Christian Cultural Engagement And Liturgical Inculturation

The following essay situates the issue of liturgical inculturation in terms of the larger question of the relationship between the church and culture, attempting to highlight both the inevitable shaping of the church by its cultural environment and the important mission of the church to work for the transformation of culture. Unlike some recent Roman Catholic approaches to inculturation, which often begin by discussing how the text of the liturgy should be adapted to a given cultural situation, this essay describes a framework in which all aspects of worship can be considered in their cultural context.

The greatest challenge facing liturgists today is arguably the challenge of inculturation. The expansion of the church into every neighborhood of the global village and the cultural ferment characteristic of our age challenges the church on every continent to reconsider the relationship of its institutions, theological formulations, and corporate worship to its cultural context. With respect to worship, a bevy of recent publications have addressed the cultural dimension of Christian liturgy, arguing either to bolster traditional liturgical practices threatened by contemporary culture or to censure traditional practices in favor of enticing alternatives. These often animated arguments are frequently advanced in the context of difficult dilemmas that face local parishes. To what extent should Roman Catholic worshipers in Zaire adhere to prescribed Roman rubrics? Should the Protestant community church in any town in America implement a seeker-sensitive alternative worship service? It is an understatement to assert that the passion involved in such debates usually emits more heat than light. What is needed is a far-ranging model for conceptualizing the problems of inculturation. Participants in these passionate debates need a balanced, even dispassionate, framework both to negotiate between entrenched and conflicting perspectives and to sense the implications of their eventual decisions. Such a model must reflect both rigorous theological thinking and a passion for the church's mission in the world. It must offer a balanced, multidimensional view both of liturgical action and of the culture in which the liturgical action will take place. This essay attempts to define some important dimensions of such a model. Its task is thus synthetic. At many levels, this paper is dissatisfying because of it; complex issues and theories are addressed in only a cursory fashion so as to observe their interrelations. The goal of this essay, then, is not to answer any specific liturgical issue, but rather to propose a framework that will guide the asking of future questions about the relationship of worship and culture. The implicit thesis of this analysis is that liturgists have not always addressed cultural questions with either an understanding of the cultural dimensions of liturgy or a passion for the church's mission in the world. Likewise, missiologists and evangelists have not always appreciated the significance of Christian liturgy both as a central act in the church's life and as an important means for initiating God's children into the full life of the church. This paper is offered to promote resolution of these often clashing interests. Christian Cultural Engagement The relationship of the Christian faith and human culture is a question that has both haunted and inspired the Christian church since its inception. The first Christians faced innumerable questions about how to live Christianly in pagan Hellenistic culture. Post-Constantinian Christians faced questions about the identification of the church with the monarchy. In recent generations, Christians in the West have again needed to discern how to engage a pagan, secularized culture, while fast-growing Christian communities in third world countries face the challenge of working out the implications of their faith in their cultural context for the first time. Human culture has and will always provide the context in which the church both lives and defines its identity. Throughout the Christian tradition, many strategies for relating to culture have been practiced and identified. These range from the affirmation of the world by liberal Protestantism to the denial of the world by some forms of Fundamentalism. The variations along this spectrum have been classified by various scholars, from the seminal work of Ernst Troeltsch to the most famous of its progeny, H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1951). This scholarly conceptualization, perhaps most discussed by social ethicists, is an immensely important work. It crystallizes the most significant theological commitments of various traditions and sets them on the brink of praxis, where they function to motivate and guide Christian communities. Equally interesting are the ongoing efforts of individual Christians and Christian communities to live out their faith in culture. This praxis both precedes and is later shaped by this scholarly reflection. Christians throughout the centuries have made valiant attempts both to come to grips with the culture around them and to find ways of relating to that culture that are consistent with their faith. Roughly two broad strands of such efforts can be identified. The first strand consists of efforts within cultures where the church is already established. Whether or not Christian values are dominant within a culture, these efforts find support from a church already largely inculturated. In such contexts, Christians have produced scholarship and participated in the political and economic life of the community, reflecting their faith commitments in each area of life. The second strand consists of missionary enterprises to establish Christian churches in new cultural contexts, such as early Jesuit missionary efforts to Native Americans or current efforts to evangelize various third world countries. These two strands of cultural involvement are rarely considered together. The former is typically the domain of social ethicists; the latter the domain of missionaries and missiologists. But what is significant for the discussion of liturgical inculturation is the striking similarity between these two tasks, for each requires an assessment and evaluation of the cultural context and the development both of a posture to relate to that culture and of strategies with which to engage it. In each of these efforts, Christian believers and Christian churches are addressing an aspect of human culture and are doing so in a self-consciously Christian way. Liturgists considering cultural issues must learn from the insights of both missiologists and social ethicists. The Role of Christian Liturgy in Cultural Engagement Strikingly absent from most discussions about the Christian faith and culture is any mention of liturgy. Although liturgy is arguably the most public act of the church, although it includes the central acts of proclamation and sacramental celebration—constitutive dimensions of the Christian church in almost every ecclesiology—and although corporate worship is the single act for which more time and energy are spent than almost any other activity in the history of the church, liturgy is largely ignored in Christian social ethics and missiology. Yet what the church does in its worship, I will argue, both reflects and shapes its attitude toward culture. Since this suggestion is not self-evident to many Christians, especially Protestant ones, some apologetic is needed for taking liturgy seriously when thinking about Christian cultural engagement. First, liturgy inevitably mirrors both the cultural context and the particular strategies for cultural engagement of any given worshiping community. As Michael Warren has observed, "?The worship of the assembly actually does truly embody and express the lived commitments of the group, whatever these are?" (Faith, Culture, and the Worshiping Community [Washington, D.C.: Pastoral Press, 1993], 59). In the nineteenth century, for example, the "?Christ against culture?" orientation of the Cambridge ecclesiologists and the "?Christ of culture?" orientation of mainline Protestantism is given no more eloquent testimony than in their respective worship practices. Second, Christian worship is an essential dimension of the missio dei (mission of God) in the world. The very act of worship by the royal priesthood of God declares the praises of God to the world (1 Pet. 2:9). And one essential dimension of the Lord's Supper is its role in "?proclaiming the Lord's death until he comes?" (1 Cor. 11:26). Unfortunately, the relationship of worship and mission has not always been appreciated. Rarely have missiologists and liturgists been collaborators in theological discussions or ecclesiastical structures. This was observed as early as thirty years ago by J. G. Davies, who nevertheless urged his readers to "?seek to understand worship outwardly in terms of mission?" (Worship and Mission [London: SCM Press, 1966], 7). Liturgy and mission are not dialectical sparring partners. In the words of Patrick Kiefert, "?Effective evangelism and liturgical worship belong together in a mutual apostolic mission?" (Welcoming the Stranger: A Public Theology of Worship and Evangelism [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992], 5). Finally, liturgy has a powerful role in forming individual Christians and the Christian community in their appropriation of a cultural environment. Christian worship forms participants by means of narrative and proclamation, prayer and sacrament, so that they will approach their day-to-day lives in ways that reflect deeply biblical patterns of thought and action. It is one occasion where the church's distinctive vocabulary, narratives, and rituals are developed and enacted. If the church wants to exercise any initiative in its engagement with culture while remaining faithful to the gospel, then it must not neglect the liturgy. For liturgy, more than any other dimension of the church's life, shapes the "?lived theology?" of a given worshiping community. It writes what might be called the theology of the heart, the theology by which Christians live, think, and pray. In Constructing a Public Theology: The Church in a Pluralistic Culture (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991) Harvard theologian Ronald Thiemann indicates:

[Liturgy] has been one of the most important teaching tools throughout the history of the church. Text, ritual action, liturgical movement, and visual images intertwine to manifest the living faith of the Christian church. For today's Christian, who participates in the life of the Christian community primarily through its Sunday morning worship, liturgy continues to be the primary setting in which the beliefs and practices of Christianity are communicated.

Similarly, as Mark Searle observed, "?Celebrating the liturgy should train us to recognize justice and injustice when we see it. It serves as a basis for social criticism by giving us a criterion by which to evaluate the events and structures of the world?" (Mark Searle, "?Serving the Lord with Justice,?" in Liturgy and Social Justice [Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1980], 29). Corporate worship is an opportunity to model an honest and balanced form of cultural engagement, to awaken in worshipers a deeper sensitivity to matters of justice, and to form worshipers in deeply biblical patterns of thought and action.

The Process of Liturgical Inculturation Christian cultural engagement has been a central concern for the church throughout its history. Christian liturgy is a dimension of the church that cannot be ignored in this important activity. But how ought liturgy to engage culture? How should liturgists charged with planning and leading worship take into account their cultural context? Following its intent to chart broad conceptual territory, this essay will now propose three tasks in which liturgists should be engaged. These are not intended to be a tidy three-step solution to the problem of cultural engagement, but rather three areas for constant attention in the ongoing challenge of planning and leading Christian worship. Conceptual Task. The first task is conceptual and theological. Its goal is the refinement of a model in which the questions of cultural engagement can be asked. This task involves proposing definitions for culture, the church, and liturgy, and suggesting how these entities relate. At the very least, this conceptual task demands answers to at least three important questions. First, what should the Christian posture be toward culture? Quite obviously, consensus among Christians on this question has never been achieved. Answers to this question are both irreconcilable and entrenched in centuries-old traditions, ranging from the affirmation of culture by various liberal Protestant groups to the abnegation of culture by various Anabaptist communities. What is important for liturgists to understand is that this posturing by Christians of every age and tradition reflects deep theological commitments. If creation is highly valued and seen to include the potential for human culture, then Christian cultural engagement will likewise be highly valued and believed to contain great potential for good. If creation is devalued or subordinated to redemption in a larger theological scheme, then culture will undoubtedly be viewed skeptically. Likewise, the theology of the Incarnation is a theological construct often used as model for Christian cultural engagement, whereby Christian cultural engagement is understood as a mirror of Jesus' simultaneous full participation in culture and his critique and transformation of culture. Also important for liturgists to understand is that both any given culture and the Christian message are too nuanced, rich, and complex to admit any simplistic, monolithic strategy. At a given time and place, Christians may need to participate vigorously in some forms of cultural life, seek to transform others, and avoid still others. The complexity involved can not be overstated. Modern culture exerts influence on several levels of meaning and is itself comprised of a host of diverse subcultures. Blanket statements about either culture as a whole or the nature of Christian cultural engagement are very dangerous. Among liturgists, there appears to be consensus that the extremes of either identifying with or spurning a given culture are to be avoided at all costs. Identification with culture, among other things, threatens the meaning of Christian symbols. In the words of Langdon Gilkey, "?Religious symbols that lose a special judgment and a special promise over against culture also lose their life and reality?" (Langdon Gilkey, "?Symbols, Meaning, and the Divine Presence,?" Theological Studies 35 [1974], 253). The denial of cultural elements, in contrast, fundamentally calls into question the very human quality of the liturgy itself. Perhaps the greatest perceived threat to liturgists today is the mutation of traditional liturgical worship into presentation and even entertainment evangelism. Quentin Schultze observes:

Across the Protestant and Roman Catholic spectrum, local congregational worship seems more and more like a Hollywood production. Although the televisional influence is not the only one, show-business elements are unmistakable in contemporary worship. The key words used by advocates are "?relaxed,?" "?informal,?" "?interesting,?" and "?relevant.?" … (Quentin J. Schultze, Televangelism and American Culture [Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1991], 221)

The reasons behind this development and its implications for the life of the church are significant and complex, to be sure. But in analyzing this trend, liturgists—and church leaders of every type—must realize that it represents nothing less than a radical identification with culture.

The second question concerns the goal of Christian cultural engagement. Some Christians limit their vision, believing that personal evangelism is the only way in which they should relate to their larger cultural environment. Others expand their vision to include a host of cultural activities, proposing that Christians bring their particular insights and values into the public square. This task must be informed by theological insight, particularly by eschatology and missiology. Each of these disciplines in its own way presents a grand portrait of the kingdom of God both as anticipated in the future and realized in the present. In their classical form, each militates against a reductionistic view of mission, which concentrates solely on individual salvation and claims proselytism as its highest goal, while still emphasizing the importance of individual conversion to God. Suffice it to say that throughout its history, the church has tended to emphasize one to the exclusion of the other. The third question to be addressed regards the role liturgy should play in cultural engagement. This question is particularly important, given the significance of worship in defining and forming the Christian community. Like the others, this conceptual question must be approached theologically, this time from the discipline of the theology of liturgy. Any adequate theology of liturgy teaches that Christian liturgy is a multivalent entity. It is worship, but it is more than worship; it is prayer, but it is more than prayer; it is sacrament, but it is more than sacrament; it is witness and proclamation, but it is more than witness and proclamation. Christian liturgy is also at once the activity of God and the actions of the worshiping community. The community gathers, listens, sings, prays, and eats. And yet it is God who is present, Jesus Christ who perfects the priestly offerings of the community, and the Spirit who effects this presence and groans within individuals of the community—as in all of creation—as they pray. Christian liturgy properly resists being reduced into an evangelistic platform on the one hand or being disembodied from the body of Christ on the other hand. Articulating these basic themes in a theology of liturgy helps to suggest how liturgy in any worship tradition could be understood as a means to cultural engagement. Specifically, it challenges any effort to limit liturgy from cultural engagement on the one hand and to reduce cultural engagement to liturgical expression on the other hand. Meanwhile, it argues that worship must maintain an independent integrity in the life of the church, having its own unique purposes, methods, and modes of participation. These three conceptual questions suggest that, in addition to other important and proper roles, a liturgist must be a theologian. This involves the lovely and enviable task of imagining the fullness of the kingdom of God, of dreaming of that ideal world yet to come, and of fending off every effort to reduce or limit that vision. Task of Assessment. If the first task concerns an ideal or idyllic world, the second is oriented to the real world, to real problems, and to the day-to-day worship of the church. This second task is assessment. Christian liturgists who plot strategies for cultural involvement need to be studious observers of both the culture(s) in which they work and the liturgies they plan and lead. This suggests two types of assessment. The first is assessment of the local cultural context. Liturgists must be skilled cultural observers. Fortunately, liturgists have many mentors and fellow workers in this task, given the huge industry that supports the description and criticism of culture. Cultural pundits, advertising strategies, and sociological studies all teach us about the defining characteristics of life and culture in the twentieth century. Even the church is blessed with sophisticated sociological analysis of its life. These are voices to which liturgists must listen and listen discerningly. Perhaps the greatest trap into which Christian liturgists may fall regarding such analyses is the temptation to oversimplify the trends and values of contemporary culture. Recent social and anthropological theory has moved away from a vision of a given culture as a unified whole. Instead, it distinguishes structural and improvisational dimensions at work in any given cultural setting. With regard to life in the United States, for example, consider the many terms that could claim to define the current cultural climate: individualism, privatism, modernism, postmodernism, pluralism, secularism, subjectivism, multiculturalism, cynicism, populism, consumerism, narcissism, entertainmentism, violent, politically correct, ritually incompetent, post-Christendom, and becoming intimatized, politicized, and bureaucratized. Each of these terms identifies an important feature of modern North American culture. The sheer number of these and related descriptions calls the attentive student of culture to resist simplistic analyses. Also problematic is the assessment of any one of those terms for its import for Christian worship. With regard to the subjectivism, for example, M. Francis Mannion is quick to observe that it will lead to a "?bitter harvest?" in which worship degenerates into "?therapy,?" becomes disengaged from its role in social transformation, and—along with the Scriptures and the church itself—becomes a slave to "?inner realities and personal dispositions?" (M. Francis Mannion, "?Liturgy and the Present Crisis of Culture,?" Worship 62 [March 1988], 105–107). In contrast, Michael Aune considers this assessment "?needlessly inflammatory?" and proposes that precisely this sort of subjectivism may lead to a realization of the new potential for appropriating the objective meaning of liturgical action (Michael B. Aune, "?Worship in an Age of Subjectivism Revisited,?" Worship 65 [May 1991], 224–238). Any prominent cultural value may have simultaneous potential for good and evil with respect to worship. Liturgists must be vigilant for liturgical strategies that will foster the good without reaping the evil. The second task of assessment is assessment of current liturgical practice. This is an art that liturgists have always practiced to some extent. Every effort to analyze the relative strength of the worship life of a community is a part of this task. But liturgists must go beyond a simple evaluation of their goals and relative strengths and learn to view their own community as if they were from the outside. Particularly instructive are methods of cultural anthropologists and other students of human ritual who attempt to observe religious rites with the goal of interpreting or of hypothesizing about the relationships they express and the theological commitments they imply. These methods attempt to distill what may be the hidden cultural assumptions of a given Christian community. This sort of assessment turns liturgists into students of themselves and their community, heightening self-consciousness about the far-reaching implications of even mundane liturgical choices for the theological integrity of the worshiping community. Observing who leads liturgical celebration, for example, provides a clue to the particular vision of leadership and community that a given church espouses. Observing what style of music is employed in liturgy is indicative of the social and cultural setting of a given community and of its implicit relationship with local culture. Every liturgical action is a cultural icon that teaches the attentive observer a great deal about the cultural values and theological commitments of a worshiping community. Liturgists must be constantly vigilant about these indicators and must become adept at carefully scrutinizing local liturgical practices as such an icon. The Liturgical Task. A third ongoing task for Christian liturgists is one of liturgical contextualization. This task permeates every aspect of planning and leading Christian worship, each of which inherently involves issues of contextualization within culture. Every anthem, hymn, or bit of service music; every banner, parament, or vestment; every spoken prayer, homily, or rubric is a cultural artifact. The goal of the conscientious liturgists should be not only to describe this phenomenon but also to prescribe liturgical practices that adequately reflect a community's cultural context and theological commitments. This third task is carried out in light of the conceptual- and assessment-oriented tasks described above. This task is particular to each worshiping community. No universally applicable approach nor any universal solution to a given set of liturgical questions can be recommended in this brief essay. What can be said is that its largest challenge is to both remain faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ and to be appropriately responsive to the cultural context in which it is placed. The twin dangers it seeks to avoid are "?cultural capitulation?" on the one hand and "?cultural irrelevancy?" on the other hand (Kenneth Smits, "?Liturgical Reform in a Cultural Perspective,?" Worship 50 [1976], 98). Final Comments This essay has proposed that liturgical inculturation be attempted in light of a complex web of theological and cultural analyses. The three tasks described above complicate what otherwise may have been conceptualized as a comparatively simple task of, say, translating a given liturgy into a new vernacular language or adopting a new style of music. But what is the benefit of this complex scheme? First, it alerts liturgists and anyone else who will listen to their formative role in the church. Liturgists who plot changes in liturgical practice along cultural lines are never changing only the order or style in which a Sunday morning service takes place. In a much broader and significant way, they are rewriting the church's approach to social ethics and theology; they are rewriting and adapting the church's strategy for cultural engagement. Second, a more expansive frame of reference exposes unwitting inconsistencies in the church's life and work. It is paradoxical, for example, that conservative Protestant evangelicals, who have long been wary of cultural engagement, eagerly embrace a sweeping mélange of cultural forms in their liturgical life. It is similarly telling that many worshiping communities with a strong liturgical tradition are now questioning nearly every aspect of their worship life. Not even the most cherished liturgical texts, music, and visual symbols in the most traditional communities have escaped cultural critique. It is important that this evaluation not take place in a overly simplistic discussion that ignores the complexity of modern culture. Third, by discussing cultural engagement, evangelism, and liturgical inculturation in the same context, each is given its own identity while remaining open to insights gleaned from the others. Without each other, each produces an unnecessarily narrow vision of Christianity. Evangelism without social ethics is mere proselytism; social ethics without evangelism is mere activism; social ethics and evangelism without inculturation, is cultural chauvinism; and inculturation without social ethics and evangelism is merely cultural capitulation. Any divorce of these concepts from each other renders both Christian cultural engagement and Christian worship impoverished. Fourth, this scheme reminds liturgists that they will inevitably err. Liturgical inculturation is fraught with dangers on every side. One decision that absolutizes culture may be followed by one that sells out an enduring and integral aspect of the Christian faith. One decision that shores up the church's identity and criticizes a local cultural context may endanger the church's survival in that context and vice versa. This is not to deter the effort from being made, for liturgical inculturation is inevitable. To not attempt to control or shape liturgy is to be left open to the warp and woof of a culture. Rather, this scheme calls liturgists to a certain sobriety for their task. Thus, the task of liturgical inculturation is never to be underestimated. If carried out oblivious to a culture milieu, apathy to larger theological issues, and strong-headed self-confidence, this task can and will paralyze both the mission and the liturgy of the church for generations to come. But if handled with sociocultural poise, theological acumen, and prayer-filled common sense, this task can invigorate the mission of the church on every level.