Wednesday, October 13, 2004 AD
De-Pelagianizing the Liturgy
Interesting article by William Oddie in this week's Spectator, "Whose rite is it anyway?", on recent developments in Roman Catholic liturgy.
Oddie begins by describing the process in the 1960s and 70s by which, in both the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches:
He then goes on to report how the Roman Catholic Church, at least, may now be recovering lost ground with proposed revisions to the Missal. The changes are being made in response to a papal document issued three years ago, Liturgiam Authenticam, in which the Pope called for more accurate liturgical translations from the Latin.
Fr Bruce Harbert, the liturgist who is leading the project to producte the new English translation, has argued that the current texts (as well as being of poor literary quality) are also theologically flawed. Oddie quotes an article from 2001 in the Catholic Herald, in which Fr Harbert wrote:
It also makes me wonder how this change in direction compares with the new Lutheran Service Book being adopted by the LCMS. Confessional Lutheran liturgy seems to have been less affected by the negative trends in the 1960s and 70s which William Oddie describes (I know Lutheran Worship has its detractors, but it's positively Cranmerian next to the Church of England's Alternative Service Book 1980). However, I wonder if the LSB's language will come to feel a bit "functional" in places, particularly where it has adopted liturgical texts which the Roman Catholics may now be moving away from (eg for the Gloria in Excelsis).
(Update: Architecture comments now moved to a separate post)
Oddie begins by describing the process in the 1960s and 70s by which, in both the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches:
...a new kind of liturgical English - bare, sparse, apparently wilfully lacking in elegance or sonority — gradually replaced both Cranmer’s English and the Latin of what became known as the old Mass.Particular liturgical crimes highlighted by Oddie include the "fearsome, jingly new settings" in place of Elizabethan plainsong, the "bouncy new version of the Gloria [which] can be sung to the Eton boating song", and, of course, the replacement of "And with thy spirit" with "And also with you", which Oddie describes (rightly, in my view) as "graceless and pedestrian".
He then goes on to report how the Roman Catholic Church, at least, may now be recovering lost ground with proposed revisions to the Missal. The changes are being made in response to a papal document issued three years ago, Liturgiam Authenticam, in which the Pope called for more accurate liturgical translations from the Latin.
Fr Bruce Harbert, the liturgist who is leading the project to producte the new English translation, has argued that the current texts (as well as being of poor literary quality) are also theologically flawed. Oddie quotes an article from 2001 in the Catholic Herald, in which Fr Harbert wrote:
"Our current English texts ... repeatedly overestimate the value of human effort and undervalue the role of divine grace in human life, that is, they tend towards the Pelagian heresy."Oddie goes on to say that:
One notorious sign of the Pelagian tendency of the old translation was in its inclination to remove any sign of humility before God. The idea of God as being our superior (fairly fundamental, one would have thought), conveyed traditionally by the use of the title "Lord", was frowned on, and wherever possible, "Lord" tended to be "translated" as "Father". Any note of supplication tended to be downplayed...One particular example given by the chairman of the committee revising the liturgy is replacement of the "somewhat peremptory" words:
"And so, Father, we bring you these gifts. We ask you to make them holy by the power of your Spirit"with the more ringing (and apparently more accurate translation of the Latin):
"Therefore, Lord, we humbly implore you: graciously make holy by the same Spirit these gifts we have brought to you for consecration..."Setting to one side the theology of these statements, this move towards more stirring and memorable - not to mention more humble and supplicatory - language seems a positive development. And it's certainly an improvement on the drift in recent Anglican liturgies towards what Francis Schaeffer used to call "connotation language", focusing on stirring up our inner feelings ("reader-response"), rather than on the words actually having meaningful content. (One particular low-point that springs to mind is the line, "all your works echo the silent music of your praise", from one of the new eucharistic prayers - indeed, one of my first-ever blog posts was on this subject).
It also makes me wonder how this change in direction compares with the new Lutheran Service Book being adopted by the LCMS. Confessional Lutheran liturgy seems to have been less affected by the negative trends in the 1960s and 70s which William Oddie describes (I know Lutheran Worship has its detractors, but it's positively Cranmerian next to the Church of England's Alternative Service Book 1980). However, I wonder if the LSB's language will come to feel a bit "functional" in places, particularly where it has adopted liturgical texts which the Roman Catholics may now be moving away from (eg for the Gloria in Excelsis).
(Update: Architecture comments now moved to a separate post)
