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Renewing Worship: The Recovery of Classical Patterns

By Geoffrey Wainwright

On almost all sides, official liturgical revisions in the second half of the twentieth century have recognized that Christian Sunday worship, in its fulness, includes both word and table. This is clearly stated in the Lima text on Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry, and in one way or another, practically all church responses accept this, whatever their respective difficulties of implementation. It is not simply a question of antiquarian return to early tradition Rather the ancient tradition is seen to have permanent theological advantages.

The recovery of the classical substance and forms of Christian worship was an aim, and to a considerable degree the achievement, of the modern liturgical movement in both its Catholic and its Protestant manifestations. Never an end in itself, the recovery subserved the active, intelligent participation of the people of God in worship that expressed the gospel and the faith in their purity and their richness.

This pastoral concern marked already the event from which the twentieth-century liturgical movement in the Roman Catholic Church is conventionally dated: the address of the Belgian Benedictine priest Lambert Beauduin to the Malines conference in 1909 was inspired by the perception that corporate worship is where the lives and belief of the Christian people are shaped.¹ The German Benedictines of the abbey of Maria Laach quickly turned to the early church for the theological undergirding and concrete display of a liturgical practice that embodied the saving mystery of God in Christ. In many countries, pastors sought to renew catechesis and to restore the vernacular in worship so that the instruction and active contribution of the faithful might take place under the same conditions as in the early centuries. The witness from such luminous points as St. John's Abbey (Collegeville, Minnesota) and the Centre de Pastorale Liturgique in Paris radiated throughout the Catholic Church, until finally the principles

Geoffrey Wainwright is Professor of Systematic Theology at the Divinity School of Duke University. He is a widely-recognized authority on the history and theology of worship, and his several major volumes on these themes include Eucharist and Eschatology(1971) and Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine, and Life(1980).

¹See A. Haquin, Dom Lambert Beauduin et le renouveau liturgique (Gembloux: Duculot, 1976).

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of the liturgical movement were consecrated by the Vatican II constitution on the sacred liturgy, "Sacrosanctum Concilium." Normative rites were produced in accordance with that charter for liturgical reform, and the "Order for the Christian Initiation of Adults" (1972) and the Missal of 1969-70 in particular put a clearer scriptural and patristic stamp upon patterns of worship that had been obscured by medieval and later developments.²

Meanwhile, many Protestant churches had also been engaging in a liturgical movement. The starting points, themselves somewhat varied, were certainly different from the Roman Catholic. In Protestantism, it was less a matter of scraping away ritual accretions than of recapturing the fulness of a sacramental celebration in which gesture and object allowed the Word to be seen-and indeed handled (I John 1:1) and tasted (Hebrews 6:4f. and I Peter 2:3)-as well as heard. In Protestantism, the vernacular was already in use, even if there was to grow up a concern about the effects of cultural secularization upon ecclesial language and symbols. A first historical reference point for modern Protestant renewal was the liturgical intentions of the Reformers; Luther, Calvin, and the English had, for instance, all considered that Sunday worship properly included the communion of the people at the Lord's Supper. But in some respects, the sixteenth-century Protestants had remained prisoners of the medieval system against which they were rebelling; so the twentieth-century revisers had to return as far back as the patristic period in order to discover the liturgical expression the earliest church had given to an apostolic gospel and faith about whose expression in worship the canonical scriptures say tantalizingly little. And here the Protestant scholars found Catholic colleagues already at work. The extent of their agreed conclusions finds striking expression in such landmark documents as the Episcopal Church's Book of Common Prayer (1976)³ and The Lutheran Book of Worship (1978), and somewhat less stably in the "worship resources" produced by the United Methodist and the Presbyterian Churches in the 1970s and 1980s.

In what follows we shall concentrate on four areas in which the recovery of classical, patristic forms has taken effect: (1) the recapture of the paschal mystery of Christ's death and resurrection as the pivot of salvation history; (2) the restoration of a full pattern of Christian initiation, including catechesis, baptism in water and the Spirit, and first communion; (3) the return to a service of word and table as the regular fare of Sunday worship; (4) the repossession of rite and symbol as means of communication in the dialogue between God and humankind. Each of these moves will appear not merely as backward-looking

²Annibale Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy 1948-1975 (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1990).

³See Thaddaeus A. Schnitker, The Church's Worship: The 1979 American Book of Common Prayer in a Historical Perspective. (Frankfurt and New York: Peter Lang, 1989).

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but as having a future orientation as well. Nevertheless we shall have cause to wonder whether they are in danger of fading before they have achieved lasting results.

I

The Paschal Mystery-At a time when the history-of-religions school was making the most of the similarities between early Christian sacraments and pagan rites, Odo Casel's theology of the Christian mysteries came under suspicion of forfeiting their special character by attributing a Hellenistic derivation to them.⁴ But in fact biblical theology did not have too far to seek for a deeper scriptural background to his notion that Christ's death and Resurrection stand at the heart of the Pauline kerygma and that Christians are given through baptism and eucharist a saving share in the redemption gained by Christ's work. The "memorial" that the sacraments constituted of the original Easter mystery was foreshadowed by the Passover rites in which the children of Israel reappropriated the Lord's deliverance of their ancestors from Egyptian bondage. In the Old Testament, a "memorial" is a divinely instituted object or action by which human beings call on God in their thankfulness or need in order that God may extend or renew the divine blessings to them. In the New Testament, the Lord Jesus, on eve of his passion, instituted the eucharist as his memorial in order that his death be proclaimed until he come again. By that means, Christians continue to draw on the benefits of his redeeming work that are first sealed to them in their baptism into Christ according to the institution of the risen Lord.

The original paschal mystery of Jesus was a trinitarian event: "Christ through the eternal Spirit offered himself to God" (Hebrews 9:14). And "if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit which dwells in you" (Rom. 8:11). Correspondingly, baptism into Christ's death and resurrection is performed "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 28:19). And the Christian eucharist follows the pattern of Ephesians 2:18: "Through Christ we have access in one Spirit to the Father."

The WCC Faith and Order text on Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry sets out "the meaning of the eucharist" in its paschal and trinitarian dimensions with particular clarity.⁵ The eucharist is presented as "thanksgiving to the Father memorial of Christ," "invocation of the Spirit," "communion of the faithful," and "meal of the kingdom." The official Roman Catholic response to the Lima text recognizes well the

⁴Casel was a monk of Maria Laach. Several of his important studies are assembled in his The Mystery of Christian Worship. (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1962).

⁵Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (Faith and Order Paper No. 111) (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982).

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procedures of Faith and Order, which are in fact those learned in the liturgical movement right across the ecumenical board:

The sources employed for the interpretation of the mystery of the eucharist and the form of celebration are scripture and tradition. The classical liturgies of the first millennium and patristic theology are important points of reference in this text.... It presents a strong christological dimension, identifying the mystery of the eucharist in various ways with the real presence of the risen Lord and his sacrifice on the cross... The presentation of the mystery of the eucharist follows the flow of classical eucharistic liturgies, with the eucharistic theology drawing heavily on the content of the traditional prayer and symbolic actions of these liturgies. The text draws on patristic sources for additional explication of the mystery of the eucharist. There is strong emphasis on the Trinitarian dimension. The source and goal of the eucharist is identified as the Trinity.... There is a strong eschatological dimension. The eucharist is viewed as a forestaste of Christ's parousia and of the final kingdom, given through the Spirit.⁶

The appreciation shown by the churches' responses for the structure and content of the eucharistic section of the Lima text are in fact so overwhelmingly positive that we may confidently declare them to be in principle very close to a common mind on the matter. Such doctrinal and practical convergence is indisputably a fruit of the ecumenical liturgical movement and its recovery of classical patterns.

Another excellent example of ecumenical convergence on the paschal and Trinitarian character of a matching pattern of worship ("lex orandi") and pattern of belief ("lex credendi") occurs in the renewal of the Easter vigil in the Roman Catholic Church (since 1951) and its introduction in many Protestant churches. An order of service is found in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (1976) and in the minister's edition of the Lutheran Book of Worship (1978), and gentle encouragement to such a practice is given in the Presbyterian "supplemental liturgical resource" Holy Baptism and Services for the Renewal of Baptism (1985) and in the United Methodist Companion to the Book of Services (1988). The Easter vigil liturgies bring out in its full scope the "mystery" of God's eternal saving purpose for the whole world, now revealed in Christ, and one day to be completed (Mark 4:11; Rom. 16:25-27; I Cor. 2:7; Eph. 1:9-10; 3:1-12; Col. 1:25-27; 2:2-3; 1 Tim. 3:16; Rev. 10:7). The Old Testament Scripture readings display the mighty redemptive acts of God, especially through death-dealing and life-giving water as in the Exodus, looking forward to the "baptism" of Christ in his death and resurrection. "This night" (the haec nox of the Easter proclamation) is traditionally the preeminent occasion for the baptism of Christians, and so the waters of the font are blessed. If there are no candidates, then at least the faithful are invited to renew their baptismal profession. Easter communion follows, an anticipation (as always) of the feast in the messianic kingdom and especially

⁶In Max Thurian (ed.), Churches Respond to BEM, vol. 6 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1988), pp. 1-40 (esp. 16-17).

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appropriate at a season when the eschatological prospect of Christ's return has traditionally been strong.

II

Christian Initiation-Baptism is the climax of a more or less extended period of preparation for entry into the Church and gives access to a continuing life of communicant membership. There is no doubt that the classical process of Christian initiation was constructed with intelligent and active subjects in view. Whatever the pros and cons of baptizing infants, it has always been in their case a matter of retrieving" at a later date those elements that, whatever they were decided to be and with whatever nuances their lack was understood, could not in the nature of things be present at the baptism of an infant (catechesis? personal profession of faith? "confirmation"? communion?). From various starting points in the different churches, the modern liturgical movement has reverted to a classical ritual of initiation developed in the patristic period, stretching from (or at least presupposing) evangelization and catechesis, climaxing in baptism in water and the Spirit, and introducing the new Christian to eucharistic communion. The Roman Catholic "Order for the Christian Initiation of Adults" is the most complete example, and the "adaptation to the true condition of infants," which Vatican II called for in the case of their baptism, was felt to be so extensive that a separate "Order for the Baptism of Infants" (1969) was also formulated. The tendency in most Protestant revisions has been rather the reverse one of bringing baptismal candidates of all ages and conditions into a single rite, with minimal rubrical adaptation to the case of those unable to answer for themselves.

Differences over the location of infants in relation to the Church undoubtedly reflect tensions in ecclesiology, as the responses of the churches to Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry continue to show. Yet these responses also allow the hope that "the churches are coming to an understanding of initiation as a unitary and comprehensive process, even if its different elements are spread over a period of time." And substantively, "the total process vividly embodies the coherence of God's gracious initiative in eliciting our faith."⁷

Again, the Roman Catholic response to BEM pinpoints well the sources and methods of the section on baptism:

It draws in a balanced way from the major New Testament areas of teaching about baptism; it gives an important place to the witness of the early church. While it does not discuss all major doctrinal issues that have arisen about baptism, it is sensitive to the effect that they have had on the development of the understanding of this sacrament and to the positive values of differing solutions that emerged; it appreciates the normative force that some forms of liturgical celebration may have and the

⁷Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry 1982-1990: Report on the Process and Responses (Faith and Order Paper No. 149) (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1990), in particular 44-51,112.

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significance of pastoral practice; within the ecumenical scope it sets for itself, it articulates the development of the Christian understanding of baptism with a coherent theological method.⁸

Since these are also the sources and methods of the ecumenical liturgical movement, it is not surprising that the Roman Catholic response should also note that the baptismal section of the Lima text "has many affinities, both of style and of content, with the way the faith of the church about baptism is stated in the Second Vatican Council and in the Liturgy of Christian Initiation promulgated by Pope Paul VI."⁹

With the varied qualifications already mentioned in connection with infants (which reflect differences among themselves over the role of personal faith), many churches would, according to their own responses to BEM, clearly subscribe to the substantial summary made in the Roman Catholic response:

(a) Baptism is confessed to be the gift and work of the Trinitarian God [1, 7, 17]. Faith in the Trinity allows the text to deal profoundly with the Christ-centeredness of baptism and with the role correspondingly played in it by the Holy Spirit [4, 5, 7, 14].

(b) The practice of baptism is an integral part of God's plan to gather all into his kingdom through the church, in which the mission of Christ is continued through the Spirit [1, 7, 10].

(c) Baptism is a sacramental reality. The text calls baptism a sacrament [23 and Commentary 13]. But it deals with the question, not so much by using the word (which, because of its complex history, needs a great deal of explanation in interchurch conversations) as by affirming the principal features of baptism that the word sacrament has served to express. It says:

(i) Baptism is a sign [2, 18], with definite ritual requirements [17, 20], celebrated in and by the church [12, 22, 23]; it is a sign of the faith of the church [12], of its faith in Christ and in the new life that he inaugurated in his paschal mystery [2, 3, 4], of its faith in the gift of the Holy Spirit in whom this life is shared [5].

(ii) Participation in Christ's death and the gift of the Holy Spirit are both signified and effected by baptism [14].

(iii) The effective sign that is baptism was inaugurated by Jesus [1].

(iv) Baptism is both God's gift to us and our human response to that gift [8]. The gift that it signifies and effects is the washing away and overcoming of sin [2, 3], conversion, pardon, and justification [3, 4], incorporation into Christ [6], moral sanctity [41, of which the Holy Spirit is the source and seal [5], the making of men and women to be sons and daughters of God in Christ the Son [5], who will finally enter their full inheritance to the praise of the glory of God [5]. Our response is faith [8], confession of sin and conversion [4], life-long moral effort, under the transforming power of grace, to grow in the likeness of Christ [9], and work for the coming of the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven [7,10].

(v) Baptism, in making us one with Christ, makes us one with each other and "with the church of every time and place" [6]; it signs and seals us in this common fellowship [61 and is an unrepeatable act [13].¹⁰

⁸Churches Respond to BEM, vol. 6, pp. 9-10.

⁹Ibid.

¹⁰Ibid., pp. 10-11.

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Those are precisely the themes that come through in modern revisions of initiatory rites in Protestant churches under the influence of the liturgical movement, often in considerable verbal enrichment, and certainly with ritual enhancement, in comparison with the older Protestant services. They are indebted to the ancient church order of the so-called Apostolic Tradition of Hipploytus as well as to the various surviving series of catechetical lectures by which bishops in the patristic age explained the rites of Christian initiation to those about to undergo them. One notes in particular three examples: First, a fuller ritual expression of conversion is often provided in the form of questions and answers concerning the renunciation of sin and evil and the threefold interrogation that invites profession of faith in the Holy Trinity in the words of the traditional Western baptismal creed, the Apostles' Creed. Second, a prayer of thanksgiving over the baptismal water rehearses the history of salvation and looks forward to the final consummation. Third, a pneumatological sign is often provided in a prayer of invocation, an imposition of hands, or an anointing that calls down the Holy Spirit upon those being baptized.

Churches that practice initiation in such ways, and people who undergo these rites, have brought home to them the particular place the church occupies in God's saving purpose, which yet is comprehensive in scope. The privileges and responsibilities of adherence to the Christian faith are granted to the evangelized who in turn become the evangelizing.

III

Word and Table-It is possible that the Emmaus story of Luke 24:13-35 reflects a primitive Christian service of word and table, as on the first Easter Sunday, the risen Lord expounds to his disciples the scriptures concerning him and then makes himself known to them in the breaking of the bread. On "the first day of the week," the Christians at Troas gather together "to break bread" and listen to the apostle Paul (Acts 20:7-11). Certainly by the middle of the second century, Justin Martyr reports the regular Sunday assembly of the Christians in Rome for the celebration of word and sacrament:

And on the day called Sunday an assembly is held in one place of all who live in town or country, and the records of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read as time allows. Then, when the reader has finished, the president in a discourse admonishes and exhorts us to imitate these good things. Then we all stand up together and send up prayers: and as we said before, when we have finished praying, bread and wine and water are brought up, and the president likewise sends up prayers and thanksgivings to the best of his ability, and the people assent, saying the Amen; and the elements over which thanks have been given are distributed, and everyone partakes; and they are sent through the deacons to those who are not present....

And we all assemble together on Sunday, because it is the first day, on

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which God transformed darkness and matter, and made the world; and Jesus Christ our Savior rose from the dead on that day.¹¹

In the first centuries, to be a Christian meant gathering for Sunday worship and receiving communion (the sick and the imprisoned were included through the ministry of the deacons), and only Christians were admitted to the assemblies. With the conversion of the empire and then of the Germanic nations, things changed. Others were admitted at least to hear the Scriptures and the preaching, while many of the hastily baptized then refrained from communion. Into the middle ages, Masses were multiplied as a propitiatory sacrifice, while lay communion declined to an annual event. Luther, Calvin, and the English Reformers sought to restore weekly communion, but the Lord's Supper was to be celebrated only if sufficient communicants announced themselves. The unhabituated could not be persuaded, and so the attempt to restore a primitive and early pattern of Sunday worship largely failed, leaving a service of Scriptures, sermon, and prayers as the regular fare for Protestants. Some knew better, but could not prevail. Thus, at a time when Anglican parishes held the communion service but four times a year, John Wesley in a letter of September 10, 1784 advised his North American elders to "administer the Supper of the Lord on every Lord's day," his choice of terms demonstrating the eschatological link between the Resurrection, the sacrament, and the life of the Lord's people.

The most successful effort to encourage increased lay communion in the Roman Catholic Church began under Pope Pius X at the turn into the twentieth century. Belatedly, Catholics joined in the biblical revival, and by the time of the official liturgical reforms initiated by Vatican II, they were in a position to produce a Sunday lectionary that restored an Old Testament lesson to the Epistle and Gospel of the Mass, and Vatican II's constitution on the sacred liturgy declared the homily to be an integral part of the Mass. On the Anglican and Protestant side, it has been a matter of increasing the frequency of eucharistic celebrations, either through the "parish communion" movement or by seeking to include the sacrament in the "main service."

On almost all sides, official liturgical revisions in the second half of the twentieth century have recognized that Christian Sunday worship, in its fullness, includes both word and table. This is clearly stated in the Lima text on Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, and in one way or another practically all church responses accept this, whatever their respective difficulties of implementation. It is not simply a question of an antiquarian return to early tradition (although even such an ostensibly unlikely instance as the Swiss Protestant Church Federation declares that "celebration [of the Lord's Supper] every Sunday is in

¹¹Justin Martyr, Apology I, 67.

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line with biblical tradition"¹²). Rather, the ancient tradition is seen to have permanent theological advantages.

Here are but three examples: First, contemporary Orthodox theologians have taught us to recognize that the Sunday service is "the sacrament of assembly."¹³ Vatican II's constitution on the sacred liturgy calls the worship assembly "the principal manifestation of the Church" (praecipua manifiestatio ecclesiae). Classical Protestants should have no difficulty with the idea that the Church is "a congregation of faithful people in which the pure word is preached and the sacraments are observed according to the gospel" (cf. Augsburg Confession 7, Anglican Articles, 19, etc.). Nor is recognition of the corporate, communal nature of the Church any impediment to insistence on the dispersal of its members for evangelism, service, and holy living. Rather, Christians feed on word and sacrament for what the Orthodox have taken to calling "the liturgy after the Liturgy."

Second, the regular service of word and sacrament brings out, as the Roman Catholic liturgist Emil Joseph Lengeling has emphasized, the dialogical character of the relationship between God and the people of God.¹⁴ To God's addressing us in the Scriptures and the sermon we respond by the confession of faith and prayers. In particular, the great prayer of thanksgiving for creation and redemption prepares for God to communicate to us again, through the eating of the bread and the drinking of the wine, every good and perfect gift and the blessings of salvation.

Third, the service of word and sacrament recognizes the theoanthropological fact and incarnational confession that humans are intelligent, sensate beings destined in Christ for a final resurrection and the eternal praise of God and feasting in the divine kingdom. As the response of the United Methodist Church to Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry declares in the eucharistic liturgy of pulpit and altar, "God's effectual word is revealed, proclaimed, heard, seen and tasted"¹⁵ to which we may add "touched" (I John 1:1) and "smelled" (II Cor. 2:14-16).

IV

Signs and Symbols-In the twentieth century, the human sciences have devoted sustained attention to the complex systems of symbols- words, gestures, objects, even institutions-by which people and communities explore, describe, interpret, and fashion reality, express

¹²Churches Respond to BEM, vol. 6, p. 83.

¹³ Notably Nicolas Afanassieff, "Le sacrement de l'assemblee," Internationale Kirchliche Zeitschrift, 46 (1956), pp. 200-13; then John Zizioulas, Being as Communion (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1985) and Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1987).

¹⁴Emil Joseph Lengeling, Liturgie: Dialog zwischen Gott und Mensch. (Freiburg: Herden, 1981).

¹⁵ In Max Thurian (ed.), Churches Respond to BEM, vol. 2 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1986), p. 188.

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and form their thoughts, emotions, and values, and communicate across time and space in ways that both build and convey traditions as well as both allowing and reflecting social relations in the present. Linguistic philosophy speaks of "performative language," or "how to do things with words" (to borrow the title of J. L. Austin's book)Hermeneutical theory emphasizes the importance of a tradition in the "reading" of "texts," broadly understood. Semiotics uncovers the structures and dynamics of the processes of signification. Ritual studies examine the consecrated ways by which groups of people define and maintain their identity and place in the world.

Now the Christian liturgy is a complex system of signs, a rich "speech-act" (Sprachhandlung), a locus of communication. Christians do not, of course, remain content with a purely humanistic account of the liturgy, since they believe it is God who invites its celebration, before whom it is performed, and from whom it receives its vital power. But, perhaps at first in rather an amateur fashion and then with increasing attention to the human sciences, Christian liturgists in the twentieth century have sought to improve the significant, communicative, and effective quality of the Church's worship.

In Roman Catholicism, it was a matter of laying bare again the main lines of rites whose sequence of principal moments had been obscured by the interpolation of many secondary and tertiary items and ceremonies and of simplifying the postures and gestures of the ministers in particular (compare, for instance, the actions of the presider at the new eucharistic prayers with his performance in the pre-Vatican II missal). Catholics were helped to return to a pristine clarity and crispness in their ritual and ceremonial by reversing the secondary and tertiary developments described by Josef A. Jungmann in his "genetic explication" of the Roman Mass (Missarum Sollemnia).

With Protestants, it has been more a matter of overcoming the suspicion of rite and ceremony that resulted from the overcorrection brought in the sixteenth century to the abuses of medieval liturgy. It was again to the patristic period that twentieth-century Protestants turned for the enrichment of the symbolic texture of their worship, in the reasonable trust that the early church had given appropriate expression to themes at which the apostolic scriptures only hint. Thus the "kiss of peace" has been widely reintroduced (cf. Rom. 16:16; I Cor. 16:20; II Cor. 13:12; I Thess. 5:26; I Pet. 5:14; Justin, Apology I. 65); a lighted candle may be presented to the newly baptized, or "enlightened" (cf. Eph. 5:14; Heb. 6:4; 10:32; I Pet. 2:9; Justin, Apology I. 65); an anointing, or at least an imposition of hands, may betoken the unction of the Holy Spirit (cf. II Cor. 1:21-22; Eph. 1:13; I John 2:20, 27).

In this way, George Lindbeck's notion of doctrine as the "grammatical rules" of the Church as a "cultural-linguistic" community can find its proper location in the more complex reality of an ongoing tradition in which the "lex orandi" and the "lex credendi" are more intimately

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related than Lindbeck brings out.¹⁶ A deeper replunging into its own tradition will, in my judgment, be necessary if the Church is to survive in recognizable form, particularly in our Western culture.¹⁷

V

We have spoken of the saving purpose of the triune God-Father, Son and Holy Spirit-for the world. We have spoken of a history of redemption focussed on the paschal mystery of Christ's death and Resurrection. We have spoken of initiation into the Church as a distinct community, privileged with divine blessing and responsible for evangelization. We have spoken of a living dialogue and communion between God and God's assembled people. We have spoken of a particularistic Christian use of natural and cultural symbols. We have done all this in terms of the contribution of the liturgical movement, which joined in a remarkable confluence and interaction with several other movements in the life of the Church that all reached their most significant development in the second third of the twentieth century: biblical theology, the return to the patristic sources, the ecclesiological. renewal, and the ecumenical movement. By the liturgical channel, these concerns passed into the life of the churches through the revised worship books of the 1970s.

If these things are not happening in your church, then either the liturgical movement has passed you by, or someone thinks your church has already outgrown it (there are disturbing signs of loss in, for instance, the 1986 Book of Worship of the United Church of Christ and the 1989 Supplemental Liturgical Texts: Prayer Book Studies 30 of the Episcopal Church). My own hunch is that the liturgical movement of the twentieth century will have served, first, to make the Roman Catholic Church more biblically faithful and, second, to reintroduce many Protestants to the riches of the ancient tradition. When the next great schism comes, the liturgical movement will thus have helped to maximize the number of those who stay with historic Christianity while others depart into doctrinally, morally, and institutionally unrecognizable forms.

¹⁶See George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984).

¹⁷For a compatible approach to the church as a liturgico-linguistic community, see Helen Kathleen Hughes, "Understanding the Nature and Function of Liturgical Language: A Narrative Approach," The Language of the Liturgy: Some Theoretical and Practical Implications (Washington: International Commission on English in the Liturgy, 1984, pp. 2-18), and Geoffrey Wainwright, "Divided by a Common Language? A Comparison and Contrast of Recent Liturgical Revision in the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Australia," Studia Liturgica, 17 (1987), pp. 241-55.