Liturgical Cosmology

Liturgical Cosmology
Lecture at Conference of International Deans and Rectors
St George’s Cathedral, Cape Town
2009-05-05
Hans Engdahl


Introduction
Our worship of God, which is a liturgical act, has this as a presupposition: the temple that was destroyed and rebuilt in three days, that is Jesus Christ, our Lord. The liturgy, which is the encounter between us and God, is where this drama is actualised.
It is the liturgy that forms the central stage: the Eucharist. Christian Eucharistic liturgy has never had the ambition to establish temples in the first place. Central stage was from the beginning the temple as the body of Christ, i.e. the people coming together as an assembly in his name. As an afterthought buildings that took into consideration this Christian celebration came into being.
This reflection will concentrate on this Eucharistic liturgy. The Eucharist is the central sacrament of the church giving sustenance to her people. Together with the Word, read and proclaimed, the Eucharist remains the most obvious expression of Christian faith.
What many Christians never realised or thought of is the independence of this Eucharistic celebration, also in relation to the Word of God. We know that Christ instituted the Eucharistic prayer his last evening before the crucifixion. Ever since that night we have an unbroken chain of celebrations of this Eucharist to the present day; and it has its own history long before the Bible.
We could not enough stress the power that is inherent in this tradition. Even today it should be marked by intense simplicity: Jesus said, this is my body, given for you, this is my blood, shed for you. And it was a meal consisting of bread (a loaf of bread) and wine.
It is not that this tradition should be spelt out over against the Bible, on the contrary: when finally a New Testament Canon came into existence more than 100 years later, the tradition of the Eucharist was strongly affirmed (Matthew, Mark, Luke, 1 Cor. 11) or taken for granted (John).
The second surprising thing seems to be the overwhelming power in Jesus’ words of institution as interpretive tools. The surprise being that few, even among sacramentally inclined Christians, seem to be aware of the decisive influence of these words.
What he says is of course in line with what he answered the Jews after having cleansed the temple; for you given, for you shed, this is a language of very clear interpretation. Jesus says with these few words that what would take place the following day, i.e. the crucifixion, was to be his offering, his sacrifice, God’s action of love into this world, for the sake of this world and its humanity.
To our surprise it stands out as very clear that it is Jesus’ words at the Last Supper that have made us see the crucifixion in this sacrificial and redeeming light, not the other way round: “The doctrine of sacrifice (and of atonement) was not read into the Last Supper; it was read out of it” (Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy. Westminster: Dacre Press, 1943, p. 4, especially footnote 13, quotation from the bishop of Derby, in G. K. A. Bell, ed., Mysterium Christi, London, 1930, p.241).


Liturgical world making or cosmology
With the literal meaning of ‘teaching or doctrine of the world, cosmos’, cosmology could be understood in at least the following three ways.
The discipline of astrophysics, i.e. the whole perceivable universe, ‘die heelal’ and its constituent parts on macro level and on micro level, the totality of astronomy and nuclear science.
A more metaphysical or transcended view of cosmology as the inquiry about the social and personal sense of an ordered world, its significance, its consequences. One could for example ask about the cosmology of any given culture, and culture would normally imply some kind of world view.
We then also have what is called ‘the new cosmology’. Due to the dire need of addressing our ecological concerns, cosmology is now more and more taken to mean just concern for cosmos, the world, i.e. the earth only, without astrophysics.
Here we will reflect on the second meaning of cosmology and see it in relation to the Eucharistic liturgy.
Is there at all a relationship between the liturgical encounter with God and cosmology? Yes, indeed there is a connection and let me start on a personal level. I can remember certain Sundays, at least in the upper teens and so on that the liturgical service I had been part of, created a new sense of the world around me. It was as if the world was recreated. New hopes and meanings leapt forward that I previously had not been aware of.
It could also be quite physical. The sun and the wide open landscape in front of me had a new splendour. Having moved from the rural into the city, the same thing happened to me there. The liturgical worship helped me to see the city in a new light, not just as an ugly place, but as a place for community, for connections, friendships, not isolations. But were not these mere feelings and in the end illusions?
I don’t think so, but we have to be careful. As we will see just now, the church does not have her own cosmology or world view that could be rolled out for all to see, Christian or not; not at all. A sense of realism is needed, and the best way of achieving that maybe is to mention a few anomalies when it comes to church/liturgy and cosmology. The following four examples may be useful.
Most churches under apartheid did not only stay passive in face of segregation legislation. It was much worse than that. The liturgical worship through the constituent members, active in the church, helped create and sustain a cosmology that seemed to keep us apart for ever.
A state church like the Church of Sweden, until the end of 1999, when the links with the state were severed, certainly developed a cosmology that to a large extent was a painful reminder of a national and ethnic captivity. The worst part was perhaps the perception that one could be a part of the church without being part of its liturgical worship. The church had become petrified as a permanent national project.
One may also recall the present Russian Orthodox Church that suffered grievously during the communist regime but now is resurrected to a new lease of life. The only thing is that this resurrection has come out as quite reactionary. For example, great efforts are made to show that the Emperor and his family, who were brutally murdered during the beginning of the 20th century by the communists, were very saintly Christians.
The church is today part of sustaining a mythology, but also a cosmology, where Russia is the great Christian nation, unique in the world.
One could say similar things about the Anglican Church, the British Empire, South Africa, the Second Anglo-Boer War and Lord Milner, the saviour of the British Empire, to others a tyrant; his name still to be found in St George’s cathedral.
When we speak about the Christian church, her Eucharistic liturgy, etc., we have to be quite humble. The church should never fall in line with a specific nation, ethnic group or ideology. The church in her Eucharistic celebration should be a sign that is gainsaid, contradicted. The church would never be able to create a fully fledged cosmology.
Our own liturgies may speak of “a deep-going modesty, a critique of our own claims to coherent meaning and a constant conversion to hope in God’s meaning” (Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy Ground. A Liturgical Cosmology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003, p.16).
“The texts of prayer frequently express, in their biblical or Cranmerian parallels and repetitions, a kind of stammering before God, ‘the overall casting of liturgy as the hope that there might be a liturgy’” (p.16).
With the Lord’s Prayer as a central prayer and with the Eucharistic meal we may make “a modest down payment on God’s promise, on God’s conception of the world” (p.16).
At best the liturgy could “function as contradictory parables to all of our consequent narratives, including the current narratives of consumer happiness…” (pp.16f.). One should realise that the shopping malls today are a complete concept, a kind of cosmology, a world that provides meaning.
Liturgical cosmology should get inspiration from the Gospel parables. They are often characterized by ‘reversal’ and ‘surprising grace’. In many parables there is a kind of reversal as a surprise: the lost sheep, the mustard seed, the prodigal son, etc. And a great deal of surprising grace is there too.
“So we will see, the classic actions and words of the Christian assemblies can be seen to set out reversals and subversions to many of the coherent accounts we may use to hold our world together, to construct our cosmologies” (pp.17f).
As the liturgical action always is centred on the self sacrifice of Christ it is no wonder that it produces signs to the world that are gainsaid.
Christ died for the outsider, the lonely, the poor, the stranger. At best liturgical worship will turn many things upside down but also create cosmological visions and at least potential realities.
Eucharistic liturgy will always come back to the oneness of Christ and his body which is the church. And this oneness must be seen as a full sign to the one world. Jesus gave his life, not for the church, but for the world (John 3.16) and what the church must envisage, not violently but as a possibility, is an inclusive world, the one world as the heart beat of the broader creation and the universe. That is a cosmology that we never will be able to hold in our hands but rests in God’s hand.
It is ultimately a cosmology with Kingdom of God values.


Liturgical Reorientation
After these preliminaries I would like to do the following. First look into what one could call “liturgical reorientation”. Secondly, it is important to look at how liturgy might create false worlds, in fact produce cosmologies that are contrary to the gospel. In addition the liturgical assembly is problematic in a persistent way when it comes to the following: it is a gathering of sinners, not saints, Christians have radically divergent views on vital issues that make up any world view and the Christian church in its liturgical coming together more often than not, mirrors one particular world view, cosmology, i.e. a particular nationalism, ethnicity, ideology, or class etc.
Thirdly, there is reason to mention the ecumenical discussion on church and society, especially in the World Council of Churches (WCC), from the 1960s to the end of the 20th century. There is an incredible span in the discussions between the notion of ‘the church for others’ at the beginning of this era and ‘the church as a moral community’ in the 1990s. The ecumenical movement might have missed a golden opportunity to develop a liturgy that helped bring about reversals of existing, powerful cosmologies dominating the world (cf. the so-called Lima document, Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, of 1982, WCC).
In this whole exercise regarding the role of the liturgy as initiating cosmological structures I have the following point of departure. The liturgy or ‘the geography of the liturgy’ is a metaphor on the one hand, on the other it is more than that. The liturgy is also something that has to be emulated in ‘real life’. The meaning of this will become clear in due course.
Metaphors are however central to our discussion here. Lathrop regards ‘sacrifice’ as one such major metaphor that has become central in Christian liturgy with a partly radically changed meaning. The definition of metaphor he takes from Aristotle’s Poetics, as “the transposition of an alien name” (Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy Things. A Liturgical Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998 [1993], p.142). He says something quite profound: “We need to inquire what truth about God is proposed by our calling our assembly action sacrifice when it is not” (p.142). Without trying to exhaust the discussion on metaphors in any way, one could perhaps here differentiate between a more ‘hard’ type of metaphor and a more ‘soft’ type. What I mean is this. ‘Sacrifice’ is a hard metaphor in the sense that the actual meaning has travelled a long way from its origin. It is almost ‘hard’ to see the connection sometimes. The ‘geography’ of the liturgy is also a metaphor, but much closer to the reality that is described. Patterns in the liturgy, for example the way a collection is done, are easily recognisable as ‘geography’ or as ‘map’ for any cosmology. They could be seen as ‘soft’ metaphors, as the actual meaning has travelled a very short distance from the actual metaphor to what it signifies. It should be noted here that this comment on hard and soft metaphors are my own reflections.
In all my deliberations on liturgy I am quite indebted to Gordon Lathrop, even when disagreeing with him.
What makes our deliberations possible is the liturgical renewal during the 20th century, a renewal that was ecumenical on the one hand and on the other based on thorough scholarly research. Many Christians also had hopes that such a liturgical renewal, and I see myself as one of them, would indeed play a role in the churches’ orientation towards issues of justice and social action in general (Lathrop, 2003, p.51).
“The Christian liturgy orients its participants in the world” (p.51). In other words, there is a link between what we do in church and what we do in the world. So what is orientation in this world with its various cultures and patterns? It could be said to be:
“As we grow to adulthood, every human being acquires a special way of seeing and understanding the world and the human community. This is a shared conception of reality, created by the members of a society living together over generations, through their language, their institutions and arts, their experiences, and their common work and play. We call this human phenomenon ‘culture’ and it enables people to understand how and why the world around them works.” (pp.51f)
Further when you orientate yourself it would be recommended that you work yourself forward by way of ‘triangulation’. It is simply to establish one’s location with the assistance of at least another two orientation points (p.53). With two other points identified you would be able to draw up a triangle and with your point of departure included. The triangle would be able to tell where you are exactly, by telling you the angles in it, so at least in a two-dimensional reality you would know now where you are.
This positioning could also be seen metaphorically but it is also of vital importance to be able to tell where exactly we are on the earth.
When claiming that liturgy orients us in the world in terms of justice we are clearly talking metaphorically. The same is the case when we say “the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the dawn of the true sun on the darkness of the world and our assembly gathers to face toward that dawn, we are using the richest of the metaphors of orientation” (p.54). So letting the worshipping congregation face east is a good metaphor for the fact that the God who is the creator of heaven and earth and the Lord of light also raised this Jesus from the dead. Without in any way claiming that this is literally what is to happen, it is good metaphor also to watch towards east for the second coming of Christ (p.55).
More precisely the metaphor now could be said to be the geography of the liturgy. In order to navigate we need the liturgy, which could be said to be our binoculars, compass or map (p.57). In other words, the liturgy will give us tools of interpretation and also an opportunity to exercise power. What is involved is not just space but at least as much time. The orientation in question has to do with our past as well as with our future (p.57).
There are two dangers here. One is that we simply don’t see that the liturgy is a means of orienting ourselves in the world. The other is that we might be tempted through “our religious rituals to give… almost exclusively interior orientations to the self, a map of the human heart without a macrocosm, without exterior references except to a World Away From Here, ‘heaven’ we may call it” (pp.58f).
There are four examples of how liturgical practices could be seen as ‘real action’ as well as metaphors at the same time. First, there is the intercession that in order to be effective and cosmologically useful has to be ecumenical. The vision of the one church has to be held up in order to make sense when praying for the one world, created by God. Secondly, the main collection in the liturgy should be for the poor and not for the edification of the own community. Thirdly, a basic metaphor for real action in the world, in order to alleviate the basic needs, would be to see the Eucharist as “the utterly basic shared meal with enough for everyone” (p.59). Finally, baptism is not simply purification but a combination of water and the word. “Baptism by water and the word, rather, is an immersion in identification with all the needy ones of the world. Such identification makes of the church that is created by baptism a paradoxical society, a centered society of the open door, the Spirit-formed ‘body’ of the one in whom God is reconciling all things, a community carrying its own contradiction” (p.65).
In other words, a healthy liturgy is full of juxtapositions and the reason for that is its Christological and Trinitarian nature (p.65). There are contradictions and in order to find one’s way a kind of triangulation is needed: in order to find the way in the liturgy and not being misled one needs at least two things to hold on to, for example “thanksgiving conjoined with lament, song with silence, people with leaders” (p.66).
Lathrop’s summary here is masterly: “Christian liturgy at its best, receives our senses of direction, our maps, our geographies, our cosmos, and radically reorients them. Such reorientation is the most important form of liturgical map-making, the liturgical way of enacting the reversals of the Bible” (p.66).


The Making of False or Distorted Worlds
The liturgical assembly is not always helpful in reorienting its people to a world to God’s liking. Here I like to make a distinction. We would easily say that the worshipping community is such and such because of influences from the outside. Of course one can say that, but this is not very helpful if the people of the liturgy are supposed to regard this gathering as the defining (kairos) moment before everything else. The distinction I want to make is simply this: regardless of who influences who, in my present argument I work from the assumption that this assembly, this liturgy is what defines the rest.
Lathrop mentions two distortions that may lead to false cosmologies, hierarchical leadership and the assembly as a closed circle. Hierarchies are incompatible with Christian liturgy, according to him. In short, Lathrop argues that the church adopted a political structure through its association with the Roman Empire from the 4th century onwards. What is reflected in the ministry performing in the liturgy is a hierarchy of leaders who are served rather than serve.
His point is taken. Even when a bishop leads the liturgical assembly, his (her) only attributes should not be the throne, the mitre, or any other royal symbols, etc.; also attributes of servant-hood should be there; one could rightly ask which these attributes are?
On the other hand, Lathrop’s criticism is rather sudden and surprising, even a bit naïve. It is common knowledge that the main reason for the church adopting hierarchical structures in the end (and any organization of any advancement has some kind of hierachical structure) has to do not only with influences from the abovementioned factors or as he also adds, neo-Platonism. As early as during the time of Irenaeus it became necessary to develop a hierarchy of leaders so as to keep the worst heretics at bay.
What is further disturbing is that Lathrop gives the impression that only in the more catholic tradition (here belong also some Anglicans, Lutherans and a few other Protestants) one would find an explicit hierarchy. This is simply not true. All churches have hierarchies of some sort and the preacher hierarchy is not necessarily more tolerable than the more liturgical or sacramental one.
What is intriguing though, thanks to Lathrop’s rather severe criticism, is the need for new liturgical symbols, expressing the hierarchy (bishop, presbyter and deacon) as servants. This is very welcome and needed; also the fact that Feminist theologians already have contributed to new thinking as to the hierarchy and power relations in the congregation.
The second distortion is said to be the closed circle. Protestants are prone to fall here. The need to control, to keep a high standard of commitment, the need for revival and discipline can easily lead to a group formation that is closed. It becomes very much like a formal dinner with invitees and non-invitees, insiders and outsiders.
Lathrop is right in saying that the worst of all combinations is a church that is hierarchical and at the same time a closed circle.
(This section, see pp.179-191)
Let me also mention another three reasons why it simply may be difficult or impossible to achieve a liturgical assembly that is able to draw up a map for a meaningful cosmology.
First of all the simple fact that the members of any worshipping church are all sinners, of various degrees and this bare fact may be enough to thwart all good intensions. People may be so filled by their own burdens of their own making that the mere fact that they end up in church is a miracle of sorts. Why expect from such a congregation highflying plans for a renewed world? Is it not enough if these people somehow could unburden themselves so as to be able to pick up the pieces of themselves in their everyday lives?
Secondly, what is further disturbing or distorting the people involved in liturgy is the sheer divisions apparent, theologically and morally between them on critical, central points, also in the same church or denomination. It makes it almost impossible to reorient yourself in such a case in terms of liturgy and world.
Thirdly, and equally disturbing, is the fact that the church more often than not already mirrors a particular world view or cosmology. It is here too late to blame others. The liturgical assembly in fact represents a particular ethnicity, nationalism or ideology and actively so, both in terms of real presence but also metaphorically. Gospel, Christological and Trinitarian values seem to be sacrificed on the altar of group selfishness and short-sightedness.
I am of the opinion that we here are dealing with a real threat against the wonderful potential of allowing the liturgy to play an effective role in the reversal of false cosmologies and in the creation, at least tentatively, of real ones.


The Church as Metaphor for the World: the ecumenical discussion of the church as moral community
Finally I like to draw the attention to a critical discussion in the World Council of Churches regarding to role of the church in the world. We may here infer that the core of this church would be its liturgy.
What I will explore here is a rather strict parallel to what has been said earlier in this paper. An important observation would be that the ecumenical movement also was heavily involved in liturgical renewal. Its greatest achievement in the Faith and Order tradition was no doubt the work on Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, the Lima Report of 1982. The only other achievement of similar import is to be found in the Life and Work tradition; where capacity to create an international movement against apartheid was built. One should also add that liturgical research, including the Roman Catholic Church, early on in the 20th century was characterised by ecumenical co-operation.
The discussion in question took place roughly in the period from the 1960s to the mid-1990s. Suffice it here to do only two things; first, give a very brief résumé of how the discussion unfolded, second, relate this enormous long-term engagement of more than 30 years or more than a whole generation to our present reflection on the liturgical assembly as real presence and as metaphor for a viable cosmology.
The discovery that the church was meant to serve the world dawned upon many Christians after the Second World War. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s dictum, ‘the church for others’, became a central tenet for a viable theology of and for the world. It was however also criticized for being too bourgeois and condescending. Theo Sundemeier (Heidelberg, and Namibia) preferred the term conviviality, expressing the church ‘with others’ rather than ‘for others’.
Be that as it may, during a number of world conferences, especially the Church and Society Conference in Geneva in 1966, the WCC General Assembly in Uppsala in 1968 and the CWME (Conference for World Mission and Evangelism) in Bangkok in 1973, the emphasis was totally on the church in the world. The stress was in fact on the world even in terms of salvation, and especially in Bangkok the question was rather what role the church might have, if any.
Theologians like J C Hoekendijk spelt out that the church was there for others, not for herself; she was nothing in herself and it was also not of particular interest to find out what that ‘in herself’ was in any case.
However, things started to turn around as early as 1975, at the following General Assembly of the WCC in Nairobi. With quite some humility the conference report said that in the end the church had to play a role, there was no other body and the Eucharistic celebration was emphasized.
This was in a way the beginning of a renewal towards saying that the church was important in itself. One contradiction is still that while the extraordinary document BEM was agreed upon in 1982 and while this in effect meant something concrete for the church and the liturgy, this whole reality was somehow kept aside in the Faith and Order tradition of the WCC.
Only in the 1990s there was a coming together of the two traditions, Faith and Order and Life and Work. Only when operating together, was the word, would it become clear what the role of the church would be in the world and secondly, what the church was called to be in itself.
The result of three different conferences in the early 1990s dealing with ‘Costly Unity’, ‘Costly Commitment’ and ‘Costly Obedience’ respectively, led to a very important synopsis called Eccleciology and Ethics from 1995. In a progression one can see how the role of the church became more and more articulated, from having been a facilitator of justice, peace and the integrity of creation ‘out there’ to becoming something in herself. In the end Ecclesiology and Ethics pronounces without hesitation that in order to play a role in the world at all, the church is and must be ‘a moral community’.
This leads me to the second remark. It is not without quite some interest that I here see a parallel with what we have been discussing earlier. It is as if the two kinds of observations are valid, both of them. It was said about the liturgical assembly that it had a real presence to be emulated by the world and secondly that it also was a metaphor for the world.
In the ecumenical discussion, it is quite obvious, and then I offer a benign interpretation of what was taking place, that somehow in the end the church had a role to play ‘for others’. That was a metaphorical role. After all the church was the carrier of the gospel and other values attributable to Christ and God as revealed to us humans. It was not as if the church was anything in itself except metaphorically; one must say: this is better than nothing.
Secondly, the ecumenical movement in the end took courage and said, ‘the church is moral community’. This saying is conducive to talking about the real presence of a life of flesh and blood in the liturgical assembly that would state a real example to the world, pointing to a new cosmology or to the reversal of old cosmologies.
Seeing these together, the liturgical engagement with God in Christ as a real presence of a new pattern and at the same time as a metaphor of what must happen in cosmos opens up new perspectives. In a resurrection paradigm one might venture to say that the internalisation of liturgical inspiration into one’s own soul or into some heavenly realm is out of the question. What it all is about is the fact that the liturgical gathering, where the resurrected Christ is confronting us as both a real presence and as a metaphor for the world, now becomes the fertile ground for any talk about what might be called ‘heaven’, or rather the transformation or even rather the transfiguration that already has started as an ongoing process in the ever fresh encounter between God and humans in the liturgical assembly.
How better could this be described than in the following verse written by N F S Grundtvig, the Danish 19th century hymn writer and theologian, the verse found on a church bell in emigrant USA:

To the bath and to the table,
To the prayer and the word,
I call every seeking soul.
(p.224)