The enduring beauty of Radical Orthodoxy

The central idea of this article is that orthodoxy is itself a radical tradition and cannot become more radical. Scholarship cannot therefore correct it but can only search out its depths. The liturgy acknowledges this when, after a reading from the bible, the reader says "This is the Word of the Lord". Note that the reader does not say: "These are the words of the Lord". God speaks in the stories. When the liturgy reminds us of the stories it becomes the Word of the Lord. Indeed, in the medieval monasteries believers were nurtured by the liturgy and little else. The engine that drives theological and liturgical development is the quest for the radical centre of the tradition. This task often consists of clearing away the accretions that have gathered over the years so that the tradition may speak on its own terms. When that is done we are surprised by what we find. If this is the case, then the liturgical movement is not just a matter of taste and harking back to a golden age of the church, it is an attempt to find the centre and express it as clearly as possible. It is acted preaching.

Father Grant emphasized the importance of story both in biblical texts and in our own lives. It seems that our cognitive machinery is adapted to process and retain information in the form of connected narrative. The crisis of belief that coincides with the decline of the church has been mis-spelt in terms of our inability to believe certain things. Again this is a framing of the question that comes from Enlightenment rationality and the rise of natural science. It is said that we can no longer believe that God exists. But a God who is encountered in worship via the rich biblical story is immune to such objections. To hear these stories and for them to become our story is an encounter with God. The framing of the argument about God is thus moved from philosophical speculation to Sunday morning.

The crisis of our time is not that we can no longer believe, but that we are formed by weak stories that do not bear the weight of living in the world. The stories that form the lives of our contemporaries emphasize endless progress and more elaborate lifestyles. It is interesting that the Federal Government's warning on terrorism is so that "our way of life be protected". These are thin stories that do not interpret the world to us, know nothing of suffering and death and produce correspondingly thin and frustrated lives. The claim of faith is that the Christian story is the story we need to interpret the world adequately. We encounter God when we listen to such a story and let that story form our lives. It is the sole function of the liturgy to do that for us and that is why it is so important, even central, to Christian life.

It is time we took a look at our prejudices that are associated with Christian worship. From the Protestant side, "high church" is perceived as a reversion to pre-reformation forms and smacks of superstition, church control and cultic practice. But we must remember that Luther left the Mass virtually intact. Modern catholic liturgy is a new development on the old form and has, hopefully, been cleansed of the mistakes and abuses of the past. There is no reason that Protestant congregations cannot be enriched. However, experience has shown that this can be a hard road. The worship habits of a lifetime are not easily changed. It is an indictment on church leadership that the people of God who worship a God, a movement and surprise are so entrenched in their ways. Liberal Protestantism may be shown to be not so liberal. Indeed it seems that there is a vested interest in not letting anything really happen in church.

Thanks to Father Grant and his team for a memorable Christmas Eve.