isolated from the rst creation, we
have to choose between two excluding perspectives. But is this really the case?
Understanding recreation as a vindication of creation claries that we can-
not think in concepts which exclude any other. The discontinuity between
creation and new creation does not imply the annihilation of creation, but its
transformation and its glorication, which means that the existing creation
has to be valued highly, because it will be taken in the context of the new cre-
ation.
Third, the foregoing point can be applied to the ethics of marriage which we
can use as a key to interpret the relationship between ‘now’ and ‘then.’ Howev-
er much the gospel relativizes marriage, even stating that it does not belong
to the coming age, the Christian church has not concluded that marriage is
not holy or that sexual intercourse outside the marriage is acceptable. In con-
trast, in the New Testament marriage is perceived to have a high value in com-
bating heathen tendencies, and as an indication that the order of creation
has to be respected.
Fourth, the second observation has another implication. If there is continui-
ty between creation and re-creation—and there is such continuity—cosmical-
ly oriented ethics are qualied in a special way. Instead of understanding these
ethics as the responsibility that creatures have towards creation and the Cre-
ator, our care for God’s creation is actually the opposite and also an expression
Rm. :–.
Oliver O’Donovan understands the resurrection as a vindication of created order, Resur-
rection and Moral Order. See also his “Sanctication and Ethics,” in K.M. Kapic (ed.), Sanc-
tication: Explorations in Theology and Practice (Downers Grove: Academic, ),
–, .
Bavinck understood re-creation as the sanctication and conrmation of creation, Dirk
van Keulen, “Herman Bavinck on the Imitation of Christ,” .
Mark :–; John :; Cor. , especially verse .
Luke :.
Eph. :–.
of God’s sustainable and durable care for his creation. The Christian faith does
not just make an appeal to God to justify cosmic ethics, but Christianity ex-
plain this ethics as a longing to know God’s presence, his goodness, his wisdom
and his power in creation.
Conclusion
In this research article Bavinck’s concept of cosmic catholicity is described
and analyzed. It became clear that Bavinck’s concept was very diferent from
Calvin’s. While Calvin’s concept of catholicity can be characterized as a sote-
riological, ecclesiological and eschatological concept, Bavinck’s concept is re-
markable for its valuation of creation. Without giving up the eschatological
aspects of Christian faith and life, in this article, Bavinck’s cosmic catholicity
is integrated with his proposal of a Reformed cosmic ethics to be a proposal of
a creative constructive theology. In an age where fragmentation is rife in the
world and the reduced eschatological theology ofered by the church does not
provide a real answer to this cultural development, Bavinck’s cosmic Reformed
ethics ofers a valuable and necessary contribution to a form of contempo-
rary Christian ethics as fruit of confessing the church’s catholicity in liturgy.
Although the apostolic creed needs explanation, it can be stated that genuine,
heart-felt participation in the confession of catholicity in Christian liturgy has
a transformative efect on Christian ethics, represents a new commitment by
Christians to cosmic ethics and promotes a new meaning of the church as a
truly ethical community in the world today.
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© Koninklijke Brill NV, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004356528_006
Theatricality of Liturgy and Its Relevance to Ethics
Rehearsal, Performance, and Hypocrisy
Jaeseung Cha
It is far beyond my ability to deal extensively with three elusive concepts:
theater, liturgy, and ethics. But the issues regarding them are both profound
and challenging, considering that many theologians seem to find in both
the analogical metaphorical meaning and the analytical reality of theater,
ways to solve the problems of the classical understanding of doctrines
and ethics. Christology is believed to come not from dogmatic studies
but from active engagement with Christ in prayer and action. Rehearsal,
performance, improvisation, and emptiness are claimed to unveil the nature
of liturgy and its ethical dimensions. Notwithstanding the difficulty of
generalizing performance and theater amid the diverse cultures throughout
history, the interactive relationships found in theater—between script
and performance, between actors and their roles, and between reality
and its imitation—seem to provide significant clues for liturgy and ethics.
Shannon Craigo-Snell argues that Christian liturgy is the performance that
forms us as fit players in the ongoing drama of salvation, and it is the actors’
workshop, rehearsal space, and drama school that shape us as people who
perform a story about Jesus.
However, dissimilarities between theater and liturgy and the ambiguity
of theatricality of liturgy in its ethical link must not be ignored. The most
critical issue is how theatricality of liturgy can suciently express the pres-
ence of God. God is both subject and object of liturgy and is the unique actor
and audience. Any human theory and performance of theater can hardly ex-
press this unique God revealed in Christian liturgy. Second, the fundamen-
tal nature of performance is a descriptive imitation of reality, which can be
morally neutral, stimulate moral consciousness, or even deteriorate human
morality. Unlike a human drama, liturgy in its normative morality invites us
to the divine kingdom of God where the higher standard of ethics is to be
Brian O. McDermott, Word Become Flesh (Collegeville: A Michael Glazier Book, ), .
Shannon Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church: Theater, Theology, and Bodily Hope (New York: Ox-
ford University Press, ), .
proclaimed and practiced. Even when a performance in a theater pursues an
ethical content, secular ethics does not totally overlap with Christian ethics,
which in turn may be seen in a diferent framework, for example sancti-
cation or mystical union with Christ. At best, a theatricality of liturgy can be
linked to ethics more in methodologies than in contents. Lastly, nding a
theological and hermeneutical clue in drama and in theatricality of liturgy
based on a community as a means of overcoming classical foundationalism
remains problematic, since liturgy itself consists of divinely propositional
proclamation and confessional contents, demanding their actualization in
life. Making a shift from dogma to drama is not the only option we have—we
consider a third option such as a modest and collective foundationalism with
possibilities of collecting culture- and context-relevant pieces of plausible
foundational knowledge, not locked in its own dogma but communicative
to and changeable with diverse components. Furthermore, a community as
such is not a single subject that produces realities but one of the compo-
nents of interactions between the transcendental and apophatic God com-
ing to us, persons in community standing before God and human beings, and
in diverse contexts in diferent cultures. More critically, simply pointing out
interactions is not sucient because there are various degrees of interactions
which are dicult to generalize.
Considering all these ambiguities, dissimilarities, and critical issues,
the theatricality of liturgy and its ethical relevance can still be expressed
in three ways. First, rehearsal as repeated practices in performance can be
related to the fact that Christian worship shapes Christian morality. In the
rst part of this paper, I will deal with two concepts—improvisation and
emptiness—in relation to the ethical formation of liturgy, and point out
their limitations. Second, because of the danger of hypocrisy in theater, its
image critically expresses that liturgy is something less than ethics. By sim-
ply participating in performance and liturgy, we can mask our critical mor-
al reality. So-called “theater theologians” do not seem to be fully aware of
this problem. I will touch on this issue by discussing The York Corpus Christi
Plays and two writings of Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa. Third, a theater
image efectively expresses the fact that liturgy is something more than eth-
ics in its holistic demonstration of human reality. A human drama of one
individual person can include her life story of despair, sufering, success,
and joy. Likewise, we holistically participate in God’s invitation, proclama-
tion, sacrice, and promise in our repentance, prayers, confessions, praise,
and thanksgiving and in our life of morticatio and vivicatio. An ethical for-
mation is not the only dimension but a part of liturgy, characterizing hu-
man beings as beings-before-God, in which God and God’s people interact
holistically. Out of the three points—liturgy shapes ethics, liturgy is less
than ethics, and liturgy is more than ethics—I will deal with the rst two
points in this paper by focusing on rehearsal and performance and hypocrisy.
In conclusion, I will briey discuss Calvin’s use of theater for his view of cre-
ation and the church.
Liturgy as Ethics: Improvisation and Emptiness
Don Saliers claims that the relations between liturgy and ethics are formulated
by specifying how certain afections and virtues are formed in the modalities
of ritual action, and that afections and virtues grounded in the saving mys-
tery of Christ constitute a way of being moral. He continues:
The exercise of such afections requires a continual re-entry of the per-
son into the narrative and the teachings which depict the identity of Je-
sus Christ. As I proposed, the modalities of prayer and liturgical action
are the rule-keeping activities of the afections. Liturgy provides both a
rehearsal of the narratives and a continual re-embedding of persons in
the language of faith.
Good liturgy is the fundamental framework in which the continual re-entry of
the person into the story of Jesus should be based on a deliberate and commu-
nal rehearsal of the afections and virtues betting life in Christ. We can see
here two distinctive aspects of ethical formation of liturgy: () past-oriented
rehearsal and () present-oriented performance. The former is emphasized by
Samuel Wells and the latter by Shannon Craigo-Snell.
Samuel Wells in his Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics discusses
how the church may become a community of trust in order that it may faithful-
ly encounter the unknown future without fear. Worship is a habit, according
to Wells, that comes about through moral eforts and theatrical improvisation
Don E. Saliers, “Liturgy and Ethics: Some New Beginnings,” Journal of Religious Ethics /
(), –, .
Saliers, “Liturgy and Ethics,” .
Saliers, “Liturgy and Ethics,” .
Saliers, “Liturgy and Ethics,” .
Saliers, “Liturgy and Ethics,” .
Samuel Wells, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press,
), .
is all about training and performance. He nds the role of theater in relation
to Christian ethics in the practices of theater, namely, rehearsal. He also de-
scribes a sort of chain reactions that moves from repeated practice to virtue as
he explains that repeated practices nurture skill, skill develops habit, and habit
develops instinct, a pattern of unconscious behavior that reveals a deep ele-
ment of character, virtue. Then, he moves on to his concept of improvisation,
pointing out that a dimension of Christian life requires more than repetition.
Improvisation is inevitable as he writes:
When Christians … gather together and try to discern God’s hand in
events and his will for their future practice, they are improvising, wheth-
er they are aware of it or not. They—almost inevitably—accord authority
to Scripture, and generally to some other forms of discernment, perhaps
tradition, or reason, or experience, or something similar. These provide
the boundaries of their performance, their stage, as it were. And on this
stage they strive to enact a faithful drama. Whether debating the use of
language in theological discourse or considering whether to resign a job
because of misgiving about one’s boss’s integrity …: each of these is stim-
ulus to faithful improvisation, fresh embodiment of the grace and truth
of the scriptural witness. In each case, improvisation is the only term
that adequately describes the desire to cherish a tradition without being
locked in the past (emphasis mine).
Improvisation means spaces between words and freedom, with relaxed aware-
ness to be obvious in what might otherwise seem an anxious crisis. What
Wells stresses is, however, not so much the improvisation per se as the process
of reaching the moment and stage of improvisation. Distinguishing between
eforts and habit, he maintains that ethics is not primarily about the operating
theater but about the lecture theater with training and commitment, since in
every moral situation the real decisions are ones that have been taken some
time before. Wells illustrates several stories, among which is a story of Gen-
eral Culkin, a Roman Catholic priest who self-studied Russian language with
Wells, Improvisation, –.
Wells, Improvisation, .
Wells, Improvisation, .
Wells, Improvisation, .
Wells, Improvisation, –.
Wells, Improvisation, .
Wells, Improvisation, .
his creative imagination during his seminary period at Ushaw. Later, when he
ministered to soldiers in Egypt and had a chance to meet a Russian soldier, he
was able to hear a few words of confession in Russian and give absolution in
the last moments of the man’s life. Then Wells concludes:
General Culkin’s story illustrates all the themes of this chapter. The time
for creative imagination, moral efort, and discipleship was at Ushaw.
The time for ordinary imagination, habit, and grace was in Egypt. The
great majority of life is spent in preparation: this is where the emphasis in
Christian ethics needs to be. And the experience of grace in the moment
of crisis, of decision—the “situation”—came not through being clever or
inspired in the moment, but through falling back on something he had once
worked hard at and now took for granted (emphasis mine).
Thus, real improvisation with creative imagination took place in the past when
one could prepare for the moment for a decision in the future; for it is only
moral efort and formation in the past that can ofer freedom from impossible
moral efort in the present. Unlike a common view that improvisation is a
creative, immediate, and momentary performance, Wells, seeing it as both
preparation and performance, emphasizes what has been behind the moment
of improvisation, as he argues that the creative work lies in the preparation.
With this aspect of preparation emphasized, Wells denes worship as the
whole life of training skills and performance.
Shannon Craigo-Snell is in accord with Saliers and Wells in nding similari-
ties between theater and liturgy. According to her, all Christians are performers
and the entire Christian life is a performance in which they attempt to enact
and create the event narrated by Scripture. In this performance, there are
many rehearsals where the lines of the text are repeated and so often commit-
ted to memory and actors place themselves in the characters, standing as ones
commanded.
In her comprehensive book, The Empty Church, Craigo-Snell mentions a ten-
sion between repeated practices and freedom of performance: Actors repeat
Wells, Improvisation, .
Wells, Improvisation, .
Wells, Improvisation, .
Wells, Improvisation, .
Shannon Craigo-Snell, “Command Performance: Rethinking Performance Interpretation
in the Context of Divine Discourse,” Modern Theology / (), –, .
Craigo-Snell, “Command Performance,” .
lines of dialogue to themselves again and again until they condition their
tongue muscles to a point of absolute obedience—and so gain total freedom.
Compared with Wells, however, she focuses on performance rather than on
rehearsal, contending that interpretation is not just part of the rehearsal but
continues in the performance because performing itself inuences and alters
the company’s view of the play and that each performance contributes to the
formation of the actor. Her key concepts are doubleness and emptiness for
her claims of holistic, interactive, and communal dimensions of performance.
Doubleness, she argues, can resonate with understanding of performance
that centers on the play between the actual and the imaginary, and between
the real and the mimetic. But performance does not imply that it is deceptive
or inauthentic because our behavior is not entirely our own. Thus, it points
toward the space, uidity, multiplicity, and plasticity of human identity that
performances shape. In a similar way, according to Craigo-Snell, the church
is performing events, interaction, and doubleness of dialectical tensions be-
tween current actions and the ideal, between empirical reality and normative
calling, and between the hidden and the revealed. Christian liturgy must re-
ect the shift from a view of the church as a stable entity toward a view of
the church as dynamic performances of space between the negative and the
double negative: “We are not the ideal we strive to be, yet we are also not not
that ideal.”
Doubleness as a liturgical tension of the church between normative and
descriptive is rooted in the emptiness of the church. Craigo-Snell borrows her
concept of emptiness from Peter Brook’s The Empty Space, where he explains
that “A man walks across this empty space while someone else is watching
him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theater to be engaged.” Craigo-
Snell also nds a clue for her concept of emptiness in Karl Barth, who demands
that the church always remains an empty crater where the bomb of Jesus has
Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church, .
Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church, –.
Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church, .
Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church, .
Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church, –.
Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church, .
Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Atheneum, ), , quoted from Craigo-Snell,
The Empty Church, . Kevin J. Vanhoozer also mentions the same book by Peter Brook
and adds a quotation from John Webster that the church is an empty space in which that
which is mediated is left free to be and act (The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic
Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, ), ).
detonated. The emptiness of the church is discussed in the context of three
sorts of churches: a deadly church, a rough church, and an immediate church.
A deadly church is one where the congregation gathers without any real expec-
tation that they might interact with God during worship. Of course, we come
to church with a certain expectation based on tradition and repetition. But
if there is nothing other than predictable expectation in worship, the church
would be a deadly church.
A rough church means an incarnational one where God gets dirty by be-
ing present in and to the roughest realities of human life. Since God found-
ed the church by inviting us into partnership, human performance must be
part of the church. According to Craigo-Snell, we can foster emptiness, and
our discipline of emptiness might contribute to the conditions in which the
invisible-made-visible could be perceived by others and by ourselves.
An immediate church is the one where emptiness is performed and worship
leaves room for God to reveal Godself, which may disrupt our lives. God is
surprising and we are to be ready in our humility to the surprising newness of
God. Craigo-Snell also relates it to Christ’s empty tomb: “The church of the
Risen Christ began in an empty tomb, and at our best, we are still there.”
Wells nds the importance of rehearsal in his concept of improvisation
whereas Craigo-Snell emphasizes exible freedom of performance with her
concepts of doubleness and emptiness, which is similar to Well’s concept of
improvisation. In both of them, however, the real stress seems to be put on
the anthropological and communal aspects of liturgy: We are actors and per-
formers of worship based on a common understanding of community. Wells,
even when discussing the presence of God, highlights various skills that we
possess as actors such as a skill of politics in encountering God’s glory; a skill
of story-telling in interpreting Scripture; a skill of discernment and patience
in interceding one another; a skill of naming of our own sins in participating
in baptism; and a skill of distribution in partaking of the Lord’s Supper. In
Craigo-Snell’s case, we nd Christological and Pneumatological perspectives
Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church, . For a fuller explanation of Barth’s view of emptiness,
see –.
Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church, .
Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church, .
Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church, –.
Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church, .
Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church, .
Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church, .
Wells, Improvisation, –.
with respect to her concept of emptiness. Yet, while her view of human per-
formance leaves room for emptiness, her understanding of God’s action is stat-
ic: God acts but does not perform because the acts of God do not have the
characteristic of doubleness; God is not repeating an act God has learned from
someone else or been taught by society. In contrast, she focuses on our per-
formance: “Our performance of hope should be a performance of emptiness
expecting the Spirit.” Furthermore, even when mentioning Christ’s crucix-
ion, which alienates us from the rest of the world and creates emptiness, she
holds that we ourselves rst need to be alienated from the cross and have our
long-performed patterns interrupted to engage them. This anthropological
approach seems to be contradictory to her concept of the immediate church
where God is surprisingly new to us, discussed above.
As we arm that liturgy shapes Christian morality, two critical points
must be addressed here. First, both Wells and Craigo-Snell miss the essential
diference between liturgy and theater. It is not we but God who acts and
performs the story of God’s own kingdom in liturgy when God calls and
invites us, laments over our sinfulness and awaits our repentance, proclaims
forgiveness and sacrice, and unites us with Christ. God is the primary and
leading actor and we are the secondary and supporting actors. Interactions
between God and God’s people are living and reciprocal but not symmetrical
since our performance is a limited relection of God’s performance. Or to put it
in a better Reformed paradigm, God is the single actor in whose performance
we perform our virtuous lives as an expression of our gratitude to God in God’s
own drama. That God is the leading or single actor is becoming more crucial
in liturgy, considering that contemporary Reformed believers tend to move to
Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church, . Her view is somewhat similar to Plato’s view of God
and drama. Plato has a critical view on the possibility of representing or imitating a god
(Republic and ) and even human life (Critias, e). Since a god must always be
represented as he is (Republic , a) and is not liable to change (Republic , c-e), a
god must not be deceived by images, words, or signs (Republic .e). As it is extended
to a matter of how to imitate, Plato, on the one hand, accepts actual engagement of the
actors in performing their roles: The individual performers enact their roles partly by ex-
pressing their own characters, partly by imitating those of others (Laws, , d). On the
other hand, Plato points out the substantial limitation of human nature in performing:
Human nature can neither imitate many things well nor do the actions themselves, of
which those imitations are likenesses (Republic .b). Then he admits that imitations
practiced from youth become part of nature and settle into habits of gesture, voice, and
thought (Republic .d).
Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church, .
Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church, .
a low liturgy by wrongly assuming that they are leading actors in worship and
God is an audience.
Second, Wells’ and Craigo-Snell’s emphasis on believers’ performance in lit-
urgy can be appreciated if we understand that the main theme in their writings
is not so much about a theological balance as it is about human ethical virtues.
But precisely because of their emphasis on virtue, the danger of hypocrisy in
liturgy should have been clearly pointed out. In what follows, I will discuss the
critical reality of performers and spectators in theater and in worship, focusing
on The York Corpus Christi Plays and writings of the church Fathers.
Liturgy is Less Than Ethics: Hypocrisy
Natalie Carnes points out that recent theater theologians collapse important
distinctions between persons and their roles, which is seen particularly in their
insistence that actors become their characters. Indeed, a distinction between
actors’ persons and their roles could be natural in theater—no one would se-
riously challenge actors’ performance simply based on their morality in their
real life—but discordance between actors’ person and their roles in liturgy is
one of the most desperate issues in the church. The role we assume in worship
and in the performance of Christ is actually one that discloses and realizes the
truth of one’s person. The issue is more than a discrepancy between our em-
pirical reality and God’s normative calling; the real issue here is self-deceptive
hypocrisy; for we often ignore or even justify our sins and misbehaviors simply
based on our liturgical participation. God cannot endure solemn assemblies
with iniquity. Worship becomes a burden to God when worship is a way of
camouaging and dissimulating our true reality as a person. Hypocrisy is one
Natalie Carnes, “The Mystery of our Existence: Estrangement and Theatricality,” Modern
Theology / (), –, . She continues to summarize ve instances of the
distinction collapsing: () The theater image can be the guiding metaphor as we take it
with the utmost seriousness in living out what we believe, in order to overcome hypoc-
risy; () the body’s movement is an index of the soul, so that the conation between the
inner and outer on the stage of life must neither be an exhaustive humility nor a coun-
terfeit humility; () theatrical performance is a habit by which one practices Christ-like
living in worship in order to become Christ-like, and thus, worship forms character; ()
one can play one’s role regardless of one’s actual status of class; and () we have to resist
our roles when deception of a person-role distinction remains a standing threat (Carnes,
“The Mystery of Our Existence,” –).
Carnes, “The Mystery of Our Existence,” .
Isaiah :.
of the most serious moral issues, an accusation brought by Jesus in Matthew
and by Paul against Peter in Galatians. By attending worship, we commit a
more serious sin of disguise and hypocrisy that could be seen as a profound
root of secularization and corruption of the church everywhere throughout
history.
The rst type of this problem can be found in an actual dramatization of
Christian stories and the Eucharist. The York Corpus Christi Plays were the
most long-lasting and complex form of collective theatrical enterprise in En-
glish theater history. They were played on pageant-waggons, possibly from as
early as , produced by the trade guilds, written by anonymous clerics and
regulated by the civic oligarchy, and lasted until . They begin with some
important stories of the Old Testament such as Creation, the Fall, the Flood,
and Pharaoh, consist mostly of stories of Christ’s life, death and resurrection,
and include the purication and assumption of Mary and the nal judgement.
The York Corpus Christi Plays could be seen as more than a dramatized
performance of Christ’s stories, since they were deeply communal enterpris-
es: They were part of the social, cultural, economic, and political life of the
medieval city. The theme of Corpus Christi was society seen in terms of the
body, when the city York as a single administering body aimed at expressing
social bonds and contributing to social integration. In the scene of Christ’s
entry into Jerusalem, for instance, the city York became Jerusalem where struc-
tures of belief and doctrinal considerations were unimportant. Of course, the
highlight of the Plays was a Catholic tradition of the Eucharist, as we can see
in Cliford Davidson’s explanation, “The feast of Corpus Christi, celebrated
annually on Thursday after Trinity Sunday, was devoted to the Eucharist, and
the normal practice was to have solemn processions through the city with the
Host, the consecrated wafer that was believed to have been transformed into
the true body and blood of Jesus.” Yet, it is the very theatricality that unveils
Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi
Plays (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, ), xv. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doc-
trine, .
Beckwith, Signifying God, xv.
Beckwith, Signifying God, xvi.
Mervyn James, “Ritual, Drama and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town,” Past
and Present (), –, , quoted from Beckwith, Signifying God, .
Beckwith, Signifying God, .
Cliford Davidson, “Introduction,” in The York Corpus Christi Plays, Teams Middle English
Text Series of University of Rochester, http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/ davidson
-york-corpus-christi-plays-introduction
one of the most controversial issues of the Catholic tradition of the Eucharist,
as Beckwith writes:
Sacramental theater: the very term introduces itself as oxymoron. That
the central sacrament, the body of Christ in the mass, was theater con-
stituted the very bases of the searching and vituperative polemics of re-
form. … All historians of the mass stress the extent to which it became a
clerical celebration observed by onlookers, in which consecration, not
communion, was understood to be the most important moment. That
visual theophany, that moment of turning, crucial yet not apparent, is
more important than the communion of the faithful.
Beckwith also discusses the concept of transubstantia and the relation between
sign and reality of the plays. Yet, it may not be fair to say that the Catholic the-
ology of the Eucharist in general can generate a sharp distinction between the
Eucharist and participants in it because it also views the faith of participants
and the work of the Holy Spirit as key components of the mystical union in the
Eucharist. But a theology of ex opere operato and the practice of consecration
by the actor, the priest, as Beckwith points out above, could make us raise a
question of the theatricality of liturgy that we deal with here: Are we truly
participating in liturgy or simply spectators? Vanhoozer agrees with Beckwith
in claiming that the Puritans’ anti-theatrical mind-set was no doubt inuenced
by the Reformers’ earlier criticism that the Mass had become mere theater.
Martin Luther objected to Corpus Christi Plays in Germany on doctrinal
grounds, even though he admits that dramatization of biblical stories could
help ordinary people understand Scripture in an age of signicant illiteracy
and appreciated its educational and evangelical benet. Luther condemned
the practice of Eucharistic processions of the plays because he believed that
they turned Christ’s Passion into a spectacle. Calvin also pointed out the
problem of Catholic practice of the Sacraments through his analogy of theater,
as he discussed the importance of the word:
Beckwith, Signifying God, -, Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, .
Summa Theologica .., .
Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, .
Andreas Loewe, “Proclaiming the Passion: Popular Drama and the Passion Tradition in
Luther’s Germany,” Reformation and Renaissance Review /- (), –, .
Loewe, “Proclaiming the Passion,” –.
Loewe, “Proclaiming the Passion,” .
Loewe, “Proclaiming the Passion,” .
But if those visions … require to be animated by the word, then they
who obtrude signs, invented at the will of men, upon the Church, exhibit
nothing else than the empty pomps of a profane theatre. Just as in the
Papacy, those things which are called sacraments, are lifeless phantoms
which draw away deluded souls from the true God.
Yet, what he sees here is not an actual dramatization but an analogy of liturgy
to theater. This leads us to the second point of this section.
The danger of hypocrisy of theater and the church was metaphorically
addressed by Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa. Augustine’s view is straight-
forward as he writes in his On Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount according to
Matthew:
For hypocrites are pretenders, as it were setters forth of other characters,
just as in the plays of the theatre. For he who acts the part of Agamemnon
in tragedy, for example, or of any other person belonging to the history
or legend which is acted, is not really the person himself, but personates
him, and is called a hypocrite. In like manner, in the Church, or in any
phase of human life, whoever wishes to seem what he is not is a hypo-
crite. For he pretends, but does not show himself, to be a righteous man;
because he places the whole fruit [of his acting] in the praise of men,
which even pretenders may receive, while they deceive those to whom
they seem good, and are praised by them.
Here, Augustine associates plays of the theater with a character of hypocrisy
and includes the church as one where pretenders wish to seem what they are
not. Augustine’s concern, following Christ’s sermon in Matthew :, is to dis-
tinguish those who give alms in order to seem virtuous from those who give be-
cause they are virtuous. In his homily on verse :, where Christ admonishes
hypocrites who see the speck in the neighbor’s eye, not seeing the log in their
own eye, Augustine sees hypocrites as those who conceal under a mask what
John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentaries, volumes, Calvin Translation Society (Grand Rap-
ids: Eerdmans, f), Commentary on Genesis :.
Carnes, “The Mysteries of Our Existence,” –.
Augustine, De sermone domini in monte secundum Matthaeum, ..; On Our Lord’s Ser-
mon on the Mount according to Matthew (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series , Vol.
( ), ed. Philip Schaf) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), .
Carnes, “The Mysteries of Our Existence,” .
they are and show themselves of in a mask what they are not, and concludes
that the church as the spouse of Christ must not have spot of a double heart.
Gregory of Nyssa’s analogy of theater and Christian life and spirituality is
more critical yet more nuanced than Augustine’s. He argues that hypocrisy is
the most serious sin of all the evils because it is hidden. Hypocrites with their
secret sickness are like dogs whose fury is not signaled by a warning bark or a
direct assault, but which in a gentle and quiet posture watch for our incautions
and unthinking moment. When he discusses pride and poverty in his Homily
on Matthew :, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Gregory of Nyssa rst declares
the qualitative distinction between God and human beings: The divinity alone
is blessed, imitation is impossible, and blessedness is unattainable for human
life. All the divine attributes exceed the limit of human littleness, but humil-
ity has a natural anity with us, because Christ himself voluntarily takes on
the form of slavery and becomes poor. Thus, “poor in spirit” means “voluntary
humility” for us to imitate. Then, Gregory brings up the issue of pride, which
he diagnoses as a disease preventing us from imitating Christ’s humility. He
laments over those with pride by raising rhetorical questions on the fatal lim-
itation of human nature: “Do you not see at each end the limits of human life,
how it begins and where it ends? … Have you not seen in the burial ground the
mysteries of our existence?” Then he compares the actor’s personality on the
stage to the believers’ pride:
Who will convince those in this condition that they difer not a whit from
those in shows on the stage? These wear a mask artistically crafted and
a purple robe shot with gold, and they proceed in a chariot; and yet no
disease of pride gets into them as a result, but what they were in their dig-
nity before the show, they keep the same state of mind unchanged during
the display, are not upset afterwards when they get down from the chariot
and take of the costume. Those however who strut on the stage of life …
take into account neither what is shortly before or shortly after, and in just
Augustine, On Our Lord’s Sermon ..– ( .–).
Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Beatitudes, ., Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Be-
atitudes: An English Version with Commentary and Supporting Studies, eds Hubertus R.
Drobner and Albert Viciatno (Leiden: Brill, ), –.
Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Beatitudes, . ().
Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Beatitudes, . ().
Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Beatitudes, ., (-, ).
Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Beatitudes, . ().
Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Beatitudes, .– ().
the same way that bubbles expand as they are blown up, these people
are roundly inated by the loud proclamation of the herald; they plas-
ter over themselves the shape of some other personality, switching the
natural features of the face into something unsmiling and daunting, and
they contrive a harsher voice, one made to resemble an animal in order
to terrify the hearers.
Interestingly, we can see here multiple layers of the relationship between ac-
tors on the stage and believers with pride. On the one hand, they look similar
to each other since they hide their true face. Moreover, human life is also a
performance on the stage of theater since it is a brief show with its beginning
and end. On the other hand, actors on the stage do not have pride as a result
of masking their real personalities whereas we on the stage of life can in pride
mask our human nature with its fatal limitations. Reversed ways of masking
can happen: A face with masks in theater is not masking its true identity as
long as the actor plays her roles on the stage but a face without masks in Chris-
tian life is indeed masking the genuine face of human nature by virtue of pride.
But the essence of Gregory’s claim is that human nature must be reected by
God in Christ who is the actor on the stage of divine drama, and that because
this God lowers Godself to us in humility, the sins of pride and hypocrisy, which
are worse than any other sins, can be more critically viewed through the anal-
ogy of theater where actors seem to understand the fatal temporality of their
performance. Although Augustine and Gregory do not pinpoint the liturgical
hypocrisy, their discussions allude to the fact that liturgy can be something
less than ethics if performers, simply by attending worship, pretend that they
encounter and follow Christ, who unmasks their true faces by taking the form
of a slave.
Conclusive Remarks Referring to Calvin’s View of Theater
Liturgy has moral relevance in two ways: It shapes our morality in its repetition
and in its performance. These two dimensions are the very substance of the dy-
namism of liturgy, as Vanhoozer claims that we go to church to rehearse, to cel-
ebrate, and to better understand the drama of redemption, and we go out from
the church to serve the world, to play our part in the drama of redemption.
Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Beatitudes, . (). Emphasis mine.
Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, .
Worship is the principal practice and discipleship training for Christians, and
at the same time, worship is one unied performance that includes the world
of the whole community, so that strict demarcations between formation, lit-
urgy, and Christian life may be inadequate, even though they are distinctive.
Because of this multi-dimensional and holistic nature of liturgy, it should be
more critically witnessed that liturgy can create the moral and spiritual prob-
lem of hypocrisy.
Craigo-Snell, in fact, discusses the theatrical catharsis—without acting we
feel that we are acting— the passivity of the laity, and the critical reality of
theater that as we move from one mask to another, distancing ourselves from
an ideological mask or all masks, we need to choose better masks. Yet, she fails
to see the more crucial issue of hypocrisy in liturgy. Moral disciplines are all the
more signicant if we can realize that we camouage our true reality in wor-
ship as well as in our life, to which both the divine lamentations and human
confessions are related. The essential nature of liturgy is that precisely because
we cannot stand with our bare reality before God and other humans both in
worship and in our life, we often experience in worship that God laments our
reality, waiting for our confession, and we ought to be divested of our masks.
Thus, a question immediately arises: What would prevent the so-called theater
theologians from engaging in a critical discussion of the issue of hypocrisy? We
may be able to nd a hint from Calvin.
Theater would remind Reformed theologians of Calvin’s view that human
beings are placed in the most glorious theater of the universe as spectators of
God’s works in it, and in this beautiful theater we can nd the rst evidence
that God created all things. The whole world is a theater for the display of
the divine goodness, wisdom, justice and power. In the “Argumentum” of his
Commentary on Genesis, Calvin’s analogy of creation as theater becomes more
vivid: God places humans in the theater of creation where God clothes himself
with the image of the world, since we cannot have true knowledge of God’s
Wells, Improvisation, .
Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church, .
Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church, .
Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church, .
Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church, .
Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (), ed. John T. McNeill; trans. Ford Lewis-
Battles (London: S. C. M. Press, ), .., Commentary on Isaiah :, Commentary on
Acts :.
Calvin, Institutes ...
Calvin, Commentary on Psalm :.
essence. Thus, it is God, not we, who plays as the actor in this theater of cre-
ation on earth, and we are spectators who are asked not to speculate on the
essence of God but to touch God’s works in our hands and to inhale a sweet
fragrance from owers. But in this dazzling theater, according to Calvin, one
out of hundred is scarcely a true spectator of God’s glory, since we in our fallen
nature are struck blind. Theater as an image of God’s creation should be a
place for God’s glory to be performed, but the performance in this theater has
a twofold limitation: () God performs God’s glory in creation, but what is per-
formed in this theater is not identical to the true essence of the actor, and ()
God is the actor on the stage but spectators are blind in understanding God’s
performance.
Calvin’s analogy of creation to theater as revealing the relationship be-
tween the reality and its performance or imitation remains problematic
when it comes to its relevance to ethics. Nature is ethically and aesthetically
neutral or ambiguous in its violence, destruction, sufering, pains, and ug-
liness as well as in its goodness and beauty. It must be admitted that this
moral ambiguity is a harsh reality that is hidden in our spiritual and episte-
mological blindness as spectators, because of which a doubt about God, the
actor on the stage of nature, can be raised. Now, it can be seen that anoth-
er feature of theatricality is the moral ambiguity of performance. It is not
realistic that the actors should be ethically identical to what they perform
and that spectators can be morally transformed simply by beholding actors’
performance.
The genuine relevance of theater to ethics can be found in Calvin’s use of
theater as an image of the church. According to Calvin, divine goodness is pri-
marily displayed in the church, because God selected the church as the great
theater where his fatherly care may be manifested. “Shall not the Lord mani-
fest himself to be far more wonderful in enlarging and multiplying the Church,
Calvin, “Argumentum” in Commentary on Genesis.
Calvin extends his view of spectators to one enjoying the multiplied abundance and
variety of good things which are presented in this theater in his Commentary on Psalm
:. Viewing a theater as a place where the spectators passively behold God’s work,
Calvin asks us to exercise ourselves in praising the liberality of God and enjoying the rich-
es of heaven and earth in this theater in his Commentary on Acts :.
Calvin, Institutes ... The same idea can be seen in Calvin’s Institutes .., Commentary
on Psalm :, Commentary on Corinthians :.
Alister McGrath, The Passionate Intellect: Christian Faith and the Discipleship of the Mind
(Downers Grove: , ), .
Calvin, Commentary on Psalm :.
which is the principal theater of his glory?” Thus, unlike the common view of
Calvin’s use of theater that creation is the theater of God’s glory, the primary
theater in Calvin is the church, where Christ reveals the true image of God. In
his argumentum where creation is viewed as theater, Calvin argues:
Nothing shall we nd, I say above or below, which can raise us up to God,
until Christ shall have instructed us in his own school. Yet this cannot be
done unless we, having emerged out of the lowest depths, are borne up
above all heavens, in the chariot of his cross. … For Christ is that image
of God in which God presents to our view, not only his heart but also his
hands and his feet. … But the human race has been preserved by God in
such a manner as to manifest his special care for his Church. … From this
point he not only related continuously the singular Providence of God in
governing and preserving the Church, but also commends to us the true
worship of God; teaches … and exhorts us … to constancy in enduring
the cross.
God preserves the human race by caring for the church where Christ on his
cross reveals God’s heart, hands, and feet, and God by governing and preserving
the church commends to us the true worship of God in which God teaches
and exhorts us to endure the cross. Thus, on the one hand, the church is the
real theater where God is the actor who protects us and reveals his wonderful
power and love. On the other hand, in this distinctive theater, we can be lifted
up by the chariot of the cross and worship God by following Christ’s cross. The
genuine theatricality of liturgy and its ethical relevance can be found here in
Christ’s crucixion.
This gives us two important aspects of liturgy which theater theologians
may not be keenly aware of: () God in Christ through the Spirit is the true ac-
tor and () we are actors but our actions are limited reections of God’s actions.
These two dimensions are mysteriously met in Christ, who is unique among
all humans and at the same time genuinely in and with us in his incarnation,
crucixion, and resurrection. Nicholas Wolterstorf claims that two diferent
actions constitute the liturgy: Proclamation as God’s action and worship as
our actions. Of course, worship includes our actions of praises, prayers, and
Calvin, Commentary on Isaiah :.
Calvin, “Argumentum,” Commentary on Genesis.
Calvin, Commentary on Psalm :.
Nicholas Wolterstorf, Hearing the Call: Liturgy, Justice, Church, and World, eds Mark R.
Gornik and Gregory Thompson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), .
confessions that are active and constitutive. Yet, there must be a qualitative
distinction between God’s actions and our actions since our actions are limited
commemorations and reections of God’s action. Liturgy can be ethical when
it is grounded on the mystery of this twofold Christian existence.
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Liturgy in Practices
© Koninklijke Brill NV, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004356528_007
Liturgy and Justice
Nicholas Wolterstorf
The linkages between Christian liturgical enactments on the one hand, and
justice and injustice on the other, are multiple. The connection most often
discussed is the potential of liturgical enactments for the formation of just
persons: if the liturgical assembly itself manifests justice, and if God’s love
of justice is clearly presented in readings, sermons, and hymns, then the
participants are formed into acting justly outside the assembly as well as within.
Another connection, one that I have myself explored in some of my writ-
ings, is the connection highlighted by the prophetic literature of the Old Testa-
ment/Hebrew Bible: a condition of liturgical enactments being acceptable to
God is that the participants be committed to acting justly in their daily lives.
About these two ways in which participation in liturgical enactments can
be formative of just persons I have nothing more to say than what I and oth-
ers have already said. So in this essay I propose exploring a diferent relation
between Christian liturgical enactments and justice and injustice. I propose
exploring the presence within Christian liturgical enactments of justice and in-
justice. I will briey identify a number of diferent ways in which justice and
injustice are present; and I will then devote the bulk of the essay to discussing,
in some detail, one of the ways in which injustice is present.
I cannot assume a shared understanding of justice; so let me preface my
discussion with a very brief explanation of how I understand justice. Many
people, when they hear the word “justice,” think of meting out punishment.
Justice, in their mind, consists of justice in punishment. In the discussion
that follows I will not be talking about justice in punishment; I will instead
be talking about rst-order justice. First-order justice is exhibited in how the
members of society treat each other, specically, in whether or not they treat
each other justly: whether merchants treat clients justly and whether clients
treat merchants justly, whether teachers treat students justly and whether stu-
dents treat teachers justly, and so forth. Corrective or second-order justice in the
See my essay, “Justice as a Condition of Authentic Liturgy,” in Nicholas Wolterstorf, Hearing
the Call: Liturgy, Justice, Church, and World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), –.
In previous writings of mine I used the term “primary justice” for this form of justice. I think
the term “rst-order justice” is better.
form of punishment, reparations, etc. becomes relevant when there has been
a breakdown in rst-order justice, when someone has wronged someone. Cor-
rective or second-order justice presupposes rst-order justice; if there were no
such thing as rst-order justice, or if there were but there were no breakdowns
in it, then there would be no occasion for corrective or second-order justice in
general, nor for punishments and reparations in particular. So rst-order jus-
tice is basic. It is the presence of rst-order justice and injustice in Christian
liturgical enactments that I will be looking at in this essay.
In the Western tradition there are basically two ways of thinking about jus-
tice. One of them comes from Aristotle. Taking for granted that justice pertains
to the distribution of benets and burdens, Aristotle’s thesis was that a distri-
bution of benets and burdens is just if it is equitable. He discussed in some
detail what makes for an equitable distribution; and he argued that his thesis
holds not only for rst-order justice but also for corrective or second-order jus-
tice. Punishment is just if the “harm” imposed on the wrongdoer is roughly
equal to the “harm” that the wrongdoer imposed on his victim.
The other traditional way of thinking about justice comes from the late Ro-
man jurist Ulpian. Justice, said Ulpian, consists of rendering to each what is his
or her jus—that is, what is his or her right or due. Justice consists of rendering
to each what is theirs by right, what they have a right to, what is due them. I
favor Ulpian’s understanding of justice for reasons that I have developed in
some detail elsewhere and will refrain from repeating here. Treating someone
justly consists, on my view, of treating them as they have a right to be treated.
Justice is grounded in rights.
The obvious question raised by this way of thinking of justice is, what ac-
counts for someone having a right to being treated a certain way? There are
many ways of being treated to which one does not have a right. What brings
it about that, of the many ways in which Malchus can treat Matilda, she has a
right to being treated in some of those ways and not others? I think the answer
What I call “rst-order justice” has traditionally been called “distributive justice” and what
I call “corrective or second-order justice” has traditionally been called “retributive justice.” I
avoid the term “distributive” because I do not think that all instances of rst-order injustice
are instances of maldistribution of benets and burdens; it seems to me grotesque to say that
what is wrong about rape is that benets and burdens are distributed inequitably. I avoid the
term “retributive” because I interpret Jesus and Paul as teaching that we are not to engage in
retribution. Retribution is getting even, paying back, evening things up. Jesus and Paul say
that we are not to pay back evil with evil but that we are instead to answer evil (harm) with
good. Punishment is not to be understood, or undertaken, as retribution.
See my Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ).
to this question is to be found in two facts about Matilda: the fact that she
has worth, worth of many diferent sorts—the worth she has intrinsically as
a human being, the worth she has on account of her accomplishments, etc.—
and the fact that she can be treated in ways that do or do not bet her worth.
Matilda has a right to be treated by Malchus as bets her worth. Rights, so
understood, are correlative with duties: if Matilda has the right to be treated
by Malchus in a certain way, then Malchus has the duty to treat her that way,
and conversely.
Ways in Which Justice is Present in Christian Liturgical Enactments
With this all-too-brief explanation of justice in hand, let us take note of some
of the ways in which justice and injustice are present in Christian liturgical en-
actments. In The Holy Eucharist: Rite One of the Episcopal Church, The Great
Thanksgiving begins with the words, spoken by the celebrant, “It is very meet,
right, and our bounden duty, that we should at all times, and in all places, give
thanks unto thee, O Lord, holy Father, almighty, everlasting God.” When the
celebrant says these words, the rst-person plural “we” refers, quite obviously,
not just to the participants in that particular enactment, nor just to Christians,
but to human beings in general: “It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty
as human beings that we should at all times.”
The declaration that it is our duty as human beings to give thanks to God
was not original to this particular Episcopal rite. It occurs often in the eucha-
ristic prayers collected by Lucien Deiss in Springtime of the Liturgy and in
those collected by Jasper and Cuming in Prayers of the Eucharist: Early and
Reformed. The words used to express the idea vary somewhat. Often the En-
glish translation of the words used are those of the Episcopal liturgy: “bounden
duty,” or just “duty.” In four of the prayers collected by Deiss the English trans-
lation of the words used is “right and just.” In more than fteen of the prayers
in Jasper and Cuming the English translation of the words used is “tting and
right” (this is their translation of the words that Deiss translates as “right and
just”). Sometimes the word “truly” is added for emphasis: “it is truly tting
and right.” In some liturgies the declaration is repeated, sometimes with the
Lucien Deiss, Springtime of the Liturgy (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, ).
R.C.D. Jasper and G.J. Cuming, Prayers of the Eucharist: Early and Reformed (New York: Pueblo
Publishing Company, ).
Deiss, Springtime, , , , and .
Jasper and Cuming, Prayers, , , , .
very same words, “tting and right, tting and right,” sometimes with syn-
onyms, “tting and right, just and right.” The Egyptian anaphora of St. Ba-
sil (fourth century) is particularly emphatic: “it is tting and right, tting and
right, truly it is tting and right.”
It is, of course, good and desirable that we human beings give thanks to God.
But that is not what these liturgies are declaring. They are declaring that it is
our duty to thank God, that it is right for us to do so, that it is not just a good
thing to do but that it is tting.
Now suppose my claim is correct, that duties and rights are correlative: if X
has a duty to treat Y in a certain way, then Y has a right to be treated that way
by X, and conversely. Then in declaring that it is our duty to thank God, these
liturgies are implying that God has a right to our thanksgiving. In thanking
God, we are rendering justice to God.
To the best of my knowledge, liturgies have traditionally used the language
of “bounden duty,” “tting and right,” “right and just,” and so forth, only at the
beginning of the great prayer of thanksgiving (the “anaphora,” as it is called
in the East). But if asked, those who used these liturgies would surely have
said that it is also our bounden duty to praise God, to intercede with God, to
confess our sins to God, to listen for God’s speech—in short, to acknowledge
liturgically who God is and what God has done. And that implies, given the
thesis of rights and duties as correlatives, that to participate in some liturgical
enactment is to render justice to God throughout the enactment, not just in
the Eucharist. In the very nature of the case, acknowledging God liturgically is
doing justice. Liturgical enactments are corporate acts of doing justice to God.
“Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name,” said the psalmist (:).
Among the things for which God is to be thanked and praised in Christian
liturgical enactments is God’s commitment and promise to bring about justice
among human beings. So this is a second way in which justice can be present
in liturgical enactments, namely, in the form of recognition by the participants
that God is worthy of worship on account of God’s love of justice. I say that it
Jasper and Cuming, Prayers, f.
Jasper and Cuming, Prayers, , .
Jasper and Cuming, Prayers, .
The Great Prayer of Thanksgiving in The Holy Eucharist: Rite Two of the Episcopal
Church drops the reference to duty: “It is right, and a good and joyful thing, always and
everywhere to give thanks to you, Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.” The term
“right” alludes to duty; if something is the right thing to do, then one ought to do it. But the
allusion is weak; and most people will miss it.
“can be” present in that form. Often it is not. Often all recognition of God’s love
of (rst-order) justice is missing from Christian liturgical enactments.
Some remarks by St. Paul in his rst letter to the Corinthians and by the writ-
er of the New Testament letter of James point to a third way in which justice
can be present in a liturgical enactment—and a way in which injustice can be
present instead. In his letter to the church in Corinth Paul says he has heard
that when they assemble, the well-to-do eat and drink their ll while the poor
are left hungry. One infers that the assemblies of the church in Corinth includ-
ed some sort of potluck, and that the well-to-do arrived and began to eat and
drink before the slaves and servants got of work. Paul uses striking language
in criticizing the behavior of the well-to-do. We can be condent that he re-
garded them as failing in love for their fellow believers. But that is not what he
says. What he says is, “you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate
those who have nothing” (I Cor. :).
The writer of the New Testament Letter of James uses similar language to
condemn the acts of favoritism displayed by the seating arrangements in the
assemblies of those whom he was addressing: rich people were given seats of
honor while the poor were made either to stand or to sit on the oor. God,
says the writer, has “chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be
heirs of the kingdom that he has promised. … But you have dishonored the
poor” (James :-). We can be condent that the writer regarded those who
organized or tolerated such seating arrangements as decient in their love for
the poor. But that is not what he says. What he says is, you have “dishonored”
the poor.
Suppose my suggestion is correct, that treating someone justly consists of
treating him or her as they have a right to be treated. Suppose I am also right
in suggesting that to treat a person as they have a right to be treated is to treat
them as bets their worth. Then Paul and James are both pointing to injustice
in the assemblies. Humiliating someone is a patent case of not treating some-
one as bets their worth, and hence of treating them unjustly. Dishonoring
someone is likewise a patent case of not treating someone as bets their worth,
and hence of treating them unjustly. By virtue of how the participants in litur-
gical enactments treat each other, justice and injustice are present in those
enactments. The assemblies are to be paradigms of justice. Often they are not;
sometimes they fall appallingly short. The point could be developed at length,
with many examples in addition to those described by Paul and by the writer
of the Letter of James.
Yet another way in which justice can be present in a liturgical enactment
is in the ofering of intercessory prayers for justice and for the undoing of in-
justice. The prayers for justice that one nds in traditional liturgies are almost
always generic; no injustices are mentioned. For example, in one of the forms
for the prayers of the people in the Episcopal liturgy the leader bids the people
to pray with these words: “Guide the people of this land, and of all the nations,
in the ways of justice and peace; that we may honor one another and serve the
common good.”
On June , , a prayer service was held in South Africa in which the
prayers for justice were anything but generic; prayers were ofered for the end
of unjust rule in South Africa. The service, held in a church in Hazendal, Ath-
lone, near Cape Town, was called by the South African Council of Churches in
a declaration titled, “A Theological Rationale and a Call to Prayer for the End to
Unjust Rule.” Both the call to prayer and the subsequent prayer service were
the topics of enormous controversy, much of it very angry.
The Injustice at the Heart of the Biblical Story
In the remainder of this essay I will discuss, in some detail, one of the ways
in which injustice is present in Christian liturgical enactments. The rst sen-
tence of the opening chapter of James Cone’s book, The Cross and the Lynching
Tree, is this: “The paradox of a crucied savior lies at the heart of the Christian
story.” The point that Cone develops in the chapter is that the death that lies
at the heart of the Christian story was a death by lynching. Lynchings are ap-
palling episodes of injustice. At the heart of the Christian story is the paradox
of a savior who was the victim of appalling injustice. Jesus had declared, at the
beginning of his public ministry, that he was divinely appointed to proclaim
that justice for the oppressed was on the way (Luke :-). Now he himself
was felled by a perversion of justice.
Death by crucixion was a slow and excruciatingly painful method of ex-
ecution. It was also shameful. In the Roman empire of the time it was re-
served for those whom the ocials regarded as despicable; rebellious slaves
The episode is discussed by the contributors to the collection, When Prayer Makes News,
edited by Allan A. Boesak and Charles Villa-Vicencio (Philadelphia: Westminster Press,
). The volume includes the sermon preached at the service by Allan Boesak.
James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, ), .
Cone, Cross, : “the crucixion was clearly a rst-century lynching.”
The story told by the gospel writers includes other appalling episodes of injustice: the
massacre of the innocents, the beheading of John the Baptist, the stoning of Stephen.
The extreme pain of death by crucixion is well described by Fleming Rutledge, The Cru-
cixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), –.
were commonly executed by crucixion. “You are scum” was the message.
Crucixion “sent an unmistakable signal, ‘Not t to live; not even human’
(damnatio ad bestias, as the Romans puts it—condemned to the death of a
beast).” Crucixion was not only excruciatingly painful but an assault on
human dignity.
All three synoptic gospels report that, in the case of Jesus’ death, mockery
was added to the humiliation inherent in crucixion. Matthew’s report is the
most explicit. In the governor’s headquarters, just before Jesus was led out to
be crucied, the attendant soldiers
stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and after twisting some
thorns into a crown, they put it on his head. They put a reed in his right
hand and knelt before him and mocked him, saying, “Hail, King of the
Jews!” They spat on him, and took the reed and struck him on the head.
After mocking him, they stripped him of the robe and put his own clothes
on him. Then they led him away to crucify him.
This report by Matthew makes it sound as if the mockery was the main thing,
as if the crucixion simply nished of the humiliation of the mockery of Jesus
by the soldiers.
The mockery was continued by onlookers to the crucixion:
Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, “You
who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! If
you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” In the same way the
chief priests also, along with the scribes and elders, were mocking him,
saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel;
let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him.” … The
bandits who were crucied with him also taunted him in the same way.
Behind some of the mockery was hatred. Never has that hatred been more
powerfully expressed in visual art than it was by Hieronymus Bosch in his great
painting, “Christ Carrying the Cross.”
In Judaism, the message of crucixion was diferent from its message in the
empire, not “You are scum” but “You are cursed,” cursed by God and cursed by
Rutledge, Crucixion, .
Matthew :–.
Matthew :–.
The painting hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium.
God’s people: “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree” wrote Paul, quoting
Deuteronomy.
The episode of Jesus falling victim to the appalling injustice of lynching by
crucixion is, of course, part of a larger narrative. Christians confess that this
same Jesus who died by lynching was raised from the dead. Had he not been
raised, he would not have been worshipped as savior. Stories about his baing
sayings and mysterious doings might have been handed on; but it was his res-
urrection that led to his being worshipped as savior. Absent those, there would
have been no Christian church, and hence no Christian liturgy. The connec-
tions that I pointed out earlier in this chapter, between liturgical enactments
on the one hand and justice and injustice on the other are important; but it
was the resurrection of the one who had been lynched that gave birth to Chris-
tian liturgy.
Jesus’ Crucixion in Mainline Liturgies
When Paul instructed the Corinthian Christians to enact a memorial celebra-
tion of Jesus, one might have expected him to say that they were to do so by
incorporating a rehearsal or representation of Jesus’ resurrection. But not so.
They were to enact a memorial whose centerpiece was a rehearsal and imita-
tion of what Jesus did at his last supper, thereby “presenting the Lord’s death
until he comes.” They were to recall his words, “This is my body, broken; this
is my blood, shed.”
In short, whenever the Eucharist is celebrated in a way that is faithful to
Paul’s instructions, the participants are once again confronted with the epi-
sode of lynching by crucixion that Cone rightly describes as lying at the heart
of the Christian story. In his instructions to the Corinthians Paul says that Jesus
was betrayed; he does not say that he sufered death by crucixion, nor does
he speak of him as victim. But his readers would have known all that. In cel-
ebrations of the Eucharist, participants are confronted, each time again, with
Galatians :; Deuteronomy :. Jürgen Moltmann writes, “In Israelite understanding,
someone executed in this way was rejected by his people, cursed amongst the people of
God by the God of the law, and excluded from the covenant of life. … Anyone who, con-
demned y the law as a blasphemer, sufers such a death is accursed and excluded from the
circle of the living and from the fellowship of God.” Quoted in Rutledge, Crucixion, f.
I Corinthians :. The usual translation of the Greek verb katangelloo is “proclaim”
rather than “present.”
an episode that was an appalling perversion of justice: lynching by crucixion
of the one they worship.
When one has a clear picture in mind of Jesus’ manner of death and then
reads mainline present-day Eucharistic liturgies and the earlier ones collected
by Deiss in Springtime of the Liturgy and by Jasper and Cuming in Prayers of
the Eucharist: Early and Reformed, one is struck by how veiled is the presen-
tation of Christ’s death in most of these liturgies. Some do not even mention
his sufering. This is particularly striking in the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving
of the Episcopal Church to which I referred earlier; the priest says, “We now
ofer unto thee [God the Father] the memorial thy Son hath commanded us
to make; having in remembrance his blessed passion and precious death, his
mighty resurrection and glorious ascension.” Not only is there no explicit men-
tion of Jesus’ sufering; the terms “blessed passion,” “precious death,” “mighty
resurrection,” and “glorious ascension,” tend to put all thought of sufering out
of mind. In the anaphora of the Orthodox liturgy there is also no mention of
Jesus’ sufering; the only allusion to his mode of death occurs when the priest
says, “the night he was handed over—or rather surrendered himself for the life
of the world.”
Though most Eucharistic liturgies do include a reference to Jesus’ sufering,
albeit usually very brief and unemphatic, seldom is there a clear indication
that Jesus was the victim of injustice. The contemporary Catholic liturgy is ex-
ceptional in this regard. Early in the prayer the priest says, “On the day before
he was to sufer.” Then later he says, “we ofer to your glorious majesty from
the gifts that you have given us this pure victim, this holy victim, this spotless
victim.” Behind this use of the term “victim” there is an elaborate and contro-
versial liturgical theology. But whatever one thinks of that theology, the sug-
gestion that Jesus was a victim of injustice is unmistakable.
This pales, however, before what we nd in a few of the ancient liturgies.
In one of the anaphoras contained in The Apostolic Constitutions (mid-fourth
century) the presider says,
In one of the six alternatives for the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving the priest says, “On the
night he was handed over to sufering and death.”
The idea that Jesus surrendered himself goes back into some of the ancient liturgies. For
example, the anaphora included in what has come to be known as The Apostolic Tradition
(ca. ) includes the line, “When he [Jesus] was about to surrender himself to voluntary
sufering” (Deiss, Springtime, ). Jesus did not “surrender himself”; he was arrested. It’s
true that he did not resist arrest; but not resisting arrest by the police is not the same as
turning oneself in to the police. And his sufering was not “voluntary.” It’s true that he did
not try to elude his torturers; but he did not volunteer for sufering.
Having brought his entire work to completion, he was betrayed by the
man who was corroded by wickedness, and delivered into the hands of
the impious by the treachery of priests and high priests unworthy of the
name, and of a corrupted people. He sufered painfully at their hands,
endured every kind of ignominy in accordance with your plan, and was
handed over to Pilate, the governor.
He, the Judge, was judged.
He, the Savior, was condemned.
I have noted the fact that most Eucharistic texts give only a very veiled pre-
sentation of Christ’s death; seldom are participants confronted with the grue-
someness of it, the shame, the curse, the injustice. But printed liturgical texts
always fall short of indicating the full extent of what takes place in liturgical
enactments. Usually hymns are sung while the people receive the Eucharistic
elements; it’s likely that, on occasion, some of those hymns ofer a much less
veiled presentation of Jesus’ lynching by crucixion than does the liturgical
text.
Whatever the case throughout the church year, once a year, on Holy/Good
Friday, liturgical participants will usually if not always be confronted with an
unveiled presentation of Jesus’ lynching by crucixion, whether in the liturgi-
cal text, in the hymns sung, or in the sermon preached.
The Orthodox liturgy for Holy Friday describes the crucixion in vivid lan-
guage: he received “blows to his face” (), he was “transxed with nails”
(, ) his side was “pierced with a spear” (), he was “crucied unjustly”
(), “unjust judges dipped their pens in ink” (), “they incurred the guilt
of murder” ().
Here are the opening lines of a few Holy/Good Friday hymns:
Deiss, Springtime, .
In the eucharistic liturgy that was rst printed in the Dutch psalter issued by Peter
Dathenus in and used for many centuries in the Dutch Reformed Church, the ex-
hortation which preceded the eucharistic prayer included these lines: “He was bound that
we might be loosed from our sins, … He sufered innumerable reproaches that we might
never be confounded; … He was innocently condemned to death that we might be acquit-
ted at the judgment seat of God, … He sufered His blessed body to be nailed to the cross
that He might fasten to it the bond written in ordinances that was against us, … and has
humbled Himself unto the very deepest reproach and anguish of hell, in body and soul,
on the tree of the cross” (Psalter Hymnal, l, ). What comes through more clearly
here than the sufering, humiliation, and injustice of Jesus’ crucixion is the theological
interpretation given to those.
Go to dark Gethsemane, all who feel the tempter’s power;
your Redeemer’s conict see, watch with him one bitter hour.
To mock your reign, O dearest Lord, they made a crown of thorns.
Were you there when they crucied my Lord?
O sacred head, now wounded, with grief and shame weighed down.
Alas! And did my Savior bleed,
and did my Sovereign die?
And here are a few lines from a powerful Holy Week sermon preached by Meli-
to of Sardis (second century):
O Israel, why have you committed this unheard-of crime? You have dis-
honored him who dishonored you. … In order to immolate the Lord as
evening came, you prepared for him sharp mails and false witnesses and
ropes and whips and vinegar and gall and sword and pain, as for a ban-
dit who had shed blood. You scourged his body, you set upon his head a
crown of thorns, you bound his kindly hands that had shaped you from
the dust, you gave a drink of gall to the noble mouth that had fed you with
life, and you put your Savior to death during the great feast.
African-American Liturgies
James Cone is an African-American theologian. Born in , he grew up in
Arkansas. In The Cross and the Lynching Tree he describes his Early Church
experience.
During my childhood, I heard a lot about the cross. … We sang about “Cal-
vary,” and asked, “Were you there?”, “down at the cross,” “when they cruci-
ed my Lord.” “Oh! Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.”
These are among the sixteen Good Friday hymns included in Lift Up Your Hearts.
Deiss, Springtime, f. It should be noted that not only does Melito make no mention
of the role of the Roman authorities in the crime; the mockery that he attributes to Israel
was attributed by Matthew to the Roman soldiers. Melito structures his rehearsal of the
events in such a way that it is an accusation of Israel.
… There were more songs, sermons, prayers, and testimonies about the
cross than any other theme. The cross was the foundation on which their
faith was laid.
Cone’s personal experience was typical of African-American Christianity in
general. “Black Christians,” he writes, “sang more songs and preached more
sermons about the cross than any other aspect of Jesus’ ministry.” The cross of
which they sang and spoke was not prettied.
Though wonderful and beautiful, Jesus’ cross was also painful and tragic.
Songs and sermons about the “blood” were stark reminders of the agony
of Jesus’ crucixion—the symbol of the physical and mental sufering he
endured as “dey whupped him up de hill” and “crowned him wid a thorny
crown.” Blacks told the story of Jesus’ Passion, as if they were at Golgotha
sufering with him. “Were you there when dey crucied my Lord?” “Dey
nailed him to de cross”; “dey pierced him in de side”; and “de blood came
twinklin’ down.”
And when blacks celebrated “‘Holy Communion,’ (they) raised their voices
to acknowledge ‘a fountain lled with blood,’ ‘drawn from Immanuel’s veins’;
‘blood,’ they believed, ‘will never lose its power,’ because ‘there is power in the
blood,’ and ‘nothing but the blood.’”
Poor little Jesus boy, made him be born in a manger.
World treated him so mean,
Treats me mean too. …
Dey whipped Him up an’ dey whipped Him down,
Dey whipped dat man all ovah town.
Look-a how they done muh Lawd.
I was there when they nailed him to the cross.
Oh! How it makes me sadder, sadder,
When I think how they nailed him to the cross.
Cone, Cross, .
Cone, Cross, .
Cone, Cross, f.
Cone, Cross, .
I was there when they took him down …
Oh! How it makes my spirit tremble,
When I recalls how they took him down.
Why was Jesus’ crucixion so prominent in African-American singing and
preaching, and why was its agony, humiliation, and injustice so sharply in
view? Cone’s explanation is that it was because the daily experience of black
people led them to identify with Jesus in his sufering, humiliation, and victim-
ization. They
identied with Jesus’ rejection in Jerusalem, his agony in the Garden of
Gethsemane, and his sufering on the cross of Calvary. Like Jesus, who
prayed to his Father to “let this cup pass from me” (Mt. :), blacks
also prayed to God to take away the bitter cups of slavery, segregation,
and lynching. Just as Jesus cried from the cross, “My God, my God, why
hast thou forsaken me?” many lynched victims made similar outbursts of
despair to God before they took their last breath, hoping for divine inter-
vention that did not come.
“Blacks told the story of Jesus’ Passion, as if they were at Golgotha sufering
with him.” Ministers “preached sermons about Jesus’ crucixion, as if they
were telling the story of black people’s tragedy and triumph in America. The
symbol of the cross spoke to the lives of blacks because the likeness between
the cross and the lynching tree created an eerie feeling of mystery and the su-
pernatural. Like Jesus, blacks knew torture and abandonment.” Cone contin-
ues: “Black ministers preached about Jesus’ death more than any other theme
because they saw in Jesus’ sufering and persecution a parallel to their own
encounter with slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree.”
“No matter what songs they sang,” writes Cone, “they infused them with
their own experience of sufering and transformed what they received into
their own. ‘Jesus Keep Me near the Cross,’ ‘Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone?’
and other white Protestant evangelical hymns did not sound or feel the same
when blacks and whites sang them.”
Cone, Cross, .
Cone, Cross, f.
Cone, Cross, f.
Cone, Cross, .
Cone, Cross, .
Cone, Cross, f.
An additional note must immediately be added. Those who identied with
Jesus in his lynching by crucixion never lost sight of the fact that this same
Jesus had been raised from the dead and had conquered injustice and death.
His claim, that he had been divinely anointed to proclaim that justice for the
oppressed was imminent, had been vindicated in the most astonishing way.
That gave black people hope that they too would somehow be “raised up.”
That God could “make a way out of no way” in Jesus’ cross was … pro-
foundly real in the souls of black folk. Enslaved blacks who rst heard the
gospel message seized on the power of the cross. Christ crucied mani-
fested God’s loving and liberating presence in the contradictions of black
life—that transcendent presence in the lives of black Christians that em-
powered them to believe that ultimately in God’s eschatological future,
they would not be defeated by the “troubles of this world,” no matter how
great and painful their sufering.
“The dialectic of sorrow and joy, despair and hope was central in the black
experience.”
My burden’s so heavy, I can’t hardly see,
Seems like everybody down on me.
An’ that’s all right, I don’t worry, oh, there will be a better day,
The sun’s gonna shine on my backdoor some day.
Implicit in the liturgical enactments of black people that Cone describes was
liberation Christology: by his crucixion and resurrection Christ is changing
the social order, liberating human beings from the grip of oppression and in-
justice. Implicit in the liturgical enactments of most North American white
people is atonement Christology: by his crucixion and resurrection Christ has
atoned for our personal sins. Experience shapes Christology. The lyrics of the
enormously popular hymn, “Amazing Grace,” were composed by John Newton,
converted slave trader. The grace of which Newton wrote was the grace “That
saved a wretch like me,” not the grace that saves from oppression. Grace for
wrongdoers, not for victims.
But though the resurrection was never out of mind, it was the cross and not
the empty tomb that was central in African-American singing and preaching.
Cone, Cross, .
Cone, Cross, .
Black spiritual, quoted in Cone, Cross, .
“The resurrected Lord was the crucied Lord.” For it was in the cross of Jesus
that black people heard a “message of justice in the midst of powerlessness,
sufering, and death.” The African-American theologian, Shawn Copeland,
explains the African-American spirituals like this:
If the makers of the spirituals gloried in singing of the cross of Jesus, it
was not because they were masochistic and enjoyed sufering. Rather, the
enslaved Africans sang because they saw on the rugged wooden planks
One who had endured what was their daily portion. The cross was trea-
sured because it enthroned the One who went all the way with them and
for them. The enslaved African sang because they saw the results of the
cross—triumph over the principalities and powers of death, triumph
over evil in this world.
A parenthetical note: The Gospel of Matthew reports that the Roman soldiers
compelled “a man from Cyrene named Simon” to carry Jesus’ cross (:).
A traditional view in the African-American community was that Simon was
black; he was commonly called “Black Simon.” That led African-Americans to
identify with Simon as well as with Jesus. In a sermon that Martin Luther King
Jr. preached in he said,
I think one day God will remember that it was a black man that helped
His son in the darkest and most desperate moment of his life. … It was a
black man who picked up that cross for him and who took that cross on
up to Calvary. God will remember this. And in all our struggles for peace
and security, freedom and human dignity, one day God will remember
that it was a black man who aided his only-begotten son in the darkest
hour of his life.
The African-American poet James Weldon Johnson wrote:
Up Golgotha’s rugged road
I see my Jesus go.
I see him sink beneath the load,
I see my drooping Jesus sink.
Cone, Cross, .
Cone, Cross, .
Quoted in Cone, Cross, f.
Quoted by Cone, Cross, .
And then they laid hold on Simon,
Black Simon, yes, black Simon;
They put the cross on Simon,
And Simon bore the cross.
Identication
Cone’s explanation, of why a sharp focus on the horror of Jesus’ crucixion
has been so prominent in African-American liturgical enactments, is that the
experience of black people led them to identify with Jesus in his sufering and
humiliation as a victim of injustice. There are white people around the world
who also identify with Jesus in that way. There are some in our society who do;
one thinks immediately of certain prisoners. But most white people in our so-
ciety do not; I include myself. To this should be added that a person who does
not identify with Jesus in his humiliation as a victim of injustice might none-
theless identify with him in his sufering; some cancer patients, for example,
might identify with Jesus in that way.
Identication is mysterious; I don’t understand it very well. But let me say
a few things about it. In his Life of Christ the German Carthusian, Ludolph of
Saxony (ca. –), urged his readers to imagine, as vividly as possible,
events in the life of Jesus. “Make present to yourself how he spoke and went
about with his disciples and with sinners, how he speaks and preaches, how he
walks and rests, sleeps and watches, eats and performs miracles.”
Many of the African-American songs about the cross represent extraordi-
nary feats of the sort of visual and auditory imagination that Ludolph urges.
Jesus, my darling Jesus,
Groaning as the blood came spurting from his wound.
Oh, look how they done my Jesus.
O see my Jesus hangin’ high!
He look so pale an’ bleed so free.
Cone, Cross, .
Quoted in Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, ), .
Cone, Cross, .
And another:
Oh, dey whupped him up de hill, up de hill, up de hill,
Oh, dey whupped him up de hill, an’ he never said a mumbalin’ word. …
Oh, dey crowned him wid a thorny crown, thorny crown, crown o’ thorns,
Oh, dey crowned him wid a thorny crown, an’ he never said a mumbalin’
word. …
Well, dey nailed him to de cross, to de cross, to de cross,
Well, dey nailed him to de cross, an’ he never said a mumbalin word. …
Well, dey pierced him in de side, in de side, in de side,
Well, they pieced him in de side, an’ he never said a mumbalin’ word. …
Well, de blood came twinklin’ down, twinklin’ down, twinklin’ down,
Well, de blood came twinklin’ down, an’ he never said a mumbalin’ word,
Well, de blood came twinklin’ down, an’ he never said a mumbalin’ word,
Den he hung his head an’ he died.
Often the temporal distance between the singer and the crucixion is col-
lapsed in African-American songs. The singer imagines that she was there: “I
was there when they nailed him to the cross”; “I was there when they took him
down.” Or she employs the liturgical present tense and imagines that the cru-
cixion is happening now.
But one can do what Ludolph urged, namely, vividly imagine the crucix-
ion, without identifying with Jesus in what he underwent. Identication re-
quires imagination; but there’s more to identifying with Jesus in his sufering
than vividly imagining his sufering. One can vividly imagine the sufering of
someone with whom one does not identify. Those who sing the Holy/Good Fri-
day hymns whose rst lines I quoted may, when singing, quite vividly imagine
Jesus’ sufering; but most of them do not identify with Jesus in his sufering.
One never just identies with someone; one identies with someone in
some respect. We are considering those who identify with Jesus in respect to
his sufering, humiliation, and victimization. Black persons who identify with
Jesus in these respects believe that there is a deep similarity between what was
done to Jesus and what has been done to them. They believe, for example, that
James Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, ), f.
just as Jesus was whipped, they have been whipped, and that just as they have
been whipped, Jesus was whipped. The belief of black people that Jesus and
they are alike in this respect is a condition of their identication with Jesus as
one who was whipped.
But there is more to identication than this sort of belief-that. What also
enters into the identication of black people with Jesus, in respect to Jesus’
experience of being whipped, is that they know rst-hand what it’s like to be
whipped. They know what it is like because they have had the experience of
being whipped or of watching others being whipped. They have experiential
acquaintance with what it is like to be whipped – knowledge by acquaintance.
“I can identify with Jesus,” the black person says; “because I know what it’s like
to be whipped.” Those who have neither been whipped nor seen someone
being whipped don’t know what it’s like to be whipped. Experiential acquain-
tance with what it’s like is an indispensable component of identication.
This still falls short of actually identifying with Jesus in his experience of
being whipped. It’s a condition of actually identifying; but not yet the thing
itself. What is the thing itself? I’m not sure. But it appears to me that two addi-
tional things must be present. To identify with Jesus in his experience of being
whipped, one must not only believe that Jesus’ experience and one’s own ex-
perience are similar; one must actively see or regard the experience of Jesus as
like one’s own experience and see or regard one’s own experience as like Jesus’
experience. The general phenomenon of which this is an example is that of
seeing or regarding something as so-and-so: seeing the tilt of someone’s hat as
a sign of arrogance, for example. Not just believing that it is a sign of arrogance,
but seeing it as a sign of arrogance. In the absence of seeing or regarding Jesus’
experience as like one’s own and seeing or regarding one’s own experience as
like Jesus’, there is no identication.
The second thing that must be present, so it appears to me, is emotional
bonding in the form of empathy. Identifying with Jesus in his experience of
being whipped requires that one empathize with Jesus in this respect. From
their songs, it’s clear that African Americans did that.
Above I made the point that one can vividly imagine the crucixion as
Ludolph urges without identifying with Jesus in his sufering. Let me close this
section by noting that vividly imagining the crucixion may lead one to em-
pathize with Jesus in his sufering even though one does not, strictly speaking,
identify with him. I am thinking here of what the pilgrim Egeria reports about
Cone quotes the black historian Lerone Bennett, as saying that black people knew “at the
deepest level … what it was like to be crucied” (Cross, ).
the liturgical enactments that she encountered in Jerusalem. She reports that
in the regular Sunday liturgy the bishop would take “the Gospel book” and read
“the account of the Lord’s resurrection.” As he begins to read, “the whole as-
sembly groans and laments at all the Lord underwent for us, and the way they
weep would move even the hardest heart to tears.” A bit later she describes
the Good Friday liturgy, held on the site reputed to be Gethsemane: “When
everyone arrives at Gethsemane, they have an appropriate prayer, a hymn, and
then a reading from the Gospel about the Lord’s arrest. By the time it has been
read everyone is groaning and lamenting and weeping so loud that people
even across in the city can probably hear it all.”
Does It Matter?
There are many people in situations of oppression around the world, both
Christians and non-Christians, who can identify with Jesus as a tortured,
humiliated, and accursed victim of injustice; Cone’s description of the experience
of African-Americans speaks to the experience of these oppressed people. I, along
with most readers of this essay, cannot identify with Jesus in that way. Nothing
in our experience enables us to do so. The weekly liturgical enactments in which
we participate could, nonetheless, “proclaim” Christ’s death as the gruesome,
ignominious, and accursed perversion of justice that it was. But they do not.
They veil it from us. James Cone remarks, “The cross has been transformed into
a harmless, non-ofensive ornament that Christians wear around their necks.”
Does that matter? Wasn’t it a matter of happenstance that Jesus’ death was
a gruesome, humiliating, and accursed perversion of justice? Isn’t the manner
of his death irrelevant? Could he not just as well have died in some other way?
Isn’t the fact that he died for us the important thing, not how he died? What’s
wrong with speaking of “his blessed passion and precious death” and letting it
go at that?
From the translation in Lester Ruth, Carrie Steenwyk, and John D. Witvliet, Walking
Where Jesus Walked: Worship in Fourth-Century Jerusalem (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
), §., .
In Ruth, Steenwyk, and Witvliet, Walking, §., . Describing the response of the peo-
ple to the readings at a point later in the Good Friday liturgy Egeria says, “It is impressive
to see the way all the people are moved by these readings, and how they mourn, You could
hardly believe how every single one of them weeps during the three hours, old and young
alike, because of the manner in which the Lord sufered for us” (Walking, §., ).
Cone, Cross, .
Cone also remarks, “during the course of , years of Christian history,
this symbol of salvation [the cross] has been detached from any reference to
the ongoing sufering and oppression of human beings—those whom Ignacio
Ellacuría, the Salvadoran martyr, called ‘the crucied people of history.’” As I
noted earlier, the Christology implicit in the liturgical enactments of most North
American white people is atonement Christology, not liberation theology: Jesus
came to save sinners, not to liberate the oppressed. Does that matter? One can
understand why black churches favored liberation Christology. Does it matter
that atonement christology speaks more to us than liberation Christology?
The massive treatise on the crucixion by Fleming Rutledge, The Crucix-
ion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, can be read as an extended answer
to this question. Rutledge identies and discusses a number of distinct “motifs”
in the New Testament and subsequent theology concerning the crucixion of
Jesus, that is, a number of distinct angles or perspectives on the crucixion,
a number of diferent ways of understanding it. Each of the aspects of Jesus’
death that I have highlighted—excruciating, humiliating, accursed, a perver-
sion of justice—is intrinsic to one or more of these motifs.
The Godlessness of the Cross motif: Isaiah foretold the abandonment that
Jesus experienced in his sufering and humiliation.
He was despised and rejected by others;
a man of sufering and acquainted with inrmity;
and as one from whom others hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him of no account. …
He was wounded for our transgressions,
crushed for our iniquities,
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
and by his bruises we are healed.
The Substitution motif: by being cursed, Jesus delivered us from the curse.
Cone, Cross, .
+ pages.
Rutledge discusses The Godlessness of the Cross motif in Crucixion, ch. .
Isaiah :–.
Rutledge discusses The Substitution motif in Crucixion, ch. .
All who rely on the works of the law are under a curse; for it is written,
“Cursed I everyone who does not observe and obey all the things written
in the book of the law. … Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by
becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs
on a tree.”
The Christus Victor motif: by sufering gross injustice but then not remaining
dead, as the authorities intended and expected, but rising from the dead, Jesus
conquered the powers of deceit, oppression, and injustice that have society in
their grip and liberated us: “He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a
public example of them, triumphing over them” (Colossians :).
When the liturgy veils from participants the gruesome, demeaning, and ac-
cursed perversion of justice that Jesus underwent, it veils from them what is
intrinsic to the New Testament understanding of the meaning of Jesus’ cruci-
xion and subsequent resurrection. And when the implicit Christology is only
atonement Christology and not also liberation theology, it fails to incorporate
one of the central motifs in the New Testament concerning the signicance of
Jesus’ crucixion and resurrection, the Christus Victor motif.
Something more happens to liturgical participants when the horror of Jesus’
crucixion is veiled and Christ’s work as liberator is ignored. Not only is their
perception of the reality of what happened blurred and their theological under-
standing impaired. The possibility of a certain moral formation is foreclosed.
The participant who sees clearly that the one he worships is one whose
death was a horric, ignominious, and accursed perversion of justice will not
be dazzled by power and prestige. How could he be? It’s not those with power
and prestige who resemble the one he worships but those who are demeaned
and downtrodden. When he sees one of those, he sees someone who resem-
bles Jesus. He will act accordingly.
Galatians :–.
It was Paul’s thought that wrongdoing is not to be attributed solely to the actions of in-
dividual human beings but that society and its members are in the grip of strange forces
that press us into evildoing. It’s those forces that he is referring to with the terms “rulers”
and “authorities.” In other passages he calls them “principalities,” “powers,” “thrones,” and
“dominions.” The classic discussion of this aspect of Paul’s thought is Hendrikus Berkhof,
Christ and the Powers (Scottdale: Herald Press, ).
Rutledge discusses the Christus Victor motif in Crucixion, ch. . The term “Christus
Victor“ was introduced by the Swedish bishop Gustav Aulén in his enormously inuential
Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement,
trans. A.G. Herber (London: , ).
Bibliography
Aulén, Gustav, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of
the Atonement, trans. A.G. Herber (London: , 1931).
Balthasar, Hans Urs von, The Glory of the Lord, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982).
Berkhof, Hendrikus, Christ and the Powers (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1962).
Boesak, Allan A.; Charles Villa-Vicencio (eds), When Prayer Makes News (Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1986).
Cone, James, The Spirituals and the Blues (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1991).
Cone, James, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2011).
Deiss, Lucien, Springtime of the Liturgy (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1979).
Jasper, R.C.D.; G.J. Cuming, Prayers of the Eucharist: Early and Reformed (New York:
Pueblo Publishing Company, 1965).
Ruth, Lester; Carrie Steenwyk; John D. Witvliet, Walking Where Jesus Walked: Worship in
Fourth-Century Jerusalem (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).
Rutledge, Fleming, The Crucixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015).
Wolterstorf, Nicholas, “Justice as a Condition of Authentic Liturgy,” in Nicholas Wol-
terstorf, Hearing the Call: Liturgy, Justice, Church, and World (Grand Rapids: Eerd-
mans, 2011), 39–58.
Wolterstorf, Nicholas, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2008).
© Koninklijke Brill NV, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004356528_008
Eucharist and the Ethics of Sacrice
and Self-Giving
Ofertory Exemplied
Bernd Wannenwetsch
The ofering of the gifts of the faithful at the altar was widespread in all major
traditions of the Western and Eastern church as a liturgical act in its own right,
a station of the Early Church’s Eucharistic worship. What knowledge we have
of the ancient ofertory rite we owe to studies of gures like the Jesuit liturgist
Josef Andreas Jungmann and the Anglican Benedictine Gregory Dix. Their
archaeological work in the eld of early liturgy was undertaken in a reforming
spirit: to help the churches of their day reconnect with the rich ritual traditions
that they had lost touch with and regain a sense of what Dix called the “shape”
of the Eucharistic liturgy.
Josef A. Jungmann, Vom Sinn derMesse als Opfer der Gemeinschaft (Einsiedeln: Johannes Ver-
lag, ); Missarum Sollemnia: Eine genetische Erklärung der römischen Messe, vol. and ,
th ed. (Wien: Herder, ).
Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: A&C Black, ). Dix’s seminal study
provoked controversy from the beginning. While some of his claims (such as about the
original position of the celebrant at the altar or about Cranmer’s alleged Zwinglianism)
have been superseded by more recent historical scholarship, the controversies about
Dix’s account of the offertory rite and its central significance were based less on histor-
ical than on theological grounds. Protestant critics such as Colin Buchanan (The End of
the Offertory, (Cambridge: Grove )) rejected his account with its strong focus on the
activity of the faithful within the Eucharistic celebration as potentially semi-pelagian.
But such criticism could only arise when overlooking what I understand to be the crux
of Dix’s account, which stresses the shape of the Eucharistic liturgy as being charac-
terized through a fine-tuned relating of two distinct moments of identification, human
and divine, in which the latter fully encompasses the former at any point in time. For a
recent appraisal of Dix’s book and its reception, see: William J. Tighe, “The Shape of the
Liturgy: Dom Gregory Dix’s Imperfect Work Remains an Edifying Modern Classic,” Touch-
stone Nov. http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=--
-f#ixzzjWysywv.
Withering Rituals and Shrinking Conceptual Frameworks
By the time these key gures of the liturgical renewal movement began their
work in the rst half of the twentieth century, the ofertory rite had practical-
ly vanished from the worship of all major traditions, or at best had been re-
duced to a shadowy existence as “oferings” in terms of a monetary collection.
In this essay, I would like to ofer reections on the early ofertory rite with a
special focus on the moral dimension inherent in its structure, movements,
gestures and prayers, as well as in the Eucharistic theologies that accompanied
its practice. The examples and insights drawn from those ancient liturgies will
demonstrate, once again, how “pregnant” the Christian liturgy is for the moral
formation and transformation of believers, individually and corporately.
But being reminded of ancient ofertory rites also means having our attention
directed to an issue that strikes me as relevant for the hermeneutics of the ‘Lit-
urgy and Ethics’ discourse as a whole. If the liturgy is to be assumed instructive
for our conceptualizing of core ethical concepts such as ‘gift,’ ‘sacrice,’ ‘trans-
formation,’ any withering of ritual knowledge such as it happened in the case of
the ofertory puts an uncomfortable question before us: Could it be that, along
with the withering of a key ritual and the wisdom it represents, there also comes
a shrinking of the conceptual frameworks that we operate with? And could it
be that the heated Eucharistic debates in the era of the Reformation were al-
ready indicative of such a shrunken conceptual framework? A framework that
left them operating with narrowed alternatives (say, with regard to the concept
of sacrice as either exclusively conned to Christ or encompassing the priestly
function of the celebrant), which could have arisen only once the richer theo-
logical horizon had disappeared that the ofertory rite carried with it?
It is true, though, that since the inspiring studies of scholars like Jungmann
and Dix were rst published, the ofertory rite has enjoyed a revival in a num-
ber of church traditions, Roman Catholic and High Anglican, in particular.
Many who worship in these liturgical traditions have since borne witness that
the inclusion of the ofertory makes a crucial diference for how ‘complete’ and
‘sound’ a Eucharistic celebration appears. After all, it is this very rite that places
‘us,’ as it were, on the altar along with Christ so that we can be identied with
and benet from his salvic self-sacrice. This is true regardless of the fact
that, in comparison to the full extent of the ancient rite, modes of adopting
For the historical development, see: Kenneth W. Stevenson, Eucharist and Ofering (New
York: Pueblo Press, ).
Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England, Vol. : The Ecumenical Century –
(Princeton, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).
-
the ofertory in modern day liturgies have tended to remain somewhat rudi-
mentary.
The Ofertory in the Context of the Early Church’s
Eucharistic Theology
As Dix describes in his seminal study The Shape of the Liturgy, in the Eastern
rites, ranging from the East-Syriac to the Byzantine and Jerusalem rites, the
ofertory procession seems to have been fully established in the fourth cen-
tury, when the deacons would carry the gifts brought by the faithful from the
sacristy into the nave of the church. This ‘great entry’ was usually positioned
between the dismissal of the catechumens and the confession of faith.
In the Western rites (Roman, Franco-Spanish, and apparently also Egyp-
tian), an alternative form persisted in which the faithful carried their ‘obla-
tions’ (bread, wine, and other foodstufs such as oil, cheese, vegetables, fruit,
etc.) themselves to the tables that were arranged in front of the altar. This usu-
ally happened after the exchange of the peace and was followed by prayers over
the gifts. These prayers anticipated the actual Eucharistic prayers, which were
said later on specically over the ‘elements,’ as they were chosen from among
the gifts ofered for use at the communion. In the simple pre-Nicene form of
the liturgy, there was no actual ‘prayer over the gifts’; however, the Eucharistic
prayers specically commemorated the dual character of the elements as at
once taken from among the gifts of the community and consecrated as the
present body of Christ. Whether presented in two separate prayers or in one
integrated Eucharistic prayer, the double representation of the elements as
represented both in the ofertory and the consecration can be said to have con-
stituted the theological core of the Eucharistic theology of the Early Church.
The Gifts as ‘Sacrice’
What has always seemed potentially alienating (at least to Protestant ears)
about patristic theologies of the Eucharist is their apparently careless use of
sacricial terminology in relation to human actions within the liturgical cele-
bration. A closer look, though, makes it apparent that the talk of sacrices in
the context of the whole Eucharistic rite refers primarily (and in some writers
Cf. the synopsis provided by Dix, Shape, .
exclusively) to the ofertory or the oblation. But even in cases where this ‘sac-
rice’ of the community was put in relation to the sacrice of Christ, a more
careful analysis is necessary in each case to establish whether this was done
in a theologically questionable way or in a way that challenges us to a deeper
understanding of the economy of action within the Eucharistic event.
As Dix’s investigations suggest, the ofertory rite was unied practically and
terminologically even before the end of the rst century, i.e., the end of the
apostolic period, probably mediated by the shaping inuence of the Church in
Rome. In Hippolyte’s ‘Traditio Apostolica’ (Apostolic Tradition) it is apparent that
bread and wine were designated by the technical term ‘sacrice’ even before being
consecrated by the bishop—indeed even before they were brought to the altar. “To
(the bishop) then let the deacons bring up the oblation (prosphora), and he with
all the presbyters laying his hands on the oblation shall say ‘eucharisting’ thus …”
Sixty years earlier, Justin Martyr, also in Rome, explains the reference to ‘pure
sacrices’ in the prophet Malachi (: ) as follows: “The sacrices which are of-
fered (prospheromenon) to God by us gentiles, that is the bread of the eucharist
and cup likewise of the eucharist.” And towards the end of the rst century, the
First Letter of Clement emphasizes that ‘sacrices and liturgies’ are performed
at the Lord’s Supper, and that these liturgies should difer according to the rele-
vant ‘orders’ (tagmata). The picture that emerges of the Early Church’s practice
is one of a clear sequence of distinct acts with respective distinct agents:
– the Church (i) as a whole ofers gifts to God as sacrices; it does so
through the hands of
– the faithful (ii) who ‘bring’ (prosenegkein) their sacrices (prosphora,
thysia), and through
– the hands of the deacons (iii), who ‘present’ or carry them ‘up’ (ana-
pherein), and through
– the hands of the bishop (iv), who ‘sacrices’ (prospherein) them at the altar.
The Ofering of the Gifts as Self-Giving of the Faithful
The theological impetus of this early theology of sacrice in relation to the
Eucharist would be entirely misunderstood if it were to be regarded as a pre-
guration of the high medieval understanding of the Church’s re-enactment
Apostolica Traditio, ..
Justin Martyr, Dialogue .
Clem. f.
-
of Christ’s sacrice on the cross—a concept that attracted the criticism
of the Protestant Reformers. It is true that the substance of the sacrice that
the community ofers, bread, and wine is the same as that which represents
the sacricial death of Christ. But the representational imagination in the
dramatic sequence of the Eucharistic liturgy of the Early Church works in a
distinct way. The gifts ofered by the faithful represent, rst of all, the faithful
themselves.
In his sermons on the Lord’s Supper, Augustine emphasizes that the ofering
of the gifts is by no means a mere pragmatic necessity but that this practice
contributes to the understanding of the entire Eucharist: “You yourselves are
spread on the table,” Augustine calls out to the freshly conrmed communi-
cants at the Easter Liturgy: “You yourselves are in the cup.”
The oblations are thus understood as an act of self-ofering of the faithful
‘into’ the Eucharistic event and not as a usurpation of Christ’s unique sacri-
ce through human agency. This idea of the faithful being spread with the el-
ements on the altar is enhanced in the ensuing rite, described in Hippolyte’s
‘Traditio Apostolica,’ of the bishop’s and presbyters’ imposition of hands on
the elements. It is noteworthy here that the blessing of objects was never per-
formed by an imposition of hands: rather, the practice was related specically
to a sacramental blessing of persons, as in the rites of ordination and baptism.
Drawing from Irenaeus’ dense formulation—“that poor widow the Church
casts in all her life into the treasury box of God”—Dix ofers a brilliant sum-
mary of the Early Church’s theology of the Last Supper from the perspective of
the ofertory, which is worth quoting in full:
Each communicant from the bishop to the newly conrmed gave himself
under the forms of bread and wine to God, as God gives Himself to them
under the same forms. In the united oblations of all her members the
Body of Christ, the church, gave herself to become the Body of Christ,
the sacrament, in order that receiving again the symbol of herself now
transformed and hallowed, she might be truly that which by nature she
is, the Body of Christ, and each of her members members of Christ. In
this self-giving the order of laity no less than that of the deacons or the
high-priestly celebrant had its own indispensable function in the vital act
Cf. Martin Simon, Die Messopfertheologie Martin Luthers: Voraussetzungen, Genese, Ge-
stalt und Rezeption (Tübingen: Mohr, ).
“ … ibi vos estis in mensa, et ibi vos estis in calice.” Augustine, Sermon , , .
Apostolica Traditio, ..
Ireanaeus, Adversus Haeresis, ...
of the Body. The layman brought the sacrice of himself, of which he is
the priest. The deacon, the ‘servant’ of the whole body, “presented” all to-
gether in the Person of Christ, as Ignatius reminds us. The high-priest, the
bishop “ofered” all together, for he alone can speak for the whole Body. In
Christ, as His Body, the church is “accepted” by God “in the Beloved.” Its
sacrice of itself is taken up into His sacrice of Himself.
In the sense described by Dix, the celebration of the Eucharist, including the
ofertory, can be seen as the central rite of the Church, in which the whole
divine economy is represented in a dramatic chain of events. This event spans
incarnation (God’s relating to his creation in the identication of Christ with
the elements), judgement and reconciliation (the necessity of the transforma-
tion of the community represented by the elements), and redemption (the
‘Christo-formity’ of the faithful as his ‘body’, as which they receive themselves
anew in the rite).
In a next step, we will turn to aspects of the ofertory rite and its correspond-
ing theology that are especially fecund for an understanding of the ethical di-
mension of the Eucharist.
Everyone Brings Something, Everyone Plays Her Part:
The ‘Egalitarianism’ of the Ofertory
An especially conspicuous aspect of the Early Church’s ofertory practice is the
care taken to ensure that everyone is able to ‘ofer’ something and play a part.
Ever communicant has to be, in quite a literal sense, ‘present’ in the rite.
This concern was mirrored in a highly nuanced theology of oces, according
to which each believer had a distinct ‘ministry’ in the liturgy, and in which the
respective bearers of diferent liturgical oces respectfully acknowledged each
other’s distinctiveness and importance. Especially the oce of the laity to ‘bring
forward’ their gifts was seen as essential for the whole rite. After all, both, the
‘bringing up’ of the gifts by the deacons, and their being ‘ofered up’ by the bishop,
were founded on this genuine oce of the laity. The same emphasis that was laid
on the right of all members to assume their proper ministry was, accordingly,
also laid on the duty of each communicating believer to actually bring her gifts.
Thus, Cyprian, on one occasion, rebukes a rich woman “who comest to the
dominicum (Lord’s sacrice) without a sacrice, who takest thy share from the
sacrice ofered by the poor.” The latent ethical rationalization of this rebuke
Dix, Shape, .
Cyprian, de Opera et Eleemos, .
-
with regard to the fact that the rich here receive communion at the cost of the
poor must not obscure the more important fact that the positive principle be-
hind it derives directly from an integral understanding of the Eucharist. For the
Eucharist to be complete, it was of central importance that each communicant
would be able to see herself as placed on the altar in the form of the gifts which
she herself may have brought and which would thence be transformed by way
of their unication with God’s unique gift in Christ Jesus.
The honouring of each individual in this liturgical setting as being at the
same time oferer (ofertory), ofering (oblation), and counter-ofering (conse-
cration into the body of Christ, in which the individual receives herself anew),
found expression in a later variant of the rite as it was practiced in the Spanish
church. Here a ‘calling the names’ of all communicants was performed either
between the procession of the gifts and the prayer over the gifts, or even in
a special prayer ad nomina as a distinct part of the ofertory. In the Roman
rite, an equivalent practice was performed during the Eucharistic prayer. Inno-
cence I. describes the contemporary form of the rite around the year : “So,
one should rst commend the oferings and afterwards name those who have
made them. One should name them during the divine mysteries and not in the
part of the rite which precedes….”
The stress laid on the participation of all communicants in the ofertory is,
once again, evident in a related practice in the church of Rome, which ensured
that even the proverbial “have-nots,” the children of the papal orphan school,
had something to ofer: they were entrusted with the ofering of the water
which was to be mixed with the wine for the Eucharistic consumption. This
concern for the complete representation of the community casts light on the
ethical signicance of the ofertory, insofar as it beckons the acknowledgement
of equality of all the faithful. In the light of the ofertory rite, we can speak of
a ‘Eucharistic equality,’ which even precedes the one that is experienced in the
moment of consumption at the altar, where there is no ‘distinction of person’
and everyone—prince or pauper—is made equal in the mode of reception.
No doubt the aspect of equality in receiving is signicant and radiates from the
rite as a whole. However, the acknowledging of an earlier ‘egalitarian moment’
in the ofertory sets a diferent emphasis, which echoes Paul’s teaching on the
charismata ( Cor. ): Here, equality pertains also to that which the faithful
contribute, which they actively bring forward. The completeness of the ofer-
tory requires the gifts of the orphans as much as it requires the bishop to ‘bring
Dix, Shape, .
Quoted in Dix, Shape, , emphasis removed.
Dix, Shape, .
forward’ his own personal oblation as an individual believer, rather than mere-
ly ‘ofer up’ the gifts of all the others in his capacity as their episkopos.
The Church as a Whole Ofers Itself
When the wine was collected from the small containers brought by the faith-
ful and poured into large silver jars held by the deacons before the altar, and
when the necessary quantities of bread were selected from among the gifts
on the table and brought up to the altar, another signicant point was grafted
on the experience of the community: Although each believer was individually
represented in the elements (having brought these herself), these elements
were now presented for consecration in a mixed form, thus representing no
longer just the believers individually but the community as a whole. The el-
ements, which were brought to the altar, were in a heightened sense corpora
permixta: containing an irreducible mixture of expensive and cheap wine, of-
fered by rich and poor members of the community respectively. Purity of taste,
it might be said, had to be sacriced for the sake of symbolic representation
of the Church as a whole in these elements: the Church with all its members,
with all the aspects of its corporate existence, success and failure, conict and
reconciliation.
The gradation of the entire event of ofering the gifts according to the dif-
ferent oces in the Church can thus be understood to imply that the self-
ofering of the faithful in the elements can never be a simple, unmediated act.
The passing on of the gifts by the faithful to the deacons and then to the bishop
constitutes a corporate act of the Church—an act in which the acts of all par-
ticipating individuals are contained and ordered and which is still conceivable
as a distinct act by a distinct social body. What is hence ofered to God are, as
the ‘Traditio Apostolica’ puts it, precisely the “gifts of your holy Church.” The
signicance of the ofertory as a distinct act, which was nevertheless under-
stood in intimate relation to the sacrament, becomes apparent not least in the
fact that a case of excommunication would prohibit not only the reception of
the gifts at the altar, but also already their bringing forward by the respective
person.
The Gifts Represent Life in Its Complexity
The material constitution of the elements, too, needs to be appreciated in its
moral signicance. For the transformation of a congregation of those who
Dix, Shape, .
Traditio Apostolica, ..
-
ofer themselves into the Eucharistic body happens not on a spiritual and
world-less plane, but in a sensuous and emphatically material fashion. This
divine way of interacting with humans by ‘friendly, lovely forms’ corresponds
perfectly, as Luther would later emphasize, to both God’s mercy and human
neediness. Sacramental mediation means that the world is not being negat-
ed by the Eucharistic event, and hence that the elements must not be said to
be annihilated in the consumption and transformation that occurs in that
event.
However, this mediation bears another, even deeper signicance. It is not
incidental that bread and wine provide the ‘matter’ of the Eucharist, rather
than grain and grape. Precisely as the elements of bread and wine are at once
gifts of the creator and products of human labor, they can be said to represent
the whole of human life along with God’s grace: the ‘manufactured’ nature of
the elements encompasses both, the good use human hands make of the gifts
of creation as well as their misuse. Present in these elements is the inextrica-
ble togetherness of success and failure, thankfulness and ungratefulness that
characterizes human life.
Accordingly, we can speak of the transformation of the ‘elements’ that oc-
curs in the Eucharist along those same lines, when Christ makes this conglom-
erate of human life his own life. The formula of identication, ‘This is my body,’
both expresses this transformation and enacts it in a royal act of acceptance.
The transformation of the elements is, therefore, precisely the transformation
of the lives of those represented in them, when Christ makes their lives his
own by taking them into the night of Good Friday and the light of the Easter
morning. The Eucharist is the transformation of the dispersed ock, of isolated
and self-distorted individuals, into the corpus mysticum (mystical body), the
Church. As members of this body, the Body of Christ, the faithful receive back
Luther, “Von den Konzilien und Kirchen” (); in: Martin Luther, Ausgewählte Schriften,
Bd. (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, ), . English: On the Councils and the
Church, .
“To the Eucharist we bring not raw materials, not even the cultivated wheat or grape,
but bread and wine, manufactures, bearing upon them all the processes, and the sin, of
commercial production” (John A.T. Robinson, Liturgy Coming to Life (London: Mowbrays
), ).
Oswald Bayer, Promissio: Geschichte der reformatorischen Wende in Luthers Theologie, sec-
ond edition (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, ).
“Even as this broken bread was scattered over the hills, and was gathered together and
became one, so let Your Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into Your
kingdom” (Didache, ).
in the Eucharist the ‘matter’ of their lives, the inextricable complex of achieve-
ment and neglect, yet now transformed.
In the light of these clarications, aforded by a conceptual reading of the
Eucharist feast that takes into account the distinct role that the ofertory as-
sumes within it, the consort of divine and human action can also be seen in
greater clarity. Even though this connection is, as we have seen, already present
in the elements as such, prior to their Eucharistic transformation it remains
numinous and ambiguous. Prior to Eucharistic transformation, the consort of
divine and human action in the elements is still open to a plethora of mis-
leading assumptions. It could be assumed, for example, in Hegelian fashion
that it is up to human agency to give meaning to the elements of creation in
the rst place, which in their givenness are but ‘material’ to be given shape
in the pursuit of human self-realization; or it could be assumed that the role
of human participation is one of a passive spectator of the unfolding of an
all-determining divine will, represented in the elements as some otherworldly
diet that has come straight from heaven; or it could be assumed that the task
at hand would be for humans to bring the relation between their own actions
and God’s actions into a ne-tuned balance by, for example, ascribing separate
domains to each centre of agency.
In contrast to such misleading accounts, a full Eucharistic practice includ-
ing the ofertory rite points to a diferent way of understanding and living
out this consort. It facilitates an acknowledgement of the human being as an
agent in the context of the sacramental event without repudiating the princi-
ple of sheer receptivity at the Lord’s Table, which prepares the faithful for the
kingdom. In the course of their gathering around the Eucharistic table and
their receiving of bread and wine, the works of the believers are not absent
but co-present with the divine work, as they are ‘baked into’ the elements, as
it were. The elements of the Eucharist represent, as we have seen, not dead
matter but the entirety of human life, in its complex interwovenness of activity
and passivity. In these gifts, the faithful bring their whole life to the altar and
ask for its transformation.
A telling attitude sanctioned by the Church was the so called “ocular consumption” of the
Host, in which the faithful sought to fulll their duty to physically partake in Eucharistic
celebration in certain intervals (at least once per year) by merely looking at the Host. Cf.
Charles Caspers, “The Western Church During the Late Middle Ages: Augenkommunion or
Popular Mysticism,” in: Charles Caspers et al. (eds), Bread of Heaven: Customs and Practices
Surrounding Holy Communion: Essays in the History of Liturgy and Culture (Kampen: Kok
Pharos, ), –, –.
-
In this transformation, they become what they are: pre-eminently ‘God’s
poiema’ (work): we receive ourselves back precisely as the work of Christ, and
so become active participants of the works which, according to Ephesians
:, God has “prepared beforehand that we may walk in them.” In this way,
human action in its temporal extension is included in the dramatic event of the
Eucharist; God’s action embraces human action—not in the sense of stiing it,
but in the sense of allowing it to be transformed and ourish precisely within
God’s salvic activity.
The Transformation of the Community into the Body of Christ
So with regard to the Eucharistic elements, we face two related yet distinguish-
able processes of identication: rst, the elements are identied with the faith-
ful, then Christ identies with them. In a densely compressed formulation,
Irenaeus of Lyon described this process as follows: “The mingled cup and the
manufactured bread receives the Word of God and becomes the eucharist of
the Body and Blood of Christ.” It is only if and when these two moments of
identication are not, or not suciently, distinguished that the theological-
ly problematic semantic emerges which employs the activist terminology of
‘ofering’ as applied to human agents (the clergy) when dealing with Christ’s
sacrice.
It seems to me that no small number of heated ecumenical debates about
the way or extent in which the sacrice of Christ can be represented (com-
memorated, enacted) in the Church’s worship have become hampered by
insuciently distinguishing between the two acts of identication that we
detected as being constitutive of the fully edged Eucharistic practice in the
Early Church. In the dramatic sequence of liturgical acts that characterized
this practice, the distinction and inner relation between these two processes
of identication must have been obvious to the participants. With the fading
of the ofertory rite, however, the capacity to distinguish in this way was largely
lost, too.
Dix points to the fact that the Eucharistic prayers of the Early Church—
especially at the time when the ofertory was not yet, as in the post-Nicene period,
concluded with a separate prayer over the gifts—encompassed and incorporated
the entire Eucharistic process including the ofertory: “The ‘eucharistic’ prayer
was originally intended to embrace in its single statement the meaning of the
whole rite, from the ofertory to the efects of receiving communion.” When in
Irenaeus, Adversus Haeresis, ...
Dix, Shape, .
these prayers the expression ‘we sacrice’ was placed in immediate proximity to
the sacrice of Christ, this was not a premature identication but a compressed
formulation of the dual identication incorporated in the Eucharistic rite as a
whole: the rst identication of the faithful with the elements and the second
identication of the elements with the Body of Christ (through Christ’s royal act
of acceptance).
It was only when this dual aspect of identication was merged into one, as
happened in the ofertory prayers of the Roman Mass (through the inuence
of Gallic rites in the th and th centuries), that the understanding of the
sacricial nature of the Eucharist had to become theologically problematic.
In these prayers, the elements are described exclusively under the aspect of the
second identication, and so even the not yet consecrated elements of bread
and wine are described as ‘pure oferings.’ The point of diference is palpable,
for example, in the old Egyptian ofertory prayer whose formulation expresses
the dramatic sequencing of the whole event:
Master Lord Jesus Christ … make Thy face to shine upon this bread and
this cup, which we have set upon Thy table. Bless them, hallow them,
sanctify them and change them, that this bread may become indeed Thy
holy Body and the mixture in this cup indeed Thy precious Blood.
“We ofer to Thee the bread and the cup,” as the earliest Eucharistic prayer, represented in
the ‘Traditio Apostolica’ has it. The second oldest version of the Eastern ‘Sarapion’ is less
prone to misinterpretation in that is uses not the present but the perfect tense (“we have
ofered,” both quoted in Dix, Shape, ), apparently pointing back to the ofertory. Given
the unity of the Eucharistic event in the conuence of times (Christ past, present, fu-
ture), the question of tenses would appear of secondary importance, as long as it remains
clear that we are dealing with a twofold moment of identication with distinct centers of
agency.
However, traces of theological confusion about the relatedness of the two modes of iden-
tication appear much earlier. We can nd them, for example, as early as in Cyprian’s
suggestion (Letter , ; C, ) that the mingling of the Eucharistic wine with
water symbolizes the unication of the believers with Christ. Here, the second act of
identication (of Christ with the believers) is problematically associated with an event
that, according to the dramatic sequencing of the Eucharist, belongs to the rst moment
of identication. See further on this: Bernhard Lang, Heiliges Spiel: Eine Geschichte des
christlichen Gottesdienstes (München: C.H. Beck ), .
‘Immaculate victim’ and ‘cup of salvation,’ quoted in Dix, Shape, .
Quoted in Dix, Shape, .
-
The expression ‘change them’ points to the essential fact that the second iden-
tication does not simply and smoothly ow from the rst. It rather evokes
the entire divine economy of salvation and reconciliation. The connection be-
tween the two moments of identication is not causal in the sense of do ut des
(give that you may be given), as though the self-ofering of the faithful was to
be ‘rewarded’ by the identication of Christ with the elements.
The acceptance of the human sacrice, as represented in the oblations,
through Christ who identies himself with it cannot remain external to the
sacrice itself. We are not, in this dialectical process of sacrice, dealing
with an exchange—an exchange of a ‘something’ which humans would
bring forward as a gift, and to which Christ would answer by giving another
‘something’ in return. Rather than exchange, what actually happens in the
Eucharist is that the faithful give themselves into the transformation that
occurs by the power of God’s self-giving in Christ, who identies with the
human ‘sacrice’ on the altar by taking it up into his own
That the speech act that occurs in the uttering of the ‘Words of Institution’ was
in fact understood as such an event of identication is apparent in the follow-
ing wording of Irenaeus of Lyon, who says with reference to Christ:
Instructing his disciples to ofer to God the rst-fruits of His own creation
… He took that bread which cometh of the creation and gave thanks say-
ing, This is My Body. And the cup likewise, which is from created things,
like ourselves, He acknowledged for His own Blood, and taught the new
oblation of the New Covenant …. For … the bread from the earth receiv-
ing the invocation of God is no more common bread but eucharist … The
mingled cup and the manufactured bread receive the Word of God and
becomes the eucharist of the Body and Blood of Christ.
What Irenaeus’ designation ‘Eucharist’, describing the second identication of
Christ with the elements, shows is that the Early Church’s theology was—unlike
speculative theologies from the medieval up to modern times—not concerned
with the question of a change of substances. Irenaeus does not stipulate that
‘bread becomes body, and wine becomes blood,’ or even (according to the
doctrine of ‘concomitance,’ as it developed from the th century) that ‘bread
Irenaeus, Adversus Haeresis, ..–.; .., orig. emphasis removed and mine
added.
Defended at the Council of Constance against John Wyclife and Jan Hus.
and wine’ become ‘body and blood’; what he says is rather: ‘bread and wine
become the Eucharist of the body and blood of Christ.’ Ordinary bread and
ordinary wine become elements of the Lord’s Supper in its entirety by the
power of the dual identication through Christ.
What remains decisive here above all is that the event ‘Eucharist’ cannot be
conceptualized at any point of its occurrence in abstraction from the partici-
pation of the faithful. The faithful do not admiringly observe a transformation
of elements as a quasi-inner-Christological process, which makes present a
Lord previously absent. Rather, the faithful are, by virtue of the ofertory rite,
always already inextricably united to the elements, and their presence is hence
of constitutive signicance for the Lord’s Supper.
The Distribution of the Gifts to the Poor
Against the background of a plethora of morally signicant aspects inherent in
the ofertory rite, as pointed out thus far, it should have become apparent why
we have to this point deferred dealing with the one aspect of the Eucharistic
feast that is usually regarded as the pinnacle expression of its ethical signif-
icance: ‘sharing.’ So strong is the immediacy by which this one aspect com-
mends itself to a moral analysis of the Eucharist that it tends to absorb those
other aspects of moral signicance, resulting in armations such as ‘the Lord’s
Supper really is all about sharing.’
It is true that the early rites appear to give even more reason for the stressing
of this point, when extending the aspect of sharing in the Eucharist beyond the
group of communicants. After the communion, for which only a small portion
of the gifts was used, the oblationes (oblations) of the faithful were distributed
among the needy of the Christian and civil community. Just as the faithful
received themselves anew through Christ’s identication with the elements, so
the remaining gifts were able to be used in their original signicance as means
for the sustenance of life and community. Yet, just as the Church experienced it-
self at the Lord’s Table as needy (in accordance with the ancient self-description
of the faithful as hoi ptochoi, ‘the poor’) and gifted alike, so their turning towards
other needy people was no longer conceivable as a ‘sacrice’ in the common
The social character of the Eucharist is already apparent in the so-called Kelchwort (word
of chalice) in Cor. :: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” The “cup” that is
circulated and out of which all drink (Mk. :) designates neither the jar nor its content
but the divine action of making a new covenant that is sealed through the blood of the
Lamb. Cf. Oswald Bayer, Leibliches Wort: Reformation und Neuzeit im Konlikt (Tübingen:
Mohr, ), f.
Traditio Apostolica, ..
-
sense of the word, a kind of gracious condescension, but now had to be under-
stood as a genuine self-expression of the new humanity that is the Church.
The actual liturgical practice of the Early Church demonstrated that sharing ‘in’
the Eucharist cannot suciently and properly be understood as sharing ‘of’ the
Eucharist. After all, what was distributed to the poor were the oblations, not the
consecrated elements. Rather than adding to the sacrament a moral imperative,
in terms of exhorting those who receive something to also give away something
to others, it is more appropriate to say that according to the dramaturgical sense
of the liturgy, the communicants, in receiving themselves anew in consumption,
are now consecrated into a position in which they are free to practice that same
abundance in which they nd themselves as partakers of the holy meal.
The oblations that were ‘left over,’ sitting on the tables and waiting for
distribution to the needy, were, of course, still understood as representing the
believers themselves according to the rst process of identication. It seems
altogether appropriate, therefore, to use the expression of a modern theologian,
Oswald Bayer, and speak of the ‘consecration of the community,’ the Eucharistic
transformation of the social body which receives itself back as ‘Church for others,’
to use the expression of another modern theologian, Dietrich Bonhoefer.
In a derivative sense, and only in this sense, we may also speak of the
transformation of ‘matter’—the transformation of the oblations through the
transformation of the faithful: that which the Eucharistic people are able to
bring back to the world is, even though consisting of the same materiality,
no longer conceivable as a means of competition, status diferentiation, or
economic domination, but is dened anew. As Martin Luther aptly expressed:
“God’s gifts must ow from the one to the other and become communal, so
that each may care for his neighbour as for himself.”
What Has been Lost with the Withering of the Ofertory
The decline of the once richly orchestrated ofertory rite brought about a range
of conceptual and practical shifts, amongst them some especially problematic
aspects which I shall briey highlight in what follows. Generally speaking, the
prime consequence of this withering (or in some cases: complete loss) of the
ofertory was a growing tendency towards abstraction. Once the intertwining of
Bayer, Leibliches Wort, .
Dietrich Bonhoefer, Letters and Papers from Prison ( ), transl. Isabel Best et al., ed.
by John W. de Gruchy (Minneapolis: Fortress, ), .
, ,–.
liturgy and day-to-day lives of the faithful that was ingrained in and sustained
by the ofertory begun to fade, a trend towards speculative and spiritualizing
interpretation of the Eucharist became dominant. This trend was palpable
most notably in highly technical discussions about the ‘real presence’ of Christ
and was often accompanied by another, no less problematic tendency towards
a moralizing understanding of the sacrament.
From the Eucharist of the Whole Life to a Concentration
on the Theme of Atonement
The decline of the ofertory rite is also representative of—and very likely co-
responsible for—the tendency to reduce the signicance of the Eucharist to
aspects surrounding the theme of atonement. This tendency was promoted, in
part, by a shift in conceptualizing the oce of presiding over the Eucharist, as it
became more and more understood in terms of a priestly function. According
to this shift, the sacerdos (sacricial priest, Opferpriester) was seen less and
less as the representative of the community who ofers up the self-surrender
of all members to God, but increasingly as vicarius Christi, the representative
of Christ, who performs the atoning sacrice ‘for’ the community on behalf of
Christ. It should be noted that this shift towards a more ‘cultic’ understanding
of the bishop’s role at the Eucharist was motivated to no small degree by a
political move: the modelling of the role of episkopé (oversight) in mimicry of
attributes celebrated at the courts of political rulers. The shift of emphasis to-
wards the priestly function was hence a function of another shift: towards the
so-called ‘monarchical episcopate.’
A further stimulus that led to the narrowing of the focus on the atonement
motif was the growth of the communities celebrating the Eucharist together.
The increasing quantities of bread required for communion brought with it a
shift in symbolism. If the single loaf that was originally used had been a sym-
bol for the unity of the Church, the multiplicity of loaves that were required
in ‘mass’ services could hardly speak any longer in this way. Consequently, the
early emphasis on unity gave way to an emphasis on the breaking of the bread
as a symbol of Christ’s sacricial death.
The focus on the theme of atonement is mirrored, to quote one example
for many, in the distribution formula used in Lutheran churches today: ‘Take,
eat (drink), this is the Body (Blood) of Christ given for you, for the forgive-
ness of sins.’ Though the theme of atonement is inextricably linked to the self-
Writing in the third century, Cyprian did not shy away from using the gentile concept of
sacerdos for the Christian bishop (and less frequently for presbyters). Lang, Heiliges Spiel,
, p..
-
sacrice of Christ as commemorated in the Eucharist, the distribution formula
used in the Early Church, ‘This is the bread of heaven/life—This is the cup of
salvation,’ represented a notably wider theological horizon that included the
concept of atonement but did not absorb all the other aspects into it.
From the Consecration of the Church to an ‘Efect’ for the Faithful
The trajectory just described entails another problematic shift. Whilst the Early
Church’s practice had projected a Eucharistic transformation (or consecration)
of the faithful, what progressively moved into the foreground then was the idea
of a Opfergewinn (sacricial gain), an efect of the sacrament for the faithful.
The now dominant terminology of ‘apportioning’ of the goods of salvation ‘to’
the faithful or of ‘appropriating’ of these goods by the faithful, suggested not
only an initial distance of the faithful from these goods (forgiveness, strength-
ening, etc.), but also promoted an understanding of the recipient as being pri-
marily the individual believer (pro me) instead of the community (pro nobis).
The focus on the ‘efect’ for the faithful would enhance not only the tendencies
towards individualism and sacramentalism but also a trend towards the ethicizing
of the holy meal. Even though the latter trend is often presented as a critical
turn against the former tendencies, both spring, in fact, from the same root. The
ethicizing of the Lord’s Supper, particularly widespread in modern Protestantism,
sees its efect not only in the apportioning of the goods of salvation, but also (or
sometimes even primarily) in the ethical motivation the sacrament is to provide
for the participants. According to this logic, the salvic goods that the faithful are
being apportioned as a result of Christ’s atoning sacrice are to be mirrored in
their moral lives through a corresponding morality of self-sacrice.
When compared and contrasted with the fully edged, uncastrated practice
of the Eucharist, in which the ofertory assumes its proper place, the motiva-
tional logic (bequeathed to modern Christianity by Kant’s tract on religion) re-
veals itself as but a substitute: a secondary bridging mechanism, necessitated by
the prior separation of the gifts of the meal from the faithful themselves. Once
this separation has been efected, such a secondary construct must appear nec-
essary in order to save the ethical dimension of the event from disappearing be-
hind the ‘salvation egotism’ of the pro me that threatens to prevail otherwise.
The rediscovery of the ancient rite of the ofertory and the richly orches-
trated Eucharistic theology in which it was embedded should have become
apparent by now in its capacity not only to stimulate liturgical renewal but also
Bernd Wannenwetsch, Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, ), –.
to cast new and genuinely illuminating light on historical developments and
theological debates. It is my contention that studying the ofertory rite from a
variety of diferent angles, including that of moral theology, promises to lead
to further discoveries and deeper insights than the ones we have been able to
touch upon in this essay.
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Gestalt und Rezeption (Tübingen: Mohr, 2003).
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© Koninklijke Brill NV, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004356528_009
Weekly at the Lord’s Table
Calvin’s Motives for a Frequent Celebration of the Holy Communion
Herman Speelman
Introduction
This article examines Calvin’s motives for his persistent plea for a weekly
lay participation in communion, in which he opposed the long-standing
custom of the church in his days that was to continue for centuries after him.
Throughout his life, Calvin argued that the Eucharist should not be celebrated
only “at least at Easter,” but he wanted people to receive communion “at least
weekly.” Ideally, people ought to have the chance to “partake of the Eucharist”
at every gathering, that is, probably even at the weekday assemblies, or, as he
argued, “there should be no meeting of the church without the word, prayers,
and the communion of the Supper.” For him, plainly, the custom which
enjoins us to take communion only “once a year is a veritable invention of the
devil.”
The Fourth Lateran Council () demanded from all citizens, both men and women, that
they critically examine themselves at least once a year and “let them reverently receive the
Sacrament of the Eucharist at least at Easter.” Norman P. Tanner (ed.), Decrees of the Ecu-
menical Councils: From Nicaea I to Vatican II, (Washington: Georgetown University Press,
), Vol., , art. . Elsie A. McKee, The Pastoral Ministry and Worship in Calvin’s Geneva
(Genève: Droz, ), f.
John Calvin, Joannis Calvini Opera selecta, Petrus Barth/ Guilelmus Niesel (ed.), vol., (Mu-
nich: Kaiser, –) (), Vol. , . John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion
(John T. McNeill ed.), vol. (Philadelphia/ London: Westminster Press, ) (Inst.) ...
At the end of his life Calvin wrote: “When I rst came here [in Geneva], the Lord’s Supper
was observed only three times a year, and seven whole months intervened between the ob-
servance at Pentecost and at the Birthday of Christ.” He was pleased that, later on, the Lord’s
Supper was being celebrated every month. John Calvin, Ioannis Calvini Opera quae supersunt
omnia, Guilielmus Baum, August E. Cunitz and Eduard W.E. Reuss (eds.), vol. (Brunswick:
C.A. Schwetschke, –) (), Vol. , –. See for this letter of August
also Karin Maag, Lifting Hearts to the Lord: Worship with John Calvin in Sixteenth-Century Ge-
neva (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), .
, .
The shift from a purely spiritual communion with Christ to a more sacra-
mental communion, nding its modest origins in the Late Middle Ages, oc-
curred in Wittenberg to a signicant degree when Luther established a weekly
Lord’s Supper communion in the Sunday liturgy, which was open to all be-
lievers. A few years later, in Geneva, Calvin also attempted to pursue a weekly
celebration of the Eucharist, but failed in this respect.
Since Calvin appears to give little to no indications to explain his desire for
a very frequent sacramental communion for lay people, his pursuit must be
explained from his view on the Lord’s Supper, since the frequency of celebration
depends, according to Calvin, on “the end for which our Lord intended it.” On
the basis of his theology on the Lord’s Supper I present four central reasons, as
well as an enumeration of more detailed arguments, pleading for a frequent
celebration.
Firstly, the longing for union with Christ is, according to Calvin, like a new
life rhythm, and forms an important Christological motive of purication and
sanctication through Christ’s body and blood for partaking frequently of the
Eucharistic elements. The institutions that Calvin created (e.g., the consistory,
home visitation, and the lay elder) to replace the system of penance and con-
fession of the established church of his time must be situated in the context
of recurring preparation for the Lord’s Supper. Their purpose related to the
In the Genevan Council authorized, against Calvin’s wish, to follow the practice of Zu-
rich and Bern quarterly: four celebrations in Zurich beginning in , and three in Bern
starting in . Calvin also opposed a monthly celebration. Communion three or four times
a year became the norm in most continental Reformed churches: on Easter, Pentecost, early
September, and Christmastide. This was probably three times more than most people’s an-
nual reception of the sacrament in the Late Middle Ages. Christian Grosse, Les rituels de la
cène: Le culte eucharistique réformé à Genève (XVIe–XVIIe siècles) (Geneva: Droz, ), .
Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven/
London: Yale University Press, ), .
, .
In some fascinating studies about Calvin’s Eucharistic Theology, Wim Janse calls attention
to Calvin’s exible approach and adaptability concerning the Lord’s Supper. Unlike Janse,
I see more consistency of vision and perception in Calvin’s Eucharistic Theology over the
years. Wim Janse, “Calvin’s Eucharistic Theology: Three Dogma-Historical Observations,” in
Herman J. Selderhuis (ed.), Calvinus sacrarum literarum interpres (Göttingen: VandenHoeck
& Ruprecht, ), – and Wim Janse, “The Sacraments,” in Herman J. Selderhuis (ed.),
Calvin Handbook (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, ), –. Herman A. Speel-
man, “The Eucharist as a Mysterious Representation of Christ,” in idem, Melanchthon and
Calvin on Confession and Communion: Early Modern Protestant Penitential and Eucharistic
Piety (Göttingen: VandenHoeck & Ruprecht, ), –.
’
admission or barring of people from the Table of the Lord through repentance
and confession, forgiveness and reconciliation.
Complete trust in Christ replaced condence in one’s own faith and worthi-
ness. For this reason, the troubled conscience constantly sought the comfort
and peace of acceptance through Christ, and the communion with his body
and blood and the resulting purication, sanctication, and conrmation of
one’s trust in the perfect sacrice of Christ. These elements were continuously
present in Calvin’s theology of the Eucharist, and formed important reasons
for his push for a frequent celebration.
Secondly, the spirituality of the intimate bridal mysticism and of the con-
tinuing desire to keep and preserve that direct bond with Christ, and to expe-
rience it through the personal work of the Holy Spirit, forms another central
motive, the pneumatological-mystical motive, in Calvin’s theology of the Lord’s
Supper. Salvation must not only be heard and understood, but tasted and ex-
perienced.
Thirdly, there is the ecclesiological-liturgical motive. Life, as it had been
structured according to the existing daily rhythm of the liturgy of the hours,
had to be adjusted, and, as a direct result, a new balance had to be made with
regard to the administration of Word and Sacrament. In contrast to the medi-
eval daily rhythm of life, determined as it was by the many calendar holidays,
the Reformers wanted, through the regular alternation between the two forms
of the announcement of the promises of salvation (i.e., the preaching and the
Lord’s Supper), to sanctify life. Furthermore, Calvin wanted the ecclesiastical
Eucharistic liturgy to set the tone for daily life, also in a social-civil sense. It is
possibly also for that reason that he wanted the Lord’s Supper not only to be
connected to the regular Christian holidays, but to give it a place in the weekly
liturgy.
In the Protestant view, fourthly and lastly, the justied man remained in
every respect a sinner, and dependent on the preaching of the law alongside
the announcement of grace, and on the spiritual and sacramental union with
Christ. This persistent awareness of one’s unworthiness and transience, and
the resulting orientation toward the kingdom of heaven, both now and with
Herman A. Speelman, Biechten bij Calvijn: Over het geheim van heilig communiceren (Calvin
on confession: About the mystery of Holy Communication) (Heerenveen: Groen, ). Her-
man A. Speelman, “Calvin on Confession: His Struggle for a New Form of Discipline and our
Struggle to Understand his View,” in Herman J. Selderhuis and Arnold Huijgen (eds), Calvinus
Pastor Ecclesiae:Papers of the Eleventh International Congress on Calvin Research (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, ), –.
a view to the future, is a recurring heavenly directed-eschatological motive in
Calvin’s Eucharistic spirituality.
There are also good reasons for celebrating the Sacrament that do not plead
for a frequent communion of the Lord’s Supper: its community-shaping or uni-
fying efect, the sanctication of church and society, and the valuable ethical
and social-civil fruits of communion. In what follows we unfold in more de-
tail four arguments that plead for a frequent celebration of the Lord’s Supper
and three reasons that do not necessarily plead for a frequent communion. We
conclude with a few comments on Calvin’s Eucharistic spirituality.
The Christological Motive of Purication and Sanctication
through Christ
The substantial communion with Christ’s body and blood is our daily food, and
for Calvin this is indeed how true life, as well as the justice and mercy of God,
taste. “We should not think that there is life elsewhere than in God,” Calvin
says, and “our souls have no other pasture than Jesus Christ.” If people were
angels, they would need no Sacraments, but “we are so rude and earthly, we
need help.” “For if we were incorporeal (as Chrysostom says), he would give us
these very things naked and incorporeal.” The body is the obstacle: “Shut up
as we are in the prison house of our esh,” Calvin wrote with the Platonic avor
of his anthropology, “we need Sacraments.”
Two things are presented to us in the Supper:
Jesus Christ as source and substance of all good; and second, the fruit and
ecacy of his death and passion. This is implied also by the words which
are there used. For in commanding us to eat his body and drink his blood,
he added that his body was delivered for us, and his blood shed for the
remission of our sins.
, .
(th Sermon on Cor. –), ; cf. : “(W)e are so weak in faith and rude.”
Cf. Inst. .., where Calvin used the word tarditas, slowness, dullness, lumpishness.
Inst. ...
Inst. ... Frequently the body is compared to a prison cell. Inst. ..; ..; ..;
..; ..; ..; .. and ; ... See Henri A.G. Blocher, “Calvin on the Lord’s
Supper: Revisiting an Intriguing Diversity,” Westminster Theological Journal (),
–, .
, .
’
And another purpose of the personal sacramental union in which he presents
his body to us, is to signal and conrm the promise by which Jesus Christ says
to us that “His esh is truly food and His blood drink by which we are fed
for eternal life” (John :-). For He certies that He is the bread of life;
anyone who eats of this will live forever (John :,). However, a paradox
remains in the position Calvin assumes. On the one hand, he is insistent that
a sign is nothing but itself; on the other hand, he emphasizes our need for
signs as vehicles to carry our minds to see things we otherwise could not per-
ceive. While the Holy Spirit moves the heart and enlightens the mind directly,
the Sacraments, as secondary instruments (comme instruments), used by God
because our weakness needs them as mirrors in which we may see heaven-
ly things reected in a familiar and earthly way, for otherwise we could not
reach them in our understanding. Again and again—in the Petit traicté de la
saincte cène alone, eighteen times!—Calvin returns to the fact that he truly
feeds us “with his own substance (de nous repaître de sa propre substance).”
The spiritual communion in the holy Sacrament ensures that we “cease to
live to the world and the esh, and that God himself may live in us (que Dieu
luimême vive en nous).”
A large part of Calvin’s teaching is devoted to the way in which a person
comes to possess Christ and his grace, that is, to the appropriation of salvation.
Calvin thus gives part three of his Institutes of the Christian Religion the title: De
la manière de participer à la grace du Christ. The question concerns the way in
which we come to share in the God-man Jesus Christ:
First, we must understand that as long as Christ remains outside of
us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done
for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no val-
ue of us. Therefore, to share with us what he has received from the
Father, he had to become ours and to dwell within us (qu’il soit fait
nôtre et habite en nous). For this reason, he is called ‘our Head’ (Eph.
John Calvin, Institution de la religion chrestienne (), Edition critique par Olivier
Millet, vol., Geneva: Droz, (), Vol. (Ch. ), - = Elsie A. McKee, John
Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion, French Edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
), .
, f, answers –; , .
, and (see also n. ) and John Calvin, Tracts and Treatises on the Doctrine and
Worship of the Church, Vol. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ) (), Consensus Tigurinus,
art. , .
, .
:), and ‘the first-born among many brethren’ (Rom. :). We also,
in turn, are said to be ‘engrafted into him’ (Rom. :), and ‘to put on
Christ’ (nous sommes entés en lui et le vêtons; Latin: donec cum ipso in
unum coalescimus; Gal. :). For, as I have said, all that he possesses
is nothing to us until we grow into one body with him (nous soyons
faits un avec lui).
There is a double mystical implantation here. On the one hand Christ “is made
ours” and “lives in us,” and on the other hand his children are “implanted in
him” and united with his divinity and humanity. It can be compared to the
branch on the vine, which lives and bears fruit by the grace of the uninter-
rupted presence of divine sap: “Whoever remains in me, with me in him, bears
fruit in plenty; for cut of from me you can do nothing” (John :f). In order to
be able to continue to grow and bear fruit, God’s juices must continue to ow
through us.
For Calvin the process of dying and sanctication is rst of all a matter of
the individual believer and his personal salvation, where the pastoral guidance
of the church’s oce-bearers plays an important and dominant role. In all
of this, the rst concern is not so much for the congregation as a whole as for
the eternal salvation of the individual members, who share through the Lord’s
Supper, among other things, in the cross of Christ and in the resurrection of
the God-man Christ.
The ideal of the reformers was for someone to die daily (morticatio) in his
penitence and to share in the sufering, death, and life of Christ, as a daily con-
version. In the wake of his holy baptism, man dies to himself every day again
and receives a part in the renewed, resurrected life of the God-man Christ. In
this personal battle against sin and evil, and for the righteousness of God and
the good, a Christian cannot do without sacramental union with Christ. More-
over, as the other side of the coin and continuing on from his baptism, there
is the sacramental unication with Christ in the Lord’s Supper of those who
receive a share in the life-giving power of the resurrection (vivicatio) and thus
Inst. ...
Inst. ...
Here too we nd a subtle distinction related to the role of the oce-bearer and that of
the believer. The Sacrament is a tool, and the participant does not automatically (ex opere
operato) receive Christ when he eats the bread and drinks the wine. Nicholas Wolterstorf
calls this a “double agency action.” Idem, “John Calvin,” in Lee Palmer Wandel (ed.),
A Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation (Leiden/ Boston: Brill, ), –.
Speelman, Eucharistic Piety, .
’
in the continual renewal of life. Calvin concludes: “Though we have no express
command about the time and the day, it should be enough for us to know that
the intention of our Lord is that we use it often; otherwise we shall not know
well the benet which it ofers us.” In Calvin’s theology, daily penance and
conversion are for that reason closely connected to the worthy reception of the
Sacrament in faith and full awareness. In all of this, the rst concern is not so
much for the congregation as a whole as for the eternal salvation of the indi-
vidual members, who share through the Lord’s Supper among other things in
the cross of Christ and in the resurrection of the God-man Christ.
In the chapters of the Institutes dealing with the Lord’s Supper, Calvin makes
it clear that the Eucharist involves an exchange, where our mortality is traded
in for his immortality:
Our souls can receive from this Sacrament a great sweetness and fruit
of consolation in recognizing that Jesus Christ is so incorporated into us
and we into Him that we can call all that is His “ours” and all that is ours
we can call “His.” … This is the exchange which He has made with us by
His innite goodness: that in receiving our poverty He has transferred to
us His riches; in bearing our weakness He has conrmed us in His power;
in taking our mortality, He has made His immortality ours; in coming
down to the earth he has opened a way to heaven; in making Himself Son
of man, He has made us children of God.
This close unication between Christ and the Christian does not efect a min-
gling but an exchange (commutatio). Jesus Christ is given to us by the Father
as the bread of life (John : ) and “He made us participants of His divine im-
mortality.” The Christian does not experience that bond with Christ through
the Lord’s Supper alone. Nevertheless, the continuous fusion in body and soul
remains for Calvin a very important reason for celebrating Communion on a
highly regular basis. It can be compared to such well-known biblical images as
the putting of of our own old clothes and the putting on—as God’s chosen and
beloved saints—of his new clothes, which we do every day again (Eph. :f;
, .
, Vol. (Ch. ), - = Elsie A. McKee, John Calvin: Institutes of the Christian
Religion, French Edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), – = , .
, / McKee, Institutes, . Cf. Luther’s “marvelous exchange” (mirica commutatio).
Inst. ... The exchange has to do with the Royal banquet and to nd pasture there in
the form of a non-material banquet so as to share in the new life of Christ.
Col. :f). There is also the image of the exchange of our perishable with his
gloried imperishable clothing ( Cor. :f; Eccl. ), or the image of us be-
ing clothed from heaven in our naked bodies when we come home and enter
God’s dwelling ( Cor. :). To put on Christ is to clothe ourselves with him,
and this is what the Christian does every day again.
The Pneumatological-Mystical Motive
If, however, believers receive what the Sacrament efects by faith alone, why
then should they partake of it so frequently? For Calvin the Holy Communion
was, in the rst place, about the inner experience of sharing in the body and
blood of Christ, in the unio cum Christo.
By abandoning the Sacrament of penitence the Protestant churches had
lost their hold on the congregation. A consequence of this was that the
people’s own responsibility increased. In this new situation, the conscience
was no longer governed by the church. The church had surrendered its
power, and that ecclesiastical control was replaced by the direct communion
with God which people could now enjoy. Entirely in the spirit of someone
like Melanchthon, Calvin often sounded a warning to the people that they
must fear God. It is foolish, he claimed, to be smug and to think that we no
longer have to fear God. In the spirit of the late medieval penitential piety,
yet without its traditional Sacrament of penance, the emphasis in Calvinist
spirituality came to be placed on personal mortication (morticatio). Based
on faith in a relationship with God that is directly efected by the Spirit, the
Lord’s Supper for Calvin obtains a place for regular believers to die daily
(Rom. :). This is so central that he favors a highly frequent celebration of
the Lord’s Supper.
Paul points to the unication of man and woman in marriage, when a man
“joins himself to his wife and they become one body” (Eph. :; cf. Gen. :).
The relationship between Christ and Christians is seen as an intimate, tran-
scendental relationship of marriage: esh of his esh, and bone of his bones.
This typically Reformed bridal mysticism, which is efected by the Holy Spirit,
brings about that God and man “possess” each other: “And when nothing more
is added to that, we have good reasons to be pleased that we understand that,
in the Supper, Jesus Christ gives us the proper (propre) substance of His body
, no. , .
Cf. McKee, Institutes, –.
’
and blood, so that we may fully possess Him and possessing Him, partake in all
His blessings.” This unio mystica, which is efected by the Sacraments, is like a
sacred marital bond by which we become esh of his esh.
In the application to the Lord’s Supper, Calvin’s thinking is imbued with in-
timate and afective images, such as the marital relationship, the relationship
between parent and child, or of God’s housemates (domestiques de dieu). This
wonderful (bridal) mystical bond with Christ is for Calvin a practical rather than
speculative knowledge of the Other, whose I am and want to be:
This Union alone … is served by that sacred wedlock (le marriage sacré)
through which we are made esh of his esh and bone of his bone (Eph.
: ), and thus one with him (comme un avec lui). But he unites himself
to us by the Spirit alone. By the grace and power of the same Spirit we are
made his members, to keep us under himself (pour nous retenir à lui; ut
nos sub se contineat) and in turn to possess him.
The intimate bond between Christ and Christians, as efected by the Holy Spir-
it, is experienced by them as a marital relationship, and must for that reason
be maintained as often as possible, since believers live in him. This is how the
Lord’s Supper obtains a mystical signication.
For Calvin the Lord’s Supper is not only a (purely) spiritual but also a sacra-
mental mystery, an event in which we share in a substantial manner in Christ’s
exalted humanity, notwithstanding the fact that his body is and remains in
heaven. It is above all a matter of the communication with the entire Christ, a
mystical union with this heavenly God-man.
It is that all benet which we ought to seek from the Supper is annulled,
unless Jesus Christ be there given to us as substance and foundation of
all (comme substance et fondement de tout). … Moreover, if the reason for
communicating with Jesus Christ is in order that we have part and por-
tion in all the gifts which he has procured for us by his death, it is not only
a matter of being partakers of his Spirit; it is necessary also to partake of
his humanity (participer à son humanité) … For when he gives himself to
, . Cf. , = Grosse, Rituels, : “an que nous le possedions entierement en
telle sorte, qu’ il vive en nous, et nous en luy.”
, , answer .
Inst. ...
us, it is in order that we possess him entirely (an que nous le possédions
entièrement).
Human beings will not be quick to claim that they possess God. All the same,
that is the very language Calvin employs when he speaks about the Lord’s Sup-
per. In the Lord’s Supper Christ makes himself the common property of all be-
lievers, Calvin insists, no believer possessing any greater or lesser participation
in Christ or any of his benets than the others.
The children of God, who are “engrafted into the body of Christ,” live in
Christ by continually communicating with him. And how does Christ com-
municate with us (Quomodo se Christus nobis communicet)? In that he “be
made one with us, and we be engrafted into his body (confondions en un seul
corps avec lui; in eius corpus coalescere oportet).” This infusion of His life into
us “makes increase of the body in the proportion of each member.” Those who
had already long been made partakers of Christ “continue and renew that com-
munion.” It is this intense desire to strengthen that bond and to maintain
the union with Christ and to nourish it that forms Calvin’s point of departure.
Every meeting elicits the desire for a next meeting.
Calvin reserved in his theology a very special place for the Holy Spirit. The
Spirit works personally and internally in every believer because he makes
people penitent, he works repentance and bestows faith. But also in a more
, . See also J. Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Be-
lievers in Union with Christ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ) and J. Todd Billings,
Union with Christ: Reframing Theology and Ministry for the Church (Grand Rapids: Baker
Publishing Group, ).
Inst. ... Cf. Martin Bucer, “The Reign of Christ,” in Wilhelm Pauck (ed.), Melanchthon
and Bucer (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, ), –, and –. See also
Michael S. Horton, “Calvin’s Eucharistic Ecclesiology,” in David W. Hall (ed.), Tributes
to John Calvin: A Celebration of his Quincentenary (Phillipsburg : P&R Publishing
Company, ), –, .
, art. ,,, f. Lee Palmer Wandel concludes, “the Supper, for Calvin, was not
‘external’—a ceremony … nor even ‘worship’ in the sense that other evangelicals, such
as Zwingli and Luther, used: “a mode of honouring God.” Rather, it is a means of binding
us together more and more with Christ in an ongoing relationship in which Christ “is
made completely one with us and we with him.” Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the
Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .
The Lord’s Supper is for those who greatly desire (capables et desirent grandement) the
body and blood of the Lord, and “who already live in the Lord and long for that life in him
to increase … and that they may hunger for that food unto eternal life (de vie eternelle).”
, .
’
outward fashion and in general terms he does his work in the liturgy, where
he is called upon in the prayer for illumination prior to the preaching. Thus
we see then, that it is the Holy Spirit who descends in the act of the Eucharist
to raise believers up. And the “Spirit reforms whatever is vicious in us, that we
may cease to live to the world and the esh, and God himself may live in us.”
Because “we draw life from the esh once ofered in sacrice and the blood
shed in expiation,” there takes place as we saw a substantial transfusion of the
participant, but not of the elements of the Lord’s Supper.
Both central acts in Calvin’s view of the Supper (i.e., the ofering and recep-
tion of the substance of Christ’s body) are done by God. This also applies to the
elevation of the believer’s heart. In this way, Calvin gave this traditional call to
prayer from the early Christian liturgy to lift up our hearts to heaven a central
place and a new function in the Reformed liturgy of the Lord’s Supper. As a re-
sult, it also received a place in the heart of the mystery of the unio mystica cum
Christo worked by God’s grace and Spirit in the Lord’s Supper.
In our service to God, so Calvin writes, we present “our bodies to God as a
living sacrice (en hostie vivante), holy and acceptable to him.” It is not that the
body of Christ must be sacriced again and again, but we ourselves, our bodies
as hosts and as living sacrices of thankfulness: “In this consists the lawful wor-
ship of him” (Rom. :). For that reason, the Lord’s Supper must be celebrated
not only on the great feast days, but as often as possible, so that this holy liturgy
might set the tone in regular, everyday life.
The Ecclesiastical-Liturgical Motive
The Reformers sought to give new meaning to the centuries-old customs of the
established church. In Calvin’s Geneva dozens of worship services were held ev-
ery week, apart from other kinds of assemblies where, for example, Bible studies
were held. By having the Lord’s Supper celebrated not only on the great feast
days, as was the case in Bern and Zurich, but every week or at least every month,
Calvin attempted to undo as well as he could the medieval distinction between
secular and sacred days. And by disconnecting the Lord’s Supper from specic
religious feast days, he paved the way for the Lord’s Supper to exercise an inu-
ence also on everyday, civil life. In this way, the church calendar was increasingly
secularized, while conversely the religious signicance of the liturgy was bol-
stered. In fact, in Geneva there was only one holiday, the Sabbath, and in Calvin’s
, and .
opinion on that day the Lord’s Supper should not missed. Christian Grosse has
rightly argued that it was Calvin’s intention to bring regular life and the liturgical
season so close together that regular, daily life would become more spiritual.
The administration of Word and Sacrament could efect a constant sancti-
cation of society in the form of greater obedience to God and self-denial. This
required a new daily rhythm and liturgy of the hours.
For Calvin, the ideal thus appears to be a daily communion, similar to the
way in which Luther, following Augustine, spoke of a “daily baptism.” In his
Large Catechism Luther, like Augustine, describes the entire Christian life as
a “daily baptism,” just as earlier he had spoken of the Sacrament of penance
in the spirit as a “daily penance,” “that the entire life of the believers (omnem
vitam delium) be penitential.”
In this same line, Reformed Protestantism too would make a distinction be-
tween a “rst or initial” and a “continual or daily repentance.” For Calvin too,
the life of Christians is marked by daily penance or conversion, and, in line
with this, by the daily participation in the living bread of grace through the
administration of both the Word and the Sacrament.
Because, in the medieval period, set prayers at set times structured the
rhythm of life, people were accustomed to pray every day for their daily bread.
As such “bread” in the fourth petition of the Lord’s Supper must be understood
not only as the physical but also the spiritual food, the bread of life (i.e., both
God’s Word and the Lord’s Supper), since people are composed of body and
soul and since both need daily sustenance.
The Reformers too applied the petition for daily bread to spiritual nourish-
ment. Pierre Viret, one of Calvin’s loyal sympathizers, did so in his explanation:
“I admit that what this petition of Jesus Christ encompasses consists more of
spiritual than corporeal matters (comprend plus les choses spritituelles, que cor-
porelles).” But God has also decided “in this mortal life (en ceste vie mortelle) to
make the [body] like the gloried body (au corps glorieux) of Jesus Christ, and
to cause it to share in its immortal and divine nature.”
Grosse, Rituels, .
/, f (Martin Luther, Disputation for the exposition of the power of indulgences of
October , thesis ). For Ambrose and Augustine, see Speelman, Eucharistic Piety, .
For the distinction between a conversio actualis prima and a later conversio cotidiana,
see Herman Bavinck, Gereformeerde Dogmatiek (Reformed Dogmatics), th ed. (Kampen:
Kok, ), Vol. , .
Pierre Viret, Exposition familière de l’oraison de nostre Seigneur Iesus Christ & des choses
dignes de consyderer sur icelle, faite en forme de dialogue (Geneva: Iean Girard, ),
–.
’
In his exposition of the petition to “give us this day our daily bread,” Calvin’s
friend and kindred spirit, Pierre Viret, treats at length the meaning of the word
“daily,” which some understand as “supernatural or metaphysical” (supersub-
stantiel, ou superessentiel), but which “can also be suitably rendered as ‘con-
tinual’ (continuel), ‘successive’ (ensuyuant), and ‘regular’ (ordinaire), as when
one says: ‘Lord, pasture us, feed us, not only today, once or twice, but every day,
tomorrow just as much as today and in fact all the days that follow.’” He who
“nourishes our bodies with physical bread in this temporal life is also pleased
to feed and perfect us with the true bread of life.” Thus we eat “at his table, in
his Kingdom, according to the promises he gave to his apostles of this meat
(viandes!) and these drinks (breuvages!) of immortality that he has prepared
through Jesus Christ our Lord for all those who love him in truth.” And if we
pray daily for this manna from heaven, it only makes sense that we also receive
it daily.
In regard to Acts : Calvin had also been thinking of a new interpretation
of the daily routines, and probably with regard to this proof-text specically
of doing certain things together at xed moments, such as teaching, the con-
gregational chanting of prayers from the Old Testament prayer book, partici-
pation into the body and blood of Christ, in conjunction with the faithful and
loving care for the needy neighbor. And his ideal of a Eucharistic liturgy in a
new Reformed style was from the beginning a very frequent (i.e., “at every gath-
ering of the congregation”) communication with Christ through the Word and
the Lord’s Supper, as in the Early Church. Aside from that, he created space
in the liturgy for the sharing of brotherly love and care through the ofering
of alms. Calvin also gave a xed place in the liturgy to communion through
the taking of an ofering for diaconal purposes. In this way Calvin used Acts
: to express his views on liturgy within the Genevan context of the time.
He was providing a biblical basis for his views and thereby ofering this inter-
pretation to the people he served. The denitive status of this passage extends
to the element of communicatio, a silent witness to the fact that the church
Viret, Exposition, and .
Cf. John K.S. Reid, Calvin: Theological Treatises (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, ),
. However, the place of a sacrice or ofering in the Roman Eucharistic liturgy
traditionally existed, rst with the gifts people brought in natura, and from the eleventh
century onwards increasingly in the form of money. In his commentary on Acts ()
Calvin described communicatio in terms of “mutual association, alms, and other duties of
brotherly fellowship.” Indeed he made a distinction between koinoonia as expressed in a
Eucharistic community and that of fraternal love or charity. Elsie A. McKee, John Calvin
on the Diaconate and Liturgical Almsgiving, (Geneva: Droz, ), .
order necessarily includes concern for the temporal as well as the spiritual,
that Christian worship also has an explicitly ethical dimension.
In the Reformed liturgy, the words of institution no longer sound during
the prayer of consecration, but as a proclamation right before communion.
And the call to lift up our hearts to heaven is for him in fact a prayer in which
the Holy Spirit is asked to lead our souls into the kingdom of God. For that is
where he lives, and his children are nourished and restored to life through his
substance.
The Heavenward Directed-Eschatological Motive
God’s children experience life according to a heavenly liturgy, in communion
with all saints, and looking ahead to full unication with Jesus Christ as their
true nal destination. In Luther translated into German the well-known
medieval hymn Media vita in morte sumus (“In the midst of life we are in
death”; Luther’s famous version begins with ‘Mitten wir im Leben sind’). Calvin
lived his life with his face turned towards the light, and therefore experienced
life, although mortal and surrounded by death, above all as being in the midst
of eternal life.
Therefore, when the Dutch poet Klaas Heeroma (alias Muus Jacobse) adapt-
ed this song about life and the mystery of Holy Communion, he started with
death and followed more in the spirit of Calvin when he wrote:
Surrounded by death/ we are alive/ because Someone breaks the bread/
to live with us/ in death.
Death is in our blood/ death facing us/ but He gives us courage/ that we
might live/ with death in our blood.
That from death/ we might rise to live/ eating from the bread/ that He
gave us/ in death.
Following Farel, Calvin located the sursum corda right before communion at the end of a
long exhortation as a call to lift one’s heart and as an invitation to participate, and began
that exhortation as follows: “Lift up your hearts, and seek the heavenly in heaven, where
Jesus Christ is seated.” Irmgard Pahl (Hg.), Coena Domini, Bd. I: Die Abendmahlsliturgie der
Reformationskirchen im ./. Jahrhundert (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag, ), f.
My own translation of a Dutch hymnal, Liedboek voor de kerken (Book of Hymns for the
Churches), no. verse –.
’
The heavenly bread nourishes and strengthens, and the believing, mortal man
longs intensely for it in his orientation to heaven: “For this spiritual bread is not
given us in order that on the rst occasion we eat our ll of it; but rather that,
having had some taste of its sweetness, we may long for it the more, and use it
when it is ofered us.”
In opposing the theory of a local presence and the practice it supported,
Calvin used the liturgical call to point (elevate) one’s heart up to heaven. The
sacramental reality has a Christological and pneumatological side to it. A pre-
cise distinction between the presence of Christ and the Spirit in the Sacrament
is not indicated by Calvin. It is a dynamic act that we nd in his liturgy, both in
the epiclese, the prayer for the presence of the Spirit in the Sacrament, and in
the sursum corda, the call to lift up the hearts to Christ in heaven:
For only then will our souls be disposed to be nourished and quickened
by his substance when they are so lifted up above all earthly things to
attain even unto heaven and to enter into the kingdom of God (entrer au
Royaulme de Dieu) where he dwells. Let us, then, be content to have the
bread and the wine as signs and attestations, seeking the truth spiritually
where the word of God promises that we shall nd it.
We ourselves, we are not capable of this knowledge of and communion with
God, and we also cannot lift our hearts up where Christ is in heaven. Here too,
man depends on the Spirit of God. By the efective working of the Spirit, says
Calvin, “the esh of Christ is like a rich and inexhaustible fountain that pours
into us the life springing forth from the Godhead into itself.” We are related to
Christ not only generically as fellow humans, but soteriologically, pneumato-
logically (which is not the same thing as ‘spiritually’), mystically, and eschato-
logically.
At the heavenly table, our existing relationship with Christ is strengthened
and the promises of the gospel are sealed. It would be highly untting for
someone like Calvin, with his orientation to the life in God’s Kingdom, for a
person to attend who does not desire to dwell in this mysterious house of the
Heavenly Father forever.
, .
, = Grosse, Rituel, . Cf. Marcel Royannez, “L’eucharistie chez les évangéliques
et les premiers réformés français (-),” Bulletin: Études, Documents, Chronique
littéraire (), –, . See also , and f. , f and .
Inst. ... John Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul to the Galatians and
Ephesians, trans. William Pringle (Grand Rapids: Baker, ), on Ephesians : f.
Motives Not Explaining Calvin’s Plea for Weekly Communion
After this investigation of four convincing reasons, now three reasons will be
examined that do not suciently explain why Calvin favored a weekly Com-
munion.
The Community-Shaping Efect of the Lord’s Supper
The Reformers considered it important that the Sacrament was administered
in the midst of the church, and was not celebrated in private Masses or
with only the priest communicating (and sometimes not even he!): “Where
there is no communal table for all believers, where they are not invited
to a communal breaking of the bread, and where finally believers do not
share amongst each other, there one falsely speaks of the Lord’s Supper,”
says Calvin. As such, the Lord’s Supper obtained an increasingly obligatory
character for Calvin, together with the prayer for unification in that one,
Holy Communion. Yet, with a specific interpretation of the ‘communion
of saints’ as the communion of the members of the (local) church, the
Reformed Eucharistic spirituality would continue to obtain a more
horizontal significance.
At times, this communal character is ofered as a reason for Calvin’s
pursuit of a very frequent celebration of the Lord’s Supper in this more
horizontal sense, on the pretext that this celebration shapes ecclesiastical
communities. In this context, an appeal is frequently made to Paul’s rst
letter to the Corinthians: “Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are
one body, for we all share the one loaf” ( Cor. :). The Protestant New
Testament theologian Wolfgang Schrage thus writes: “The central notion is
the orientation of the Eucharist to the congregation as the body of Christ
constituted by the Supper.”
In this line, Protestant theologians, pointing to Karl Barth, argue that the
Lord’s Supper is about “the sacred marriage between Christ and the church as
his bride.” For, as they see it, the Lord’s Supper means “that the church in its
earthly form of a Religionsgemeinschaft already is God’s dwelling-place among
humankind, the Bride of Christ.” For this reason, the Lord’s Supper must have
( Cor. : ), . Speelman, Biechten, .
See Wolfgang Schrage’s extensive commentary on the rst letter to the Corinthians ()
at Cor. : , Der erste Korintherbrief, . Kor , – ,, Evangelisch-Katholischer
Kommentar zum Neuen Testament, Bd. / (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag,
), : “Das Zentrale ist die Ausrichtung der Eucharistie auf die Gemeinde als den
durch das Mahl konstituierten Leib Christi.”
’
for them, as a matter of principle, a place in every worship service. Yet the re-
ality is that “we in Protestant churches now have a proclamation of the Word
that has extracted itself from the Sacraments.”
According to Calvin, it is indeed true that the relationship between church
and sacrament had to be re-conceptualized in Reformation times. The Sacra-
ments draw us out of our private rooms into the public dining room, where
the believers are co-heirs at the family table, not consumers of exotic or mean-
ingful religious experiences, and where we become “one body by such partic-
ipation” as Christ gives us his body. It is in this context that Calvin criticized
also those who shunned the Lord’s Supper, on the pretext that it means the
breaking of the union between God and his people.
In spite of its importance, the community-shaping efect of Holy Commu-
nion still does not form a motive for a weekly celebration. In Calvin’s Lord’s
Supper theology the emphasis is not so much on the shaping of the commu-
nity and the strengthening of the mutual bond among believers, as it is on the
new place of the individual belief through the new place of the lay person
in the communion in which he, too, now regularly participated, and on what
God does through the Supper for the individual believer, feeding him with all
Christ’s benets and with Christ himself. For Calvin the meaning of the Lord’s
Supper therefore primarily has a vertical direction. The reason for his insis-
tence on a highly regular celebration—which, in his ideal, would take place
every time the church assembled—must accordingly not be sought in the ne-
cessity of the Eucharist for the shaping of the congregation.
The Sanctication of Church and Society
William Bouwsma, a critical Calvin scholar, defended the thesis that
Calvin pursued a frequent celebration of the Lord’s Supper as a means for the
Conrad W. Mönnich and Gerrit C. van Niftrik, Hervormd-Luthers gesprek over het
Avondmaal: Explicatio van de consensus over het Avondmaal tussen de Nederlandse
Hervormde en de Evangelisch-Lutherse kerk (Reformed-Lutheran Discussion on the Lord’s
Supper: Explicatio of the Consensus on the Lord’s Supper between the Dutch
Reformed Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church) (Nijkerk: Callenbach, ), ,
with a reference to Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik, (Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag, ),
Vol. ., f.
Inst. ...
Someone who abstains from the table “denies Jesus Christ silently, as it were,” and does
not declare himself to be a Christian. ( , = , –, answer and ).
To Calvin’s way of thinking, that separation takes place at the Lord’s Supper: those who do
not participate place themselves outside of the community.
ecclesiastical leaders to gain control over believers, that is, as a form of social
and spiritual control. As such, Calvin’s new system of penance and confession
would no longer serve the holy mystery, but frequent participation in the Sac-
rament would rather be necessary in order to manage the system of control:
“He [Calvin] valued the Eucharist, as a rite of community but also because
those who proposed to receive it were required to give notice in advance;
this gave the clergy opportunities to admonish, instruct, and console those
for whose spiritual welfare they were responsible.” Hereby the discipline of
penance, although formally still coupled to the Lord’s Supper, is factually
made independent of it. In order to support his position, Bouwsma appeals
to a letter from Calvin to Farel. Although in theory Bouwsma’s line of argu-
mentation is possible, in reality Calvin’s church discipline is connected in a
fundamental way to the Lord’s Supper. One cannot, therefore, maintain that
Calvin defended a frequent communion with a view to the sanctication of
church and society.
The Ethical and Social-Civil Fruits
In our investigation of Calvin’s plea for a frequent celebration of the Eucharist,
it is logical to assume that it has to do with the meaning of the Lord’s Supper.
But is it also related to the preparation for, and/or the efect of, Communion in
the lives of the communicants?
Calvin’s Eucharistic spirituality is, above all, individual—more so, in fact,
than has been assumed in scholarship up until now, and notwithstanding the
fact that the Lord’s Supper must, in Calvin’s view, be celebrated in the assem-
bly of the church. The misconceptions that have arisen may have originated
from the Reformed church-consciousness, which rightly demands greater at-
tention for the communal and ethical dimensions of the Lord’s Supper. All
the same, this aspect of communality is of less importance in the context of
the reasons for a frequent celebration. What is more, the social-civil conse-
quences play no direct role in Calvin’s liturgy. Indirectly, of course, one should
, no. (May ), . William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century
Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –. Speelman, Biechten, .
For Calvin the goal of church discipline was not one-sidedly the punishment and rooting
out of evil, as with Zwingli, or the punishment of the congregation or the repentance
of the sinner, as with Bucer, or the creation of a pure church, as has been claimed by
Bouwsma and others. Bouwsma insisted that Calvin “yearned for a pure church, a visible
and exclusive community of saints.” Bouwsma, Portrait, . Speelman, Eucharistic Piety,
Ch. and .
’
not forget that there are no diferences in rank at the Lord’s Table, where the
faithful participants are all equal. Yet Calvin places the social and ethical ad-
vantages of the Lord’s Supper outside the liturgy, both ahead of time when the
communicants are examined in life and faith by the church’s representatives,
and during the very act of participation through which there is greater atten-
tion for the awareness of unication both in the here and now, and beyond
time and place.
On this point there is a wide symbolic consensus regarding the Lord’s Sup-
per, where all kinds of motifs of solidarity play a role and representativeness
converges in a few liturgical acts. The one small piece of bread, for example,
symbolizes “a whole body, a whole community, a universal church, an all-
embracing kingdom of God.” It is important for the symbolic signicance of
the Sacraments to be closely related to our “day-to-day reality,” and for one to
realize that it does not refer to the past alone. Nevertheless, it does not seem
plausible to assume that this formed a deeper motive for Calvin to propose a
weekly Communion.
For this, we must pay attention to the order. In the Lord’s Supper, Jesus
Christ is the source and substance of all good, who causes us to participate
in the power of his death and passion, including renewal, forgiveness, and
redemption, instead of rigidity, bitterness, and subjugation. Among these de-
lightful fruits of participation in the Sacrament Calvin counts also the assur-
ance of eternal life, a Christian life lived in thankfulness, and mutual charity
and unity. Although the Holy Spirit accomplishes these great efects through
the Lord’s Supper, they still form no reason for a very frequent celebration, as
Michael Horton claims.
Final Remarks about Calvin’s Eucharistic Spirituality
Some elements of Calvin’s Eucharistic spirituality especially afect the fre-
quency of active participation in the liturgical communication with the body
of Christ.
Martien E. Brinkman, Sacraments of Freedom: Ecumenical Essays on Creation and Sacra-
ment–Justication and Freedom (Utrecht: Meinema, ), , referring to the Didache.
, and .
Michael S. Horton, “At Least Weekly: The Reformed Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper and of
Its Frequent Celebration,” Mid-America Journal of Theology (), –, .
With regard to the Supper, and within the context of a social-spiritual dis-
cussion, Paul says in Corinthians and that we have to discern the body
( Cor. : ). For Calvin “discerning the body” meant, in the rst place, the
natural body of Christ, not the social and spiritual body of the church. Our sal-
vation is fully connected to the sacriced and gloried body of Christ. Calvin
emphasized above all that the Holy Spirit bridges the distance, so that believers
on earth can be joined to that life-giving body of Christ in heaven. This notion
of participating in Christ’s esh and blood in a non-spatial, pneumatological
and, at the same time, substantial way would continue to mark the Reformed
experience of the Eucharist.
Calvin’s experience of the Lord’s Supper betrays a deep connection with
currents from medieval Eucharistic spirituality, although he did have his own
understanding of it. Already in the early scholastic period one regularly nds
a purely spiritual consumption of Christ (manducare Christum spiritualiter).
This eating of Christ entails union with him in faith and love, in a personal and
spiritual communication. In this desire for, and the necessity of, a substantial
unication with Christ already in this life, the continuing renewal of our lives
was very important to Calvin.
The position of the individual Christian and the church as an assembly of
believers was upgraded by Protestants. They saw the congregation as a com-
panion of believers or a communion of saints. Instead of participating in exter-
nal religious ceremonies, each person was expected to consciously experience
the liturgy, aware of the meaning of partaking of the body of Christ. True Chris-
tians ought to be also intrinsically motivated, out of their love for God and his
justice, to share in the treasures and gifts of Christ as they are worked by the
Holy Spirit. From this point of view the function of the participant in the laity’s
reception of both Word and Sacrament received more emphasis. The kingdom
of heaven opens “as often as” the believer accepts the promise of the gospel
through preaching and communion with true faith.
For Luther this means that one rst had to discern the natural and true body of Christ. In
other words, physical eating has to precede spiritual eating. , “Against the Heavenly
Prophets in the Matter of Images and Sacraments (),” . Cf. Brian A. Gerrish,
“Discerning the Body: Sign and Reality in Luther’s Controversy with the Swiss,” Journal of
Religion (), –, .
Gerrish, “Discerning the Body,” . In both Roman and Zwinglian conceptions, the
Eucharist was, according to Calvin’s view, too much a human work, either of ofering
Christ again for sacrice or else of remembering and pledging.
Inst. ..; , , answer .
’
At the same time, a spiritual person needs an outside substance (substantia
extra nos) to anchor his life, to dwell in that substance and to receive substan-
tial assurance. The continuing renewal of our lives played an important role in
Calvin’s desire for a substantial unication with Christ in our daily lives. The
mystical and social-ethical connection between the participation in the Lord’s
Supper and our daily life is inseparable to him. Every Christian, and not just the
priests and monks, who regularly communicate the holy sacrament, ought to
be a ‘spiritual man’ (homo spiritualis). This important principle also had con-
sequences for the frequency of the use of the sacrament for every believer. In
addition, according to the reformed doctrine, people are entirely dependent
on Christ alone (solus Christus), upon whom depends all our salvation.
To Calvin, the Supper was a unique drama, but its source was God. No hu-
man act could add to that meaning in any way. It is more transcendent than
immanent, “a purely passive action,” and not/less a matter of the societal-
ethical binding signicance of communion, or the idea that the frequent ad-
ministration of the sacrament was necessary with a view to the increasing
transformation of the congregation into the body of Christ. The Christian must
be transformed bit-by-bit every day (journellement de plus en plus) into one
substance (une même substance) with Christ until he is fully one with us.
Preaching of the Word and celebration of the Supper belonged together.
And like the established church, Calvin, too, emphasized the obligatory char-
acter of the Lord’s Supper. Calvin did not consider the Lord’s Supper to be
a liturgical element, which could be added or omitted at will. It is only as an
exception that someone may have an excuse for not participating in commu-
nion. When people abstain from communion, the church becomes fragmented
in some way.
The notion of a weekly lay communion in the Protestant tradition was no
less than a revolutionary liturgical renewal, because the Reformers harshly crit-
icized the sacramental externalization of a Christendom guided by a church,
Steven E. Ozment, Homo Spiritualis: A Comparative Study of the Anthropology of Johannes
Tauler, Jean Gerson and Martin Luther (–) in the Context of Their Theological
Thought (Leiden: Brill, ), f.
Inst. ... The sign does not transform into the signied (Rome), nor are the
sign and the signied confused (Luther) or separated (Zwingli). For Calvin the signs
were “guarantees of a present reality: the believer’s feeding on the body and blood of
Christ.” Brian A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin
(Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, ), .
(; De Fide .), . Cf. , , art. .
, . Speelman, Biechten, and .
whose pastoral care and sacramental rituals structured and disciplined the
whole life. This is particularly noteworthy in Calvin’s case. According to Lee
Palmer Wandel, “no other evangelical so explicitly situated the Eucharist with-
in a dialogic process not simply of deepening faith, but of the increasing ca-
pacity to read the signs of the Supper itself, and by extension, of God, in the
world.”
In the Late Middle Ages, the altar sacrament had become commercialized
and the manner of celebration encouraged individualism: for the church
members advanced one by one to receive the host from the priest’s hand. This
ambulatory or walking communion service was preserved in the Reformed
tradition. Following prayers, the singing of a psalm, a reading from Scripture,
and a sermon, Calvin’s liturgy of the Lord’s Supper (La manière de célébrer la
Cène) prescribed a lengthy exhortation enumerating those who were specif-
ically excluded, followed by men (baring their heads) and women (covering
their heads with veils) respectfully striding forward at the conclusion of the
service to receive the bread and wine from the hand of the minister or one of
his assistants. Calvin, therefore, stressed the symbolism of the communality
by only celebrating the Supper in a church service, with the exception of the
communion of the sick.
Calvin felt that the communicant was ‘coming home’ at the Lord’s Supper, in
unity with God, and that God comes to the communicant, who becomes a holy
temple where sacrices of thanksgiving are ofered. Christ and Christian are
slowly melted together in a dynamic movement and in an everlasting moment.
Calvin thereby paradoxically lifts the communicant to heaven, although the
event at the same time actually takes place in his heart on earth.
In his theology of the Eucharist, Calvin combined the sacramental-mediated
and spiritual-unmediated unication with God in a strikingly dialectical way.
For Calvin the Eucharist became a more mysterious event because of the
Wandel, Eucharist, .
In fact, the Ecclesiastical Ordinances forbade in the celebration of the Supper
anywhere except in the church “until a more favorable occasion.” , . The purpose
was to prevent any private Mass or practices like a procession in which the consecrated
element is carried out. Later Calvin wrote: “Many weighty reasons force me to feel that the
sick should not be denied access to the Lord’s Supper.” , – (August , ).
(), . Speelman, Eucharistic Piety, . Here we might also recall Calvin’s mot-
to: “Cor mactatum in sacricium ofero”, and, in that context, Rom. :.
Calvin’s Eucharistic liturgy ended with a prayer of thanksgiving for the food “to eternal life
(de vie eternelle)” together with the singing of the Song of Simeon, adapted to the Lord’s
Supper: “Maintenant, Seigneur Dieu, as donné en moy lieu.” Grosse, Rituels, and .
’
Platonic–Augustinian dualism of his Eucharistic theology: one must go be-
yond the wine and bread because they are signs, not reality. The Eucharist is
the presence of Christ in a physical sense, and it is not. The sacrament has re-
ality and validity to the degree that the earthly sensible signies the heavenly
intelligible. The efect of this mystical approach to the Lord’s Supper is that
also the more horizontal, communal and human side was depicted by Calvin
primarily as the continued work and fruit of the Spirit of God.
Calvin’s vision on the holy sacrament is best understood from the dialectic:
God is present and He is absent, in the mystical union. He is very close and at
the same time there is an immense distance, the holy symbols hide and reveal
Him. For Calvin the physical, visible aspect and the spiritual, invisible aspect
of the sacraments are both important. Although the mystery of the presentia
realis, Christ’s spiritual presence in the worship and in the administration of
Word and Sacrament, contains both transcendent and immanent traits, Calvin
believed that it drew the Lord to us in a very special way, ofering to us himself
and his grace in the Holy Communion.
Conclusion
From the abovementioned summary of motives and arguments for a more or
less frequent communion, it can be deduced that Calvin’s passionate desire is
best explained from his personal and mystic Eucharistic spirituality, in which
the main focus is on communion between Christ and the communicant. The
Supper is the occasion for the believer to exercise living in a holy union with
his Savior. The expression this is my body calls the participant time and again
to live in Him, because He is my body.
Calvin was not so much concerned with the mutual fellowship of the par-
ticipants, for the Lord’s Supper is celestial (celeste), “it is the communion with
Christ, that is to say, with his body and blood” for forgiveness of sins and “to
“The concept of exhibitio [presentation] honors the reality of the gift of grace (because
of God’s promise) as well as the mystery–aspect of the Lord’s Supper (because of the
transcendence of grace).” Janse, “Calvin’s Eucharistic Theology,” .
Inst. ...
, = (Calvin’s Catechism), –, answer : “For though both in
baptism and in the gospel Christ is exhibited to us, yet we do not receive him wholly
[like in the Supper] but only in part” (Car combien que Iesus Christ nous soit vrayement
communiqué, et par le Baptesme, et par l'Evangile, toutesfois ce n'est qu'en partie, non
pas pleinement).
enable the life of Christ to grow” (la vie de Christ en nous) more and more (aug-
menter) in the life of the communicant so that the believer becomes conrmed
in his faith (conrmation) and grows in the gratitude for, and assurance of, eter-
nal life, for “in this sacrament He gives Himself to us, so that He lives in us and
we in Him.” This Divine communion cannot be experienced too often, for, and
that is the main principle (le principal), that “the whole mystery of the Supper
(tout ce mistere de la Cene) is that we live in Christ and He in us.”
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© Koninklijke Brill NV, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004356528_010
“Do This in Remembrance of Me”
On the Lord’s Supper, Performative Memory, and the Christian Moral Life
Robert Vosloo
I was baptized as an infant in a congregation of the Dutch Reformed Church lo-
cated in the town of Port Elizabeth, South Africa. I participated in the church’s
pre-school activities and later in the formal catechesis program, receiving
every year a beautiful stamp for my Sunday school certicate, indicating my
progress. When I was years old I was conrmed as a confessing member of
the Dutch Reformed Church. Shortly after that I celebrated the Lord’s Supper
for the rst time by receiving a small piece of neatly cut bread and some wine
from a tiny glass cup. Deacons distributed the bread and wine to us while we
remained sitting in the pews. I actually still have this small communion cup
since a few of us “took” our cups as a souvenir of the event. For me this rst
celebration of the Lord’s Supper was not a negative experience per se, and I
merely accepted it as the way in which the Lord’s Supper is supposed to be cel-
ebrated. I thus grew up with the idea that the ecclesial norm is that the Lord’s
Supper is a solemn and sober afair—a special occasion, to be celebrated only
a few times a year.
I was therefore quite surprised when I learned during my theological
studies that Calvin—who is such a pivotal authority gure for the Reformed
churches in South Africa—was in favor of weekly celebration of the Lord’s
Supper. For instance, one reads in his Institutes: “(T)he Supper could
have been administered most becomingly if it were set before the church
very often, and at least once a week.” During my theological studies I also
learned that the division of the Dutch Reformed family of churches into
separate denominations along racial lines was connected historically to the
persistence of the practice of separate worship and separate celebration of
the Lord’s Supper. In the th century the Dutch Reformed Church, which
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vols., trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T.
McNeill (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, ), ... And a few pages further we
read: “The Lord’s Table should have been spread at least once a week for the assembly of
Christians, and the promises declared in it should feed as spiritually. None is indeed to be
forcibly compelled, but all are to be urged and aroused; also the inertia of indolent people is
to be rebuked. All, like hungry men, should ock to such a bounteous repast.” (..).
gained its autonomy from the church in the Netherlands in , had to face
a specic challenge, namely how to integrate the converts from its mission
work into the existing white congregations. This led to some disputes in
the s and s about whether whites and the black converts should
worship and celebrate Holy Communion together. At the synod of the
ocial position still was “that Holy Communion be served simultaneously
to all members notwithstanding race or descent,” but at the synod of
a decision was taken that allowed for worship in separate buildings “due to
weakness of some” (that is, due to the prejudice of some white members).
This decision had great ecclesial implications (and afterwards became an
important historical and symbolic marker in the interpretation of the history
of the Dutch Reformed Church). Rather than being the exception, separate
worship along racial lines, including the celebration of the Lord’s Supper,
became the rule over time.
In this article I want to place my argument within this historical context
in which the separate celebration of the Lord’s Supper is associated with
a long and complex history of racial division, exclusion and enmity. Given
the impact of Calvin on the Reformed heritage in South Africa, I am also
interested in the way that he gave theological justification to the idea that
the Lord’s Supper should be celebrated frequently and not merely once
or a few times a year. In the process I want to make an argument for the
celebration of the Lord’s Supper as “performative remembrance,” drawing
in the process on Calvin and also some contemporary scholars. The article
argues that the Reformed tradition provides resources to view participation
in the Lord’s Supper (as a “return in memory to the passion of Christ”) as
a sustaining remembrance, a proclaiming or kerygmatic remembrance, a
Acta Synodi Kerk , .
The decision of , which sought a compromise in the debate, reads as follow: “Synod
regards it as desirable and scriptural that our members out of the heathendom should be
accepted and incorporated within our existing congregations, wherever this can happen;
but where this measure could, as a result of the weakness of some, obstruct the advance of
the cause of Christ amongst the heathen, then congregations formed out of the heathen,
or which may still be formed, shall enjoy their Christian privileges in a separate building or
institution.” See Acta Synodi Kerk , . For a discussion of the decision of the Synod
of see, for instance, Chris Lof’s chapter “The History of a Heresy,” in John W. de Gruchy
and Charles Villa-Vicencio, Apartheid is a Heresy (Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Phil-
ip/ Guildford: Lutterworth Press, ), –. Cf. Robert Vosloo, “The Welcoming Table?
The Lord’s Supper, Exclusion and the Reformed Tradition,” in Eddy Van der Borght and Paul
van Geest (eds), Strangers and Pilgrims on Earth: Essays in Honour of Abraham van de Beek
(Leiden: Brill, ), –.
“ ”
Eucharistic remembrance, and an ecclesiological-ethical remembrance.
Such an understanding of performative remembrance suggests that the
celebration of the Lord’s Supper is not a mere repetition of a past event,
but an embodied non-identical performative re-enactment marked by
representation and anticipation, with implications for the Christian moral
life. At the heart of this logic is the theological idea that ecclesiology and
ethics cannot be separated.
The Lord’s Supper as “Performative Remembrance”
The notion of “performative memory” is increasingly being used in cultural
memory studies, with some scholars even speaking of a “performative turn.”
Indicatively of this broader shift, some scholars have also armed and utilized
the possible links between memory and performativity in their discussion
of the work of various truth commissions that dealt with a past marked by
historical injustices. The work of South African Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (), for instance, has often been analysed through the lens
of the notion of “performance.” Deborah Posel, among others, has referred to
the as “theatre.” Other observers have reected on the as a national
ritual, and some even used metaphors associated with Eucharistic redemption
to describe it. In her study Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission
See in this regard, for instance, Liedeke Platea and Anneke Smelik (eds), Performing
Memory in Art and Popular Culture (New York/London: Routledge, ). As the editori-
al introduction states: “[I]n this volume we seek to understand memory as an embodied
and localised practice. Such a move is part and parcel of a broader paradigm shift in
cultural memory studies, from a linguistic to a performative turn” (–). See also Ka-
rin Tilmans, Frank van Vree and Jay Winter (eds), Performing the Past: Memory, History,
and Identity in Modern Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, ). In the
introduction to this collection of essays the editors point to the fact that the domain of
performativity is fertile ground, “since performance reiterates and innovates at the same
time” ().
Deborah Posel, “Truth? The view from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission,”
in Deborah Posel et al. (eds), Keywords: Truth (New York: Other Press, ), –.
See Antjie Krog, “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission – a National Ritual?” Missionalia
/ (), –.
See Ebrahim Moosa, “Truth and Reconciliation as Performance: Spectres of Eucharistic Re-
demption,” in Charles Villa-Vicencio and Wilhelm Verwoerd, Looking Back, Reaching For-
ward: Relections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (Cape Town:
Cape Town University Press/ London: Zed Books Ltd, ), –.
Catherine Cole also looks at the work of the Commission through the lens of
performativity, asserting
that the commission was a performance and that we need to understand
how its performative dimensions operated: how the commission used re-
stored behaviour, expressive embodiment, storytelling and retelling; how
it called into being diferent audiences and arenas of witnessing; how it
functions as a ritual for addressing a massive breach in the social fabric;
how it drew on existing genealogies of performance, particularly as the dis-
empowered come into contact with the law in judicial and quasi-judicial
arenas; how, in sum, the serves as a literal and gurative stage for
South Africa’s political transition.
The emphasis on the notion of “performance” in memory studies indeed opens
up rich possibilities for analysis and interpretation, and rightly challenges
some reductive understandings of memory that deal with memory on a more
individual level without taking into account how knowledge of the past is sus-
tained by embodied ritual performance. In his inuential study How Societies
Remember Paul Connerton rightly states that
re-enactments of the past depend for much of their rhetorical persua-
siveness … on prescribed bodily behaviour … Our bodies, which in com-
memorations stylistically re-enact an image from the past, keep the past
also in an entirely efective form in their continuing ability to perform
certain skilled actions.
Along these lines one can argue that the notion of performative remembrance
can also be a valuable lens for reecting on the Lord’s Supper, thus understand-
ing the sacrament as an embodied ritual practice that sustains our knowledge
of the past through the re-enactment and representation of the “memory of
Christ.” The possible link between the Lord’s Supper and the notion of “perfor-
mative memory” is of course already suggested in the well-known words from
Luke :, where we read, in the context of the meal of the Passover during
the night that he was betrayed (thus in the midst of the messiness of history),
that Christ took bread, broke it and said: “This is my body given for you. Do this
Catherine M. Cole, Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), .
Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
), .
“ ”
in remembrance of me” (cf. also Corinthians : , ). The command to
“Do this” points to a memorial action or practice.
Some commentators point to the fact that although we often speak today of
attending the Eucharist, the Early Church “by contrast, tended to speak of do-
ing the Eucharist (eucharistiam facere), or performing the mysteries (mysteria
telein).” As William Cavanaugh puts it: “The word anamnesis had the efect
not so much of a memorial but rather of a performance.”
Several other scholars have armed this link between the celebration of
the sacraments and the notion of performance. Richard McCall, for instance,
observes:
Built into the very warrant for sacramental worship is a verb of perfor-
mance … Christians inherited from the Jewish prayer traditions the habit
of invoking God’s active involvement in the presence by remembering
thankfully God’s almighty acts in the story of God’s people. Narrative re-
members act; act fulls narrative.
The link between memory and action is also armed by Martha Moore-Keish
in her study Do This in Remembrance of Me. Drawing on ritual theory, and in
conversation with John Calvin, she calls attention to the need to see “the lex
orandi as rst and foremost about doing, as a lex agendi in which participants
are both engaged in embodied activity and also formed by patterns of liturgical
action over time.”
Another theologian who has drawn upon some work in memory studies in
his reections on the Lord’s Supper is the German Reformed theologian Mi-
chael Welker. In his book What Happens in Holy Communion? Welker points to
Holy Communion as an event that establishes and arms the remembrance
of Jesus Christ; for him this is one of the answers to the question posed in the
title of his book. This “act of remembrance” (also called “the memorial” or an-
amnesis) is, moreover, not just a merely mental or intellectual act exercised by
William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ
(Oxford: Blackwell, ), . Cf. D. Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London:
Continuum, ), . Dix’s remarks on ‘doing the eucharist’ is found in a chapter in his
book aptly titled “The Performance of the Liturgy.”
Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, .
Richard D. McCall, Do This: Liturgy as Performance (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, ), .
Martha L. Moore-Keish, Do This in Remembrance of Me: A Ritual Approach to Reformed
Eucharistic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), loc of [Kindle edition].
individuals, but a public event in which the remembrance of Jesus Christ “is re-
newed and revitalized, concentrated and intensied.” What is of interest here
is the fact that Welker does not understand the celebration of Holy Commu-
nion as a private, individual and static repetitive event, but as a generative and
dynamic power. Drawing on the important work of the German Egyptologist
Jan Assmann on cultural memory (who in turn draws on the work of Maurice
Halbwachs and Claude Lévi-Strauss), Welker arms: “Memory is not only an
individual or a communal mental phenomenon. It is, rather, a power for the
communal generation of a world. Memory not only species to a high degree
the common past, but also the shared present and the expected future.”
With reference to Assmann’s thinking, Welker points out how the power of
memory to transform becomes clear when we understand how cultural mem-
ory stretches beyond what is called “communicative memory.” Communicative
memory is in ux and continually being transformed, and often shifts layers.
Out of this more uid “communicative memory” develops what can be called
“cultural memory,” which as a rule has greater longevity but is also less adap-
tive to change. Hence cultural memory often functions to immunize the com-
munity against its own transformation. Assmann refers to this stabilizing force
of cultural memory as “cold options of memory.” But, as Welker emphasizes,
cultural memory can also become “hot memory” that functions as a motor for
change in society. Welker further points to the fact that cold and hot memory
are not stark alternatives for societies, but that, in fact, highly developed soci-
eties “strive for a cultural memory that allows them to connect the continual
stabilization of their identity and their dynamic development.”
Like the biblical canon, cultural memory can act in two ways: it can immu-
nize human society against the transformations associated with historical fac-
tors (“cold options of memory”). But cultural memory can also become a “hot
memory” that makes more space for dynamic development. For Assmann the
canon—one can, for example, think of the biblical canon—makes the creative
interplay between cold and hot memory possible. This efectuates a living cul-
tural memory. The astonishing power of living cultural memory—Welker also
speaks of canonical memory, with reference to the set of texts of the biblical
traditions that developed over a long period of time—on the one hand, im-
poses limits on the possibilities of transformation, while on the other hand, it
stimulates ongoing interpretation and transformation.
Michael Welker, What Happens in Holy Communion? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), .
Welker, What Happens in Holy Communion?, f.
Welker, What Happens in Holy Communion?, .
Welker, What Happens in Holy Communion?, .
“ ”
Welker regards the “memory of Christ” as a memory that the celebration of
Holy Communion renews and revitalizes as just such a living cultural memory
(or canonical memory). The memory of Christ, which reaches back to various
biblical strands, connects multiple perspectives in a continual interplay that,
in diferent ways, renders Jesus present. In the interplay between xed and
uid forms canonical memory witnesses to the vitality of the presence of the
risen Christ. This living canonical memory is for Welker, furthermore, a cultur-
al power in which “the Crucied and risen Jesus Christ can continually come
anew to an efective presence.” For Welker, this is not the result of our com-
memorative powers, but happens through the power of the Holy Spirit: “The
Holy Spirit is the power which continually renews the act of bringing human
beings together for the solidication, renewal, revitalization, and enrichment
of the memory of Christ.” The fact that this memory is efected by the Holy
Spirit does not make it something vague and numinous, but “a cultural power
that transforms the world.” Hence the need to emphasize in the celebration of
the Lord’s Supper the signicance of the invocation of the Spirit (the epiklesis).
I recount Welker’s reference to Holy Communion as a living cultural mem-
ory here, since it opens space to see the celebration of the Lord’s Supper not
as mere repetition, or as an identical repetition, of the Last Supper. Christ is
present, through the Holy Spirit, in this anamnesis. Thus the remembrance of
the Last Supper becomes the Lord’s Supper, and this anamnesis is also a fore-
taste of Christ’s Parousia. In the process we are “timed” in a diferent way, with
meaning-bearing forms being imposed on our recollections of the past, our
experiences in the present, and our expectations of the future. In this way it is
a performative remembrance marked by non-identical repetition (to use Cath-
erine Pickstock’s phrase). As participation and incorporation in the “memory
of Christ” it is marked by ongoing interpretation, continual improvisation, and
creative re-enactment and embodiment.
If the Lord Supper has the power to function as a living cultural memory
marked by representation and anticipation, the question can be asked wheth-
er this does not point to the need for the frequent celebration of the Lord’s
Supper. With this question in mind I turn to John Calvin’s plea and justication
for the frequent celebration of the Lord’s Supper.
Welker, What Happens in Holy Communion?, .
Welker, What Happens in Holy Communion?, .
Catherine Pickstock, Repetition and Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), .
Calvin and the Frequent Celebration of the Lord’s Supper
It is well known that Calvin made a strong and passionate plea for the frequent
celebration of the Lord’s Supper. He called the custom of taking communion
once a year “a veritable invention of the devil.” His arguments in this regard
should of course be understood within the context of the development of his
understanding of the Sacraments, and within the context that his whole theo-
logical project can be seen as a Eucharistic theology. Various scholars have
traced the development and scope of Calvin’s view of the sacraments and his
Eucharistic theology. The Dutch Church historian Wim Janse, for instance,
has argued persuasively that we should not merely interpret Calvin’s view of
the Lord’s Supper as the sum total or common denominator of all his state-
ments on the topic between and . He writes:
Calvin’s Eucharistic views were not from the beginning a detailed, co-
herent, and unied doctrine, nding its representative expression in the
Agreement of Zurich () or the Institutes, but show a historical
development … A fundamentalist, a-historical, non-developmental ap-
proach to Calvin’s doctrine of the Lord’s Supper will inevitably lead to
simplication and misrepresentation.
This said, for our purposes here I want to attend more closely to Calvin’s argu-
ment for the frequent celebration of the Lord’s Supper by using a quotation
from the Institutes as a cue for a conversation on the possible contours
for a theology of the Lord’s Supper as “performative remembrance.” Calvin
writes in Institutes .. that his discussion of the Lord’s Supper up to this
point has made it abundantly clear that the sacrament was not ordained to be
received only once a year:
Calvin, Institutes, ...
See in this regard, for example, Thomas J. Davis, The Clearest Promises of God: The Development
of Calvin’s Eucharistic Teaching (New York: Studies, ), Thomas J. Davis, This is My
Body: The Presence of Christ in Reformation Thought (Grand Rapids: Baker, ); Keith A.
Mathison, Given for You: Reclaiming Calvin’s Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper (Phillipsburg: P&R,
); Dirk J. Smit, “Oor Calvyn se siening van die nagmaal” (On Calvin’s Understanding of
the Lord’s Supper), / (), –, and Brian A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude:
The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Minneapolis: fortress Press, ).
Wim Janse, “Calvin’s Eucharistic Theology: Three Dogma-Historical Observations,” in
Herman J. Selderhuis (ed.), Calvinus Sacrarum Literarum Interpres: Papers of the International
Congress on Calvin Research (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, ), –.
“ ”
Rather, it was ordained to be frequently used among all Christians in or-
der that they might frequently return in memory to Christ’s Passion, by
such memory to sustain and strengthen their faith, and urge themselves
to give thanksgiving to God and to proclaim his goodness; nally, by it to
nourish mutual love, and among themselves give witness to this love, and
discern its bond in the unity of Christ’s body. For as often as we partake
in the symbol of the Lord’s body, we reciprocally bind ourselves to all the
duties of love in order that none of us may permit anything that can harm
our brother, or overlook anything that can help him, where necessity de-
mands and ability suces.
The kernel of these ideas is already found in Calvin’s discussion of the sac-
raments in his Institutes. In his commentary on Calvin’s Institutes
Karl Barth succinctly summarizes Calvin’s view:
The point of the sacred action is ) to remind us of the goodness of God
in Christ and to summons us to recognize it ) to enable us to perform
an act of confession ) to bring us to a nal awareness of our fellowship
with the brethren and to lead us to love of them in Christ and of Christ
in them.
Calvin’s argument for the frequent celebration is by no means limited to the
Institutes and can be found in several of his writings, although it certainly
nds its mature expression in his Institutes. In his discussion Calvin sees
the frequent celebration of the Lord’s Supper as the practice of the apostol-
ic church. Drawing on Acts and I Corinthians , he argues that no church
Calvin, Institutes, ...
Karl Barth, The Theology of John Calvin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), .
In his Articles Concerning the Organization of the Church and of Worship at Geneva ()
Calvin writes that “It would be well to require that the Communion of the Holy Supper of
Jesus Christ be held every Sunday at least as a rule … In fact, it was not instituted by Jesus
for making a commemoration two or three times a year, but for a frequent exercise of our
faith and charity, of which the congregation of Christians should make use of as often as
they be assembled.” See John Calvin, Theological Treatises, ed. J.K.S. Reid (Philadelphia:
The Westminster Press, ), . Also in his Draft Ecclesiastical Ordinances we read:
“Since the Supper was instituted for us by our Lord to be frequently used, and also was so
observed in the ancient Church until the devil turned everything upside down, erecting
the mass in its place, it is a fault in need of correction, to celebrate it so seldom.” See
Calvin, Theological Treatises, .
meeting should take place “without the Word, prayers, partaking of the Lord’s
Supper, and almsgiving.”
But let me return to Calvin’s argument as to why the Lord’s Supper should
be celebrated frequently. Calvin argues that it should be celebrated frequently
among all Christians “in order that they might frequently return in memory to
Christ’s Passion, by such memory to sustain and strengthen their faith.” One
can thus describe the return in memory as a sustaining remembrance. The re-
turn in memory to Christ’s Passion sustains and strengthens our faith over time.
Calvin further adds that this remembrance, this frequent return in memory
to Christ’s passion, evokes the urge to sing thanksgiving to God. It is in this
sense a Eucharistic remembrance, responding in gratitude to God’s grace. This
gratitude is enabled by the fact that, as Calvin starts his discussion of the Lord’s
Supper in the Institutes:
God has received us, once and for all, in his family, to hold us not only as
servants but as sons. Thereafter concerned for his ofspring, he under-
takes to nourish us throughout the course of our life. And not content
with this alone, he has willed, by giving his pledge, to assure us of this
continuing liberality.
This Eucharistic remembrance is furthermore a kerygmatic remembrance,
since it is also a proclamation of God’s goodness and of the life and salvation
enabled through Christ’s death. As Calvin writes in the Institutes:
Now because in it the Lord reminds us of the great generosity of this
goodness and wants us to recognize this; so he likewise exhorts us not
to be ungrateful for such an undisguised kindness but rather to magnify
it with suitable praises and remember it with thanksgiving. This is why
he gave the institutions of the sacrament to his apostles, he commended
them to do this in memory of Him, which St Paul interprets, “proclaiming
the death of the Lord” (I Cor []). This is to confess publically, openly,
and all together, as with one mouth, that all our condence and trust for
life and salvation is in the Lord’s death.
Calvin, Institutes, ...
Calvin, Institutes, ...
Calvin, Institutes, ...
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion: French Edition, trans. Elsie McKee
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), .
“ ”
And:
Here we see the goal of the sacrament: to give us practice in remembering
the death of Jesus Christ. For the fact that we are commanded to proclaim
the Lord’s death until he comes in judgment means nothing else than of
us to make known by the confession of our mouths what our faith has
recognized in the sacrament, which is that the death of Jesus is our life.
The return in memory to Christ’s passion is, moreover, not only a sustaining
remembrance, a Eucharistic remembrance, and a kerygmatic remembrance,
but also an ethical remembrance with ecclesiological and public implications.
Calvin argues that through this return in memory to Christ’s passion mutual
love is nourished. Through partaking of the Lord’s Supper we thus bind our-
selves to the duties of love. Here Calvin links the return in memory to Christ’s
passion through the frequent celebration of the Lord’s Supper to the concern
to help and not to hurt our sisters and brothers. This idea is in line with Cal-
vin’s argument earlier in his discussion of the Lord’s Supper that the sacrament
functions as a kind of exhortation to us to holiness of life, and to love, peace
and concord. Hence his oft-quoted statement:
We shall benet very much from the sacrament if this thought is im-
pressed and engraved upon our minds: that none of the brethren can
be injured, despised, rejected, abused, or in any way ofended by us,
without at the same time, injuring, despising, and abusing Christ by the
wrongs we do; that we cannot disagree with our brethren without at the
same time disagreeing with Christ; that we cannot love Christ, without
loving him in the brethren; that we ought to take the same care of the
our brethren’s bodies as we take of our own; for they are members of our
body; and that, as no part of our body is touched by any feeling of pain
which is not spread among all the rest, so we ought not to allow a brother
to be afected by any evil, without being touched with compassion for
him.
This powerful passage from Calvin concerning the unity of the body of
Christ was quoted at length in a document written by the South African anti-
apartheid theologian Allan Boesak entitled “God Made Us All, But … Racism
Calvin, Institutes French Edition, .
Calvin, Institutes, ...
and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches.” Boesak states that racism
in South Africa made it virtually impossible to share with one another in the
Lord’s Supper, the sacrament expressing the unity of the body of Christ: “And
so both black and white and black Reformed Christians are deprived of the
meaning of the sacrament that Calvin so much wanted to impress upon our
minds.” This document was sent by the Alliance of Black Reformed Church-
es in Southern Africa () to delegates attending the meeting of the
World Alliance of Reformed Churches in Ottawa, Canada in —an event
that would become an important marker in the church’s struggle against
apartheid. This document, which was a plea for the World Alliance to play a
more active role in the struggle against racism, described racism as structured
sinfulness and also refers to the fact that racism in South Africa makes it vir-
tually impossible to share in the natural expression of unity within the body
of Christ, namely the Lord’s Supper. These words gain special weight from the
controversy that erupted when the delegations of the black Dutch Reformed
Churches refused to share Holy Communion with the members of the white
Dutch Reformed Church. The events in Ottawa formed part of a groundswell
that resulted in the Dutch Reformed Mission Church calling a status confes-
sionis with regard to apartheid, and later adopting the Belhar Confession in
which the notion of the unity of the body of Christ plays a pivotal role. The
Belhar confession makes it clear that this unity of the people of God must
become visible and that it
must be manifested and be active in a variety of ways: in that we love one
another; that we experience, practise and pursue community with one
another; that we are obliged to give ourselves willingly and joyfully to be
Alan A. Boesak, Black and Reformed: Apartheid, Liberation, and the Calvinist Tradition
(New York: Orbis Books, ), –, here .
Boesak, Black and Reformed, .
For a discussion of these events, see Jacobus Christof Pauw, Anti-Apartheid Theology
in the Dutch Reformed Family of Churches: A Depth-Hermeneutical Analysis (PhD Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam, ), –.
The Belhar Confession was accepted in draft form at the Synod of the Dutch Reformed
Mission in and ocially adopted as fourth confession of the church in . For
the draft confession of Belhar and the accompanying letter, as well as for some very
informative essays on the confession, see G. Daan Cloete and Dirk J. Smit, A Moment of
Truth: The Confession of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
). On the Belhar Confession, see also Piet J. Naudé, Neither Calendar nor Clock:
Perspectives on the Belhar Confession (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ).
“ ”
of benet and blessing to one another; that we share one faith, have one
calling, are of one soul and mind, have one God and Father, are lled with
one Spirit, are baptised with one baptism, eat of one bread and drink of
one cup, confess one name, are obedient to one Lord, work for one cause,
and share one hope.
It is thus not surprising that in discussions on the reunication of the racially
divided Reformed churches in South Africa the fact that the Lord’s Supper im-
plies mutual love has often been highlighted, also with reference to Calvin. For
Calvin the Lord’s Supper is sweet and delicate spiritual food for those who, in
tasting it, are moved to thanksgiving and mutual love. But it is a deadly poison
to those whom it does not arouse to thanksgiving and love. When people rush
to the Lord’s table without any spark of faith and zeal for love, they profane
and pollute the sacrament. Christ’s body is torn and dismembered. They bring
judgment on themselves by mixing the sacred symbol of Christ’s body with
their discords.
Much more can be said about how the return in memory to Christ’s passion
has ethical and ecclesiological implications. The celebration of the Lord’s Sup-
per, as performative remembrance, should not be dislocated from the embod-
iment of love and justice amidst discord and inequality. In Calvin’s argument
for the frequent celebration of the Lord’s Supper one hears a theological and
ethical justication. Clearly for Calvin the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is
closely connected to the Christian moral and ecclesial life, to the faithful em-
bodiment of mutual love. Put diferently, and as the Belhar Confession also
makes clear, the fact that we eat of one bread and drink from one cup implies
that we make visible the unity of the one body of Christ through the embodi-
ment of mutual love. Ecclesiology and ethics cannot be separated.
Performative Remembrance and Embodied Participation
In the introduction to this article I mentioned that I grew up in the racially
divided Dutch Reformed Church, in which the Lord’s Supper was celebrated
only three or four times a year. The South African theologian John de Gruchy
has rightly written that the
Belhar Confession, art. .
Cf. Calvin, Institutes, ...
infrequent celebration of the Eucharist does not necessarily indicate a
lack of signicance; it may even give it a greater signicance and solemnity.
But that is not the point at issue. What the infrequent celebration of Holy
Communion does is to signicantly change the character of worship.
Because of the predominance of preaching, Reformed worship began to
resemble an academic lecture characterized by didactic and moralistic
rhetoric rather than a joyous celebration of the presence of the crucied
and risen Christ.
The emphasis on “performative remembrance” helps, in my view, to chal-
lenge this reductive way of celebrating the Lord’s Supper. This does not
mean that we should neglect the focus on preaching or teaching, but that
we understand that the goal is the transformation of lives, the embodiment
of the gospel. As Martha Moore-Keish rightly states about Calvin: “He was
concerned about teaching, not because he wanted to form doctrinal posi-
tions, but because he wanted to form people into more faithful worshippers
… Calvin’s intention was to move his congregation to more lively and en-
gaged participation.”
If the infrequent celebration of the Lord’s Supper changes the character of
worship, it is also true that the more frequent celebration of the Lord’s Supper
can change the character of worship and, if we take the link between worship
and ethics seriously, also our Christian moral lives. The point is not merely a
numerical game of more or fewer celebrations, but rather the armation that
the “return in memory to Christ’s passion” is a corporate, embodied and trans-
formative action that is informed and formed by a theology that attests to the
fact that what we receive in grace and respond to in gratitude is inextricably
linked to ecclesiological and ethical implications, including the embodiment
of mutual love amidst brokenness and divisions.
In their book A Body Broken, A Body Betrayed Mary McClintock Fulkerson
and Marcia Mount Shoop write:
Eucharistic liturgy and habit cultivate the expectation that we have a
shared story and that we embody this shared story in our eucharistic
practice. Yet when real bodies gather at the table there is a thoroughgoing
John W. de Gruchy, John Calvin: Christian Humanist and Evangelical Reformer (Wellington:
Lux Verbi, ), .
Moore-Keish, Do This in Remembrance of Me, loc of .
“ ”
dissonance that signals rupture and betrayal as well as particularity and
possibility.
This sobering insight reminds us, also in contexts marked by racial divisions
and injustices, that the call is not merely for more frequent celebrations of
the Lord’s Supper, but rather for more frequent celebrations that express and
embody visibly and corporately the unity of the body of Christ amidst contin-
ued historical divisions and painful experiences of misrecognition. This will
indeed require courageous and wise “performative remembrance.” Yet we can
also point to the fact that the celebration of the Lord’s Supper as performative
remembrance, as “the return in memory to Christ,” is not a mere repetition of
past knowledge and practice, but that as a living memory it can provide re-
sources for creative renewal and faithful improvisation, challenging the way in
which we distort and domesticate the “memory of Christ” through our inability
to let liturgy and life rhyme. And we should also remember that the emphasis
on performative remembrance does not imply that the doing is all ours. Mar-
tha Moore-Keish puts it well:
‘Do this in remembrance of me,’ said Jesus at the Last Supper. ‘Do this in
remembrance of me,’ says the minister at the Eucharist. And so we do,
but the doing is not all ours. God does something through our own doing,
moving in divine freedom to unite our full humanity to the fullness of
Christ. Sometimes this happens quickly, but most often it happens over
time, as the Holy Spirit gradually draws us into closer union with the One
who gave us birth, who feeds us with his own body, and who beckons us
from the brightness of divine glory at the end of time.
Mary McClintock Fulkerson and Marcia W. Mount Shoop, A Body Broken, A Body Betrayed:
Race, Memory, and Eucharist in White-Dominant Churches (Eugene, : Cascade Books,
), . They also write: “To understand the function of the Eucharist both in reproduc-
ing social brokenness and in potentially aiding in the transformation of our brokenness,
we need a framework wise to the complexity of social trauma, race, and embodiment
… We need greater attention to the connections between embodied practice and theo-
logical imagination … We invite a re-membering of Eucharist both by interrogating col-
orblindness and by making space to acknowledge the traumatic imprint of race in our
believing communities” (–).
Moore-Keish, Do This in Remembrance of Me, loc of .
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Celebrating the Lord’s Supper as Act of
Moral Formation
A Qualitative Research Report
Jasper Bosman and Hans Schaefer
In Reformed churches all over the world, the Lord’s Supper is celebrated reg-
ularly. Participants are said to celebrate their unity with Jesus Christ and with
each other. After receiving bread and wine, they praise God and pray to Him so
that their lives may be spiritually renewed. This renewal may foster the unity
of the communion of saints—being one aspect of the ethical impact of the
Eucharistic celebration.
In this article we present the results of qualitative research conducted
in . This research focuses on how the Lord’s Supper is experienced by
participants in three diferent Reformed congregations in the Netherlands.
The research focuses on the relationship between the experience of the Lord’s
Supper and moral formation on both the level of groups and individuals within
these communities. Our main research question is as follows: In what respect
does participation in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper foster the unity of the
communion of saints in three Reformed congregations?
The authors wish to thank Dr Robert Covolo () for his comments on the English text
of this chapter.
To be precise, our focus is on the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands (Liberated)
which are called: Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland (vrijgemaakt).
In this article, ‘moral formation’ is limited to the formation of an individual within a group
of believers (a congregation), as experienced by the subject itself. This implies that other
possible (social) facts or events that may have inuenced its (moral) formation will not
be evaluated as part of this research, although their inuence may be of crucial impor-
tance and cannot be denied. The term ‘moral formation’ is used tentatively, as to denote
the (trans)formative power of worship for Christian ethics. Cf. Bernd Wannenwetsch, Po-
litical Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens (Oxford: University Press, ), esp. –;
–; Liturgical Commission of the Church of England, “Transforming Worship:
Living the New Creation” (June , ), https://www.churchofengland.org/media/
/gs.pdf (visited: February , ), –; Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel
Wells (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (Second edition; Malden/Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, ).
’
In previous theological research, this question has not yet extensively been
addressed from an empirical point of view. There are three previous stud-
ies—two located in the and one in Germany—that are distinct from the
following research. The rst is a doctoral dissertation by John Tamilio that
describes the practice and understanding of the Eucharist within ve con-
gregations of the United Church of Christ. While an important work in many
ways, Tamilio’s research contains no sustained focus on formative aspects. The
second is Martha Moore-Keish’s case study of Reformed Eucharistic theology
from a Ritual Studies perspective. While very interesting, Moore-Keish’s work
is limited to one congregation. Finally, Christian Grethlein refers to several
empirical research reports in the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland. As with
Tamilio, Grethlein’s research is without a special focus on moral formation.
The above demonstrates that little is known about Eucharistic experiences
of contemporary believers within the Reformed tradition, especially out-
side the and Germany. In order to ll in this gap, we have developed an
Closely related, but without empirical analysis: Martien E. Brinkman, “Het sacrament
in de gereformeerde geloofsbeleving” (The Sacrament as Experienced in the Reformed
Faith), in Martien E. Brinkman (ed.), jaar theologie: Aspecten van een eeuw theologie
in de Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland (–) ( Years of theology: Aspects of
a century of theology in the Reformed churches in the Netherlands (–)) (Kam-
pen: Kok, ), –. Also Mark Allman, “Eucharist, Ritual and Narrative: Forma-
tion of Individual and Communal Moral Character,” Journal of Ritual Studies / (),
–.
John Tamilio , Practice and Understanding of the Eucharist: United Church of Christ: A
Practical Theological Study (Saarbrücken: Scholar’s Press, ).
Martha L. Moore-Keish, Do This in Remembrance of Me: A Ritual Approach to Reformed
Eucharistic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ).
Christian Grethlein, Abendmahl feiern in Geschichte, Gegenwart und Zukunft (Leipzig:
Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, ), –.
However, in the Dutch context, the Netherlands Organization for Scientic Research
() has rewarded funding for a research project called De verbindende en scheidende
kracht van rituele maaltijden: op weg naar een kwantitatief meetinstrument (The Unifying
and Dividing Force of Ritual Meals: On the Way Towards a Quantitative Analytical Instru-
ment), coordinated by Peter-Ben Smit, Remco Robinson and Maarten Wisse. The aim of
this research project was to develop an analytical instrument for quantitative research.
Related to this, but without proper scientic verication, the Dutch Council of Church-
es (Raad van Kerken in Nederland) published a short report called: “Beleving eucharistie
en avondmaal” (Experiencing the Eucharist and the Lord’s Supper), in Oecumenische be-
zinning (Ecumenical Reection) (), http://www.raadvankerken.nl/fman/
.pdf (visited: July , ).
analytical instrument by which also quantitative data is collected for the pur-
pose of qualitative research.
This article will proceed in four movements. First, we will provide a the-
oretical framework. Second, we will dene our research design and present
our analytical instrument. Third, we will use our research data to discuss the
hypothesis that a reasonable number of participants do not experience moral
formation by means of Eucharistic celebration. Indeed, this being the case even
though this formation seems presupposed in the work of some contemporary
scholars and though the Eucharistic celebration is central to the liturgy within
the Reformed tradition. Finally, we will discuss the results of our research in
order to reect on the relationship between liturgy and moral formation.
Theoretical Framework
In this section, we will present a theoretical framework based on the results of
literature reviews in the elds of Ritual Studies and Liturgical Studies.
The Lord’s Supper: A Ritual Studies Perspective
In the past few decades, the discipline of Ritual Studies has emerged, ofering a
rigorous academic study of ritual behavior. Within the eld of Ritual Studies,
several theories have been developed to describe and interpret rituals. When
it comes to dening rituals, at least three approaches can be distinguished: a
Although some quantitative data is collected and used, our analytical instrument is called
‘qualitative’ instead of ‘mixed methods research’ because quantitative data is only col-
lected within the group of interviewees—in order to provide a better description of the
participants of this research. The use of quantitative data in qualitative research can be
called methodological triangulation. Cf. John W. Creswell, Research Design: Qualitative,
Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches (Los Angeles: , ); John W. Creswell
and Vicki L. Plano-Clark, Designing and Conducting Mixed Methods Research (Thousand
Oaks: , ).
Mark Searle, “Ritual,” in Cheslyn Jones, Geofrey Wainwright, Edward Yarnold, and Paul
Bradshaw (eds), The Study of the Liturgy (revised edn; London: , ), –. Later,
this article appeared in Paul Bradshaw and John Melloh (eds), Foundations in Ritual
Studies: A Reader for Students of Christian Worship (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, ),
–. Cf. Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford: University Press,
); Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge:
University Press, ); Gerard Lukken, Rituals in Abundance: Critical Relections on the
Place, Form, and Identity of Christian Ritual in Our Culture (Leuven: Peeters, ); Ronald
L. Grimes, The Craft of Ritual Studies (Oxford: University Press, ).
’
‘formal,’ a ‘fundamentalist,’ and a ‘symbolic’ approach. First, there are formal
denitions that seek to dene ritual activity in terms of distinctive features
such as “repetitive, prescribed, rigid, stereotyped, and so on.” Second, there
are fundamentalist approaches that dene ritual in terms of the purposes it
serves. This includes, for example, rituals satisfying individual or collective
needs like social cohesion and cultural coherence. Third, there are symbolic
denitions that dene ritual in terms of communication, that is, as “an activity
that conveys meaning.”
The purpose of this article is neither to choose between one of these ap-
proaches nor to provide a new approach or denition. Instead, it uses the pos-
sibility created by the emergence of Ritual Studies to provide an interpretation
of the Lord’s Supper within the Reformed tradition from a Ritual Studies per-
spective. This interpretation makes it possible to relate several aspects that
have been discovered by ritual experts with the Lord’s Supper. Based on this
research, we distinguish the following aspects of ritual action:
– Style (repeatability, immutability, rule deniteness of the ritual);
– Meaning (religious meaning, interpretations, tradition, convictions
individual/group);
– Conduct (what needs to happen, what do I need to do and what
happens around me?);
– Space (inuence of the physical space, also: which (ritual) space is
being created?);
– Experience of the self related to others (expectations, norms, etc.);
– Experience of the self related to God (God image).
Searle, “Ritual,” –.
Searle, “Ritual,” .
Searle, “Ritual,” .
Cf. Moore-Keish, Do This in Remembrance of Me.
These aspects are loosely inspired by the six characteristics of ritual-like actions as
summarized by Catherine Bell (Formalism, Traditionalism, Invariance, Rule-governance,
Sacral symbolism, and Performance; cf. Bell, Ritual, –) and the ve features of
rituals as dened by Roy Rappaport (Encoding by others than performers, Formality (as
decorum), Invariance (more or less), Performance, and Formality (vs. physical ecacy); cf.
Rappaport, Ritual, –). Beside this, Rappaport has acknowledged the importance
of space (cf. Rappaport, Ritual, –). Because some aspects overlap and others are
missing, we have developed a new conceptual model of ritual-like actions in which a.o.
the ‘experience of the self related to God’ has been added because of its theological
importance.
Together, these six aspects are used not only as a means to interpret the Lord’s
Supper from a ritual perspective, but specically as sensitizing concepts by
which to diferentiate between the diferent dimensions of ritual action. They
are not intended to dene the sacrament theologically, but are used to, as
Searle rightly observed, “identify the subjective and objective conditions under
which people today might still be able to participate fruitfully in the liturgy.”
Or, to state it in terms of practical-theological research, they are part of the
four tasks of practical-theological interpretation: the descriptive-empirical,
the interpretive, the normative, and the pragmatic task.
Within Reformed theology careful attention to ritual has not enjoyed a
prominent focus. Abraham Kuyper, however, protested in his time against “li-
turgical arbitrariness” and gave much attention to style, conduct, requirements
for church buildings, and so on. Kuyper’s approach suggests two things. First,
that within all four practical-theological tasks theology plays a part. Second,
that the lens ‘Ritual Studies’ is to be used in the descriptive-empirical, the in-
terpretive, the normative, and the pragmatic tasks.
Thus, the focus on the concrete shape of the ‘ritual’ of the Lord’s Supper,
perceived through the lens of Ritual Studies, serves to describe a particular
aspect of the fostering of communion as part of the moral formation of the
participants. We are well aware (as the Reformed missiologist Stefan Paas re-
cently stated) of the objection that liturgy may not be instrumentalized for
moral formation. If doxology is the core task of the church, the liturgy re-
mains at its center. What is more, given the celebration of the Lord’s Supper is
the fulcrum of the liturgy, it may be argued (according to Paas) that the Lord’s
Supper is the nexus wherein we encounter doxology’s three most important
Searle, “Ritual,” .
Cf. Richard R. Osmer, Practical Theology: An Introduction (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
).
Abraham Kuyper, Our Worship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, [abridged transl. of
Onze Eeredienst (Kampen: J.H. Kok, ]), esp. . Marinus de Jong recently stated that
the Reformed tradition in its concern for a well-balanced doctrine of the Holy Spirit
has much to bring for an ‘embodied liturgy’ (“Heaven Down Here: The Presence of the
Spirit in Reformed and Charismatic Worship,” Journal of Reformed Theology / (),
–).
On the relation between theology and non-theological sciences, cf. Hans Schaefer, “The-
ologie en etnograe: een eerste verkenning voor gereformeerde praktische theologie in
Kampen” (“Theology and Ethnography: A First Exploration for Reformed Practical Theol-
ogy in Kampen”), in Marinus Beute and Peter van de Kamp (eds), Instemmend luisteren:
Studies voor Kees de Ruijter (Listening in Agreement: Studies for Kees de Ruijter) (Utrecht:
Kok, ), –.
’
aspects: looking back, looking around, and looking ahead. It is exactly be-
cause the liturgy should not be instrumentalized, however, that careful inves-
tigation into what actually is perceived by the participants is so important.
If celebrating the liturgy is not merely for fostering virtues, we need to move
beyond Paas so as to advance the liturgy’s transformative power. Conceiving
the liturgy from a Reformed point of view as a “means of grace,” therefore, is
not the same as instrumentalization. Indeed, the Lord’s Supper should serve
as an instrument of the Holy Spirit to transform human lives. Therefore, to
further elucidate the transformative power of the Lord’s Supper we turn to the
concept of liturgical formation as described by James K.A. Smith and Susan
Wood.
Liturgical Formation: A Liturgical Studies Perspective
James K.A. Smith has argued that there are three kind of practices: thin
practices, thick practices, and liturgies. Thin practices are rituals that are as
normal as everyday life. They are learned over time, either intentionally or
automatically, and thus become practices that are more or less automatic
habits. For example, most people do not remember the exact time they
brushed their teeth. Thick practices are practices that are more signicant,
because they are important to those who perform them. For instance, religious
rituals like praying and participating in worship can serve as thick practices.
But also non-religious activities may be thick, like visiting friends once in a
while, or going on summer vacation. The diference between thin and thick
practices is that thick practices are formative (or even transformative) for
those who perform them. They are meaningful and identity-signicant. The
thickest practices, according to Smith, are liturgies. Here liturgies are dened
in a broad sense as “rituals of ultimate concern: rituals that are formative
for identity, that inculcate particular visions of the good life, and do so in a
Cf. Stefan Paas, Vreemdelingen en priesters: christelijke missie in een postchristelijke omge-
ving (Strangers and Priests: Christian Mission in a Post-Christian Environment) (Zoeter-
meer: Boekencentrum, ), –.
“Door ons te herinneren aan wat God heeft gedaan in Jezus Christus werkt de doxologie
bevrijdend en ontspannend” (“By remembering what God has done for us in Jesus Christ,
doxology is liberating and relaxing”) (Paas, Vreemdelingen, ). We think that the prima-
ry goal of Paas’s objections may not be the ‘instrumentalization’ of the liturgy as such, but
‘instrumentalization by human activity’ instead of conceiving the liturgy as a ‘means of
grace’ on God’s behalf.
James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation
(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, ), –.
way that means to trump other ritual formations.” This implies that, beside
religious rituals like Christian worship, secular rituals like shopping or sports
can also be understood as liturgies.
According to Smith, Christian worship is liturgy par excellence. That is, as a
ritual of ultimate concern, it embodies a particular vision of the good life and
therefore retains the capacity to transform those who perform it. In Smith’s
words, the Lord’s Supper is “a macrocosm [sic] of what the church is called to
be as the new humanity: a community that gathers, irrespective of preferences,
tastes, class, or ethnicity, in order to pursue a common good.”
Susan Wood adds to this understanding. According to Wood, liturgy is “the
place where an ecclesial group preserves its traditions, symbols, and texts and
expresses its self-identity.” Using Michael Polany’s concept of ‘indwelling’ she
explains that in the liturgy as a whole, including rituals like the Lord’s Supper
and preaching, participants indwell the Christian story, thereby being “formed
into a Christian community” through the process of assuming the story as their
own. Thus, “[l]iturgy becomes the microcosm of the work that God is do-
ing in the world, that is, transforming it into his body.” Wood also remarks,
however, that one easily romanticizes or idealizes the liturgy. This is why she
raises the question of whether a view of the liturgy “reect[s] more the wish
of the author than reality.” It all comes to placing ourselves “in the formative
environment of the liturgy so as to acquire the perspective expressed there,
to experience ourselves as active members of a worshipping community, and
through the liturgical rite to be caught up into the doxological return to the
Father through Christ in the power of the Spirit.” It is this ‘placing ourselves’
and the presumed outcome of such self-placement that was a focus of our in-
vestigation within three local Reformed churches.
It may now be clear that liturgical formation is not intended to describe
some inherent magical power of the ritual, or some activist account of rituals
Smith, Desiring, (italics in original).
Cf. Smith, Desiring, .
Smith, Desiring, (italics in original).
Susan K. Wood, “The Liturgy: Participatory Knowledge of God in the Liturgy,” in James
J. Buckley and David S. Yeago (eds), Knowing the Triune God: The Work of the Spirit in the
Practices of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), .
Wood, “Liturgy,” .
Wood, “Liturgy,” .
Wood, “Liturgy,” .
Wood, “Liturgy,” .
’
intended to bring about ethical improvement. It is about Christian believers
being touched by the sacred and by means of God’s grace called upon a new
way of life—the “new humanity.”
The liturgy, thus conceived, may be called a praxis of the community of be-
lievers. It is the way in which they practice Christian life. Liturgy and dox-
ology are the telos of the church, and by participating in the practices of the
church, Christians perform the life-form of the liturgy in order to serve this
telos. The liturgy, then, is not the starting point for community building, but
is the way in which Christians over time have practiced their longing for God
himself. In other words, it is a way to bring about communion in its deepest
sense and in its vast and multiple dimensions.
By way of summary, we assent to the conclusion of Mattijs Ploeger in his
account of liturgical theology:
A thorough understanding of a liturgical or eucharistic ecclesiology does
neither start with the liturgy or the eucharist, nor with the church. It
starts with God, his being and his mission in and for the world. There,
in God’s Trinitarian being, the notion of koinonia nds its source. From
there, the notion of koinonia leaves its mark on a Christian view on hu-
manity as God has created it and as God wants to restore it. Within this
context of humans destined to live in koinonia with God and one anoth-
er, the church has its natural place as the preliminary form of a restored
divine-human and inter-human koinonia, a place that is simultaneously
indispensable and provisional. As the preliminary form of koinonia be-
tween God and humanity and between reconciled humans among them-
selves, the church nds its natural centre in the tangible source and ex-
pression of koinonia, the eucharistic liturgy.
The Liturgical Form of the Lord’s Supper
Before we turn to the question whether this ‘new humanity’ as koino-
nia—though provisional—may be experienced, we will take a look at the
Liturgical Commission of the Church of England, “Transforming Worship,” esp. –.
Cf. Bernd Wannenwetsch, “Gottesdienst als ‘Einübung’ in die christliche Existenz,” in:
Martin Klöckener et al. (eds), Gottesdienst der Kirche: Handbuch der Liturgiewissenschaft,
Teil , Band (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, ), –.
Mattijs Ploeger, Celebrating Church: Ecumenical Contributions to a Liturgical Ecclesiolo-
gy (Groningen: Instituut voor Liturgiewetenschap; Tilburg: Liturgisch Instituut, ),
.
classical liturgical form for the celebration of the Lord’s Supper within the
Dutch Reformed Churches. Within the Reformed Churches (Liberated), this
form is still in use. In many ways, it has inuenced the practice and under-
standing of the Lord’s Supper in the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands
(Liberated). The classical form for the celebration of the Lord’s Supper
makes clear that the sacrament is performed in order to remember Christ.
One could say that this is the main end of the sacramental celebration, ac-
cording to Dathenus. But within the classical form, several other reasons are
identied as well. First of all, remembering Christ means remembering his
sufering and sacrice. Second, the participants are called to “rmly believe”
that they belong to the covenant of grace. When celebrating the sacrament,
the aim is to move beyond conceptuality to an experience of the vicarious
work of Christ. They may receive his quickening Spirit and share in all of his
blessings, of life eternal, righteousness, and glory. Third, the believers “may
also be united as members of one body, in true brotherly love” (cf. Cor.
:). They are engrafted into Christ and therefore part of his body. Be-
cause of the love of Christ, those who celebrate should love one another, not
only in words but also in deeds.
Until now we have elaborated on three sources that explain the Lord’s Sup-
per from a theoretical perspective. First, from the perspective of Ritual Studies,
aspects of ritual action were introduced as a means to look for formative qual-
ities of the practice of the Lord’s Supper. Aspects such as description, analy-
sis, normative treatment, and perspectives on implementation highlight what
is going on in the Lord’s Supper. This includes how the Supper operates as a
‘means of grace’ to restore koinonia between God and humanity, and between
The form we are looking at is that developed by Petrus Dathenus in for his own con-
gregation in Frankenthal, Germany. Christopher Dorn, The Lord’s Supper in the Reformed
Church in America: Tradition in Transformation (New York: Peter Lang, ), . Cf. F.
Gerrit Immink, The Touch of the Sacred: The Practice, Theology, and Tradition of Christian
Worship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), –.
Until the ’s it was the only liturgical form available for the celebration of the Lord’s
Supper. After that, the synod of the Reformed Churches (Liberated) approved an abbre-
viated version of it. In the past decade, the existing forms have been modernized and an
additional number of three (shorter) forms have been approved for liturgical use. With-
in the Canadian and American Reformed Churches, who originate from the Reformed
Churches in the Netherlands (Liberated), the classical and abbreviated form are still the
only forms in use. Cf. for the original form: http://www.canrc.org/?page= and for the
abbreviated version: http://www.canrc.org/?page=.
Dorn, The Lord’s Supper, .
’
the participants. Second, James K.A. Smith and Susan Wood make clear that
the Lord’s Supper is a central element of Christian worship. The Lord’s Supper
embodies a ritual that is both meaningful and formative for identity. As a ritual
of ultimate concern, it holds the potential to transform the character of its par-
ticipants, not only individually, but as a “catalyst for reconciliation.” As such,
the Lord’s Supper transforms the communion of saints. Third, in the classical
liturgical form for the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper something similar is stat-
ed. As the formula reads, the participants should love one another, not just in
words but also in deeds. Again, this implies that participation in the celebra-
tion should foster the unity of those who attend, even if “we do not serve God
with such zeal as He requires.”
The second and the third point together ofer something of a blueprint for
churches celebrating the Lord’s Supper. They lead to the question of whether
the Lord’s Supper is indeed experienced as a transformative practice. Do par-
ticipants experience mutual charity as described in the liturgical form? Is there
transformation as described by Smith? These questions will be answered in the
next sections.
Research Design
We conducted qualitative research from December till February in
three congregations across the Netherlands. The communities were all con-
nected to the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands (Liberated), a denomina-
tion with about . members and about local congregations.
Population
Each local church that participated difered in size, geographical background,
and style of celebration of the sacrament. Primary and secondary criteria were
used by way of selecting the congregations. The primary criterion was style. We
chose this rst and foremost because it is often assumed that this is the most
Smith, Desiring, .
Phrase taken from the classical form for celebrating the Lord’s Supper (http://www.canrc
.org/?page=, visited: February , ).
Cf. Nicholas M. Healy, Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology
(Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press, ), –.
More information on the Reformed Churches (Liberated) can be found online: http://
www.gkv.nl/.
important element when it comes to the experience of participating in the
Lord’s Supper. Secondary criteria were geographical background and member
size. These criteria, though not as key, were also considered inuential in how
one experiences the Lord’s Supper. Together, these criteria led to the selection
as displayed in Table .. Notable, some criteria not used for the selection of
congregations included ‘life phase’ of a congregation and the frequency of cel-
ebration.
Because of the small size of this research, only three diferent styles have been under
consideration. A historical analysis of diferent styles of communion in the Netherlands
is presented in: Jan R. Luth, “Communion in the Churches of the Dutch Reformation to
the Present Day,” in Charles Caspers, Gerard Lukken and Gerard Rouwhorst (eds), Bread
of Heaven: Customs and Practices Surrounding Holy Communion: Essays in the History of
Liturgy and Culture (Kampen: Kok Pharos, ), –. More specically, on the use
of common bread: Erik A. de Boer, “Liturgical Reform in the ‘Breaking of the Bread’ in
the Lord’s Supper in the Palatinate and Its Resonance in the Heidelberg Catechism,” Acta
Theologica: Supplementum (), –.
For example, the life cycle of congregations has been described in ve diferent stages of
life: church planting, growth, continuity, revitalization, and decay, in Rein Brouwer et al.,
Levend lichaam: Dynamiek van christelijke geloofsgemeenschappen in Nederland (Living
body: Dynamics of Christian denominations in the Netherlands) (Kampen: Kok, ),
–. However, when starting this research, it seemed unlikely that the life phase of
a congregation was more of inuence on the experience of the Lord’s Supper than the
style of celebration. Beside this, it proved to be impossible to investigate the inuence
of frequency of celebration—because of the short period of research time available. For
these reasons, style has been chosen as primary criterion for the selection of congrega-
tions.
. Participating congregations
Congregation Celebration style & frequency Geographical background Member size
AWalking, times/year Countryside (village) –
BWalking, times/year Urbanized (village) –
CSitting (at a table) or
standing (in a circle),
times/year
Urbanized (city) –
’
In each local church, four members of diferent age groups were interviewed.
The interviews were semi-structured and consisted of ve questions. In total,
twelve individual members were interviewed (Table .).
Beside these individuals, in each congregation a focus group consisting of com-
munity members was interviewed with the same set of questions (Table.).
Third, the ministers of each congregation were also given the same set of ques-
tions in individual interviews. Because this tradition of Reformed churches
only allows men in the pastoral oce, only men were interviewed (Table .).
The number of individual participants per age group is neither in accordance with the
number of congregants within the respective congregations (because this number was
unknown), nor in accordance with the demographic statistics of the Dutch population.
Further research may solve this by changing the composition of the age groups or chang-
ing the number of participants per age group.
. Participating individual members
Age Congregation A Congregation B Congregation C
Under years of age A (male) B (female) C (male)
From to years A (female) B (female) C (male)
From to years A (male) B (male) C (female)
Older than years A (female) B (male) C (female)
. Participating group members (m = male, f = female)
Age Congregation A (Ak) Congregation B (Bk) Congregation C (Ck)
Under years of age - - (m=, f=)
From to years (f=) (f=) (m=)
From to years (m=, f=) (m=, f=) (f=)
Older than years (m=, f=) - -
Sum (m=, f=) (m=, f=) (m=, f=)
Analytical Instrument
During the individual interviews and group interviews the same set of ques-
tions has been used. When interviewing the ministers, the questions were
placed in the context of their role as a liturgist (i.e., their profession). All in-
terviews were accompanied by two questionnaires: (.) a short questionnaire
developed by ourselves and (.) the Dutch Questionnaire God Image () as
developed by Hanneke Schaap in . The latter is a validated instrument
that intends to measure an individual’s feelings towards God and perceptions
of God’s actions. Within the research, the was used to describe the popu-
lation with regard to the aforementioned sixth aspect of ritual action (‘expe-
rience of the self related to God’). Conducting the interviews with individuals
took about thirty to forty-ve minutes. Group interviews took about fty to
seventy minutes. All interviews were conducted and audio-recorded by the
rst author of this article. The recordings were transcribed and coded induc-
tively by the same person with coding software (Dedoose), using both open
and thematic codes.
Diferent Styles of Celebration
The following styles of celebration were customary within the three congrega-
tions participating in this research.
In congregation A, in the event of celebrating the Lord’s Supper in a walking
manner, the minister rst reads a liturgical form and then prays on behalf
. Participating ministers
Congregation Minister Age
AAp (male) From to years
BBp (male) From to years
CCp (male) From to years
Cf. Hanneke Schaap-Jonker et al., “Development and Validation of the Dutch Question-
naire God Image: Efects of Mental Health and Religious Culture,” Mental Health, Religion
& Culture / (), –.
Dedoose is a cross-platform app for analyzing qualitative and mixed methods research.
Cf. http://www.dedoose.com/.
’
of the congregation. Thereafter, the congregation confesses the faith (This is
conducted standing and by listening to a confession text being read by the
minister or by singing a composed confession text). The minister reads the
words of institution, breaks a loaf of white bread and pours red wine out of a
silver carafe in a large, silver cup. All of this happens when the congregants are
still located on their seats. Then, one of the elders invites the congregation to exit
their seats row by row and walk to the front of the church hall. Non-participants
are supposed to remain seated. Those who participate walk behind each other
to the front of the church hall to receive a cube of white bread given to them by
the minister himself. After this, the congregants walk a small distance to a table
with several large, silver cups lled with red wine. The cups are distributed
by two or three elders, so that all participants ‘share the same cup.’ After this,
the participants immediately return to their seats. During the celebration,
background music is being played (usually organ music, accompanied with
the singing of psalms or hymns by the congregation members). After all the
participants have received the elements, the minister ends the Eucharistic
section of the liturgy by saying thanks to God and performing a prayer.
Although located in a smaller building and being a smaller congregation,
the celebrations in congregation B retain some similarities to congregation A.
That said, there are some diferences. In congregation B, the liturgical form
preceding the celebration is replaced by a short meditation delivered by the
minister himself. Additionally, instead of cubes of white bread being ofered,
the congregants tear of a piece from a loaf of wheat bread. This implies that all
participants eat from one, common provision. Also diferent, during the cele-
bration of congregation B photos of splendid nature and felicitous people are
projected on a screen while either live or recorded worship music plays in the
background.
Distinct from A and B is congregation C. Here two alternate forms are em-
ployed. In the rst form, rows of tables are placed across the church hall in
which congregants are seated. When the celebration begins, the minister rst
reads a liturgical form (sometimes partly) and prays on behalf of the congrega-
tion. Next, he invites the people in the church to stand and confess their faith.
After this, those who are allowed by the church council to join the celebration
are invited by an elder to rise and choose a place at the ‘table of the Lord.’
Non-participants are requested to remain seated. When all seats around the
tables are occupied (or all participants have a seat) the minister reads the rst
part of the words of institution and breaks the bread. The bread (again white
cubes) is distributed from neighbor to neighbor on several dishes. People usu-
ally eat the bread immediately after receiving it. Once everyone around the
table has received bread, the minister pours some wine out of a silver carafe
into a large, silver cup and says the second part of the words of institution.
Several cups of wine are distributed from neighbor to neighbor. After everyone
has received a sip of wine, the minister may share a short meditative sermon
which is sometimes followed by a song being sung by the whole congregation.
Quite often, a second and even third table is seated and served when the rst
table did not serve all those ready to participate. Background music is being
played when people are walking to the tables, or when they return to their
original seats. But while the participants are seated, it remains silent. After all
participants are served, the minister ends the celebration by saying thanks to
God and leads a prayer.
When celebrating standing (in a circle) in congregation C, the minister does
not read a liturgical form, but shares a short meditation before praying on
behalf of the congregation. After this, everyone (including non-participants)
is invited to rise and make a large circle. While standing, everyone is invited
to confess their faith. Hereafter the minister reads the words of institution,
breaks the bread, and pours wine into a cup. Dishes with bread (white cubes)
are distributed around the circle, usually from neighbor to neighbor. After all
participants have received bread, large silver cups lled with red wine are dis-
tributed in the same way. A small number of dishes and large cups are used, so
that all share the same cup. Non-participants can pass the dish and cup to their
neighbor, or may even choose to excuse themselves. During the Eucharistic
celebration it remains silent. At the end of the celebration a song is sometimes
sung by the congregation. The minister ends the celebration by saying thanks
to God and leading in prayer. After this, all may return to their original seats.
Quantitative Data
Frequency of Participation in the Lord’s Supper
Three values were measured by means of a short questionnaire given to the
interviewees: () how often one has participated in celebrations of the Lord’s
Supper within one’s own congregation in ; () the number of times partic-
ipating in celebrations in other congregations in the same year; and () the de-
sired frequency of celebration. In Table . the average results are compared
with the actual number of celebrations in each of the congregations.
One group member (Ck) did not provide answers to questions related to frequency, be-
cause this person told the researcher that he/she did not celebrate the Lord’s Supper (yet),
because of personal reasons.
’
In relative terms, it becomes clear that in the participants of congrega-
tion A participated with the most frequency in the Lord’s Supper. However,
in absolute terms, participants of congregation C celebrated the Lord’s Supper
more than those in the other congregations. In the same year, participants of
congregation C celebrated the Lord’s Supper more in other congregations (i.e.,
as guests) than the other congregations. Lastly, it is noteworthy that partici-
pants of congregation B (and possibly congregation C) would like to celebrate
the sacrament most often.
In order to test whether the average results of the three congregations dif-
fered signicantly, the (non-parametric) Kruskal-Wallis test (p<.) was con-
ducted three times. These tests revealed that the diferences between the three
congregations do not difer signicantly (this is probably due to the small sam-
ple size).
God Image
After completing the interviews and the short questionnaire, the participants
were asked to complete the Dutch Questionnaire God Image (). This ques-
tionnaire assesses whether diferences in one’s God image correlates to difer-
ences in one’s experience of the Lord’s Supper within a congregation or group.
Using this questionnaire, six types of statements about God are measured: pos-
itive feelings towards God (); anxiety towards God (); anger towards
Two participants of congregation C mentioned two values with regard to the ideal fre-
quency. Eventually, they are willing to celebrate on a weekly basis. If these values are
taken into account, the average result of congregation C will be . times/year.
. Average frequencies of celebrations per congregation (ministers excl.)
Congregation Celebrations/year Partic. in own
congr.
Partic. in other
congr.
Ideal frequency
A (n=) times/year . times/year . times/year . times/year
B (n=) times/year . times/year . times/year . times/year
C (n=) times/year . times/year . times/year . times/year
God (); supportive actions of God (); ruling/punishing actions of God
(); passivity of God ().
The questionnaire contains seventeen words (“If I think about God, I experi-
ence X”) and sixteen statements about God (“God is doing X or Y”). In total, the
instrument consists of thirty-three items. Every item required an evaluation by
the respondent which is registered on a ve-point scale. Nine of the items were
connected to , ve to , three to , ten to , four to , and two
to (cf. Table .).
Table . contains the average sum scores per scale per congregation (all par-
ticipants, ministers included). For comparison, also the average sum-scores
These six scales can be dened as follows. : to which extent the relationship with
God can be dened as close and safe, and to which extent the respondent feels love and
afection towards God. can be described in multiple facets. It might be anxiety for
rejection, for punishment, or for failure (towards God). Within this scale, anxiety corre-
sponds to uncertainty and guilt. : to which extent the respondent feels anger and dis-
appointment towards God. : this scale measures the experience of God as comforter,
supporter, and leader. : designates the interpretation of God as judge. : means
that God is interpreted as the one who does not act or intervene (cf. J. Schaap-Jonker and
E.H.M. Eurelings-Bontekoe, Handleiding Vragenlijst Godsbeeld (Manual Questionnaire
God Image) (), – http://hannekeschaap.nl/media/Handleiding__(versie%
).pdf (visited: January , )).
When using the , only the sum-scores have been used. This means that the sum-
score per scale per participant is used to calculate the average scores per congregation,
group, or gender. This approach makes it possible to compare the various scores with-
in one scale. In order to compare the scores between the various scales, the sum-scores
should be converted to standard scores using the standard scoring table as developed
. Scale division questionnaire God image
Scale Number of items Minimal score Maximum score
’
of the original research of Hanneke Schaap have been included. However, the
scores of Schaap cannot simply be compared with the results of this research,
because the composition of the various groups is not comparable.
Only within the scale ‘Ruling/punishing actions of God’ () the results of
the A, B, and C congregation difer signicantly (tested with the non-parametric
by Hanneke Schaap (cf. Schaap-Jonker and Eurelings-Bontekoe, Handleiding, -).
Within this research, this comparison is considered less important. Therefore, only the
sum-scores are used.
Schaap’s normal group (n = ) contains respondents from diferent religious denom-
inations (like Roman Catholic, Mainstream Protestant, Reformed, Orthodox-Reformed,
Evangelical, Baptist, etc.). Members of this group did not receive mental healthcare
during her research. The ‘Orthodox-Reformed’ group (n = ) includes members of
both Neo-Calvinist and more traditional Reformed (‘bevindelijke’) churches. Within the
bevindelijke churches it is considered normal for confessing members to abstain from
the Lord’s Supper (for religious reasons), whereas in Neo-Calvinist churches this is un-
usual. Furthermore, an unknown number of ‘Orthodox-Reformed’ group members re-
ceived mental healthcare when the research was conducted. As a result, it is dicult
to make a fair comparison. Therefore, the scores only have been displayed by way of
illustration.
. Average sum scores questionnaire God image per congregation (with )
Congregation
A-sum score
(n=)
. (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.)
B-sum score
(n=)
. (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.)
C-sum score
(n=)
. (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.)
Normal group
(n=)
. (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.)
‘Orthodox-
Reformed’
(n=)
. (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.)
Kruskal-Wallis test, p<., cf. Table .). Subsequently, the scores of the
three congregations have been compared as pairs using Mann-Whitney tests
(p<.). These tests revealed that only between congregation A and B a sta-
tistically signicant diference exists (p=.). This implies that participants of
congregation B scored signicantly lower on ‘Ruling/punishing actions of God’
than participants of congregation A. Other diferences were not statistically
signicant.
Subsequently, in Table . the average sum scores per scale display the re-
spective groups of participants. Note that the average scores of interviewed
individuals is displayed separate from focus group members and ministers.
The non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis test (p<.) revealed a signicant difer-
ence between the three groups within the scale ‘Ruling/punishing actions of
God’ (cf. Table .). Within this scale, the three groups have been compared
in pairs using Mann-Whitney tests (p<.). This showed that a signicant dif-
ference exists between the individuals and the ministers (p=.) and between
the members of focus groups and the ministers (p=.). This implies that on
the scale ‘Ruling/punishing actions of God’, ministers have scored signicantly
higher than individuals and focus group members. Other diferences between
the scores of diferent groups are not statistically signicant.
Lastly, in Table ., the sum scores by gender are displayed. Here the
Mann-Whitney test (p<.) was used to determine the diferences between
The score displayed in bold designates signicant diferences between congregations
within one scale.
The score displayed in bold designates signicant diferences between groups within one
scale.
. Average sum scores questionnaire God image per group (with )
Group
Individuals
A+B+C (n=)
. (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.)
Focus Group
A+B+C (n=)
. (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.)
Ministers
A+B+C (n=)
. (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.)
’
men and women. This revealed that on the scale ‘Passivity’ men scored signi-
cantly higher than women (p = .). Other diferences are not statistically
signicant.
In short, the results of the show that participants of congregation B (in-
cluding individuals, focus group members, and the minister) score signicant-
ly lower on the scale ‘Ruling/punishing actions of God’ than participants of
congregation A (idem). Furthermore, ministers (taken together as a group)
score signicantly higher on the scale ‘Ruling/punishing actions of God’ than
individuals and focus group members. Lastly, male participants (ministers in-
cluded) score signicantly higher on the scale ‘Passivity’ than female partici-
pants.
Qualitative Data
Based on the twelve interviews with individuals, the three additional focus
group interviews (named Ak, Bk, and Ck), and the individual interviews with
the three ministers we observe the following concerning how the celebration
of the Lord’s Supper is experienced. Here we use the aforementioned six as-
pects of ritual action to interpret the Lord’s Supper from a ritual perspective.
We also mention the distinct experiences among the interviewees in light of
quantitative diferences. The aim is not to quantify the qualitative data, but
only to indicate the diferences between individual participants and within
focus groups.
The score displayed in bold designates signicant diferences between males/females
within one scale.
. Average sum scores questionnaire God image per gender (with )
Gender
Males
A+B+C (n=)
. (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.)
Females
A+B+C (n=)
. (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.) . (.)
Style
In all three congregations, the majority of the individual participants and focus
group members reported being satised with the current frequency of celebra-
tion. Compared to most of the participating church members, ministers are
more eager to celebrate the Lord’s Supper more often. Two ministers preferred
weekly celebrations; one opted for ten times a year.
Nearly half of the individual participants and some focus group members
(in Bk and Ck) are positive about celebrating the Lord’s Supper in smaller
subgroups. While a large minority of the individuals (in all congregations) be-
lieves that the sacrament should always be celebrated by the congregation as a
whole. Other individuals (only in congregation A and C) and some focus group
members (found in each congregation) are open to Eucharistic celebrations as
part of a normal dinner, although practical problems may arise. At the same
time, none of the participants in this research expressed a desire to celebrate
the sacrament in a bigger group than they currently do.
Individual participants are divided about the reading of liturgical forms
during the celebration. A minority of the individuals is positive, another mi-
nority is negative, and half of them did not mention this topic. A small number
of focus group members was negative about the use of liturgical forms (in Ak),
while a comparable number of focus group members in congregation C were
wondering why the current liturgical forms are so comprehensive. Lastly, two
(out of three) ministers advocated a limited use of the existing liturgical forms.
Meaning
Above all, the meaning of the Lord’s Supper is experienced by individuals as a
moment of remembrance. A large majority celebrates the sacrament so as to
commemorate the sacrice of Christ. While a good number see the celebration
as an opportunity to ‘think about (personal) sins,’ ‘to experience grace,’ or to
experience ‘communion with each other.’ The focus group interviews show
another picture. A signicant minority of group members see the celebration
as a time to experience ‘communion with each other,’ while others view it as
a time ‘to confess/actualize faith,’ ‘to commemorate Christ’ (only in Bk and
Ck), ‘to experience the faith physically,’ and ‘to experience/receive forgiveness’
When defending their proposals, the respective ministers referred to (expected) intensi-
cation of spiritual experiences, the (imagined) customs in New Testament times, and to a
liturgical style (i.e., standing in a circle, without the reading of a liturgical form) that saves
time and allows for a higher frequency of celebration.
In comparison, only some of the individual participants (B, B, C) and none of the
focus group members mentioned ‘communion with Jesus’ as a reason to celebrate.
’
(only in Ak and Bk). The ministers ofered a slightly diferent interpretation.
They all displayed a uniform stress on the importance of ‘physical experience’
and ‘communion with Jesus.’ Less often than their congregants they mentioned
‘communion with each other’ (minister A and C) and ‘to experience/receive
forgiveness’ (minister A and B).
Half of the individual participants described a development in their expe-
rience of the Lord’s Supper. This involved various trajectories including an ac-
cumulation of signicance within a given meaning, a maturing of faith, and an
increasing awareness of various meanings. In the focus groups, this is repeated
by several group members. One of them spoke about personal faith and growth
due to one of his children (in Bk). Another told of a positive development of
faith due to accumulated life experiences (idem). Some other focus group
members (in Ak and Ck) felt less bound to strict rules around the sacrament
due to personal developments and/or another style of celebration. One focus
group member (Ak) was less doubtful than in the past about whether or not
to participate in Eucharistic celebrations. Some other members of the same
group (Ak) appreciated a more personal touch during the celebrations in the
last few years. One focus group member (Ck) reported skipping celebrations
more easily because of a higher frequency of celebrating the sacrament. Lastly,
ministers reported comparable developmental experiences akin to these indi-
viduals, although they stressed other meanings as being important for them.
Behavior
A minority of our individual participants (in congregation A and C, mostly
younger people) are eager to celebrate the Lord’s Supper with a more personal
touch. They would like to ask attendees questions such as: Why do you believe?
What touches you? What are your experiences? Using diferent expressions,
there is a common concern that the current celebrations are individualistic.
As one respondent stated:
A: “… But in my experience (…) there are not enough good conversations,
you know, about your life, about your faith … (…) Because now [i.e., during
the Lord’s Supper] you walk alongside each other … both literally and gu-
ratively.”
Translation of: “Maar in mijn beleving (…) wordt er veel te weinig echt gepraat, gewoon, over
je leven, over je geloofsleven … (…) Want nu loop je langs elkaar heen … eigenlijk letterlijk en
guurlijk.”
A large majority of individual participants are positive about (non-)verbal
communication with others during the celebrations. While not noted by every-
one, a signicant number referred to the personal encounter with their local
minister during the celebration of the Lord’s Supper when expanding on this
feeling. Within the focus groups a common theme emerged. In all three groups,
participants were positive about personal encounters with others during cele-
brations. Some group members reported positive experiences due to their in-
teraction with the minister during the celebration (in Ak and Bk). Other group
members proposed to use a diferent style of celebration. Indeed, the idea of
combining the Lord’s Supper with a regular dinner so as to stimulate personal
encounter was mentioned in all of the focus groups.
Space
Half of the individual participants was positive about celebrating the Lord’s
Supper in a diferent location rather than within the church hall. In turn, a
diferent location may require another group size: The sacrament may be cel-
ebrated on another location by the congregation as a whole, by smaller sub-
groups of it, and/or within families. However, celebrations on a smaller scale
do not necessarily need to replace the existing celebrations. In fact, a large
minority of the individuals (of all age groups) was satised with the church
hall as the current location of celebration.
The decoration of the physical space during the celebration was mentioned
by a number of individuals and one of the ministers. The individual partici-
pants commented on the imagery that was displayed and/or background mu-
sic that was played during (some) celebrations. One person was positive about
a painting that had previously been on display in the church hall. Another per-
son commented negatively on the photos of happy people being projected on
a screen and the articial nature of recorded music. Additionally, members of
one group (Bk) were positive about the attention paid to decoration by their
minister. Later, the same minister (Bp) told us that he desired to periodically
decorate the communion table in a diferent manner. He hoped people would
be awakened, and come away with a new sense of the signicance of the cel-
ebration.
Experience of the Self Related to Others
A majority of individual participants reported being satised with the current
level of personal encounter during and/or after celebrating the Lord’s Supper.
However, a minority of the individuals (especially younger people) told us
that they desired more opportunities for personal encounters during the cel-
ebrations in their congregation. During the focus group interviews, one group
’
member (Ck) reported that celebrating the Lord’s Supper ‘standing, in a circle’
stimulates the sense of community. For this celebrant, standing together was
preferable to walking alone to the front of the church so as to join the celebra-
tion. In other focus groups the sense of community was frequently mentioned
as a central reason for celebrating the sacrament (cf. the paragraph on ‘Mean-
ing’ above). In the interviews with the ministers, the experience of ‘commu-
nion with each other’ played a less dominant role.
None of the individual participants were opposed to an open table when
celebrating the Lord’s Supper. However, only a minority of these participants
advocated that all people (whether they are a member of a church or not)
should be allowed to join the celebrations. Furthermore, although uncommon
within the Reformed Churches (Liberated), a large minority of the individu-
als (found in all congregations) was in favor of children participating in the
celebrations of the Lord’s Supper. Other individuals have not elaborated on
their view on this point. However, several focus group members (again in all
congregations) supported the viewpoint that children should be allowed at the
table of the Lord. One minister (Bp) mentioned this topic as a “current topic”
in his congregation.
Experience of the Self Related to God
Above all, most congregants in our survey described the Lord’s Supper as an
immanent experience. Although all ministers stated that they celebrate the
sacrament in order to experience ‘communion with Jesus’, only a minority
of the individual participants (B, B, C, all women) and none of the focus
group members mentioned the same argument as a reason to celebrate.
With regard to the , half of the individual participants in congregation
B were proponents of full hospitality (see above). This might correlate with
a signicantly lower score of the congregation B participants on ‘Ruling/
punishing actions of God’ according to the (compared to participants of
congregation A). Curiously, ministers received a higher score within this scale
() than congregants. The interviews did not provide a solid explanation
for this dynamic. Finally, men scored signicantly higher within the scale ‘Pas-
sivity’ than women. This might explain why the three individual participants
Within the Reformed Churches (Liberated) it was—until —customary that only
members of their own federation and members of sister-churches were allowed at the
table of the Lord. Since then, also members of other churches are allowed, if the person in
question adheres the Reformed confession, lives god-fearing, and is not subject to church
discipline in his/her own church.
naming ‘communion with Jesus’ as a reason to celebrate the sacrament were
all women.
Conclusion
In this article we have explored two ways of research. First, six aspects of ritual
action were introduced as sensitizing concepts. These opened up the signi-
cance of our driving question: How participation of the Eucharistic celebra-
tion impacts participants. A short literature review illustrated the importance
of the Lord’s Supper as a formative, meaningful, and identity-signicant ritu-
al. Scholars like Smith and Wood were drawn from by way of elucidating the
central role the Lord’s Supper plays in Christian worship. According to Smith,
the sacrament (as with all liturgies) held transformative potential. Similarly,
according to Wood, those dwelling within the Christian story could be “formed
into a Christian community” as they took on the story as their own. Further-
more, analysis of the classical liturgical form for the celebration of the Lord’s
Supper in the Reformed churches in the Netherlands made clear that Eucha-
ristic celebrations are not without consequence. These have direct bearing on
the command that believers should love one another, not only in words but
also in deeds ( Jn. :).
However, our qualitative research points in another direction. Only a quar-
ter of our individual participants and none of our focus group members men-
tioned ‘communion with Jesus’ as a reason to celebrate. Indeed, this stands in
contrast to the expressed aim of all of the ministers. From a theological point
of view, this may account for many of the observed diferences in experience
between ministers and congregants. A minority of the individual participants
would like to celebrate the sacrament with a more personal touch. In their
view, the current celebration of the Lord’s Supper is individualistic. Ironically,
Holy Communion lacks personal communion. As we have seen, our study has
revealed the majority of our interviewees mentioned ‘communion with each
other’ as a reason to celebrate. However, it is important to say that the individ-
ual participants who preferred a more intimate celebration were also part of
It should be noted that also the three (male) ministers have mentioned the same ar-
gument. It is not clear whether this correlates with profession and/or gender. What is
known, is that ministers have scored lower on the scale ‘Passivity’ than congregants (in-
dividuals and focus group members respectively, male and females together, cf. Table
.)—although these diferences are not statistically signicant.
Wood, “Liturgy,” .
’
this larger subgroup. This may indicate that while there is a desire to celebrate
communion with each other, this is not experienced in a satisfactory way by
everyone. Although a signicant smaller number of focus group members re-
ported the same feelings (which is probably due to the open conversation style
during the group interviews), our data may indicate that—within these three
congregations—the Lord’s Supper is experienced more as a thick (or even a
thin) practice than as a ‘liturgy’ (as dened by James K.A. Smith). Or stated
otherwise, it is not transformative for all who participate. To sum up, one could
argue that the experience of the celebration falls short compared to both the
theological literature and the liturgical form. According to some who have par-
ticipated in our research, this is due to a lack of personal encounter during the
celebration of the Supper of the Lord.
In conclusion, we ofer a suggestion for further research. This article has de-
scribed and interpreted the results of both a literature review and qualitative
research. As such, it has performed what Richard Osmer considers the rst
and second task of Practical Theology. Following Osmer’s trajectory, further
research on the Lord’s Supper remains for the third and fourth task; that is, the
normative and pragmatic task. This implies that the questions ‘What ought to
be going on?’ and ‘How might we respond?’ remain to be answered for those
seeking a practical-theological account of the Lord’s Supper.
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Liturgy and Cultures
© Koninklijke Brill NV, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004356528_012
Cutting, Binding, and Re-Membering
A Covenantal Approach to Christian Liturgy and Ethics
Hak Joon Lee
Introduction
The relationship between worship and ethics is not a new topic in Judeo-
Christianity; it has been consistently discussed since biblical times, as we
see the rich theological exchanges and occasional clashes between priestly
and prophetic traditions. However, the topic takes on new currency today
in the face of the spiritual and moral challenges that many churches
experience in a postmodern society. We witness younger generations’
dwindling interest in and commitment to institutional churches. As their
cultural motto—“spiritual but not religious”—indicates, they distance
themselves from traditional churches and want to construct spirituality
on their own terms. Young Americans are skeptical of the function and
role of institutional religion in meeting diverse needs and interests
in a postmodern society. This attitude is best captured in “a moralistic,
therapeutic, and deistic ()” form of spirituality pervasive among young
Christians today. Although this cultural form of spirituality does not deny
the existence of God, neither does it acknowledge God’s involvement
in the everyday life of a believer, except during extreme moments of
individual crisis. The Christians adhering to this popular spirituality seek
religion mostly for their emotional comfort and psychological self-help;
they want to live a happy, self-fulfilled life in this side of heaven, and want
to go to heaven when they die. discloses a new postmodern form of
civil religion that is thin, individualistic, and self-oriented, with a shallow
sense of Christian identity and conviction.
A close tie between liturgy and ethics in Christianity is found in that the ideas of goodness
and godliness, morality and piety, purication and sanctication are closely associated in
Scripture around God’s holiness.
Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual
Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), f.
Postliberal theology is one response to this pervasive spiritual-moral malaise
among Western churches. Relying on the philosophies of Aristotle, Karl Barth,
and the later Wittgenstein, as well as postmodern philosophy, they reject
both modern abstract rationality (either Cartesian or Kantian) and liberal
theology’s attempt to secure cultural and intellectual relevance in secular (or
post-secular) societies. Instead, they celebrate the historical distinctiveness of
tradition and narrative, and emphasize the liturgical practices of Christianity
as the starting point for theology and ethics. They dene ecclesiology as the
prolegomena, focusing their research on the logic and grammar inherent in the
church’s story, tradition, and communal practices. Evidently, liturgy occupies
a central place in their theological model. As the heart of Christian life, liturgy
is unparalleled in its ability to bring the Christian story and practices together
for the formation of identity and character.
Postliberals and their sympathizers claim that the way we understand the
world is not rst through ideas, concepts, or principles, but through particular
liturgical practices in which we participate. We see the world through
imagination rather than analytic theory, and imagination is the function of
the in-culturated body. Postliberal ethicists like Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel
Wells assert that Christian ethics is not an autonomous discipline at all; it
ows from liturgy as the latter shapes the deepest dispositions, afections, and
desires of Christians. Turning upside down traditional approaches of ethics,
they claim that liturgy is ethics, and study various aspects of liturgy for their
social ethical meanings and implications.
James K.A. Smith, philosophy professor at Calvin College, is a Christian
scholar who further develops and expands this insight of postliberal theology
in his academic work on liturgy. In his much-discussed book, Desiring the
Kingdom, he claims that Christian ministry and education should prioritize
practice over theology because religious practices are the place where our
deep afections are expressed and nurtured. He says:
Initiated in the s, postliberal theology is a genre of contemporary theology proposed by
scholars closely aliated with Yale Divinity School, notably Hans Frei, Paul Holmer, David
Kelsey, and George Lindbeck; in turn, they were signicantly inuenced by Karl Barth, Clif-
ford Geertz, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical Linguistic Approach to Christian Doc-
trine (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, ), –.
Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, Sec-
ond edition (Oxford: Blackwell, ).
, , -
The rhythms and rituals of Christian worship are not the “expression of”
a Christian worldview, but are themselves an “understanding” implicit in
practice—an understanding that cannot be had apart from the practices.
It’s not that we start with beliefs and doctrine and then come up with
worship practices that properly “express” these (cognitive) beliefs; rath-
er, we begin with worship and articulated beliefs bubble up from there.
“Doctrines” are the cognitive, theoretical articulation of what we “under-
stand” when we pray.
Smith claims that human beings are rst afectionate and imaginative before
cognitive; they are homo liturgicus before being homo sapiens. Liturgies, either
religious or secular, exercise a profound inuence on the members of a society
by shaping their afections, imaginations, and understandings.
This essay studies the relationship of Christian liturgy and moral formation
from a covenantal perspective. Although I am sympathetic to Smith’s (and other
postliberal theologians’) deep concern about Christian identity and character
in a secular society, I question his neo-Aristotelian, Wittgensteinan premises
in conceptualizing the unity between liturgy and ethics in Christianity. In
particular, I claim that Smith’s approach (that prioritizes practices over ideas,
desires over intellect) raises a serious question on the central role of the
triune God and the relationship between divine agency and human agency
in Christian worship. Like postliberals, his focus is mostly on how worship
and practices shape ethical dispositions, convictions, and the crucial skills of
ethical discernment. His approach is built upon the insights and premises of
religious sociology rather than liturgical actualism—what actually happens
in worship. In other words, his analysis concentrates on the relationship of
liturgy and worshippers, rather than what actually happens between God
and worshippers through liturgy. Smith’s method has the unintended efect
of relegating divine agency and the Christian canon secondary to the church’s
practices. This marginalization of divine agency is correlated with his low view
of sin, on the one hand, and his overly optimistic view of the church, liturgy,
and their formative power, on the other hand. Smith’s ecclesiocentric approach
is ethically naïve (in overlooking the susceptibility of church and liturgy to
James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, Cultur-
al Liturgies Vol. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, ), –.
His intratextual (intrasystematic) theory of truth that refuses to ascribe any meaningful ref-
erential value to Christian truth claims is not consistent with a critical realist theory of truth
implicit in the Bible and its canonization process.
sins and errors), theologically problematic (in marginalizing divine agency to
practices), and philosophically incoherent (in conating worship and ethics).
As an alternative, I propose a covenantal approach, which is re-conceptualized
by incorporating communicative action theory, as a more faithful and adequate
conceptualization of the relationship between liturgy and ethics. Noting that
covenant is the theological framework in which the relationship of liturgy and
ethics is conceptualized in Scripture, I claim that both Christian worship and
moral life are covenantally structured and communicatively enacted; the God
who is explicit or implicit in Christian liturgy is in fact covenantal in nature.
With its emphasis on God’s sovereign initiating grace and reciprocating human
responsibility, this covenantal approach is consistent with—in fact central
to—not only the Reformed tradition but also the scriptural ethos.
In explicating a covenantal theory of liturgy and ethics, this essay studies
the nature of the covenant and divine communicative action, as well as their
relationship to each other and to liturgy and ethics. Then it explores how a cov-
enantal approach achieves the integration of liturgy and ethics, before high-
lighting its distinctive merits as compared to a postliberal approach.
A Covenantal Approach
Although the meaning of covenant is variegated in Scripture, it is generally de-
ned as a moral mechanism of reaching mutual agreement between diferent
parties through the exchange of commitments and promises, with God as its
partner or guarantor. The covenant has long held a central place in Reformed
Christian theology and ethics. The Reformed tradition understood covenant
as the unifying framework of Scripture, the central plot of salvation history,
and God’s way of administrating God’s dominion on earth. Covenant is a key
theological metaphor in Scripture, dening its narrative plot. Scripture is cer-
tainly more than the collection of the stories or events related to the covenant;
however, it is the covenant that helps to make sense of the overall ow and plot
Cf. Nicholas Wolterstorf, The God We Worship: An Exploration of Liturgical Theology (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, ).
Covenant and similar ideas or forms are found in many diferent societies: pactum, com-
pactum, alliance, Bund (Germany), contrat (France). Cf. Max L. Stackhouse, Covenant and
Commitments: Faith, Family and Economic Life (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press,
), . Rich vocabularies testify to the pervasiveness of the idea in human social life
in general.
, , -
of the biblical drama. Covenant is critical in understanding who God is and
how God relates to the world. That is to say, covenant is the modus operandi
that God takes in interacting with humanity and the world; God works cove-
nantally in history. God’s reign in history is covenantal in nature. This means
that God encounters and interacts with human partners, including worship
and the moral life, through covenant. A covenantal understanding of Scripture
was pervasive in the early doctrinal development of the Reformed tradition, as
evident in the Westminster Confession of Faith (), the Savoy Declaration
(), the London Baptist Confession of , and others.
However, recent scholarly engagement of the idea of covenant with commu-
nicative action theory marks an exciting new development because it opens a
more dynamic and fresh understanding of the biblical notion of covenant. Pi-
oneered by J. L. Austin and articulated by John Searle, communicative action
theory is a genre in the philosophy of language that studies the relationship
between human speech and action. Through their analyses of a speech act,
Austin and Searle show that human speech has three constitutive elements
in it: locution, illocution, and perlocution. While locution is concerned with
what language refers to or describes, illocution focuses on the act implied in
a speech in a particular discursive situation, and perlocution has to do with
the impact or inuence of the speech act on a hearer. Put diferently, locution
refers to the proposition of the statement; illocution refers to the performative
aspect of speech; and perlocution is concerned with speech’s impact. Their
notable contribution is the insight that a speech is not just informative but also
performative. When we speak (for example, commanding, ordering, pleading,
promising, and apologizing), we do something with our words. At the same
time, every speech act is contextual; the meaning of a specic speech is com-
prehensible only in the context of a specic relationship and context where
the speech act takes place. This insight can be applied to God’s speech acts in
Covenant is closely associated with other important metaphors and motifs in Scripture
such as Kingdom of God, church, cross and resurrection, new creation, love and justice,
as well as doctrines such as justication, sanctication, and eschatology. Cf. N.T. Wright,
Paul and the Faithfulness of God, vols. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, ).
For the centrality of covenant in Christian theology, see Michael Horton, Covenant and
Salvation: Union with Christ (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, ), Covenant
and Eschatology (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, ); Peter J. Gentry and
Stephen J. Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of
Covenants (Wheaton: Crossway, )
J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, second edition (New York: Oxford University
Press, ).
Scripture, in particular, the performative nature of God’s speech. When God
speaks, God simultaneously acts. Kevin Vanhoozer notes, “God’s call is efec-
tual precisely in bringing about a certain kind of understanding in and through
the Word. The Word that summons has both propositional content (matter)
and illocutionary force (energy).” Furthermore, he contends, “Father, Son,
and Spirit may be expressed in terms of tripersonal communication: speaker
(author); word/discourse (formed sounds/content); breath (medium; channel;
power).”
The theory of communicative action is important for showing how a
covenant is established and sustained between God and God’s human partners.
Covenant is established through communicative action: “Covenant making is
a verbal action with illocutionary force.” The parties enter into a covenant by
expressing their intent and exchanging promises (oaths) to each other, and this
exchange of promises is a typical form of communicative action. In fact, God’s
covenant interaction with believers is lled with various forms of communicative
action: promising, blessing, beseeching, commanding, convicting, threatening,
and comforting, as we see vividly in the prophetic literature. A covenant is
sustained and renewed through divine-human communicative actions.
Therefore, life in the covenant is never static because it is sustained through a
living fellowship between diferent parties, and liturgy is a major occasion of
such communicative fellowship. In communicating with the people God uses
various modes and media: verbal and nonverbal, visible and invisible, personal
and impersonal. It could come “through the Word (with the capital W),
through the words of the Word, through the words of others to whom God’s
Nicholas Wolterstorf, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Relections on the Claim that God
Speaks (New York: Cambridge University Press, ); Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine.
One may understand God’s faithfulness in terms of God’s communication. Only in God
there is no gap between what God does and what God says. God and God’s words are
inseparable; God’s whole being is present in God’s Word; the Word was with God, and the
Word was God. Therefore God is completely faithful with God’s promise.
Kevin J. Vanhoozer, First Theology: God, Scripture and Hermeneutics (Downers Grove:
Academic, ), .
Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship
(New York: Cambridge University Press, ), .
Dale Patrick, The Rendering of God in the Old Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
), .
“Theology derives its task from the fact that God speaks to man and man is called to lis-
ten” (Jacob Jocz, The Covenant: A Theology of Human Destiny (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
), ).
, , -
Word has come.” To sum up: while covenant is the structure and form,
communication is its enduring process and dynamic energy.
Worship
Worship in Judaism and Christianity has an explicitly covenantal basis, which
is found in the rst tablet of the Ten Commandments (“ten words” in Hebrew)
in which God commands exclusive worship of God (monotheism), prohibition
of idolatry and the vain use of God’s name, and consecration of Sabbath ob-
servance. The Ten Commandments are a covenantal document par excellence.
If the rst four commandments that dene the object, manner, and time
of worship are part of the covenant, then what is the relationship of worship
to the covenant? All of these stipulations are a crucial part of the covenantal
agreement between God and Israel, and their obedience is based on Israel’s
experience of God’s salvic activity in Egypt. Indeed, the preamble to the Ten
Commandments explicitly ties all of these commandments to God’s initiating
grace in the Exodus experience.
In addition, the passage (Deut. :-) on the Sabbath connects holy day
observance specically with God’s deliverance in Egypt. This connection has a
signicant implication for worship because the passage implies that the Sab-
bath is the occasion of covenantal remembrance in ancient Israel, solely ded-
icated to the service of God. Not only the Sabbath day, but other major cultic
events (such as the Feast of Passover, Feast of Weeks, and Feast of Tabernacles)
also instituted the remembrance and reenactment of the salvic event as cen-
tral part of their celebration or observance. For example, in the autumn Feast
of Tabernacles, the historic experience of the Sinai covenant was reenacted
together with the recital of the divine law. This brief observation shows that
worship is central to a covenantal relationship and that worship is mostly con-
ceived as the occasion for covenantal remembrance and reenactment.
This insight applies to Christian worship as well because early Christian
worship basically involved a reworking of Jewish worship. Christian worship,
Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, . God sometimes communicates through natural
events or history; for example, God exercised judgment against Egypt through various natural
and miraculous events in the Exodus story, and used a storm to communicate with Jonah.
Ernest Nicholson, God and His People: Covenant and Theology in the Old Testament (New
York: Clarendon Press, ), . This shows the organic connection between covenant
and cult, ethics and worship. Psalms and speak of a cultic actualization of God’s
kingship over the chaotic powers of the world.
like Jewish worship, has a covenantal structure and foundation, and carries out
the function of a covenantal rehearsal. Early Christians theologically re-
conceptualized Jewish worship (which was centered on the Sinai Covenant)
around the person and work of Jesus Christ, with strong Christological, pneu-
matological, and eschatological content and tone.
The New Testament declares Jesus Christ to be the fulllment of all the
covenants. The word and sacrament are integrated and centered in Jesus
Christ.
Jesus is presented as the Lamb of God (sacrice), the incarnate Word (Logos)
and the Eucharist meal (esh and blood). Fully divine and fully human, he is
the covenantal communion between God and humanity. First and foremost,
Jesus instituted the New Covenant at his Last Supper with his disciples, which
occurred at the time of the Passover, and gave the new commandment: “Love
one another as I have loved you” (John :). The two stone tablets of the Ten
Commandment (the religious and the ethical, respectively) are now unied in
the single person of Jesus Christ. The Church is the new Israel, a chosen nation,
and a priestly kingdom including Jews and Gentiles, men and women, slave
and free.
There is also a strong connection between the Sinai Covenant and the
Eucharist; the time of his Last Supper where Jesus instituted the New Covenant
with his disciples was a time of the Passover celebration—a major event that
celebrates God’s liberation. The Eucharist, as its diverse nomenclature indicates,
repeats the central motifs of the Sinai Covenant: sacrice (atonement),
thanksgiving, and common meal, and fellowship.
The two sacraments, Baptism and Eucharist, show the covenantal nature
of Christian worship. They are understood as the signs and seals of the New
Covenant. Baptism is the initiating covenant, sealed by immersion in water
(signifying the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ) that establishes our cov-
enantal union (sealing bond) with Jesus Christ. The Eucharist is the occasion
to recapitulate the Christ event: his death and resurrection. In particular, the
Eucharist is directly associated with Jesus’ institution of the New Covenant rat-
ied by his blood. Jesus said to his disciples: “This is my body, which is given
for you. Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke :). Through the practices
of Baptism and Eucharist, the memory of God’s redemptive story is reenacted
and His coming future messianic banquet is rehearsed; people’s covenantal
“And he did the same with the cup after supper, saying, ‘This cup that is poured out for you
is the new covenant in my blood’” (Luke :).
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relationship with God is renewed through the Eucharist in the power of the
Spirit.
One needs to pause for a moment and ask: Why is communal remembrance
so central to the worship of Israel and the Church, and how is it related to
the covenant? Remembering is more than a coping mechanism to deal with
the challenge of amnesia. To remember is to personally participate and re-
appropriate the original salvic event of a faith-community as one’s own.
Liturgy contains and displays the formative stories of God’s revelation and re-
demption, which constituted the foundation of Israel’s and the Church’s cove-
nantal relationship with God. And when the people participate in worship and
rehearse the story, it has the efect of refreshing their covenantal relationship
with God and others. Allen Verhey notes: “(M)emory is to own a particular his-
tory as one’s own a past and to own it as constitutive of identity and deter-
minative for discernment … there is not identity apart from memory and no
community apart from common memory.”
Amnesia is a grave threat because it undermines the basis of the covenant
relationship between God and the people.
In Jewish and Christian worship, liturgy is a visible, embodied form of sto-
rytelling. It is designed to retell and remind the central salvic event of the
Exodus (Jewish) and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (Christian).
The story is ritualized in liturgy and becomes part of the sacrament, providing
a dramatic script for its enactment; when the congregants perform the liturgy
in accordance to the script, the story is retold, the redemptive and revelatory
event that the story witnesses is reenacted (comes alive) and the congregants
re-participate in the event. For Christians, when this story is told, the Spirit
reconnects us to the Christ event because the Spirit “testies about Jesus.” By
participating in the communication with God, their covenantal relationship
with God is refreshed. Through worship Christians rearm their membership
in the community and renew their covenantal commitment to God and others.
Figuratively speaking, to participate in worship is much like renewing wedding
vows on an anniversary date.
Now I hope that it is clear that worship serves as the occasion of covenant
renewal, which takes place through retelling the redemptive story of God’s
deliverance in liturgical practices. If worship is the occasion of covenantal
renewal, then how does the renewal happen, and what are its meaning and
Interestingly, the English word remembering, which is the composite of “re-” and “mem-
bering”, means to be a member of the formative event again.
Allen D. Verhey, Remembering Jesus: Community, Scripture, and the Moral Life (Grand Rap-
ids: Eerdmans, ), .
implications for ethics? In the following section, I claim that renewal happens
through communicative action between God and the believers and this has
the efect of shaping dispositions and afections and ethical vision.
Worship as Communicative Process
If Christian worship is based on the covenant, then it serves as an occasion of
divine and human communication and fellowship that takes place on the basis
of God’s covenantal promise and human obligations. Worship is a reciprocal
and communicative event between God and God’s people.
Nicholas Wolterstorf observes: “The liturgy is a meeting between God and
God’s people, a meeting in which both parties act, but in which God initiates
and we respond.” Quite similarly, a major Vatican document, “The Consti-
tution on the Sacred Liturgy,” reads: “In the liturgy God speaks to his people
and Christ is still proclaiming his gospel. And the people reply to God both by
song and prayer. The above statements, one Reformed and the other Catholic,
concur that worship is not just a religious gathering to perform scripted sacred
rites; rather it is a dynamic, God-centered, reciprocal event. To worship is to
enter the sphere of God’s communicative action by relying on God’s covenant-
al promises. Jesus said, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am
there among them” (Matt. :).
What is implicit in worship is that God is not a static, impassive entity. God
is a free, communicative being. People come to worship to speak and listen
to this God. Worship is a public occasion where God communicates with the
believers in an explicit and implicit manner. Liturgical practices of confes-
sion, praise, intercession, and ofering presuppose that God will be present
in worship and receive and respond to them. Worship consists of a series of
divine-human communicative actions with verbal or nonverbal forms. The
pronouncement of greeting, absolution, reading of the Scripture, preaching,
prayers, testimony, sacraments, and benediction are all communicative in
nature. Liturgists, preachers, and communicants do something when they
speak or sing. They believe that their words have the efects that they intend
to signify. For example, when a liturgist declares in God’s authority that “your
Nicholas Wolterstorf, “The Reformed Liturgy,” in Donald K. McKim (ed.), Major Themes in
the Reformed Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), –, .
Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, par.. http://www.christusrex.org/www//
v.html.
Wolterstorf, “The Reformed Liturgy,” .
, , -
sins are forgiven,” then worshippers believe that forgiveness is actually granted
by God at the moment of the declaration. In these liturgical practices, God
speaks, hears, receives, forgives, and acts; and we respond to God’s action with
confession, prayer, praise, adoration, and thanksgiving.
Since worship is covenantal and communicative in nature, it is something
that is to be engaged self-consciously and intentionally with utmost serious-
ness. We are held accountable to our actions and words in worship. Worship
matters to God. Our words and action in worship are our bonds; meaningless
words or careless acts invite God’s judgment (e.g., Aaron’s two sons). Therefore,
what we say and what we do in worship and social life matter because they
anticipate some form of God’s response.
God’s communicative action in Christian worship is the work of the three
persons of the Trinity who are involved as the ground/goal (Father) the form/
content (Son), and the power (Spirit) of worship. God the Father utters the
Word (Logos), and the Spirit is the power who makes the Word ecacious
in the hearts and minds of worshippers. In the same manner that the Spirit
turns the wine and the bread into the blood and the esh, He also turns the
proclamation and the sacraments into divine utterances. Through the work of
the Word and the Spirit (the two hands of God), God comforts, nurtures, and
sancties, granting grace and forgiveness to God’s people. The communicative
economy of the Spirit makes the stories, symbols, and sacraments come to life
as intended by God in Jesus Christ. By participating in this communication
with God, the people’s covenantal bond with God is refreshed and strength-
ened. Because of this bilateral, communicative nature, worship in a covenant-
al framework is reciprocal, participatory, and democratic, rather than passive,
unilateral, and hierarchal. It is neither a lecture nor a ritual, but a living, dy-
namic fellowship in faith, love, and hope.
Unity between Worship and Ethics
How, then, should we conceive of the relationship between worship and eth-
ics, and where do we nd their unity in a covenantal model?
First, the unity of worship and ethics is found in the fact that in Scripture
the process of covenant-making itself has both cultic and moral dimensions.
Wolterstof, The God We Worship, .
Kevin Vanhoozer helpfully explains the trinitarian structure of divine communicative ac-
tion; he corresponds the work of Father, Son, Spirit in a speech act to locution, illocution,
and perlocution, respectively (Vanhoozer, First Theology, –).
In addition to the discursive process of reaching the agreement (covenantal
terms that include both religious and moral stipulations), a covenant-cutting
is typically accompanied by a rich ritual or rite that seals the agreement: a rite
of cutting animals and walking through them, common meal). The covenant
cutting event in the Sinai covenant is (framed) by two cultic ceremonies:
solemn consecration of Israel as God’s people through the sprinkling of the
blood over them (Exodus :-), which was later followed by a communal
meal—eating and drinking before God (Deut. :-).
Second, there is a natural connection between worship and ethics because
of a monotheistic understanding of God. God is the One Lord of the universe,
God is the source of life and goodness, and God deserves the undivided devo-
tion of humanity in every area of life. This monotheistic unity between worship
and ethics is found in the structure of the Ten Commandments: the rst tablet
has to do with worship of God, the second with the ethical life of the people
of God. The Ten Commandments are a constitutional covenant document that
binds every aspect of Israel’s life. Similarly, the double love commandments,
Jesus’ summary of the Torah and the prophets, integrate cultic and moral life,
in parallel to the two tablets.
Third, the unity between worship and ethics is found in covenantal obliga-
tion. In a covenantal framework, worship and ethics can never be separated
in the least. A proper covenantal response to God’s deliverance should be ex-
pressed sincerely and gratefully in worship as well as in responsible actions
toward others. Those who truly know God cannot but live a life that reects
God’s character and walk in His way, and the moral life functions as a key ba-
rometer of our sincerity—internal spiritual relationship with God. Birch and
Rasmussen support this claim when they write:
In both Jewish and Christian traditions, faith’s truth is nally a ‘performa-
tive’ one. We know it when we see it, or experience it. It is real when it is
embodied, and only then. The test of any moral truth is in the social form
it takes, and the diference it makes in society. Moral truth and a way of
life always go hand in hand.
It is a consistent teaching of Scripture that our delity as God’s worshippers
and covenantal partners is tested and proved by our acts of love and justice
toward others, especially the poor and the oppressed.
Bruce Birch and Larry Rasmussen, Bible and Ethics in the Christian Life (Minneapolis:
Augsburg Books, ), ; emphasis theirs.
, , -
Covenant and Liturgy: Comparisons with a Postliberal Approach
A covenantal approach shows several distinctive characteristics and merits in
comparison with a postliberal approach.
() James Smith denes worship as the function of desire, in particular
love. As desiring animals, he claims, love undergirds every human action (even
thoughts), and worship is the expression of this love in the most powerful and
pious form. That is, worship is the function of our ultimate desire—love of
something ultimate, and “liturgies are ritual practices that function as pedago-
gies of ultimate desire.”
Despite his good anthropological insights on liturgy in general, however,
Smith’s denition of worship is not necessarily congruent with a biblical un-
derstanding of worship. It is questionable whether liturgy is primarily a func-
tion of desire. Christian worship is not necessarily grounded in, nor always
motivated by our afection and desire of love, although to do so would be laud-
able. We worship because we agreed to do so when we entered a covenant re-
lationship with God in the Baptism. We worship not only because we love God
but also because God has commanded it; we are covenantally obligated to do
so. This in turn means that we must worship God in the way God prescribes,
not in our ways or preferences. Calvin writes:
(T)he rule which distinguishes between pure and vitiated worship is of
universal application, in order that we may not adopt any device which
seems t to ourselves, but look to the injunction of Him who alone is en-
titled to prescribe. Therefore, if we would have Him to approve our wor-
ship, this rule, which he everywhere enforces with the utmost strictness,
must be carefully observed.
We worship God because we agreed to do so in our covenant with God (Bap-
tism), and we need to do it in the way God approves; it is God’s right to be
properly worshipped.
On God’s part in return, God promised to meet with us wherever and when-
ever we gather to worship Him in the name of Jesus Christ. In other words,
Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, .
Similarly, in Scripture to love God is not just an afectional act. It is also obligatory; we are
commanded to do so: “Love your God all your strength, hearts, mind, and soul” (Deut. :;
Luke :).
John Calvin, “The Necessity of Reforming the Church,” in Selected Works of John Calvin
(Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, ), –, .
divine presence and communication in worship is assured on the basis of the
covenant. This covenantal understanding of worship is consistent with a gen-
eral Christian view of the purpose of worship: to acknowledge the worth of
God. Worship is “worth-ship”—attitudes and acts assigning utmost worth to a
certain object (usually a deity). To acknowledge means “to recognize the rights,
authority, or status of” something or someone. According to Calvin, the main
foundation of worship is “to acknowledge Him to be as He is, the only source
of all virtue, justice, holiness, wisdom, truth, power, goodness, mercy, life, and
salvation.” This brief observation shows that worship is not the function of
our desire alone, but also our cognitive volitional decision and commitment.
Unlike James Smith’s rigid dichotomy, a covenantal approach refuses to bi-
furcate desire and cognition. Communicative action between God and wor-
shippers is encompassing and holistic in its scope and efect; it touches and
includes every aspect of a worshipper: intellect, desire, and will. As mentioned
earlier, the divine-human communicative action is not only informative (lo-
cution), but also performative (illocution) and transformative (perlocution),
which naturally includes all faculties in the process of their interactions. A
divine covenant, unlike a contract, demands a believer’s total commitment,
loyalty, and sincerity in every realm of her life in walking with God. For exam-
ple, in intercession, a believer uses all her faculties; she appeals to God’s moral
integrity, compassion, or reason. Like a psalmist who makes a plea to God, she
may cite past memory and God’s promises, appeal to God’s loving, merciful na-
ture, or protest on the basis of certain principles of justice and righteousness.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/acknowledge
Calvin, “The Necessity of Reforming the Church,” .
Scripture uses diverse metaphors of afectional, cognitive, and volitional nature in de-
scribing who Jesus Christ is: the incarnate Word, eneshed Love, the Way, the Truth, and
the Life. The organic nature of the relationship between intellect and afection is found in
core biblical concepts such as truth, faith, and knowledge. Unlike the Greek or Enlighten-
ment philosophical concepts, these biblical concepts are relational rather than abstract,
as they are informed by a covenantal worldview. They are concrete nouns. The word truth
and truthfulness are exchangeable, just as faith and faithfulness are. Likewise, knowledge
of God is personal. Horton notes: “Knowing God is an existential way of knowing. It does
not occur apart from knowledge of certain facts about God (any more that it can in or-
dinary human relationships). Nevertheless, the Hebrew understanding of knowledge in
general was covenantally determined by its own dramatic history and narrative of re-
demption, in contrast to the ideal of scientia or the gnosis of speculative philosophers and
rst-century sects. It was knowledge oriented toward a person and for a particular reason
involving (but not reduced to) one’s own existence” (Horton, Covenant and Eschatology,
).
, , -
By dening the human being as desiring animal and liturgy as the pedagogy
of ultimate desire (worship as the function of ultimate desire), Smith tends to
instrumentalize liturgy as if it exists for formation. However, formation, from
a covenantal perspective, is not the primary goal of worship, but rather a fruit
of our truthful worship and covenantal obedience to God. From a covenantal
perspective, worship is a communicative act between God and believers, char-
acterized by two reciprocating acts that dene the covenantal: grace (charis)
and gratitude (eucharistie). While grace is the revelatory and formative power
of God shaping our knowledge and afection, gratitude is the driving force in
worship and ethics in response to this grace. Human worship of God and the
moral life are not what we desire or initiate rst; they are our responses to
God’s initiating grace. We love God because God rst loved us. This in turn
means that, technically speaking, the primary sentiment or desire for Chris-
tians in worship is gratitude. Gratitude is a deeper and more foundational sen-
timent of worship and ethics than love. It sparks and nurtures the desire to
love and obey God. We praise and adore God because we are grateful to God
and God’s redemptive acts. Henry Stob sums up the signicance of gratitude
for worship and ethics in a concise manner:
What drives the Christian to love and obedience is thankfulness. This
gives to the moral life a characteristic note of joy. Appreciative of God’s
mercy, thankful for his unspeakable gift, happy in his gracious confer-
ments, the Christian seeks with might and main to show forth his [God’s]
praises and to do his [God’s] will.
This same gratitude leads us to love others in a manner reciprocating God’s
love for us.
() From a covenantal perspective, the postliberal claim that “worship is
ethics” is problematic as it borders on liturgical reductionism. Though inter-
related, ethics is not reducible to worship. Reducing ethics to liturgy runs a risk
of simplifying all the complexity involved in ethical reasoning to the matter
Christian virtues are neither natural nor civic; they are not the product of human exer-
tions alone; they are the fruits of the Spirit—His communicative work in humans. From a
covenantal perspective, formation is important because it brings stability (reliability) to a
covenantal relationship. It empowers our covenantal loyalty. It is not an end in itself.
Covenant views a human as a responsive animal rather than a desiring animal.
Henry Stob, Ethical Relections: Essay on Moral Themes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ),
.
It is also limited in developing a viable Christian social ethic.
of the ultimate good and love. This stance faces ethical diculties. Although
Smith is helpful in explaining how love is central to the life of worship and
ethics, he still fails to address the question of how love is translated (applied)
to concrete ethical issues and situations. Specics on empirical social data and
historical contexts matter in ethical decisions; they are constitutive of ethical
reasoning. Persons of good character often make terrible mistakes in their eth-
ical decisions despite good intentions when they ignore or lack proper knowl-
edge of the issues. In other words, liturgy forms dispositions and character,
but these dispositions and character do not take the place of ethical reasoning
per se. Ethical reasoning is not reduced to disposition and character, although
it is profoundly inuenced by them. It includes a cognitive and intellectual
dimension as well.
Smith’s approach runs the risk of glossing over the complex relationship be-
tween the ultimate good and subordinate (minor) goods. Smith presumes that
the question of the ultimate good (corresponding to the deepest desire of love)
is not only supremely important for, but also almost exhaustive of, liturgy and
ethics (by dening humans as desiring animals and worship as the enactment
of ultimate desire). It is a mistake to assume that the love of the ultimate good
would solve the questions of subordinate goods; knowing and seeking the ul-
timate good does not automatically give rise to knowledge of what to do with
subordinate goods of human life. For example, the knowledge of the ultimate
good does not tell how Christian faith is specically related to in vitro fertiliza-
tion, the minimum wage, higher education, outsourcing of jobs, or the global
economy. Complications increase because Scripture itself does not provide
information on these goods or ofers confusing or conicting ideas of them.
Worship and ethics are symbiotic but distinct in the covenantal life. Together
they enrich and fulll human life as intended by God. Worship brings a sense of
God’s mystery and transcendence to ethics, while ethics gives a structure/order
to the mystery. God’s mystery cannot be reduced to morality, just as morality
cannot be exhausted by the mystery. Connected to ethics, liturgy avoids turning
into sorcery or magic; the mystery is no longer terrifying, arbitrary or chaotic.
The covenant ofers a safe place where the divine mystery becomes accessible
to humans, by God’s own free and gracious decision to enter a relationship with
them. Conversely, related to the mystery (worship), our ethical life is reorient-
ed and energized. When detached from the deep spiritual sources available in
worship, ethics may become overly strict, moralistic, or fragmented.
Liturgy and ethics belong to two diferent spheres of human activities—each
with a unique focus, authority, and purpose. Ethics is afected by liturgy but not
determined or exhausted by it. The relationship of liturgy to ethics is not one-
way. Ethics, together with theology, plays an important function in assessing
, , -
whether liturgy is properly enacted in church, whether its fruits are consistent
with the vision and values of God’s Kingdom. Communal ethical examination
is necessary because liturgy is the work of still sinful human beings.
Marginalizing the cognitive dimension from liturgical life is dangerous. Li-
turgical practices are often the most recalcitrant sources of bigotry and vio-
lence against them. Because of the sacred status which people confer on them,
they resist change. The tragedy is that in their earnest pursuit of the ultimate
concern (good), Christians often have not heard the cries of others. There have
been many sincere, pious Christians who condoned slavery, sexism, and colo-
nialism, all the while believing that Scripture endorsed their activities. Unless
its underlying theology and scripts are changed, liturgy maintains the status
quo. However, change is possible and its impact could be transformative, as we
see in Vatican in which a major theological shift made to critically engage
with modernity has entailed the revision of charism, ecumenism, liturgical cal-
endar, Eucharistis prayers, liturgical music, among many others.
Smith is correct in saying that liturgy exercises a great deal of formative
power over its participants with the particular vision, values, convictions em-
bedded in its story and practices. It shapes and molds its participants one way
or another, for good or bad, and Christians need to become critically aware
of the enormous socializing power of liturgy. However, liturgy’s inuence is
not always benign, and liturgy in itself has no guarantee for a positive ecacy.
Liturgy’s ethical record in history is mixed. Just as not every interpretation of
Scripture is liberating, not every liturgical practice is emancipatory, either. Lit-
urgy could be morally distortive and harmful, as many examples in Scripture
and Christian history indicate. It has often functioned as a means of clerical
control and psychological manipulation (e.g., the Hebrew Prophets’ criticism
of Israel’s corrupted rituals and the Reformers’ denunciation of the priestly
manipulation of the mass in the medieval Roman Catholic Church).
Churches have abused and misused their liturgy to condone injustices and
protecting the status quo, and to punish their critics in order to protect or expand
their own institutional interests. Even today, many churches still marginalize
a particular race, gender, nationality, class of people and reinforce dominant
views of their cultures through their liturgies, with a deleterious impact on
the personality and moral character of their members. Therefore, liturgical
practices, together with their explicit and implicit theological assumptions,
need to be constantly subjected to the communicative examination and
Cf. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct//august-web-only/we-need-more-than
-liturgy.html
self-reection of its members, and for which the contribution of theology (lex
credendi) and ethics (lex agendi) is indispensable. As love is a powerful energy,
and as blind desire (love) is dangerous, it needs to be informed and enlightened
(before it is put into practice) by theology and ethics.
The socializing power of liturgy and genuine Christian formation are not
identical. The church’s liturgy, like other liturgies, does not have a power to
guarantee or secure proper Christian character formation and cultivation of
virtues. Just as the authority of Scripture is secondary to God’s authority, litur-
gy is secondary to God’s communicative action in worship. Liturgical symbols
and practices (sacraments) point toward realities beyond themselves. They are
not the sources of inspiration and imagination, nor do they possess formative
forces. This means that liturgical practices are the means (vehicles) that God
uses in communicating with believers. Stories and liturgical practices do not
have intrinsic transformative ecacies, just as water, wine, and bread do not
have salvic ecacy in themselves, either. It is only God’s amazing grace and
faithfulness that sustains the integrity of liturgy and procures its formative ef-
cacy, and this happens when the covenantal basis and nature of Christian
worship is specied. When this divine communication is absent or suppressed,
liturgy loses its power; it is misused for human purposes (e.g., therapeutic self-
help or magical performance) or turns into a meaningless ritual, a cultural lit-
urgy disguised in Christian form.
A Covenantal Perspective on Formation
Then what is a covenantal understanding of liturgical formation, and what is
the primary source for that formation?
When properly conducted, worship renders new energy, focus, and vision to
us; it reorients and guides us toward God’s purpose and way of life. For Chris-
tians, however, what ultimately changes human hearts is not liturgy itself, but
God’s Spirit working through the liturgy. God’s grace, the work of the Spirit,
is not static; it has a transformative power. Once it resides in the heart of a
believer, it labors until it bears fruit. God’s grace works communicatively; ac-
cording to Stephen Mott, God’s grace “does not merely ‘inspire’ the response,
it actually creates the ability to respond—it is both the reason and the power
for the response.” Grace has a molding power: “grace does not simply ‘perfect’
Stephen C. Mott, Biblical Ethics and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press,
), .
, , -
nature. Grace also inhibits, thwarts, suspends, and channels various inclina-
tions of human nature.” In the communicative action of the Spirit, “the word
of God is living and active … it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of
the heart.” (Heb. :), and the entire liturgy becomes God’s own living drama
performed through human representatives. Genuine afection in worship is
the work of the Spirit. The Spirit touches our heart, enlightens our understand-
ing, and moves our will.
Because of its communicative nature, worship always has an unknown,
surprising, revelatory potential. It is an event where we nd even our best in-
tentions and desires are unworthy or misguided before the Holy One. God’s
communicative action has the power to correct our misguided perception of
the reality and hidden dispositions, which Isaiah’s experience at the Temple
implies: Isaiah cried out when he was encountered by the Holy One of Israel:
“Woe to me! I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean
lips” (Isa. :)
Worship is crucial but not exhaustive in the formation of discipleship.
Christian formation takes place beyond a worship setting as a believer contin-
ues to fellowship and communicates with God in grateful obedience in every
context of his/her life. Fellowship is a process of imitatio Dei. Proper formation
requires ongoing repetition of liturgical and moral practices through which
God moves and communicates (including, for example, personal daily prayer,
the reading of Scripture, meditation, and regular community service).
Specically, formation takes place through the fellowship (koinonia) with
God that occurs in the context of covenant. As a child learns the character of
her parents through their shared life together, a person imitates God’s char-
acter through ongoing living fellowship with God. The intimate tie between
fellowship and formation is found in Peter :: “Thus he has given us, through
these things, his precious and very great promises, so that through them you
may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust, and may
become participants of the divine nature.”
The Greek word for “participants (or partakers)” is κοινωνο, a cognate of
koinonia. The word koinonia connotes a kind of fellowship that is intimate,
solidaric, and communal, in which the members share their life in entire-
ty without reservation, including their joys and suferings, with each other.
That is why one meaning of koinoneois is to intercourse or commune with.
Stephen J. Pope, Human Evolution and Christian Ethics (New York: Cambridge University
Press, ), .
Today the simple practical challenge of a short worship time in a post-industrial society
impedes such formation.
Communication—an exchange of ideas, afections, and things—is the heart
of fellowship. Koinoneois is more than a simple or light aggregation for fun
(e.g., a cofee hour after worship); it is to give oneself into the other to the ex-
tent one can claim a part in it for oneself.
This word analysis shows a close tie between koinonia and covenant. Occur-
ring through communicative action, covenant is the life of solidaric fellowship
in which the participants share in each other’s life. Fellowship is neither a one-
time nor a unilateral process, but a mutual, shared, and ongoing experience
between God and a believer. Various spiritual practices (worship, community
life, daily devotion, prayer) are vehicles of this living fellowship with God. As
the means of grace, they ofer opportunities to intercourse with and imitate
God.
Fellowship (koinonia) is the very process of partaking or sharing in Christ,
both his blessings and his suferings, in dedication and solidarity. We partici-
pate in the divine nature (God’s life) through fellowship (or intercourse) with
God, and by doing so we increasingly imitate God’s character; through fel-
lowship (koinonia), God instills in us new habits and dispositions that reect
God’s character. Peter : contrasts “corruption” in the world with “the divine
nature,” escape from the corruption of the world with participation in the di-
vine nature. The implication is that those who fellowship or intercourse with
God can escape from corruption, and vice versa.
In this process of fellowship, the covenantal stipulations (God’s moral law
and Jesus’ teachings) ofer concrete guidelines and directives for our moral for-
mation. That is, these stipulations help a believer to stay in the fellowship with
God, and as she does so, they are gradually internalized in her.
Conclusion
This essay showed that a thoroughgoing and constructive covenantal approach
(incorporating communicative action theory) ofers fresh and faithful insights
on worship and its coherent relationship with ethics. A covenantal under-
standing of worship is more plausible in explaining why Christians worship,
Fellowship with God has a regenerating, transformative power; it enables us to properly
understand and freely obey God’s commandments. Richard Mouw supports the signi-
cance of fellowship when he writes: “We can perceive and participate fully in God’s com-
mands only when our minds and reason are regenerated by a living relationship with
God” (Richard J. Mouw, The God Who Commands (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, ), –).
, , -
the basis for their worship, and what actually goes on in worship. In short, it
shows a more coherent and encompassing view of worship than Smith’s cul-
tural anthropological view of worship. As an overarching rubric and organic
linchpin between worship and ethics, covenant explains how the relation-
ship between liturgy and ethics is neither causal nor extrinsic but “internal
and conceptual” through divine-human communicative action. Countering
the postliberal idea of liturgy as ethics, it demonstrates that the relationship
between liturgy and ethics is not unilateral but complementary and bilateral;
ethics (and theology) cannot be reduced to worship. Each has its own distinc-
tive task and purpose in God’s economy. Both liturgy and ethics involve the
communicative work (service) of the church for God and for the world. The
church as God’s covenant people communicatively engages with each other
in discerning and deliberating how to serve God and the world more faithfully.
Thus, liturgy and ethics are constantly brought together in this communal re-
ection of the church.
The Reformed tradition aimed at the restoration of the worship of the Early
Church. The Reformers had a new vision of what should be done in the liturgy
and how it was to be done. Against an overly sacramental, objectivistic, hierar-
chal model of liturgy and ecclesiology, they declared that liturgy is the work of
the whole people of God. The Reformers restored the sermon and the vernac-
ular reading of Scripture so that lay people could understand and participate,
together with a proper balance between word and sacrament. The Reformed
emphasis on God’s sovereign grace and the democratic nature of worship has
an important theological heritage and contribution for the other Christian
churches. The covenantal approach that we studied in this essay not only re-
arms this precious Reformed heritage, but also expands and enriches it in a
new and relevant way in current cultural contexts. Interpreted communica-
tively, covenant is more than a legal structure (polity); it is a living fellowship
whereby grace and gratitude are the reciprocating communicative energies
(acts) between God and God’s human partners.
In contrast to a post-liberal approach that privileges ecclesiology over divine
agency, a covenant approach restores God’s sovereign grace and communicative
E. Byron Anderson and Bruce T. Morrill (eds), Liturgy and the Moral Self: Humanity at full
Stretch Before God, Essays in Honor of Don E. Saliers (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press,
).
A communicative understanding of the covenant helps to overcome a more legal
(judicial) understanding of the covenant, which has been prevalent among Reformed
Christians recently, often to the extent of becoming indistinguishable from the idea of
contract.
action as the ground of Christian worship and ethics. In a way consistent with
the heart of the Reformed tradition, this approach efectively captures and
presents the realist and actualistic understanding of God and God’s agency in
worship and ethics. It reclaims that the heart of worship is neither practices
nor the story, but the living God who gave Himself in Jesus Christ and who is
dwelling among us through the Spirit. By securing God’s transcendence and
mystery as well as God’s intimacy with the participants in worship, a covenant
approach is also efective in helping Christians to cope with the inundating
power of secular liturgies driven by market capitalism and commercial media
today. Amazed at God’s holiness and grace, Christians realize that to worship is
to adore, enjoy, and glorify God forever with the entirety of our being.
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© Koninklijke Brill NV, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004356528_013
Celebrating God’s Works
The Day of Worship and the Ethics of Work
Pieter Vos
In his popular book on the meaning of work, entitled Every Good Endeavour,
Tim Keller emphasizes the goodness of “living in the constant cycle of work
and rest.” He refers to the biblical creation narrative:
The book of Genesis leaves us with a striking truth—work was part of the
paradise … Work did not come in after a golden age of leisure. It was part
of God’s perfect design for human life, because we were made in God’s
image, and part of his glory and happiness is that he works.
Keller emphasizes the goodness of work and opposes the view that work is
just a means to an end, for instance participation in life outside the workplace.
Besides work, the Sabbath—or the Sunday—is meaningful as a necessary and
blessed day of rest and worship.
In this view, the Sabbath basically receives its meaning from the experi-
enced dynamics of work and rest. Therefore, in this picture it is not very clear
what the Sabbath, or Sunday, as a day of worship precisely means and what it
means for how we do our work. Although Keller acknowledges that the Sab-
bath as a day of rest is a good in itself alongside the goodness of work, his
view nevertheless reveals a functional approach to the Sabbath: since we need
rest after work, the Sabbath is good as a day of rest. In this way, the juxtaposi-
tion of Sabbath and work may easily become imprisoned in the instrumental
logic that dominates our common understanding of work and rest: We work
so that we can relax, or we relax so that we are able to work. In such hidden
assumptions and representations the Sabbath becomes part of a functional
Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavour: Connecting your Work to God’s Plan for the World (Lon-
don: Hodder & Stoughton, ), , quoting Ben Withering, Work: A Kingdom Perspective on
Labor (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), .
Keller, Every Good Endeavour, .
Cf. Keller, Every Good Endeavour, and –.
Bernd Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, trans. Margaret Kohl (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, ), .
’
interpretation in which it receives its primary meaning as a moment of rest by
being the necessary counterpart of the time that is devoted to work. Against
this backdrop the question arises whether it is possible to think of the Sabbath
in a diferent way and how we should value work theologically. On the one
hand, the task is to think of Sabbath and worship in a non-instrumental way,
as having importance of their own. On the other hand, the question is how the
Sabbath as a ‘holy day’ and how worship may be meaningful for our under-
standing and experience of work.
In a way, Keller’s emphasis on the goodness of work and the necessity of rest
reects traditional debates about the relationship between the vita activa and
the vita contemplativa. In medieval Christianity, Aristotle’s thesis, “we are busy
that we may have leisure,” was endorsed in the sense that the vita activa was
made completely subservient to the vita contemplativa, interpreted as the life
devoted to the worship of God. The laity were expected to be part of the com-
mon social life, whereas the clergy were supposed to focus their attention on
the spiritual life, with the result that clerical status became the primary model
of vocation and sacerdotal liturgy the center of life. The Reformers opposed
this traditional hierarchy between spirituality and materiality, clergy and laity,
the supernatural and the natural.
Vocation was interpreted as the calling of every individual believer to
serve God in everyday life; doing our work faithfully was not inferior to our
response in worshipping. In Calvinism true vocation meant to live, move and
have one’s redeemed being in the common life, filling it and transforming
it with a new spirit from within, instead of removing oneself from the
common fabric of life. As a result, some Reformed accounts weakened
the connection with liturgy as a whole: work in the world became the
predominant outward response to God’s action in liturgy. In the modern
era, partly under this influence, the traditional relationship between the
Moreover, as Wannenwetsch observes, free time is often seen as ‘empty time,’ which must
be lled somehow or in which we must have something on hand or have to ‘treat ourselves’
to something: “then our everyday language betrays that the consumer-bourgeois versions of
the instrumentalization of work for the sake of free time also remains imprisoned within the
economic logic” (Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, ).
Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, b .
Cf. Max Stackhouse, “Vocation,” in Gilbert Meilaender & William Werpehowski (eds), The
Oxford Handbook of Theological Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –,
–. As Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber have pointed out, the Reformed understanding
of the ‘royal priesthood’ of all believers transferred the classical notion of ascetic discipline
from the monastery to the sphere of ordinary life in a so-called this-worldly
vita activa and the vita contemplativa was even inverted: worship was made
subservient to the active life of work in the world and for many lost its
meaning completely. Keller’s claim that God created us to work and that
we are designed to work together to make the world a better place may be
seen as a re-articulation of this later Protestant thought, rather than of the
initial Reformed interpretation.
In the debates on the active and the contemplative life, the theological
question is often misunderstood as an either/or dilemma. Is the signicance
of ordinary life that it preserves our present material and social existence in
order to participate in the liturgy? Or does liturgy serve our life and work in
the secular world? Either Monday through Saturday is seen as being for the
sake of Sunday (the traditional Catholic view), or Sunday is seen as being for
the sake of Monday through Saturday (the traditional Reformed view), i.e., the
signicance of work is that it enables worship, or the signicance of worship is
that it enables authentic work. Strikingly, both views reveal an instrumental
approach.
It must be admitted that this picture is a little oversimplied, in so far as
the two positions are extremes and as extremes are exclusively attributed to
Catholic and Reformed views respectively. This picture can be nuanced, for
instance by pointing to Vatican and the thought it inspired that grants work
its own intrinsic signicance, and to Reformed theologians who acknowledge
the intrinsic value of worship. John Paul ’s encyclical Laborem Exercens, for
example, is remarkably more positive about work than some Reformed voices
nowadays are, as I will point out. Yet, the question remains how worship and
work are to be related.
asceticism (Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches (New York: Har-
per, ); Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, )). Although these thinkers insuciently emphasized the Reformers’
interpretation of vocation as primarily becoming a disciple of Christ and a member of
the community of faith, they rightly argued that the Reformers rearmed ordinary life as
the space where God is to be gloried for his grace (cf. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self:
The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ()),
–). Cf. Pieter Vos, “The Relative Good of Work: Reconsidering Vocation Eschatologi-
cally,” Christian Higher Education /– (), –.
Cf. Miroslav Volf, Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work (Eugene: Wipf & Stock,
()), .
Cf. Nicholas Wolterstorf, “Trumpets, Ashes and Tears,” in Nicholas Wolterstorf, Hearing the
Call: Liturgy, Justice, Church, and World, ed. Mark R. Gornik and Gregory Thompson (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, ), –, .
’
In this essay, the question of the relationship between work and worship
will rst of all be approached from recent conceptions of liturgy as a for-
mative moral practice, in which Christian ethics is seen through the lens of
Christian worship. Do these conceptions provide an alternative approach that
allows us to overcome the dilemma of prioritizing either worship over work
or work over worship? Or do they in fact imply a return to a prioritizing of the
vita contemplativa over the vita activa? In that case, is an alternative theolog-
ical approach possible in which the two sides are related in a diferent, non-
instrumental way?
From Work to Worship
In recent theological ethical approaches in which liturgy is seen as the pri-
mary source of Christian action in the world, the center of the Christian life
is found in the practices of the church, the liturgy in particular. Samuel Wells,
for instance, shows how God in liturgical action, especially in the Eucharist,
gives us an abundance of everything we need to worship him, to be his friends
and eat with him. Ethics is a reection of this abundance; it is the work of
bringing all creation into companionship with God. In Wells’s view, all other
work is to be seen as an analogy of this denitive work: “It is not that work is
co-creation, it is that work is appropriate participation in nding a place and
a role and a fulllment as God’s companion … and enabling others to do the
same.”
From such a perspective, the traditional diferences between ‘Catholic’ and
‘Protestant’ theological accounts of work, as outlined tentatively in the intro-
duction, may change dramatically. In Stanley Hauerwas responded very
critically to the conception of work as co-creation proposed in Laborem Exer-
cens. In this encyclical, John Paul emphasizes that human work has an ethi-
cal value of its own: work makes us more human and work has the capacity to
draw us closer to God. According to Hauerwas, there are no biblical grounds
for attributing such an extraordinarily high theological status to work. In Scrip-
ture, work is not regarded as ultimately signicant. It is simply seen as a way of
earning our living: “Work gives us the means to survive, be of service to others,
Samuel Wells, God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, ),
.
John Paul , Laborem Exercens, http://w.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/
documents/hf_jp-ii_enc__laborem-exercens.html, §, , and .
and, perhaps most of all, work gives us a way to stay busy.” It is a hedge against
boredom. Attributing greater signicance to work runs the risk of making it an
idolatrous activity through which we try to secure and guarantee our signi-
cance. Moreover, in emphasizing the dignity of the common man’s labor, John
Paul advocates a romantic and elitist view of work. In the end, raising work
to a high status will legitimize some of the most inhumane forms of work.
Furthermore, the church does not need to overestimate the signicance of
work as a factor that unites people, because the church is already a community
in which people learn to count on each other. Therefore, in Hauerwas’s view
as opposed to that of both John Paul and, by implication, Tim Keller, work is
just a means or a necessity and entirely subordinate to being part of the com-
munity of the church.
Although his critique of the encyclical’s optimistic trust in the positive and
humanizing signicance of work may be justied to some extent, in my view
Hauerwas’s own account of the signicance of work as merely a means of mak-
ing a living is inadequate too. As R.R. Reno puts it in The Blackwell Companion
to Christian Ethics:
To say that work is just making a living is as implausible as saying that sex
is just satisfying instincts. Work, like sex, seems to have a theologically
important signicance, and this prevents us from either ‘naturalizing’ it
completely or relegating its spiritual signicance to punishment or dis-
traction.
In his own account of work, Reno adopts a liturgical approach by connecting
work with worship: a “Christian ethic of work must always reect the fact that
our labors lead to the Sabbath. The work-a-day world of earning a living and
taking care of a household nds its proper end in the divine work of worship.”
Liturgy and worship, Eucharist and reading the Scriptures complete and fulll
our daily work. Thus, Reno does not avoid the language of fulllment, as Hau-
erwas does, but points to Augustine’s uti and frui: We should enjoy God, and
Stanley Hauerwas, “Work as Co-Creation: A Critique of A Remarkably Bad Idea,” in John
W. Houck and Oliver F. Williams (eds), Co-creation and Capitalism: John Paul II’s Laborem
Exercens (Washington: University Press of America, ), –, .
Hauerwas, “Work as Co-Creation,” .
R.R. Reno, “Working Toward Worship,” in Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (eds.), The
Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, second edition (Malden/ Oxford: Blackwell,
), –, .
Reno, “Working Toward Worship,” .
’
others in God, and use everything else in such a way that we might enter ever
more fully into that enjoyment. This ordering is expressed in the priority of
the vita contemplativa over the vita activa. According to Reno, our joy is in the
Sabbath, and we live well when we work towards that end.
Reno hastens to emphasize that the subordination of work to the enjoyment
of God in worship should not be confused with the antique philosophical ideal
of contemplation— Plato’s favoring of philosophical knowledge over practical
expertise and Aristotle’s valuation of the bios theoretikos as the highest good.
The presumed antagonism between the necessities of work and the highest
good should be rejected, since the life of discipleship accepts the necessity of
work as useful “providential imposition.”
Yet, in Reno’s approach, too, work still seems to have mainly instrumental
value. This becomes clear from how he elaborates the relationship between
work and worship. First, the disciplining necessity of work prepares us for dis-
cipleship and prayer. Second, the bitter necessity of work reminds us of our
sinfulness and our need for divine grace. Finally, the humanizing role of work
awakens our desire for the divinizing power of worship. Although Reno also
highlights the fact that work provides a social identity, demands social inter-
action, requires self-discipline and provides scope for creativity, in the end
these positive features of secular work function only as a preguration of the
sacred work of prayer and the gathering of God’s people in worship. Hence, it is
questionable how secular work may be conceived of as a potential good in itself
and how liturgy would shed light on how to do work. Seemingly, the active life
is seen as a preparation for the real life of ‘contemplation.’
In sum, Reno claims that the ordinary conditions of work have common
features that make the act of Christian worship a tting fulllment. However,
in dealing with the three aspects his argument shows a diferent pattern: work
is a useful means that contributes to our spiritual lives. For instance, the ne-
cessity of work foreshadows the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy, the
painfulness of work teaches us that sustaining a Christian community is hard
work too and forces us to expect everything from God’s saving grace. In Reno’s
approach, a Christian view of secular work should never confuse the demands
of the workplace with the commands of God. Such demands have only limited,
instrumental value inasmuch as they can train the soul for the more severe
disciplines of the Christian life.
Reno, “Working Toward Worship,” .
Reno, “Working Toward Worship,” .
Reno, “Working Toward Worship,” –.
Work Put into Perspective
Similar accounts of work can be found in recent Reformed theology. According
to the Dutch Reformed theologian Gerrit de Kruijf, work should not be seen as
an aim in itself, but just as a means of sustaining life. Referring to Gen. :-
, de Kruijf argues that work is a matter of necessity to prevent oneself from
dying. In principle, work is not very joyful. People have tried to improve the
conditions under which they work, by sharing out their tasks and using var-
ious talents among people. Nevertheless, work and economy are still dened
by structures of power that allow some people to enjoy life whereas others do
the hard work in pain and distress. Against the common understanding, de
Kruijf interprets the Reformation as a critique of the division as such between
the natural and the supernatural, ordinary life and the contemplative life. This
division stems from antiquity and dened the hierarchy of laity and the higher
estates of nobility and clergy through the ages. In opposition to this hierar-
chical division, Luther and Calvin envisioned the spiritual as taking place in
ordinary life. That is why Luther left the monastery.
At the same time, de Kruijf criticizes the common identication of vocation
and work in later Reformed thought. Calvin didn’t defend an identication of
calling and professional vocation. In his reading of Institutes .., de Kruijf
demonstrates that Calvin’s starting point is that our calling is rst of all to be
citizens of the kingdom of God. Each individual has his profession “as a sentry
post” of this kingdom. Working as a baker is as useful for this purpose as being
a monk. Therefore, according to de Kruijf, work is just a relative good or even
only a necessary evil.
As Jacques Ellul has pointed out, in Scripture people are called to become
a prophet, priest, or king, i.e., they are called to a special oce or a particular
deed or service, but nowhere is work itself seen as service to God. Hence, Karl
Gerrit de Kruijf, Ethiek onderweg: Acht adviezen (Ethics Along the Way: Eight Recommen-
dations) (Zoetermeer: Meinema, ), –.
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vols., trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T.
McNeill (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, ), ... Here, the starting point
is that our calling is rst of all to be citizens of this kingdom. Each individual has his
calling “as a sentry post” in the kingdom of God. At the same time, our various callings in
life commit us to duties tted to our situation and possibilities assigned to us by God. We
should not transgress our limits so as not to “heedlessly wander about throughout life.”
De Kruijf, Ethiek onderweg, .
Jacques Ellul, Les combats de la liberté (The War of Liberty) (Paris: Le Centurion/ Labor et
Fides, ), –; de Kruijf, Ethiek onderweg, .
’
Barth classied work as but one form of the tasks God had imposed on human
beings. It is regarded as an “indispensable presupposition” of the real work of
bearing witness to the coming of God’s kingdom; “work can be done only
incidentally, as a parergon, in the context of the service to which man is truly
and essentially called.” Human work should not become totalitarian, since it
is limited and only nds its fulllment in the Sabbath as the day of worship to
God.
Following this line of thought, de Kruijf reinterprets Corinthians : :
“Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called” (King James).
In Luther’s view, this text points to a surprising relationship between calling
and profession, but in recent biblical scholarship the text is interpreted as part
of an ongoing argument at the time about the question whether the Kingdom
of God required a disengagement from earthly life. Paul’s response is that we
should respect life forms like marriage, work and government, not as having
intrinsic value—since they are not part of the renewal provided by God—but
as valuable domains that exist and where we are called to obey our vocation
as Christians. Our professional positions can be instances where we fulll our
vocation to be witnesses of the heavenly kingdom. From this eschatological
stance we should neither identify ourselves with our work, nor neglect its rel-
ative value, since it is part of the ordinary life in which we are called to answer
God’s calling to be pilgrims on the way.
Like Hauerwas, de Kruijf emphasizes that work has only instrumental value
and should not be romanticized. Nowadays people overestimate their work as
the most important way to develop their identity and nd ultimate meaning in
life. Therefore, according to de Kruijf, it is most urgent to put work into perspec-
tive. In a similar way to Hauerwas, de Kruijf criticizes the elitist character of
what he calls a romantic ideal of self-realization through work. Self-realization
and self-fulllment may be seen as relative goods, but what if one does not
have the possibility or potential to realize oneself in one’s work? What if you
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T
Clark, –) (), Vol. /, .
Barth, /, .
Barth, /, –. Cf. Pieter J. Mulders, Arbeid om te leven en arbeidsleven: Een
theologisch-ethische verkenning van het fenomeen ‘arbeid’, in het bijzonder bij C.J. Dippel,
A.Th. van Leeuwen, Hanna Arendt en E.F. Schumacher (Work for a Living and the Life of
Work: A Theological-Ethical Exploration of the Phenomenon of ‘Work,’ according to C.J.
Dippel, A.Th. van Leeuwen, Hannah Arendt and E.F. Schumacher in particular) (Den
Haag: Boekencentrum, ), –.
De Kruijf, Ethiek onderweg, –.
have become just a cog in the machine without any control over your life?
Work can estrange you from yourself in such a way that you only long for lei-
sure time after work in order to realize something of a real life.
This putting into perspective stems from de Kruijf’s account of the meaning
of the Sabbath or Sunday as a sign of the new life, a time in which we become
open to hearing the voice of God. Sunday is a day of hope, a day in which our per-
spective is broadened by an interruption of the normal pattern of doing things.
At the same time, this hope is still directed towards the earth. On Sunday we ex-
perience something of an interchange between the old and the new life. Worship
arms the Christian identity of being a pilgrim on the way and helps us not to
accept things just as they are. Whereas our days of work testify to the power of
reality, the Sabbath testies to a power over reality. As the rst day of the week,
the Sunday is not meant as a day of rest from the work that has been done in the
week before, but it shows that God’s words and actions are the starting point of
our life, preparing us to do our work in a particular way in the week that follows.
In my view, Hauerwas, Reno and de Kruijf ofer important arguments for
putting into perspective the value of work from a Christian eschatological
point of view. Their analyses make clear how a theological estimation of work
can become mixed up with a romantic ideal of self-realization. These authors
rightly emphasize the central meaning of the enjoyment of the Sabbath. In
Scripture, work is treated as a gure for eschatological joy (see for instance Is.
:-). Such an eschatological focus on the Sabbath opens the way for a
critical approach, not only to an overestimation of the theological signicance
of work, but also to all kinds of unjust economic structures.
Nevertheless, I think these approaches ofer too little. The question is how
an emphasis on the Sabbath as the end of work and an eschatological per-
spective on the signicance of work may contribute positively to carrying out
one’s daily work and to nding positive criteria for criticizing and improving
work that is dehumanizing, unjust or characterized by alienation. Hauerwas
and de Kruijf rightly devaluate work because of its potential ideological mis-
uses, and Reno relates work to its nal fulllment in worship, but it is not clear
how these accounts may contribute positively to thinking through the nature
and purpose of ‘good work’ or ‘better work.’ Neither de Kruijf nor Reno derives
a perspective from the Kingdom of God or the Sabbath for transforming the
conditions under which work is carried out. In the end, work is seen as instru-
mental to worship and eschatological joy.
De Kruijf, Ethiek onderweg, –.
De Kruijf, Ethiek onderweg, –.
’
Here, it may be helpful to add to this one-directional movement from work
towards liturgy a second movement: from liturgy back to work. Not only do the
hands of work pregure the hands of prayer, as Reno puts it, but the hands
of prayer also transgure the hands of work. Although de Kruijf touches upon
this aspect, he does not develop it. Yet, in this way it may be possible to resolve
the tension between an overestimation of work (the vita activa) on the one
hand and of worship (the vita contemplativa) on the other. Life must point to
liturgy, but liturgy must also point to life. Or in other words, the Christian life
of worship is not a diferent life from the life in which work is carried out.
A second correction is needed as well. In their devaluation of work, Hauer-
was, Reno and de Kruijf are particularly concerned about the potentially te-
dious, unjust or dehumanizing nature of work. By emphasizing this potential
degradation they tend to qualify work in general as inferior and instrumental.
In doing so they negate a signicant distinction that could be made between
work on the one hand and labor on the other, as developed by Hannah Arendt
in her analysis of the vita activa. As the fundamental condition of labor she
regards the sheer necessity of staying alive. The eforts of labor are born of
urgency, since the purpose of labor is the preservation of life itself. Work, on
the other hand, corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence and
provides an ‘articial’ world of things. Work consists of the activities of crafts-
manship or production, bringing forth products which are marked by a cer-
tain solidity and permanence. Insomuch as the man-made world of things,
which is the result of work, transcends both the pure functionality of things
produced for consumption and the pure utility of objects for use, it is a ‘work
of art.’ In this sense work is opus or oeuvre, marked not by hard labor and
efort but by satisfaction, honor, admiration or even fame among other people,
Reno, “Working Toward Worship”, : “The hands of work are transgured into the hands
of prayer.”
Cf. Wolterstorf, “Trumpets, Ashes, and Tears,” .
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, second edition (Chicago & London: The Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, ), . Although the distinction between labor and work nds
little support both in pre-modernity and in modern theory, it is signicant that every
European language contains two etymologically unrelated words which we have come to
think of as referring to the same activity, ponein and ergazesthai in Greek, laborare and
facere or fabricari in Latin, travailler and ouvrer in French, labour and work in English,
arbeiten and werken in German, and arbeiden and werken in Dutch.
In labor the tools and instruments that are the result of work can be used in order to ease
the labor. In that case they are no longer used in order to build a world, but to mechanize
the rhythm of the labor processes (Arendt, The Human Condition, –).
Arendt, The Human Condition, .
as Anton Houtepen describes it in reference to Arendt. The third category
Arendt distinguishes is action, basically consisting of the public practice of free
communicative co-operation, which Aristotle called bios politikos and which
is motivated by the fundamental human condition of plurality itself. These
distinctions are relevant, because they enable us to criticize not only the over-
valuation of labor/work in general, but also the oversimplied devaluation of
work. Whereas in antiquity both labor and work were undervalued, in moder-
nity labor has been overvalued and idealized by equating the homo laborans
with the homo faber. From Arendt’s point of view, the overvaluation of labor
and the dehumanizing circumstances of laborers who work as a ‘cog in the
machine’ are to be criticized. On the other hand, the distinction may do justice
to work that transcends strict utility or necessity and that is honorable and
satisfying in itself. Thus, contrary to what Hauerwas, Reno and de Kruijf claim,
not all ‘work’ is only a matter of necessity.
I think that the two-directional approach to the relationship between work
and liturgy, as well as the distinction between work and labor, ofer import-
ant building blocks for rethinking this relationship. Yet, we should take further
theological steps. The question is how liturgy may inform the way we carry out
our work as good work. What is the meaning of the Sabbath as a day of worship
and remembrance of God’s acts for how we experience and do our work?
Starting from the Sabbath
As we have seen, Tim Keller understands the Sabbath basically in terms of rest.
He argues:
Since God rested after his creation, we must also rest after ours. This
rhythm of work and rest is not only for believers; it is for everyone, as part
of our created nature. Overwork or underwork violates that nature and
leads to breakdown. … To violate the rhythm of work and rest (in either
direction) leads to chaos in our life and in the world around us. Sabbath
is therefore a celebration of our design.
Anton Houtepen, Uit aarde, naar Gods beeld: Theologische antropologie (From Dust, In
God’s Image: Theological Anthropology) (Zoetermeer: Meinema, ), .
Arendt, The Human Condition, .
Keller, Every Good Endeavour, .
’
In this way, Keller parallels the ‘natural’ rhythm of work and rest for human
beings with the sequence of work and rest of the Creator. The meaning
of the Sabbath is articulated in relation to this rhythm: after work we
needrest.
Unlike Keller, Bernd Wannenwetsch brings in the logic of the Sabbath to
criticize the functional logic in such common conceptions of the relationship
between work and rest. Theologically, the Sabbath (or Sunday) is not just a part
of the weekend, just another holiday, but a holy day which manifests the telos
from which work can be seen properly. To understand this, we must rst get a
clear view of the meaning of the Sabbath.
Wannenwetsch quotes Genesis : from Buber’s and Rosenzweig’s translation:
On the seventh day God nished the work which he had done, and on the
seventh day celebrated from all his work (feierte von all seiner Arbeit) that
he had done. God blessed the seventh day and sanctied it, for on that
day he celebrated from all his work which God, making, had created.
The curious phraseology “celebrated from his works” draws us into the depths
of the Sabbath mystery. “The relation between work and rest, works and the
freedom from works, ethics and liturgy, life and worship, is here removed from
all the directness of an ‘in order to.’” The starting point is found in God’s cre-
ative work and how he celebrates it. God neither celebrates his works directly,
as if he were nothing without them, nor simply rests from them, as if he were
only his true self apart from his working. According to Wannenwetsch, these
words point in another direction. They are not about a particular function of
the seventh day, but about its blessing.
What does this ‘blessing’ mean? Wannenwetsch draws our attention to
the striking feature that in the creation narrative the human being celebrates
the rst Sabbath before he himself has performed any work. He shares God’s
rest, not like God, by celebrating from his own works—he is indeed not a co-
creator—but by celebrating with God from his divine works.
This relativity and relatedness remain the secret of the sabbath even after
the human being has gone to work himself. The sabbath does not acquire
Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, .
Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, .
Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, .
its meaning from the act of working. … On the sabbath, human beings do
not look at their own work, at least not primarily.
Remarkably, we nd similar emphases in Calvin’s explanation of the fourth
commandment. Though he also explains the commandment in terms of a
healthy day of rest from work, this is just the third element in how he describes
the meaning of the Sabbath. First of all the Sabbath is meant as a “type” of “the
spiritual rest” ofered to believers “to meditate on the Kingdom of God,” and
“to cease from their own works, and allow God to work in them.” Moreover,
we should employ the Sabbath “in meditating on his works.” Thus, Calvin’s
starting point for outlining the meaning of the Sabbath is a celebration with
God from his divine works.
In my view, this account of the Sabbath as a celebration of God’s works
has important consequences for an ethics of work. First of all, on the Sab-
bath the human being is not primarily directed to his own work, but to God’s
work. His gaze is neither drawn downwards to the fragments of his part-work,
nor upwards to the success of his work, but open to the gift of God’s work.
Thus, Sabbath rest neither means a depreciation of work (Hauerwas, Reno, de
Kruijf), nor directs us to the need for rest as a consequence of work (Keller),
but through the Sabbath the human being is ‘put to work’ in a particular way.
This is evident, as Wannenwetsch explains, in the relocation of the day of rest
to Sunday as the rst day, the beginning of the week. Sunday is to be under-
stood as the morning of the new creation, which has dawned with Christ’s res-
urrection. Note that this is also in accordance with Judaism, since according to
the creation story the last day of God’s creation was the rst day for the human
being.
Second, from this perspective it is possible to connect the eschatological ap-
proach, as advocated by de Kruijf and others, more positively with ordinary
life: the kingdom of God is not just the proper end of our work, but rather its
starting point. This opens up the possibility of seeing the old life from the per-
spective of the new life. As Jürgen Moltmann puts it, in the weekly Sabbath, Is-
rael experienced the general eschatological expectation of the future in which
Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, .
Calvin, Institutes, ...
Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, .
De Kruijf, Ethiek onderweg, , emphazises the same in reference to Barth, as we have
seen, but doesn’t elaborate the content of this ‘in a particular way.’ It seems only to mean
that we must put work into perspective as something relative.
Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, –.
’
“the whole earth will be full of God’s glory” (Is. ). Instead of going back to a
supposed original meaning in a creational ordering of work and rest (Keller), a
Sabbatical-eschatological stance puts work into a particular perspective from
the start. If worship is an anticipatory celebration of the eschatological peace,
worship teaches us to do our work in the service of God’s new creation. Sure-
ly, the eschatological approach is not opposed to the remembrance of God’s
creative acts. Sabbath’s worship consists of both remembering and expecting
God’s creative and liberating works. The expectancy of ‘the new creation’ is
connected with the remembrance of God’s initial creation, but the expect-
ed divine works extend much further than the beginning works of creation.
The creation is good, not in the sense of being perfect and without any future,
but as tting, appropriate and corresponding to the Creator’s will. Only the
Sabbath of creation is more than good, ‘hallowed,’ ‘sanctied,’ pointing to cre-
ation’s future glory as its completion as ‘new creation.’ The Sunday worship
of Christians too is devoted to the celebration of the remembered and the ex-
pected divine acts, at the center of which is Christ’s resurrection and the arrival
of the peaceable Kingdom. Remembering and expecting worship form the
decisive context of the Sunday: “When we drop worship out of the day of rest,
we destroy this practice of bringing to the fore (in memorializing celebration)
the actions that constitute the abiding context of our existence.”
Third, diferently from Reno’s approach, work does not so much prepare us
for worship as the proper end of our work. Rather the day of worship is the
starting point, the decisive perspective for envisioning the signicance of our
work, not as something relative (contra de Kruijf and Hauerwas), but as di-
rected towards God’s work. On the day of worship we celebrate in the promise
and reality of the heavenly kingdom and we relate it to the present life, in-
cluding work and labor in both their humanizing and dehumanizing aspects.
With Miroslav Volf, worship can be seen as an “anticipatory celebration of the
eschatological shalom, in which human beings will live in peace with them-
selves and in fellowship with nature, one another, and God.” Only from the
eschatological perspective of the Sabbath as the proper starting point can we
adequately speak in terms of a rhythm of work and rest. Moltmann speaks of a
Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl
( Minneapolis: Fortress Press, ()), .
Moltmann, The Coming of God, .
Moltmann, The Coming of God, ; Wolterstorf, “The Tragedy of Liturgy in Protestant-
ism,” in Hearing the Call, –, .
Wolterstorf, “The Tragedy of Liturgy in Protestantism,” .
Volf, Work in the Spirit, .
“rhythmicization of the times of history,” an ordering of lifetime, not in a linear
sense but rhythmically. For working time and mechanical time are linearly
directed towards a purpose or goal, whereas the weekly Sabbath sets a rhythm
that healingly interrupts the ux of time. Every Sabbath celebration is a messi-
anic intermezzo in time, in which we celebrate with God from his remembered
and expected works.
Fourth, this eschatological-Sabbatical approach not only inspires people to
do their work as a creative activity in the service of God’s new creation, but
also ofers them criteria for how to do this, especially in terms of justice. This
becomes clear from the way the Old Testament envisions the Sabbath order as
a social order. The Sabbath commandment is formulated as a commandment
for masters and servants, parents and children, indigenous people and strang-
ers equally. No matter how diferent their respective social status may be, on
the Sabbath they become equal in sharing time for worship. Moreover, in ac-
cordance with the Sabbath order, illuminating regulations are connected with
the seventh year and the ‘year of Jubilee,’ in which land must be given back to
former owners, since the land belongs to God, and slaves should be set free, be-
cause they are only God’s servants, freed from Egypt, and should not be sold as
slaves (Lev. ). The Sabbath order does not allow for relationships among the
children of Israel according to the mode of possessing. It implies a critique of
an economic order of inequality in which the space of one is to be maintained
over that of another. Instead, it establishes an order in which we recognize
each other as contemporaries, brothers and sisters, in which one does not rule
the other. Or as Wolterstorf puts it, worship as celebrating God’s creative and
liberating deeds requires us to do the works of mercy and justice in grateful
response. The authenticity of the liturgy is conditioned by the quality of the
ethical life of those who participate: no authentic liturgy without justice. The
signicance of liturgy is to give symbolic expression to the commitment of our
lives to God.
Moltmannn, The Coming of God, .
Moltmannn, The Coming of God, . Somewhat diferently from Moltmann, who em-
phasizes the meaning of the Sabbath as the experience of God’s rest, I would rather qualify
the Sabbath as the celebration of the gift of God’s work (in which we rest).
Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, –.
Wolterstorf, “The Tragedy of Liturgy in Protestantism,” .
Wolterstorf, “Justice as a Condition of Authentic Liturgy,” in Hearing the Call, –,
and .
Wolterstorf, “Justice as a Condition of Authentic Liturgy,” .
’
Yet, fth, something needs to be added to Wolterstorf’s ‘no liturgy without
justice.’ Since worship not only has a life of justice and mercy as its condition,
but is also a practice in which we are formed to become just and merciful peo-
ple, worship as an anticipation of the kingdom has formative meaning. In the
‘practice’ of the liturgy the kingdom of peace and justice is not just proclaimed
but imagined, so that it will foster our love for Christ and his kingdom and
direct our desire in such a way that it “transforms our actions by inscribing in
us habits or dispositions to act in certain ways,” as James K.A. Smith puts it.
Rather than seeing justice as the precondition of authentic liturgy, liturgy it-
self is the way in which we learn to become faithful people that practice justice
and mercy in our lives, including our work. Liturgy is a formative practice of
desire, by which the participants are shaped. Worship is an ordering and reor-
dering of our world to the end for which it is meant.
Liturgy as Formative Practice
In the practices of Christian liturgy a particular vision of the good life is imag-
ined and experienced. I conclude with some remarks about how liturgy may
foster the way we experience our work.
First of all, the act of gathering itself is meaningful as a critical counter-practice
to all the practices of alienation, suppression by the powerful, possessiveness
and competitive relationships that we nd in all kinds of workplaces in the
world. In the Christian liturgy, a community is gathered in which the status
of each participant is not determined by wealth, ownership or power, but all
depend on each other. The center is koinonia, participation, fellowship or com-
munion, both with God and with the neighbor. An important narrative con-
text for the Christian practice of liturgy is found in Acts :-, where it is
told that those who are converted to the gospel hold “all things koina.” Here,
worship (communion and breaking bread) is closely related to economics: “no
James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, Cul-
tural Liturgies, Vol. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, ), .
Wolterstorf, “Justice as a Condition of Authentic Liturgy,” . Cf. p., where he explains
the notion of “discerning the body” in Corinthians , –. My interpretation difers
a little from Wolterstorf’s. If you “humiliate those who have nothing” you eat the bread
and drink the cup of the Lord “in an unworthy manner,” not just in the sense that the
actions that precede the liturgy are unjust and merciless, as Wolterstorf emphasizes, but
also in the sense that this precisely reveals that you completely failed to understand what
the Lord’s Supper is about.
one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned
was held in common.” (Acts :). Instead of holding property idion, things
were held koina, i.e., property was seen from the perspective of participation
within the community of faith. Of interest is not so much whether early
Christians indeed practiced shared ownership (and whether we ought to do
the same), but the fact that in koinonia possessions—we could say: the results
of daily work—were valued in terms of a common good. From this perspective,
an alternative perspective on economy appears to be intrinsic to the Christian
practice of worship.
This is pre-eminently expressed in the Eucharist. Here we discover a fore-
taste of the ultimate good of God’s new creation. At the table we receive the
earthly products of bread and wine. Although the Eucharist is diferent from
our daily meals, it is continuous with them too. Bread and wine belong to the
daily diet in many parts of the world and across history. The Lord’s Supper is a
sanctication of the everyday, pointing to a transformation and transguration
of this world. Moreover, what we eat and drink are the products of human
labor, hard work aimed at survival. In blessing the bread and giving thanks
for the cup of wine, Christ also hallows the products of our hard labor. Yet, in
the Eucharist these products are not just consumed with the aim to sustain
life, but they are indeed hallowed, i.e., set apart for a holy consummation and
communion. They are freely distributed to all those who are in communion.
In this communion, resources are not scarce or subject to competition, but
everyone can be satised and the satisfaction of one person increases instead
of weakens that of the neighbor. All share in the abundance of God’s creative
and eschatological goodness.
Furthermore, liturgy itself is work, a work for the benet of the world. This
is indicated by the etymology of the word ‘liturgy,’ from the Greek word leitour-
gia, meaning “a public work (ergon) of service or duty undertaken by the citi-
zen and done for the benet of the people of the wider community (leitos).”
D. Stephen Long, “Christian Economy,” in Nancey Murphy, Brad J. Kallenberg and Mark
Thiessen Nation, Virtues and Practices in the Christian Tradition: Christian Ethics after
MacIntyre (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, ), –, .
Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, , referring to Peter J. Leithart, “The Way Things Real-
ly Ought to Be: Eucharist, Eschatology, and Culture,” Westminster Theological Journal
(), –.
Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, .
Long, “Christian Economy,” .
Luke Bretherton, “Class, Hierarchy, and Christian Social Order,” in The Blackwell Compan-
ion to Christian Ethics, –, .
’
As a public work of God’s people and the Spirit of God, Christian liturgy is an
act that mediates the work of God in the world. The fruits of the liturgy are
distributed as goods to the participants. But these goods are also distributed to
the world, for instance when the people gathered for worship represent work-
ing people before God in their prayers, songs, and words. In this way the usual
economic dynamics of exchange, competition and gain in daily work experi-
ence is interrupted. In the liturgy a work for everyone is done: praying for the
world and for everyone in the world. In a non-proprietorial, non-monetized
exchange the peace, prayers, sermons and words are shared as gifts from God
and as a good that cannot be expropriated by one set of people for exclusive
use, but in which “the ourishing of each is intertwined with the ourishing of
all,” in the words of Luke Bretherton.
Finally, the nature of liturgy as a work for the world may shed light on the
relationship between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. From the argu-
ment ofered so far, we should not see the two vitae as separate ways of life but
as interconnected aspects of one single Christian life. In Christianity, past and
present, this has not always been understood, as we have seen. Nevertheless,
in general the awareness that the two forms of life are intertwined has not
been entirely lost, neither in the Protestant armation of ordinary life nor in
monasticism. Although, as for instance in the Rule of Benedict, the priority of
prayer is emphasized and the ora precedes the labora, this does not mean that
monastic life excludes active life,” i.e., the monk must have a desire to seek God
in communal prayer. The opus Dei consists of the daily prayer oces. Howev-
er, the double meaning of prayer as the ‘work of God’ points to the fact that the
contemplative life is not just about a life of prayer as the monks’ work in service
of the divine, but rst of all about God’s working in and through this work of
prayer. Hence, in a monastic worldview the life of prayer and the active life can
be seen as one, and are in fact seen as one, since the rule of praying is the rule
of believing and both show themselves in action: lex orandi, lex credenda, lex
faciendi.
In conclusion, the vita contemplativa and vita activa are to be seen as inter-
twined. The core of the vita contemplativa consists not so much of a particular
Bretherton, “Class, Hierarchy,” .
Bretherton, “Class, Hierarchy,” .
Mary Ewing Stamps, “Lives of Living Prayer: Christomorphism and the Priority of Prayer
in the Rule of St. Benedict,” in E. Byron Anderson and Bruce T. Morrill (eds), Liturgy and
the Moral Self: Humanity at Full Stretch Before God. Essays in Honor of Don E. Saliers (Col-
legeville: The Liturgical Press, ), –, –.
Stamps, “Lives of Living Prayer,” –.
human activity (contemplation), but rather of opening oneself to God and his
works (opus Dei as subjective genitive). Such a ‘life’ of prayer does not compete
with the vita activa but opens up a particular perspective from which the vita
activa is lived.
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A Day to Remember
A Community-Based Understanding of the Wedding Liturgy
Almatine Leene
Introduction
Nowadays, the general expectation is that one’s wedding day must be perfect;
therefore, the perfect venue must be chosen. Church buildings are no
longer the obvious places to conduct wedding services. Increasingly couples
preferthe beach, the woods, a boat or other venues. These venues inuence
how the liturgy may be performed: Musical instruments and symbols like
a cross are not necessarily available at these locations. Also, and more
importantly, the opportunity for the church community to attend the service
becomes problematic. Often church members do not know about the service
and if they do, it may be too dicult to attend if the venue is some distance
away. Another reason for non-attendance might be that the venue cannot
practically accommodate more people in the wedding service than those
who are invited.
The changing of wedding ceremony venues is but one of the signs of the
high expectation of wedding days and marriage nowadays. Theologians speak
of an “over-romanticizing of marriage.” This has to do with the view of mar-
riage as basically a private afair. The romantic setting (beach, wine farm, or
castle) is complemented by a private celebration with only close friends and
For example, in the Western Cape province in South Africa, auent couples replace the
church building with the beach or wine estates. Even less auent people who cannot aford
expensive wine estate venues can still choose the beach or the woods since the costs for the
ceremony are even cheaper than a church building.
E.g., Marco Derks, Thijs Tromp and Pieter Vos, “In de ban van de ring: Over het huwelijk als
dominant construct in seksegerelateerde kwesties” (Under the spell of the ring: On marriage
as dominant construct in sex and gender related issues), Radix / (), –. Tim Keller,
The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God
(New York: Penguin Books, ).
In my use of the term ‘privatization’ I do not mean that the state should have no authority to
dene the terms of personal relationships such as marriage, but that society in general and
the church community in particular are less involved in marriage.
family attending. We nd this also in wedding preparation courses like the
‘Marriage Course’ from Alpha International—I will return to this at a later
stage in this essay.
Before examining diferent denitions regarding marriage, we need to ac-
knowledge various practices of wedding customs and legal contexts worldwide
and across denominations. For Protestants, in countries where churches are
not allowed to marry people, for example in the Netherlands and Belgium,
matrimony is a religious conrmation; a blessing of what was formalized in
a civil court. According to civil law in these countries, marriage has a social
and political status. For the church a moral and religious perspective is also
important. In countries where the church is a legal ocial like the civil registry,
for instance, in South Africa, the United States and Spain, the civil aspect is
intertwined with the moral aspect. The majority of couples in these countries
choose to be married by a minister, even if they are not involved in that specic
local religious community. Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches
see marriage as a sacrament. Regardless of civil ceremony, matrimony is seen
as the legitimate wedding.
The focus of this paper will be on Reformed liturgies, without regard for
the legal position of the church in the various international contexts. Cer-
tainly, the legal position inuences liturgical choices; nonetheless most set-
tings are afected by ideas and practices of romance and privacy. Questions
to be addressed in this article are: How does the observed privatization and
romanticizing of marriage inuence the perception and the performance of
wedding liturgies? What biblical and traditional theological core elements in
the conception of marriage are helpful in understanding and performing wed-
ding liturgies nowadays? To answer these questions, theological reection on
marriage throughout history is considered. Subsequently, the importance of
wedding services in diferent historical periods is examined. In conclusion, a
community-focused liturgy is proposed.
Theological Reection on Marriage
Behind every wedding celebration lies a conviction about the meaning and
purpose of marriage. As such, it is crucial to reect on diferent denitions of
marriage, especially because there is no such thing as a complete and static
biblical understanding of marriage. In the Bible we nd a variety of perspec-
tives like polygamy and monogamy. Although there are core elements we can
use to build a theologically responsible understanding of marriage, deni-
tions in history are formed by culture and time. In the rst centuries of church
history marriage was seen as a remedy for sexual desire, as a religious vocation,
with emphasis on the indissolubility of marriage and the prohibition of di-
vorce (except on the grounds of adultery). Later on, in the Middle Ages, mar-
riage was understood to be less than honorable, a second-class arrangement
for those Christians who were unable to attain the ideal of celibacy. By the time
of the Reformation, marriage became important again, through the rejection
of virginity as the norm, as part of the rejection of justication by works. Clergy
no longer had to remain celibate. Anthropology and grace worked together in
Protestant ethics in an interesting fashion: “God’s grace, therefore, could ex-
tend even to the sexual dimension of human existence.” Thus, marriage was a
way of being a Christian in the created world, and being seen as part of God’s
good creation. Staying alone and childlessness became needless sufering
during the Reformation.
According to Stephanie Coontz, in her extensive work on the history of mar-
riage, until the late th century marriage was seen as far too vital an economic
and political institution to be left entirely to the free choice of two individuals.
Love was seen as unreasonable and transitory. Although Calvin already speaks
about the need of a spark of romance as essential for a good marriage, and we
do nd diferent examples of marriage for love in history, these were excep-
tions. Only during the last two hundred years have Europeans and Americans
begun to see marriage as a personal and private relationship, which should
full the couple’s emotional and sexual desires. Coontz is of the opinion that
history can ofer no specic instructions, but it can help us to decide which
Philip Reynholds concludes that this religious vocation doctrine served as a shibboleth and
he nds Augustine’s theory (as the West’s great theorist of marriage) speculative. See Philip
Lyndon Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage During
the Patristic and Early Medieval Periods (Leiden: Brill, ), .
Stanley Grenz, Sexual Ethics: An Evangelical Perspective (Louisville: Westminster John Knox
Press, ), .
Ad L.Th. de Bruijne, “Areken of opbouwen: is het e-eeuwse huwelijksideaal alleen een
construct?’’ (Breaking down or building up: Is the th century marriage ideal only a con-
struct?), Radix / (), –, .
Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Penguin
Books, ), .
Don Browning in John Witte jr and Robert M. Kingdon, Sex, Marriage, and Family in John Cal-
vin’s Geneva: Courtship, Engagement and Marriage (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans ), .
Coontz, History, f. Also see Megan McKenna, Rites of Justice: The Sacraments and Liturgy
as Ethical Imperatives (New York: Orbis Books, ), . She highlights that in the Hebrew
Scriptures only one woman, namely Rachel, married for love.
precedents are relevant to contemporary concerns. She concludes that few
precedents regarding marriage are relevant for today; uncharted territory has
been entered into because marriage for love is a new phenomenon.
Romantic Ideals in the st Century
The st century can be seen as an era of transition. The secularization process
in Western society has caused a disengagement from relationships, and sex has
become a freestanding activity engaged in for pleasure. During the uncertain
economy of the s and s, concern over sexually transmitted diseases and
demographical changes turned the tide. Add the growing legalization of same sex
marriages, and it is apparent that the denition of marriage has changed tremen-
dously. Coontz’s observation that marriage nowadays is seen as private and as the
fullment of sexual and emotional needs—called love—is ironically supported
by statistics of people that do not dare to marry and rather live together, while
divorce rates are exceedingly high. The expectations of marriage for love are high
and therefore people are easily disappointed in each other. In the Netherlands, for
example, % of children are born from extramarital relationships and approx-
imately , children per year experience the trauma of parental divorce. In
countries like the and South Africa these statistics are even higher. Churches
struggle to incorporate this reality into traditional beliefs concerning marriage.
The gap between theological concepts and wedding liturgies on the one hand
and everyday experiences regarding relationships on the other is growing.
In addressing these issues, churches put more emphasis on the impor-
tance of marriage and faithfulness, thereby continuing to over-romanticize
marriage. This is seen, for example, in the popular ‘Marriage Course’ by Al-
pha International. ‘The Marriage Course’ is, according to the website, a seven-
session course with a candlelit meal in a romantic setting. This takes place
while couples listen to practical talks. Alpha international emphasizes the re-
specting of privacy, saying, “Background music ensures that you can chat in
complete privacy. You will never be asked to share anything about your rela-
tionship with anyone other than your partner.” Themes for the preparation
course are: the couple’s relationship, communication, the importance of com-
mitment, appreciating diferences, communication, resolving conict, spend-
ing time together, family background and goals, and values and dreams. For
Coontz, History, .
Coontz, History, .
Grenz, Sexual Ethics, .
http://www.nji.nl/Scheiding-Achtergronden-Cijfers
http://www.themarriagecourses.org.
the ‘Marriage Course’ the seven sessions are basically the same: building strong
foundations, the art of communication, the power of forgiveness, the impact
of family, and good sex and love in action. The romantic setting and the prom-
ise not to share anything with the rest of the group is a sign of the emphasis
on privacy and does not promote the public sphere and community as part
of marriage. The themes are exclusively focused on the couple and not on the
community, the history of Christian marriage or other forms of relationships.
Dutch theologians Marco Derks, Thijs Tromp and Pieter Vos recognize a
romantic version of marriage in the—often veiled—hermeneutical construct
used by orthodox Protestants to build their biblical account of divorce, re-
marriage, women’s ordination, and homosexuality. They conclude that this
romantic understanding difers on many levels from biblical accounts of mar-
riage. The complementarity of the sexes together with marriage as the best lo-
cus for spiritual life imply that only married people are complete. This is what
Derks, Tromp and Vos call ‘Romantic love.’ In this version of marriage, there is
no space for homosexuals, divorcees, or singles.
In reaction to Derks, Tromp and Vos, Hans Schaefer states that marriage
which is seen as romantic love raises the expectation that space is made for
the subjects of divorce, remarriage, women’s ordination, and homosexuality.
He suspects these three theologians of devaluing marriage as an institution. It
might be that Schaefer expects too much of Derks, Tromp and Vos, since they
do not claim to give a denition of marriage, as Schaefer does in his book Cre-
atedness and Ethics, which will be discussed in the next section.
The Purpose of Marriage
Grenz discusses, in the context of the st century, three diferent purposes of
marriage. The rst sees marriage as a context for sexual expression. Despite
its biblical sanction, Grenz states that this understanding cannot be put forth
as the only, nor the highest, purpose of marriage: “There are other aspects
of the male-female bond, beyond its serving as the outlet for the human sex
drive.” The second view on the purpose of marriage that he discerns focuses
http://www.themarriagecourses.org/try/the-marriage-course.
Derks, Tromp and Vos, “Huwelijk,” –.
Derks, Tromp and Vos, “Huwelijk,” –.
Hans Schaefer, “Het huwelijk—romantisch construct of door God gegeven levensvorm”
(Marriage—romantic construct or a lifeform given by God), Radix / (), –.
Hans Schaefer, Createdness and Ethics: The Doctrine of Creation and Theological Ethics in
the Theology of Colin E. Gunton and Oswald Bayer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, ).
Grenz, Sexual Ethics, .
on procreation and child rearing. According to Grenz, while important to mar-
riage, procreation and child rearing cannot be elevated to its central purpose,
because couples also live without children and therefore procreation and child
rearing do not represent the sole or central meaning of marriage. This under-
standing has been adopted in general by Western society and has a biblical
foundation; Grenz states that it can become self-centered, in the sense of being
family-centered and not community-centered.
The last viewpoint he discerns is marriage as spiritual metaphor. Grenz nds
this the most suitable view, and gives two reasons for this. Firstly, marriage
forms a picture of the community which is already present within the triune
God. “Just as the Trinity is a community of love, so also the marital relationship
is to be characterized by love, thereby revealing the love inherent in God.”
This also means that marriage is exclusive, like the relationship between the
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the holy nature of God’s love for creation.
Secondly, Grenz states that marriage is intended to be a picture of the divine
will for community among humankind, and between humanity and God. He
sees marriage as a signicant institution because it emanates from the divine
program for humanity. It is a metaphor of deeper spiritual realities and is in-
tended to mirror the inter-Trinitarian relationship.
Although I agree that human community can be seen as a picture of the Tri-
une God, this cannot be exclusive to marriage. The danger in Grenz’s viewpoint
lies therein that marriage is understood as the only form to mirror God, there-
fore excluding singles and all other forms of relationships. Grenz’s denition
of marriage as a spiritual metaphor also neglects a context where love is not
necessarily seen as lifelong. By starting with the sex-act in marriage, as Grenz
does, any other forms of relationships occur in negative terms relative to the
ideal of marriage. In this manner, sexual ethics is narrowed down to marriage,
and the church and community are degraded. However, in later publications,
Grenz understands marriage more within an ecclesiological and eschatologi-
cal perspective. In The Social God and the Relational Self he discusses Genesis
, saying that although it depicts the union of male and female as completed
in the marriage relationship, this union does not end with husband and wife as
Grenz, Sexual Ethics, .
Grenz, Sexual Ethics, .
Grenz, Sexual Ethics, .
Grenz, Sexual Ethics, f.
Grenz, Sexual Ethics, .
Wolart Pannenberg observes marriage also from a departure in sexual ethics. See
Wolart Pannenberg, Anthropologie in Theologischer Perspektive (Göttingen: Vanden-
hoeck&Ruprecht, ).
isolated units. Still, other relational forms are not discussed at length and the
romantic ideal of love mirroring God is held in high honor.
Schaefer does not start with the topic of sexual ethics; for him, marriage is
also exclusive, although less spiritual, in the sense of mirroring the Trinity. In
his denition, God is not even mentioned. He describes marriage as a life-form
of a man and a woman together who have publicly commenced a marital rela-
tionship which is promised to be lifelong, exclusive, and based on a more than
human foundation, explicitly celebrated in the act of sexual intercourse, and
open to procreation. Therefore, according to Schaefer, marriage is import-
ant. In his book Createdness and Ethics he elaborates on the place of marriage
in the doctrine of creation. Within the context of the doctrine of creation,
marriage can be said to be God’s gift to mankind, although the context of mar-
riage in Genesis - is one of conict. Consequently Schaefer places empha-
sis on God’s promise. The notion of God’s promise is helpful when thinking
about the goodness of marriage on the one hand and being realistic about the
uncertainties of life on the other. In this concept, the goals of marriage do not
determine its level of success. According to Schaefer, either marriage is seen
as a gift from God, or marriage is seen as a social construct. The goal is not
marriage itself but teaching each other to honor God. Schaefer links marriage
to freedom because an approach from the doctrine of creation stresses the
constitutive relationship between human life and God’s providential care: “It
places any comment on marriage within the community of the Church which
is to preserve and acknowledge God’s sustaining power.”
See Stanley Grenz, The Social God and the Relational Self: A Trinitarian Theology of the
Imago Dei (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, ), .
Schaefer, “Het huwelijk,” : “Het huwelijk is een levenslange band tussen man en
vrouw die publiek is aangegaan en daarmee de ruimte biedt voor de seksuele expressie
en het krijgen van kinderen.” Cf. Createdness, f.
Schaefer deliberately does not write about sexual ethics, Schaefer, Createdness, f.
Schaefer, Createdness, .
Schaefer, Createdness, .
Schaefer, “Het huwelijk,” .
We also nd this in the theology of Bernd Wannenwetsch. He does not start his reection
on marriage with creation or society, but with the concept of ‘freedom.’ For Wannenwetsch
the ‘heuristic’ tools for the treatment of social ethics are ecclesia, oeconomia and politia.
Wannenwetsch does not want to separate sexual ethics from family ethics, to avoid a
functional approach. Bernd Wannenwetsch, “Wovon handelt die materielle Ethik? Oder:
warum die Ethik der elementaren Lebensformen (‘Stände’) einer ‘Bereichsethik’ vorzu-
ziehen ist: Oswald Bayer zum sechzigsten Geburtstag,” in Andreas Fritzsche and Manfred
Kwiran (Hgs), Kirche(n) und Gesellschaft, Ökumenische Sozialethik (München: Bern-
ward bei Don Bosco, ), –.
In searching for the meaning of marriage, Schaefer distinguishes four con-
cepts of marriage. First, marriage as contract developed in the liberal tradition
of the Enlightenment. The aim of a contract is free choice and marriage is eval-
uated in terms of goals and one’s promises. Secondly, marriage can be seen
from a ‘natural law’ perspective. In this view, the indissolubility of marriage
is stressed. The third approach is a constructivist view: marriage as a human
invention for controlling the cohabitation of man and woman. The fourth con-
cept of marriage is an eschatological qualication. “The eschatological qual-
ication of marriage … is the assurance of God leading those who trust Him
towards a goal in which the relationship between the believer and God will not
be endangered any more.” Marriage will be transformed, but not necessarily
absent.
Compared to Grenz, Schaefer elaborates on the meaning of marriage in the
broader context of changing practices and his notion of promise is helpful. Yet,
Schaefer’s denition of marriage is problematic in an age where most couples
have intercourse long before the wedding. His viewpoint on marriage as either
a gift from God, or as a social construct, is unnecessarily dualistic. In practice,
it is dicult to distinguish between cultural and social constructs on the one
hand and God’s goal for marriage on the other. It would be benecial if Schaef-
fer had incorporated the church community and eschatological notions in his
denition. To elaborate on these notions, we will engage with Catholic theo-
logian Jana Marguerite Bennett’s emphasis on the prominence of ecclesiology
and community, linking this with other forms of relationship and liturgy.
Ecclesiastical Core Elements
In Water is Thicker than Blood: An Augustinian Theology of Marriage and Single-
ness, Bennett insists that both marriage and singleness must be placed in the
context of the Christian story of redemption. By engaging with Augustine’s
assimilation of being married or single into salvation history, from creation to
eschatology and the ecclesiastical life, she is of the opinion that Augustine’s be-
liefs are enlightening for contemporary life and ideas about gender, marriage,
Schaefer, Createdness, .
Jana Marguerite Bennett, Water is Thicker than Blood: An Augustinian Theology of Mar-
riage and Singleness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).
Until recently marriage was dened by the position and role of male and female. Theo-
logians today hold diferent opinions regarding the role of male and female in marriage.
Two opposite positions are the so-called complementarian and egalitarian view. The rst
group sees male and female as equal in being, but diferent in role and function: the male
is the head, the female the help (see Wayne Grudem and John Piper, Rediscovering Biblical
and the church. A theology of marriage damages ecclesiology because dichot-
omies such as gender, state-family relationships, and the nature of the ‘family’
generate signicant theological problems: it separates people who are united
in Christ. Therefore, Bennett rather speaks of a ‘theology of the household.’
Bennett concludes that gender issues are important, and singleness and
marriage cannot be considered separately. This notion is a welcome addition
to Grenz and Schaefer’s understanding of marriage. According to Bennett,
marriage between Christ and the Church is the rst consideration in under-
standing and living in diferent periods of one’s life. As we already nd in the
Old and New Testament, the community () and the relationship between
the believer and Christ () were most important. All other forms of relation-
ships are instruments to strengthen the relationship between God and men.
Christian communities expect Christ’s imminent coming and, therefore, Paul
even recommends staying single ( Cor. ). This makes baptism, rather than
familial ties, the primary standard for relationships. If one follows this premise,
water is thicker than blood. Communion with Christ and with each other is
most essential. According to Bennett, a relationship is not about meeting each
other’s individual desires, but helping the partner in Christian discipleship. For
Augustine, marriage is a model of the restored relationship of all humanity.
Through Christ all states of life are equal and related to the Church commu-
nity. “Via the church, we are returned to the original, ambiguous state we
had at creation, somehow both married and virgin, because the church itself is
both married and virgin.” The church recongures everyone, married or sin-
gle, through the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist. Bennett combines
Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism (Wheaton: Crossway,
). Egalitarians see no role description; there are no gender-based limitations in so-
ciety, church or family (see Ronald W. Pierce and Rebecca Merrill Groothuis, Discovering
Biblical Equality: Complementary without Hierarchy (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press,
).
Bennett, Water, .
Bennett, Water, .
Grenz, Sexual Ethics, f, sees the importance of the public act for the Christian un-
derstanding in a way analogous to baptism, although he does not explain this at length:
“Baptism too, is a public armation of an inward faith and commitment, faith and com-
mitment to Jesus as lord. As such it is solidication of that commitment and can become
a day to remember for the baptized believer.” He also sees another analogy with baptism:
the inward commitment remains incomplete and tentative without its corresponding
outward expression. Therefore the community is needed.
Bennett, Water, .
Bennett, Water, .
ecclesiology with eschatology wherein human beings are rst understood as
being members of the Body of Christ and as having a unied history which
participates in God’s grace. Only then are marriage and various states of sin-
gleness rightly understood in relation to the church and each other. Both have
eschatological signicance. Bennett’s outstanding theological approach to
marriage is of great help in this day and age where churches and theologians
are too narrow in their approach (like Grenz and Schaefer), and the romantic
perversion is maintained.
Bennett links her understanding of marriage to liturgical practises. After a
short overview of wedding ceremony traditions in history, her understanding
of wedding liturgies will be elaborated on.
A Retrieval of Wedding Ceremonies from Church History
In the Bible the wedding feast itself was a huge celebration and lasted a few
days. It difers from modern day celebrations, as in the past the whole com-
munity was part of the ceremony. The formation of the marital bond was a
relatively straightforward matter. Marriage comprised a family contract and a
consummation in intercourse, which sealed the marital contract between the
two families.
In the Early Church, the lack of any formal liturgy reects the importance of
celibacy. Marriages were publicly blessed during Sunday worship. Tertullian
favored wedding ceremonies during Eucharist. In the Eastern church, this
practice was common in the th century. The earliest surviving Christian mar-
riage liturgies in the Western church are from the th century, but they were not
integral to religious culture. It was only from the th century that Christians
were obliged to celebrate weddings in a church and it became a sacrament. For
Catholic and Orthodox Christians, the church was, and still is, considered to be
the only institution that can conrm a marriage.
Bennett, Water, .
William H. Willimon, Worship as Pastoral Care (Nashville: Abingdon Press, ), .
Ad Blijlevens and Ernest Henau, Huwelijkssluiting (Wedding ceremony), Studies
(Averbode: Altiora Averbode, ), . The Eucharist was a type of pastoral care: as
Christian it was not recommended to marry a non-Christian.
Leendert Brink, De taak van de kerk bij de huwelijkssluiting (The task of the church in the
wedding ceremony) (Nieuwkoop: Heuf, ), .
John Witte Jr, From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western
Tradition (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, ).
Gradually, the marriage rite moved from the civil court to the church’s front
entrance, and then into the church itself, where it became a distinct worship
service during the late Middle Ages. During the Reformation, the concept
of marriage changed radically. In the book Sex, Marriage and Family in John
Calvin’s Geneva, John Witte and Robert Kingdon argue that Calvin wrote little
wedding theology, but rather incorporated the theory into church policy and
liturgy. For Calvin, marriage was, fundamentally, a church community mat-
ter and his liturgy conrms this. For three Sundays before the wedding, the
church proclaimed the banns, serving as a general invitation for everyone to
attend the wedding service, which was to take place during the worship service,
or on a weekday when a public Bible lecture was scheduled. The service took
place in a church, not at home, as had been customary in some Catholic and
other Protestant communities. Marriage was a public congregational event:
“Even the couple’s parents or relatives had no special place in the wedding lit-
urgy.” Compared to other Protestant and Catholic liturgies of that day, Calvin’s
wedding liturgy was long on instruction and short on ceremony. There was evi-
dently no Eucharist, no kneeling at the altar, no ritualistic clasping of hands, no
lifting of the veil, no kissing, no exchange of rings, no music or singing.
For Luther, however, marriage is a ‘weltliches Geschäft’. There can, therefore,
be no profanation of marriage. Luther sees marriage as ‘heiliger Stand’. It is
indeed a portrait of mutual love and surrender between Christ and his bride.
Both Luther and Calvin placed matrimony in a Christological and ecclesiolog-
ical context. Since the Reformation a diversity of liturgical practices have de-
veloped, but in general, Calvin still heavily inuences Protestant convictions
about marriage. However, Calvin was unfamiliar with the modern practices.
Therefore, the next section discusses the current challenges surrounding wed-
ding ceremonies.
Wedding Liturgies Today
Not only the service location, but also the tension between the Christian tra-
dition and contemporary life inuences the liturgy. The wishes of the couple
and the liturgy the church ofers nowadays is not an easy combination. Dutch
Witte and Kingdon, Sex, Marriage, and Family.
Bryan D. Spinks, “The Liturgical Origins and Theology of Calvin’s Marriage Rite,” Ecclesia
Orans (), –, , –.
Witte and Kingdom, Sex, Marriage, and Family, .
In the Reformation they were wary of linking a wedding ceremony with the Eucharist, see
Brink, De taak van de kerk, . They wanted all the attention for the celebration of the
Eucharist. The synod of Dordt prefers the marriage ceremony on Sundays.
theologian Paul Post nds the postmodern human has an uneasiness regard-
ing rituals within wedding ceremonies. According to him, there is more at
stake and denitely more happening than only a lack of rituals and liturgical
routine. It is about something more fundamental because mankind has be-
come ‘a tourist in a world of rites and symbols.’ Participation in the ritual act is
minimal and it is more and more about a sort of show. Wedding ceremonies
nowadays are rather a conrmation of a relationship than the beginning of
a life together. This conrms the private core of marriage, because the cou-
ple has already made important decisions regarding their union. The danger
of a private wedding celebration is that one does not look further than one’s
ownlife and distances oneself from liturgical participation. In line with Cal-
vin’s thought, however, there is nothing private about wedding ceremonies.
Because worship is about God the ceremony belongs to the whole church. But
by using the same norms and guidelines we applied to all worship services it
becomes a challenge. The starting point should rather be the relearning of the
meaning of liturgy in present times and context. That is exactly what Bennett
proposes.
In line with Calvin, Bennett considers the relationship between bride and
groom not to be private, only vaguely connected to the public sphere. Based on
Augustine’s thought, she sees the newly-weds as having received new identities
Paul Past, “Trouwen: de mooiste dag van je leven” (Marriage: the most beautiful day in
your life), in Paul Post and Marcel Barnard, Ritueel bestek: Antropologische kernwoorden
van de liturgie (Rituals: Anthropological keywords from the liturgy) (Zoetermeer: Boeken-
centrum, ), –, .
According to Post, in our times the civil wedding ceremony gets more a semi-religious cel-
ebration. It becomes increasingly a liturgical and sacramental celebration, and a personal
celebration (“Trouwen,” f).
In all Reformed churches in the Netherlands, a wedding ceremony is an ocial service. In
the Dutch Reformed Churches in South Africa () it is not a common service under
leadership of the oces, Kerkorde , .. (“Die Sinode besluit dat die huweliksdiens
nie ‘n gewone samekoms van die gemeente (erediens) onder leiding van die ampte is nie.
Die persone by ‘n huweliksluiting kom nie as gemeente van God met die oog op ‘n open-
bare erediens saam nie”). The Reformed Churches in South Africa () see a wedding
service as the responsibility of the church council, Church Order Dutch Reformed Church
South Africa, Article .
Mitchell Jones, “Liturgical Practice and Ethical Perspective: Revisiting the Marriage Litur-
gy,” Journal of Lutheran Ethics / (), http://www.elca.org/jle/.
Calvin did not use many rituals, but I think that forgoing certain rituals is not the answer
in our visual culture, especially when the service is held on a weekday.
and new ways of acting and being, by God’s grace, as a result of the wedding
celebration. According to Bennett, worship is where Christian ethics begins.
The corollary of thinking about liturgy as theology is that theological eth-
ics (and conversations about sexual ethics in marriage and singleness)
likewise cannot be separated from prima theologia. Liturgy as theology
and liturgy as ethics provide enough of a beginning for seeing general
households in the context of liturgy as well. That is to say, one way an
argument could proceed for considering households in the context of lit-
urgy and sacrament is to see households as places where Christians prac-
tice their way of life, and that this relationship links households by mere
association to Christian theology.
Bennett states that some of the signicance of baptism is missed, for instance,
if we do not take into account what it means when we bathe at home. Although
she does not discuss the wedding ceremony itself, her thoughts are inspiring
for everyday life as a liturgical witness, and imagine individual households as
coming together as one household in the regular Sunday service.
Stanley Hauerwas gives more details about the wedding ceremony and its
public meaning. In his sermon for the wedding of Jana and Joel, Hauerwas
claims marriage threatens to destroy the love that constitutes the church. It
can become selsh if hospitality is not central. According to him, Christian
marriage depends on the life of others. This means that marriage is not pri-
vate, but useful for society in diferent ways. Speaking about love Hauerwas
also says:
When couples come to ministers to talk about their marriage ceremo-
nies, ministers think it’s interesting to ask whether they love one another.
What a stupid question! How would they know? A Christian marriage
isn’t about whether you’re in love. Christian marriage is giving you the
practice of delity over a lifetime in which you can look back upon the
marriage and call it love. It is a hard discipline over many years.
Hauerwas suggests that we need to counteract the “romantic perversion” of
marriage by re-placing marriage inside the Christian community, a community
Bennett, Water, .
Bennett, Water, .
Stanley Hauerwas, Disrupting Time: Sermons, Prayers, and Sundries (Eugene: Cascade
Books, ), .
with a clear purpose and mission. I agree with Hauerwas on the romantic
perversion of marriage, but that makes the message of love rather urgent, if
understood correctly. In a civil court, it is not about love, but about the law.
Therefore, love is the message celebrated in church. However, this love is more
than a feeling and not limited to marriage, as Catholic scholar David Matzko
McCarthy highlights.
In The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics McCarthy makes a valuable
contribution. According to him, the focus on communion between husband
and wife as the core of marriage in contemporary theology and church life, is
a well-meaning mistake.
The wedding day does not mark the beginning of a new family; indeed,
it is a consequence and outgrowth of a kinship and community of faith.
Christian marriage is not a whole communion of two, but a particular
kind of grace-lled friendship within the fellowship of the Church.
He spells out this claim in relation to practices of discipleship, baptism and
Eucharist. According to McCarthy, on a typical wedding day, bride and groom
will be embraced and congratulated on the auspicious beginning of their new
family, and are then left alone on hard and unforgiving terrain, where only the
strong and lucky will survive. This should worry us. Not only because the prom-
ises of marriage are likely to die of exposure, but also because the tasks and
ends set for a married couple are misguided challenges for the church:
If only the lucky and strong survive, enduring marriages will surely be
with us, but not necessarily because we share life in Christ … Howev-
er, good company among husbands and wives, not passion or a couple’s
self-reliance, is at the centre of Christian practices of marriage. When we,
who gather in God’s name, are able to sustain mediocre and fragile mar-
riages through misfortune, we will know that we are living as the people
that God has gathered as the Body of Christ. This is the calling of mar-
riage in the Church: when two are bound together, they are more deeply
bound in the household of God.
Hauerwas, Disrupting, .
David Matzko McCarthy, “Becoming One Flesh: Marriage, Remarriage and Sex,” in Stanley
Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, Second
Edition (Malden/Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, ), –, f.
McCarthy, “Becoming,” .
McCarthy, “Becoming,” f.
Marriage, according to McCarthy, only makes sense when the church under-
stands itself as a social body. He argues that the practices of common life in
the church and the virtues of discipleship are the foundation and purpose of
marriage, which then form a fertile place for the cultivation of interpersonal
intimacy.
Community-Based Preparation, Celebration and Remembrance
Searching for the meaning of wedding liturgies today, we have reviewed history
to discuss the diferent denitions of marriage. A wide variety of meanings are
no longer appropriate, nevertheless it is still dicult to dene marriage in the
st century. It has become clear that a Christian approach to marriage must
have ecclesiological and eschatological foundations, especially when we dis-
cuss the role of liturgy in contemporary wedding celebrations. Only when we
see marriage in the broader context of the ecclesial community and as blessed
by a divine promise will it be neither privatized nor over-romanticized. The im-
portance of liturgy must not be underestimated. Churches have an enormous
opportunity to elaborate in the liturgy on the importance of the community.
But not only for the wedding service itself, it starts with the preparation and
must be continued after the wedding, as Shirley C. Guthrie describes clearly:
A wedding is far more than the civil or religious legalizing of sexual in-
tercourse many consider it to be. But it is also far less than the magical
moment when a previously unmarried couple suddenly becomes a mar-
ried couple, as others consider it to be. It is the public announcement
and conrmation of a life partnership that should have begun before the
wedding ceremony and will be fullled only over a long period of time
after the wedding.
The challenge for the church is to speak and listen to all members of the body
of Christ without addressing just one group. These members would include
homosexuals, singles, divorced and married people. If churches do focus on
one group, speaking about all forms of relationships must be addressed. In
conclusion I will give some practical recommendations for the preparations,
wedding service itself and married life.
Shirley C. Guthrie jr, “Towards a Theology of Christian Marriage,” in Donald. K. McKim
(ed.), Major Themes in the Reformed Tradition (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, ),
–.
Preparation
Most churches ofer a marriage preparation course before the wedding day, al-
though in most Reformed churches this is not compulsory. Especially in coun-
tries where the church is also a legal adviser, for couples who are uninvolved in
church life and who still want to be married in church, a marriage preparation
course may provide an opportunity to rethink their commitment to a congre-
gation. However, we saw that in the very popular Alpha Course the couple’s
role in the church community is left out. Therefore, I would recommend add-
ing this important part. An opportunity is missed when the community’s role,
the history of Christian marriage and even the decision on the venue for the
wedding ritual itself, is not discussed.
Wedding Service
No matter what the legal or ceremonial role of the church is, one might imag-
ine including a marriage blessing in the Sunday service because the congre-
gation is present. If this is not possible, a special prayer or blessing could be
included in the Sunday service just before or just after the wedding ceremony.
The possibility for Reformed churches to combine a marriage blessing with the
celebration of the Lord’s Supper would also help to focus on the communal
element of weddings, but this requires, in most Reformed churches, a more
frequent celebration of the Lord’s Supper. By celebrating the Lord’s Supper the
love of Christ for his congregation, the basis for all relations in the Christian
community, is brought to the fore. Other relationships, like friendship, are
therefore also touched upon. By referring to baptism, in the use of water in any
manner, it also becomes more communal.
If the wedding is held somewhere other than the local church, opportuni-
ties for church members to attend the wedding ceremony can be explored.
As I understand McCarthy, in the Roman Catholic Church they pay more attention to
discipleship. He says about Marriage preparation courses that they do good work as they
attempt to initiate the process of sustaining a household and a couple’s friendship. This
is an appropriate task for the Church, but it also shows the profound failure of modern
courtship, “love-as-passion,” and Walzer’s attempt to create a sphere of love through our
dominant social and economic languages of interests and utilitarian exchange, McCarthy,
“Becoming,” .
Saturday is the preferred day for weddings in South Africa and in the Netherlands couples
on average choose a weekday. It is preferred that the government be responsible for the le-
gal part, otherwise state and church are involved too much, but this is no reason for seeing
the wedding service as less important. Interestingly enough, the holy matrimony service
in the Netherlands is a proper service, around one hour; in South Africa the ceremony
conducted by a Dutch Reformed minister takes on average twenty to thirty minutes.
Conducting a wedding liturgy in the woods, on a beach or somewhere else
might not be ideal and creates some challenges for the liturgy but with some
efort it is possible to make it more community-based. Alternatives for music,
conducting the ofering and other liturgical aspects can be approached in a
creative way by, for example, sending a money transfer sms (for the ofering)
to the nominated organization for the ofering. In comparison with wedding
services in the time of the Reformation it is essential to pay more attention to
guests’ participation in the liturgy to make the service more community-based,
for example, by reading a poem or an appropriate Bible text. However, the use
of alternative spaces for the ceremony helps people to understand that God
is not only present in church and it therefore creates new possibilities for the
liturgy including the liturgical process. This advantage must be explored in
greater depth.
A Day to Remember
Wedding days are seen as a day never to be forgotten. But how can this be
done in a positive manner? The tradition of renewing wedding vows is one
way of doing that. This is common in Italy and popular in the United States. In
other countries in the world this is slowly becoming a custom. Most Reformed
churches do not ofer this service and often this is a private ceremony in the
context of travel and tourism. The possibility for churches to ofer this cere-
mony can further be explored, especially when they form part of the church
services and are not celebrated as a private ceremony. Besides the renewal
of vows, a commitment to the community could be integrated. Also, opportu-
nities for celebrating other forms of relationships should be incorporated. In
a rearmation session, relations of friendship, family, and especially being a
community as the bride of Christ, are celebrated.
Part of celebrating is remembering, therefore remembering can become a
celebration. In liturgy, room for celebrating diferent forms of relationships can
easily be made, especially with the Lord’s Supper and baptism. While celebrat-
ing our relationship with the Triune God, attention should be paid to all kinds
of relationships, the diversity, but also the unity of the body of Christ. In this
manner, liturgy will help to remember: wedding days, friendships, and most
important the unity of the church community as God’s family. Liturgy helps
us to remember that marriage is a tool to experience the unity and diversity of
Barry Stephenson, Performing the Reformation: Public Ritual in the City of Luther (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, ), . Stephenson refers to the renewal of vows service that
took place on Saturday evening during Luther’s wedding.
For example on World Marriage Day, the second Sunday in February.
the body of Christ and it points us to the eschaton where all relationships are
validated. The more wedding liturgies embrace this communal, eschatological
part, the more it will be a day that is always remembered, not only by the cou-
ple, but also by the whole community.
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© Koninklijke Brill NV, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004356528_015
The Priestly Liturgy of Creation in
the Book of Leviticus
An Indonesian Contextual-Theological Consideration
Emanuel Gerrit Singgih
Introduction
Let me start by giving two local examples, to show the importance of ritual
in the liturgy of the Indonesian churches. The rst is from the liturgy of the
church where I belong, the Protestant Church in Western Indonesia, which
has a congregation in Yogyakarta. In this church, there is little use of symbolic
gestures or acts or rituals. At the beginning of the service, after the votum and
the introitus, the minister raises his/her right hand, and says, “Grace to you
and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” The congregation
responds with: “And also to you.” However, many in the congregation have no-
ticed that recently quite a number of ministers do not raise their hands, and
when I inquired later on, I got the explanation that ‘according to the Synod,’
there is no need to raise your right hand, as it is not a blessing but just a greet-
ing. It is only a slight change in the liturgy, but since it is the disappearance of
a gesture, the congregation feels that something is lost. For them, the gesture,
the raising of the right hand, is a blessing, not a greeting. So the Synod and
the congregation interpret the gesture diferently. At the end of the service, of
course, there is a blessing, often in the form of the blessing of the High Priest,
taken from Numbers :-. Here the minister raises both hands, and the con-
gregation responds with several variations of the song, “Amen, Amen, Amen.”
It seems that for the Synod, one blessing at the end of the service is enough.
But I also notice that after the service, almost all the congregation makes
the efort to go out of the church building through the front entrance, where
the minister and one of the elders are standing to shake hands with them. All
I am grateful to my colleagues Jozef M.N. Hehanussa, Daniel K. Listijabudi, Handi Hadiwitan-
to, Wahyu Satrio Wibowo and my friends Ekaputra Tupamahu, Daniel Sihombing and August
Corneles T. Karundeng for reading an earlier draft.
Gereja Protestan di Indonesia bagian Barat ().
Cor. :.
shake hands with the minister, and when there are children among them, the
minister puts his right hand on the head of the child. If for some reason the
minister is unable to shake hands with the congregation—for instance, be-
cause of a sudden attack of dizziness—the news is accepted with disbelief and
negative shows of body language. Later on when I made inquiries concerning
these reactions, it turns out that for the congregation this shaking of hands is
a very important liturgical event. It is the equivalent of being blessed by the
representative of God. The service is not complete without the handshake.
The handshake, which formerly had no liturgical meaning, now has become
the logical continuation of the Priestly blessing in the people’s understanding
of the liturgy. A contemporary handshake is the equivalent of the traditional
laying of hands in the act of blessing. The Synod has the right to scrap one
blessing from the liturgy and the people accept that, but then they compen-
sate this lacuna by creating their own version of blessing, outside the ocial
formulation of the liturgy.
The second example is from the liturgy of the Batak churches from North
Sumatra. It is common for ministers from these churches to give communion
to those who are dying. It is a diferent service from the usual communion for
the sick. I became aware of this ritual when an undergraduate student at our
theological faculty submitted a thesis proposal on this topic. She belongs to the
same church as I, but was wondering why is it that our church does not have
the same ritual as the Batak churches, and then it became clear to me that she
is a Batak, and that she had seen some of her relatives in the Batak churches
who received this equivalent of the Catholic last rites. Whatever their under-
standing of the communion sacrament is, for Batak Christians this commu-
nion for the dying is an important ritual, even if it is not so stated by the ocial
teaching of the church. Here they are following the custom, the adat of giving
the last farewell meal—in the form of feeding with a spoon, to a dying, elderly
family member. Just as in society there is this last ‘physical’ meal, so in church
there is this last ‘spiritual’ meal.
From these two examples—and more later on—I hope it is clear that rit-
ual is important and even decisive for Christians in Indonesia, and I will use
this view as a perspective in looking at the present discussion on liturgy and
ethics and on the reference to rituals in the book of Leviticus. I rely on Frank
Gorman, who studied the rituals in Leviticus and proposed that the Priestly
liturgy of creation reects a worldview. My rst aim is to show that there is
a biblical basis for integrating liturgy and ethics. Actually this insight is not
Frank H. Gorman Jr, The Ideology of Ritual, (Sheeld Academic Press, ).
new. I remember from my undergraduate days that the Hebrew term abhodah
conveys both agrarian work and religious service or rite. But if the book of
Leviticus, which points to the ‘world’ of ritual, is closely related to ethics, then
it may help to see both in an integral way. With the help of Samuel Balentine,
I hope to be able to look for the reasons why for a long time there has been no
appreciation for the book of Leviticus in Protestant circles. My second aim
is to show the problems related to the discourse of rituals and their applica-
tion to the present context of Indonesia, and reect whether and how this re-
appraisal of rituals can renew our concepts of worship and liturgy in the
Christian communities of Indonesia.
Ritual and Liturgy
Usually ritual is regarded as belonging to the discourse of anthropology or
social theories, while liturgy belongs to the discourse of theology. What is rit-
ual to the anthropologists is liturgy to the theologians. In the Catholic church
there is reference to ‘rites,’ for instance, ‘the last rites,’ and the word is used for
ceremonies outside the liturgy. But there is also another kind of ‘rites’ which
is used within the liturgy. If ‘rites’ can be regarded as ‘rituals,’ then I suppose
ritual can also be seen as part of the liturgy. From the two local examples
above, it seems that ritual is not identical with liturgy. But is it part of liturgy
or is it broader than liturgy? I have never heard this term used in Protestant
churches. If there is no mention of the word ‘ritual’ in Protestant discourses,
then it can be assumed that ritual has a negative meaning, compared with
liturgy, which has a positive meaning. I will take the position that ritual has
also a positive, even liberating meaning. The term ‘liberating’ in this context
originates from Tom Driver, who wrote a book with the title Liberating Rites.
The word ‘liberating’ carries a double meaning. Rituals can perform in the
liberation of humankind from enslavement of powers that diminish freedom
and bring death instead of life. But to be able to do so, rituals themselves
need to be liberated from misunderstanding and from an alleged lack of cre-
ativity in their presumed function as guardians of conformity. In chapter six
of his book, Driver shows that ritual is performance, and in church worship,
Georg Fohrer, Hebrew & Aramaic Dictionary of the Old Testament (London: Press, ),
.
Samuel E. Balentine, Leviticus, Interpretation series (Louisville: John Knox Press, ).
Tom F. Driver, Liberating Rites: Understanding the Transformative Power of Ritual (Boulder-
Oxford: Westview Press, ), –.
performance should be both confessional and ethical. It is easy to imagine
that what he refers to here is the close relationship between liturgy and ethics.
An ethical performance or act is one that is willing to be seen. It is a public
performance or act, but precisely because it is a performance, it is a ritual, a
public ritual. Driver takes examples from the experience of Christians in the
, acts of civil disobedience such as the people’s march to Selma, Alabama,
and people’s demonstrations at the underground nuclear testing site in Neva-
da. According to Driver, he formerly held a view in which ritual was identied
with Christian liturgy. However, by studying anthropology, he realized that
ritual is broader than liturgy, as it is related to society and social processes. If
so, is ritual positive because it is broader than liturgy? Not necessarily so. Both
ritual and liturgy need liberation from conformity, from becoming stilted fos-
silized. Here Driver holds an opposite view from Victor Turner, the famous
anthropologist and one of the foremost experts on rituals, who criticized the
liturgical reforms of Vatican . For Driver, both ritual and liturgy have their
positive and negative sides.
So what is ritual? Catherine Bell decides not to dene what ritual is, and
describes how regular actions become ritualized. But in that case anything
can be ritualized. If regular actions could be detected in church worship, then
every church is liturgical, even those which never identify themselves as ‘li-
turgical churches.’ However, in her next book she presents some criteria. Rit-
ualized actions have certain features in common: formalism, traditionalism,
disciplined invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism and performance.
By applying these criteria, Wesley Bergen has demonstrated that activities in a
meat-packing plant t the categories of ritualized actions! If we apply Bell’s
insight to the two local examples above, then the rst one, the handshake after
church service ts her rst description. It is not part of the liturgy, but since it is
a regular action which is ritualized, it becomes an extension of the liturgy, and
also if we talk about performance—both according to Driver and Bell—then
the handshake after church service can also be seen as a public ritual. In the
second example, the communion for the dying can be seen as a transfer of a
Driver, Liberating Rites, .
Driver, Liberating Rites, –.
Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, ),
–.
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
), –.
Wesley J. Bergen, Reading Ritual: Leviticus in Postmodern Culture, (London-
New York: T&T Clark International, ), –.
public ritual from the societal realm to the confessional realm. Gorman has
a diferent denition: “‘Ritual’ refers to a complex performance of symbolic
acts, characterized by its formality, order and sequence, which tends to take
place in specic situations, and has as one of its central goals the regulation of
social order.” Some of the criteria mentioned by Bell are also evident in this
denition.
We can conclude this part by stating that liturgy is closely related to rituals.
Therefore, when we discuss the relationship between liturgy and ethics, we
have to include within this discussion the topic of rituals. If rituals are con-
cerned with performance, then there is no dichotomy between thought and
action. This also holds for discussions on liturgy, which is closely related to rit-
uals. Liturgy and ethics are one, and perhaps it is best to talk about the integral
unity between liturgy and ethics.
Ritual and Ethics in the Book of Leviticus
I am aware of the abundant contemporary literature concerning Leviticus, and
of course the best book to consult on almost every aspect of Leviticus is the
massive commentary in three volumes by Jacob Milgrom. But as I said above,
I will investigate how ritual and ethics could be held in a unied and integral
way, and to do that I rely on Gorman and Balentine.
Frank Gorman
In his book The Ideology of Ritual, Gorman started his study of the ritual texts
of Leviticus by observing that many in the mainly Protestant intellectual tra-
dition focused on the narrative rather than the rituals, and according to him
this is because this tradition has an aversion to rituals. He focuses on the text of
Exodus :-Leviticus :. The text, as it is known, belongs to the Priestly
(P) tradition. He does not discuss the second part of the book, because there is
some doubt whether the so-called “Holiness Code” also belongs to the Priest-
ly tradition. But there is agreement that the end-product of Leviticus as a book,
in relation to the nal product of the Pentateuch, comes from the Priestly
Gorman, The Ideology of Ritual, .
Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus -, Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, ); Jacob Mil-
grom, Leviticus -, Anchor Bible a (New York: Doubleday, ); Jacob Milgrom, Le-
viticus -, Anchor Bible b (New York: Doubleday, ).
Gorman, The Ideology of Ritual, –.
Leviticus –.
editors. According to Gorman, the Priestly redaction of the Sinai material,
namely the text of Exodus :-Leviticus :, reects a theological con-
cern for sacred space. In discussing the elements of ritual beforehand, Gor-
man describes ritual space, ritual time, ritual objects, ritual roles, ritual actions
and ritual sound and language. But actually he dwells on just four elements:
ritual space, ritual time, ritual roles and ritual objects (the altar). We shall fo-
cus on the text of Leviticus, which according to Gorman consists of ve parts:
“Instructions for sacricial activity in sacred space (Lev.-),” “Ordination of
priesthood in sacred space (Lev. -),” “Narrative: Improper practices in sacred
space (Lev. ),” “Causes of delement and purication rituals concerned with
sacred space (Lev.-),” and “Annual day of purication and restoration of
sacred space (Lev.).”
According to Gorman, a central feature of the Priestly worldview is the be-
lief that the world order is a created order. God brought into being an ordered
world and at the heart of this created order is a ritual order. Priestly creation
theology, as can be seen in Genesis :-:a, gives clear expression to this con-
cern for order. One way in which the concern for order is expressed is through
the use of the word badal, which means ‘separating,’ ‘dividing.’ Creation is de-
picted, in part, as an act of dividing and separating. God separated the light
from the darkness, God separated the waters under the rmament from the
waters above the rmament, the waters under the rmament were gathered
together to become separated from the dry land, the lights were placed in the
rmament to separate the day from the night and the light from the dark-
ness.
Inherent in this conceptualization of creation is the idea that the order of
creation was brought about through the separation and classication of
Rolf Rendtorf, “Is it possible to read Leviticus as a separate book?” in John F.A. Sawyer
(ed.), Reading Leviticus: A Conversation with Mary Douglas, (Sheeld: Shef-
eld Academic Press, ), –; Graeme Auld, “Leviticus at the heart of the Penta-
teuch?” in Sawyer, Reading Leviticus, –.
Gorman, The Ideology of Ritual, .
Gorman, The Ideology of Ritual, –.
Gorman, The Ideology of Ritual, –.
Gen.:.
Gen. :, here the rmament is created to function as agent of separation.
Gen.:.
Gen :.
Gen. :.
the basic elements of creation. Order is brought about through divisions,
separations, and distinctions between one element and another. It is only
as these lines of demarcation, or boundaries, are established that order
is realized.
These boundaries must be maintained to ensure that the created order does
not collapse into confusion and chaos.
The idea of creation as involving separation or as separation is of course
not new. Long ago, Paul Beauchamp, the French Old Testament scholar, cham-
pioned this idea. In the Netherlands, as early as in the s, the systematic
theologian O. Noordmans referred to Schepping als scheiden (Creation as Sepa-
ration). Lately, Ellen van Wolde in her inaugural lecture at Nijmegen in
has insisted that the word bara in Genesis does not mean ‘create’ but ‘sepa-
rate.’ To trace the term badal in Genesis from its occurrences in Leviticus is
also not new, but to see the term in both Genesis and Leviticus, as having to do
with the Priestly worldview which is enacted in rituals, is new as far as I know,
and we owe it to Gorman. He is able to achieve this by utilizing the insights of
anthropology and social sciences, and to some extent Gorman is dependent
on the ndings of anthropology on traditional societies. In his description of
ritual he relies on Victor Turner, Cliford Geertz and Mary Douglas. Especially
the last author is interested in the book of Leviticus and has written a book
on it, Leviticus as Literature. The terms ‘demarcations’ and ‘boundaries’ come
from her famous book, Purity and Danger. Her insights on Leviticus are ac-
knowledged by many biblical scholars, and a colloquium to honor her was
held in at Lancaster University, England, even before the publication of
her book on Leviticus in . However, applying models from the social sci-
ences does not mean that sociology or anthropology in the sense of statistical
analysis or eldwork is being conducted. Models from the social sciences are
Gorman, The Ideology of Ritual, .
Paul Beauchamp, Création et séparation: Étude exégétique du chapitre premier de la Genèse
(Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, ).
Oepke Noordmans, “Herschepping” (Re-creation), in Verzamelde Werken (Collected
Works), Vol. (Kok: Kampen, ).
Ellen van Wolde, “Terug naar het begin” (Back to the beginning), Inaugural Speech (Nij-
megen: Radboud University, ).
Mary Douglas, Leviticus as Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London
and New York: Routledge, ).
Sawyer, Reading Leviticus.
theoretical models, and they provide a framework for interpretation. Gorman
is aware that the ‘world’ of ritual is a world of meaning and signicance within
which the ritual is conceptualized, constructed and enacted. It is very similar
to the idea of the ‘narrative world’ from literary criticism. In other words, rit-
uals are means for a world construction.
The Priestly rituals must be understood in the context of the world of mean-
ing operative in and through the rituals. The interpreter must seek to discover
the worldview that stands behind the rituals, that gives rise to the rituals and
that is enacted and made real in the rituals. The ‘world’ of ritual is a world
of meaning, a world of symbols. A worldview is one means by which a soci-
ety attempts to structure the world and human existence within that world.
It attempts to bring order into existence. The term “worldview” is taken from
Turner, and Turner in turn is indebted to Dilthey’s Weltanschauungslehre.
It consists of three interrelated elements. First, there is a body of knowledge
which serves to identify and categorize the world ‘out there’ or the ‘real’ world.
This cognitive and linguistic side of world view is primarily an attempt to iden-
tify the elements of the cosmos and organize these elements into a systematic
view of the structure of the world. Second, there is a set of meanings relat-
ed to the structure of the world that serves to locate and give meaning to hu-
man existence in the cosmos. This set of meanings attempts to establish what
it means to be human within a particular cosmic structure. Third, there is a
system of conduct or a system of praxis which gives direction to proper and
appropriate actions within a particular world of meaning. Ritual action, as a
major element of the system of praxis, serves as an important means by which
an individual or community participates in the world order. This participation
helps to maintain that order. The Priestly worldview, which is a religious world-
view, is not only concerned with the structure of the world, but also with the
appropriate way to live in that world.
The worldview of the Priestly writers has as its framework three distinct or-
ders of creation—the cosmological, the societal and the cultic. These various
orders are not independent of one another but are intricately connected. In
the narrative of Leviticus, the wilderness tabernacle in the center of the wil-
derness camp, that is the cultic order, is a reection of the social order which
is in turn a reection of the cosmological order. The cultic order and the social
Gorman, The Ideology of Ritual, .
Gorman, The Ideology of Ritual, .
Gorman, The Ideology of Ritual, .
Gorman, The Ideology of Ritual, –.
Gorman, The Ideology of Ritual, –.
order are part of the cosmological order. The conceptual element that holds
these three orders together is that of order through separation. Just as the
cosmological order is achieved by acts of separation, so the societal and cultic
orders are also achieved through categorical distinctions. Aaron the priest is in-
structed to “ divide (lehabddil) between the holy (haqqodesh) and the common
(hakhol) and between the unclean (hattame) and the clean (hattahor).” The
separation of conceptual categories focuses on three areas: space, time and
status. The separation of the holy of holies from all other areas is concerned
with space; the separation of the Sabbath from all other days is concerned with
time; and the separation of the priests from all other persons is concerned with
status. Each of these is said to be ‘set apart’ and categorically distinct by the
Priestly tradition. The central conceptual element of the Priestly worldview
is the idea that order is established through careful observation of categorical
divisions, through the recognition and maintenance of boundaries.
Samuel Balentine
Balentine has written a commentary on Leviticus in the Interpretation series,
and acknowledges the inuence of Gorman and Milgrom. He also relies on
the insights of social sciences, as can be seen from his references to Geertz.
His commentary has an introduction on “Reading and Appropriating Ritual
Texts” where he starts with Milgrom’s remarks that the theology of Leviticus
is not expressed in the biblically conventional form of pronouncements, but
is embedded in rituals. Following Gorman, Balentine reiterates that Leviticus
requires a diferent approach than we bring to other biblical texts, where nar-
rative rather than ritual laws typically conveys the message. The interpreter
must broaden the exegetical task beyond traditional historical-critical preoc-
cupations in order to focus on the meaning of the ritual the text conveys. Like
Gorman, Balentine thinks that the usual approach to Leviticus is colored by
(Protestant) anti-ritual tendency.
The Priestly worldview is based on two crucial beliefs. First, the conviction
that God has created the world and purposefully designed the rhythmic orders
that keep it tuned to its capacity to be “very good.” Second, God’s creational or-
der is generative of and sustained by human observance of an imaging ritual
order. This ritual order is manifested in the litany of the primordial week, when
through seven commands God speaks into being a cosmic order that nds its
Lev. :.
Gorman, The Ideology of Ritual, –.
Balentine, Leviticus, .
culmination in the observance of Sabbath day. In the book of Exodus there is a
liturgy of covenant making, which follows a heptadic (groups of seven) pattern:
in Ex. - there are God’s seven commands and in Ex. :- another group
of Israel’s seven acts of compliance. The book of Leviticus sustains this liturgy
of covenant making by repeatedly tying its rituals to the same heptadic pattern:
seven speeches convey God’s instructions for sacrices; seven acts concerning
the ordination to the priesthood; a seven-day period is prescribed for bodily
impurities; seven-plus-one-day purication rituals are prescribed for persons
recovered from skin disease; a sevenfold aspersion ritual cleanses the sanctu-
ary on the Day of Purication; seven-day festivals, seven ‘holy days’, the seventh
months, and the seventh or sabbatical year—the jubilee year—comprise the
liturgical calendar. Balentine refers to the creation of the world as part of a grand,
cosmic liturgical celebration, a liturgy of creation. When the congregation of
Israel gathers for worship, they follow this liturgy of creation through ritual acts.
More than Gorman, Balentine emphasizes that rituals are more than ways
of thinking about the world. They are fundamentally concerned with concrete
ways to conceptualize and enact the world as it is or as it should be. Priestly
rituals seek not only to reinforce existing assumptions about the world’s order
and structure. They also seek to criticize ways of seeing and living in the world
and alter them according to God’s abiding vision. Here Balentine is applying
the theory of Geertz that the sacred rituals of religion provide models both of
and for reality. For example, building a house enacts a plan that has already
been established in the blueprint; the house is a model of the preconceived
plan, which its construction now makes apprehensible. But the blueprint
is also a symbol, and in its own way it provides a model for conceptualizing
and thus bringing into existence a house that does not exist yet. This analogy
can be used in looking at the tabernacle. On the one hand, the tabernacle,
which according to Exodus Moses ‘nished’ just as God ‘nished the work’
of creation, is envisioned as a completion of God’s blueprint of the world.
Gen. :–:a.
Lev. –.
Lev. .
Lev. :; :, .
Lev. .
Lev. :–.
Lev. , .
Balentine, Leviticus, , –.
Balentine, Leviticus, –.
Ex. :; Gen :.
Following Blenkinsopp, Balentine thinks that the Priestly tradition considers
the construction of the sanctuary to be a ritual completion of the work God
began in creation. On the other hand, when the tabernacle is desecrated by the
sins of Israel, the rituals of the Day of Purication in Leviticus body forth
behavior that in a tangible and symbolic way becomes a model for recreating a
vision that is yet to be fully realized but still should be and more important, can
be. Geertz makes a distinction between ‘the real’ and ‘the really real.’ The ritu-
als in Leviticus then convey a message of a wider reality, a transcendent—the
really real—truth that corrects and completes the given—the real—historical
and political realities. The perception of what is ‘real’ comes from a common
sense orientation to the experiences of everyday life. The perception of what
is ‘really real’ comes from a lingering awareness that there are other realities,
beyond those we may be able to see or verify, and which have the capacity to
enlarge and correct what would otherwise be accepted as merely given.
I will end my references to Balentine by describing what he thinks is the
right relationship between rituals and ethics, in his commentary on Leviticus
:-:. The addendum in Leviticus :-: introduces the instructions to
the priests with a new term—torah. The book of Leviticus contains ten toroth.
Five are concerned with sacrice: the burnt ofering, the cereal ofering, the
purication ofering, the reparation ofering, and the well-being ofering.
Five are concerned with impurity: animals, childbirth, skin disease, puri-
cation of skin disease, and genital discharge. Following Milgrom, Balentine
thinks that these ten toroth may be regarded as a ‘decalogue of ritual life.’ The
idea that the priestly concern with sacrice and impurity has the weight of
the torah opens a window for reection. Chapters -, which address sacrice
from the perspective of the laity, do not use the term torah. The instructions
Balentine, Leviticus, .
Balentine, Leviticus, .
Balentine, Leviticus, .
Lev. :/ :.
Lev. :/ :.
Lev. :/ :.
Lev. :.
Lev. :.
Lev. :.
Lev. :.
Lev. :; :–.
Lev. :, .
Lev. :.
Balentine, Leviticus, .
to the priests are understood as an enlargement of the meaning of the torah,
where the obedience to the ‘Decalogue of Ten Commandments’ and to the
‘Decalogue of Ritual Life’ will have an equal and abiding claim. If we look at
the Sinai material, there is general agreement that the Priestly strand pro-
vides the basic information: Israel arrives at the mountain in the wilderness
of Sinai; Moses ascends the mountain and enters the cloud that signals the
presence of ‘the glory of the Lord’; God gives Moses instructions for building
the sanctuary, which becomes the new locus for ‘the glory of the Lord’ and for
establishing the cult. If this sequence of events is isolated from the larger nar-
rative, then it is apparent that the Priestly tradition makes no reference to the
Sinai covenant and there is no reference to the Decalogue or to the statutes
and ordinances that comprise the book of the covenant. This could and has
been interpreted in the sense that the priests are only preoccupied with merely
ritualistic behavior and have no concern for the moral exhortations which are
associated with the covenant. But when the Priestly strand is read as an inte-
gral part of the Sinai narrative, then it is clear that Israel is to become both a
covenant community and a worshipping community, a community dened by
both justice and holiness.
Ritual and Ethics in the Context of Indonesia
We have seen above that Gorman and Balentine regard positively the referen-
ces to ritual in the book of Leviticus. Both start their research on ritual by not-
ing the anti-ritual tendencies in Protestant theological thinking. It is not di-
cult for us in Indonesia to detect these negative tendencies in our missionary
theological heritage. For instance, when the missionaries in Central Java started
their medical missions in the beginning of the th century, the doctors and the
hospitals were put forward as a better alternative than the traditional dukun
(indigenous healers) who, by using rituals, were thought to be just incapable
of healing the sick. So here medicine and rituals are placed in an antithesis.
Ex. –Num. .
Ex. :–.
Ex. :–.
Ex. –, –.
Lev. –. See Balentine, Leviticus, .
Ex. :–.
Ex. :–:.
Balentine, Leviticus, .
Moreover, the modern system of healing brought by the missionaries was re-
garded as ‘progressive,’ while the traditional one was regarded as ‘backward.’ Lat-
er on the more radical-conservative mission groups and the Pentecostals came
to the scene, and branded the traditional healing rituals as ‘pagan’ or ‘anti/un-
Christian.’ So the practices of traditional ritual were considered both ‘backward’
and ‘pagan.’ But curiously enough, these later groups ofered their own kind of
rituals for liberating people who were under the spell of certain amulets or oth-
er magical objects, called jimat or susuk. When an elderly person was dying, the
family and relatives waited for the departure of their beloved one. But the wait-
ing could be abnormally long. If so, then it was surmised that the dying one had
something to which he or she held on, like hanging on to the last rope, which
was one of the susuk. When this happened, ministers who were known to have
special talents were called to perform a special service to let the dying confess
the whereabouts of the susuk. Then the minister prayed so that the susuk could
be taken out of the dying one, and at last he or she could take a last breath and
die in peace. And as is known, the Pentecostals have their own healing ministry
and healing rituals. But they never called them rituals, and instead they use the
terms ibadah or kebaktian, which means ‘service or worship,’ but is actually a
very special worship or a special liturgy, a special ritual.
Although this anti-ritual tendency is still very strong in some circles, I notice
that in general it has receded. In our contemporary scene of Indonesia there
is openness from the side of the government and society toward indigenous
healing practices, and there are certied clinics that use herbal medicines and
practices of acupressure and acupuncture. Even the famous former Bethesda
mission hospital in my hometown, Yogyakarta, has its own branch of tradition-
al healing therapies. When I was ill and hospitalized in this hospital, a senior
colleague of mine, who must have experienced the tension between doctors
and dukun in the past, came to visit me in my sickroom and prayed to Jesus:
“Lord Jesus, you are both our doctor and our dukun.” In him the two images of
Jesus have been reconciled. Both the modern system and the traditional one
now exist side by side, and what is important is societal supervision and con-
trol over both practices, in order to prevent malpractices from both the doctors
and the dukun. One inuence of this contemporary reconciliation can be seen
in pressures from the side of the congregation to change the liturgy which fo-
cuses mainly on the sermon—the verbal aspect. On the other hand, it is also
interesting to ask whether in practice the sermon itself has been transformed
into ritual. Some are asking why it is that there is no special liturgy for the sick,
In Javanese: cekelan.
or why are the seminary-trained ministers helpless in facing cases of exorcism?
In short, why is it that there is no ritual in our worship or liturgy?
Before replying to these acute questions, let us go back to Gorman and
Balentine. We have seen their utilization of the ndings of anthropology and
social sciences which are positive toward ritual. This positive attitude is con-
trasted with the negative view of ritual on the side of the Christian tradition.
Gorman traced it to the intellectual theological tradition, which places the
Priestly source after the Prophetic source, and gives a positive evaluation to the
latter but a negative evaluation to the former. Wellhausen is mentioned as the
most important proponent of this intellectual tradition. The Priestly source
is considered the mother of Judaism, while the Prophetic tradition is seen as
the mother of Christianity, especially the Protestant tradition. On the other
hand, Balentine refers to the New Testament as the source of this anti-ritual
tendency. He came to this conclusion after comparing his interpretation of the
rituals of the Day of Purication—not the Day of Atonement as it is more com-
monly known in other Christian commentaries on Leviticus—in Leviticus
with others such as G. Wenham, who wrote a commentary on Leviticus, and
F. Craddock, who wrote a commentary on Hebrews. Space does not permit
an elaborate description of the rituals in this long chapter. For our purpose it
suces to say that Balentine is very appreciative toward the Jewish religion of
today, whose rituals of the Yom Kippur festival can be seen as a continuation
of the rituals of Leviticus , even if the Temple as the holy space is defunct. It
goes without saying that for him the rituals of forgiveness are not only impor-
tant for the Jews, but also for Christians.
Although Wenham is an Old Testament scholar who wrote a commentary
on the Old Testament, in the end he is using the perspective of the New Tes-
tament, especially the Letter to the Hebrews chapters - which criticize the
rituals in Leviticus , to give a theological evaluation of the chapter. Balentine
provides a list in which Wenham places all the important diferences between
the ministry of Aaron and the ministry of Jesus. I shall mention only one, as it is
also frequently put forward by my students when I lecture to them on Leviticus
: “Whereas Aaron’s sacrice had to be repeated because of the persistence
of sin, Christ’s once-for-all sacrice efected a permanent forgiveness of sin
(Heb. :-).” As a New Testament scholar Craddock focuses on Hebrews
Gorman, The Ideology of Ritual, .
Balentine, Leviticus, –.
Interestingly, Balentine is a Baptist minister, a denomination which is not known as being
liturgical.
Balentine, Leviticus, .
:- and from there he ofers a theological evaluation of Leviticus . Bal-
entine quotes his view at length:
At :-, two images are ofered. One is of a priest, standing, working
in the relentless cycle of the day-after-day repetition of the same words
and actions. It is the picture of futility. The other image is of a priest who
has made a single ofering, a one-time-only act, and is now seated, wait-
ing for the full harvest of benets from that never-to-be-repeated sacri-
ce. It is the picture of nality. Much that is presented from desk to pulpit
is, of course, properly framed as ‘both-and.’ However, in most recitals of
events and relationships there are also discontinuities that beg for crisp-
ness and clarity. The writer of Hebrews ofers a model for casting such
material ‘on the one hand/but on the other hand.’
Both Wenham and Craddock implored their readers not to neglect Leviticus
as a necessary theological primer for understanding the sacrice of Christ. But
in the end their methods of contrasting the Letter of Hebrews and the Book of
Leviticus put the latter in the constraints of the former. People have to choose
between Hebrews - and Leviticus . However, in my view we need to re-
consider the relationship between those two biblical texts. It is not that I do
not appreciate the New Testament heritage, but there are some issues which
we need to face seriously. First, Hebrews is often seen as superior to Leviticus.
The image of Christ is constructed as superseding the rituals, and so there is no
need for rituals. Second, in this era of acknowledging the fact of religious plu-
ralism, there is no need to continue the tensions and antagonisms between the
Early Church and the Jewish religion as reected in the Letter to the Hebrews.
There are almost no followers of Judaism in Indonesia. But when Indonesian
Christians read the New Testament polemics toward the Jews or the Prophetic
tradition’s criticism of the Priestly tradition in the Old Testament in the dis-
course of Old Testament theology, they are used to reading ‘Muslims’ when-
ever they come to the term ‘the Jews.’ And what they understand as ‘Muslims’
is not just followers of the Islamic religion but all the other religions as well,
including the people’s primal religions. Third, although the Letter to the He-
brews is anti-Jewish, its anti-ritual stand was also used in the past to belittle the
Catholic tradition, which was considered as continuing the Priestly tradition
and rituals. On the other hand, the Catholic tradition also used the argument
in Hebrews about the superiority of the priests of Melchizedek over against
Craddock in Balentine, Leviticus, .
the priests of Aaron to place the superiority of the Catholic priesthood over
against the Jewish priesthood. What we need is to nd a new way of interpret-
ing Hebrews and to discontinue the idea of supersession of religions.
Conclusion: On Applying the Rituals of Leviticus
What about applying the rituals of Leviticus? Gorman and Balentine are
not very clear in what they want in conclusion. They emphasize that what
is important is the meaning of rituals, but their arguments come close to
reintroducing Leviticus-like rituals in Christian (Protestant) worship. The book
of Leviticus is then regarded as a kind of manual for rituals or liturgies. But is
this an adequate approach?
As noticed by Bergen, most of the information concerning the eld where
the ritual is performed in Leviticus - is missing: what kind of object was used
to kill the animal? How much time did each part of the sacrice take? What
words or music accompanied the actions? Was there song-and-response, spo-
ken liturgy, were texts read, or were the participating parties silent through-
out? Who is this “any of you” the text talks about? Could it be anyone, or did
the writer presume the head of the household? Similarly, Bryan Bibb argues
that even if one could rmly situate the Pentateuchal ritual texts within a par-
ticular historical setting, it still would be impossible to observe the rituals in
practice. Aside from the historical uncertainties, the texts themselves do not
provide enough information to allow the interpreter fully to imagine a real per-
formance. The ritual world constructed by the text is partial, fractured and
ambiguous. Bibbs commented on Gorman’s book above, which he otherwise
considered an excellent piece of work, that for him Gorman’s purpose is not
very clear. Is he referring to analysis of rituals or ritual procedures in a particu-
lar socio-cultural context? Or is he talking about the meaning embedded in the
rituals, as described in a set of texts? If he is talking about the meaning of ritu-
als, then according to Bibbs, Gorman is talking about rituals as a literary reality,
although he does not use that terminology. To be fair to Gorman, as we have
seen above, Gorman is aware that he is not doing eldwork in anthropology
Bergen, Reading Ritual, .
The great Milgrom is only able to do this with the help of the Rabbinical tradition, which
is of course later than Leviticus.
Bryan D. Bibbs, Ritual Words and Narrative Worlds in the Book of Leviticus (New York-
London: T&T Clark, ), .
Bibbs, Ritual Words, .
or the social sciences. Models from the social sciences are theoretical models
and provide a framework for interpretation. The ‘world’ of ritual is a world of
meaning, and it is very similar to the idea of ‘narrative world’ from literary crit-
icism. But it is also clear that Gorman wants to move from a text- or narrative-
oriented approach to a ritual approach concerning the book of Leviticus. Not
only narratives can be the source of theological reection, but also rituals.
According to Bibbs, it would be better for Gorman to use the term ‘ritual texts,’
because both the narrative and the ritual are in the text. Or, as it is aptly for-
mulated by Bergen, “Leviticus is not a ritual. It is a text. And while it is a
text about a ritual, this is not the same thing.” Following Gerstenberger, Bergen
even thinks that the text is a sign of the absence of ritual!
After considering all the pertinent factors, I can reply to the questions asked
by the congregation above. First, it is true that in Indonesia we inherit a theo-
logical view which is anti-ritualistic, and this view contradicts the reality of
our context, where religious convictions are often embedded in rituals. If a
part of the Bible, here the book of Leviticus, is full of references to ritual, then
it is good for us to try to understand the workings of ritual by looking at the
meaning of ritual. At least a good understanding of ritual can help us in the de-
velopment of a contextual theology which is inspired both by our own cultural
context and by the context of Scripture. This contextual theology could then
be the base from which we can enrich our present liturgy with symbolic ges-
tures or rituals. Second, there are some factors that make me somewhat hesi-
tant to incorporate the practice of rituals right away in our life as Indonesian
Christians. We have seen above that, despite his positive view of ritual, Driver
still refers to good ritual and bad ritual, good liturgy and bad liturgy. Also, if the
text of Leviticus does not explain everything about ritual practices in the wor-
ship and social processes of ancient Israel, then it may be wise not to envisage
a programmatic renewal of our present liturgies, lest we fall into the mistake
of claiming more than what is necessary. I also have my own reservation which
comes out of my observation of the Priestly liturgy of creation as it is explained
by Gorman and Balentine. They place the importance of the creation narrative
in the references to the term badal, ‘to separate.’ It is this term which serves
as a bridge between the creation narrative in Genesis :-:a and the rituals
concerning the tabernacle in Leviticus -. On the one hand it is good to see
that these texts are related to each other. But on the other hand, by only focus-
ing on the dynamics of separation, the creation narrative loses its universal
Gorman, The Ideology of Ritual, –.
Bergen, Reading Ritual, .
content. The focus is not on the world as the context of Israel as we can see it
in the narrative of Genesis -, but on Israel, which appears only outside the
narrative in the story of Jacob in Genesis :.
I do not deny that ancient Israel here represented by the Priestly tradition
understands universality from her standpoint as a particular, chosen people.
But I doubt whether the term badal is so decisive that there is no longer any
need to look at the other verbs used for creation (bara, yatsar, asah) in Gen-
esis and , or whether the creation narrative from P in Genesis :-:a is
so decisive that there is no longer any need to look at the whole narrative of
Genesis -. I think the universal perspective is still important, and we always
have to see the relationship between particularity and universality in a kind of
creative tension. In other words, if rituals and liturgies separate people from
one another, with no hope of any point of contact between them, then rituals
and liturgies are bad, and need to be exchanged for other rituals and liturgies
which want to promote the unity of mankind, without losing its particularity.
It is then an identity problem. It is all right if we place our discussion on litur-
gy and ethics within the framework of identity. Pluralism is about identities.
But if we put too much emphasis on identity, where our rituals and liturgies
become identity markers, then we are in danger of becoming a closed commu-
nity. Our rituals and liturgies will become means by which we communicate to
others that we are superior to them.
What we need are rituals and liturgies which communicate an open identity,
where our own identity is conrmed, but which at the same time invite ‘the
other’ to participate in this never ending process of identity formation. In post-
colonial discussions on hybridity, this is called ‘the third space.’ I propose a
qualied acceptance of rituals in our worship and liturgy, in the form of move-
ment and gestures, to strike a balance between words and acts. If we return
to the two local examples above on the handshake as a ritual of blessing and
the feeding of the dying as a ritual of farewell, then we must say that these are
not indigenous rituals. They form part of our Western ecclesiological heritage.
Still, because the worldview of Indonesians is formed by rituals, these liturgical
practices are ritualized to become part of this worldview. This worldview also
inuences the perception of the ritual of Holy Communion, which in the In-
donesian churches has become the most important identity marker. This ritual
separates Catholics and Protestants, and Christians and non-Christians. But
in an Indonesian context and worldview sacred meals are always inclusive. In
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, ),
–.
Yogyakarta, right after the fasting month of Ramadhan, people in the villages
celebrate the syawalan, which is an evening feast at the bale desa (the common
meeting hall) where everybody regardless of their religion is invited. In this
social gathering they sit together on the oor to eat the sacred meal, which is
mainly yellow rice and chicken. It is a real feast, but at the same time preg-
nant with symbols. The common meal itself is called kenduren or slametan.
The last term is important because it is related to salvation and well-being. Af-
ter the common meal and a Muslim prayer, everybody shakes hands with one
another to ask for forgiveness. It is very open and social compared with the
Holy Communion, which is closed and exclusive. Could we renew the liturgy
of Holy Communion, so that it also embodies the worldview of our context,
which conveys a very important message: whenever you eat, you always invite
others to eat with you?
Bibliography
Balentine, Samuel E., Leviticus, Interpretation Series (Louisville: John Knox Press,
2002).
Beauchamp, Paul, Création et séparation: Étude exégétique du chapitre premier de la
Genèse (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1969).
Bell, Catherine, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Bell, Catherine, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997).
Bergen, Wesley J., Reading Ritual: Leviticus in Postmodern Culture, 417 (London-
New York: T&T Clark International, 2005).
Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture (London-New York: Routledge, 1994).
Bibbs, Bryan D., Ritual Words and Narrative Worlds in the Book of Leviticus (New
York-London: T&T Clark, 2009).
Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Lon-
don and New York: Routledge, 1966).
Douglas, Mary, Leviticus as Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Driver, Tom F., Liberating Rites: Understanding the Transformative Power of Ritual
(Boulder-Oxford: Westview Press, 1998).
Fohrer, Georg, Hebrew and Aramaic Dictionary of the Old Testament (London:
Press, 1973).
In Javanese: nasi tumpeng.
In Indonesian: maaf lahir-batin.
Gorman Jr, Frank H., The Ideology of Ritual, 91 (Sheeld: Sheeld Academic
Press, 1990).
Milgrom, Jacob, Leviticus 1-16, Anchor Bible 3 (New York: Doubleday, 1991).
Milgrom, Jacob, Leviticus 17-22, Anchor Bible 3a (New York: Doubleday, 2000).
Milgrom, Jacob, Leviticus 23-27, Anchor Bible 3b (New York: Doubleday, 2001).
Noordmans, O., “Herschepping” (Re-creation), in Verzamelde Werken (Collected
Works), Vol. 2 (Kok: Kampen, 1979).
Sawyer, John F.A. (ed.), Reading Leviticus: A Conversation with Mary Douglas,
227 (Sheeld: Sheeld Academic Press, 1996).
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(Nijmegen: Radboud University, Nijmegen, 2009).
© Koninklijke Brill NV, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004356528_016
Liturgical Formation and Practical Ecclesiology
Relections on the Quest of a Local Church
Hans Schaefer
Introduction
Imagine a small Reformed congregation in the North of the Netherlands, part
of the Reformed Churches (Liberated). Until about a decade ago, it shared a
pastor with a community nearby. That combination had lasted for decades,
but in the two did not have enough means for maintaining two church
buildings and sharing one pastor. One of these two congregations decided to
disestablish and its members chose to join other congregations nearby. By
now, the church-community still existing has about members, but is falling
back in numbers. Research within this congregation indicates several things:
the church members experience their present situation as an identity crisis;
they experience the Sunday services explicitly as the centre of their congrega-
tion; and they experience a lack of leadership.
In the course of , the church-council decided to see what they could
do together with four other congregations of their denomination in the same
area, all ve without a pastor now, all ve in decline (for various reasons
though, and some still relatively big), and all ve struggling to nd their way.
They experience what the church in Western-Europe as a whole experiences: a
phase of deep transition or even transformation in virtually every aspect. The
initial idea of all ve congregations was: can we have a pastor—for then our
The Reformed Churches (Liberated) (Gereformeerde Kerken (vrijgemaakt)) are a Reformed
denomination with approximately , members and about local Churches in the
Netherlands. In this article I will abbreviate Reformed Churches (Liberated) to .
Arjo Riemer, Stormbestendig: Onderzoek naar beleving van gereformeerde identiteit in een tijd
van transitie van kerk-zijn (Storm resistant: Investigations on experience of Reformed identi-
ty in a time of transition of being church) (-thesis TUKampen, ).
It may suce here to point to Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, : Harvard Uni-
versity Press, ). For a practical-theological application of transition, see Henk Geertse-
ma and Hans Schaefer, Koninkrijk van Priesters: Thematisch onderzoeks- en activiteitenplan
Praktijkcentrum (A royal priesthood: Thematic research- and activity plan Practice Centre)
(Zwolle: Praktijkcentrum, ).
problems will resolve and our continuation as a church can be readily guaran-
teed. As a group of ve they asked the Practice Centre of their denomination
to help them. Together with my colleagues of the Practice Centre, I became
involved in this process.
Outline
In this article, I will present the direction in which the Practice Centre tried
to solve the problem, as an example of how practical ecclesiology illuminates
the connection of ethics and liturgy. The main question on which this article
focusses, therefore, will be how the liturgy and its community-building capac-
ity can be used in practical ecclesiology, and what practical implications this
could entail for community-building processes in a congregation. It will be ar-
gued that liturgy is more than just ‘a’ praxis of the church and that its pivotal
role is underestimated in many practical-ecclesiological concepts.
After an outline of the theoretical elds in which this case could be dis-
cussed, I will secondly describe the case in more detail, in order to show that
it concerns the question of the identity of the church. Third, the case will be
described from a practical ecclesiological point of view. In the fourth place, the
ecclesiological consequences will be described in order to provide a systematic-
theologically sound framework to illuminate the issues that are at stake in this
case, leading to—in the fth place—a discussion of the role of liturgical for-
mation in practical ecclesiology. Subsequently, it will turn out that the relation
between liturgy and ecclesiology may well be understood in terms of Bon-
hoefer’s notion that the church is a community sui generis. Finally, the article
presents some concluding remarks on further investigation and practical di-
rections that could provide a fruitful approach to a case like the one presented.
Mapping the Field
Discussing the present case involves crossing boundaries and using several
sources and methods to come to an answer. This endeavor entails ‘theological
reection’:
The Practice Centre (Praktijkcentrum) of the was established in , and serves local
congregations (mostly) within this denomination with concrete advice, equipment, and re-
search (www.praktijkcentrum.org).
Theology emerges as a practical problem-solving and inductive disci-
pline, which connects with practical issues in a way that illuminates and
empowers. It also emerges as a way of reection that draws on other dis-
ciplines in its analysis of experience in order to do justice to the complex-
ity of any given situation.
Apart from two small recent articles and an older proposal by Christian
Möller, there is not much written on the concrete relation between liturgy
and community-building. In recent overviews of practical-ecclesiological lit-
erature, the theme of church-service or liturgy is virtually absent. Within the
Dutch context, Gerben Heitink and Henk de Roest have taken the liturgy and
the church as worshipping community into account. Heitink, however, does
not really focus on how liturgy is related to community-building. In his book
on the church, Henk de Roest dedicates a chapter to the church- service. De
Roest, however, is not univocal on the role of the liturgy. On the one hand,
attending church services is to ‘practice’ oneself to enter the mystery of
God’s love. On the other hand, de Roest considers such practices mostly as
Elaine Graham, Heather Walton and Frances Ward, Theological Relection: Methods (London:
Press, ), . For a recent overview on the methods used in practical theology, see
Bonnie Miller-McLemore (ed.), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology (Oxford:
Blackwell/Wiley, ), esp. –.
B.A. Müller, “Liturgie as agent in transformasieprocesse” (Liturgy as agent in transformation-
processes), Dutch Reformed Theological Journal/ Nederduitse Gereformeerde Teologiese Tydskrif
/– (), –; and I.A. Nell, “Leaders lost in transition: A case study in leadership,
ritual and social capital,” Dutch Reformed Theological Journal/ Nederduitse Gereformeerde Te-
ologiese Tydskrif /– (), –.
Christian Möller, Lehre vom Gemeindeaubau (Bd. and ) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, respectively ); Christian Möller, Gottesdienst als Gemeindeaubau: Ein
Werkstattbericht (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, ).
Cf. Sake Stoppels, “Literatuurbericht kerkopbouw –” (Literature review church
building –) and “Literatuurbericht gemeenteopbouw –” (Literature re-
view community building –)—both available through https://www.handelingen
.com/index.php/literatuurberichten – accessed March , . Stoppels himself is not in-
clined to taking the church-service as something of special value for strategic community
building, cf. Sake Stoppels, Oefenruimte: Gemeente en parochie als gemeenschap van leer-
lingen (Practice facility: Congregation and parish as community of disciples) (Zoetermeer:
Boekencentrum, ), –.
Gerben Heitink, Een kerk met karakter: Tijd voor heroriëntatie (Church with character: Time
for reorientation) (Kampen: Kok, ), –.
‘expression’ of what is already present. There is, however, a subspecies of ec-
clesiology, called ‘liturgical ecclesiology.’ In his eminent overview on liturgical
ecclesiology Mattijs Ploeger argues that
(b)eing transformed through baptism and the eucharist, through the
Word and prayer, through music and celebration, Christians are invited
to return to daily life as doxological persons. God’s transformative power,
most generously present in the liturgy, invites to an ‘overowing of re-
sponse’ in worship, beauty, joy, compassion and charity.
Liturgical ecclesiology seeks to discover the formative relation between liturgy
and ethics. Ecclesiology in general is usually focussed “on the question of the
ecclesiality of the church, that is, what makes the church church, or what are
the conditions for being a church.” However, such endeavour entails critical
theological reection as well, for the church is never only an idea but it is an
existing, living reality. The acknowledgment of the church’s reality leaves us
with the task of taking ecclesiology in its practical-ecclesiological form, as well
as in its systematic form. Methodologically, practical-ecclesiology implies the
use of empirical tools to describe what is going on, to analyse what is going
on, to decipher what ought to be going on, and to provide the participants in
the congregational life with clues to nd out what they could do to respond to
this situation. When (systematic) ecclesiology is the theological theory about
Henk de Roest, Een huis voor de ziel: Gedachten over de kerk voor binnen en buiten (A home
for the soul: Thoughts about the church inside and outside) (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum,
), –. De Roest states, quoting Johannes van der Ven: “The church gathers in
the liturgy to ‘express its faith ritually and establish itself as church-community’” ().
Mattijs Ploeger, Celebrating Church: Ecumenical Contributions to a Liturgical Ecclesiolo-
gy, Netherlands Studies in Ritual and Liturgy (Tilburg: Universiteit van Tilburg, ),
f—referring to Rowan Williams.
E.g., David L. Stubbs, “Ending of Worship—Ethics,” in Leanne Van Dyk (ed.), A More Pro-
found Alleluia: Theology and Worship in Harmony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), –
. John Witvliet, “How Common Worship Forms Us for Our Encounter with Death,” in
John D. Witvliet, Worship Seeking Understanding: Windows Into Christian Practice (Grand
Rapids: Baker Academic, ), –.
Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, An Introduction to Ecclesiology: Ecumenical, Historical and Global
Perspectives (Downers Grove: Acadamic, ), .
Cf. Richard Osmer, Practical Theology: An Introduction (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ).
Andrew Root rightly asks whether the image Osmer might give rise to, as if such practical-
theological investigation is in fact ‘social science lite,’ is right (Andrew Root, Christopraxis: A
Practical Theology of the Cross (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, ), . With John Swinton,
the church, practical-theological ecclesiology is the practical-theological the-
ory about the church, “especially the practices of the church as a whole and of
local communities, in their interrelation.”
By way of conclusion, practical ecclesiology, as a sub-discipline of ecclesiol-
ogy and including its attention to liturgy and church practices, will provide the
conceptual tools with which we will discuss the case.
Practical-Ecclesiological Comments
In the case described, the initial solution envisioned by the congregations’
leadership concerned appointing a pastor. During our interventions, howev-
er, the Practice Centre pointed to some important insights that put this initial
solution in another light. Starting with the relation between pastor and con-
gregation, continuing with the shared task of theological reection, we turn
to retrieving the theology of the community. That search, in turn, asks for a
specic reconsideration of the role of the pastor: her or his schooling the con-
gregation in the well-springs of tradition.
Community building strategies all recommend vision-making processes
with due contribution of the community itself as ‘doing theology’ in the con-
gregation. One can discern four diferent roles exercised in doing theology: for-
mal and informal leaders, the entire congregation itself, those with professional
I would argue that “Practical Theology therefore finds itself located within the uneasy
but critical tension between the script of revelation given to us in Christ and formulat-
ed historically within scripture, doctrine and tradition, and the continuing innovative
performance of the gospel as it is embodied and enacted in the life and practices of
the Church as they interact with the life and practices of the world” (John Swinton
and Harriet Mowat, Practical Theology and Qualitative Research (London: Press,
), .
Albert K. Ploeger and Joke J. Ploeger-Grotegoed, De gemeente en haar verlangen: Van prak-
tische theologie naar de geloofspraktijk van de gemeenteleden (The congregation and its
longing: From practical theology to faith-practices of community-members) (Kampen:
Kok, ), : “Praktisch-theologische ecclesiologie is de praktisch-theologische the-
orie van de kerk, in het bijzonder van het kerkelijk handelen van de kerk als geheel en
van de gemeenten voor zich, in hun onderlinge samenhang”). Cf. also Rein Brouwer et al.,
Levend lichaam: Dynamiek van christelijke geloofsgemeenschappen in Nederland (Living
body: Dynamics of Christian faith communities) (Kok: Kampen, ), ; they dene
‘practical ecclesiology’ as starting from church or church-related practices, pointing to-
wards perspectives and tensions that are to be discerned, in order to reect on them to be
relevant to the praxis itself.
theological education, and the professional outsider. In the case under review,
the congregations themselves did not have the vision necessary to proceed.
Their ‘doing theology’ had not been addressed yet. But it cannot be the pastor
who, simply for being a theologian, can provide an answer to questions of iden-
tity on his own. In order to conduct a fruitful process of vision making within
a community the concept of ‘priesthood of all believers’ has been used, in or-
der to indicate the necessity of the community to be involved in the vision-
making process: “(A)ll are subsumed in the most religious ministerial category:
that of priesthood.” Whereas research indicates that the contribution of ‘all’ as
priests is not often realised, translation of this theological concept into values
and concrete practices of respect and attention is necessary. Of course, the
professional theologian as a congregational pastor can be very fruitful for such
vision-making processes. But there is a danger as well: It “is common for a vol-
untary organization to recruit its rst paid employee when it is under stress.”
This, however, “creates the feeling that all will be well once the worker arrives,
and when they do arrive there are a lot of unexplained and unresolved issues,
leading, possibly, to an early breakdown in the employing relationship.”
Secondly, the concept of priesthood of all believers, which is a distinctive-
ly protestant characteristic of ecclesial thinking, implies that the diference
between the pastor and ‘common members’ is a relatively small one. Every
Christian is called to ‘theological reection,’ at the heart of which are questions
about the relationship between theory and practice, and how theological dis-
course is related to the exercise of faith. This “is an endeavour shared by laity
and clergy: Christian practice is not simply about the duties of congregational
ministry but the entire life and witness of the Church.” This, however, calls for
a thorough exploration of the theology of the community itself.
Nancy T. Ammerman et al., Studying Congregations: A New Handbook (Nashville: Abing-
don Press, ), .
Jan Hendriks, Verlangen en vertrouwen: Het hart van de gemeenteopbouw (Longing and
trust: The heart of community building) (Kok: Kampen, ), .
Hendriks, Verlangen, –.
Helen Cameron et al., Studying Local Churches: A Handbook (London: Press, ),
.
Graham et al., Theological Relection, . The use of theories of practice within prac-
tical theology is summarized in the article by Ted A. Smith, “Theories of Practice,” in
Miller-McLemore, Companion, –. Smith observes that “(a)ttention to practice has
also helped practical theologians dene their eld as they have moved beyond what Ed-
ward Farley … dubbed the ‘clerical paradigm’ to consider the beliefs and actions of all the
people in a community” ().
That leads us to the third point: How to retrieve the ‘theology of the commu-
nity’? There has been a remarkable interest in this question and its solution.
Especially the conceptual adaptation and theological reframing of so-called
‘action research’ by Helen Cameron and her team must be mentioned here.
They dene practical theology as concerned with connections between the-
ology and practices of faith, whereas action research provides processes and
skills by which practice can be spoken of and reected upon. They developed
a way of doing action research that is ‘theological all the way through,’ thus en-
suring the theological integrity of theological action research (). In their
opinion, there are four theological ‘voices’ that should be heard and brought
into conversation with each other: () the voice of normative theology, con-
sisting of formal documents, confession, church-order; () the voice of formal
theology, which is what theologians within the congregation, or denomina-
tion, or even wider than that, can bring to the discussion; () the voice of es-
poused theology, being what the participants or members of the congregation
articulate as their own convictions and ideas; and () the voice of operant the-
ology: what is actually ‘done’ in the congregation, like the practices of church-
services, diaconial projects, gatherings of all kinds etc. These four voices have
to be retrieved by thorough and conscious listening, in order to bring them
together in a conversation. This conversation works as a device that makes
the complexity of voices within a community manageable “as a heuristic and
hermeneutic framework within which to understand processes.” Though
designed as a tool for action research, we used this fourfold theological spec-
trum of voices as an instrument for gaining access to the many-coloured pal-
ette of opinions and feelings within the congregations. It especially made us
aware of the important co-existence of the normative and the espoused voice
of theology with respect to the identity of the congregations. Historically, it
can rightly be argued, ‘Reformed identity’ was conceived of in terms of ap-
plying “standards of Reformed ecclesial identity … derived from confessional
texts and jurisprudence, apparently without much doubt that these theoreti-
cal standards aptly described the socio-cultural reality in the .” In a recent
report by the Practice Centre on Reformed identity, presented to the General
Synod of the , it is stated that
Helen Cameron et al., Talking About God in Practice (London: Press, ), –.
Cameron, Talking, .
Stefan Paas and Hans Schaefer, “Reconstructing Reformed Identity: Experiences from
Church Planting in the Netherlands,” Journal of Reformed Theology (), –,
here .
‘Reformed identity’ is the complex unity of living, working, listening and
celebrating as taking place within the community of the church. In that,
it is crucial, whether the church will listen to God’s voice in Scripture and
reverberate it, from the conviction that not we make the identity of the
church, but that we draw on God’s own action in the life of the church for
our identity.
Gradually the acknowledges that ‘Reformed identity’ is the complex com-
posite of the ongoing interaction between the four theological voices as lived
in the life of the congregation.
Retrieving the identity, fourthly, as an ongoing conversation between all the
four voices, requires pastors with specic integrational skills, and for practi-
tioners that act as ‘action researchers.’ Elaine Graham, assessing the current
blossoming of theological action research, rightly remarks that
(t)he objectives of such a model of practical theology, then, would be
both to study faith in practice using qualitative methods, but also to put
such data to work in the cultivation of theologically-grounded practical
wisdom. In adopting action research methods, practical theologians are
not simply concerned with change management or the techniques of ac-
tivism, but with schooling people in the well-springs of tradition from
which practical wisdom ows.
It is this “schooling … in the well-springs of tradition” that makes the quest
for renewing and re-investigating congregational and confessional identity a
complex one, being part of an ongoing process of the community, that cannot
be dealt with by the theologian-professional alone. On the other hand, it turns
out that the intuition with which the congregations started their search, viz.
the longing for a pastor, is not only a simplistic answer to a complex problem.
The community building process of retrieving the theology of the commu-
nity is the task of pastor and community alike. The task of the pastor is to foster
Hans Schaefer, Annemiek de Jonge and Hayo Wijma, Chocoladereep of -hagelslag? Liter-
atuuronderzoek naar ontwikkeling van “Gereformeerde Identiteit” in zeven decennia (Choc-
olate bar or chocolate sprinkles? Literature-review on the development of ‘Reformed
identity’ in seven decades) (Praktijkcentrum: Zwolle, ).
Cf. Cameron, Talking, passim; Swinton and Mowat, Practical Theology, –.
Elaine Graham, “Is Practical Theology a form of ‘Action Research’?,” International Journal
of Practical Theology / (), –, .
this search for identity by practicing a “schooling of people in the well-springs
of tradition.” The question is: how?
Systematic and Practical Ecclesiology
In order to answer the question how to foster the quest for identity in local
congregations, we must not leave systematic theology aside. As Paul Murray
argues, the task of ecclesiology is “a process of systematic, critical- constructive
reection on the articulations, ecclesial forms and practice of faith with a view
to diagnosing their ills and strains—whether conceptual, historical, herme-
neutical, or practical—and seeking to enhance their quality.” Ecclesiology
therefore should have practical impact, even leading to strategic proposals for
the concrete life of the church. Murray states that ecclesiology is reection on
what above was labelled as the voice of the espoused and operant theology
(Cameron), and continues to assert that ecclesiology comprises of the strategic
task to do proposals for concrete action. Implicitly, Murray also suggests that
it encompasses expressing the ‘normative voice’ in referring to “diagnosing,”
which seems possible only when applying some kind of normative framework
as relevant into the discussion.
Murray here builds on the work of (among others) Nicholas Healy, who has
abundantly shown the tendency in systematic theology to treat the church’s
identity with normative models of metaphors. Such “blueprint ecclesiologies
frequently display a curious inability to acknowledge the complexities of ec-
clesial life in its pilgrim state.” It is Healy’s concern “to rule out both theolog-
ical and non-theological reductionism in descriptions of our ecclesial identi-
ty.” Others have made similar remarks about ecclesiology needed to combine
an approach ‘from above’ with an approach ‘from below,’ such as Roger Haight
and Gerard Mannion.
Paul D. Murray, “Searching the Living Truth of the Church in Practice: On the Transforma-
tive Task of Systematic Ecclesiology,” Modern Theology / (), –, .
Cf. the task of practical theology (Osmer, Practical Theology).
Nicholas M. Healy, Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .
Healy, Church, .
Roger Haight, SJ, Christian Community in History, Vol. (New York: Continuum, );
Gerard Mannion, Ecclesiology and Postmodernity: Questions for the Church in Our Time
(Collegeville: Liturgical Press, ). In a volume dedicated to investigating Haight’s pro-
posal for a ‘comparative ecclesiology,’ Mannion states that the aim of such ecclesiological
We have seen that blue-print ecclesiology, building highly idealized concepts
of being church has been proven not to be fruitful. Let us now turn to Healy’s
solution for overcoming both theological and non-theological descriptions
of the church, which is a ‘practical-prophetic ecclesiology’ that describes and
assesses the various practices, beliefs, power structures, functions etc. of the
church. This ecclesiology is thought of as “a church-wide social practice of com-
munal self-critical analysis” which immediately introduces the topic of ‘forma-
tion’ of the Christian. Again, this type of ‘ecclesiology’ is a practical- ecclesiology
rather than a formal, historical or systematic one, in that it comprises all these
aspects. Here, we touch upon the dynamic relation between ecclesiology and
social- scientic approaches to congregational life. Any ecclesiology that does
not focus on the practice of ecclesial life in the end describes only opinions
on the church without any real systematic description of church-life itself.
This is why we can do better with Healy’s plea for a ‘practice of communal
self-critical analysis,’ in which church members and pastors work alongside to-
wards the goal of becoming God’s witness and of enabling one another in play-
ing their part in the theodrama. One has, Healy states, to achieve a “strong
investigations “will always be ultimately existential and practical—bringing about greater
harmony between ecclesial vision and ecclesial practice, ecclesiology and ethics” (Gerard
Mannion (ed.), Comparative Ecclesiology: Critical Investigations (London/New York: T&T
Clark/Continuum, ), ). Mannion (Ecclesiology and Postmodernity, –) pro-
poses what he calls ‘virtue ecclesiology,’ meaning that the church “should live as an analog-
ical representation of the loving being of God” (). I would, however, argue that these
and similar proposals may not be as ‘realistic’ as necessary (cf. Hans Schaefer, “Taylor en
traditie: De theologische vraag naar de praktijk van gemeenschap” (Taylor and tradition:
The theological question to the practice of community), in Hans Burger and Geert Jan Spij-
ker (eds), Open voor God: Charles Taylor en christen-zijn in een seculiere tijd (Open to God:
Charles Taylor and being Christian in a secular age) (Vuurbaak: Barneveld, ), –).
Healy, Church, –.
Cf. James Nieman and Roger Haight, SJ, “On the Dynamic Relation between Ecclesiology
and Congregational Studies,” in Christian B. Scharen (ed.), Explorations in Ecclesiology
and Ethnography (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), –.
Cf. Neil Ormerod, “Ecclesiology and the Social Sciences,” in Gerard Mannion and Lewis
S. Mudge (eds), The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church (New York: London,
), –, here .
Healy here draws on Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theodramatic theory (Healy, Church,
–). The ideas of Kevin Vanhoozer on living theodramatically in the church point at
the same direction (Kevin Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical Linguistic Ap-
proach to Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, ). For a recent
debate on theodrama, ecclesiology and ethics, see Wesley Vander Lugt, Living Theodrama:
Reimagining Theological Ethics (Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate, ).
and complex ecclesial culture, but the test of that culture lies in whether it
produces strong and complex disciples.”
This call for a ‘strong and complex discipleship’ resonates with what Kath-
leen Cahalan describes as being of vital importance for ministry in congrega-
tional life. Such discipleship should be conceived in terms of concrete prac-
tices, initiated by baptism, of every Christian. Baptism denes a Christian’s
identity in three ways: one is called by her or his name to follow their Lord, one
is baptized into the community of believers as the Body of Christ, and baptism
is vocational in that it calls for a life of discipleship as “the shared communal
calling to a life of service for the sake of God’s world.” As baptism signals the
“imperative to the self-identity of each disciple to understand their life, their
whole of life, in terms of vocations,” ministry is nothing but “the vocation of
leading disciples in the life of discipleship for the sake of God’s mission in the
world.”
Cahalan’s framing congregational life and its ministry in terms of disciple-
ship resonates with Healy’s call for “strong and complex disciples.” It also gives
way to interpreting congregational life in terms of concrete practices, with-
out losing sight of any normative or teleological framework to decide whether
practices can be called Christian or not. Cahalan elsewhere notes that the ba-
sic task of practical theology is “to promote faithful discipleship” for this term
denotes the concrete embodiment of Christian faith in personal and commu-
nal practices related to the vocation by God himself. It is a normative descrip-
tion of the more neutral phrase ‘practices’ in general, tting the experienced
identity of the Christian community.
Healy, Church, .
Kathleen A. Cahalan, Introducing the Practice of Ministry (Collegeville: Liturgical Press,
), .
Cahalan, Introducing, .
Cahalan, Introducing, (italics omitted).
Kathleen A. Cahalan and James R. Nieman, “Mapping the Field of Practical Theology,” in
Dorothy C. Bass and Craig Dykstra (eds), For Life Abundant: Practical Theology, Theologi-
cal Education, and Christian Ministry (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), –, here .
“(W)ithout the orienting purpose of discipleship, practical theology can be prone to
vested interests of curricular turf, aimless clericalism, and complacent piety. By contrast,
practical theology at its best advances scholarship, educates ministers, and supports be-
lievers’ faithful living when each of these is related to the others because all are aimed at
faithful ways of life in Christian community. This is why the eld, in its most basic task, is
oriented towards lived discipleship in its contemporary and concrete settings” (Cahalan
and Nieman, “Mapping,” ).
A small local church in the Netherlands, in search for its identity, should
therefore be aware that its core business is to foster a strong and complex ec-
clesial culture, producing strong and complex disciples. This goal, however, re-
quires due attention for the formation of Christians. For how can such a small
community develop such culture? And – to take up the discussion above—
how does the Christian community foster such character and virtue? To this
question I will turn now.
Liturgical Formation in Practical Ecclesiology
How can a congregation develop a “strong and complex ecclesial culture,
producing strong and complex disciples,” as Healy proposes? This entails the
question of concrete, practical formation of Christians. Christians are living
in the world and in the church. These two cannot be separated nor equated.
This implies that Christians are citizens of ‘two kingdoms.’ From a Christian
perspective, being both in the world and in the church implies having to be
well aware of the way in which both church and world inuence our being and
perception. In this paragraph, it is argued that liturgical formation is not taken
into account in practical ecclesiology.
James K.A. Smith, from a Reformed philosophical-theological point of view,
discerns three levels of practices. The rst is ‘thin practices,’ containing every-
day practices like taking the car to go shopping or taking a shower. The second
is ‘thick practices,’ which are practices that contain explicit value for those who
perform them, like visiting friends or taking part in the liturgy of a church-
service on a Sunday-morning. The third level of practices, according to Smith,
consists of ‘liturgies.’ Here, liturgies are dened in a broad sense as “rituals of
ultimate concern: rituals that are formative for identity, that inculcate particu-
lar visions of the good life, and do so in a way that means to trump other ritual
formations.” This implies that, beside religious rituals like Christian worship,
also secular rituals like shopping or sport can be dened as liturgies.
Attention to the formation of Christians resonates with general philosoph-
ical and theological observations that arise in the aftermath of modernism.
Within practical theology, the notion that there are no xed, eternally and uni-
versally constant presuppositions from which we can start living and thinking,
is now taken for granted. The very notion of ‘formation’ came to the fore as it
James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation
(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, ), (italics in original).
became much more obvious that one’s own position was not only informed by
dealing with Scripture or tradition, but was also inuenced by one’s local and
temporal context. Academic practical theology, according to Alister McGrath,
“is about being attentive to the specics of a given situation … when seen
through the lens of the Christian tradition.” It involves the assessment of sit-
uations and ministerial possibilities, partly through observation. As this ob-
servation never can be neutral, theology and Christian practices appear to be
closely related. “The primary task of practical theology is to enable us to see
situations and individuals from the standpoint of the Christian tradition, so
that we may evaluate them and behave toward them in an authentically Chris-
tian way.” This implies some kind of ‘mapping reality’ that is
already being absorbed through participation in the Christian communi-
ty, in which the reading of Scripture, the inhabitation of liturgical forms,
and exposure to preaching shape our outlooks. … To speak of theologi-
cal attentiveness is to highlight the importance of allowing the specics
of the Christian narrative to shape the way in which we understand the
world and society, in order to better understand how to serve them.
Several authors explicitly treat formation by liturgy. James Smith’s argument is,
that human beings are raised by and through partaking in concrete communal
practices. To be raised as a Christian is not primarily a matter of (intellectual,
cognitive) worldview, but rather of taking part in the practices of the Chris-
tian community. “(O)ur thinking and cognition arise from a more fundamen-
tal, precognitive orientation to the world. And that precognitive or preration-
al orientation to the world is shaped and primed by very material, embodied
practices.” It is his concern to “develop a cultural theory that has a radar, so
to speak, attuned not primarily to ideas but to practices, and more specical-
ly, to identity-forming practices,” which he calls ‘liturgies.’ Smith stresses the
priority of liturgy to doctrine: “Doctrine, beliefs, and a Christian worldview
emerge from the nexus of Christian worship practices; worship is the matrix of
Alister E. McGrath, “The Cultivation of Theological Vision: Theological Attentiveness and
the Practice of Ministry,” in Pete Ward (ed.), Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), –, here .
McGrath, “Cultivation,” f.
McGrath, “Cultivation,” .
Smith, Desiring, .
Smith, Desiring, .
Christian faith, not its ‘expression’ or ‘illustration.’” This is why Smith, nally
turning to describe the liturgy as a formational practice, wants “to exegete the
understanding or social imaginary that is implicit in the practices of Christian
worship.”
Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells have tried to compose a form of doing
ethics that is entirely framed along the lines of liturgy: The Blackwell Compan-
ion to Christian Ethics. They state that
(t)he liturgy ofers ethics a series of ordered practices that shape the char-
acter and assumptions of Christians, and suggest habits and models that
inform every aspect of corporate life—meeting people, acknowledging
fault and failure, celebrating, thanking, reading, speaking with authori-
ty, reecting on wisdom, naming truth, registering need, bringing about
reconciliation, sharing food, renewing purpose. This is the basic staple of
corporate Christian life—not simply for clergy, or for those in religious
orders, but for lay Christians, week in, week out.
Liturgy is “a corporate practice for discerning the good.” In the same volume,
Philip Kenneson argues that the assembly of Christians called ‘church’ “is un-
derstood to be the primary context in which disciples of Jesus Christ learn the
skills, convictions and dispositions that animate its life in the world.”
Liturgy is the communal bodily practice of the people of God by which
Christians are shaped and formed as part of the Body of Christ. It is im-
portant to note here that the word ‘formation’ is primarily understood in
its passive connotations. Christians experience the liturgy, take part in the
Smith, Desiring, .
Smith, Desiring, . In his essay “Ecclesiology: Worship and Community” (in Paul M. Col-
lins, Gerard Mannion, Gareth Powell and Kenneth Wilson, Christian Community Now: Ec-
clesiological Investigations (London: T&T Clark, ), –), Collins argues against
the claim that participants of the worship make their own meanings so that “the idea that
a congregation is formed through the collective experience of worshipping together reg-
ularly (is) to be jettisoned” (). He therefore points to church-practices like catechesis
and preaching: all practices should interact, so that people are formed in diferent ways.
This does, however, not counter the idea of this essay, that liturgical acts should be more
than just ‘expressions.’
Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics
(Oxford: Blackwell, , ), . I have used the rst edition.
Hauerwas and Wells, Blackwell Companion, .
Philip Kenneson, “Gathering: Worship, Imagination, and Formation,” in Hauerwas and
Wells, Blackwell Companion, –, .
liturgy, undergo the liturgy. Thus, liturgy is not—at least not primarily and
principally—considered to be the expression of personal or communal faith
but the life-context of practices that take Christians up into the worshipping
of the Triune God. Also important to note here, as James Smith does, is that
one must never lose sight of “the charged nature” of liturgical practices: they
are “the uniquely intense site of the Spirit’s transformative presence.” When
highlighting the transformative power of liturgy, this transformation is funda-
mentally a ‘by-product’ of worship, which aim is the glorication, praise and
adoration of the triune God.
In community-building literature, however, this notion of liturgy as formative,
and undergoing the liturgy primarily in its passive (or: receptive) dimension,
is virtually absent. Here, the usual sequence is the other way around: liturgy
is the expression of some virtues, opinions and feelings apparently obtained
otherwise. Two inuential books on practical ecclesiology within the Dutch
context can function as examples of this community- building-perspective on
the liturgy as ‘expression’ of religious feelings and emotions.
The rst example is the book by Jan Hendriks entitled Verlangen en ver-
trouwen, already mentioned above. Hendriks unfolds his book on community-
building by referring to the traditional threefold dimension of being church:
mysticism (or kerygma, or martyria), koinonia, and diakonia – the relation with
God (), with one another within the community (), and service to our fellow
human beings, society, and creation in general (). The rst (mysticism, keryg-
ma, or martyria), Hendriks describes as: “listening to God’s calling of people,”
or “communion with God.” Though this dimension of being church should be
present in all areas of church-life, Hendriks gives due attention to the area of
(as he calls it) celebration or worship (vieren):
Smith, Desiring, .
Smith, Desiring, . Cf. Nicholas Wolterstorf, The God We Worship: An Exploration of
Liturgical Theology (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, ), : “The church exists to worship
God in Christ.” In this volume, Bosman and I point also to the warning by Stefan Paas
that liturgy should not be instrumentalized (cf. Stefan Paas, Vreemdelingen en priesters:
christelijke missie in een postchristelijke omgeving (Strangers and priests: Christian mission
in a post-Christian environment) (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, ), ). Cf. what Ca-
halan says about the fact that we are not bringing about the kingdom of God: “Ministry
then is not motivated by a desire to get disciples busy building God’s kingdom, it is moti-
vated to help disciples recognize, receive, and respond to God’s reigning presence in their
lives and in the life of the world” (Introducing, ).
Hendriks, Verlangen, (trans. mine).
Worship is essential. … Also for the building up of the community, the
worship service (viering) is of central importance. … In the church-
service and in other contexts we celebrate the existence of … koinonia.
The liturgy depicts that new reality. We are not imagining it, we depict it.
… Liturgy, however, does not automatically leads to the building up of the
community. On the contrary, here lies ‘eine ständige Gestaltungsaufgabe,’
Hendriks states, referring to Christian Möller’s essay on worship and
community-building. Hendriks continues by saying that “liturgy is of central
importance for building up community and church.” He develops this the-
sis, by pointing at three areas in which community-building and liturgy have
things in common. () In every community-model, worship should be given
due place, though not exclusively in the form of church-services, but also in
gatherings of all kinds. () In the course of community-building processes, one
should take time to pause and reect, i.e., to worship. And nally (), liturgy
is not an isolated aspect of the community, which implies that “community-
building is interested in the relation between the nature of the liturgy and
the church-model that is manifested in the community.” Later on in the
book, Hendriks describes how liturgy is treated in several tendencies within
community- building literature (e.g., the missional or evangelical movement).
In sum, Hendriks considers liturgy to be central for doing community- building.
But at the same time it is obscured, for the material consequences of the recep-
tivity advocated and confessed in the liturgy, and defended throughout Hen-
driks’ book, is absent in thinking through the concrete processes and instances
of community-building activities.
Another example is the book of Albert and Joke Ploeger-Grotegoed, who
explicitly state that in their view, leitourgia and diakonia are the two key-
concepts. As for liturgy, the authors summarize many valuable things said in
the tradition of the church, both long ago and very recently. But when they
describe their own position, they say about worship:
In worship services and in other rituals should happen what people hope
for. They should give the feeling, most and for all, that an encounter takes
Hendriks, Verlangen, . Cf. Möller, Gottesdienst.
Hendriks, Verlangen, . Hendriks here, by way of example, points at the nature of the
church-buildings the community worships in: are they apt for direct contributions by
community-members, such as reecting on the sermon (prophecy).
Hendriks, Verlangen, and .
place between God and man, for that is our longing. … They should give
people a clear and unambiguous armation of their faith.
This armation of belief has to be both afective and cognitive of nature.
Mattijs Ploeger summarizes their argument as follows: “(T)he church helps
people to reach the fullment of their deepest longing: the realisation of the
good and righteous life. … (T)he church should view itself as one of several
possible ways to give expression to this longing.” The Ploegers state that in
the current cultural context, a strong identity of the church and its members is
most helpful. Liturgical ritual serves the construction of such identity, which
is both individual and communal. This construction, however, is not based on
an account of the liturgy in which the participant primarily believes God is at
work. One might say that participants in the liturgy have a ‘longing’ for God.
But liturgical ritual is only valid (passend) if “based on common human needs
for armation and continuity of their basic trust in life, in themselves, and in
the other, intertwined with trusting the Eternal One.”
In conclusion, it can be said that, though in community-building theory the
Sunday-service as worship is present, it is not treated as formative for Chris-
tians or for the process of community building. On the other hand, the impor-
tance of liturgy for the believer is clearly stated in much practical-theological
literature. This, however, is more about individual faith, its language, and its
emotions, than about transforming character in communion with the congre-
gation. We can conclude that the notion of liturgy within practical ecclesiology
Ploeger and Ploeger-Grotegoed, De gemeente, .
Ploeger, Celebrating, f.
Ploeger, Celebrating, .
Ploeger and Ploeger-Grotegoed, De gemeente, .
Other literature on community-building conveys the same image. The church is, surely,
God’s own creature as He calls people into his service. But once called, we have to work—
not as self-made Christians but living out of God’s grace, God’s promise that He will work
among his people. Liturgy in the church-service serves only to explicate this presumption.
Cf. Mees te Velde, Gemeenteopbouw (Community building), Vol. (Barneveld: Vuurbaak,
), . In her summary of contemporary models and theories of community- building
from all kinds of perspectives and denominations, mostly but not exclusively from a
Dutch perspective, Ingrid Plantinga-Kalter does not mention the liturgy at all (Ingrid
Plantinga-Kalter, De gereedschapskist van de gemeenteopbouwer: Een inleiding op gemeen-
teopbouw (The toolbox for the community builder: An introduction to community build-
ing) (Amsterdam: Buijten & Schipperheijn, )).
E.g., Duncan B. Forrester, Truthful Action: Explorations in Practical Theology (Edinburgh:
T&T Clark, ), –.
is not about formation, character, and the importance of being exposed to for-
mative practices, but is treated as expressing core beliefs, as rendering thanks
to what Christians as individual and communal believers already perceived to
have gained through faith, and as the place where we celebrate what we know
God did and will do. Liturgy in practical ecclesiology is presented mostly as
expression or elaboration of the identity already present in the individuals and
community, and not as an ongoing formative practice.
Taking up the critical remarks by Nicholas Wolterstorf, taken from Alexan-
der Schmemann, the Russian Orthodox theologian whom Wolterstorf names
“the nest liturgical theologian of the Orthodox Church in the twentieth cen-
tury,” liturgy is not intended to full the religious needs and desires of church
members, as if the church should be some kind of “service organization,” and
as if “the clergy enact the liturgy for the benet of those who nd it spiritually
nourishing and edifying.” On the contrary, for liturgy is not something the cler-
gy enacts:
It’s the church that enacts the liturgy, not the clergy. Though the church
does so under the leadership of the clergy, the liturgy is not something
that clerics do. And the church enacts the liturgy not to satisfy the needs
and desires of individual congregants but to worship God. … (I)t was for
the performance of such actions that God created the church. When the
church assembles for communal worship, she does what she was called
into existence to do. The church exists to worship God in Christ.
According to Wolterstorf, and I agree with him, “liturgical theology, at its most
fundamental, will begin from the understanding of God implicit in worship as
such, and it will move on from there to the understanding of God implicit in
mutual address between God and his people.” This mutual address is what is
going on in the liturgy, in which the participants and members are taken up.
They ‘practice’ something:
The enactment of the liturgy is the site of mutual address and listening
between God and the people. In the liturgy we are joined with God in a
community of addressers and listeners … Enactments of the liturgy are
by no means the only sites in which we address God; nor are they the only
sites in which God addresses us. They are, however, the principal sites in
Wolterstorf, Worship, f.
Wolterstorf, Worship, .
Wolterstorf, Worship, .
which mutual address and listening between God and God’s people take
place.
If we take up the argument so far, the formation of “strong and complex dis-
ciples” (Healy) is needed for the church’s quest for identity. This formation
is not about expression of one’s individual and communal faith. It is about
taking part in the enactments of the liturgy, the liturgy being the “principal”
(Wolters torf) place in which this takes place. Or, in the words of Susan Wood,
it all comes to placing ourselves
in the formative environment of the liturgy so as to acquire the perspective
expressed there, to experience ourselves as active members of a worship-
ping community, and through the liturgical rite to be caught up into the
doxological return to the Father through Christ in the power of the Spirit.
As Bernd Wannenwetsch has shown, there is a serious theological problem with
liturgy as expression and not as formative. If we look carefully into the tradi-
tion of Reformed theology, thus Wannenwetsch argues, it does not view liturgy
as the expression of inherent faith of the believer or the church. The external
means of Word and Sacrament are both constitutive and formative for faith and
its expressions. “Christian piety in Reformed perspective is not ‘transforming’
internal experiences into ‘outer forms’; it is nothing but practicing the ‘lovely’
forms, the liturgical means of grace, concrete practices, which Luther names
the marks of the Church.” We must be truthful to these ‘lovely forms,’ which
we receive and must preserve in the praxis pietatis. Wannenwetsch here criti-
cizes the typically modern concept of ‘giving form’ to faith as if faith is already
presupposed as an apriori inwardness of the immediately present relationship
Wolterstorf, Worship, f.
Susan K. Wood, “The Liturgy: Participatory Knowledge of God in the Liturgy,” in: James J.
Buckley, David S. Yeago (eds), Knowing the Triune God: The Work of the Spirit in the Practic-
es of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, ), .
Bernd Wannenwetsch, “Lob der Äusserlichkeit: Evangelische praxis pietatis als gottes-
dienstliche Frömmigkeit,” in Johannes von Lüpke and Edgar Thaidigsmann (eds), Denk-
raum Katechismus: Festgabe für Oswald Bayer zum . Geburtstag (Tübingen: Mohr/Sie-
beck, ), –, . Cf. “Soweit haben wir den Gottesdienst als ‘Einübung’ in das
christliche Leben beschrieben, in welchem die wesentlichen Vollzüge einer gemeinsamen
praxis pietatis und damit ‘Logik’ und Regelhaftigkeit des christlichen Lebens den Gläubi-
gen gewissermassen ‘in Fleisch und Blut’ übergehen” (Bernd Wannenwetsch, “Die ethische
Dimension der Liturgie,” in Karl-Heinrich Bieritz et al., Gottesdienst der Kirche: Handbuch
der Liturgiewissenschaft / (Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, ), –, ).
with God leading to a Neo-Protestant kind of projection of spirituality. In turn,
Wannenwetsch refers to the relation between formation and practices: “For-
mation is nothing more and nothing less than initiation into those practices of
discipleship.” According to Wannenwetsch, all kinds of diferent practices are
only understandable as Christian formative practices when ordered unto the
dramatic cohesion of the liturgy. In taking part in the liturgy, we become what
we are: the people of God. For it is God who gathers us in Word and Sacrament,
rather than us gathering around Word and Sacrament.
Consequently, liturgical formation is not an optional (though vital and cen-
tral) expression for Christians. It is the mode of existence of the Christian—and
of the Church for that matter. Liturgical practices build and presuppose the
Church. Becoming “strong and complex disciples” is not something we could
achieve outside the liturgy. Liturgy as the praxis pietatis of the participants is
the constituent of being church, thus shaping us to become what we are, called
to reliable disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ.
This brings us to the nal stage of the argument: a discussion of the relation
between liturgy and ecclesiology.
The Church is a Community sui generis
How, and to what degree, do we need the liturgy as formative—not primarily
to express the believer’s faith, but to bring church about? Nicholas Wolterstorf
at this point states that liturgy is the constituent of the church. Not because
the church is a human achievement, but—on the contrary—because here we
experience how God, concretely and through human beings, calls his church
into existence. Liturgy is the actualization of the church, Wolterstorf states.
In his rst doctoral thesis, Dietrich Bonhoefer presented an account of the
Church, which can be fruitful for exploring this notion and its consequences
for practical ecclesiology. According to Bonhoefer, the Church is a community
sui generis, namely a community of Spirit as community of love. “(E)xisting
sociological categories like ‘association’ or ‘community’ fall short of encapsu-
lating the nature of the Church, since they are incapable of rendering an intel-
ligible account of ‘evangelical-ecclesial forms’ such as baptism, conrmation,
Wannenwetsch, “Lob,” (quoting Martha E. Stortz).
Wannenwetsch (“Lob,” ) makes clear that this is a crucial expression.
Wolterstorf, Worship, –.
Dietrich Bonhoefer, Sanctorum Communio: Eine Dogmatische Untersuchung zur Soziolo-
gie der Kirche ( ) (München: Kaiser, ()), .
or assembly.” The only sociological community-building principle for the
church can be God’s Word. This Church can only be thought through from its
concrete existence in Word and Sacrament by which God creates her.
This notion of the Church as creatura verbi is, of course, vital for Reformed
ecclesiology. Such doctrinal formulation, however, is not some abstract truth
invented by theologians. It is the confessed and lived truth of the church itself.
Just as Martin Luther, in the context of the Wittenberg-troubles in -
preached his famous Invokavit-Predigten, defending that the concrete reform
of the church never should be legalistically achieved, but should be thought of
as the concrete manifestation of God’s power through his Word. The doctri-
nal formula serves as a summary of practical-ecclesiological lived experiences.
Is Bonhoefer’s demonstration of the “liturgical existence” of the Church,
however, not yet another blueprint-ecclesiology? Not necessarily, I would say,
if liturgy is taken as a really formative part of the church in via, as part of em-
bodying the church’s pilgrim state. This notion points to the importance of the
concept of liminality. Originally stemming from the eld of ritual studies (Vic-
tor Turner), liminality is now used in liturgical studies to indicate the fact that
the church, called to embody God’s transforming power within this world both
in its individual and corporate aspects, does not exactly know what concrete
embodiment ts this vocation. Of course one can easily list some generic fea-
tures of being a Christian. But the concrete practices of the church are always
to be looked for. Only if and when this search is undertaken as an aspect of and
in the context of worshipping God and thus being in-formed and transformed
into the Body of Christ, we do justice to the core convictions of the church itself.
Bernd Wannenwetsch, “Ecclesiology and Ethics,” in Gilbert Meilaender and William Wer-
pehowski (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Theological Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, ), –, .
Bonhoefer, Sanctorum, .
E.g., Bonhoefer, Sanctorum, f.
Cf. Jochen Cornelius-Bundschuh, Die Kirche des Wortes: Zum evangelischen Predigt- und
Gemeindeverständnis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, ), : “Zentrales The-
ma der Invokatitpredigten ist die Frage nach der Wirkmächtigkeit des Predigtwortes,” and
Christoph Schwöbel, “The Creature of the Word: Recovering the Ecclesiology of the Re-
formers,” in Colin E. Gunton and Daniel W. Hardy, (eds), On Being the Church: Essays on
the Christian Community (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, ), –.
Wannenwetsch, “Ecclesiology,” .
Healy, for instance, stated that new ecclesiologies that take the real or empirical church
into account, more or less equate the favoured practices with normatively good ones
(Nicholas M. Healy, “Practices and the New Ecclesiology: Misplaced Concreteness?,” In-
ternational Journal of Systematic Theology / (), –).
‘Liminality’ indicates that the actual outcome of concrete forms of being
Christian is not yet settled. Christians live ‘in between the lines’ of what is old
and familiar, and new and unknown. Liminality indicates the current ‘in be-
tween’ phase of the Christian community. This indicates that the church’s
liturgical practices are formative in establishing the constantly shifting bound-
aries and contents of the community both in and over against its context.
It is in the liturgy that the search for identity takes place. By performing and
enacting the practices of baptism and the eucharist, listening to the Word of
God, by preaching, singing and praying, we are constantly formed, reformed,
into taking our place within the theodramatic horizon. Liturgical practices so
are means by which God himself wants to transform us. Not that we already
know what exact shape our lives should get, or what kind of church we now are
called to be. But it is in the liturgy that we as participants, by placing ourselves
within the context of God’s own formative action—as we believe the liturgy to
be a ‘means of grace’—are shaped to cope with all the diferent challenges the
current phase of church and culture face us with.
Liturgy, thus conceived, is always political of nature. As Hans Ulrich stated:
“(W)orship has to be the place of actual engagement with the social world, be-
cause worship is the visible place of the actual performance of Christian forms
of life.” Practicing what the church has done over the centuries in both con-
stant and changing ways, the church lives its identity as pilgrim-people of God
within the world. Liturgy, then, really is an agent in concrete congregational
transformation processes.
For the concept of liminality, see Marcel Barnard, Johan Cilliers and Cas Wepener, Worship
in the Network Culture: Liturgical Ritual Studies: Fields and Methods, Concepts and Metaphors
(Leuven: Peeters, ), –. Alan J. Roxburgh (The Missionary Congregation, Leader-
ship, and Liminality (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, ) uses the concept of lim-
inality as a model of the church’s engagement of current ecclesial and societal changes.
Cf. Healy, Church, and . The Church is no distinct society. It is about its liminality.
“The conguration of a parish is constructed over time, by processes that include internal
and external bricolage” ().
Hans G. Ulrich, “Retrospect and Prospect,” in: Oswald Bayer, Alan Suggate, (edd.), Worship
and Ethics. Lutherans and Anglicans in Dialogue (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, ), . Cf.
Hans G. Ulrich, Wie Geschöpfe leben. Konturen evangelischer Ethik (Lit Verlag: Berlin ).
Cf. Bernd Wannenwetsch, Gottesdienst als Lebensform. Ethik für Christenbürger (Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, ) (: Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, )), –; Wannenwetsch, „Die ethische Dimension,” –;
Healy, Church, .
Müller, “Liturgie”.
Conclusion
We began with the small Dutch congregation and her four sister-churches,
which addressed their question to the Practice Centre. The line of thought ex-
pressed above was leading in the advice of the Practice Centre. This advice was
discussed in a series of constructive conversations with delegates of all ve
churches, and subsequently within all ve congregations themselves.
The outline of the advice can be expressed in the following steps:
. A pastor who simply does what the congregation always expected the
pastor to do, will not be sucient to solve the current crisis.
. The point is that the congregation should understand itself in its quest
for a ‘new’ identity.
. This identity is not found or expressed by the professional theolo-
gian—it should be a communal quest for the community.
. Such quest, therefore, is not a matter of a committee or some profes-
sional managerial body, but should be communal.
. The concrete role of the church-services on Sundays in this quest can-
not be overestimated, for here the formation of the Christian should
nd its core and centre.
. The solution proposed is to call two pastors for these ve churches,
to serve this quest for a ‘new’ identity in an explicitly liturgical way.
Their primary task is to lead church services in which the congrega-
tions will be able to be formed as Christians to be part of the Church
in its pilgrim-state. By this primarily (though not exclusively) liturgical
approach, the formative role of liturgy is explicitly addressed. Con-
trary to a more managerial approach, including the appointment of
committees and taskforces who gather at evenings with consequently
only a small part of the community-members attending, in the liturgy
the whole of the community can be involved and addressed.
The Practice Centre participated in this process from February until
May . As the nancial means to call two pastors for these ve churches
turned out to be insucient, the concrete proposal will not be carried out in
its original form. Each of the congregations is now in a process of calling a
pastor (part-time or as an interim-pastor). Interestingly enough, however, the
Jannet de Jong, Hans Schaefer, Eindrapport kerken Midden Drenthe (Final Report Church-
es Drenthe) (Zwolle: Praktijkcentrum, ).
line of thought was convincing to the church councils, congregations, and the
group of delegates of all ve churches. The discovery that the quest for iden-
tity should be fostered primarily, though not exclusively, by liturgy resonated
strongly with perceptions of the church-councils and church members. Other
solutions that have to be looked for will contain this strong liturgical emphasis,
as the participants assured us.
This case study shows that the lack of attention for liturgy in its formative
role within practical-ecclesiological literature should be corrected. The Re-
formed presuppositions on the constitutive and formative character of Word
and Sacraments for the Church and Christians, being their constitutive prac-
tices, contain more than enough practical starting points to do this.
The question as to what this entails for ministers in the current liminal
phase of the church and its context in the Netherlands, is one instance on
which further research needs to be done. The Practice Centre in has ini-
tiated three other trajectories within congregations to foster the liturgical for-
mation of congregation-life. This is designed as some sort of action research,
in which we will try to experience the formative nature of the liturgy. However,
this is not self-evident and continues to be dependent on God’s own action. It
is his church—and only he can lead it on the way towards its nal destination.
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Index
Action Research
Apartheidf, f
Atonement, , f,
Augustine, , , , f, f
Baptism, , , ,
Barth, Karl, , , , , ,
Bavinck, Herman–
Balentine, Samuel–, ,
Bell, Catherinef
Bennett, Jana Margueritef, f
Bergen, Wesley
Bible
Genesis :–:a, , f
Genesis –f
Genesis –
Genesis :
Genesis :
Genesis :f
Genesis :
Exodus :f
Exodus :–
Exodus :–:
Exodus :f
Exodus :–
Exodus –.–
Exodus –
Exodus :–
Leviticus, , –
Leviticus –, ,
Leviticus :
Leviticus :
Leviticus :
Leviticus :
Leviticus :
Leviticus
Leviticus :
Leviticus :
Leviticus :
Leviticus :
Leviticus :
Leviticus
Leviticus :.
Leviticus :–
Leviticus :
Leviticus :.
Leviticus :–f
Leviticus :
Leviticus
Leviticus
Numbers :f
Deuteronomy :–
Deuteronomy :
Deuteronomy :–
Chronicles :
Psalms, –
Psalm f,
Psalm f,
Psalm :
Psalm f
Proverbs :
Ecclesiastics
Isaiah :n
Isaiah
Isaiah :
Isaiah :f
Isaiah :–
Zechariah :f.f
Malachi :
Matthew :
Matthew :
Matthew :
Matthew :
Matthew :
Matthew :
Matthew :–.–,
Mark :–n
Mark :n
Luke :f
Luke :n
Luke :,
John :n
John :.n
John :n
John :–,
John :f
John :
Acts
Acts :
Acts :–
Acts :
Romans :fn
Romans :n
Romans :
Romans :
Romans :f
Romans :–,
Romans
Romans :
Corinthians :
Corinthians
Corinthians :
Corinthians :n
Corinthians –,
Corinthians :,
Corinthians f
Corinthians :n
Corinthians :.,
Corinthians :f
Corinthians :
Corinthians
Corinthians :f
Corinthians :
Corinthians :n
Galatians :–n,
Galatians :
Ephesians :
Ephesians :f
Ephesians :f
Ephesians :–n
Ephesians :f
Philippians :n
Colossians :
Colossians :–n
Colossians :f
Hebrews :
Hebrews –
Hebrews :–f
James :f
Peter :
John :
John :
Revelation n
Revelation :–
Bonhoefer, Dietrichf, , –,
Cahalan, Kathleen, n
Calvin, John, , , , f, , –,
, f, –, –, f,
–, f, , , f
Carnes, Natalie
Catholicity–
Ceremony, f,
Christ, , , f, f, –
Sufering of–, , –
Church, , , f, , , f, f,
f,
as creatura verbi
Batak Churchf
Catholicity of the–
and state,
Confessing Church, f
Dutch Reformed Church,
South Africaf
Early Church, , –,
German Protestant Churchf
Missional churchf
Reformed Churches (Liberated), the
Netherlands, , n, f, f
Communicative action theory–,
Community–, , –, ,
f, , , f, –
Community buildingf, , ,
, f, f
Cone, James–
Covenantf, –, –
Covenantal approach–,
Craigo-Snell, Shannon,
Creation, f, f
as separation
Crucixion–
De Kruijf, Gerrit–
Derks, Marco
Desiref, , f
Discipleship, f, f, f
Dix, Gregory
Driver, Tomf
Ecclesiology, f, f, f
Eschatology, f, f, f
Ethicsf, f, , , f,
Cosmic
Ecologicalf
Eschatological, –
of workf
in relation to liturgy–, f, f, f
Sexual
Etzenmüller, Gregorf
Eucharist, see also Lord’s Supper and Holy
Communion, f, , f, , f,
–, , f,
Ethical meaning off, ,
Eucharistic spirituality–
Formation, , , , f,
–
Genderf
Gift–
God,
As actor in liturgyf, , , , f, f,
f,
God image, –
Gorman, Frank, –, ,
Gregory of Nyssa, f
Grenz, Stanleyf
Gustafson, James
Hauerwas, Stanley, , , , , , ,
f, , , ,
Healy, Nicholas M.f
Heaven, heavenly, f
Hendriks, Janf
Holy Communion, see also Eucharist and
Lord’s Supper, f
Hypocrisy, f, –
Identication–
Identity, f, f
Improvisation, –
Indonesiaf, , –
Justice, Injusticef, , , , , , ,
f, , f
Corrective justicef
Distributive justicef
Keller, Tim, , f
Kuyper, Abraham,
Life, dailyf, ,
Liminalityf
Liturgy, Liturgical, see also Worshipf, ,
, f, f, f, , f, ,
f, f, , –, f
African-American–
And community building, –
Liturgical Movement,
Reformed liturgy, f, , f, ,
, n
As formativef, –, , –,
–
Lord’s Supper, see also Eucharist and Holy
Communionf, , , , –,
f, , , –
Experience of–
Frequent communion of–, f,
, f
Luther, Martin, , , , , ,
, ,
Marriage, see also Wedding, , –
In historyf
Marriage course, f
McCarthy, David Matzkof
Memory, see also Remembrance
Communicative and cultural memory
Memory of Christf, –
Murray, Paul
Mysticalf,
Neocalvinism
Noordmans, Oepke
O’Donovan, Oliver,
Ofertoryf, , –
Performance–, , , –,
Pieper, Josef
Pietismf
Ploeger, Albert and Joke Ploeger-
Grotegoedf
Postliberals, ,
Practicef,
Prayer, , , , f,
Priestly traditionf, –,
Privatizationf,
Qualitative Research,
Rahner, Karl,
Redemption, , f
Reformationf, , ,
Reformedf, f, f,
Reformed theologyf, , f, f, ,
,
Rehearsalf,
Remembrance, see also Memoryf, ,
f
Performative Remembrance–,
f
Reno, R.R.f, , ,
Ritual, –, f, –
Ritual studies
Romance, Romanticf, , f
Sabbathf, , , f
Sacrice–
Self-sacrice
Saliers, Don, , ,
Sanctication, f
Schaefer, Hans, f
Schleiermacher, Friedrich
Self-givingf,
Smith, James K.A., , , , f,
, , f, –, f
Socialf
Spirit, Holy, f, f,
Taylor, Charles,
Theater, Theatricality–,
Transformation–
Tromp, Thijs
Union with Christ–, f
Universal
Vanhoozer, Kevin J., , f
Virtuef, , , f, , , , f,
, ,
Vocation, f
Vos, Pieter
Wainwright, Geofrey,
Wannenwetsch, Berndf, n,
f
Weber, Max
Wedding, see also Marriage–
Wedding day,
Wedding liturgyf, f,
Wedding preparationf, –
Welker, Michael, , f
Wells, Samuel, , , f, , , f, ,
, ,
Wolde, Ellen van
Wolterstorf, Nicholas, , , ,
f
Wood, Susanf, ,
Work, –
and rest, f
and labor
Worldview
Worship, see also Liturgy, , , ,
, f, f, f, , f,
f
and ethics–, f, –, ,
f,
Pleasant worship –
as good in itself–
York Corpus Christi Plays, f
Youth
and religion
