A holistic perspective on liturgy and secularism

When discussing "religion" in the modern world there are many dichotomies: religion and science, sacred and secular, mystery and certainty, faith and reason, supernatural and natural, clergy and laity, transcendence and immanence, church and state.

Each of us and the communities that we belong to need to make sense of these dichotomies, as they have profound implications in ethics, education, politics, science, theology, and human flourishing.

I recently found the underlying philosophical issues, particularly about secularism, addressed profoundly by an unexpected source.

For the theology reading group this month we are reading

For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy by Alexander Schmemann

I find it very helpful that this group leads me to read authors and books that I would not normally. I grew up in the Anglo-Catholic tradition. In contrast, my church experience the past forty years has been "low" church. Most of these churches have been dismissive of liturgy and tradition, and have marginalised the Eucharist (holy communion) and any notion of a "sacramental" view of rites such as baptism, marriage, and ordination. I have also not been able to grasp the thinking behind those who are enthusiastic about Catholic and Orthodox traditions. Perhaps, I am just too practical and pragmatic. 

However, in the past few years I have come to appreciate liturgy through the Every Moment Holy and Celtic Daily Prayer books of liturgy.

I have been blessed by this book. It is amazing! It is not at all what I expected. 

First, Schmemann shares my concerns about the way that liturgy can take on a life on its own, be an escape from the "real" world, and lead to obscure and inane ideas and divisive debates about issues such as transubstantiation.

Second, significant parts of the book are about deep philosophical issues such as I raised in my introduction. His analysis of secularism is brilliant and insightful, and at least fifty years ahead of analysis today. Schmemann contends that secularism is a Christian heresy. This resonates with a view promoted more recently by Tom Holland and Brad Gregory.

Sacraments are not "miracles" but transformations.

A sacrament -...- is always a passage, a transformation. Yet it is not a “passage” into “supernature” but into the Kingdom of God, the world to come, into the very reality of this world and its life as redeemed and restored by Christ. It is the transformation not of “nature” into “supernature,” but of the old into the new. A sacrament therefore is not a “miracle” by which God breaks, so to speak, the “laws of nature,” but the manifestation of the ultimate Truth about the world and life, man and nature, the Truth which is Christ.

page 102

“This is my body, this is my blood. Take, eat, drink.…” And generations upon generations of theologians ask the same questions. How is this possible? How does this happen? And what exactly does happen in this transformation? And when exactly? And what is the cause? No answer seems to be satisfactory. 

This leads to a discussion of the problem with a reductionist approach to sacraments.

Symbol? But what is a symbol? Substance, accidents? Yet one immediately feels that something is lacking in all these theories, in which the Sacrament is reduced to the categories of time, substance, and causality, the very categories of “this world.” Something is lacking because the theologian thinks of the sacrament and forgets the liturgy. As a good scientist he first isolates the object of his study, reduces it to one moment, to one “phenomenon”—and then, proceeding from the general to the particular, from the known to the unknown, he gives a definition, which in fact raises more questions than it answers. 

But throughout our study the main point has been that the whole liturgy is sacramental, that is, one transforming act and one ascending movement. And the very goal of this movement of ascension is to take us out of “this world” and to make us partakers of the world to come. In this world—the one that condemned Christ and by doing so has condemned itself—no bread, no wine can become the body and blood of Christ. Nothing which is a part of it can be “sacralized.” 

True sacramentalism must go beyond a false dichotomy between sacred and secular. A false dichotomy is an fallacy that limits the possible options, reducing complex analysis to either/or choices and not leaving room for both/and or dialectic.

“to free the terms “sacramental” and “eucharistic” from the connotations they have acquired in the long history of technical theology, where they are applied almost exclusively within the framework of “natural” versus “supernatural,” and “sacred” versus “profane,” that is, within the same opposition between religion and life which makes life ultimately unredeemable and religiously meaningless.

Another example is the relationship between Word and sacrament.

“The sacrament is a manifestation of the Word. And unless the false dichotomy between Word and sacrament is overcome, the true meaning of both Word and sacrament, and especially the true meaning of Christian “sacramentalism” cannot be grasped in all their wonderful implications. The proclamation of the Word is a sacramental act par excellence because it is a transforming act. It transforms the human words of the Gospel into the Word of God and the manifestation of the Kingdom. And it transforms the man who hears the Word into a receptacle of the Word and a temple of the Spirit.…”

There is even emergence!

“the Greek word leitourgia. It meant an action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals—a whole greater than the sum of its parts. It meant also a function or “ministry” of a man or of a group on behalf of and in the interest of the whole community. Thus the leitourgia of ancient Israel was the corporate work of a chosen few to prepare the world for the coming of the Messiah. And in this very act of preparation they became what they were called to be, the Israel of God, the chosen instrument of His purpose.”

page 25

Beauty is important and should not be eliminated for reasons of functionality.

“Once more, the joyful character of the eucharistic gathering must be stressed. For the medieval emphasis on the cross, while not a wrong one, is certainly one-sided. The liturgy is, before everything else, the joyous gathering of those who are to meet the risen Lord and to enter with him into the bridal chamber. And it is this joy of expectation and this expectation of joy that are expressed in singing and ritual, investments and in censing, in that whole “beauty” of the liturgy which has so often been denounced as unnecessary and even sinful. 

Unnecessary it is indeed, for we are beyond the categories of the “necessary.” Beauty is never “necessary,” “functional” or “useful.” And when, expecting someone whom we love, we put a beautiful tablecloth on the table and decorate it with candles and flowers, we do all this not out of necessity, but out of love. And the Church is love, expectation and joy. It is heaven on earth,”

Faith is not just intellectual belief or assent to propositions. It is love, relational, and trust in Christ.

But faith itself is the acceptance not of this or that "proposition" about Christ, but of Christ Himself as the Life and the light of life. (I Jn. 1:2). 

In this sense Christian faith is radically different from "religious belief." Its starting point is not "believe" but love. In itself and by itself all belief is partial, fragmentary, fragile...  Only love never fails (I Cor. 13). And if to love someone means that I have my life in him, or rather that he has become the "content" of my life, to love Christ is to know and to possess Him as the Life of my life. 

(p.104-105)

Modern physics is not a threat to Christianity

Martin Rees, is the UK Astronomer Royal and a former President of the Royal Society. He is an atheist. He has an interesting article in the Telegraph newspaper, Even a theory of everything has limits. It is stimulated by Stephen Hawking's new TV series The Grand Design based on his recent book with Leonid Mlodinow.
Rees points out the limitations of Hawking's reductionist triumphalism.

Nearly all scientists are “reductionists” in so far as they think that everything, however complicated, obeys the basic equations of physics. But even if we had a hypercomputer that could solve those equations for (say) breaking waves, migrating birds or human brains, an atomic-level explanation wouldn’t yield the enlightenment we really seek. The brain is an assemblage of cells, and a painting is an assemblage of chemical pigment. But in both cases, what’s important and interesting is the pattern and structure – the emergent complexity. 

This is why the Grand Design has no relevance to most of the things that humans value. True, if you believe God is some magician who lit the blue touchpaper to set our universe expanding, you need to modify your beliefs. But nothing in modern physics – and here I disagree with Hawking and Mlodinow – need give Rowan Williams (for instance) any intellectual discomfort.

Thus, a very distinguished atheist scientist, acknowledges modern physics does not represent an intellectual threat to Christianity.

Reducing reductionism to irrationality

Francis Crick is best known as the co-discover with James Watson of the structure of DNA and of the hypothesis of the genetic code. This was the beginning of a whole new field of science, molecular biology. Given this scientific success perhaps it is not surprising that Crick was a passionate reductionist. Later in Crick's career he turned to neuroscience and wrote a popular book, The Astonishing Hypothesis: the scientific search for the soul. In it he makes the classic reductionist claim (p. 3):

"You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules"

In response John Polkinghorne writes that Crick's agenda is 

ultimately suicidal. If Crick’s thesis is true we could never know it. For, not only does it relegate our experiences of beauty, moral obligation, and religious encounter to the epiphenomenal scrap-heap. It also destroys rationality. Thought is replaced by electro-chemical neural events. Two such events cannot confront each other in rational discourse. They are neither right nor wrong. They simply happen… The very assertions of the reductionist himself are nothing but blips in the neural network of his brain. The world of rational discourse dissolves into the absurd chatter of firing synapses. Quite frankly, that cannot be right and one of us believes it to be so.

John Polkinghorne, One World, p. 92.

I thank Lewis Jones for bringing these quotations to my attention. They are discussed in more detail by John Lennox, in God's Undertaker: Has science buried God?
On a lighter note, these issues are also discussed here.

Trusting science to save us?

Jacques Monod was a very distinguished French biologist who shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In some ways he was a predecessor to Richard Dawkins. He was a very gifted writer who wrote a popular book arguing that science necessarily led to atheism. Here is a widely cited quotation from the conclusion of his popular book:

``Where then shall we find the source of truth and the moral inspiration for a really scientific socialist humanism? Only, we suggest, in the sources of science itself,..... it is the conclusion to which the search for authenticity necessarily leads. The ancient covenant is in pieces; man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immmensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. Neither his destiny nor his duty have been written down. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.''

Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modem Biology, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Knopf, 1971), p. 167

In response, I quote another atheist Nobel Prize winning scientist, Phil Anderson, who wrote in a very famous anti-reductionist article, More is Different:

``we have yet to recover from that [arrogance] of some molecular biologists, who seem determined to try to reduce everything about the human organism to ``only'' chemistry, from the common cold and all mental disease to the religious instinct.''

Scientists discover atheist gene!

I am waiting to see such a headline.

The Times (London) has a silly article, "You are born to believe in God," about the latest "research" that "shows" that people can't control their irrational tendencies and just have to believe in God..... The artilce makes dubious claims such as:

Such work is supported by other researchers who have found evidence linking religious feelings and experience to particular regions of the brain. They suggest people are programmed to get a feeling of spirituality from what is nothing more than electrical activity in these regions.

One could also say:

"Atheist thoughts are just nothing more than electrical activity in certain "rational" parts of the brain."

"William Wilberforce's passion to end slavery was really nothing more than electrical activity in certain "compassionate" parts of his brain."

"Terrorists anger and hatred is really nothing more than electrical activity in their brain".

So why don't these "scientists" make such claims?

This is reductionism and speculation run amok. Let us not consider this as real science.

Repeating the history of the mistakes of historical criticism

Why should we be skeptical about the nineteenth century historical criticism of the Bible that led to liberal theology?

In Theology of the Old Testament, Bruggemann, writes (page 47):

In order to understand the crisis of biblical theology at the end of the twentieth century, we must pause to understand what was entailed in this singular preoccupation with the historical, as it enthrallled Old Testament scholarship. It is best perhaps to recognize Hegel's articulation of "absolute history", which reflected a convinced Eurocentric view of all human reality. That is, history, in any practical reckoning, consisted in European history and reflected the uncritical hegemony of the writers of that history. Two other facets of history are readily noted in the work of Old Testament scholarship in the nineteenth century. First, history was considered as moving in a single, developmental line, again reflective of a hegemonic perspective. Second, in a mood of positivism it was widely believed that an objective investigation could recover history "as it happened," with no ambiguity. And indeed, there need be no interpretive playfulness about "what it meant".

I hate to say it, but this does help me understand better how in such an intellectual climate many theologians could end up supporting Hitler.

It also seems how some conservatives today are letting these "historical" preoccupations set the agenda for their reading and interpretation of scripture.

Brueggemann then starts to discuss the value (and some limitations) or sociological approaches and rhetorical criticism. However, much of this seems to be making the same reductionist mistake: trying to reduce theology (or at least Biblical scholarship) to a different discipline (history, sociology, literature, ...). But, as Barth emphasized, the subject under study (the triune God whose revelation Scripture bears testimony to), by its very nature, is not amenable to
such reductionism.

Liberating Old Testament scholarship from reductionism

More from Brueggemann's, Theology of the Old Testament (page 28)

Walther Eichrodt seeks to do in Old Testament study what Barth undertook in dogmatic theology, against his liberal antecedents....

Eichrodt's program is to explore how all of the variations and developments of Israel's religion can be seen to be in the service of a single conceptual notion, covenant. It is impossible to overestimate what a singular intellectual achievement this project is.....
....In our current parlance, we might say that Eichrodt polemicises against the categories of modernity that critical study had imposed on the text; these categories feature individualism and autonomoy and resist articulations that are dialogical and therefore complex, ambiguous, and unsettled. The fundamental relatedness of all of reality, which is most charateristic of Israel's faith, makes the Old Testament inimical to the categories of modernity.

As an aside, I found this interesting because it confirms a point (Barth liberated theology from the limitations of reductionism imposed by liberal 19th century theology) I tried to make in my paper, Emergence and reductionism in theology and science, that is forthcoming in the Scottish Journal of Theology.