Introduction
In 2015, I was on an interview panel seeking to appoint the first Bishop Otter Scholar for Theology and the Arts. Among the people we interviewed was someone who proposed undertaking a study of sediliaFootnote 1 in the diocese of Chichester and liturgical practice in the reformation that shaped the Church of England in the 16th and 17th centuries. The candidate hoped to show that sedilia continued to be used after the Edwardian and Elizabethan reforms, and that the ministers simply re-arranged their vesture and behaviour in order to accommodate the new rites. The rubric for Mattins in the 1549 Prayer Book prescribes that ‘The Priest beeying in the quire, shall begin with a loud voice the Lordes prayer’. The 1552 Prayer Book states that the office takes place in ‘suche place of the Churche, Chapelle, or Chauncel, and the minister shall so turne him, as ye people maye best heare … and the Chauncels shal remained, as they have done in times past’.
Custom and habit
The stipulation that the chancels shall remain as they have done in times past is unchanged in the Prayer Books of 1558 and 1662. Our potential Bishop Otter Scholar wanted to explore how far habit and custom determined the use of sacred space in public worship, leading eventually to the stacking of a sedilia from three sitting spaces adjoining each other to a triple decker arrangement which survives so splendidly in St Mary’s, Whitby.
That overtly hierarchical model of liturgical presentation gave way to a thorough-going re-ordering of churches in the 19th century which imposed a collegial arrangement. This provided a template of custom and habit for ecclesiastical architects that continued to determine the work of practitioners as apparently progressive as Edward Maufe and Basil Spence.
What seems to have emerged into Anglican liturgical practice is an instinct that the sacred minister – the vicar – still sits in a place of dignity (the stall into which an incumbent is placed as part of the archdeacon’s mandate to induct). The episcopally ordained clergy (vicar or curate) are pre-eminently allowed to enter the sanctuary during divine worship, possibly with another minister (a robed crucifer, perhaps, from the choir) who might solemnly present a large brass plate at the sanctuary step, thereby ensuring that the laity who have brought up the collection of financial offerings from the congregation do not enter the holy of holies, the sanctuary.
My point is simply this: the ordering of our church buildings in the Church of England is not arbitrary. Who sits where, what demarcates sacred space, how it is accessed and for what purpose: these points of liturgical detail are determined by habit and custom that draw authentication from the early centuries of the Christian Church. Hitherto they have permitted the Church of England to understand herself to be both catholic and reformed, claiming an identity that is more expansive than the Brexit mentality of the Tudor dynasty.Footnote 2
Public worship
The very concept of a consecrated public building that defines sacred space as the location for the transmission and practice of our faith as Christians is a fundamental theological assertion of the existence of God, of divine revelation and truth, of law and judgement, of the ordering of nature in creation, of the obligation of worship upon the human race and its benefits, of the perpetuation of God’s mission of love and salvation – the hope of heaven regained and creation perfected.
The importance of the consecration of places for the proper conduct of the Church’s life is profoundly bound up with the ordering of worship that marks the early expansion of Christian faith as the Church defines and teaches it, and its importance has been described in these terms:
When Constantine had finished an house for the service of God at Jerusalem, the dedication he judged a matter not unworthy, about the solemn performance whereof the greatest part of the bishops in Christendom should meet together. Which thing they did at the emperor’s motion, each most willingly setting forth that action to their power; some with orations, some with sermons, some with the sacrifice of prayers unto God for the peace of the world, for the Church’s safety, for the emperor’s and his children’s good … So that whether emperors or bishops in those days were churchfounders, the solemn dedication of churches they thought not to be a work in itself either vain or superstitious’.Footnote 3
So writes Richard Hooker in Book Five of his Ecclesiastical Polity, widely regarded as constituting the theological framework of the Church of England. Indeed, in this Book he outlines the principles of sacred places and objects, sacred texts and sacred persons in a scheme that is recognisable in the Canons of the Church of England today. Hooker takes seriously the agency of the emperor in overseeing the consecration of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem because it established the public nature of the work, the liturgy, as the reason for the building’s existence.
By contrast, Hooker presents the idea of a church building as a ‘privy conventicle’ that serves the purpose of false teaching (heretics who ‘adventure to instil their poison into men’s minds’). The public nature of the building also undermines that right of ownership and control which ‘their founders might have in them and to make God their owner’ – the owner of the buildings, that is.Footnote 4 The reference in the Declaration of Assent to ‘public prayer and the administration of the sacraments’ takes us directly to the dispensation that Hooker describes in the consecration of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in September 335.
Through the public celebration of the Mysteries of the Christian faith the Church sets out fundamental processes of doctrine, discipline, personal devotion, law and behaviour. This is evident in the teaching of Cyril of Jerusalem, an early, definitive version of the Alpha Course. Cyril’s Lectures on the Christian Sacraments offer us an insight into the regulation of Christian life that we would find alien, namely the dignity and status bestowed by Christian initiation as a requirement for access to the celebration of the mysteries. So Cyril concludes his introduction to the catechumens as they prepare for their admission into their participation in divine worship:
May God ‘grant you the forgiveness of your former trespasses; may he plant you in the Church, and enlist you for himself, putting on you the armour of righteousness! May he fill you with the heavenly things of the New Testament, and give you the indelible seal of the Holy Spirit, throughout all ages, in Christ Jesus our Lord, to whom be glory for even and ever! Amen’.
Public participation in sacramental Christian worship, and the denial of access to that privilege, is regulated by law within the Christian Church. We see this clearly in cases of apostacy, in the development of public rites of penance, and in the continuation of a catechumenate status for those who are preparing for admission to the sacraments. ‘Public’ does not necessarily equate to ‘unregulated’. It does not entitle participation on one’s own terms, as Canons B15Footnote 5 and B16Footnote 6 in the Church of England indicate. There is a cost to discipleship.
Revelation
The development of the Church’s public worship also follows another law: it is that the light of truth, revealed in Jesus Christ, dispels the shadows of myths and prophecy, perfecting the best ideals of those who searched for truth (a wisdom that Clement of Alexandria describes as ‘propaedeutic’: ‘a preparation, paving the way for the man who is brought to perfection in Christ’).Footnote 7
One simple example of the observance of this law, by which the truth of Jesus Christ dispels the limited shadows of human self-reliance, is in the obelisk that now stands in the centre of St Peter’s Square, whereas previously it seems to have demarcated the arena in which St Peter was martyred. The obelisk is a trophy of Roman imperialism. It is now brought under the rule of Christ the King, by whom the achievements of all earthly powers are to be judged. In token of which, the obelisk is surmounted by the cross, and at its base the inscription reads: ‘Behold, the Cross of the Lord. Be gone, you that seek to resist its power’.
The consecration of everyday life
The application of this law extends beyond the witness of a public monument. Christian liturgical worship was an evangelistic strategy that exorcised the fables of the past and proclaimed total confidence in the saving work of God revealed in Jesus Christ. It is no wonder that Christians often constructed their churches on the site of former pagan temples. The appropriation of those sites enabled the Church’s worship to give public demonstration of the sovereignty of Jesus Christ.
With growing confidence, Christianity scours the culture it inhabits, pressing into use whatever can convey the eternal truth revealed in Jesus Christ. Vines can be Bacchic, but also speak of the new wine of the kingdom and the blood of the Eucharist. A fisherman speaks of everyday labour, and can do so as one who attracts people and makes them Christians through baptism and confirmation. Jonah and the preaching of repentance touches on the Church’s wisdom and the moral issues of every generation. The shepherd is a youth who rescues a lost sheep and, having laid down his own life for them, rescues faithful Christians from the terrors of death.
These images can be found in the Roman Necropolis beneath St Peter’s Basilica. They are snapshots of what animated the liturgical life of the early Church. It is summed up by the Anglican liturgist, Gregory Dix:
By such means as the eucharists at Christian marriages and funerals (which go back at least to the second century) the liturgy did very early begin to reach out towards the consecration of the mundane life of Christians.Footnote 8
Consecratio mundi, the consecration of everyday life, was the Church’s enterprise of mission through worship, and it gave energy to the round of church building initiated in the early 4th century. The law of Christian worship laid out at that time is still evident in defining the Christian Church in the 21st century. This law as evident both in the liturgical worship of the Church and in what Pope St Paul VI defined as the distinctive priesthood of the laity which consecrates mundane, daily life. Paul VI writes that:
by consecration we mean, not the separation of a thing from what is profane in order to reserve it exclusively, or particularly, for the Divinity, but, in a wider sense, the re-establishment of a thing’s relationship to God according to its own order, according to the exigency of the nature of the thing itself, in the plan willed by God.Footnote 9
How these words would have pleased Archbishop William Temple, who, in more epigrammatic mode wrote that:
only if [God] is revealed in the history of Syrians and Philistines can He be revealed in the history of Israel; only if he chooses all men for His own can He choose any at all; only if nothing is profane can anything be sacred.Footnote 10
Inclusion
Finally, another law that determines Christian worship is the law of social, human inclusion which transgresses the boundaries so often imposed by worldly standards. Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price have set out an account of life in Rome from its origins in the eighth century BC to its identity as the centre of Christian mission. In the mid-third century AD life for Christians was hard. Many were poor, ill-educated artisans, tainted by foreignness in their connection with Palestine. They disturbed the structures of society by incorporating slaves in the Church’s company of citizens, alongside its limited number of wealthy patrons. By contrast with the law of Christian teaching and the practice of its worship, Roman society despised poverty and foreignness. But ‘in Christianity the poor were both a metaphor and a reality. Precisely this kind of symbolic re-evaluation of poverty made it a peculiarly attractive religion to the poor as a group’.Footnote 11
This analysis is important in assessing the law of social inclusion that determines the function of Christian worship, historically and in the present. Worship must engage with a hugely diverse range of human circumstances and need, uniting its participants in a shared enterprise. That enterprise must also teach and communicate faith that will withstand distortion. This accounts for the importance of image, repetition, gesture, sensory perception (smell, touch, taste), and simplicity as elements that should remain characteristic of the Church’s public worship and theological integrity.
Early in the third century AD an eloquent Christian apologist, Minucius Felix, produced a dialogue in which the Christian figure of Octavius outlines the effect of faith on moral life and behaviour. In chapter 32 he indicates what the fruit of inclusive worship should be. This is also a salutary warning against attachment to formulaic liturgy in opulent buildings:
What temple shall I build to Him, when this whole world fashioned by His work cannot receive Him? … Therefore he who cultivates innocence supplicates God; he who cultivates justice makes offerings to God; he who abstains from fraudulent practices propitiates God; he who snatches man from danger slaughters the most acceptable victim. These are our sacrifices, these are our rites of God’s worship.Footnote 12
Conclusion
So here are some laws that govern Christian worship. The law of habit and custom that connects us to every age and place, making recognisable what is done everywhere, always, and by everyone. The law of worship in the public square which resists privatisation and owes all things to God. The law of revelation in which the light of Jesus Christ dispels the shadows and limitation of the human mind. The law of consecration reveals an environmental truth about relationship, justice, labour and the dignity of human stewardship. And finally, in every sense, the law of inclusion instructs us that all is taken into God in Christ, all is healed, and all are called to the marriage feast of the Lamb.
Acknowledgements
This Comment is based substantially on a lecture delivered to the Ecclesiastical Law Society Day Conference on ‘The Law of Liturgy in the Church of England: Dead or Alive?’, at St Peter’s, Eaton Square, London on 27 April 2024.
