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Worship As a Revelation: The Past, Present and Future of Catholic Liturgy | 
 enlarge | Author: Laurence Paul Hemming
Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 70902
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.7
ISBN: 0860124606
Dewey Decimal Number: 264.02
EAN: 9780860124603
ASIN: 0860124606
Publication Date: August 15, 2008
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Product Description
The publication by Benedict XVI of the motu proprio has put the question of the history and meaning of the liturgy back into centre stage, not just for catholics but for many other christians as well. Dr. Hemming seeks to provide an intelligent background to the Pope's decision, addressing himself to a number of questions about the nature and character of catholic worship that opens a much wider historical discussion which will inform and persuade a wide audience. The chapter on liturgy and revelation is the turning point in the book and shows how an understanding of time that is presumed in all modern philosophical thought, is challenged by the understanding of divine self-revelation. This then forces us to ask what our relation to liturgical events are and how we experience them. Hemming advocates a `high` theology of the liturgy with the profoundest understanding of the spiritual and the enigma of faith. How will Christian worship change now, asks the author in his concluding chapter? He offers a sketch of what may happen in the coming decades, long after the Papacy of Benedict XVI.
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The path toward a true understanding of the liturgy July 27, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
We talk too much. We read too much. We hear too much. So much so, that we have lost the art of doing, of acting - as individuals or as a people. We no longer understand what it is to belong to a people who acts, who has `public action' of its own. We no longer are liturgical.
For in our vernacularism and modernisation and reform, the very nature of the leiturgia - the nature of what is truly the work of the people - has been lost. Today we seek to comprehend and explain and decide what we do in our churches, but, it is utterly questionable as to whether our people experience in Western Catholic liturgy as it is usually celebrated the liturgical revelation of Almighty God.
In fact, let's drop the adjective "liturgical" and use Hemming's words which assert that the liturgy is nothing less than "the ordinary and continual revealing of [God's] truth." If this is true, it cannot be a forum for our own self-expression which we construct. It cannot necessarily be within our immediate comprehension or subject to our didactic commentary. It must be experienced, indeed lived as worship of Almighty God - as opposed to being `enjoyed' as a form of Christian activism - in order to begin to grasp something of what is being communicated in it: the very life of God Himself.
This raises the question not only of what liturgical practices are appropriate, but more fundamentally of the place of the liturgy in Catholic theology.
Why has Hemming, fundamentally a philosopher, concerned himself with this question? The answer is simple. This is not an erudite academic discourse. Nor is it an ecclesio-political one. It is the fruit of the author's experience of Catholic worship celebrated in continuity with her millennial tradition in which he has found that in that very ritual worship the Incarnate God made man is indeed within our grasp. It is also testament to his experience that most attempts to facilitate such connection in recent decades - from guitars to garrulous clergy - whilst they may have resulted in our happily holding hands with each other, have in part (at least) lead us to forget about the worship of Almighty God. And whilst modern liturgical forms might have led us to "feel good," it is the former that most clearly and fruitfully reveals the Triune God who has definitively revealed himself in our history, and who thereby makes demands upon us by way of both orthopraxy and orthodoxy.
Hemming - as a worshipping Catholic - knows this. As a philosopher and as a theologian he has investigated its import for us today. Hence Worship as a Revelation.
This book's philosophical and theological sophistication will challenge theologians and liturgists to re-examine their assumptions about how they perceive the relationship between theology and liturgy. For if worship is indeed the revelation of Almighty God, its centrality and indeed its priority in theological endeavour cannot be denied. The Sacred Liturgy can no longer be one component of theology, it must be its foundation, for theology that is not grounded in the living revelation of God that is the liturgy rapidly degenerates into the mere study of religion.
Hemming's evaluation of the liturgical reforms over the past century are provocative: very few will have located the genesis of the late twentieth century liturgical crisis in the reign of the good and sainted Pope Pius X, but Hemming's argument for precisely this is compelling. The author wisely refrains from proposing simplistic solutions, but allows us to see the anomalies of liturgical reform in the twentieth century for what they are theologically - a dangerous tampering with the continuity of God's revelation in the liturgy. Few `trained liturgists' have been prepared to enter into serious debate on this question. It is to be hoped that Worship as a Revelation might bring them forth.
For Hemming's rich and clear liturgical theology is starkly distinct from that prevailing in the Western Catholic Church, because it is not based on the desire for archaeological reconstruction of a `dreamtime' primitive liturgical purity, nor indeed for a modern ideological construction of something tailor-made for "modern man" (whomsoever he might be). No; Hemming is no ideologue nor is he an antiquarian: he is one who has discovered that, precisely in the sometimes untidy and somewhat idiosyncratic habits of worship handed on to us from our forebears, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, indeed the very God who became Incarnate and who died and rose for the remission of ours sins that we might share unending communion with Him and all the saints, is to be found. Catholic worship is indeed a revelation. It is a live epiphany, it is tangible theology, it is the very heart - indeed the "source and summit" of our faith.
That, of course, is why we tamper with the liturgy at our peril. That is why Pope Benedict XVI has placed the reform - neigh, the correction - of the Sacred Liturgy so high on the agenda of this pontificate. And that is why this book will provoke the liturgical establishment, for Hemming does not accept that the apotheosis of all Christian liturgy may be found in the forms produced following the Second Vatican Council, or indeed in the manner in which these forms have been celebrated in the subsequent years.
The role of Sacred Scripture in the life of the Church - as Hemming reminds us, a very live Reformation and Enlightenment issue - is another area in which his liturgical theology makes serious and important claims. In short, he points out - and at last someone has had the courage and clarity to do this - that "the liturgy is the proper ground of Scripture (and not the other way round, i.e. the false view that the liturgy derives from Scripture)," or, put more simply, in the modern understanding of the relationship between the liturgy and scripture, "scripture has lost its ground." This claim to priority on behalf of the liturgy over the biblical text will certainly provoke debate. But once again, if Worship as a Revelation becomes a catalyst for the re-examination of what a Catholic understanding of role of Sacred Scripture indeed is, it shall have done very well indeed.
This then is a book that must be read and studied and read again by theologians, scripture scholars, liturgists, all seminary faculty, and indeed by all liturgical `practitioners' - clerical and lay. It will challenge and it will inform. The pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI continues to remind us that "the true celebration of the Sacred Liturgy is the centre of any renewal of the Church whatever." Dr Hemming has rendered the Church a fine service by pointing us along the path toward a true understanding of the liturgy, a path that cannot but inform our celebration of it.
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