Deep Calls to Deep: An Apology for Liturgy

For many of my friends, my decision to leave the Evangelical Church (in the denominational rather than literal sense of the term) in favour of the Anglican Communion has been somewhat puzzling. Usually, they are willing enough to allow that God can, probably begrudgingly, work through the High Church in spite of the "impersonal," "deadening" effect of liturgical prayer and praise, and that a liturgical church is better than no church; however, many of my Christian friends, whom I highly respect, have trouble understanding why I would leave a democratised and populist church for the sake of "wooden forms," allegedly sleepy congregations and the empty pews that accompany them. I cannot, of course, answer all such concerns, but, today, in this post, I will talk about one of the major reasons for my liturgical turn.

The best way to explain this is to explain the need that drove me to it. As a good evangelical, I was taught to believe that the centre of Christian faith is a privatised, individualised encounter with God; at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what your pastor, or your church, or your friends think about God - what counts is a personal engagement with, and application of, scripture. Most Evangelical Church services are theoretically designed to facilitate such an engagement - the community is only necessary inasmuch as it supports our personal relationship with Christ, and the only guideline for interpreting the Bible is that one should strip it of any cultural, historical, or liturgical baggage that keeps one from encountering the text in its barest possible terms.

As I was shaped in the context of these beliefs, I usually tried to avoid any sort of biblical commentaries or external reading patterns during my devotional time - after all, if the Bible itself is God's word, why clutter it with the opinions of mere humans? But as I followed this pattern, I began to feel more and more alienated from God and his word. When I knelt to pray, my thoughts would wander, with no boundaries to curb them. More significantly, as I read selections of scripture, I began to wonder precisely what an authentic personal engagement with scripture meant. As an English Major shaped and trained in the fragmented battlefield of postmodernity, I could, almost unconsciously, identify numerous potential interpretations of a single text. As I read, the spectre of Derrida hovered over my shoulder, always seeking to disrupt the interpretations suggested by that unholy trinity, Marxism, Feminism, and Post-Colonialism. Foucault and Freud loomed large, along with Nietzsche and whoever is responsible for performance theory (Judith Butler?). I did not, of course, think that any of these interpretive paradigms would allow me to read the Bible in a way that would bring me closer to God, but, in order to counter these voices impressed on me by my English training, I required a strong interpretive counter-paradigm.

This created a problem because my Evangelical training had not taught me a method of encountering the Babel of voices that seemed to haunt me when I read the Bible. It could assert that I should go with the "plain," or "common sense" reading, but this simply left me wondering about the nature of common sense. A feminist's common sense (common sense being the ideas that are considered obvious, or self evident) would be very different from the common sense of a Marxist; for the former, a common sense reading would highlight the "obvious" assumptions about gender and sex encoded in the Bible, while a Marxist would highlight its "obvious" message for an oppressed working class. As it turned out, there were as many "common sense," "plain" readings of any given Biblical text as there were theories that approached it. So I could not simply still the wind and the waves by appealing to the "plain" sense of Scripture.

With little more success, I looked to historicism. Basically, a historicist reading of the Bible seeks to discover the ways that a Biblical text interacts with the historical setting in which it was written. I thought that, if I could simply bypass the interpretive frames, and read God's word from the perspective of its first audience, I could get at what he was saying to humans, and thereby get at what he is saying to humans. However, I soon became disenfranchised from this approach for two reasons. The first is that history does not really manage to evade the postmodern culture wars that I sought so earnestly to escape. It became clear to me that one could historically contextualize the Bible in a variety of ways, and that these ways suspiciously reflected the biases of interpreters. For example, one cannot simply talk about the single historical context of, say, the Gospel of Luke - one could construct, out of primary source materials, a variety of histories (historical contexts) that are written from different perspectives. To follow our earlier theme, we could, using the same primary texts, construct both a historical context that is organized around the concept of class, and another that is organized around the concept of performative gender; these are only two examples, but I could come up with many more. In which of these contexts should we view Luke? Once again, we are overwhelmed by a multiplicity of potential histories unveiled by a variety of theories, and are faced with the daunting question: Of this wearisome infinity of contexts, which will unlock the meaning of the text so that we can get to God? Again, I was confused.

The other problem I had with the historicist method was that it placed a great deal of distance between myself and the Biblical text. I could pretend to escape both secular postmodern theorizing and facile Evangelical moralizing by limiting my engagement with the Bible to an understanding of its historical context, in the dryest and most uninteresting sense of the term (interest, after all, implies dangerous bias). But I had no strategy for applying historicist fragments of the Bible to my own life. My safety consisted in the barest assertion of what was said in the text, and I feared personal application, lest I should once again enter the realm of subjectivity, and, once again, be mercilessly assaulted by the plurality of postmodernity. But this shelter from postmodernity came at a high cost; I traded a bible vexed with subjectivity for a bible whose certainty lay safely entombed in graveclothes woven from endless layers of history. It seemed as if I would have to choose between a personal interpretation of the Bible that had no access to truth, and a truthful preservation of the Bible that kept it from effecting any change, whether personal or cultural.

In these plights, I found (and still find) the Anglican Book of Common Prayer to be an efficacious means of reading the Bible. To begin, the prayer book prefaces and follows the scriptural readings with prayers that are themselves extracted out of, and synthesised from, the bible. Rather than confining me, these prayers guide my wandering thoughts so that they can be directed toward God. It is freeing to know that I can rest in the prayer-forms of scripture instead of undertaking the Herculean task of personally overcoming my own strong-willed, individualistic tendency to mentally stray during prayer.

These prayers, which have been used time and again by Christians for 2000 years (they are therefore not arbitrary, as are many devotional manuals/programmes), basically work to re-create in me an interpretive paradigm extracted from Scripture itself, and they also draw me much nearer to the Biblical text (and thereby to God); there is a world of difference between talking about moral, historical, political etc. points that we can take from the Bible, and actually using the very words of Scripture as the instruments of our prayers. As I use these words and forms, inspired by God himself, my heart and mind becomes tuned to the heart and mind of God; scripture no longer points toward me, and my own personal affairs, but, rather, it re-forms me so that the direction of my life points toward God. And as the Word begins to teach me to have the mind of Christ, through Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, I am exposed to other portions of scripture, so that I can use my biblically tuned ears to hear what they have to say. In many ways, liturgy is circular, for we are invited to use the Bible as both the instrument of our interpretive reform, and the object of the reformed interpretive capacity, and this cycle is itself set in motion by that model of holy cyclicality, the Trinity, who has predestined us to interpret his Word according to his Word. Thus, the Babel of voices postmodern, historical, and otherwise, is stilled as God's word communes with itself, and as we are caught up in this glorious communion. All the rivers of God's Word flow into the sea of his Word, and the sea is never filled, and we cry with the Psalmist, "Deep calls unto deep at the noise of your waterfalls; all your waves and billows have gone over me."