The Study of Liturgy and Worship

‘the theology we most readily recognize and practice is . . . neither primary nor seminal but secondary and derivative’

In the Anglican tradition, also affirming the celebration of the liturgy as the place of Christ’s presence in his Church, the official liturgies of the churches of the Anglican Communion are explicitly expressive of the doctrine of those churches, a principle which derives from the place of the Book of Common Prayer in the Church of England as in particular containing the doctrine of that church, along with the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion and the Ordinal (see Canon A5 of the Canons of the Church of England). In the Anglican tradition, therefore, liturgy, theology and ecclesiology are inseparable one from another, but it is in the liturgy itself that this relationship is most typically to be seen.

For example, in the Roman Catholic tradition the hugely influential Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy which emerged from the Second Vatican Council in 1963 (the same year that the Faith and Order Conference was held in Montreal) defines liturgy as a ‘an exercise of the priestly office of Jesus Christ’, in which ‘public worship is performed by the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, that is, by the Head and his members’ (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 1996, §7). Significantly for ecumenical dialogue and for liturgical renewal and revision, the presence of Christ in the liturgy of the Church was to be identified not just in the eucharistic elements but in other dimensions of the liturgical celebration: ‘He is present in his word since it is he who speaks when the holy scriptures are read . . . he is present when the Church prays and sings’ (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 1996, §7).

The pioneer of the Liturgical Movement of the early twentieth century, Lambert Beauduin, defined liturgy succinctly as ‘the worship offered to God by the Church itself’ (Jungmann, 1975, p. 851).

‘liturgy’ has come to denote the structured body of text and ritual by which the Church as a corporate body offers worship to God. This is sometimes referred to as ordo – literally ‘order’ – and it is usually authorized by the official processes of the ecclesial bodies in which and by whom it is employed,