Mastr document

1	Israel and the Church

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5

1

6

2	Synagogue and Church

13

7

14

3	The Daily Prayer of Israel and the Church

45

15

46

4	The Faith of the Church

79

47

80

5	Origin and Early Development of Baptism

99

81

100

6	The Baptismal Liturgy in the East

129

101

130

7	The Baptismal Liturgy in the West

149

131

150

8	Liturgy on Sabbath and on Sunday

173

151

174

9	Origin and Development of the Anaphoral Liturgy

281

175

282

10	Order

303

283

302

11	The Canon of Scripture

337

307

336

12
The Re-integration of Tradition

At the heart of the life of the Church is the mystery of Christ, and at the heart of the mystery of Christ is the kerygma of his death and resurrection. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is none other than the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who raised him from the dead.

The kerygma that 'God raised Christ Jesus from the dead' is repeated over and over again in the epistles of St Paul and in the sermons and speeches of Acts in one form or another. It is also 'the form of the Gospel tradition'. In the Gospels, that is to say, the death and resurrection of Christ are not only set out in narrative form; but equally the manifold pericopai of his life bear the impress of the kerygmatic events.

The apostolic testimony is not however merely the assertion 'that God raised him from the dead'. The death and resurrection of Christ are 'in accordance with the scriptures'. It is not that they are treated as the fulfilment of isolated texts, chosen without reference to context; but there is an analogy between God's revelation in Israel and God's revelation in Christ. 'The fall and rising up of many in Israel' have their apotheosis in the death and resurrection of Christ. The act of God unfolds in a unity.

The kerygma which is delivered is also received. It is received in the heart and mind of the disciple, who is able to verify what he is taught in his own prayer, where Christ, man and God, has become the mediator between God and man. But his own prayer is inseparable from the corporate prayer of the Church. To this he has been introduced in the baptismal mystery, in which he has been baptized into Christ's death. Further, the fundamental disposition of God towards man is revealed in the mystery of the eucharist, in which the disciple renews his status every Lord's day. The apostolic tradition of the death and resurrection of Christ thus reaches the disciple in different ways, in teaching and hearing, prayer and the mysteries, which nevertheless cohere in the centrality of Christ.

Liturgy is one aspect of the kerygma. It is the embodiment of the kerygma in the forms of worship. The study of liturgy therefore is a distinct but not isolated discipline. Accordingly, just as New Testament Christology requires for its understanding the background of the Old Testament, so the origin and early development of Christian liturgy need to be understood in relation to the liturgy of the Temple and synagogue. The community of liturgical forms in the Church point to a community of origin in Judaism. In this area, admittedly, the rarity and dispersal of evidence is a difficulty, and recourse has to be had inevitably to hypothesis and probability, at any rate in the present state of scholarship.

In the sequel, since so far as written evidence goes the Church was composed of Greek-speaking converts, the study of the Greek liturgies must first engage our attention. Here again there is a parallel in the history of the text of the New Testament. The Greek papyrus and uncial texts are of paramount importance. The early versions, Latin, Syriac, Coptic and others, are of secondary though substantial importance. Similarly, since the language of the early Church was Greek, and Greek was also the language of liturgy, Greek liturgies have a primary importance. Greek liturgical forms lie behind those vernacular forms which began to make their appearance in the third and fourth centuries. The great mass of Latin texts which accumulated in later centuries should not blind us to this fact. In the study of liturgy, therefore, Greek texts are specially necessary for the maintenance of proper perspectives. This principle, so far as the eucharist is concerned, is recognised in the collections of Renaudot early in the eighteenth century, of C.E. Hammond and F.E. Brightman at the end of the nineteenth century, and most recently of A. Hänngi and I. Pahl.

This study of the liturgy has been given a context in the life of the Church. It began with the source of Christianity in Israel, and the continuity of the Christological tradition and of kerygmatic liturgy with Israel and Judaism has been emphasized. The convert to Christ was introduced to the prayer and creed of the Church. Then when his conversion was stabilised he entered the Church through the baptismal liturgy, by baptism, the laying-on of hands and chrismation. This rite originated in Judaism, but was developed to express the kerygma. He thereby entered into newness of life, a life of communion with God through the sacrifice of Christ. Henceforward, taking his place in the new order of the Church, he was to live in and from the eucharist, a rite which had its source in the sabbath meal and in the crucifixion at the passover of our redemption. The anaphoral liturgy was itself preceded by the synaxis, derived from the Sabbath morning liturgy of the synagogue, where the old and the new canon of Scripture was read and expounded. The indebtedness of the Church in its Sunday liturgy extended to the whole of Sabbath observance and liturgy in Judaism.

Christian liturgy therefore forms a complex but coherent whole. It has nevertheless through the centuries suffered dis-integration in consequence of a variety of causes, and this dis-integration has been felt in every part of the liturgy. The transference of the baptismal liturgy from adults to infants inevitably resulted in dislocation. Most serious was the loss of the conditions for baptism, namely repentance and faith on the part of the baptizand. Theology was able to supply damage limitation, by magnifying the grace of God, for example, in the increase in the number of 'scrutiny' masses in the West, by extending the role of the Godparents, and by emphasizing the corporate nature of the life of faith in the Church. But these considerations did not remedy the total passivity of the baptizand, or make good the absence of the personal abrenuncio and credo. The further dismemberment of the baptismal liturgy by separating (in the West) the episcopal imposition of hands and chrismation from baptism in the font, and again by separating (in the West) the bishop's part in the baptismal liturgy from communion in the bishop's eucharist, has created problems which not even theological ingenuity can wholly overcome. These rites, baptism, confirmation and communion, are seen in separation, and not as a whole manifesting unity with Christ whom God raised from the dead. The problems are familiar. Their solution is harder to see. Far-reaching reform is needed. But the more far-reaching, the greater the risks that the reformers run, and the harder it is for those upon whom the reforms are imposed to accept them.

Only less familiar is the dis-integration of the eucharistic liturgy. Insidious consequences flowed from the practice of the silent recitation of the canon. Although Justinian legislated against this practice, he was surely one of the promoters of its causes. How could the patriarch make himself heard in Justinian's Hagia Sophia? Even if the canon was intoned throughout, it would require a strong and cultivated voice to make it heard in so vast a space. That is to say, the big church, vying with all other public buildings, if not bigger than they, introduced a distance between the priest and the people, both audibly and visibly. While the domed basilica tended indeed to limit the size of the building and to give it unity, the longitudinal basilica paved the way for increasing dis-integration. The orders of the Church became separated, by the growing distinction of sanctuary and nave - a distinction which became more profound in the Romanesque basilica and the interpolation of a collegiate or monastic choir between sanctuary and nave. The elongated big church then became the model to be followed, needlessly and uncritically, in smaller and poorer and less pretentious churches. The eucharistic liturgy thus became a staged drama in which the laity were increasingly the spectators. With a silent canon, and the want of a vernacular liturgy that could be heard and understood, it became easier to demonstrate the presence of Christ in the eucharist by elevations, censings, and the ringing of bells, than to communicate Christ's sacrifice to the plebs sancta. Without the communion of the people, moreover, such a rite poorly expressed the apostolic kerygma 'for us' of the death and resurrection of Christ.

The principle of the vernacular, adopted as a means of communication by the reformers, is now at length universally accepted. The vernacular nevertheless is not without its disadvantages liturgically, for it leaves exposed the weaknesses of the liturgical autographs of the reformers in replacement of patristic rites, and now of liturgical committees in our own times.

Dis-integration in the eucharistic liturgy, as in the baptismal, is deepened by dis-integration in holy order. If architecture has set the dis-integration of the eucharist in stone, politics and economics have fixed the dis-integration of order. Holy order has long since ceased to be perceived as a liturgical unity. The stational masses of Rome and elsewhere represented an endeavour to preserve liturgically the unity of the local church. The shadow of this system still fell upon the masses of Lent and Eastertide, Advent and Christmas, and the embertide masses, with their assignment in the rubrics to the Roman stational churches in the Tridentine Missal, abandoned only in 1970. But for most of the people most of the time the usual celebrant of the eucharist is not the bishop but the presbyter. The bishop is rarely seen, and rarely wanted. Sunday by Sunday the church is a presbyteral church. The feudal and Tudor lord, and the baroque prince of the church have become the managing director of a conglomerate. It is often said that the modern Church could not afford very much smaller dioceses. Conceived as they are in organisational and financial terms, that may be true. But can the Church afford not to restore apostolic order to the local church for the proclamation of the apostolic faith and the celebration of the apostolic liturgy?

It is no part of this study to propose a programme of reform. On the contrary, in the midst of the difficulties that beset the Church at the present time, restraint in making changes is essential. The present ardour for change requires to be tempered by the broadest perspectives, and proposed reforms need to be subjected to a scrutiny no less critical than that directed upon the past. Innovation and experiment are the worst guides. What enters the Church from the world should especially be treated with liberal doses of scepticism, for hitherto it has been no part of the Church's teaching that the truth which is in Christ has its origin in a world that is in need of redemption.

We need to understand why the present is as it is. We need to respect the past, which means respecting also our forebears in the faith, and to work our way back along the process of tradition and return to sources, above all to that tradition by which the Church lives, namely the apostolic kerygma of the death and resurrection of Christ. Liturgy is not more important than other facets of tradition, but it is as important as others. The aim must be coherence, within liturgy as a whole, and of liturgy with the rest of Catholic tradition.

Tradition is indeed process, but fundamentally it means content. It is, in the words of St Paul, 'that which I also received, and which also I delivered unto you, and which also ye received'. It is this tradition in which we are to stand, and which we are to hold fast. It is this tradition, integrated in its various aspects, that constitutes authority in the Christian religion.

12	The Re-integration of Tradition

Bernard Moreton

2015-09-23T14:44:34.378747901