The Theology in the Liturgy

Theologically, there are two ways of understanding the liturgy. One way is to see worship as essentially the expression of a peculiar kind of human experience commonly known as religious experience. To the extent that our religious experience changes with the times, to that extent our liturgy needs to be revised to reflect the new circumstances. This view may be called, to use Lindbeck’s categories, the experiential-expressive theory.1 If this is how the liturgy is understood, it is hardly surprising that many Christians today seem to think that when it comes to the liturgy or “order of service” the critical question is how it could be creatively constructed to meet the needs of worshippers. The second way may be called the revelational approach. Worship is essentially the response to the revelation of the triune God; it cannot be constructed arbitrarily, but must be shaped by the giveness of revelation. The shape of the liturgy is determined by the shape of that revelation. There are, therefore, theological norms to be observed in the construction of the liturgy. The liturgy is true to the extent that it faithfully embodies the revelation of the triune God.

In this paper I have presupposed the revelational approach as the only appropriate way of dealing with the theology in the liturgy. For one cannot properly speak of a primary theology (theologia prima) without presupposing the prior action of God, as we shall see below. It is this primary theology that is reflected in the liturgy. The liturgy in turn aids and guides further theological reflection (secondary theology). This dialectical process is summed up in the phrase lex orandi lex credendi.

Lex orandi lex credendi

Protestants tend to see the liturgy (if there is a liturgy) as a product of the church’s theology. In other words, the rule of faith (lex credendi) is the beginning of liturgical production. The lex credendi precedes the lex orandi. There is a sense in which this is true. Any attempt on the part of the church to construct its common or corporate prayers must ensure that they faithfully reflect the church’s basic beliefs; otherwise, the liturgy lacks theological integrity.

The formula lex orandi lex credendi (the rule of prayer is the rule of faith) however, points to a more primary process at work. Before we could think about God and even before we could worship God, there is a prior action on the part of God who makes worship and theological reflection possible. God takes the initiative to reveal himself, and in that self-revelation God also calls those to whom that revelation is given. Worship is the response of those called. It is this giveness of revelation that constitutes the primary reality which must shape all subsequent liturgical developments.

The Christian tradition recognizes the shape of this revelation to be essentially Trinitarian. It begins with the one true God of Israel, whose faithfulness to the covenant with his people culminates in the coming of Jesus Christ and the sending of the Holy Spirit (“in the fullness of time”). The coming of the Holy Spirit to indwell the church is to elicit a response from the people of God: “Because we are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, ‘Abba, Father’” (Gal 4:6). This response that recognizes God as “our Father” (the Paternoster) is the foundation of Christian worship. Worship, therefore, may be defined as the Spirit-inspired response of the church to the revelation of the triune God in which praise and adoration is rendered to the Father, through the Son and in the Holy Spirit. There is, then, in the very act of responding to revelation an implicit acknowledgment of a theology of a most primary kind, that is, the knowledge of who God is. It is this primary theology that finds expression in the liturgical celebration, so that the liturgy could be described as, in Alexander Schmemann’s words, the “epiphany of the Church’s faith.”2 The works of Schmemann have been especially influential in focusing attention on the primary theology of the liturgy.3 If the liturgy schematizes the revelation-response dynamic, then it is not the case that only certain portions of the liturgy (such as the proclamation of the word) are more theological than others; rather, the whole liturgy is theology. This is why the whole liturgy could be said to be constitutive of the church. The idea is implied in the Reformation teaching that the church is constituted by word and sacrament which are the basic components of the liturgy. They are what make the church the church. In the faithful observance of word and sacrament, the church is actualizing itself as church. Further, if we look at Luther’s seven “marks” of the church, namely, the preached word, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, the keys (church discipline), church offices, worship, and cross-bearing, one will not fail to notice that they are directly or indirectly linked to the liturgy. In fact, all the “core practices” of the church grow out of the liturgy.4 Luther describes these marks as “the great holy possession (Heilthum) whereby the Holy Spirit effects in us a daily sanctification and vivification in Christ.” In the medieval church, a Heilthum is a miracle-working relic. Thus, the marks are the means by which the Holy Spirit transforms the church. The liturgy always involves a “synergy”: The church carries out the liturgy, but it is also the Holy Spirit who is at work, just as the “Abba, Father” is as much our prayer as the Spirit’s response to the Father.

The liturgy is a life-transforming practice because it is the primary locus where the Holy Spirit is at work to craft the ecclesial community. It is there that we encounter the living God. It is there that theology is experienced as a lived reality. In worship, we are not thinking about our experience of God (secondary theology) but encountering an epiphany (primary theology). This article seeks to recover some important aspects of the living theology encountered in the liturgy.

The Trinitarian Persons

As I have already noted, the liturgy is simply an attempt to be faithful to the Trinitarian revelation. The liturgy enacts a Trinitarian theology and draws us into a vital relationship with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is why Christian worship in all the major Christian traditions is thoroughly Trinitarian. Protestant churches are at least familiar with the doxology (“Praise God from whom all blessings flow”) and the Gloria Patri (“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost”). In the Eastern liturgy, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are far more frequently named than in the Western liturgy. It begins with “Blessed is the kingdom of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” The Trisagion (Thrice Holy) is used repeatedly in different parts of the liturgy:

Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy and Immortal, have mercy on us.
Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy and Immortal, have mercy on us.
Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy and Immortal, have mercy on us.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, both now and ever and to the ages of ages. Amen.
Holy and Immortal, have mercy on us.
Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy and Immortal, have mercy on us.

In the Roman liturgy, a regular hymn of adoration to the Trinity is the Gloria in Excelsis. It begins with “Glory to God in the highest.” The Father is called “Lord God, heavenly King, almighty God and Father.” Next Jesus Christ is praised: “the only Son of the Father,” the one “who takes away the sins of the world” and is “seated at the right hand of the Father.” The hymn ends by specifying the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit:

For you alone are the holy one
You alone are the Lord
You alone are the most high, Jesus Christ
With the Holy Spirit
In the glory of God the Father.

The Trinitarian economy is most clearly expressed in the Eucharistic prayers. Although the Western churches, both Catholic and Protestant, have multiplied the number of Eucharistic prayers in recent years, they all follow a basic pattern. It begins with prayer to the Father whose works of creation and sending his Son for the world’s salvation are recounted. This is followed by the remembrance of the work of Jesus Christ culminating in the words of institution. The Spirit’s coming is invoked over the bread and wine.

At every turn, the liturgy directs our thoughts to the God who reveals himself in Jesus Christ whom Jesus calls his Father. The liturgical tradition has followed Jesus’ own practice by using Father as the primary term for addressing God in prayer. The central prayer of the church begins with “Our Father.” It is most appropriate because we are “sons in the Son” (filii in Filio). In modern times, however, some have tried to substitute these with supposedly more inclusive terms, such as Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier. There are serious implications with these substitutions. They imply that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are descriptions of the roles they play and therefore could be replaced by other functional equivalents. But the term Father is not primarily a function but refers to the person who distinguishes himself from the Son. “Father” is the name of the person who is revealed by and distinguished from the one who identifies himself as the Son. In other words, Father and Son are meant to highlight the fact that the persons of God must be understood first and foremost in their relation to each other and only secondarily in relation to their functions. A person is defined in relation to another person. Father is Father in relation to the Son. God as person can only be explained in relation to God, not in relation to what he does in the world. There are therefore no functional equivalents for the names Father, Son and Holy Spirit since they are “a way of being” of the three persons.5 According to John Zizioulas, the very being of the Trinity must be explored not in terms of the question what is it but how is it, that is to say, not according to their “substance” or “nature” but according to their “mode of being” or personhood. The person is an ontological category and cannot be reduced to ethical or psychological categories which may only be aspects of personhood. The ontology of person (and hence of communion) is at the center of Christian theology. God’s relation to humans, too, must be understood in ontological terms: humans are “modes of being,” a way of relating to God and each other. That is what it meant by calling them persons. An ethical or psychological conception of human beings is inadequate. Yet, according to Zizioulas, this is what has happened in Protestantism. It steers away from Cartesian rationalism but it fails to arrive at a full ontology of persons:

By dismantling all ontological connection between God and the world, Protestantism marked a departure from the intellectual path to faith [Cartesianism] and its replacement by a psycho-logical or ‘existential’ approach: faith is to be understood in terms of trust [Lutheran] rather than of rational conviction and persuasion, or as response and obedience to the Word of God [Barthian]. In none of these cases does the eucharistic ethos seem to play a decisive role as a way of faith.6

By “eucharistic ethos” Zizioulas means an attitude of grateful acknowledgement of the “gift of being,” i.e. the acknowledgment of God’s very Person—the Other—“and our own existence as a gift of the Other.” Eucharist presupposes an ontological communion and otherness of persons. The faith generated by the “eucharistic ethos” is not merely psychological certainty or ethical resolve but is linked to “personal causality”; that is to say, it takes the stance that “whatever exists or happens is given to us by a person.”7 Thus faith is primarily a “way of being” between persons. Although it may produce rational or psychological conviction it cannot be reduced to either.

This insight which we owe largely to the Cappadocian fathers has far-reaching implications. From the persons of the Trinity (who are what they are in relation to each other), we understand what it is to be human persons. Humans are who they are not because of certain personal capacities (such as rationality, intentionality, freedom, etc.), but because they are ultimately related to the Trinity as imago Dei. That is to say, humans, by being from God and made in God’s image, are truly persons by virtue of their relation to the triune persons, regardless of what capacities they might possess or lack. When persons are defined according to certain qualities or to an abstract human nature, a dangerous distinction inevitably emerges: some human beings will be regarded as less than persons if they are deficient in or lose certain “personal” qualities: the fetus is only a potential person, the comatose is no longer a person; the Alzheimer’s sufferer or mentally retarded is not a full person, etc. Abortion and euthanasia then become perfectly legitimate options. Christianity rejects these rationalizations because basic to its conception of the human being is not “human nature” but personhood based on the inextricable relation to God as persons.

It is in the liturgy culminating in the Eucharistic celebration that we come to know the truth that God is persons-in-communion and we are persons-in-communion with God and each other.

The Monarchy of the Father

The liturgy not only affirms personhood as the ultimate reality in God, it further specifies the way in which the persons of the Trinity are ontologically ordered. Christian theology speaks of the generation of the Son and the procession or spiration of the Holy Spirit from the Father. In the Eastern church the Father is the One “without origin” who “causes” the personal otherness of the Son and the Spirit, and it uses the phrase “the monarchy of the Father” to express this idea. The phrase faithfully reflects the New Testament data where only the Father is explicitly referred to as God and is always the initiator, the one who sends the Son and the Holy Spirit. There is a certain “order” in which the three Persons move. Zizioulas describes their movement in the following way:

It is clearly a movement with personal initiative. It is not that the Three, as it were, moved simultaneously as ‘persons in communion’; it is the one, the Father, that ‘moved’…to threeness.”8

Only a consistent doctrine of the monarchy of the Father helps to preserve the ultimacy of divine personhood. But this has only been partially realized in the Western tradition. Traditional Western conceptions, while accepting the priority of the Father, have not given the doctrine full play, first, because of the insertion of the filioque into the Creed, suggesting that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son and therefore not from the Father alone. Second, the oneness of God is identified with the one substance that the three persons share, in which case the divine nature and not persons becomes the ultimate reality. Many modern Western theologians, such as Colin Gunton, Thomas Torrance, and especially Jürgen Moltmann, have also rejected the concept of the monarchy of the Father, perhaps driven by modern egalitarian interests. They have instead argued for the simultaneous “co-emergence” of the Three, conceiving of the communion of the triune persons as one of mutual co-inherence. The one God refers to the unity of the persons. Relationality itself thus becomes the ultimate reality.9 The problem with these conceptions of oneness is that they fail to give a proper account of the nature of Christian worship. When Jews and Christians pray to the one God, they are not praying to a “substance” or a “relationship” but the person who in the Christian liturgy is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is seen in ancient doxologies where praise is rendered to the Father, through the Son and in the Holy Spirit. It was only later, in order to combat Arianism, that the doxology was changed to a coordinated formula: “to the Father and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.” Further, all ancient Eucharistic prayers are addressed to God the Father who sent his Son, and in the epiclesis the prayer is again to the Father to send the Holy Spirit.

Despite the explicit rejection of monarchy, modern Eucharistic prayers continue to follow the ancient monarchical pattern. We see this, e.g., in Common Worship (2000) of the Church of England. This shows that in prayer we cannot avoid what we know in our heart of hearts to be the case: the One to whom we address our prayer is God the Father. Here is one clear illustration of the ancient principle that lex orandi is lex credendi. We do well to follow the rule of praying even if we are tempted to think otherwise!

The foregoing discussion of the way the liturgy reveals the persons of the Trinity and the order in which the persons are related (monarchy of the Father) should forewarn us against hasty attempts at liturgical revisions because its language offends our modern sensibilities. Instead of asking how the liturgy could be remade to fit our religious needs, perhaps we need to re-examine our own religious experience. Perhaps it is we, not the liturgy that need to undergo a conversion!

The Corporate Nature of the Liturgy

The liturgy not only reveals or conveys a primary theology of the Trinity, it also reveals and reinforces a primary ecclesiology. In the liturgical celebration we are made aware of being the church, the corporate body of Christ. The liturgy hardly uses the singular noun or pronoun when referring to the worshippers. We enter into communion with the triune God who is persons-in-communion as members of the body of Christ through baptism. We are no longer self-referencing individuals (the Cartesian “I”), but one body in Christ indwelled by the Spirit who prays in us the “Abba, Father.” This does not mean that each person is not personally active and involved. As a matter of fact, each person is called, in the words of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, to “active participation.” When one is baptized into Christ, one does not become a nameless member of a herd; rather, one is given a new name, signifying a new and unique identity. At the same time, we are, in Paul’s language, “members one of another” (Eph 4:25, AV), i.e. persons-in-communion.

The ecclesial body is not a collectivity of individuals seeking to find their personal self-fulfillment at worship. Here is where the ancient liturgy challenges the so-called “contemporary” service which often shifts the center of worship from God to self. The “I” dominates the service. Consider the following: “I worship you, almighty God, there is none like you/I worship you, O prince of peace/That is what I long to do/I give you praise, for you are my righteousness/I worship you, almighty God, there is none like you.” What this song conveys about worship is that it is the activity of an individual. Biblical titles for God are used: almighty God, prince of peace. But this God is there for me: “you are my righteousness.” Worship is not only individualistically conceived, it seldom focuses objectively on who God is but how good God is to me or how good I feel about Him. Take this song: “I love you Lord/And I lift my voice/To worship you/O my soul, rejoice/Take joy, my king, in what you hear/ Let me be a sweet, sweet sound in your ear.” The message, translated into more prosaic, less sentimental terms is: Lord, I am worshipping you, and you must be very happy with what I’m doing.

The liturgy reminds us that as we are gathered together “in Jesus’ name” we are not there as individuals doing our own thing and experiencing God. Rather, we are the qahal, the gathering of God’s people responding to God’s call. The song of adoration to God, so well epitomized in the Gloria in Excelsis, objectively declares who God is. It is the song of the whole people of God. To God the Father we sing “We worship you, we give you thanks, we praise you for your glory.” To Jesus Christ we pray, “You take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us… You are seated at the right hand of the Father, receive our prayer….” Similarly, most liturgical prayers are in the plural, seldom in the singular. The rare exceptions are the prayer of confession and the prayer of humble access before communion in the new Roman Missal. The latter has: “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word, and I shall be healed.”

Before the awesome Mystery of the Body and Blood of Christ, each person kneels as a responsible member of his Body, engaged at the highest level of “active participation.”

The whole liturgy is one objective declaration. The church not only declares the glory of God, it also declares the word. After each reading of Scripture the reader declares: “This is the word of the Lord,” and the congregation responds: “Thanks be to God.” At the communion, we declare the “mystery of the faith”: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. In the Creed, we declare the faith of the church. The liturgy confronts us with the sheer fact of who God is and the great work of redemption accomplished in Christ. When confronted with the mystery of the gospel, our only appropriate response is one of thanksgiving and gratitude. In these declarations we are practicing and imbibing a primary theology of grace: God owes us nothing, but we owe him everything. Everything is given. Even in our offerings which include the Eucharistic offerings of bread and wine, we acknowledge: “Everything in heaven and on earth is yours. All things come from you and of your own do we give you” (Alternate Service Book).

The Church in the Liturgy

In the liturgy we learn what it means to truly give God the glory. In fact, the word “glorify” is virtually synonymous with worship. In glorifying God we are practicing the highest purpose of human existence. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Worship has no higher end than the acknowledgement of God as God. We are, in short, learning what some liturgical theologians describe as the “aimlessness” of worship.

In the liturgy man is no longer concerned with himself; his gaze is directed towards God. In it man is not so much intended to edify himself as to contemplate God’s majesty. The liturgy means that the soul exists in God’s presence, originates in Him, lives in a world of divine realities, truths, mysteries and symbols, and really lives its true, characteristic and fruitful life.10

In the language of Paul, the ultimate end of our existence is “to the praise of his [God’s] glory” (Eph 1:6, 12, 14). The liturgy teaches us that we worship because God is who he is. We do not worship in order to gain something for ourselves; rather, we worship because God is simply to be acknowledged as God, no more or less. When worship is driven by ideologies or pragmatism, it becomes a tool to serve our own agenda. Then we begin to feel the need to make worship “relevant” to certain interest groups. But to realize that the church exists for God’s glory entails an ecclesiology very different from an instrumentalist view. The instrumentalist view says that the church exists to serve the world, however that service is defined: to promote peace and justice, to feed the hungry, to proclaim the gospel. All these are important works of the church, but they are not the church’s raison d’etre. The church’s ultimate purpose is to praise God. Frank Senn has well brought out the far-reaching implication of this truth for the church:

If the idea of living “to the praise of God’s glory” seems too vaporous to modern ears, that is our fault, not the apostle’s. Perhaps we need to heed his warning to “Give up living like the pagans with their good-for-nothing notions” (Eph. 4:17). Perhaps the idea of living “to the praise of God’s glory” is opaque to us also because we have reversed the relationship between the church and the world that is spelled out in the Ephesian letter. We think that the church exists for the sake of the world, but that is not true. The world, indeed the whole universe, exists for the church…. The world exists as the arena in which the gospel of Jesus Christ, the crucified, risen, and ascended Lord of all, can be proclaimed, and as a source of fresh recruits for the royal priesthood of the redeemed world.11

This is an astounding vision. We are accustomed to thinking of the church as an instrument to serve God’s purpose in the world, a purpose vaguely expressed in the phrase “the kingdom of God.” We are often told that the church has a mission in the world to promote “kingdom values.” But if the world is meant to glorify God, it means that the world does not discover its end within itself. The world is meant to find its fulfillment in the church. The church is the end for which the world was made. The church is bigger than the world! It is bigger in the sense that it is meant to embody the final order of things which embraces the new heavens and the new earth. The church inhabits both heaven and earth. In the liturgical celebration, we are joined by saints in heaven and other heavenly hosts in rendering to God “songs of everlasting praise.” In the Roman and Orthodox liturgies, the dead are included in the intercession. The reach of the church is farther than the present creation. In singing praises to the triune God, the church is made aware of faint echoes of her song in the far reaches of the heavens.

The liturgy gives us a vision of the church that could only inspire confidence despite its present weaknesses and dismal failures. There is much cynicism today towards the church both outside and within it. Yet, if we have a true liturgical vision of the church, we could say with Augustine, “The church may be a whore, but she is still our mother.”

The Liturgy and the Glory of God

The liturgy that declares the glory of God also specifies something of the content of the divine glory. When Moses asked God, “Show me your glory” (Ex 33:18), God’s answer to Moses was to proclaim the glory of Yahweh in a highly paradoxical manner:

Then the LORD came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the LORD. And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation” (Ex 34:3-7).

The Lord both forgives iniquity and judges wickedness. The fullness of God’s glory cannot be properly expressed except in these paradoxical terms. As Rudolf Otto’s classic The Idea of the Holy has shown, God’s revelation always comes to us in the form of a paradox: fascinans et tremendum. God’s presence both attracts (fascinans) and fills us with fear (tremendum). He is both loving and holy. “Behold…the kindness and severity of God” (Rom 11:22, NASB). God is both “God with us” (Immanuel) and “Wholly Other,” dwelling in “unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see” (1 Tim 6:16).

The liturgy is full of such paradoxes.12 The adoration of the triune God is juxtaposed to the confession of sin (cf. Isa 6:1-5). At baptism the baptizand is both buried and raised to new life. Sunday straddles the old and new creation. It is the eighth day, the day of the resurrection and the beginning of the new creation, and also the first day, the day of the old creation. The Eucharist anticipates the joyful Marriage Supper of the Lamb, yet it comes with a warning: “A man ought to examine himself before he eats…” (1 Cor 11:28). The liturgy captures this paradox most succinctly at the invitation to the Holy Meal: “Holy things for holy people.” Gordon Lathrop observes that the words of welcome also carry an implicit warning: Holy things are meant for holy people.

One danger of modern worship forms, whether “traditional” or “contemporary,” is the reduction of this paradox of the divine glory into something more agreeable with our modern sentiments. In the contemporary worship one usually gets the impression that God is intimate and cuddly, always there to meet my needs when I call. Similar sentiments can be found in the modern liturgies of mainline Protestant churches. Compare the following two prayers of confession from the United Methodist Church liturgy in 1965 and 1989 respectively:

Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, maker of all things, judge of all men: We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we from time to time most grievously have committed, by thought, word, and deed, against thy divine majesty. We do earnestly repent, and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; the remembrance of them is grievous to us. Have mercy upon us….13

Merciful God, we confess that we have not loved you with our whole heart. We have failed to be an obedient church. We have not done your will, we have broken your law, we have rebelled against your love, we have not loved our neighbors, and we have not heard the cry of the needy.14

In the 1965 prayer the language of sin and the sense of God’s majesty and holiness are quite emphatic. In the 1989 prayer these are conspicuously muted. The word “sin” is not used; rather, the confession is mainly about failure to obey, hurting a loving God and neglecting “our neighbors” and “the needy.” The transcendence and immanence of God in the old prayer (“Almighty God, Father) is replaced by a picture of God that is decidedly immanent and friendly (“Merciful God”).

Examples like these could be multiplied. But we do not get the full impact of this theological dilution unless we actually attend a modern liturgical service of a mainline church in the West.15 The overall impression that one gets is that God is a nice guy who would let us get away with almost anything except, perhaps, when we happen to use politically incorrect language.

The real tragedy in modern worship whether charismatic, evangelical or mainline Protestant is that the glory of God has become shrouded by human attempts at constructing new forms and revising old forms without taking serious cognizance of the revelation of the triune God as found in Scripture and embodied in the liturgical traditions of the ancient church. When this happens, there is no more true worship. For how can we glorify the God whose glory we have corrupted? Liturgical revision is necessary as the church encounters new situations and as language changes over time. But we can only do it faithfully if we first recover the primary theology of the ancient liturgy.

This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Sep/Oct 2008).