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THE
HIGH CHURCH TRADITION

by

G. W. O. ADDLESHAW, M.A., B.D.

 

Chapter 7

INTEGRATION


In the liturgical thought of traditional High Churchmanship is to be found its most permanent and valuable contribution to English religion and its significance for our own day. It would be idle to pretend that, apart from the age of Andrewes and Laud and to a lesser extent that of Queen Anne, High Churchmen were ever within measurable distance of attaining their ends. After the Restoration the growth of non-conformity, of secularism, of latitudinarianism, made it impossible for them to build up their ecclesiastical polity. The oneness of Church and society became a mere fiction; society drifted away from the Church; and the retention of the theory of the oneness between the two made the Church an Erastian body, the creature of a nominal Christian society. The disappearance of synodical government deprived the Church of all means of self-expression. The growth of Parliamentary sovereignty subjected the Church to a mechanical and rigid theory of sovereignty and law utterly alien to its being as the Body of Christ. Latitudinarianism resulted in indifference to dogma. Through infrequent celebrations the Eucharist gradually ceased to be the centre of the Church’s worship.

Where there is no dogma, no sense of the Church as an organic body, no vital connection between the Church and man’s life, the Church is deprived of that background of life and thought which the High Churchmen realized was the necessary presupposition of Christian worship; the liturgy becomes lifeless and formal. Yet High Churchmanship still has something to teach us. Its contribution to the Church of England is an emphasis on the wholeness of Christianity; that the dogma, the prayer, and the life are a living whole which expresses itself in the liturgy. The High Churchmen viewed the whole nation as the potential Body of Christ; it was with the life of the nation that the liturgy had to do, and so their message is not only for their own communion; it is for the whole nation. Their tradition is something to which we can return as a refuge from the disintegrating forces of liberalism, individualism, and secularism. Here is to be found that wholeness which our countrymen need.

Modern Anglicanism, in a characteristically English manner, views the task it is facing not in terms of ideas and principles but of facts; in particular the fact of what is central in the Church’s life, its worship. The problem is viewed in terms of Church services, full and empty pews. The question is asked – why are they so often empty? The people are usually friendly to the Church; they are kind and good-hearted; they rally round on special occasions. But as a general rule worship is not the centre of their lives. Traditional High Churchmanship helps us to examine the question from a different angle. It suggests we should ask ourselves whether we have any grounds for supposing that they should come; that they should respond in their hundreds to our appeals for full churches. For worship is the centre of something which is a whole; it is the meeting-place of eternal truth with the life of man, the realization of man’s wholeness as a child of God. And wholeness is what the modern Englishman lacks.

Worship presupposes dogma; it proclaims, brings near and acts out great truths: creation, the incarnation, redemption, justification, sanctification, heaven and hell, truths meaningless to a generation whose one idea of the Faith is the emptiness and sentimentality of liberal interdenominational Christianity. People may come if we evacuate the liturgy of all dogma; but then it is not Christian worship. A people who have never learnt of the dogma behind the liturgy, or to whom the dogma is an academic thing divorced from all reality, cannot be expected to worship.

The liturgy is the voice of the Church, the Body of Christ. A people who think of the Church as a collection of individuals, as their parish, as the bishops and their clergy, a people who have never been accustomed to think of themselves as the Church, the new race, the community of the redeemed, are not likely to feel much of a desire to take their part in the prayer of the Church. The liturgy is vitally connected with everyday life; it presupposes that the body, whose voice it is, should embrace every side of man’s life, and that the life of the body in all departments should reflect the justice and charity proclaimed by the dogma. If society is divorced from the Church and its life not a reflection of the divine order, men will feel no inclination to join in what can only be an unreality and a sham owing to the circumstances under which they live and work. If, too, society has no sense of sin, the need of Calvary’s ever-present, redeeming power, all that the liturgy claims to do seems meaningless.

With the exception of the Church of Rome and a few Anglo-Catholic circles, English religion in its worship, whether liturgical or unliturgical, moves on one level plane. It is one long action of psalms, prayers, hymns, sacraments. Nothing stands out; there is no centre on which everything can converge; there is no culminating point. The worship does not appear to have much relation to life; nowhere in the service does there seem to be a place where God and man’s life meet, and which man can grasp as the heart of the whole thing, where Calvary can be pleaded for his own sins and those of his fellow men, and where his life and his work can be offered in actual reality to God and made part of the divine order.

To the traditional High Churchmen the problem of worship can only be solved when the liturgy is seen in the setting of the dogma which forms its background and of the community which offers it. Liturgical worship, no less than private devotion, is of vital importance in the life of the Christian, giving him balance, completion, making him live as a cell in the Body of Christ, uniting him with the Church of past ages and the Church beyond the veil. The liturgy is not his prayer; it is the prayer of one person, Jesus Christ, offered through His mystical Body the Church. This Body is not a collection of pious individuals interested in the Sermon on the Mount, but humanity incorporated into Christ, a humanity which has become the Church and so reached the fullest possible limit of its growth and development. The liturgy is the voice and expression of humanity, which is most truly itself, humanity in Christ. Until humanity has become the Church, the liturgy itself will be imperfect; for the body whose voice it is has not yet fully grown up. The liturgy is a unity since it is the voice of one person, Christ in humanity. It has about it a characteristic belonging to all great art, what Guardini calls ‘style’. [The Spirit of the Liturgy, ch. 3.] The ‘style’ comes not from its being the conscious creation of any one person or age, but from this unity which it has acquired through being the expression of One Person down the ages and through the devotion which has poured through it. A liturgy in its entirety is a matchless work of art; it has a beauty ever old and ever new; round it hovers the timeless beauty of eternity. To alter it, or to carve it about to suit modern needs or please particular congregations destroys its nature as the prayer of humanity in Christ, and is a piece of vandalism akin to defacing a masterpiece of sculpture or painting.

The liturgy is one with dogma; it presupposes dogma; it is dogma which brings it to life. A Church can only take part in it when its life is rooted in dogma, and its people have an overpowering conviction of the reality of Christian truth as the one thing which gives meaning to existence, showing them how to live, work, love, suffer, and die. Before we can expect Englishmen to worship, we must bring them back to Christian truth, the only foundation on which human life can be safely built.

Liturgical worship is bound up with the state of the Church. It must not be summed up in its rulers or fall visibly and naturally into two halves, governors and governed, pastors and people. It must not be an ecclesiastical counterpart of the secular state, with its law and government sharing the latter’s rigidity and centralization. A Church that would worship must be a community, an organism, where each element is in an organic relation to every other, where no part is able to dictate to the whole, and in which the law and government are not something imposed from above but rise naturally from the community’s life. Such a community must embrace the whole of man’s life, bringing politics, industry, commerce, home, and leisure under the rule of the divine justice and charity proclaimed by the liturgy. Worship means a theocracy in which the civil government is in the hands not of clergy, humanitarians, men of good will, but Christian laity. Man’s life is a unity; he has little chance of living as a Christian, much less of being able to worship, when he is enslaved to a secularist political and industrial system. The Church cannot run away from secular society, for then it is being untrue to its own nature and is betraying those for whom Christ died. The Church must strive to conquer society, make it one with itself, incorporate it into Christ, so that its political, commercial, industrial life, its home life and life of leisure are brought under that eternal law which Hooker in laying the foundations of High Churchmanship proclaimed to be the ultimate guide and authority in human life. Society when left to itself brings slavery and destruction; only as it is incorporated into Christ and becomes the Church does it attain fullness of being, and men themselves find that true manhood and true freedom which are so necessary for the worship of God.

Worship demands that man’s work and everyday life be offered to God and integrated into the divine order; but man who comes to offer his work and life in the liturgy has sinned; he belongs to a race which has corporately sinned. Sin has cut him off from the divine order, his true home; and the way back is the way of Calvary. Worship demands a point of integration where Calvary is brought back as an ever-present reality, so that man can plead it in reparation for his own sins and the sins of mankind: where man’s work and life, however imperfect they may be, are given purpose and direction by being joined to and made one with Christ’s perfect offering on Calvary; where man can see a vision of that adoration which all life should be. This point of integration, the High Churchmen said, was to be found in the Eucharistic sacrfice; it is the centre on which the whole liturgy converges, integrating dogma and life in one whole and giving life its true meaning. Englishmen will never worship, will never recover wholeness of life, unless in the liturgy of the Church the Eucharistic sacrifice is given that emphasis and centrality which is its due.

It is in the identification of Church and community, the stress they laid on the community conscious of itself as a Church as well as a State, and in the part played in their Eucharistic thought by the offering of the Church, that the greatness of High Church liturgical thought becomes apparent. They believed that the liturgy should edify, that it should be a uniform and ordered structure – but not out of a pedantic legalism, an interest in petty things, a desire to limit man’s approach to God. Liturgy was to them the voice, the prayer of humanity, a humanity no longer in slavery to the secular and pagan state, but a humanity which has become the Body of Christ, the Church. The liturgy must edify and be something which helps man to worship; for it is in worship that man finds the end of its existence. The liturgy must be uniform, for thus only can it become the adoring prayer of humanity. Its order is of infinite value because it centres on Calvary where alone humanity can find pardon and recreation and become part of the divine order. The supreme moment in the prayer of humanity is the sacrifice of the Eucharist. It is not only the supreme act of the Church; it is the supreme act, too, of the community, of the whole national life which has become the Church. It is in the Eucharist that the community expresses itself according to its true nature, that which in the divine purpose it is meant to become; here it is offered in union with Our Lord to the Father and takes its place in the divine order; here it most truly adores the eternal Trinity for whose honour and glory it exists.

 


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