sacrament

The Relationship of Visual and Verbal Elements in Worship

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The following article describes how visual and verbal elements have been used throughout the history of the church, noting how the modern church has not allowed visual elements to have a significant role in worship. It goes on to describe how the visual arts can be revived and how we can learn to communicate and receive theological truths through the visual arts.

In the life of the church, the visual arts have ranged from being conspicuously pervasive to being totally absent. In no period was art as central or so important as in the Middle Ages, nor, in contrast, so programmatically and theologically absent as in the Reformed tradition beginning from the sixteenth century as well as in many churches that grew on English soil. Although such extremes do not define our time, their impact has left us with considerable ambiguity about the place and role of the visual arts in the church.

History sheds only partial light on the sources of this ambivalence. For the Middle Ages we can point to the proliferation of saints and the ascendancy of Mary to a special place in redemptive history, both widely depicted in the arts along with biblical figures, Christ and the Godhead. At that level, one would assume that the Reformation would stand for the removal of the saints and of Mary, with concentration instead on Christ and biblical subjects in works of art. But the total abolition of the arts in the Reformed churches, sometimes with frightening evidences of violence, indicates that more than the subject matter was involved.

Idolatry, of course, was the pivotal word, and the second commandment was interpreted to mean that images, not just false images, were to be destroyed. But for images to be considered idols meant that something had happened, for up to the Middle Ages an image remained an image and was not confused with the reality it represented or mirrored. But already in the Carolingian period images were viewed with suspicion, not because they would be confused with what they imaged, but because they were only images. Relics were considered more important, for they provided tangible realities in which God was literally as well as symbolically present. Seeing and touching such realities was more important than experiencing images in which the divine was not physically present. But in the subsequent medieval history, images, as well as the consecrated elements, were interpreted as if they were relics. Then images became idols, or so the Reformed tradition understood them.

That this could happen discloses something about the visual. It too, like other sensibilities, can be a power for good or evil. In much of the Middle Ages, seeing was more important for the public than hearing. The consecrated elements were lifted up to be seen, and it was believed that seeing the elements made it unnecessary for all to partake or to hear what was said.

What a reversal, then, when the Reformed tradition based everything on hearing, and its derivative, reading, along with the abolition of the visual. But what had happened to the visual in the Middle Ages now occurred with respect to the verbal. The initial symbolic power of language took on a literal meaning, as the verbal increasingly and variously was understood as propositional statements of truth, or a fundamentalist reading of Scripture, or a spiritual or moral reduction of content to management proportions. Emphasis on the words in the Word had brought a new form of idolatry.

What we need, of course, is a rightful view of both the visual and the verbal. They represent one reality through two modalities, each appropriately important and necessary for the full expression of our humanity. Theologically, considerable progress has been made in recovering the imaginative power of language, a development that bodes well for an alliance between the visual and the verbal. But among those responsible for services or worship, a preoccupation with the dynamics of the worship service has led to a conviction that only that which directly serves the liturgy has an appropriate place. Some liturgists have declared that the better the work of art, the more it interferes with liturgical practice or the worshiping community. That outlook encourages the use of poor art, including the inordinate profusion of banners, with the result that only art which has no power of its own, that is, only art that can be used for purposes other than what art conveys, is acceptable. Such a reintroduction of art is neither dangerous nor helpful; such art is simply banal.

The reappropriation of the visual for the church, for which theological seminaries can be a vehicle—and for which some have taken responsibility—requires taking the arts seriously on their own terms.

Scripture is not directly helpful on that point, for some passages are positive; some are negative. In addition to the problem of how the second commandment is to be understood, there is a reference in 1 Kings (7:14) to Solomon’s bringing Hiram from Tyre to do works of bronze, and in Exodus 31 (vv. 1–11) an artist named Bezalel is mentioned as doing works in various media for the temple. Concepts of beauty play their part in the Psalms and in sections of the New Testament, as in the lilies of the field, though these passages point to the works of God, not the works of the artists.

The other arts—music, drama, and dance—also have had an ambiguous relation to the church, but, unlike the visual arts, they have been more widely accepted. It is surely ironic that many churches will not shrink at spending large sums of money for a new organ, but not a penny for paintings or sculpture. The plea for the organ rests, of course, on the fact that music has made its way into the worshiping life of the congregation, even though, in principle, music is not necessarily dependent on the organ. Surprisingly, literature as an art form does enter into biblical consciousness. Perhaps that is because Scripture itself is a literary form, thereby making it a natural medium for those who expound Scripture, sometimes with quotations which at their best shed new light on biblical passages.

Music and literature, while banished from the church at certain periods, are art forms that have nevertheless made their way within it. They confirm rather than challenge the worship life of the community, though to be sure avant-garde music and literature can create a stir within the church.

What is it about dance and the visual arts that make the church uncomfortable? Undoubtedly, it is because both are sensual. In dance for the church, that art form is frequently stylized to the point that it merely illustrates biblical passages and has been deprived of much of its sensual nature as dance. But sensuousness defines the very essence of dance and the visual arts.

We have come full circle. The Reformed tradition, in its fight against idolatry, defined the spiritual over against the material or sensual. Hence Reformed churches, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, or those who eschewed such connections, such as Quakers, abolished the arts, for in their way of perceiving the spiritual, the material or sensual was not a medium through which the spiritual could be manifest. Theologically, that was the great divide between the medieval world and the Reformed tradition, with Lutherans and Roman Catholics accepting that the spiritual was also manifest in materiality and through the senses, even though the latter had been abused in the past. On this issue, the Anglicans, reflecting England’s self-conscious Protestant stance, were also originally suspicious of the arts; but in the nineteenth century, they returned to more Catholic sensibilities.

In recent decades, spirituality has invaded the consciousness of most churches. Derived from the Catholic tradition, but understood partly in Protestant terms, spirituality has become a bridge on which the spiritual, the material, and the sensual have come together again. Without judging either the defects or contributions of spirituality as a movement, one can say that it has become a vehicle for overcoming the split between the spiritual and the material or sensual. Hence, it places us in a more favorable ethos with respect to the visual.

Just as the disappearance of the visual in Protestantism and its transformation in Catholicism was a theological issue, so its reemergence today is theological. This reemergence involves how we understand our various sensibilities, that is, how all our senses may be related to moral, religious, aesthetic facets of existence, involving both emotional and intellectual ingredients. One way of understanding the human scene is to admit that hearing, seeing, feeling, tasting, smelling—all of which belong to our humanity—do not form a unity. It is as if, theologically speaking, there were a split among our senses, and some of them were considered safer than others. No one would challenge the role of hearing, giving preeminence to speaking and to the printed word. More recently, we have witnessed the dominant characteristic of television and its technique of telling us what to hear through seeing. Hence it is more a verbal than a visual source of understanding. But while we accept the role of hearing, and its consequences for good, seldom do we face what may be called word pollution. For some reason, word pollution is not considered as dangerous or bad as the abuse of the other senses. In contemporary life, the verbal is surely as abused as was the visual in periods of the Middle Ages.

All of our senses belong to our humanity. Therefore, to bracket one or more out because it or they present problems, also deprives us of the good that belongs to each sensibility, that is, it leaves out something that belongs to our created humanity. That is too high a price to pay, for we are called to be fully human. Leaving out part of our humanity makes us less than that which was intended in creation, for each sense gives us something, which, while related to what the other senses convey, is also unique. The intermixture of the senses is surely evident in biblical and religious language, such as “having the eyes of our hearts enlightened,” or “taste and see how good the Lord is.” Surely, the word in proclamation and the word in sacrament are the same word; yet, in each, the mode of reception also provides us with perceptions that come to us only in that way.

Stressing the visual as well as the verbal demands visual as well as verbal literacy. The expression “I know nothing about art but I know what I like” has to go. Would one really accept ignorance as an ideal anywhere else in life? No sensibility is to be trusted unless it has been honed. An informed sensibility is the fruit of work and discipline. Just as we are schooled in the verbal, we must be schooled in the visual. Yet, schooling in the visual requires disciplines appropriate to that sensibility. While there are analogies between the verbal and the visual, schooling in the visual is not the same as schooling in the verbal.

The visual requires a discerning eye. While our distinguished artists have a special talent, as do our distinguished writers, talent is not enough. Without the disciplined exercise of the medium, which comes only with practice and learning, and usually with the help of teachers, talent burns itself out and provides nothing of enduring or transcending value.

For those of us with lesser talent, the development of a discerning eye is especially important. That can happen in two forms, sometimes separate, sometimes combined: (1) by engaging in the practice of an art form, such as painting or sculpture, or (2) by repeated seeing and careful study of works of art. Traditional learning, whether through lectures or books, about the works of art is appropriate, but as an adjunct to seeing.

Learning to paint or sculpt introduces one to the special dynamics of seeing as evident in the creative process. It has the special character of interiority, in which there is an immediacy that can hardly be secondhand. When guided by those with exceptional talent, we enter into the special world of seeing, where the eye is the pulse directing the arms and hands in the use of brush or chisel. Such an experience creates forms of perception that will make us see the world differently.

By entering directly into the making of art, those with little talent may still learn the special way in which the eyes inform and form works of art. If the process becomes recreation rather than creation, human purposes may still be served, but one has not entered into the world of art. Those with little talent for the education of their own eyes need to accept and understand the difference that talent makes in the creation of art. In the visual, as in the other arts, we need to accept the range from the average to the excellent, an outlook we have learned to accept in music. While excellence in the arts may statistically be small in volume, it provides all of us with the unimpeachable power and structure of the visual. The excellent, too, is not without its dangers, for such creations express an audacity dangerously close to creation itself. But in such creations, we may also come to know the power of the human eye in imaging God and seeing ourselves as created in the image of God.

For many, probably most of us, the discerning eye will be developed by the repeated seeing of works of art, habituation that creates its own discipline and satisfactions to the point that not to see is to feel deprived of a part of one’s very being. Here it is important to be specific, for merely wandering around in museums can be debilitating. It is important to start somewhere, such as choosing four or five artists that seem to interest one. Then repeated seeing of the same works, as well as other works by the same artists, creates seeing patterns of new discoveries that become the basis for widening one’s horizons. In the context of such seeing, information about the works and the artists will be enriching but is not a substitute for seeing. In fact, information is detrimental to seeing when the printed word or the verbal defines what one is to see. Information rightly provides a helping hand, but when an end in itself, it substitutes the verbal for the visual. Sad to say, there are art historians whose studies of the iconography or social setting can be carried out without actually seeing the works of art, an exercise that has been dubbed “art history without art.”

Hence, the recovery of seeing as a human discipline is essential as a prelude to the recovery of art within the church. The loss of the visual was more pronounced in Protestantism than in Catholicism. But even Catholicism began to substitute plaster saints for authentic works of art, thus providing reminders of the verbal rather than creating the fresh perceptions required of art and its appropriate seeing, which is the function of great art.

Given that seeing is so much a part of our lives, it plays a role even when we ignore it. Both space and the forms and shapes around us affect us, whether or not we are conscious of them. Hence, poor art also affects us negatively, even unknowingly. But the obverse is also true, that significant art and architecture stimulate genuine seeing that enriches everything with which we come in contact, that stretches us, that makes us comfortable on the other side of being as comfortable as an old shoe.

Surely it is ironic that the poor or the oppressed have a greater interest in what feeds the human spirit—the visual arts, theater, and indigenous cultural ingredients—than do the conservatives or the liberals who translate justice primarily into economic terms. The drive against spending funds for architecture and art when money should be given to the poor is a liberal guilt trip that contrasts markedly with the attitudes of the poor, who have no such hang-ups. Of course, extravagance is a problem; but we also know that the funds used for art and architecture would not make a significant dent in the problems of oppression.

One cannot live without the necessities of life. But there is more to life than survival. How we determine what is “more important” becomes an essential ingredient in how we perceive the needs of our society. For some, beauty and aesthetic dimensions are as necessary to the human spirit as anything else. Perhaps it is the aesthetic dimension that makes ethics full-orbed in its concern for the human spirit. It is the aesthetic dimension that makes humanity human.

Part of the problem is that liberals and conservatives alike often fail to see aesthetics and the arts as integral to being human. For liberals and conservatives, art is entertainment, or an interest that is fashionable or au courant. Hence, they show a schizophrenia about the arts, either deriding them or courting them, but they do not see them as part of one’s very humanity. A greater danger results when society attacks the fundamental nature of humanity. Theodore Gill makes the point that a part of Bonhoeffer’s resistance to the Nazis came from an aesthetic revulsion to its limited, inverted, cynical view of what it means to be human. It is not by accident that revolutionaries, whether from the right or the left, first attack the vanguard artists. Such artists are always pointing to aspects of humanity denied or being suppressed in the culture. Many people say that the arts are not important, but why do the same people attack them so vehemently when the message of the arts does not coincide with what they believe? The arts look to the future; though, to be sure, the arts can also be reactionary when they are simply a part of the establishment or are being co-opted by it.

The New Testament demonstrates clearly that Jesus was concerned about the poor. But, as Theodore Gill reminds us, his first miracle was turning the water into wine, when Jesus was the life of the party. And of course, we all know of the story of Mary and Martha, surely an approbation of considerable waste when one thinks of the cost of the ointment. In short, there are aesthetic dimensions to the New Testament as well.

Everything can be abused, and aesthetics can become an avoidance of social responsibility. But aesthetics can also be true to ethics, to that wedding in which humanity is enriched in all its facets, its physical, spiritual, and beauteous aspects. The Expressionist painter Barnett Newman wrote that the first human was an artist, that is, a human being whose imagination created worlds that made this world worthwhile.

In a world of competing visions, the aesthetic relation to the ethical can provide conceptions of the human that make us unafraid, that make our diversity a source of enrichment, that stretch our humanity, and that create common cause in our quest for an enriched humanity. The visual and the verbal express our rich humanity through diverse modalities, and the question of God will become real again when our humanity is wide and deep enough to be encompassed by its source, that is, the God who as Creator is also redemptive.

Liturgical Worship: Enactment of Salvation History

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For those who approach worship from a liturgical and sacramental point of view, Christian worship is an action that recalls the events of the history of salvation. This recollection, which is based on biblical models of worship, is not simply an intellectual remembering; it becomes actual participation in the saving event through forms of worship empowered by the Holy Spirit and received in faith.

A fundamental principle of New Testament theology is that all salvation history is recapitulated and “personalized” in Jesus. Nothing is clearer than the fact that everything in sacred history—event, object, sacred place, theophany, cult—has quite simply been assumed into the person of the Incarnate Christ. He is God’s eternal Word (John 1:1, 14); his new creation (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15; Rom. 8:19ff.; Rev. 21–22) and the new Adam (1 Cor. 15:45; Rom. 5:14); the new Pasch and its lamb (1 Cor. 5:7; John 1:29, 36; 19:36; 1 Pet. 1:19; Rev. 5ff.); the new covenant (Matt. 26:28; Mark 14:24; Luke 22:20; Heb. 8–13), the new circumcision (Col. 2:11–12), and the heavenly manna (John 6:30–58; Rev. 2:17); God’s temple (John 2:19–22), the new sacrifice, and its priest (Eph. 5:2; Heb. 2:17–3:2; 4:14–10:14); the fulfillment of the Sabbath rest (Col. 2:16–17; Matt. 11:28–12:8; Heb. 3:7–4:11) and the messianic age that was to come (Luke 4:16–21; Acts 2:14–36). Neither the list nor the references are exhaustive. He is quite simply “all, and in all” (Col. 3:11; this verse and all subsequent biblical quotations are from the Revised Standard Version), “the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Rev. 22:13; cf. 1:8; 21:6). All that went before is fulfilled in him: “For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities” (Heb. 10:1), and that includes cultic realities: “Let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a sabbath. These are only a shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ” (Col. 2:16–17).

This is seminal for any theology of Christian worship. The Old Testament temple and altar with their rituals and sacrifices are replaced not by a new set of rituals and shrines, but by the self-giving of a person, the very Son of God. Henceforth, true worship pleasing to the Father is none other than the saving life, death and resurrection of Christ. And our worship is this same sacrificial existence in us. Paul tells us, “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven” (1 Cor. 15:49; cf. Phil. 2:7–11; 3:20–21; Eph. 4:22–24), the risen Christ, “image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation” (Col. 1:15; cf. 2 Cor. 4:4), who conforms us to His image through the gift of his Spirit (2 Cor. 3:18; Rom. 8:11ff., 29). For St. Paul, “to live is Christ” (Phil. 1:21), and to be saved is to be conformed to Christ by dying to self and rising to new life in him (2 Cor. 4:10ff.; 13:4; Rom. 6:3ff.; Col. 2:12–13, 20; 3:1–3; Gal. 2:20; Eph. 2:1ff.; Phil. 2:5ff.; 3:10–11, 18–21) who, as the “last Adam” (1 Cor. 15:45) is the definitive form of redeemed human nature (cf. 1 Cor. 15:21–22; Rom. 5:12–21; Col. 3:9–11; Eph. 4:22–24). Until this pattern is so repeated in each of us that Christ is indeed true “all in all” (Col. 3:11), we shall not yet “complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Col. 1:24). For we know “the power of his resurrection” only if we “share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” (Phil. 3:10).

Far from being a fourth-century innovation, edification and personal sanctification and the intimate relation of liturgy to everyday life is the essence of the New Testament message concerning the new cult. Indeed, for St. Paul liturgy is the Christian life. Never once does he use cultic nomenclature (liturgy, sacrifice, priest, offering) for anything but a life of self-giving, lived after the pattern of Christ. When he does speak of what we call liturgy, as in 1 Corinthians 10–14, Ephesians 4, or Galatians 3:27–28, he makes it clear that its purpose is to build up the body of Christ into that new temple and liturgy and priesthood, in which sanctuary and offerer and offered are one. For it is in the liturgy of the church, in the ministry of word and sacrament, that the biblical pattern of recapitulation of all in Christ is returned to the collectivity and applied to the community of faith that will live in him.

To borrow a term from the biblical scholars, the liturgy is the on-going Sitz im Leben of Christ’s saving pattern in every age, and what we do in the liturgy is exactly what the New Testament itself did with Christ: it applied him and what he was and is to the present. For the Sitz im Leben of the Gospels is the historical setting not of the original event, but of its telling during the early years of the primitive church. Do not both New Testament and liturgy tell us this holy history again and again as a perpetual anamnesis? Note that this is not kerygma, as it is often mistakenly called. Kerygma is the preaching of the Good News in order to awaken the response of faith in the new message. But the kerygma written down and proclaimed in the liturgical assembly to recall us to our commitment to the Good News already heard and accepted in faith, even though we “know them and are established in the truth” (2 Pet. 1:12), is anamnesis, and that is what we do in liturgy. We make anamnesis, memorial, of this dynamic saving power in our lives, to make it penetrate ever more into the depths of our being, for the building up of the body of Christ:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us—that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us; and our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. And we are writing this that our joy may be complete. (1 John 1:1–4)

It seems to me, then, that the eschatological expectation vs. sanctification of life dichotomy arose long before the fourth century, pace Dix, and was solved by the apostolic church. But it was not solved by abandoning New Testament eschatology, which sees Christ as inaugurating the age of salvation. What was abandoned was the mistaken belief that this implied an imminent parousia. But that does not modify the main point of Christian eschatology, that the end time is not in the future but now. And it is operative now, though not exclusively, through the anamnesis in word and sacrament of the dynamic present reality of Emmanuel, “God-with-us,” through the power of his Spirit in every age.

In the Gospels, the transition to this new age of salvation history is portrayed in the accounts of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. They introduce us to a new mode of his presence, a presence that is real and experienced, yet quite different from the former presence before his Passover. When he appears he is not recognized immediately (Luke 24:16, 37; John 21:4, 7, 12). There is a strange aura about him; the disciples are uncertain, afraid; Jesus must reassure them (Luke 24:36ff.). At Emmaus, they recognize him only in the breaking of the bread—and then he vanishes (Luke 24:16, 30–31, 35). Like his presence among us now, his presence to the disciples is accessible only through faith.

What these post-resurrection accounts seem to be telling us is that Jesus is with us, but not as he was before. He is with us and not with us, real presence and real absence. He is the one whom “heaven must receive until the time for establishing all that God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old” (Acts 3:21), but who also said, “I am with you always, until the close of the age” (Matt. 28:20). It is simply this reality that we live in the liturgy, believing from Matthew 18:20 that “where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them,” yet celebrating the Lord’s Supper to “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26) in the spirit of the early Christians, with their liturgical cry of hope: Maranatha! “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev. 22:20).

So the Jesus of the apostolic church is not the historical Jesus of the past, but the heavenly Priest interceding for us constantly before the throne of the Father (Rom. 8:34; Heb. 9:11–28) and actively directing the life of his church (Rev. 1:17–3:22 and passim). The vision of the people who produced these documents was not directed backward, to the “good old days” when Jesus was with them on earth. We see such nostalgia only after Jesus’ death before the resurrection appearances give birth to the Christian faith.

The church did keep a record of the historical events, but they were reinterpreted in the light of the Resurrection and were meant to assist Christians to grasp the significance of Jesus in their lives. That this was the chief interest of the New Testament church, the contemporary, active, risen Christ present in the church through his Spirit, can be seen in the earliest writings, the epistles of St. Paul, which say next to nothing about the historical details of Jesus’ life.

It is this consciousness of Jesus as the Lord not of the past but of contemporary history that is the aim of all Christian spirituality and liturgical anamnesis. The Christian vision is rooted in the gradually acquired realization of the apostolic church that the parousia was not imminent and that the eschatological, definitive victory won by Christ must be repeated in each one of us, until the end of time. And since Christ is both model and source of this struggle, the New Testament presents both his victory and his cult of the Father as ours: just as we have died and risen with him (Rom. 6:3–11; 2 Cor. 4:10ff.; Gal. 2:20; Col. 2:12–13, 20; 3:1–3; Eph. 2:5–6), so, too, it is we who have become a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17; Eph. 4:22–24), a new circumcision (Phil. 3:3), a new temple (1 Cor. 3:16–17; 6:19; 2 Cor. 6:16; Eph. 2:19–22), a new sacrifice (Eph. 5:2), and a new priesthood (1 Pet. 2:5–9; Rev. 1:6; 5:10; 20:6). This is why we meditate on the pattern of his life, proclaim it, preach it, celebrate it: to make it ever more deeply our own. This is why the apostolic church left us a book and a rite, word, and sacrament, so that what Christ did and was, we may do and be, in him. For this reason, sacred history is never finished: it continues in us.

The Newness of Christian Ritual

I think it fair to say that this New Testament vision of cult is something startlingly, radically new. Of course, human beings have always gathered to express themselves in ritual, so when Christians do so they are not inventing something new. What is new is the vision they are expressing.

Ritual itself is simply a set of conventions, an organized pattern of signs and gestures which members of a community use to interpret and enact for themselves and to express and transmit to others, their relation to reality. It is a way of saying what we are a group in the full sense of that are, with our past that made us what we are, our present in which we live what we are, and the future we hope to be. Ritual, then, is ideology and experience in action, the celebration or interpretation-through-action of our human experience and how we view it.

Human societies have used rituals especially to express their religious outlook, their universal system for relating to the ultimate questions of life. Religion is different from a personal philosophy of life in that it is a shared perspective, a common outlook on reality. As such it depends on history, on the group’s collective remembrance of things past, of events that have been transformed in the collective memory of the community into key symbolic episodes determinative of the community’s being and self-understanding.

This is the basis of ritual behavior. For it is through the interpretation of its past that a community relates to the present and copes with the future. In the process of ritual representation, past constitutive events are made present in ritual time, in order to communicate their force to new generations of the social group, providing thus a community of identity throughout history.

In primitive, natural religious systems the past was seen as cyclic, as an ever-repeating pattern of natural seasons. Rituals were celebrations of this cycle of autumn, winter, spring, harvest—of natural death and rebirth. But even at this primitive stage men and women came to see these natural rhythms as symbols of higher realities, of death and resurrection, of the perdurance of human existence beyond natural death.

So even natural religious ritual is not just an interpretation of experience but implies reaching for the beyond, for ultimate meaning in the cycle of life that seemed to be an ever-recurring circle closed by death. The discovery of history was a breakthrough in this process: life was seen to have a pattern that extended beyond the closed cycles of nature, of life and death. Time acquired a new meaning, and human ritual was transformed from a way of interpreting nature into a way of interpreting history.

Thus, events in the past came to acquire a universal symbolic value in the mind of the community: in fact, these events were so fundamental that they actually created and constituted the community’s very identity. By celebrating these events ritually, the community-made them present again and mediated to its members their formative power. Of course, these were usually events of salvation, of escape from calamity and death, and it was but one further step for them to become transformed in the collective memory of the group into symbols of God’s care and eternal salvation.

This is what happened with Israel. What makes Israelite liturgy different from other rituals is revelation. The Jews did not have to imagine that their escape from Egypt was a sign of God’s saving providence: he told them so. When they celebrated this Exodus ritually in the Passover meal, they knew they were celebrating more than the universalization of a past event in the historical imagination of their poets and prophets. The covenant with God which they reaffirmed ritually was a permanent and hence ever-present reality because God had said so.

Here we encounter a basic difference between Judeo-Christian worship and other cults. Biblical worship is not an attempt to contact the divine, to mediate to us the power of God’s intervention in past saving events. It is the other way around. It is a worship of the already saved. We do not reach for God to appease him; he has bent down to us.

With Christian liturgy, we take another step in our understanding of ritual. As in the Old Testament, we, too, celebrate a saving event. For us, too, the meaning of this event has been revealed. But that is where the parallel ends. For Old Testament ritual looked forward to a promised fulfillment; it was not only an actualization of the covenant but the pledge of a yet unrealized messianic future. In Christianity, what all other rituals strain to achieve has, we believe, already been fulfilled once and for all by Christ. Reconciliation with the Father has been accomplished eternally in the mystery of his Son (2 Cor. 5:18–19; Rom. 5:10–11). The gap is bridged forever through God’s initiative.

So Christian worship is not how we seek to contact God; it is a celebration of how God has touched us, has united us to Himself, and is ever-present to us and dwelling in us. It is not reaching out for a distant reality but a joyful celebration of a salvation that is just as real and active in the ritual celebration as it was in the historical event. It is ritual perfected by divine realism; a ritual in which the symbolic action is not a memorial of the past, but a participation in the eternally present salvific Pasch of Christ.

Christian liturgy, therefore, publicly feasts the mystery of our salvation already accomplished in Christ, thanking and glorifying our God for it so that it might be intensified in us and communicated to others for the building up of the church to the perpetual glory of God’s holy name.

Liturgy: A Work of the Church

So liturgy is an activity of the church. It is one of the ways the church responds in praise, surrender, thanksgiving, to the call of God’s revealing, saving word and deed. This eternal doxology is a response to something, and it is important to note that this divine action itself is not extrinsic to the liturgy but an integral part of it. Liturgy is not just our response; it is also the eternally repeated call. It is both God’s unending saving activity and our prayerful response to it in faith and commitment throughout the ages.

Liturgy, then, is much more than an individual expression of faith and devotion and infinitely more than a subjective expression of “where we’re at” or “where we’re coming from,” as contemporary American slang puts it. It is first and foremost an activity of God in Christ. Christ saves through the ages in the activity of the body of which he is the head. He does this in the word that calls us to conversion to him and union with him and to reconciliation with one another in him. He creates and nourishes and heals and restores this life in the water and oil and food of sacrament, and joins his prayer to ours to glorify the Father for those gifts. And all this is liturgy.

Liturgy then is the common work of Christ and his church. This is its glory. It is also what makes possible the extraordinary claims the church has made about the nature of Christian worship. Our prayers are worthless, but in the liturgy, Christ himself prays in us. For the liturgy is the efficacious sign of Christ’s saving presence in his church. His saving offering is eternally active and present before the throne of the Father. By our celebration of the divine mysteries, we are drawn into the saving action of Christ, and our personal self-offering is transformed into an act of the body of Christ through the worship of the body with its head. What men and women have vainly striven for throughout history in natural ritual—contact with the divine—is transformed from image to reality in Christ.

Of course, Christ, through the Spirit, does all these things apart from the liturgy, too—all this calling and healing and nourishing and saving and praying in us and with us. Then what is so special about the liturgy? Certainly not its efficaciousness, for God is always efficacious in all he does. The obstacles come from us. What is special about the liturgy is that it is a visible activity of the whole church. Indeed, in a certain sense church is the church only in liturgy, for a gathering in its fullest sense is a gathering only when it is gathered! Liturgy, therefore, is different from private prayer and other means and vehicles of grace and salvation in that it is a “symbol,” a symbolic movement both expressing what we are and calling us to be it more fully. It is a celebration of the fact that we have been saved in Christ, and in the very celebration that same saving mystery of Christ is offered to us again in an anamnesis for our unendingly renewed acceptance and as an everlasting motive for our song of joyful thanks and praise: “He who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name!” (Luke 1:49).

We do all this together because we are “together,” and not just individuals. Christian salvation is by its very nature “church,” a “gathering,” one body of Christ, and if we do not express this, then we are not what we proclaim to be. Redemption in the New Testament is a coming together, solidarity in the face of the evil of this world. It necessarily leads to the community because only in common can new human values be effectively released and implemented. Christ came not just to save individuals, but to change the course of history by creating the leaven of a new group, a new people of God, the paradigm of what all peoples must one day be. In the Acts of the apostles, the life of this group is sustained in gatherings, and its basic dynamic is toward unity: that they may be one in Jesus, that they may love one another as Jesus has loved them and as the Father loves Jesus, is the will and prayer of Jesus in the Last Discourse in John’s Gospel (15:9ff., 17:20ff.). This is the remedy for hate and divisiveness and enmity, the products of egoism that is the root of all evil.

Unless seen in this broader context of the whole of life, what the community does in its synaxes does not make much sense, for liturgy is not an end in itself. It is only the means and expression of life together in Christ. It is that which is primary: A common life of mutual support and generosity, of putting self second so that others can be first. Prayer in common is one of the means to this unity, part of the group’s cement, as well as its joyful celebration of the fact that inchoatively, if not perfectly, this unity exists already.

So it is toward life that worship is always directed. We see this in 1 Cor. 11–14 and Matt. 5:23–24. We see it in the Didache 14:1–2: “And on the Lord’s day of the Lord, after you have gathered, break bread and offer the Eucharist, … But let no one who has a quarrel with his neighbor join you until he is reconciled, lest your sacrifice be defiled.” A few years later, around a.d. 111–113, we see it in the garbled account of a Christian assembly in the letter of the pagan governor Pliny to the emperor Trajan, during a time of persecution in the Roman Empire. Pliny had interrogated Christians concerning their private gatherings, which had brought them under suspicion after Trajan’s edict forbidding hetaeriae or secret meetings. Pliny obviously did not comprehend the information he had received from them. But he did understand that these Christian assemblies involved a commitment to a covenant with stringent ethical implications:

They insisted, however, that their whole fault or error consisted in the fact that they were accustomed to gather before daylight on a fixed day to sing a hymn to Christ as God and to bind themselves mutually, by means of a religious vow, not to any crime, but rather not to commit any theft or robbery or adultery, nor to go back on their word, nor to refuse to return a loan when it is demanded back. (Plinius Minor, Ep. 10, 96:7)

We see it in the questions asked the baptizandi in Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition 20: And when those who are to receive baptism are chosen, let their life be examined: did they live good lives when they were catechumens? Did they visit the sick? Have they done every kind of good work? And when those who sponsored them bear witness to each: “He has,” let them hear the gospel.

In short, the touchstone of our liturgy is whether or not it is being lived out in our lives. Is the symbolic moment symbolizing what we really are? Is our sacred celebration of life a sign that we truly live in this way?

In taking this perspective we are doing precisely what we saw the New Testament do with the mystery that is Christ: we recall it, make anamnesis of it, as a medium for encountering this mystery anew, so that we might see it as it is, the model and source of what we must be. But its purpose is not merely didactic. Its blazing light serves not only to illumine our deficiencies. It also burns away our darkness and draws us into its divine light.

Liturgy then has precisely the same dynamic as the New Testament and also contains my response to it. To appropriate an expression of Mark Searle, just as the Bible is the saving Word of God in the words of human beings, so the liturgy is the saving deeds of God in the actions of men and women. And both have the same end: that we might respond to the call and live it. Indeed, in a sense liturgy is more inclusive than the Scriptures, for it comprises both the saving Word and the saving actions of God, and our response to both. But just as the Word and deeds of God are seen here in sacramental form, but are present to us at every moment, symbolized but not exhausted in the ritual movement, so, too, my ritual response is but the symbolic movement of what must be the response of my every moment, with God’s help.

For liturgy is a present encounter. Salvation is now. The death and resurrection of Jesus are past events only in their historicity, that is, with respect to us. But they are eternally present in God, who has entered our history but is not entrapped in it, and they have brought the presence of God among us to fulfillment in Jesus, and that enduring reality we encounter at every moment of our lives. The past memorialized is the efficacious saving event of salvation now, re-presented in symbol. In the risen Lord, creation is at last seen as what it was meant to be, and Christ is Adam, that is, all humankind.

So the Jesus we recall is the fulfillment of all that went before. But this fulfillment of the past is directed at the future. For just as Christ has become everything and fulfilled all, so for us to be fulfilled, we must become him. And we can do this only by letting him conform us to himself, to his pattern, the model of the new creation. It is this remaking of us into a new humanity that is the true worship of the New Law. The old cult and priesthood have been replaced by the self-offering of the Son of God, and our worship is to repeat this same pattern in our own lives, a pattern we celebrate in symbol when we gather to remember what he was and what we are to be.

To express this spiritual identity, St. Paul uses several compound verbs that begin with the preposition syn (with): I suffer with Christ, am crucified with Christ, die with Christ, am buried with Christ, am raised and live with Christ, am carried off to heaven and sit at the right hand of the Father with Christ (Rom. 6:3–11; Gal. 2:20; 2 Cor. 1:5; 4:7ff.; Col. 2:20; Eph. 2:5–6). This is one of Paul’s ways of underscoring the necessity of personal participation in redemption. We must “put on Christ” (Gal. 3:27), and assimilate him, somehow experience with God’s grace the principal events by which Christ has saved us and repeat them in the pattern of my own life. For by undergoing them he has transformed the basic human experiences into a new creation. How do we experience these events? In him, by so entering into the mystery of his life so that each can affirm with Paul: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).

This is what Christian life, our true liturgy, is all about. Our common worship is a living metaphor of this same saving reality, not only representing and re-presenting it to us constantly in symbol to evoke our response in faith and deed but actively affecting it in us through the work of the Holy Spirit, in order to build up the body of Christ into a new temple and liturgy and priesthood in which offerer and offered are one.

This is what I mean when I say that all liturgy is anamnesis. It is not just a psychological reminiscence, not just a remembering, but an active and self-fulfilling prophecy in which by the power of God we become what we celebrate, while at the same time thanking and glorifying him for that great gift.

2 Peter 1:12–16 says: Therefore I intend always to remind you of these things, though you know them and are established in the truth that you have. I think it is right … to arouse you by way of reminder.… And I will see to it that after my departure you may be able at any time to recall these things. For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eye-witnesses of his majesty.

Liturgy also reminds us of the powerful deeds of God in Christ. And being reminded we remember, and remembering we celebrate, and celebrating we become what we do. The dancer dancing is the dance.

Christian Marriage in Scripture

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In biblical cultures, the celebration of marriage was not a religious rite but a festival of common life involving family, friends, and community. Although Scripture contains some poetry for use in marriage celebrations (Song of Songs, Psalm 45), it does not describe marriage as a religious ceremony. However, in both the Old and New Testaments the institution of marriage is viewed as sacramental, as a symbol of the relationship between the Lord and the covenant community.

Christ’s Headship in the Marriage Covenant

The covenant of marriage is a mutual commitment not only to create a life of equal partnership but also to nurture and sustain. When a man and a woman covenant in Christian marriage, therefore, they commit themselves mutually to create rules of behavior that will nurture and sustain the marriage resulting from their covenant. For committed Christians, those rules are found by paying careful attention to their tradition.

The letter to the Ephesians provides scriptural rules for the living out of the marriage covenant. Its writer inherits a list of household duties traditional in the time and place. He critiques the cultural assumption of inequality in this list and instructs all Christians to “submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Eph. 5:21). This critique challenges the absolute authority of any one Christian group over another, of husbands over wives for instance. It establishes as the basic attitude required of all Christians, even in marriage, an awe of Christ and a giving way to one another because of this.

As all Christians are to give way one to another, it is hardly surprising that a wife is to give way to her husband, “as to the Lord” (Eph. 5:22). There is a surprise, however, in the instruction given to husbands, at least for those husbands who see themselves as lord and master of their wives and who appeal to the letter to the Ephesians to support this perspective. The instruction is not that the husband is the head of the wife, which is the preferred male reading, but that “the husband is the head of the wife as [that is, in the same way as] Christ is the head of the church” (Eph. 5:23). How does Christ act as head of the church? The writer answers: “[He] gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). It is an echo of a self-description that Jesus offers in Mark’s gospel: “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve” (Mark 10:45).

The Christ-way to exercise authority is to serve. Jesus constantly pointed out to his power-hungry disciples that in his kingdom a leader is one who serves (Luke 22:26). A husband who wishes to be head over his wife, or a wife who wishes to be head over her husband, in the way that Christ is head over the church, will be head by serving, by giving himself or herself up for the other.

Christlike headship is not absolute control of another human being. It is not making decisions and passing them on to another to be carried out. It is not reducing another human being to the status of chattel. To be head as Christ is head is to serve. The Christian head is called always to be the servant of others. As Markus Barth says beautifully, the Christian husband-head becomes “the first servant of his wife” (Ephesians: Translation and Commentary on Chapters 4–6 [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974], p. 618), and she becomes his first servant. One rule of behavior for the nurturing and sustaining of the covenant of Christian marriage is the rule of mutual service.

The letter to the Ephesians embraces another rule for behavior in Christian marriage, a great Jewish and Christian commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18; Mark 12:31). Husbands are instructed that they “ought to love their wives as [or, for they are] their own bodies” (Eph. 5:28), and that the husband “who loves his wife loves himself” (Eph. 5:28). We can assume the same instruction is intended also for a wife. The Torah and gospel injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself applies in Christian marriage. As all Christians are to give way to one another and to love one another so also are the spouses in a Christian marriage. The rules of Christian behavior that will respect, nurture, and sustain the covenant and the community of marriage are easy to articulate: love of one’s neighbor-spouse as oneself, love that is giving way, love that is mutual service, love that is abiding.

A Christian marriage is not just a wedding ceremony to be celebrated. It is also a loving and equal partnership of life to be lived. When they covenant in marriage, Christian spouses commit themselves to explore together in their married life the religious depth of their existence and to respond to that depth in light of the Christian faith.

Discipleship in Christian Marriage

One of the most central affirmations of the Christian faith is the affirmation of discipleship. A disciple is an ever-present New Testament word, occurring some 250 times throughout the Gospels and Acts and always implying response to a call from the Lord. By definition disciples are learners, and the disciples of Christ are learners of mystery. They gather to explore together a triple mystery: the mystery of the one God who loves them and seeks to be loved by them; the mystery of the Christ in whom this God is revealed and whom God raised from the dead (1 Cor. 15:4; Acts 2:24); the mystery of the church in which they gather and which is the body of Christ (Eph. 1:22–23; Col. 1:18, 24). Spouses in a covenant marriage are called to be disciples of these mysteries and of their implications for their married life together.

Christian marriage does not separate spouses from life. It immerses them in life and confronts them with the ultimate questions of life and of death that are the stuff of religion. There are questions of joy in love and loving and the birth of new life; of pain in illness and suffering and alienation; of grief and fear in loneliness and isolation and death; of happiness in friends and beauty and success. Marriage demands that sense be made of these competing questions and many others like them. Christian marriage demands that sense be made of them in light of the shared Christian faith of the spouses.

As they find together adequate responses to the demands their married life imposes on them, Christian spouses mutually nurture one another into Christian discipleship. They learn together and they grow together in Christian maturity. The more they mature, the more they come to realize the ongoing nature of becoming married and of becoming a covenant sign. They come to realize that, though their marriage is already a sign of the covenant between Christ and his church, it is not yet the best sign it can be and is called to be. In Christian marriage, which is a life of ongoing Christian discipleship, even more than in secular marriage, the answer to the question of when two people are married is simple: thirty, forty, even fifty years later.

Christian Marriage As Sacrament

Religions are always on the lookout for the images of God and of God’s relationship to the human world. In the Jewish prophets, we find an action image, known as the prophetic symbol. Jeremiah, for instance, buys an earthen pot, dashes it to the ground before a puzzled crowd, and explains to them what it is he is doing. “This is what the Lord Almighty says: I will smash this nation and this city just as this potter’s jar is smashed” (Jer. 19:11).

The prophet clarifies the radical meaning of his actions, which clarifies the radical meaning of a prophetic symbol. As Jeremiah shattered his pot, so God shatters Jerusalem. The depth, meaning, and reality symbolized by Jeremiah is not the shattering of a cheap pot but the shattering of Jerusalem and of the covenant relationship between Yahweh and Yahweh’s people. The prophetic symbol is a representative action, that is, an action that proclaims makes explicit, and celebrates in representation some other, more fundamentally meaningful reality.

Since the idea of their special relationship to Yahweh arising out of their mutual covenant was so central to the self-understanding of the Israelites, it is easy to predict that they would search out a human reality to symbolize the covenant relationship. It is equally easy, perhaps, to predict that the reality they would choose is the mutual covenant that is marriage. The prophet Hosea was the first to act in and speak of marriage as the prophetic symbol of the covenant.

At a superficial level, the marriage of Hosea and Gomer was like many other marriages. But at a deeper level, Hosea interpreted it as a prophetic symbol, proclaiming, making humanly explicit, and celebrating in representation, the covenant union between Yahweh and Israel. As Gomer left Hosea for other lovers, so also did Israel leave Yahweh for other gods. As Hosea waited for Gomer to return to him, and as he took her back without recrimination when she did return, so also did Yahweh with Israel. Hosea’s human action is a prophetic symbol, a representative image, of God’s divine action, an abiding love despite every provocation. In both covenants, the human and the divine, the covenant relationship had been violated. But Hosea’s action both mirrors and reveals Yahweh’s abiding love. It proclaims, makes explicit, and celebrates not only Hosea’s faithfulness to his marriage covenant but also Yahweh’s faithfulness to Israel.

One basic meaning about Hosea and Yahweh is clear: Each is steadfastly faithful. There is also a clear, if mysterious, meaning about marriage. Besides being a universal human institution, it is also a religious and prophetic symbol proclaiming, making explicit, and celebrating in the human world the abiding union of Yahweh and Yahweh’s people. Lived into this perspective, living into faith as we might say today, marriage becomes a two-tiered reality. On one level it bespeaks the mutual covenant love of this man and this woman; on another, it represents and symbolizes the covenant love of Yahweh and Yahweh’s people. First articulated by the prophet Hosea, this two-tiered view of marriage becomes the Christian view of marriage that we have found in the letter to the Ephesians. Jewish prophetic symbol becomes ultimately Christian sacrament, through which the church, the body of Christ, proclaims, makes explicit, and celebrates in representation that presence and action of God which is called grace.

To say that Christian marriage is a sacrament is to say that it is a prophetic symbol, a reality that has two tiers. On one tier it proclaims and makes explicit and celebrates the intimate community of life and love between a Christian man and a Christian woman. On another deeper tier, the religious and symbolic tier, it proclaims and makes explicit and celebrates the intimate community of life and love between Yahweh and Yahweh’s people and between Christ and Christ’s people, the church.