On meaning what you say (in the liturgy)

Or, against ecclesiastical gaslighting

One of the most tragic figures in C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, at least to me, is the Episcopal Ghost: the apostate cleric who refuses an earnest invitation to repent and believe from a former fellow-cleric and fellow-apostate who had returned to the Christian faith before death. Even while literally in hell, the ghost is unable to see the reality of his situation, lecturing his former confrere about the need to let go of primitive, mythological interpretations of heaven and hell and about the danger of ever seeking definite answers – rather than endless inquiry – in theological matters. There is much that could be said about him, but I was especially struck by one telling detail that Lewis includes. The Episcopal Ghost discusses a paper he has prepared for the theological society in hell about how much Jesus’ views might have matured if he had lived longer and not been crucified at 33 – he would, the Episcopal Ghost suggests, have “outgrown some of his earlier views.” Yet while uttering this blasphemous twaddle, Lewis notes parenthetically that upon uttering the name Jesus, “(here the Ghost bowed).”

Lewis here devastatingly indicts one of the strangest and most troubling aspects of mainline Anglicanism, as strange and troubling today as it was in Lewis’ time. The Episcopal Ghost frankly believes things about Jesus Christ which are incompatible with his solemn gesture of respect – and yet doesn’t seem to notice the incompatibility at all of bowing at the Holy Name in the midst of an address about how an older, wiser Jesus would have given up some of his more fanatical notions! And in much the same way, one of the things that I still find baffling after years in the Anglican mainline is the existence of a taken-for-granted disconnect or even opposition between, on one hand, the theological views held by many of our clergy and leaders and preached from our pulpits and, on the other hand, the stated doctrines of our church expressed in our liturgy and endorsed by our canons.

It is bizarre to experience sermons that cast doubt upon or explicitly deny certain central Christian claims that the rest of the service strongly affirms. I’ve sat through several Easter services in which the truth of Christ’s bodily resurrection, which the entire rest of the service proclaims, has been soft-pedaled or outright denied from the pulpit. I often get so upset when this happens that I miss how deeply weird it is: the collect of the day, the Scripture readings, the Creed we all say right after the sermon, the Eucharistic prayer, the hymns all say one thing – and the sermon says the opposite! It is a bizarre juxtaposition, and yet no one seems surprised or confused by this dissonance! On the other hand, then, I have at times had people seem surprised or baffled when I hold and publicly preach theological views which are clearly expressed in our liturgy; the dissonance is so taken-for-granted that its absence is an occasion for comment.

Chalk it up to overly earnest Midwestern naïveté if you must, but even after years in the mainline it still baffles me. It would be rather like, say, a union president following a rousing, enthusiastic singing of ‘Solidarity Forever’ with a speech in which he expressed his view that the union does not, in fact, make us strong. Even given the rather sick state of the US labor movement, such a union president would find himself voted out of office – but in our case we expect this as normal! I hasten to add that I don’t blame laypeople who have been taught by their priests to expect a disconnect between the liturgy of the church and what people actually believe for a lack of surprise at that very disconnect. But what I want to highlight here is the oddity of not only the existence of such a profound disconnect between liturgy and preaching – but that such a disconnect or contradiction often comes to be taken for granted.

Odd and, I think, troubling. What makes it so troubling? Even setting aside for a moment the centrality of the doctrines in question to Christian faith, we encourage our people to expect a sort of basic ecclesial dishonesty. We habituate our people to believe that the church does not really mean what we say in our worship – and somewhat bizarrely, we do so even while saying that our worship is central to our identity as Anglicans! That is, on one hand, Anglicans love to talk about the centrality of the liturgy to our expression of Christianity, boasting of its formative power in making disciples and how it enables us to define our beliefs without elaborate confessional statements. On the other hand, in many corners of our church we teach our people that ‘everyone knows’ that we don’t actually believe the things that our liturgy confesses. A disconnect between the Scripture readings or liturgical texts and the preaching and teaching of the clergy isn’t seen as something even in need of explanation or justification. It’s just the way things obviously are.

This seems to be, bluntly, a contradiction, in which the importance of liturgy is elevated at the same time as the specific content of the liturgy is dismissed. Indeed, I have met clerics who quite publicly dissent from the basic teachings of the church which our liturgy proclaims and yet would be aghast at any mistake over the course of liturgical performance. About the only way I can make sense of it is if the ‘centrality of the liturgy’ actually matters for many Anglican leaders not in terms of norming our beliefs but in terms of generating religious affections, feelings of awe or transcendence that bear no necessary relation to the truth of the statements in the liturgy. If liturgy matters for us, in many corners of mainline Anglicanism, what matters about it seems to have no particular relationship with what the words actually mean.

Now, it’s often said – I’ve said it myself – that one of the great benefits of the Anglican liturgy is that, even if people are subjected to heresy from the pulpit, the inclusion of multiple Bible readings, the proclamation of the Creed, and the words of the Eucharistic prayer in our liturgy will ensure that people are receiving at least some sound teaching. There’s something to this. Certainly I have been glad at various moments to take refuge in the liturgy if the sermon has failed to adhere to the lowest and most basic standards of Christian preaching. But – and this is important – it only works if people view the words of the liturgy as something they are supposed to take seriously as describing the faith of the church, as making a claim on them. And, unfortunately, it seems to me that our people are too often taught the opposite. If you are taught that the texts of the creeds or of Scripture or of the Eucharistic prayer are just lovely, tradition-hallowed vehicles for experiences of connection to something greater than oneself or something like that, but nothing more, then regularly encountering these texts is unlikely to lead people to a deeper knowledge and love of God.

Here's where I admit that I think that in religious matters as in others we should mean what we say. To be sure, ‘meaning what we say’ when we talk about God is a rather more complicated matter than when we talk about what we had for lunch yesterday or what have you. Theological language, after all, is a matter of grasping the ungraspable, of reaching the limits of human speech and thought and falling into awed silence before the luminous darkness of God. But there is a tremendous difference between the apophatic lapse into silence before divine mystery (a mystery that, for example, the language of the creeds carefully preserves!) and the cheerful statement that ‘of course’ we don’t actually believe in the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection or the Second Coming anymore. Naïve new Anglican that I was, I expected that the standard of Anglican identity was conformity to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the church as defined in its canons and expressed in its liturgy. I am still surprised and dismayed that so often our Anglican ethos – our habitus, if you will – is not only in direct contradiction to those very standards but also prevents people from seeing that contradiction as a potential problem. In informal, implicit ways, people are habituated to think that it is obvious that liturgical language isn’t to be taken seriously, that Anglicans don’t actually believe the things they officially say they do. Needless to say, as an outsider entering one of our communities you know none of this. And so, at the risk of using an over-used word, it feels to me like a version of ecclesiastical gaslighting.

I do not often agree with Bishop John A.T. Robinson, whose 1963 Honest to God called for a dramatic rethinking of the Christian faith because its supernatural claims about God were (in his view) no longer credible. But I do agree with him about this: it is important for the church to be honest and clear about what it actually believes. If the Episcopal Church or the Anglican Church of Canada do not actually believe what our liturgies teach, it is frankly dishonest and confusing to those considering our churches that our worship involves us solemnly declaring things that we actually think are false. Here, frankly, I must give credit to liberal Christians in the United Church of Canada or the United Church of Christ in the US, who do typically use liturgies that more closely reflect what they actually believe. On the other hand, if, as I hope and pray, we do desire as churches to believe what we claim to believe, to hold fast to the faith once delivered to the saints as expressed in Scripture, the Creeds, our liturgies (and, in Canada, the Articles of Religion – but that’s another matter), it is incumbent upon us to work to demolish this toxic ethos that teaches our people that our church does not mean what it says. And this is important not just because such dishonesty is a problem, but because it is only by overcoming it that we can welcome people into the abundant, capacious new life that the Christ of Scripture, the Creeds, and the liturgy - the real Christ - freely offers.