Before releasing the revised order for the Lord’s Supper in late January, I am publishing a few short essays explaining how it will be different and why. This is the third. Remember, this is not sanctioned by nor does it claim to speak for any part of the GMC or any other denomination.
This essay and the next are the two most challenging. Twenty-five years ago, if I had read the words that I now write, I would be incensed. That which I once taught and celebrated, I now repent of and deny. I was conditioned by seminary, notable authors, bishops, and beloved mentors to hold fast to what I now reject. I was trained to react reflexively against anyone who would speak the words that I now speak. To those who have a hard time hearing this essay: I understand. It did not come to me easily. To anyone compelled to answer me with hard words: I likely would have done the same twenty-five years ago. I do not hold it against you.
The liturgy ignores the four-fold shape.
Rationale: I am now persuaded that Dix’s Green Book (1945) with its four-fold shape, and the inventions which flowed from it, did more damage to sacramental theology and practice than Albert Outler’s Quadrilateral did to scriptural authority.
Pious X, Billy Sunday, Francis Asbury, John Wesley, Jacobus Arminius, Thomas Cranmer, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Thomas Aquinas, Augustine of Hippo, Chrysostom, Hippolytus, Peter the Apostle: a partial list of people who never heard of a four-fold shape of liturgy. If the teachers of your church promote the fourfold action with the zeal of a 19th century evangelist and defend it with the same fervor as they do Holy Scripture, then you can be sure that you are in a Western church with liturgy steeped in the ideology of the Woodstock generation and a sacramental theology that is rooted no deeper than 1945.
The scholarship behind Dix’s The Shape of Liturgy, 1945 (The Green Book) has been substantially discredited. Yet, it is still the foundation for liturgical and ecumenical innovations in much of Western sacramental theology and practice.
This is the first of the hard things for my generation to let go of. We are emotionally invested in the four-fold shape and other ecumenical reforms. We knew the authors who promoted them. They were our professors. They were our friends. They were nice people. They were us! We helped them sell these innovations to a trusting and unsuspecting laity. We were persuaded. We persuaded others. I can tell you from experience that it is hard to open one’s mind and consider that something that was so much a part of our ministry for so long could be a grave error.
Scholars have raised major questions about different parts of Dix’s work (the Anglican Bryan Spinks provides one of the most well-known), but I cannot delve into many of the details here. Despite the now dubious historical basis of Dix’s most famous claim about the four-fold shape, most 20th-century revisions of eucharistic liturgies followed Dix’s claim about this basic shape, including the 1979 Book of Common Prayer….
(W)hen one comes to read early eucharistic prayers and ask the question, “What is the logic or ordering principle of these prayers,” these four actions would never be the answer. One has to go in looking for them to “find” them. Matthew S.C. Olver, No end to Sacrifice: The Legacy of Gregory Dix
On some rather tricky point of evidence (such as the identity of the ellogimon andron of Clement 44) Dom Gregory will state alternative views and come down on the side of that which he regards as the more probable. A few pages later, this probability is restated as a certainty, and some inference is built upon it. Then that inference is itself treated as certain, and something else is erected on it. The argument is very skillfully knit together; and the final conclusion has every appearance of certainty, and of depending on irrefragable evidence; it is only as the careful reader who notices the points at which possibility has been treated as certainty, and who is able to assess the balance of improbability in the conclusion of the argument. Colin Buchanan, Gregory Dix – The Liturgical Bequest
Dix’s work has not stood up to scholarly scrutiny. His idea of an invariable shape to the primitive eucharist and his treatment of the Apostolic Tradition—a document that he said expressed “the mind and practice not of St. Hippolytus only but of the whole Catholic Church of the second century”—have been demolished by a number of liturgical scholars who are far more careful and less tendentious. Not only was Dix wrong about his central claims, but he seems to have had a penchant for shading or even making up evidence.[7] Samuel l Bray, The Shape Fallacy
The four-fold shape was never there. Wherever you can see four divisions, I can show you seven, or three, or ten, or a singularity. Look for triangles, and you will find them in every square, circle, pentagon, and octagon. Critics of the four-fold order can be found among Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics. The Eastern Church never even recognized its existence. The part of the Eastern Church that was not ironically protected by an Iron Curtain was preserved by its innate lack of interest in experimental liturgy. It is past the time when Methodists also should look back to the 1960s with more suspicion and less adoration.
The most serious damage of the four-fold shape fallacy is birthed in Dix’s claim (adopted by the liturgical and ecumenical movements) that our unity is found in the shape of the rite and not the text. This allows the professional liturgist the freedom to advance theological innovations and have them appear ancient. “It pairs a claim of innovation with a claim of continuity. Here we have this undeniably new book, but fear not, for it’s the same shape as the old one.” (Bray). The 1960s through the 1980s saw a lot of novel and false claims about God that were packaged in an allegedly ancient shape. Counterfeit liturgies were accepted in trust by parish clergy and laity. Specifically, devotion to the four actions, which are the work of the minister and people, take precedence over the centrality of the cross, which is the work of God. Our celebratory thanksgiving and our offerings are elevated in importance. Self-examination and penance with all supernatural things are diminished.
I doubt that Dix approved of how the Green Book was used by modernists. He may have been just as displeased with the results of his work as Albert Outler was with how his quadrilateral was misused. We will never know. Dix died in 1952, just seven years after publication, and was not part of the major reforms. Outler’s academic fantasy almost destroyed Scriptural authority in Methodism. Dix’s academic fantasy did ultimately destroy Sacramental integrity in the West and certainly in the last Methodist denominations that hold a claim for sacramentalism.
If one looks with ancient eyes, then one may see the shape of liturgy as an ascending spiral. We circle around to a place more than once. A proper sacramental liturgy is a liturgy of ascent. We return to the place at a higher elevation—continually being raised to the moment we receive the body and the blood and we find ourselves before the heavenly throne singing with the saints, Gloria In Excelsis.
In the first words of the received order, we invoke the Spirit “that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy Name.” Later, the Sanctus re-presents that moment as we cry out, “Holy, holy, holy.” The last words find us in the same place but in a still higher plane: “Glory to God in the highest, and peace to his people on earth. We praise you; we bless you; we worship you; we give thanks to you for your great glory….”
We did not get here by accident. We were led here. Nonetheless, an ascending spiral may exist only in my imagination. Even if it exists in the places where I see it, I do not assert a universal rule that requires any liturgy to be twisted to conform to it.
One may imagine a four-fold shape or deny the illusion and do no harm either way. One may imagine an ascending spiral or deny the illusion and do no harm either way. The shape of the Sacrament that is essential–the shape that must not be distorted – is the cruciform shape. Modern liturgies are designed to take us away from the cross. The authors of UMC Rite II for example, of their own admission, sought to take the Eucharist out of the Upper Room, away from the cross, and seek its meaning in other more celebratory meals. They proclaimed with honor that they had relieved the sacrament of its penitential burden. To them, the references to penance, blood, suffering, and the cross were hindrances that kept people from seeing the glory of God. They could never bring themselves to join the procession of saints who could pray, “Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of your dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood.” The modernist can hide the cross and claim continuity with the past, “Yes, we speak undeniably different words, but fear not, the (allegedly) ancient shape remains the same.” They are what Martin Luther called theologians of glory, “who prefer works to suffering, glory to the cross, strength to weakness, wisdom to folly.” The cross does not obstruct our view of God. It is the only lens through which we truly see him. The cruciform shaped sacrament leads us to comprehend and participate in the revealed glory of God through suffering and the cross.
The restored rite completely ignores the four-fold order and everything that proceeds from it— neither allowing it to affect the content and order of the liturgy, nor doing anything solely to prevent those who are so inclined from imagining it. Through the adapted prayer book liturgy, we recover the cruciform shape. We retain, restore, and hold close to everything that keeps us near the cross.
Leave a Reply