Liturgy: “Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox, You Are the Church”

What is the King’s Liturgy? King’s Liturgy defines our experience together as a Christian community. It outlines the rhythms we celebrate with the Church at large: Scripture readings, Sabbath habits, and celebration of Holy Days and historical events.

This Week’s Lectionary Readings

Deuteronomy 34:1-12
Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17
1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
Matthew 22:34-46

This week’s liturgy is contributed by Professor Bede, assistant professor of history:

I was not ready for the spiritual crisis that occurred in the spring of 2012 in Afghanistan. My patriotic upbringing, desire to serve my country, and goading from classical authors inspired me to abandon my family and fight in a war I increasingly found to be problematic, if not unjust. My specific job was to select people that needed killing, and then find the best ways to do it. I was in a foreign country that desperately needed the gospel, but I had come to deal death. I was horrified with myself.

So how did I get myself out of my moral, spiritual, and intellectual crisis? I did not. Christ did, and he did so through his body, the church. But it was not the church I was expecting.

The unexpected happened in three waves. The first was my chaplain. During my time in the army, I had learned to distrust many Protestant chaplains, who were more familiar with modern psychology than Christian doctrine or the Bible. Every time I was in the field I was more at home attending Catholic mass (where I appropriately only received a blessing). Now, more than ever, I needed community, and God gave me the greatest minister I will probably ever know. He was a Romanian Orthodox priest. He became my confessor, and every Sunday I learned to love the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. I even took communion (gasp!).

It was a Catholic that rescued me from my intellectual crisis, William T. Cavanaugh. A close Catholic friend of mine sent me his Migrations of the Holy while I was deployed. Cavanaugh taught me that I had placed too much hope in the nation-state, and I had prioritized killing for my country above duty to my family and to fellow humans who needed Christ. I revisited Augustine, and he reminded me that I belonged to two cities. In my haste to serve the City of Man, I had lost sight of the City of God.

And what of my guilt? The last thing was my decidedly Protestant wife. In my anger with myself I felt I had sinned beyond the forgiveness of God. Yet my wife—who should have been in grad school while her PhD husband was teaching in a university—was instead alone with a toddler and an infant in an Army town hundreds of miles away from our families. Yet she only offered me love. One day in my anger I committed a blunder, and I was raging with her over Skype about how awful I had been. The whole thing, of course, was representative of my greater guilt. She had said it before, but for some reason on that day, her words finally sunk in. “It’s okay,” she said, “I forgive you. I love you and just want you home.” Suddenly I understood and felt God’s free gift of grace. By forgiving me she had represented Christ in a way I had forgotten, and I was reminded that in the midst of my sin I was forgiven.

Now, of course, the Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant traditions can each in their own way manifest historical community, philosophical depth, and a scriptural emphasis on grace. But I believe it is no accident that the Orthodox historical community, so used to coping with institutions in tension, took me in and gave me a spiritual home when I needed it most. The Protestant emphasis on God’s grace was manifested by a loving wife steeped in a scriptural approach to theology. And a Catholic instructed me to reread the wisdom of the church fathers and reorient my duties.

Although my circumstances were exceptional, I do not believe the manner in which the church ministered to me was. I also believe it provides hope. Modern politics in the West is breaking down because it has no sense of spiritual man, much less the hope of spiritual unity. For the most part, modern political life is based on the idea that humans only share material goods and only need unity regarding material things. There is little talk of spiritual unity, with many simply denying any spiritual existence at all. “There are many gods out there, so take your pick, that is if you believe in god at all. It doesn’t really matter what god you believe in, just be kind to mother earth and don’t take peoples stuff.”

Criticize Christendom (the medieval Christian world) as much as you like, but it had this marvelous idea that humans engaged in politics should acknowledge their spiritual unity under the Creator and Redeemer Christ Jesus. And the beauty of Christendom is that it emerged out of two cultures that were politically incompatible—Judaism and the Greco-Roman world. Strife between these two was tense until the Romans crushed and displaced the Jews in the 2nd century AD. These same tensions existed in the early church. How do you reconcile circumcising, Christian Jews with philosophizing, Christian Greeks? Yet Christ—as he told the Roman that would kill him on behalf of the Jews who wanted him dead—envisioned Romans and Jews in his kingdom which “was not of this world” (John 18:36).

Similarly, Paul exhorted the already schismatic early Christians to remember that “There is neither Jew nor Greek.” Instead, “you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:38, Romans 3:29-30). Yet Paul and the other New Testament authors didn’t obliterate these distinctions either. They magnificently blended them together, relying on both Greco-Roman philosophy and Jewish historical theology to tell the story of Christ and establish the early church.

Yet many are currently using the 500-yr anniversary of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses as a chance to attack fellow Christians or idolize disputatious monks or reactionary popes. This is hardly helpful. It takes little imagination to modernize Paul’s exhortation to the Corinthians in verses 1:11-13 for ourselves: “For I have been informed . . . that there are quarrels among you. Now I mean this, that each one of you is saying, ‘I am of Calvin,’ and ‘I of Luther,’ and ‘I of Aquinas,” and ‘I of Christ.’ Has Christ been divided?” The Christian tendency toward schism was not new and is not over. Yet unity in the body of Christ is possible, even if uniformity in all matters is not. Variety is anticipated, both in historical circumstance—the Jews, Greeks, and Scythians of Colossians 3—and in spiritual strengths—the gifts of Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, and Ephesians 4, for example. This variety makes the church a beautiful tapestry.

I hope we always continue to reform the church, but I also hope that as we enter a post-Christian age we look to a post-Reformation church. Not all of those historical issues have been resolved, but a new historical moment is upon us. Christendom will not return; like the Reformation, it was a historical moment that has passed. But the church still has much to do. Nothing can build, rescue, or shape civilization, whether Western or otherwise, like the church. This is as Christ intended. He reigns “above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in the one to come. And he put all things in subjection under His feet, and gave Him as head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1). Wow. What confidence we should have in Christ’s body! And experience has taught me what history and scripture seem to indicate: this body includes Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant.