Evangelical Is Not Enough 3

Thomas Howard opens the third chapter, Christian Worship: Act or Experience?, with a story of his time living in England and attending an evangelical church that was part of the Church of England. It was familiar to him in its evangelical belief. (For those who don’t know the Anglican communion includes both evangelical and anglo-catholic churches as well as just about everything in between.) But it was named after a saint (St. Andrew); was  eight hundred years old, with a history stretching back before the Protestant Reformation; used set prayers, also kneeling for prayer; and sang the Psalms. It was both familiar and alien to him.

I can’t say that I’ve had any similar sort of childhood or adult revelations. Although my childhood formation was not specifically Christian, it did include a broad exposure to lots of different sorts of Christianity within the context of modern Christian pluralism. Nor did I have any particular bias toward one form of Christianity or another, though as a child I tended to prefer (or at least I better remember) the beauty and symbolism of the liturgical traditions over the more iconoclastic forms of Christian expression. But I adapted easily and readily to all sorts of spirituality — Christian or otherwise. So the aspects of Thomas Howard’s narrative where he is surprised by his encounter with differences is a little hard for me to inhabit. I can understand it intellectually, of course, but I can’t really grasp the impact it had on him.

One of the first things discussed is the fact that this Anglican church knelt for prayer. Howard had always wanted to be in a corporate setting that knelt, but had been constrained within his evangelical context. Nor is it simply a trivial matter of personal preference. What we do with our bodies does not merely express something internal. Rather, the posture and movement of our bodies works the other way around as well. If we are still, that stillness can begin to percolate inwards. I liked the way he uses a hypothetical Tibetan lama to make that point.

The phrase worship experience missed the point. Worship, in the ancient tradition, was not thought of as an experience at all; it was an act.

The above, of course, ties directly to his title for this chapter. He continues with his encounter of antiphons, responses that his evangelical formation had always denigrated as rote. The vicar says, “The Lord be with you,” and the church responds, “And with thy spirit.” They are not rote at all, of course.

Love greets love. … Hell hates this. It can only hiss, Out of my way, fool. But heaven says, The Lord be with you. This is what was said to us in the Incarnation. This is what the Divine Love always says.

Howard is generous in his analysis of the reasons evangelicals may react against things like antiphonal responses and set prayers and corporate postures in innocence. I’m probably a little less generous, but that’s a failing of my character, I think. Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.

In the public order we are delivered from the small confines of our own breasts. We do not want intimacy here. The attempt to make public worship personal, intimate, and informal is misbegotten. It confuses the public with the private, and in so doing it betrays both.

The above is an interesting point. I had never really considered it in those terms exactly. But the thought rings true to me.

The worship of the Church is an act — a most ancient and noble mystery — and almost nothing is gained by endlessly updating it, streamlining it, personalizing it, and altering it.

I would go even further. Not only is little gained, but much is lost in the process.

Evangelicalism, stalwart as it is, had in effect left me with nothing but the Bible and the modern world. “Sola Scriptura!” we cried. But it is not sola scriptura. This is to ignore, with almost unpardonable hubris, the Church, full of the Holy Ghost, moving faithfully along through history. It is to pit the Bible against the Church, which is heresy.

And I would add that sola scriptura is a myth and a lie. No text means anything absent interpretation. The only thing accomplished in that claim is to pit your individual, personal interpretation against that of the Church. Though, to be fair, most people who claim to believe in scripture alone are not actually asserting their own personal interpretation of the text. Rather, they accept the interpretation taught to them by someone who, for whatever reason, they trust. The problem arises when a particular interpretation can be traced to a specific individual at a specific point in time (usually in the last five hundred years or so) and that interpretation contradicts the most ancient interpretations of the text and is either a novel interpretation or a new expression of an ancient heresy. Why would a reasonable Christian accept either one as true? Of course, I guess most people never trace the provenance of the interpretations they accept. They just trust those who passed them along to them.