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 Churchs
worship.
Where there is no dogma, no sense of the Church as an
organic body, no vital connection between the Church and mans
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
Churchs 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 mans
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 mans 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 Calvarys 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 mans 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 latters
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 communitys
life. Such a community must embrace the whole of mans 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. Mans 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 mans 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 mans work and life, however imperfect they
may be, are given purpose and direction by being joined to and
made one with Christs 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 mans 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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