A passage from an interview with Oxford’s Regius Professor of Divinity, Graham Ward, quoted by catholicity & covenant, piqued my interest as getting at some things I have been trying to articulate of late. Prof. Ward was being interviewed by the website Theos about his new book, Unbelievable, concerning belief – what it is, and how ‘belief’ and ‘faith’ relate. As I understand it from the interview (not having read the book), he would define ‘belief’ as something like the complex of ways, mostly unconscious and unexamined, in which we understand and relate to our selves and the world around us. ‘Faith’, on the other hand, is the acknowledgement of the fact of belief (i.e., that there is no such thing as ‘unbelief’) and the search to understand and articulate what and why we believe.

It then follows, I would add, that if ‘belief’ is, as Ward says, the ‘pre-reflective, pre-cognitive’ set of assumptions under which we operate, then

· ‘culture’ is the communal living-out of belief, and

· ‘ritual’ is a concentrated, formalized, stylized instance of enacted belief.

Analogously,

· ‘tradition’ or ‘rite’* is the living-out of faith, and

· ‘liturgy’ is a concentrated, formalized, stylized instance of enacted faith;

and if

· faith is ‘articulated belief’, then

· tradition is ‘articulated culture’ and

· liturgy is ‘articulated ritual’.

It goes without saying, I suppose, that Christian faith, tradition, and liturgy are belief, culture, and ritual illuminated and transfigured by the Light of Christ, articulated by God’s Lógos (which may be translated, among other ways, as the sense, inner meaning, reason, or order of a thing).

But by this I do not mean that Christianity is ‘logical’ or ‘rational’ in the way we usually mean those words; one of Prof. Ward’s points is that the linking of belief and faith is done through the faculty of imagination or creativity (after all, Creation was accomplished precisely through the Lógos), and furthermore that this linking is naturally manifest in Scripture, Tradition, and liturgy: ‘Liturgy is a fabulous space for the imaginative – to allow the elemental symbols to “speak” in creative ways; “speak” salvation in creative ways.’ Indeed, he contrasts this understanding of faith with the common misprision of faith as a set of propositions to prove or disprove, to agree with or not – which is not to say that doctrine or theology are unimportant; the doctrinal formulations of the Church, and theology at its best, are the result of deeply imaginative engagement with Scripture.

This imaginative engagement is to be found in the layers of commentary and dialogue that have been produced continually since the beginnings of, and throughout the history of, our tradition, which is to say our shared lived experience of relationship with God.

But tradition and liturgy do not only express, but also impress, faith, and neither saints nor prophets can be formed if there is no tradition to mold them. Or, to switch metaphors: without the soil of tradition, fertilized by imagination, faith cannot be properly cultivated and brought to harvest. If there is no ‘shared lived experience of relationship with God’, then there is no Church.

I continue to believe that Anglicanism, having always retained certain traditional doctrines and practices, and more recently having reclaimed at least the possibility of so many more, remains a helpful and valid encapsulation of catholic tradition (indeed the only possible way to apprehend this tradition for women called to ordained ministry, or for gay persons not called to celibacy); that this catholic tradition is the best and fullest way to captivate and engage our innate religious sensibilities toward a sacramental understanding of the world (that is, to link belief and faith, in Prof. Ward’s formulation), and toward the pursuit of constant prayer and repentance with the goal of union with the divine; and that these things cannot be fully experienced apart from the Church.

What to do, though, when the edifice of tradition is so far ruined, abandoned, or buried that it is barely visible, when in some extreme cases the shape and intent, the beauty of that sacred structure and the view of heaven which it ought to afford is so obscured by the flimsy dropped-ceiling-and-drywall of managerial culture, disused by puritanical impulses in general or disassembled by a reductive and critical liberal Protestantism, that one cannot discern the presence of Christ or a common goal and understanding in it? Lay persons can advocate for the richer use of Prayer Book and Occasional Services but cannot in most cases make them happen without willing clerical leadership. The laity cannot, except in fairly rare instances, influence the education and formation given to the clergy, nor the selection thereof (both of which processes, as recent scandals point out, are deeply broken in the Episcopal Church). It may or may not be the place of lay persons to ‘rebuke openly...whosoever, though his private judgement, willingly and purposely, doth openly break the Traditions and Ceremonies of the Church...and be ordained and approved by common authority’ (Article xxxiv) – though if bishops will not, who else will?

What lay persons can do is to sing the Office and the Litany; to fast, pray, work, and give for the transformation of self, world, and Church; to read, study, and reflect; to teach other lay persons when given the opportunity; to use the imagination to write words, music, and icons; to, as Prof. Ward said, ‘read the signs of the times and wait before God for creative and imaginative inspiration.’

As the Prophets saw, as the Apostles taught, as the Church has received, as the Teachers express in dogma, as the inhabited world understands together with them, as grace illumines, as the truth makes clear, as error has been banished, as wisdom makes bold to declare, as Christ has assured,

So we think, so we speak, so we preach, honouring Christ our true God, and his Saints, in words, in writings, in thoughts, in sacrifices, in churches, in icons, worshipping and revering the One as God and Lord, and honouring them because of their common Lord as those who are close to him and serve him, and giving to them due veneration.

This is the faith of the Apostles; This is the faith of the Fathers; This is the faith of the Orthodox; This faith makes fast the inhabited world!

     From the Synodikon of Orthodoxy

O God, whom saints and angels delight to worship in heaven: Be ever present with your servants who seek through art and music to perfect the praises offered by your people on earth; and grant to them even now glimpses of your beauty, and make them worthy at length to behold it unveiled for evermore; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

    bcp1979 Prayer for Church Musicians and Artists

*  Rite involves creeds and prayers and worship, but it is not any one of these things, nor all of these things together, and it orchestrates more than these things. Rite can be called a whole style of Christian living found in the myriad particularities of worship, of laws called ‘canonical’, of ascetical and monastic structures, of evangelical and catechetical endeavors, and in particular ways of doing secondary theological reflection. A liturgical act concretizes all these and in doing so makes them accessible to the community assembled in a given time and place before the living God for the life of the world.

     Fr Aidan Kavanagh

Our Christian identity should be shaped by living the liturgical rite, by the rhythm of the Church year, by the procession to the altar every eighth day, by seeing moral questions about human beings in light of their being an image of God, by the intellectual grasp of the content of faith and the bodily enactment of that same content, by fasting and feasting, by obedience to canonical authority, by stepping under the priestly hand of absolution, by catechetical witness that is sometimes uncomfortable in prophetic circumstances, by actualizing the domestic Church within the family, and by the hundred other concretized instances of liturgical life.

     David W. Fagerberg