Those who feel that our historic liturgy is an impediment to missions and evangelism will point to the formal, repetitive aspect of our liturgy and describe it as "dead ritual." But rituals themselves are neither dead nor alive. Those who participate in them make them appear as living, vital rituals or as dead ones. Said plainly, it is not the ritual that is dead; it is we who are dead. -- Arthur Just, *Heaven on Earth* p. 35
If the Sacrament is a ritual, which I believe it is--a divine one--then it is never dead. It may be made to appear dead, but it never is. I remember reading this passage and thinking that it wasn't the clearest way of making this point.
ReplyDeleteJust defines the liturgy as a ritual in this section and proceeds to explain what a ritual is--an approach from the bottom up. I wonder whether it would have been better to look at what each unique Sacrament or each Means of Grace is, and then look at the liturgy as an enfleshment of those Sacraments--from the top down.
Phil,
ReplyDeleteGood points. I agree, it would be stronger top down - letting the gifts shine.
Timothy Quill points out in his book that this is how Odo Casel and the Liturgical Movement proceeded: Religionsgeschichte-style, you define what a generic cultic ritual is and then apply that concept to the liturgy to figure out what it is.
ReplyDeleteIt also seems like the Calvinist approach to Sacraments, where they set out to answer the question "What is a sacrament?" first and then force Baptism and the Eucharist to fit the criterion after the fact. I am eternally grateful for the Lutheran approach of "What is Baptism? What is Eucharist? What is Absolution? What is Church? What is Office?" and then only afterwards saying, "Hey, some of these things are starting to look suspiciously similar..."
I wonder if the same Lutheran Fathers who said that one might even consider Ordination a sacrament according to a certain sense--specifically because the Office itself is concerned with God's grace--would also be able to consider the Liturgy as a whole to be a means of grace or a "sacrament" in this kind of sense? Do we Lutherans have an evangelical counterpart to the Roman idea of "sacramentals"?
Ordination is an office, not an order. As such, as Sasse rightly said, the ministry is a mandate left behind by Our Lord to be perpetuated until He comes. This mandate is given to all, re the Great Commmision but exercised publicly by the ordained. Thus, Ordination is simply the authorisation by the whole church to publicly proclaim the Word in its oral and sacramental forms. Hence, Ordination is grounded in Baptism. This means that within the same order of priesthood, there are two distinct offices each with its own calling or vocation.
ReplyDelete