Shaping the heart, not just the mind

Over the past twenty or so years, publishers have turned out a steady stream of Christian worldview books, which together have altered the conversation over the relationship between faith and cultural activities in God’s world. Most of these have sought to reshape a “Christian mind.” From Harry Blamires and Francis Schaeffer to Nancy Pearcey and Al Wolters, there has emanated a growing library of writings dedicated to fashioning a Christian worldview from which to approach all of life.


But are such efforts adequate to the realities of living in the real world? Probably the worst title I have seen among such efforts comes out of Australia: A spectator’s guide to world views: Ten ways of understanding life, to which I myself contributed a chapter on liberalism. (Don’t let the title deter you from reading an otherwise excellent book!) Of course we are by no means mere spectators; we are active participants, intimately involved in a way of life, with all its rituals, customs and usages, which inevitably shape us as persons created in God’s image.

This is something that philosopher James K. A. Smith understands well and it forms the thesis of his Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. We are not simply thinking beings. We are not even believing creatures, as important as this facet is. We are, rather, desiring beings, motivated in a basic visceral way by what we love. We do not necessarily consciously decide what or whom to love; we are in fact shaped by certain rituals, by pedagogies of desire that form us without our even being aware of them. We are habituated to desire certain things by the larger culture, and it is Smith’s task to get us to recognize these secular “liturgies” and how they work themselves into our hearts. Following Augustine’s insight, Smith asserts that we inevitably worship what we love. We are homo liturgicus – liturgical man.

Two Kingdoms and Cultural Obedience

In recent decades, many Christians have been drawn to the Reformed understanding of the faith due to its holistic approach to the life in Christ—an emphasis found especially in the neocalvinist revival in the nineteenth-century Netherlands, led by Abraham Kuyper, Herman Bavinck and others. Transplanted to North America in the twentieth century, neocalvinism has led to the establishment of a number of confessionally-based organizations, including a network of Christian day schools, universities, labour unions, think tanks, political movements and farmers' associations. The Kuyperian influence has expanded over the last three decades due to the efforts of, among others, the Center for Public Justice, the Coalition for Christian Outreach, Redeemer University College, the Christian Labour Association of Canada and, of course, Cardus. It is now more common to hear ordinary evangelical Christians speak in terms of all of life belonging to Christ and of grace restoring nature, though they may differ in the practical implications they draw from this basic confession.

However, not all evangelical Christians are necessarily on side of this neocalvinist revival.

Read more here.

'World-and-life-viewitis' revisited: a response to Hart

Now that we have returned from our holiday on the balmy shores of the Huron Sea, it is time to respond to Darryl Hart's Losing the Keys and Finding a World View and to one of the comments he left in my original post on the subject.

Let me begin by observing that, because Hart has not offered a point-by-point rebuttal to my arguments, I am unable to respond on that level. What he has done is to employ a form of argument which, if it is not precisely ad hominem in character, certainly skirts at its edges. Says Hart:

But we are befuddled that folks like Koyzis do not seem to notice that most of the places where neo-Calvinism has tried to remedy secularism have also brought liberal Protestantism (or at least a movement away from Reformed Christianity) with it.

If a colleague gives me a paper he has written for my critique, it would generally not do for me to tell him in response that he has ugly circles under his eyes. To be sure, he may have been up late any number of nights working on this essay, and I may judge that he was unwise to do so at the expense of his health and alertness. In fact, his lack of sleep may have affected the quality of his paper. But to comment on his altered appearance does not in itself address the flaws in his argument.

Similarly, there may be all sorts of problems within the neocalvinist fold. Given that neocalvinists, like other Christians, are sinners saved by grace, it should not be unexpected that there will be failings — perhaps even spectacular failings — amongst them. To pretend otherwise would be naïve. Yet what is lacking in Hart's critique is a persuasive argument as to why the neocalvinist position logically leads in a liberalizing direction. Instead his argument is an appeal to fear: we don't want to end up like. . . [fill in the blank]. I might also point out that many of the older Reformed and Presbyterian bodies in Europe and North America experienced the effects of liberalism well before the arrival of neocalvinism on the scene.

Now it is true that neocalvinists have generally sought to build bridges to their fellow Christians in other traditions. They are not to be found in any single denomination, although their ecclesial roots are generally in Dutch Calvinism, and especially the Christian Reformed Church in North America. While many if not most of us, contrary to Hart's accusation, greatly appreciate the importance of the institutional church, we will not turn aside those evangelicals with more voluntaristic/baptistic views of the church. If Hart objects to this ecumenical focus in neocalvinism, then I suppose I would have to admit, for myself at least, to being guilty as charged. I will leave him to come up with the appropriate penalty for the likes of me.

One last point on the institutional church: I might indicate, to extend an olive branch, that I find much to like in many of the essays collected in Hart's Recovering Mother Kirk. His analysis and critique of evangelicalism with respect to ecclesiology and liturgy are dead-on. As someone with a special love for the biblical Psalms, I particularly applaud his endorsement of their use in the church's liturgy and hope his efforts at recovering sung psalmody bear fruit amongst his students and readers. I have listed his book in the bibliographic page of my own Genevan Psalter website. I would love to keep our conversation going on this topic at least.

Let us now turn to the rest of life outside the formal context of the worshipping community. Here once again is where Hart's position is weakest, and thus far he has said nothing to persuade me otherwise. Decades ago philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd showed the connection between the pretended autonomy of theoretical thought, as manifested in the special sciences, and the secularizing direction of western civilization. Hart again: "Many two-kingdom advocates [in whose company he counts himself] are not pleased with the way the West is going, or the state of higher learning in North America." Yet it is not at all clear how a solution will be found in re-emphasizing the neutrality of human reason in the face of the manifold ideological distortions it has facilitated and then tried to disguise. If there's a logical connection, he had best explain it, because his approach looks to me like an effort to turn back the clock to an earlier stage in the progression of the disease, rather than an attempt to remedy the disease itself.

But then there's this:

One point that neo-Calvinists don’t seem to understand about two-kingdom thought is that the two-kingdom view is not a solution to this world’s problems; two-kingdom folk actually don’t believe solutions will come in this fallen world until the consummation.

Whether or not Hart means this to apply to problems in the academy is unclear. If so, it appears to allow him an out with respect to the point I made in the previous paragraph. If we Christians must await the arrival of the eschaton to address the problems of this world, then perhaps it doesn't matter ultimately what we do with our schools, universities, businesses, labour unions, &c. And if this is true, then my objection that his commitment to neutral reason will inevitably secularize the university is perhaps beside the point, which I suppose leaves us nothing left to discuss.

Finally there's this curious remark from the comments to my first post. Hart again:

If I accept the liberal [political] order it is simply because it is a historical reality that makes pining for the Netherlands circa 1901 or the Holy Roman Empire around 1400 unbecoming.

So neocalvinists are reactionaries? I thought we were liberalizers. Which is it? This smacks of going after the beast with whatever weapon is at hand, appropriate or not. If a spear doesn't do the trick, try poison. If poison fails, there's always a pistol. Something's bound to work eventually.

I will reiterate something I hinted at in my first post. The validity of a particular school of thought can be assessed by how well it accounts for the fulness of created reality. In this case there is simply too much of life that Hart's worldview — and yes, he does have one! — cannot take into account.

D. G. Hart and 'world-and-life-viewitis'

Darryl G. Hart has fought hard to make himself the bête noir of the christian university community in North America and, truth to tell, he has largely succeeded. This is a typical entry from his blog: If the Bible Speaks to All of Life, Why Not the Confession? Here's Hart in his own words:

[A] recent speaking engagement at Grove City College . . . got me thinking about the world-and-life-viewitis that has reached epidemic proportions among Protestants. Most evangelical Protestant colleges these days are justifying their existence and identity by saying they provide a wholistic [sic] vision on learning that is grounded in the Christian faith. The Lordship of Christ, the authority of Scripture, even the cultural mandate come in for aid and comfort.

This ideal is an honorable one and springs from generally wholesome motives. Who would not want to see Christ honored in all aspects of the created order, and who would want to be unfaithful where Scripture has revealed God’s holy will?

There’s just one problem: the Bible doesn’t speak to all the arts and sciences, let alone whether incoming freshmen should receive a laptop or whether it should be an Apple or an IBM machine. In fact, the one place where Christ is revealed, the Bible, has very little to say about the curriculum of an undergraduate education. If we say that it does, we are in danger of putting the imaginations of men above the Word of God — that is, making the Bible say what we want it to say.

This point becomes pretty plausible if we consider that the Reformed creeds and catechisms have nothing to say about rhetoric, logic, grammar, music — the list could go on but not much longer for the medieval university’s curriculum. It has even less to say about quantum physics or critical theory and the vast range of subjects offered by today’s universities. But if the Bible speaks to all of these areas of human endeavor and inquiry, don’t we need to revise the confessions so that the church may rightly speak on what God has revealed?

Or could it be that what the creeds and confessions teach is pretty much the sum of what the Bible reveals? In which case, for the other areas of life we are left to our reasonable ability to make sense of God’s created order, thus leaving the church jurisdiction over divinity and the university faculty authority over the arts and sciences.

Hart represents a particular school of Reformed Christians who not only put great emphasis on the confessions of the 16th and 17th centuries, but also put something of a lutheranizing two-kingdoms spin on these confessions and on the Scripture on which they are based. This school is primarily associated with Westminster Seminary California, Hart's former employer. The expanding influence of Abraham Kuyper's worldviewish Christianity comes in for special criticism from this group.

In response three points can be made here.

First, Hart is correct to observe that the Bible has nothing to say about quantum physics and a host of other issues. He is also right to assert that we should not try to make it say what it doesn't say. My friend Roy Clouser has addressed this error in speaking of the encyclopedic assumption, i.e., the belief that the Bible is a kind of encyclopedia giving us scientific data about human origins, astronomy and, well, even political science.

However, Hart is missing something of the all-embracing character of the life in Christ as understood in Scripture as a whole. One need hardly accept the encyclopedic assumption to recognize that biblical religion has implications for how we live all of life, not just what we do in church on sundays: "So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God" (I Corinthians 10:31). Or this, also from St. Paul: "So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness. See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ" (Colossians 2:6-8).

Second, and perhaps more seriously, Hart's approach to Scripture is based on an inadequate epistemology. The Bible, it seems, is filled with a number of propositions, which have relevance to some of our activities in God's world, but not to most. In this huge swath of territory we simply rely on our own native reason, which we share with all human beings, whatever their religious commitments. Scripture informs our spiritual life, but not much beyond that. If Hart is correct about this, then it is little short of amazing that so many people emphasizing the need for a consistent christian worldview have found so much to write about. Are the issues to which they draw attention not genuine issues? Can their concerns be dismissed so easily?

In my own Political Visions and Illusions I undertake to explore the five political ideologies of liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, democratism and socialism. Despite their respective followers having access to reason, they nevertheless manage to embrace quite different visions of politics and indeed of reality as a whole. It is not too difficult to see the impact of more than one mutually incompatible worldview at play. It is also evident that these are a matter of adherents making entirely too much of a good thing, which is what Scripture calls idolatry. If Scripture is silent on a lot of particular things, it speaks clearly on idolatry, which inevitably affects the whole of life, including those academic disciplines left up to "our reasonable ability."

Third, Hart's approach must be viewed against an historical trajectory that has seen the secularization of any number of universities over the centuries, despite their christian origins. Here's Hart once more: "Or could it be that what the creeds and confessions teach is pretty much the sum of what the Bible reveals? In which case, for the other areas of life we are left to our reasonable ability to make sense of God’s created order, thus leaving the church jurisdiction over divinity and the university faculty authority over the arts and sciences." I agree that the church as institution should not attempt to pronounce in the arts and sciences. But Hart appears to be saying more than this. If we read this in light of what he's said above, we are left with a pretty toxic mix, and one that has led to the erosion of the christian character of countless universities in the past, from Harvard and Yale to Hamilton's own McMaster University, whose Divinity College sits with increasing unease on its campus among the other faculties of arts and sciences.

Disparage as he might the supposed pandemic of world-and-life-viewitis amongst evangelical Christians, Hart's approach does not represent a workable alternative. There is simply too much that it does not take into account, and for that reason it is unlikely to gain a foothold in the christian universities of North America. Though he undoubtedly has much to offer in the fields of "divinity" and liturgy, if we seek discernment with respect to the idolatries afoot in "secular" areas of life, we had best turn elsewhere.

The Burning (Unburnt) Bush

I have in my personal library two liturgical books issued by the Church of Scotland. One is The Scottish Psalter of 1929, a thin volume whose split pages, coupled with the regular metres of the versifications, enable a congregation to mix and match texts and tunes in the course of worship. The second is The Psalms and Church Hymnary: Revised Edition, containing only texts (with very small print!) and no music. Both are printed by Oxford University Press. On the front is a shield carrying the ancient symbol of the Reformed Churches, the Burning Bush. Here is the version used by the Church of Scotland, overlaid against the diagonal Cross of St. Andrew:



The motto, "Nec tamen consumebatur," is Latin for "And it was not consumed." Some versions of this shield, most notably that of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, carry an alternative motto: "Ardens sed virens," meaning "burning but flourishing." The symbolism of the burning bush originates with the 12th national synod of 1583 of l'Église réformée de France, which now uses an updated version, overlaid with the Huguenot Cross:



Why the burning bush? The biblical allusion is, of course, to Exodus 3, especially verse 2: "And the angel of the LORD appeared to [Moses] in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed." Here's a rough translation from the website of l'Église réformée:

This burning bush, in addition to signifying the mysterious and unseen presence of the Lord, is also the symbol of the decisive meeting between Moses and God, that is to say, the call of God (who calls him by his first name) and the former's response to that call. . . . The logo thus indicates that each of us is personally called by God.

The Reformed Presbyterian Church, Hanover Presbytery, in the United States, uses a modified version of the burning bush:



while the Presbyterian Church in Canada currently uses this stylized version:



As far as I know the Presbyterian Church (USA) makes no use of this symbol, except for a possible allusion to it in the two small flames at either side of the cross below:



I have seen no evidence that either the Reformed Church in America or the Christian Reformed Church makes use of it. If anyone knows differently, please let me know.

Incidentally, in Orthodox usage the burning bush is referred to as the Unburnt Bush (perhaps a more accurate name), which is strongly associated with the virginity of Mary.

The new Calvinism

A number of my blogging friends have picked up on this surprising TIME Magazine story. Under the general heading of "10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now," number 3 is titled, The New Calvinism. Cardus's Ray Pennings has twice commented on this story: Time Magazine thinks Calvinism is Changing the World?, and Time's Ten Ideas Through the Lens of Number Three. Pennings believes that within a Calvinist framework christian faith can never be merely private but has public significance:

When Calvinism takes hold, it is not just something that impacts Calvinists. It has comprehensive implications for a society when it is consistently lived out. Last week, I was trying to explain to someone why what I believed mattered to my neighbours, and was not simply a private matter that they could live with out of respect for my religious freedom and because "I'm happy it works for you -- I'll find truth in my own corner." I used an ecological metaphor. When we live together, we share the air and water -- they don't respect the boundaries of private and public we set between us. So it is that personal religious beliefs, when taken seriously, end up not being all that personal. That is not just true for Calvinism -- it is as true for secularist belief, Islamic adherence, or new age philosophy. Our beliefs impact the social ecosystem in which we live and ultimately, the purity and health (or lack thereof) of the prevailing belief systems that shape our politics, economics, culture and every other aspect of society are impacted.

Not all professed Calvinists are necessarily keen on what they see as this "worldly" vision of transformation. The Acton Institute's Jordan J. Ballor cites a recent article by Calvin Van Reken analyzing the changes in hymns sung in the Christian Reformed Church over the decades: ‘Calvinism’ Transforming and Transformed.

[Van Reken] gives Rev. George Croly’s “Spirit of God, Who Dwells within My Heart,” which dates from 1867, as an example. When Croly wrote the song, it began, “Spirit of God, who dwells within my heart, / wean it from earth.” In its current form, the song begins, “Spirit of God, who dwells within my heart, / wean it from sin, through all its pulses move” (emphasis added).

Van Reken concludes that “Rev. Croly was praying in particular for grace that would help him be weaned from attachments to this world. In Reformed churches today, this is rarely sung or spoken. After all, because our world belongs to God, should we not feel at home here?”

As Van Reken also notes in the article, in his book The Jesus I Never Knew Philip Yancey passes along the words of his former minister Bill Leslie, who “told him that as churches grow wealthier and wealthier, their preferences for hymns changes from ‘this world is not my home, I’m just a-passin’ through,’ to ‘This is my Father’s world.’”

It’s worth considering as “The New Calvinism” becomes a force for changing the world the extent to which “Calvinism,” or better “Reformed theology,” is also changed, and not always for the better. Van Reken’s critique and engagement with the “new” view is an important one that ought to be thoughtfully considered by all proponents of “The New Calvinism.”

There are some real positives in the new vision, and some correctives to the old vision that need to be taken seriously. But as Van Reken summarizes, “The new vision can also generate a real problem: It focuses all our attention on this world and the good we can do. In so doing, the hope of heaven can be diminished, with the result that some come to love the world and the things in it. In a word, it helps us become worldly.”

There is, of course, a genuine danger that, as Christians undertake to transform the world for the cause of Christ, they will themselves be transformed by the world. We are always in danger of loving the creation more than the Creator. Yet the way to combat this is not to reject God's good creation but to love it ordinately as the gift of God's grace, and to do the hard work of grappling with the very spirits that would deform our affections and obstruct the culmination of God's kingdom and the redemption of that creation. With due respect to Croly, it is precisely from sin that we seek freedom in Christ, not from our created corporeality and its attendant responsibilities, which will be transformed and redeemed in the promised resurrection of the righteous.

I will take up this issue again in a review article forthcoming in Comment on Donald A. Carson's Christ and Culture Revisited. Stay tuned.

Hungarian Reformed Church

I have posted in my sidebar a blog, Magyar Református Egyház, maintained by my cyberspace friend, the Rev. Chuck Huckaby (aka Hukabyi Károly Pál), devoted to the Hungarian Reformed Church in the US and diaspora.


Coat of Arms
Hungarian Reformed Church
Calvin Synod

"Religion is life . . ."

Could Rod Dreher have been reading H. Evan Runner? Or have they both drawn on the same wellsprings? Listen to this podcast and judge for yourself: Orthodox Christianity and American Religious Life.

Stanley Robertson Hall (1949-2008)

I have recently learnt of the death of a friend whom I knew during our graduate studies at Notre Dame in the 1980s. I no longer recall exactly how Stan Hall (shown at left in his Notre Dame regalia) and I met, but I believe it was through a mutual friend who was studying in the same theology department at the university. Stan was an ordained Presbyterian minister, and we quickly discovered we had a common love of Reformed liturgy, which, while merely an avocation for me, was precisely what he was preparing to teach professionally. We further had similar convictions that contemporary efforts at "dressing up" the liturgy and livening worship missed the point. His convictions are well summed up in the eulogy delivered by David W. Johnson:

He was convinced that worship should honor and express the Godness of God, and that anything called “worship” which allowed the fads of the moment or the clichés of the crowd to obscure the Godness of God was a perverse travesty of what worship ought to be. He was also convinced that a congregation is not an audience but a community, and therefore worship should be a community act and not a performance. His whole outlook on worship and ministry flowed, I think, from these two convictions. . . .

These two convictions do not isolate the church from the world. But they do require that the church be the church in the world, the church that is apt to offend even while it invites, because it tells the truth and exposes the sham. And these convictions insist that the movement of the Spirit, and therefore of the church, starts with the word, the font, and the table, and then goes out into the world equipped with grace, truth, and love. Those who plan worship around marketing surveys and trend analysis found Stan to be a very frustrating person, for he thought that such things did not honor the priority of Spirit, Word, font, and table.

He expressed great interest in my own versifications of the biblical psalms and canticles and used liturgical responses I composed at the congregation he was pastoring in Granger, Indiana. My own versification of the Song of Jonah became the seventh "reading" at an Easter Vigil service he led at that church.

I have been moved to read the reminiscences left by his colleagues and students at the memorial website at Austin Presbyterian Seminary, where he was the Jean Brown Associate Professor of Liturgics and Homiletics. It is rather remarkable to see the positive impact he had on so many people during his not quite twenty years there, especially given that I knew him before any of this had yet occurred. Nevertheless, everything said about him, e.g., his no-nonsense lack of sentimentality and his curmudgeonly manner, was true of him even then.

The most memorable thing Stan told me was that he thought most protestant liturgy could be summed up as "one damn thing after another." I have another memory of sitting with him and other theology grad students in the public cafeteria at Notre Dame. He delighted in telling them he was a "fundamentalist" and watching their discomfort. On yet another occasion in one of the student cafeterias, I saw him crush a bothersome fly with his thumb and then go back to eating as if nothing had happened.

Stan was unsentimental even about his own impending death, according to his friend, the Rev. Scott Black Johnston:

Knowing that the disease he had would one day claim his life, Stan went online a few years ago and located a group of Trappist monks with whom he was familiar in South Bend, Indiana—monks who support their Abby by selling simple caskets built out of pine and oak. Stan submitted his measurements to the monks, and within a couple of weeks UPS delivered a custom-made, pine box to the seminary. Unwrapping it, my friend set it up in the corner. As you might guess, most people who walked unprepared into his office felt pretty uncomfortable. First year students often left shaking their heads. Why would a person, even a person who is dying, want to spend every day working in the presence of a coffin? Stan, however, seemed genuinely amused by the students’ fretfulness.

Almost exactly a year ago, in a coffee shop in Austin, I asked my friend what the pine coffin was all about. Instead of speaking in maudlin terms about his illness, Stan began to describe for me the tradition (passed down through the centuries) whereby Trappist monks construct their own coffins, their own wooden boxes for burial. They do so, Stan said, as a prayer to God. “What sort of prayer?” I asked. Oh, he said, the monk prays that he not be tempted to live in fear for his mortal life, but that he be given the strength [to] live each day as grace—as if he had been granted a precious gift from God. His words reminded me of a prayer that Presbyterians often say at funerals. “Help us to live as those who are prepared to die. And when our days here are ended, enable us to die as those who go forth to live, so that living or dying, our life may be in Jesus Christ our risen Lord.”

We will miss Stan and look forward to seeing him again at the resurrection. In the meantime something of him will continue to live through the many people he influenced during the time God gave him in this life.

The Jerusalem Patriarchate: the drama continues

It seems we assumed too quickly that the status of Theophilos as Patriarch of Jerusalem had been definitively settled. A new difficulty has now arisen: Court freezes recognition of Greek Patriarch. If the achilles' heel of Anglicanism has long been its establishmentarian tendency to affirm the spiritual direction of the larger society, that of Orthodoxy is its historic proclivity for too easily accepting government interference in what should be internal ecclesiastical affairs. Orthodox leaders, including the beleaguered Ecumenical Patriarch whose very title Turkey is attempting to extinguish, would do well to read Abraham Kuyper and his followers on what the Dutch call soevereiniteit in eigen kring (sovereignty in its own sphere) and I myself label the pluriformity of authority. It might not keep governments out of their affairs, but it would give them a weapon with which to fight back.

The western rite, the Decalogue and Reformed influence

Although western Christians are generally aware of the several eastern- or Byzantine-rite churches in communion with Rome, far fewer know of the existence of western-rite Orthodox churches in communion with Constantinople and Moscow. From the website of St. Peter's Orthodox Christian Church in Fort Worth, Texas, we recognize a number of distinctive western elements: (1) the term Mass, rather than the Divine Liturgy; (2) a worship space that is spare by eastern standards and lacks an iconostasis; and (3) the appearance of typical western features in the liturgy itself, including the Kyrie, the Gloria and the Sanctus. The liturgy is actually a bit of an amalgam, including some typical Catholic hymns, such as the Angelus and the Regina Caeli, as well as some traditional Anglican elements such as the General Confession of sin, and even the Prayer of Humble Access.

What I find most surprising, however, is the appearance of the Decalogue, or Ten Commandments, near the beginning of the service, which is taken directly from the Book of Common Prayer. In the service of Holy Communion the BCP moved the Gloria to the end of the service where it functioned as something of a post-communion hymn, and in its place it inserted the Decalogue. This occurred under the influence of the continental reformers.

Indeed in most Reformed liturgies the reading of the law comes at the beginning of every sunday morning worship service. This comes after the confession of sin and assurance of pardon, which illustrates that for Reformed Christians the Law functions, not only to convict them of their sins, but as genuine instruction for living the new life. The BCP has the congregation respond after the recitation of each commandment: "Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law."

The eclectic liturgy used by this particular community of western-rite Orthodox Christians thus bears the unmistakable imprint of the Reformed tradition, by way of the BCP. I cannot help wondering whether its members are aware of this.

Lutherans, liturgy and society

Reading Richard Lischer's Open Secrets has prompted me to think about Lutherans once again. I spent nearly half a decade in the mid-1970s in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. There I attended Bethel College, a Baptist undergraduate institution. Bethel was something of a Baptist island in a Lutheran sea. Minnesota is, of course, heavily Scandinavian in influence, so the prevalence of Lutheran churches would scarcely be surprising. Moreover there are a large number of excellent undergraduate universities in the region, with Lutheran-affiliated institutions a dominating presence.

The glory of Lutheranism is definitely its liturgy in general, and its hymnody in particular. Unlike the Reformed churches, the Lutheran churches took a more moderate approach to reforming the liturgy, retaining such elements as the Gloria in excelsis, the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei, that is, the so-called ordinary of the mass. They further retained the traditional western one-year lectionary, which the Reformed abandoned.

Luther himself took the initiative and composed a number of hymns, some of which might be described as christological paraphrases of the Psalms. For example, "A Mighty Fortress" is such a rendering of Psalm 46. And "Out of the Depths I Cry to You" is Luther's interpretation of Psalm 130. Luther stands at the beginning of the tradition of German chorales, many of which, like the Genevan Psalms, were highly rhythmic and possessed something of the flavour of renaissance madrigals. Nearly two centuries later J. S. Bach would arrange these to conform to the more baroque patterns of his era.

The full richness of the Lutheran liturgical tradition can be found in the Lutheran Book of Worship, the chief resource for worship in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada. I particularly like the liturgies printed in the front of the volume, complete with the musical settings. Unlike Anglicans, who generally have to shuffle between two or more books in the course of worship, Lutherans quite sensibly have everything in a single volume.

However, it has always seemed to me that the chief weakness of the Lutheran tradition is its relative lack of a cultural and social witness, which is rooted in its two kingdoms theology. When Lutherans find it necessary to take up such a witness, they generally have to look outside their own tradition. Dietrich Bonhoeffer comes to mind here. In our own day Jean Bethke Elshtain, whom I find a joy to read, is quite evidently influenced by Roman Catholic social teachings. And Richard John Neuhaus, once a Lutheran pastor, jumped ship entirely and became a Catholic priest.

Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, I've actually attended very few Lutheran worship services. But some of my favourite hymns are the old chorales, often translated into English by Catherine Winkworth. The singing of "Deck Thyself, My Soul, with Gladness" during the eucharistic celebration never fails to move me. Though I am definitely a Reformed Christian and an heir of John Calvin, I nevertheless gratefully acknowledge a debt to Luther and his followers.

The ordinary of the mass

In the western church for well over a thousand years, the historic shape of the liturgy has encompassed a number of elements deemed essential to its proper celebration. Together these have formed what is known as the ordinary of the mass, including in outline form:

     The Confiteor
     The Kyrie
     The Gloria in Excelsis
     The Scripture Lessons
     The Sermon
     The Credo
     The Offertory
     The Sursum Corda
     The Eucharistic Prayer
     The Sanctus
     The Agnus Dei
     The Post-Communion

The Church of England's Book of Common Prayer retained much of this shape of the liturgy; however, under the influence of the continental reformers, it moved a reading of the Decalogue to the beginning of the liturgy and moved the Gloria in Excelsis to the end, where it became a post-communion thanksgiving hymn. The Lutheran churches retained this structure as well, although, with the elimination of a weekly observance of the Lord's Supper, only the ante-communion segment was retained on most sundays.

The Reformed and Presbyterian churches undertook a more radical reform, virtually eliminating the ordinary of the mass and substituting for it the basic structure that Old and Hart describe in their books. It has long seemed to me that, in so doing, the non-Lutheran reformers were doing more than just to reform; they came close to creating a new liturgy -- one that would inevitably seal the 16th century breach within western Christendom. Had they taken a more measured approach, namely, to remedy the defects while preserving what was right and good, they might have seen fit to keep much of what we know as the ordinary of the mass.

Imagine, if you will, an alternative history in which Reformed Christians have grown up singing and loving the Gloria in Excelsis, knowing the Sanctus by heart, praying with heartfelt passion the Agnus Dei, and seeing in these hymns a liturgical treasure shared with all other Christians in the western tradition. There would be one less cause of division among these traditions, even where genuine confessional differences remained, because we would all hold in common something very beautiful and ancient -- a way of worshipping God in spirit and truth.