2
‘Searching for Lost Coins’
Retrieval
Scottish Christians in the later Middle Ages, like their counterparts elsewhere in Britain and on the continent, had a profoundly sensual experience of religion. The church was a site of image, sound and smell; the central rite of the mass celebrated by taste; the whole defined by movement and ceremony, and designed to elicit an affective response.[1]
Postmodern permissions
The move that follows auditing is retrieval. If auditing articulated a sense of lack and loss in relation to low church Protestantism, it also stirred a desire to address this. This desire was awakening within a cultural context, from the 1980s onwards, which many voices were describing and analysing as postmodern.[2] The term reflects a developing cultural audit of modernity that was given a number of famous articulations by particular scholars and thinkers such as Charles Jencks and Jean Franc¸ois Lyotard, but also had a ‘viral’ quality. The term caught on; it stuck with a rising generation because it named a need to go beyond and behind the approach to engaging the world modernity had constructed for them. The postmodern analysis/diagnosis carried, among other emphases, the judgement that ‘the modern’ had both forgotten and suppressed traditions that, for various reasons, had not been seen as useful or fitting. It acted as permission and incentive to go back and explore what had been lost or abandoned along the way.
Staying with my claim that ‘emerging church’ begins as a reflexive moment within the churches born (directly or indirectly) out of the radical and magisterial reformations, we find that the search for ‘lost coins’[3] has been concentrated around the sites associated with these churches’ sixteenth-century Reformation revisions of church theology and practice. This is the hermeneutical ecclesiology of the emerging church project understood as what Paul Ricoeur termed a ‘hermeneutics of retrieval’.[4]
It will help to ground the argument of this chapter if we look more closely at the kinds of practices and dimensions of the Church’s life, which the alt worship/emerging church project has been most interested in retrieving from the neglect or distaste of low church Protestantism. Chief among these are the related concepts of liturgy and ritual. Within the low church imagination, both liturgy and ritual were seen for centuries as theologically contaminated, as the enemies of grace and as obstacles to the effective working of the Spirit.[5]
Liturgy, in the sense that it was opposed, has been considered problematic for three main reasons. The first had to do with the attempt to ‘fix’ the content of worship in terms of a specific written script or schedule of items, which specified both content and order. For many low church traditions this approach was inherently wrong, regardless of the ‘soundness’ or otherwise of the content of the liturgy.[6] Appealing above all to the injunction that ‘the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life’, but frequently invoking also the encouragement to worshippers at Corinth that one should bring a hymn, one a lesson, one a revelation . . . (1 Cor. 14.26ff.), the fixing of worship in script was rejected as contrary to the movement of the Spirit who inspires and animates the Church’s worship. The detailed prescription of ritual as to how the bodies of worshippers should be engaged was suspect in part for the same reasons – the fixing of movements or gestures was seen as inherently defiant of the work of the Spirit in directing the body – but a more important LCP anti-ritual discourse has its roots in reformation critiques of ritual as embodying both ‘works righteousness’ and ‘superstition’.
Such resistance was both inspired by and productive of a sensibility that privileged the extempore and the spontaneous – the Spirit sovereignly giving life in real time to the play of voice, posture, movement and gesture within the worshipping community. (At this point we should note that we are faced not just with two competing logics, but two competing aesthetics of the body and its practices in worship.)
A second front for the rejection of liturgy and ritual was the ‘Who says?’ question about the authorization of liturgy. Here we confront the politics of worship, mediated by patterns of church polity and their various relationships to the state. Most famously, within English language settings, we are familiar with talk of ‘the authorized version’ as a way of referring to the King James VI/I sponsored translation of the Bible. The rejection of liturgy and ritual on this basis has to do with the rejection of the claim by some political authority – ecclesiastical, monarchical or parliamentary – to ‘authorize’ the form and content of worship by its moves to permit or prescribe patterns of response and behaviour within worship. The theo-logic at issue is not (as sometimes suggested) a mere drive for human autonomy, but has to do with the way in which divine sovereignty is operative within the worshipping community. If the authorizing figure or body is denied legitimacy in this sphere, then their attempts to control and legislate what happens in worship must be construed as attempts to pre-empt and resist the sovereign Spirit of God, whose authorization is given more immediately, both internally and communally, to the worshippers themselves as political agents. Once attempts to legislate the content of worship are confronted with this theology of resistance, the non-authorized practices themselves become a mode of dissidence and can be taken as civil and ecclesiastical disobedience. The alternative tradition here comes to be (powerfully) construed in terms of ‘dissenting’ or ‘free’ patterns of speech and embodiment.[7]
A third problematic had to do with content. Reformation critiques of Roman Catholic liturgy and ritual were directed at aspects of the prescribed language or behaviour, which were seen to mandate theological mistakes and defy scriptural truths. The ‘fixing’ of doctrine that takes place within liturgy and ritual has therefore been seen as acting to lock in theological error to the Church’s practice.
Taken together these three problematics formed a powerful set of cautions and inhibitions for low church Protestants in respect of liturgy and ritual: attitudes that operated as taboos, as boundary markers, policing the limits of sound practice – marking ‘us’ off from ‘them’. One major effect of this historically was that there was relatively little mixing between major streams of tradition. At the hour of worship, most people were with their own people. In the twentieth century, at conventions, crusades or student fellowships, LCPs were still at home within a broad ‘low’ church tradition that held divergence over practices such as baptism within a common ‘evangelical’ or ‘reformed’ culture. Low church identity here functioned as a kind of invisible denomination, whose habits and rules worked across visible denominational boundaries to bracket the high church possibilities available within some of these denominations.
For the emerging church movement of retrieval to take place, two things were therefore necessary. First, there had to be a loosening of the cultural and theological inhibitions, which put other modes of being the worshipping church out of bounds. Second, it was necessary for there to be opportunities for encounter with and experience of other modes of church, but these encounters had to make alternative traditions available for retrieval in ways that were non-threatening. This last point is particularly significant because it stresses the importance to the emerging project of being able to appropriate and retrieve alternatives from a low church starting point, without being subsumed into them. The alternative here would be not retrieval, or ressourcement, but wholesale conversion into another ‘higher’ tradition.[8]
Natural exclusions: forgetting why we didn’t do that
For those unfamiliar with the ways and means of low church Protestantism, there may be a tendency to underestimate the extent to which a project of retrieval remained a transgressive project for those formed within these precincts. Recalling James K. A. Smith’s observations about primitivism, we are reminded that the very idea of ‘tradition’ had acquired a certain ‘taboo’ status, seen in the way that a number of evangelical theologians[9] explicitly rejected the notion of a threefold source for Christian theology (scripture, tradition, reason) as opening the door to unscriptural and anti-scriptural innovations. While the target of such critiques was what we might call a ‘strong’ view of tradition, the effect was to bring other uses of the term under a certain cloud of suspicion and to suggest that church practice could somehow be guided by a recourse to scripture that was uncontaminated by ‘tradition’.
The habits of practice meant that the bodies of worshippers within the low churches were accustomed to certain exclusions – that these had become ‘natural’. In MacIntyre’s terms, these were issues about which the arguments were perceived as ‘over and done with’ and settled judgements about the goods of the tradition were seen to have already been achieved. Acts of retrieval were therefore liable to be perceived as inherently transgressive, although this always begged the question of precisely what and whose boundaries were being crossed. As their members became accustomed to certain exclusions and these exclusions became wholly ‘natural’ to them, the precise theo-logics involved had been widely forgotten within the low churches. There was a wide range of things which those like us ‘just didn’t do’, but up to 400 years after many of these exclusions had first been fixed on, their rationale had often been both neglected and forgotten. This accumulated forgetfulness lowered the resistance of low church traditions to acts of trespass and retrieval. What made such acts both more possible and more likely, though, was the coincidence of such a lowering of the Protestant guard with a wider rehabilitation of tradition which had philosophical, theological and ecclesial dimensions.
The philosophical rehabilitation of ‘tradition’
The metaphor of retrieval can be linked to a number of intellectual and cultural counter-currents within the development of modernity. The broad stirring of sensibilities named as Romanticism, which drew some of its impulse from German Pietism, developed through the later eighteenth century and gain...