Wednesday • 7/21/2021
It’s summer, and it’s the first week of the last year of my sixth decade. Another break from the Daily Office seems to be in order. I’m offering, this week, yet more worship themes I’ve developed with my friends at Worship Leader Magazine. We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday, July 26.
Wisdom for Worship in a Wiki-world
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. …
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
T. S. Eliot, Choruses from “The Rock,” I
When the present information revolution was still in the womb, T. S. Eliot worried about losing wisdom in the quest for knowledge, and abandoning knowledge out of lust for information. Imagine how he’d felt if he’d had Wikipedia. Imagine if he could have seen the days when his own poems could be hypertexted out of rather than be patiently labored through. Imagine if he had to drive on roads with people who were literally risking Life because they were busy texting, “lost in their living”?
The ancient church offers wisdom for a time like ours.
From Scrolls to Scrolling
“In the beginning was the scroll,” quips University of Pennsylvania Professor Robert A. Kraft, a pioneer in the digitizing and coding of ancient texts. Prior to Christianity, scrolls were the tenured medium for literature, both among pagans and Jews. Scrolls were revered, but they were cumbersome. Scrolls unrolled (literally!) texts at their own pace, but they virtually forced you to “read through” a text.
An extraordinary technological innovation took place during the first four centuries of the church’s existence. About A.D. 331, the emperor Constantine commissioned the publication of fifty Bibles. In terms of content, his act signaled the consensus that had emerged about what the boundaries of Christian Scripture are. In terms of form, his act put the capstone on Christians’ adoption of the “book” over the “scroll.” In fact, the term “Bible” means literally “book.” “The Book” was compact and portable. “The Book” allowed us to embody the singular story that runs from Genesis to Revelation as an accessible, coherent whole. “The Book” allowed cross-referencing and the comparing of one passage with another. Judging “the Book” to be better suited to teaching and to furthering the mission, we adopted it as a better medium for our message.
Quite Controversial
The shift from scroll to book was not without risk. When literature is in book- rather than scroll-form, it’s easier to stand over a text rather than come under it. Once you can cross-reference, you can also skip around. If you don’t have to “read through” a text and submit yourself to its agenda, you can also merely access a text and look for support for what you already believe.
The ancient church could take the risk because of the way they worshiped. In the first place, the great creeds — crisp summaries of the faith — come from this era. And these weren’t just abstract, theoretical documents. They served worship. They were the means by which the worshiping church said, in response to the Word: “Amen. So we believe. So we will live.” The concise Apostles Creed came to mark worship during baptism and the more complete Nicene Creed worship during communion.
In the second place, it looks like ancient churches aspired to be reading the same parts of the biblical story, together. They have left to us lectionaries (prescribed scriptural readings for public worship), testimonies of the desire to get full coverage of the Bible’s story line over time. The lectionaries themselves came to be tied to a calendar, shaped not around the pagan Roman calendar, but around the sacred events of Jesus’ life (from Advent and Christmas through Holy Week, Pentecost, and Ascension). In worship, “the Book” served the telling of a singular, lucid story: Jesus’ story.
Baby and Bathwater
C. S. Lewis once advised reading one old book for every new, or at least one old one for every three new ones. My own corollary: one ancient practice for every new. To our google- and wiki-world, with its profound “decentralization of information,” the wisdom of the creeds can speak with perhaps even greater force than they did when they were formulated. Luke Timothy Johnson’s The Creed and Alexander Schmemann’s I Believe have helped me appreciate the oneness of voice with which the church has always sought — and must continue to seek — to speak. In the midst of the nearly anarchic approaches to preaching in the evangelical world — expository, topical, purpose-driven, gospel-centered, whatever — the lectionary for corporate reading and the “daily office” for personal reading deserve a second look. They offer a way of centering our corporate and personal reading around the life and work of the Bible’s point — Jesus. They also put us in fellowship with a vast number of fellow journeyers around the world and across time.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+