Church and Sacrament

March 18, 2015

The readings this week were interesting and challenging, bringing a deeper insight into the meaning of liturgy than I had had before.

There were several points I was interested in commenting on, but I will stay with the one which first caught my attention, the treatment of  “lex orandi, lex credendi” over the centuries.  Although Prosper of Aquitaine (Maxwell E. Johnson, ed., 50-51) may have been the first to bring this term into the theological vocabulary, the reasoning behind it goes back at least to St. Athanasius in the fourth century, who, in his argument against the Arian heresy,  referred to the divinity of Christ implied in the baptismal liturgy (44). 

            Pope Pius IX (58-60) referred to this principle in pronouncing the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854.  He said it was a truth “generally accepted and put into practice by the faithful” (59), although most of the passage spoke of its backing by bishops rather than by the laity.

            A century later, Alexander Schmemann also referred to lex orandi as the basis for the third task of liturgical theology: “to present the separate data of liturgical experience as a connected whole, as … the ‘rule of prayer’ dwelling within the Church and determining her ‘rule of faith’” (66).  He points out that “the early Church firmly confessed the principle lex orandi lex est credendi” (66).

Geoffrey Wainwright, a British Methodist (date?), seems to have been the first to open this phrase up to new developments, pointing out that, as structured, it can mean either that the rule of prayer is the rule for belief or vice versa (69).  He formulated the difference this way:

“Both Catholicism and Protestantism consider that there is properly a complementary and harmonious relation between worship and doctrine to express the Christian truth.  They tend to differ on the question of which of the two, doctrine or worship, should set the pace, and they differ profoundly on the question of whether either or both – the Church’s worship or its doctrine – may fall into error” (69).

            Edward Kilmartin, S.J. introduces a more nuanced contextual understanding of our subject.  He says that “the law of prayer is the law of belief and vice-versa” (73).  The law of prayer is specifically a “pre-reflective perception of the faith,” while the law of belief “requires the employment of theoretical discourse” (74).  He points out that however orthodox a prayer form might be, with time, changes in language and culture may give this form meanings which it did not originally have, so it would need to be changed, not because it was not correct when formulated, but in order to have it be correctly understood today (74). 

            David Fagerberg defines liturgical theology as “the theological work of the liturgical assembly, not the work done by an academic upon liturgical matter” (94).  Moreover, he says that liturgical theology is “normative for liturgical renewal because such efforts should arise out of the tradition of the Church and not our individual preferences” (84).  My first thought on reading this was that it was too bad that this principle was not applied to the most recent English translation of the Roman Missal, in which translators made the English be as close to the Latin construction and vocabulary as possible.  This frequently made sentences impossibly long, complex, and grammatically incorrect.   I think this was not the intention of the Fathers of Vatican II.

            Fagerberg does not accept either that theology should be approached through liturgy or vice versa.  Two defining attributes of liturgical theology are:  “it is theologia prima and it is found in the structure of the rite, in its lex orandi…. It recognizes that the law of prayer establishes the Church’s law of belief” (84). 

            Nathan Mitchell takes a different point of view.  As far as he is concerned,  lex orandi,lex credendi is meaningless.  It is circular, each term depending on the other.  Instead, he says that “liturgy is God’s work for us, not our work for God.  Only God can show us how to worship God” (97).  “Christian liturgy begins as ritual practice but ends as ethical performance” (98).  This was a difficult reading, but I understood it to be saying that we can prepare the liturgy all we want, but we are not in control of the way it turns out.  It is God’s gift to us.  The meaning of the liturgy can only be seen in how our lives are changed by it.  Do we care for the needs of our neighbors?  This is the lex agendi that Mitchell refers to.  Can we respond to the “subversive element of indeterminacy” that it introduces?  The liturgy is a language of the body, of gestures, singing, walking, tasting. 

Mitchell ends this passage in a way that brings it together for me: 

Liturgy embodies emptiness, powerlessness – that “absence” in human life where God’s word and ours are surrendered into mutual presence that creates communion without suffering confinement.  Worship is inescapably embodied and iconic; it makes us – we don’t make it.  Why?  Because liturgy is the moment when God’s own Word places itself at the mercy of the body, at the mercy of human flesh.  In liturgy, God’s Word surrenders to world, to history and to bodies” (101).

What relation does this survey of the use of a small Latin phrase make in my life?  I guess it explains to me why I have such a hard time accepting the dogmas about Our Lady:  the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption (especially the latter).    

In terms of my ministry, I think that it is true that the way the group of women with whom I have been working in the prison have been praying together for the past several months has had an effect on their beliefs.  This has not been an official liturgy, but it has been wonderful to see.