The liturgy of the Church is a public act; it is not a private encounter with God, though it is and should be deeply personal in many respects. I'm drinking from a fire-hose turned on by Ratzinger and others, and these thoughts are just beginning to form my heart, and to form in my heart. We cannot tolerate liturgical abuse, no matter how small, because of what it is: the in-breaking of Heaven into this world broken by sin, but beloved by God. Liturgy is not what we do for God; it is rather to enter into the reality of His redemption. If so, we cannot alter what that proper response is and should be, because to do this is to deny reality itself, in order to fabricate another one. We have to trust the Church, and to receive what she gives, even if it does not please us in some way, because it's not about us in the first place.
I have really begun to see what the ecumenical minimalism truly is: a denial of the reality of the Kingdom. If the Bible represents the story of the Kingdom/Church, the tragedy is that a story with so many shared elements fractures in as many ways as you can imagine. The anarchy of individualism conspires to obscure the plain fact that there is one God, one Kingdom, one altar, and therefore (essentially) one liturgy. It's the heavenly one that breaks in here, not the other way around. We cannot ascend to God, and we never could.
To frankly acknowledge the reality of competing claims to Christian truth and to judge between them is not to somehow desire a unanimity or certainty that is foolhardy; it is to insist that God is in the business of reconciling and making new. There is only one Church because there is only one King. We have to see Christian disunity for what it really is: competing liturgies, competing testimonies concerning Jesus Christ, the Word. For all the talk about appreciating "distinctives," it's someone's assertion that his are right, and yours are wrong. It doesn't matter how nice you say it. "Authority" and "history" is a shorthand way of saying, "There is more backing this liturgical claim than a bald assertion of correctness."
We do not do the works God requires of us by pretending that theological and liturgical choices are expressions of preference or cultural situation. "Who sent you?" is exactly the right question, and it always has been. How can a "Church" of one be the Kingdom of God?
I have really begun to see what the ecumenical minimalism truly is: a denial of the reality of the Kingdom. If the Bible represents the story of the Kingdom/Church, the tragedy is that a story with so many shared elements fractures in as many ways as you can imagine. The anarchy of individualism conspires to obscure the plain fact that there is one God, one Kingdom, one altar, and therefore (essentially) one liturgy. It's the heavenly one that breaks in here, not the other way around. We cannot ascend to God, and we never could.
To frankly acknowledge the reality of competing claims to Christian truth and to judge between them is not to somehow desire a unanimity or certainty that is foolhardy; it is to insist that God is in the business of reconciling and making new. There is only one Church because there is only one King. We have to see Christian disunity for what it really is: competing liturgies, competing testimonies concerning Jesus Christ, the Word. For all the talk about appreciating "distinctives," it's someone's assertion that his are right, and yours are wrong. It doesn't matter how nice you say it. "Authority" and "history" is a shorthand way of saying, "There is more backing this liturgical claim than a bald assertion of correctness."
We do not do the works God requires of us by pretending that theological and liturgical choices are expressions of preference or cultural situation. "Who sent you?" is exactly the right question, and it always has been. How can a "Church" of one be the Kingdom of God?
Comments