Evangelical Worship

Almost invariably, media stories with the word evangelical in their headlines are accompanied by a familiar stock photo: a mass of middle-class worshippers with eyes closed, faces tilted upward, and hands raised to the sky. Yet, despite the fact that worship has become symbolic of evangelicalism’s identity in the twenty-first century, it remains an understudied locus of academic inquiry. Historians of American evangelicalism tend to define the movement by its political entanglements (the “rise of the religious Right”), and academic trajectories (the formation of the “evangelical mind”), not its ecclesial practices. Theological scholars frequently dismiss evangelical worship as a reiteration of nineteenth-century revivalism or a derivative imitation of secular entertainment (three Christian rock songs and a spiritual TED talk). But by failing to engage this worship seriously, we miss vital insights into a form of Protestantism that exerts widespread influence in the United States and around the world. Evangelical Worship: An American Mosaic models a new way forward. Drawing together insights from American religious history and liturgical studies, and putting both in conversation with ethnographic fieldwork in seven congregations, this book argues that corporate worship is not a peripheral “extra” tacked onto a fully formed spiritual/political/cultural movement, but rather the crucible through which congregations forge and negotiate the contours of evangelicalism’s contested theological identity.

Finding Balance and Harmony

As Christianity arrived on the shores of Singapore closely following British colonization, Western missionaries introduced their interpretation of the Holy Communion into a foreign land and space that was experiencing its first brushes with Western modernity. Contemporaneously, the movement of modernity continues to make an impact upon an important element of life closely intertwined with religious folk practices and culture of locals: food. In the face of modernizing foodscapes and primordial religious backgrounds, converts from Chinese religious traditions to Christianity find themselves navigating the dissonance of Western Holy Communion theologies with the Chinese philosophies of food. How might churches in Singapore begin to respond to the tensions arising when these two philosophical systems meet, and when Christians and churches seem to appropriate “syncretistic” theologies into their liturgical behavior? This article undertakes an interdisciplinary effort by employing social science to explore the modernizing of food in Singapore, as well as engaging Chinese philosophies of food and the body to explain tensions among converts from Chinese religious traditions, and the resistance of local churches towards Chinese understandings of food rituals in the partaking of the Holy Communion. It will also briefly propose that interdisciplinary studies, including liturgical studies, will be essential in developing a more robust theology of the Holy Communion among churches, thereby enhancing its witness within and without.

Essential Workers, Essential Services? Leitourgia in Light of Lockdown

Within days of the outbreak of COVID-19, the language of “essential work” and “essential workers” became commonplace in public discourse. “Church workers” and their in-person liturgical services were largely deemed “non-essential”, and most assemblies shifted worship to online platforms. While some reflection on this virtual “church work” has appeared in the intervening months, there has been less evaluation of the gathered assembly’s absence from the public square, along with the contribution its liturgical work might offer in interpreting the pandemic and its effects. This essay imagines a post-COVID-19 agenda for liturgical studies that focuses on a recovery of Christian liturgy as public, in-person, and “essential” service done for the sake of the polis—a public example of “church doing world”—that proposes a countersign to the inequalities of contemporary consumer culture laid bare in these last months. It begins by engaging in dialogue with the leitourgia of groups who insisted on the essential nature of their public service, in particular the public protests against police violence that marked the summer of 2020. In doing so, it seeks ways liturgical assemblies might better propose a “public theology” of God’s work in the world understood as the concursus Dei, the divine accompanying of creation and humanity within it.

Researching preaching beyond the (transcribed) text in (South) Africa

In (South) Africa, preaching should in addition to textual studies of recorded and transcribed sermon texts, also be studied as an enacted performance and thus beyond the transcribed text. This article develops an argument regarding the need for the field of Homiletics in (South) Africa to firstly broaden the object of empirical homiletical research and study preaching as an enacted or performed liturgical ritual and secondly, augment its existing research methodologies accordingly. Such a methodology will take African epistemologies and ontologies more seriously than traditional methodologies that only study transcribed texts and to a large extent ignore the significance of the performance of the sermon. Recent methodological developments in Liturgical Studies can be helpful in this regard and a discussion between the two disciplines are encouraged, as well as insights gained from other fields such as Ritual – and Performance Studies. The article ends with some implications that the broadening of the research object may have for homiletical research methods in Africa.

Receiving Aquinas’ Sacramental Theology Today

The chapter surveys trends in sacramental theology that aid or impede a recovery of Aquinas’ sacramental doctrine: the twentieth-century liturgical movement, patristic ressourcement, the emergence of highly specialized liturgical studies, the influence of Heidegger, and the renewal of biblical studies. Some preliminary steps for a sound interpretation of Aquinas’ sacramental theology are considered: attentiveness to writings other than the Summa theologiae, awareness of the link between Trinitarian doctrine and the theology of grace, and a proper integration of Aquinas’ Christology, especially his patristic approach to the mysteries of Christ. Aquinas’ thought includes a theology of worship linked with a holistic anthropology and a rich vision of the moral life (virtue ethics). The chapter concludes with a focus on some of the original elements of Thomas’s Eucharistic theology and shows how it can meet contemporary philosophical and pastoral concerns.

„Übersetzungsverfahren“. Zum Verhältnis von Ereignis und liturgischer Performanz

“Do this in memory of me” (Luke 22, 19). Christ ‘translated’ the gift of his whole life into a ritual program (“do this”) which he asked his disciples to enact. As early as 1925, Romano Guardini (1885–1968) understood the ritual form of the Eucharist as a ritual transposition of the form of Christ’s life. He foresaw, limited as he was as a pioneer nonetheless, a dimension of the liturgy that liturgical studies would subsequently investigate using categories such as performance, Inszenierung or mise en scène. In this sense, the liturgical drama has an illocutionary and performative quality both in continuity and in discontinuity with other religious performances.

A Distanced Eucharist in Bits and Bytes. Creating a True Encounter in Online Celebrations of the Mass during the COVID-19 Crisis

Since the beginning of 2020, liturgical life in many countries around the globe has changed due to COVID-19 lockdowns or other measures related to the worldwide pandemic. While churches had to close their doors to the faithful, or only allow a limited of people to attend mass, communities brought their Eucharistic celebrations online in livestreamed or Zoom services. This phenomenon has raised questions about the authenticity of online celebrations of the Eucharist. Can those online services be considered as ‘real’ liturgy? In this article, I will address this question by focusing on embodiment and presence in the liturgy and how these key concepts of liturgical studies are being established in a new existential context of the online realm.

Do This in Remembrance of Me Online? Irenic and Elenctic Normativity in Liturgical Studies

The authors of this article, two liturgical scholars and a scholar in dogmatics, engaged in a public discussion of whether or not a Holy Communion should be celebrated online. Speaking about the case afterwards, they found that both the discourse of liturgical studies and of dogmatics introduced comparable normative elements. Barnard and Klomp in liturgical studies speak with Ronald Grimes of ‘ritual criticism’ and with Roy Rappaport of ‘The True Words’ as benchmarks that are established by religions in the infinite field of meanings of the rite. Wisse speaks on the basis of the originally Lutheran distinction of Law and Gospel of therapeutic or irenic and elenctic normativity. The authors advocate this distinction as an instrument that opens the way for a discussion about the mystery of life and of the sacraments.