An article was brought back to my attention lately. When this first came out, I had thought to comment on it, but had not gotten around to it.
In it, the Bishop of Down and Dromore (Ireland) comments on what he sees as disturbing liturgical trends in the American Church.
"I write about these because it is important to note that there really is the beginning of a new kind of religion in parts of The Episcopal Church - a religion which not only re-interprets the traditional central tenets of the Christian faith, but which in fact has the potential to jettison many of them altogether. "
The changes that he cites are:
- Replacement of the word "Lord" in liturgy
- The weakening of the title "Father" in relation to the first person of the Trinity.
- A rise of a theology of an "open table," that is, communion before baptism.
- Deletion of confession.
- Downplaying of the creeds.
- Interfaith liturgy
- Downplaying of Atonement theology in the eucharist
First of all, I'm going to ask the question I've asked before, Who are these revisionists? These kind of charges make the extreme right salivate, but i've been in churches in Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Colorado, Wisconsin, Texas, New Mexico and Oregon and I've not seen any evidence of these "trends." A clue lies in the article,
"There was a perceptible change as I travelled across from the east coast to the west, from the traditional: ‘The Lord be with you’ in the liturgy, to the revised version, ‘God be with you’, and eventually, on the west coast ‘God is in you….and also in you’!"
Aha! California is the culprit! But let's ask a question here - should anything general about America be judged by what goes on in California? My guess is that Bp. Miller was so upset by what he saw going on in some of our "progressive" parishes on the coast, that it skewed his entire viewpoint. (Did he even visit the church in middle America?)
Second, he is making the assumption that these West Coast trends are something new. I've been reading "One, Catholic, And Apostolic: Samuel Seabury And The Early Episcopal Church" (Paul Victor Marshall). Most of these were ideas being floated around in the first proposed American prayer book (1785.) The proposed revisions included wholesale deletion of Trinitarian language, the removal of the Athanasian and Nicene Creeds, deletion of the "he descended into hell" clause of the Apostles' Creed, a general downplaying of atonement theory, and a weakening of Baptism. In many ways, it was a step towards Unitarianism. This is not surprising - several of the Founding Fathers were Unitarian or Deist, and many Anglican clergymen were as well. Thomas Jefferson once wrote that he thought all Americans would be Unitarians within a couple of generations. The revisers were "riding the wave." Take this example from a sermon by William Smith,
"Blessed be God, we live in a liberal and enlightened age, when religion, if not so generally practiced as it ought, is nevertheless generally better understood; and when nothing can be considered as deserving the name of religion, which is not rational, solid, serious, charitable, and worthy of the nature and perfections of God to receive, and of free and reasonable creatures to perform."
What Smith seems to imply here is that human logic can discern completely what is rational in terms of religion and that anything "illogical" might be discarded completely. This was a common belief at the time - a byproduct of the Enlightenment coming to full fruition. Nevertheless, the Proposed Book was never adopted by the Episcopal Church and our first adopted Book of Common Prayer had a lot more in common with it's English and Scottish antecedents.
The point is, the practices bishop Miller are citing are extant only in small numbers of congregations. They are not new, but a constant presence with us that is a natural byproduct of Christian Orthodoxy and the Enlightenment rubbing together. It is hardly fair to call them "trends" and rush to snap judgements about the theological future of the Episcopal Church.
David+
