Worship as Theology

 Twenty-fourth Wednesday after Pentecost

It's theology day on the blog. As I have noted to you many times before, I'm not a theologian. As my months of blogging have passed, I've become aware that I may be running out of things to say on theology. Does this mean I should read more theology--or that I should find something else to write about on Wednesdays (NFL football? Fountain pen collecting?)?

 

A couple of weeks ago I finished Geoffrey Wainright's book Doxology. Wainright was an Englishman educated at Cambridge University, a British Methodist, and a long time faculty member at Duke Divinity School. He was a member of UUMC the last few years of his life. Important for me is that he heard me preach. It was, in fact, the last sermon I have preached, back in 2019 at Carolina Meadows (He died in the earlier part of this year). The book was readable for a lay theologian, not overly technical, although he did occasionally throw in quotations from French and German theologians in the French or German without translation. He also used a lot of Latin, as British theologians and Catholic theologians tend to do. 

 

This isn't a review of Wainwright's  book, but I do want to highlight his thesis. Wainwright contends that good Christian theology grows out of liturgy and not so much the other way around, as most folks think and as most theologians work. Practice leads to theory, as much as theory is put into practice. 

As a non-theologian, let me put forward some outsider observations related to Wainright's thesis. In the past there seems to me to have been basically two kinds of theologians. I'll call them Biblical based theologians and philosophy based theologians. Just to drop a few names, I would include in the latter category foremost St. Thomas Aquinas (13th century), also Soren Kierkegaard (19th century), and Paul Tillich (20th century). Biblical theologians would include Martin Luther (16th century), and Karl Barth (20th century). 

When I was in Divinity School, back in the 1960"s, theology professors were highly regarded; Worship professors, not so much. We had only one professor in Worship. He didn't have a Ph.D., and was widely regarded as the worst teacher in the divinity school. Being serious about liturgy was something Catholics and Episcopalians did. They went to their own seminaries. 

Things have changed dramatically since then. Now divinity schools and seminaries have substantial Worship Departments, where faculty and students go deep into liturgical study, study that includes music and art, history of liturgy, and now theology through liturgy. Hallelujah!

 

But wait! Has all this about Worship become irrelevant in the Covid era? We can't go to church. My observation is that watching church services on U-Tube (and I've watched quite a few other services in addition to those of UUMC) is just not the same. It's the best we can do for now, but not the same. Yes, it s real worship, but it's not the same. 

In light of the news about the new vaccines, I'm very hopeful that we will be back in church sometime in 2021--full throttle, choir and full congregation.  What a day that will be!

 

Faithfully,

Christian