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Part I
Foundational Sources for a Soteriology of Doxological Contrition
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1
Doxological Contrition in Byzantine Liturgy
The time has come for a deep re-evaluation of the relationship between theology and liturgy.” So began a signature essay by the great Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann, in which he lamented the mutual alienation of theology and liturgy. Schmemann contended that this separation had not only enervated both liturgy and theology but also led to a general devitalization of Christian experience. Apart from theological interpretation, he warned, liturgical experience tends toward a kind of nominalism, a fixation on rubrics as an end in themselves rather than as expressing and enabling the new life in Christ in its cosmological and eschatological fullness. Likewise, apart from liturgical experience, theology becomes a closed system that is cut off from the fullness of Christian life and consumed with considering and reconsidering doctrinal propositions that must always fall short of capturing the lived faith of the church: “For the faith which founds the Church and by which she lives is not a mere assent to a ‘doctrine,’ but her living relationship to certain events: the life, death, resurrection and glorification of Jesus Christ, His ascension into heaven, the descent of the Holy Spirit on the ‘last and great day of Pentecost.’ … But then theology cannot be anything else but the description of that experience, its revelation in human words and concepts.”
In response to the contemporary fragmentation of Christian experience, Schmemann called for the reintegration of theology and liturgy, consisting of a mutual informing and mutual critique. Theology must turn to liturgy for its foundational source, its principle of unity, and its goal: “Biblical exegesis, historical analysis, doctrinal elaboration ultimately converge in and prepare the celebration: the act of witnessing to and participating in the mystery itself.” At the same time, liturgy requires a theological critique in order to rediscover the lex credendi (rule of belief) within the lex orandi (rule of prayer) and to manifest both as expressions of the new life in Christ. Such a theological critique contributes to the purification of liturgical experience from “pseudo-theological and pseudo-pious explanations and interpretations,” as well as from “a superficial pseudo-symbolism, … individualism and legalism.” Put positively, the desired reintegration of theology and liturgy must set for itself the goal of “restoring to liturgy its theological meaning and to theology its liturgical dimension.”
In the introduction, I suggested that one of the principal reasons for our contemporary incapacity to grasp the content of traditional Christian teaching about salvation is that we have largely lost access to the liturgical experience of salvation. If this is a true diagnosis of the current situation, Schmemann’s program of a mutual informing and critique of liturgy and theology would seem to be the most apt point of departure for its remedy. In this chapter, I will adopt this program, starting from the vantage point of Byzantine liturgy, by tracing the lex orandi that has structured and informed the Byzantine liturgical experience of salvation. Subsequent chapters will seek out a fuller exposition and an intelligible synthesis of this lex orandi from within the theological tradition of the church. In advocating the principle that theological reflection should begin as a reflection on liturgical experience, Schmemann makes especially large claims on behalf of the Paschal liturgies: “To take but one example, the liturgy of the Paschal triduum—Holy Friday, Great and Holy Saturday and Sunday—reveals more about the ‘doctrines’ of creation, fall, redemption, death and resurrection than all the other loci theologici together; and, let me stress it, not merely in the texts, in the magnificent Byzantine hymnography, but precisely in the very ‘experience’—ineffable yet illuminating—given during these days, in their inner interdependence, in their nature indeed as epiphany and revelation.” In this chapter, I will follow Schmemann’s recommendation to seek a paradigmatic disclosure of the core of Christian doctrine in the Paschal liturgies. However, I will modify his suggestion by considering not only the liturgical hymnography of the triduum but that of the whole season of Lent, as well as the Easter season and the Feasts of the Ascension and Pentecost. This enlargement of scope will enable a fuller presentation of the liturgical experience inculcated by the Byzantine liturgy, which is more consistent with Schmemann’s earlier-quoted premise that the church’s life consists in its participation in “the life, death, resurrection and glorification of Jesus Christ, His ascension into heaven, the descent of the Holy Spirit on the ‘last and great day of Pentecost.’”
Schmemann’s assertion that the core nexus of Christian beliefs should be sought not only in the “texts” of the Paschal liturgies but “in the very experience” will also determine the methodology of our analysis of these liturgies. This approach will attempt to encompass, in some measure, Schmemann’s implied dialectic of “text” and “experience.” On the one hand, it is important that the distinction within this dialectic not be hardened into a separation, since the texts are themselves centrally formative of the experience. A person who wants to undergo the Byzantine experience of the Paschal triduum needs to find a church that proclaims and performs precisely these texts, not any others, and to participate in this proclamation and performance. On the other hand, part of the merit of this distinction is that it raises and implicitly rejects the theoretical possibility that these texts can be treated in their bare propositional form as storehouses of doctrine. A supplementary strategy, which would undercut to some extent the distance between text and experience, is to analyze how these liturgical texts construct the experience of the worshiper. Such a strategy would be akin to reader-response criticism in the realm of literary theory, which recognizes that the goal of a text is to bring about a transformative experience in the reader, and which attempts to identify the strategies that the text employs in order to bring about this effect with respect to an “implied ideal reader.” As a prominent exponent of reader-response criticism points out, this approach “is not a conceptually unified critical position”; nevertheless, its common denominator is that a text must be understood in terms of its effects on the reader. We can style the liturgical application of this approach a “worshiper-response” analysis of liturgical texts and rubrics, a mode of analysis that would be attentive to the experiences they inculcate in the liturgical participant. The treatment presented here will be a combination of a straightforward textual analysis of doctrinal themes and a worshiper-response approach.
First I will offer a systematic overview of what these liturgical prayers say about the nexus of themes constitutive of an integral doctrine of salvation: the condition of the original creation; the nature of sin and its effect on the original creation; and finally, the process and result of God’s salvific work culminating in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection and the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Next I will ask how the overall synthetic effect of these texts, in what Schmemann calls “their inner interdependence,” informs and transforms the experience of the worshiper. Having characterized this effect as one of inculcating a disposition of “doxological contrition,” I will then present the rationale for a liturgical “soteriology from below,” through which the liturgical experience of the “mind of Christ” can lead us to an insight into the interior character of Christ’s salvific work.
Textual Analysis: Elements of Soteriological Doctrine in the Byzantine Liturgy
In the following rudimentary sketch of the Byzantine liturgy’s dramatization of the core Christian narrative of creation, sin, and salvation, three leitmotifs will become apparent. First, we will garner evidence against the contrived modern binary between the putatively “ethical” Western approach to sin and salvation and the supposedly “ontological” Eastern approach. This binary was originally promulgated by the pioneers of liberal Protestant theology, Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack. It depicted the Western approach as preoccupied with the ethical categories of law and forgiveness, while asserting that the Eastern approach identified the problem that salvation resolved to be death, rather than sin, and conceived salvation as a “physical” or “mystical” process of deification. This caricaturing binary has not only alienated Eastern and Western traditions from each other but also alienated Eastern Christians from the fundamental sources of their own tradition. Here is a crucial point in which the “law of prayer” (lex orandi), the beliefs embedded in the prayers of the Byzantine liturgy, can serve as an authoritative critique of prevalent currents in modern theology and piety. For we shall see that the Byzantine liturgy’s vision of sin and salvation does not deny or neglect the scriptural themes of divine law and forgiveness, but rather integrates them into its understanding of salvation as deification.
A second emphasis in the following sketch will be the doxological ambience and momentum of the Byzantine liturgical services as they advance from Lent to Pentecost. On the one hand, the concept of glory enjoys a synchronic stability throughout these services. Humanity was created to glorify God, sin is described as an exile from divine glory, and salvation is conceived as both the glorification of humanity and its access to the vision of divine glory. At the same time, there is a dramatic development through the course of the Paschal season whereby the doxological dimension of salvation comes to a climax in the liturgical texts of Ascension and Pentecost. The Byzantine liturgy dramatizes the Feast of the Ascension as the glorification of Christ’s and our humanity, while the Feast of Pentecost celebrates the fullness of the manifestation of trinitarian glory.
Third, our outline of the Byzantine liturgy’s proclamations about sin and salvation will show that, underlying its luxurious employment of a rich storehouse of metaphor and imagery, there is a foundational core of christological-trinitarian doctrine. The essence of this christological-trinitarian foundation resides in the so-called “exchange” formula, which is the basis for the doctrine of deification: God became human so that humanity might become divine. While the Chalcedonian definition of the unity of divine and human natures in the single person of Christ is the foundation for this soteriological approach, its elaboration in the Byzantine liturgy extends beyond a narrow focus on the incarnation and emphatically enfolds the Paschal mystery of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection.
Creation
As is the case with Scripture itself, the Byzantine liturgy is concerned not so much with lingering over descriptions of a prelapsarian state of creation as with enabling the existential apprehension of present reality as a ruinous decline from God’s original intention, out of which issues an urgent plea for restoration. Pronouncements about the original creation are thus always implicitly statements about sin and salvation. While it is a standard theological strategy to organize the biblical narrative into three discrete and successive stages of creation, fall, and redemption, the Byzantine liturgy tends to present all three together as existential moments that are brought to light whenever we bring the entirety of our existence before the divine gaze.
The beginning of the season of Lent is one such revelatory moment in which the Byzantine liturgy induces worshipers to apprehend the present condition of their existence as one of exile from the paradise that God had ordained to be humanity’s original habitat, but also as the occasion for renewal of the hope of restoration. In the Byzantine liturgical calendar, the season of Lent is launched with Forgiveness Vespers, a service in which the theme of the casting out of Adam from paradise is combined with that of the invocation of divine forgiveness and the exchange of mutual forgiveness among the assembly. In order to facilitate the recognition of an original gift of wholeness that has been forfeited, as well as the hopeful orientation toward a restoration of this original gift through divine and mutual forgiveness, this service offers a series of meditations that recapitulate the biblical narrative of creation, fall, and redemption and applies it to the present state of the worshiper. Thus, the first chanted prayer (stichēron) prescribed for this service proclaims: “The Lord my Creator took me as dust from the earth and formed me into a living creature, breathing into me the breath of life and giving me a soul; He honored me (etimēsen), setting me as a ruler upon earth over all things visible, and making me companion of the angels. But Satan the deceiver, using the serpent as his instrument, enticed me by food; he parted me from the glory of God and gave me over to the earth and to the lowest depths of death. But, Master, in compassion call me back again.” In this account, the original state of the human being is depicted as one of being “honored” by God and of being associated with “the glory of God.” Humanity’s original honor is understood in terms of the Genesis account of humanity’s being in the image of God by virtue of its participation in the divine sovereignty over the earthly realm. Other depictions of the original creation in the opening services for Lent reiterate this stress on humanity’s original kinship with God and its assimilation to the divine glory. Human beings were originally equipped to glorify God in union with the angels and to enjoy an unobstructed vision of God; they were adorned with “a robe woven by God.” Yet, despite these characterizations of an original human intimacy with God and likeness to God, the Byzantine liturgy’s depictions of the original human condition do not, as a general rule, designate that condition as deification. Deification, as we shall see presently, is applied to the condition of the restored, rather than the prelapsarian, humanity. Thus, ultimately, the Byzantine liturgy’s nostalgia for the original condition of humanity is relative and not absolute. It provides an original motivation for lamenting one’s present state of decline, but it also motivates a forward-looking anticipation of a postlapsarian restoration that is depicted in even more glorious terms than the original creation.
Sin
In the Byzantine liturgy, both the backward gaze at the lost glory of the original pristine human condition and the forward anticipation of future renewal are grounded in a constant remembrance of present brokenness. A recognition of the Byzantine liturgy’s intense and pervasive preoccupation with human sinfulness is necessary both as a correlative to its depiction of salvation, insofar as we are thereby given to understand what we are saved from, and as an antidote to the prevalent notion that the Byzantine tradition construes salvation as a remedy for ontological corru...
