The Study of Liturgy
Hovda, Robert W.
The chronological form of the book tends to be loose, since it begins with an account of the actual military uprising of July, 1936, as it was seen and experienced by ordinary Spaniards in...
...And any liturgy is, as such, pastoral...
...Among other features, Blood of Spain contains more elaborate information than most historians have usually given on the experiments in industrial and agrarian collectivization and co-operation in regions like Catalonia and Aragon where the anarcho-syndicalists were strong...
...Commonweal: 604...
...But these also constitute grammatical freemasonries, the members of which know one another as soon as they speak...
...Theology also, as St Anselm's faith seeking understanding, must follow certain methods in order to be coherent...
...it is not mere trust or confidence in being saved by Christ, as in popular but misleading accounts of Protestantism...
...For better or for worse it segregates them from all those other people who are French-speaking, where the dim hopes of the biblical message of human liberation and solidarity in GOd have suddenly become demands everywhere, where powerless and suffering people can suddenly be heard by and be present to us all...
...Nevertheless it seems to me much too heavily British and a bit too heavily Anglican to serve its ambitious purpose...
...The significance of ritual action as "playing reign of God" and offering thereby an alternative, or many alternatives, to the status quo gets a mention so subtle that you have to be looking for it consciously to find it...
...belief...
...I regret, therefore, that I cannot share the editors' hope that The Study of Liturgy become "an introduction to the study of liturgy for students in all of our churches throughout the Englishspeaking world...
...And it presents a many-sided portrait of Franco whiCh reveals the essential and virtually unrelieved coldness of spirit that made him so able a soldier, so cruel and methodical a represser, and so durable a tyrant...
...I have felt for a long time that the phrase "pastoral liturgy" is just as gratuitously tautological as the phrase "institutional church...
...But this book has helped me see a real need for tautology...
...I think we can...
...Yarnold, Noakes, Fisher and others...
...John E. Booty The Rev...
...So we can learn much about the weakening and almost-loss of the sacramental dimension and the growth of didacticism in worship from Wainwright and others in this book...
...Thus, grammar fulfills several roles in society...
...The extent to which that powerful meaning of Gospel THE SPIRIT OF ANGLICANISM The Rev...
...It enables us to communicate within certain geographic limits...
...A decade ahead would have been too late for such a rich and many-sided compilation...
...Likewise, much of what Bernard Lonergan wrote in Method in Theology can be read as outlining the grammar of theology...
...The form of this book is that of a rambling discourse about sundry topics connected with theology: what theology is and does...
...Separate (but unequal) sections on the "Setting" (terrible word...
...Grammar would seem to provide a good analogy to understand what theology is supposed to do...
...We can begin to understand what a profound conversion is (again) reqo.ired if we are to appreciate sacraments as the actions of the assembly rather than as external objects dispensed by external ministers (Crichton, Hope and others...
...it identifies us with a certain type of contemporary civilization...
...and since a language is not born all of a sudden but has evolved over thousands of years, it places us within a long historical stream of literary, philosophical and esthetic tradition...
...even the egregious Queipo de Llano, in the accounts of those who knew him, reveals more traces of humanity...
...Come back, pastoral THE STUDY OF LITUR~'Y Edited by Cheslyn Jones, GeolTrey Wainwright, Edward Yarnold, S.J...
...It will be as useful to historians as it is fascinating to readers interested in the period, and we must be grateful that Mr...
...architecture, vesture), on "pastoral orientation," and indexes of subjects and of persons conclude the book...
...Any community of faith is, as such, an institution...
...Three editors are from the first three categories...
...What Paul Holmer means by grammar is still more obscure: it seems to be something that one does not need to know as long as one applies its rules in speaking...
...Oxford, $19.95, 547 pps...
...Fraser must have made to find such a wide range of informants, and about what has happened to these typical participants in the civil war during the forty years since 1939...
...We can discover that many of the styles which we, true to the example of our 16th century forebears, fancy as "primifive" and "apostolic" and "scriptural" are in reality more closely related to periods of ritual decadence and corruption (Wainwright, Howell and others...
...Certainly no attempt is made to articulate its elements, rules, or structure...
...This book attempts to capture and define that spirit through a study of the life, work and thought of three representative AnglicansRichard Hooker, Frederick , Denison Maurice, and William Temple...
...We can gain insight that will explain if not answer the question, "What ever happened to Christian initiation...
...There are a number of notable lacunae...
...Cardinal Newman already entitled one of his books, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent...
...Even this degree of formal arrangement is broken by a series of brief interludes, eighteen of them called "Militancies" and giving brief histories of activist careers, and fifteen of them called "Episodes" and showing the kind of adventures and accidents of fate that happened to people during the Spanish civil war...
...paperbound) $6.95 Please send check with order, adding75r postage, to MOREHOUSE-BARLOW 78 Danbury Road Wilton, Connecticut 06897 26 October 1979:603celebration has been domesticated and corrupted to reflect the very society it is supposed to judge, the very society from which we are supposed to be momentarily liberated by ritual--is any question more important in the 20th centurY and where is it here...
...I do not mean to say that people like me, whose primary worship interest is not in the tracing of historical evolution and disintegration, ups and downs, but i rather in the living worship of today and the mission it makes possible, cannot benefit from this book...
...And where people who used to be the victims of destiny and fate are now able, technologically if not yet psychologically, to take all those once-unalterable military-economicpolitical institutions in hand...
...it is, in John Macquarrie's expression, "God-talk...
...For the reader is never sure what the author means by grammar...
...Addressing the non-Anglican as well as the Anglican reader, they assess the strengths and weaknesses of the Anglican Communion by taking inventory of its resources and directionin short, of its fundamental spirit...
...Owen C. Thomas There have been many books about Anglicanism but few about the spirit of Anglicanism...
...Many of us--I am not too sure about the latest graduates of high schools and colleges--have been exposed to the intricacies of grammar...
...How can we talk about im'tiation or eucharist or ordination in our time without clear and serious discussion of women's rights and responsibilities in the church...
...When I was a child...
...A reference work and dictionary and bibliography, yes...
...Personally, I finished Blood of Spain with the feeling that another book might now be written, about the extraordinary search which Mr...
...And while there is a good account of the collapse of the Basque front, there is surprisingly little about the collapse of the C-,talonian front...
...And I don't think we will have an introduction to the study of liturgy until we get a book that grapples with them...
...of liturgical action (subsections on ceremony, music, language...
...A format with divisions of this sort seems to me to perpetuate many of the problems that such a book should help to solve--a bit of "theology" at the beginning, and, at the end, a little sop to the "externals" and to"pastoral" concerns...
...Robert W. Hovda T HIS IS a resourceful and useful work, the m-ain purpose of which is to briefly sketch historical origins and developments in Christian liturgical practice in five major public worship areas: initiation, eucharist, ordination, divine office and calendar...
...But at these points oral history doubtless suffers from the lack of survivors or the difficulty of finding them...
...In a study of theological method--unfortunately published in French and presumably unknown to Paul Holmer--I have called theology a language and I have systematically analyzed its ingredients in terms of semantics and syntax, the fundamental dimensions of grammar...
...Grammar of Faith is a tantalizing title...
...A documentary account of the Spanish Civil War seems particularly appropriate when one remembers the emphasis on the reportage as history which developed during the Thirties under the influence of left-populist fashions of thought, and Blood of Spain is a good example of the genre as it has been developed in our own day...
...Though never clearly defined or described, it seems to be a personal, lived attitude related to "belief and morals," such belief being centered on God, Christ and the Scripture...
...The authors incorporate history, biography, liturgical and pastoral concerns, and spirituality into their text...
...disaster Spanish-speaking, or Chinese speaking...
...Thirteen of the authors are Anglicans, six are Roman Catholics, two are Methodists and one is Orthodox...
...What he means by faith is not even very clear...
...He said then that we would make all the mistakes in the next decade or two that the 16th century Reformation had made in the last four centuries...
...But not an introduction...
...We can recover an appropriate respect for the ancient orders of specialized ministry when we relate and subordinate them to the basic ministerial deputation of baptism and to the faith community's constant need not only for hands to function in special ways but also for personal symbols to express and increase its solidarity (Hawkins, Crehan and others...
...Assent, or faith, follows a certain pattern which may be called, by analogy, a grammar...
...For theology implies speaking about God...
...It shows very strikingly how slight the popular support was for the military rising even in the more conservative regions (with the single exception of Carlist Navarre) as compared with the passionate mass support for the republic in cities like Madrid and Barcelona and in much of the southern and eastern countryside...
...Among English speakers all over the world, grammar acts as a bond of fraternity and sorority which allows them to recognize one another as soon as they speak...
...There's too little here about the kind of people who do these things and the reasons why they do them--and if there is anything at all that an introduction to the study of liturgy has to have, it is that...
...For example, while we learn a great deal of life in Oviedo when it was besieged by the republicans, we are told almost nothing about what happened in the great anarchist stronghold of Saragossa after it was seized with surprisingly little resistance by the insurgents...
...Meanwhile The Study of Liturgy will be a help...
...D. H. Tripp's twenty-four theses on "Worship and the Pastoral Office" are timidly in the right direction (apart from the four "distinctions" under which they are organized and which again tend to reinforce our problems...
...The book attempts to include liturgical developments in all of the Christian churches of the West, with just enough on those of the East to keep reminding us that they are there and to be reckoned with...
...When we land in a country whose language we speak, we expect its people to use the same grammatical rules or conventions...
...They should be the atmosphere and the spirit of the project...
...What does it mean for every single act of common prayer that we live in a new kind of world, Teilhard's world, When piety leads to 11E DAIllUli OF FAFrB Paul L. Holmer Harper & Row, $I0, 212 pp...
...Extensive bibliographies prefacing every section and subsection make it more helpful to students than the dense compression of its ambitious scope would suggest...
...J. Wolf The Rev...
...We can see from the experience of many what a diminishment of the Gospel Eucharist and its paschal and covenantecclesial dimensions takes place whenever it is "rediscovered" as merely "a simple fellowship meal" (Jones, Noakes, Cobb and Others...
...A help, yes...
...An essay on the "theology of worship" precedes the historical sketches Fraser had the patience and good fortune to gather such a rich harvest of oral material so far away in time from the events...
...Grammar acts here rather as an undetermined negative principle...
...The chronological form of the book tends to be loose, since it begins with an account of the actual military uprising of July, 1936, as it was seen and experienced by ordinary Spaniards in various regions, goes back to a panorama of the months of unrest that preceded the insurrection, and then clusters memories around the most significant factors in the civil war, including the geographical sectors, the social forces, the economic experiments, the conflicts behind the fronts...
...While considerations of movement, gesture, environment and the arts do receive a little bit of attention in at least some parts of the historical material, Hugh Wybrew unintentionally underscores a serious defect of the whole when he writes: "The rite, understood as a form of words . . . . " It is this sad fact, that our rites are still understood by most Christians as forms of words, that constitutes a major obstacle to the realization of the promise of our conciliar times, namely, of a dynamically experiential common prayer...
...I mean no disrespect to the distinguished contributors and imply no lack of gratitude for the service the editors and publishers have performed when I say that I have a new respect for the phrase "pastoral liturgy" after plowing through nearly 600 pages (excepting J. Gelineau and patches of the others) of stiff upper lip and rational objectivity and cool distance...
...Twenty-two authors of good repute present a vast amount of information about the texts of our rites, generally following this division of time: Jewish and New Testament, patristic, medieval, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and contemporary...
...We have some idea of what syntax is supposed to be and to do for your understandability when you speak, of the necessity of having mastered some semantics or vocabulary in order to formulate and communicate your ideas...
...It seems to me that the two ends of the chronological spectrum are fhe least satisfactory, considering the book as a whole (some sections are exceptions)our Jewish roots, on the one hand, and contemporary developments, on the other...
...The writing is, for the most part, clear and lean...
...It is the revenge of our frozen missal liturgy and our rationalistic catechetical formation that we are busily doing exactly that...
...We can gain some understalading of the ways in which the clergy became so effectively separated and alienated from the rest of the church (Crichton, Hawkins and others...
...In between, the contributors are clearly experts...
...It is not Newman's assent, which would seem to be too intellectual (somehow the author does not like intellectualism...
...Too much that is basic to and critical in an introduction is not here--at least not emphatically enough for me...
...We need all the history that we can get, if only to correct our relentless current efforts to fulfill the prophecy that Jaroslav Commonweal: 602Pelikan delivered to a group of Roman Catholic priests during or shortly after the Second Vatican Council...
...and these may be called a grammar...
...When the author wants to criticize a theology (which is often), he declares that it does not follow the grammar of faith...
...What Holmer tries to do in the present volume is, however, far from Newman's analysis of assent as the noetic aspect of faith and from my own investigation of theological method...
...But they should not have to be tacked on at the end...
...As a consequence, what about the sexist and racist and classicist language, structures, symbolization that are thereby obscenely sanctified instead of purged and discarded and transcended...
...scientific language...
...liturgy which comprise the bulk of the volume...
...George H. Tavard p ROFESSOR of theolbgy at Yale Divinity School, advertised on the book jacket as "a noted expert on the thought of S~ren Kierkegaard and of Ludwig Wittgenstein," Paul Holmer raises high expectation among his prospective readers...
...My space is up, but the questions keep rolling on, and they are all relevant to liturgy...
Vol. 106 • October 1979 • No. 19
