Saving Images: The Presence of the Bible in Christian Liturgy

By Gordon W. Lathrop

The Protestant Reformation emphasized the centrality of scripture to Christian life; the twentieth-century liturgical movement emphasized the Bible‘s place at the heart of liturgy. But we have not yet explored the place of the Bible as the subject of critical exegesis in contemporary liturgy, argues Gordon W. Lathrop. He seeks to remedy that lack because it is critical historical scholarship that has shown us the grounding of the text in the life of the assembly and the role of intertextuality in its creation. "Saving" and revitalizing images of the past are at the heart of scripture and are the work of the gathered community. Lathrop finds patterns in biblical narratives that suggest revising our models of the "shape" of liturgy (Dix and Schmemann) and our understanding of baptism, preaching, Eucharist, and congregational prayer. He lifts up the visual imagery at the Dura Europos house church and elsewhere as a corrective to the supersessionist impulse in much Christian typology. He identifies the liturgical imperative as seriousness about the present rather than an effort to dwell in an imagined past. Saving Images is a call for a new, reconceived biblical-liturgical movement that takes seriously both biblical scholarship and the mystery at the heart of worship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781506406343

Book preview

Subjects

Preface

The Christian Bible and the Christian liturgy belong together. The collection of books called the Bible (and the somewhat varying lists of books contained in diverse denominational versions of that Bible) came into existence as a result of the corporate reading practices of Christian assemblies during the first centuries of the Christian movement. To understand the Bible as a whole—and sometimes to understand certain of its individual books—it is important to remember those reading practices and useful to think about that assembly location. And Christian worship, in all of its varieties, has been classically filled with biblical texts, biblical patterns of prayer, biblical rhetoric, and biblical images. To understand Christian liturgy—the public work of Christian worship—it is useful to think about those biblical uses and, especially, those images.

This book is a study of the relationship between Bible and liturgy. Its subject is those two complex realities—Bible and liturgy—seen side by side, each in its own integrity, but the two always also in their necessary interrelationships. Believing that verbal images and communal imagination matter to both biblical and liturgical meaning, I focus here on biblical images as they recur within various biblical writings and within Christian liturgical use.

This book is not, in the first place, a historical study. It does seek to listen to and make use of current historical-critical studies of the Old and New Testaments and of the early centuries of Christian worship, under the conviction that liturgical and biblical scholars do well to pay better attention to each other’s work than has sometimes been the case. Fresh historical studies can indeed give us startlingly new insights. One way or another, they can also save us from overstatement and error.

But this study primarily engages in liturgical-theological and exegetical reflections about the meaning of the scriptures in current Christian liturgical practice. As a theological study, it stands in continuity with a series of other studies I have written with Bible and liturgy in mind, most notably Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). As an exegetical study, it continues other ways I have sought to relate critical biblical studies to liturgical practice and meaning, most notably in The Four Gospels on Sunday: The New Testament and the Reform of Christian Worship (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). Those books, as well as other liturgical-theological studies I have written, thus stand occasionally in the footnotes here, in dialogue with and supplement to the argument as it is presented in the text. But this book can be read without reference to those other studies. It is intended to stand on its own.

As a liturgical-theological and exegetical study, of course, it has an author. I am making the argument here. I am quite aware that I am doing so as a Lutheran Christian and, indeed, doing so in this year commemorating the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation. Martin Luther shows up here more than once, as do Lutheran biblical hermeneutics generally.

Still, I do hope that this location of the author, freely claimed, provides an opportunity for conversation, not its end. I hope that anyone who wants to think about the importance of the Bible and the meaning of diverse Christian liturgical practices will feel welcome to these pages and to a dialogue with their proposals. This five hundredth anniversary year, after all, has included a renewed call for Christian unity amid reconciled diversity. The diverse voices of the biblical texts gathered toward a unifying purpose in worshiping assemblies may be a model for us all.

One of the ways my own proposals, here as elsewhere, has proceeded is by thinking about a variety of classics, basic texts and images that can be seen as symbolizing and carrying a lively tradition of communal meaning. Beside important biblical classics like the Song of the Sea in Exodus 15, Melchizedek in Genesis 14 and Hebrews 5–7, the Last Judgment in Matthew 25, or the Lamb opening the scroll in Revelation 5, you also will find descriptions of liturgy by Justin Martyr and Tertullian, hymns by Ephrem of Edessa, a painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder, and signal theological and exegetical texts by Luther, Austin Farrer, and John Dominic Crossan. As evidenced by the cover of this book, the lively tradition of the Lamb—the saved and saving image of the Lamb—may be taken as the paradigmatic classic for my own thinking about Bible and liturgy.

The writing of this book had two beginning points, separated by thirty years: a lecture I gave in January 1984 as I was becoming the president of the North American Academy of Liturgy (published as A Rebirth of Images: On the Use of the Bible in the Liturgy, Worship 58, no. 4 [1984]: 291–304) and the Aidan Kavanagh Lecture that I was invited to give at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music in October 2014 (published as Saving Images: New Testament Metaphors and the Purpose of Christian Worship, Worship 89, no. 4 [2015]: 290–309). I am still deeply grateful to the academy, to Martin Jean of the institute, and to Bernadette Gasslein of Worship for the hospitality they gave to these lectures. Some of the material now published here was also first developed in lectures at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley in 2012, at the 2012 Valparaiso Institute for Liturgical Studies, at the 2013 Societas Liturgica Congress in Würzburg, at the 2013 Leuven Encounter in Systematic Theology, at a 2014 Deutsche Liturgische Konferenz meeting in Hildesheim, at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik in 2015, and at Pacific Lutheran University in 2016. I thank Ruth Meyers, Lizette Larson Miller, Lorraine Brugh, Martin Stuflesser, Joris Geldhof, Klaus Raschzok, Allison Werner Hoenen, Runar Thorsteinsson, Pétur Pétursson, and Samuel Torvend, among many others, for these invitations and these events. I also want to express my gratitude to the students in the course on Bible and liturgy that I taught at the Virginia Theological Seminary in the spring of 2015 and to Mitzi Budde, librarian at the Virginia Theological Seminary, for her care for the splendid Bishop Payne Library, a collection that was repeatedly important for my work. Finally, David Lott, Martin Seltz, and Neil Elliott were very helpful to me as I thought about making these proposals into a book. And there would have been no writing without Gail Ramshaw.

The book is dedicated with love to five young people, the children of our children, whose imagination has been delightful to me and for whom I hope that the biblical images alive in the liturgy will yield a continuously new vision of God’s mercy and their world.

Gordon W. Lathrop

Candlemas 2017

Main Body

1

Introduction: Liturgy, Bible, Images

I come into the space where an assembly meets. I am going to church. Perhaps it is like this: I am greeted and welcomed at the door. I notice first, near the entrance, a great pool of water. Carved in stone around the pool are images of a tree and leaves, together with the words, Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, through the middle of the street of the city. Beyond the pool, benches and chairs for the slowly gathering assembly are set, giving the sense of the importance of this assembly and arranged so that the participants can see a strong but simple central table, a reading desk, chairs for leaders, and each other gathered around these central things. On the table, I see a great white cloth and, hanging in front of the table, a textile containing the woven image of a wounded lamb, standing. A similar textile hanging on the reading desk bears yet another image of a tree. Painted in bright colors on the walls of the room are images that are drawn from stories: toward the front of the room, Abraham and Sarah welcoming the three visitors to table and Melchizedek holding out bread and wine, flanking a central flowering cross from which it appears that water flows and branches grow; on the side walls, as if behind and supporting the assembly, several figures standing side by side in the long, intertwined branches growing from that cross, identified by the names painted beneath them—Moses and Miriam, Deborah and David, Peter and Paul, John the Baptist, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Andrew and John, Lydia and Phoebe, Andronicus and Junia, and then also Perpetua, Lucy, Irenaeus, Augustine, Julian of Norwich, Martin Luther, and many more, until Martin Luther King Jr. and Oscar Romero of our own time; and near the pool of water, three images—the water of the sea parting and the people passing to freedom, Noah on the ark welcoming the dove with an olive branch in its beak, and, centrally, John baptizing Jesus, a hand reaching from the opened heavens and the dove descending. I join the assembly, we start to sing, and so the liturgy begins. As it does so, a procession of the leaders enters, led by a crucifix, burning candles, and a great book carried high. On the cover of the book I see the images of a lion, a human being, an ox and an eagle, surrounding a great cross. After further singing and an opening prayer, a reader arises and begins to read from the book. . . .

Or perhaps it is not like that. Perhaps that is simply a dream. More likely, when I come into an assembly space, especially if the building is a recent one of a Western Christian church, the walls will not be so painted with images and the pool, the table, the reading desk and the book will not be so marked. Or, if there are images, perhaps in the stained-glass windows, they will be fewer in number. Perhaps the water or the table will be less obvious. But, one way or another, an assembly and the book will be there. The book will be read, and language and images from its narratives and its poetry will ordinarily fill the speech and song and prayers of this gathering, if not the walls of the gathering space. The book, of course, is the Bible.

The Bible and the liturgy belong together. That is, the many different books that Christians bind together and call, as a single volume, the Holy Bible have an important, even essential, mutual relationship with the many different public and communal ritual practices that diverse Christian groups regard as their liturgy. One needs to consider the phenomena Bible and liturgy side by side.

The Bible in the Liturgy, the Liturgy in the Bible

This important relationship may be seen, first of all, in the simple fact that for the vast majority of people who regard themselves as Christian a primary encounter with the actual text of the Bible comes when they go to church, comes in one of those public rituals. This was certainly true in the long history of Christianity, when Bibles or even parts of the Bible were expensive and mostly kept and owned as communal books. But it remains true today, in an age of privately owned Bibles and easily accessible electronic texts. Even now, many a privately owned Bible may be gathering dust, many a website may be unconsulted, in the lives of those who nonetheless come together in regular meetings where the reading of biblical texts makes up one of the central ritual moments and where the Bible—or a lectionary book filled with biblical texts—may itself be an important ritual object, carried in procession or set open on a reading desk or altar, as a focused symbol of what is to happen here in assembly.

In the present study we will want to consider this central practice of reading and we will want to understand the ways that the material book itself has come to have ritual function and value. But once we begin to consider those presences of the Bible in Christian liturgy, dozens more call for our attention. The Bible not only provides the texts that are read as lessons in almost all Christian churches.[1] It also serves as the basis of preaching in those churches, interpretation of the biblical texts that are read being one major shared Christian understanding of what preaching should be. And it serves as the basis of praying. Christian communal prayer takes its very shape, its pattern of thanksgiving and beseeching, from biblical models.[2] More: the biblical Psalms and yet other poems and canticles found throughout the scriptures provide words for much of what the congregations sing. Indeed, the Psalms are taken to be the first Christian hymn book, the prototype for the creation of hymnody that has continued through the ages in almost all the Christian churches. In those hymns, the Bible has most frequently been the source of the imagery and even of the very words that are sung. Those same biblical images and sometimes those biblical words have also been painted or made into mosaics on the walls and ceilings of the spaces in church buildings intended for worship. Or they have been there, made small, painted or carved or embroidered or printed, on the books, fonts, icons, vessels, furniture, and textiles employed in Christian liturgy. Then the central practices of the sacraments—the water-bathing and oil-anointing that joins an individual to the body of this assembly; the announced word of forgiveness that recalls that bath; the thanksgiving meal that feeds this same assembly from the death and resurrection of Christ—these practices, too, which look like biblical images enacted, are inspired and enlivened by biblical texts and shared with the ancient communities of which we read in the New Testament. There certainly are aniconic or even anti-iconic traditions in Christianity, Christian groups that intentionally meet in rooms without images, but even among these groups the verbal images of the scriptures fill hymns and preaching and the enacted images of the sacraments or ordinances make up much of the worship practice.

One cannot consider the history of Christian worship nor its current actual diversities without considering the ways the Bible is used in assemblies for worship. Christian worship is thoroughly engaged with biblical texts and biblical images.[3] One important thing to note: this biblical engagement occurs in all sorts of Christian liturgies. The engagement itself is an ecumenical reality, even when Christians may otherwise disagree on the content of worship, even when the actual list of the books contained in the version of the Bible each community uses mutually differs, and even when the interpretive principles being used are not the same. The engagement with the Bible remains. Why this is so and with what authority and purpose these biblical texts and images are present in the Christian assembly—these are questions we will need to consider in this study.

But there is another set of questions as well. Beside the Bible being in the liturgy, the liturgy is also in the Bible. That is, large parts of the Bible seem to have been created with a worshiping assembly in mind, indeed, with a worshiping assembly as the intended location for the use of that text. Parts of the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch or the Torah—perhaps, for example, large parts of Deuteronomy—were most likely created to be read aloud, as the image of the reading of the book by Ezra and the scribes (Neh 8:1–12; cf. Ezra 7:6) seems to propose. It is certainly interesting that the book of the law that occasions the reform of Josiah (2 Kings 22–23) is found in the temple (22:8) and then read aloud to all the people, both small and great gathered in that same house of the Lord (23:2), that same place of worship. More: the Psalms are clearly intended for public, communal use, even when their speaker is a single voice. The Psalms seem to have existed as a communally available range of thanksgivings and laments, a communally held library of songs to be drawn on as the occasion required. Other parts of the Hebrew scriptures, as well, probably had cultic origin: for example, the Song of the Sea (Exod 15:1–18), presented in the text of Exodus as sung both by Moses and the Israelites (15:1) and by the prophet Miriam (15:20–21) with her dancing companions, can be understood as an old cultic song, predating the editing of the text of Exodus, which uses patterns drawn from ancient Near Eastern creation mythology to praise the Lord for the events of the exodus, culminating with the making of the people—the very people who are singing the song—to be the sanctuary of the Lord.[4] The confession made in Deuteronomy 26:5–9 may be an ancient liturgical text, perhaps even one that provided an early outline for some of the material that eventually became the first books in the Bible.[5] And at least some of the prophets exercised their prophetic gifts within the cult of Israel, an idea for which the story of the call of Isaiah provides one image (Isa 6:1–13).

The New Testament also presents us with a variety of ways in which the assembly worship of ancient Christians provided the occasion for the production of texts that came to make up part of the biblical canon. A whole series of New Testament songs have been explored by some scholars—the kenosis hymn in Philippians (2:6–11); the songs of Mary, Zechariah, and Simeon in Luke (1:46–55; 1:68–79; 2:29–32); the song of the Word in John (1:1–18); the song of the cosmic Christ in Colossians (1:15–20); the mystery of our religion and the sure saying in the Timothy letters (1 Tim 3:16 and 2 Tim 2:11–13); the many songs of Revelation (e.g., 5:12; 22:7); and perhaps more—with the suggestion that at least some of these songs or parts of them may have had actual communal use before their employment in writings by Paul or the evangelists or the deutero-Pauline writers or the author of the Apocalypse.[6] More certainly: the Letters of Paul are clearly written to be read in assembly and frequently begin and conclude with prayers or ritual greetings, as in the holy kiss of 2 Corinthians 13:12. Some scholars have suggested that the shape of a practice of baptism may hover behind the outline of 1 Peter. In any case, as I will argue further below, the Gospels, the Letter to the Hebrews, and the Revelation to John all envision assemblies—primitive Christian churches—as the communities to which they are addressed and for which they have critical proposals.[7] All of these assertions can be made without fear that the interpretation is overreaching, stepping into the misuse of panliturgism, as some scholars have called the tendency to find too much liturgy (or too much anachronistically conceived liturgy)[8] in New Testament sources.

But also here questions arise with which the present study will need to deal. What does it matter for us that some of the material of the Bible was originally itself material used in communal worship? And what exactly is the relationship between books or parts of books originally intended for ancient Israelite cult or originally intended for first- or second-century Christian assemblies and our own current assemblies?

The Canon as Liturgical Event

There is another, essential way that the Bible and the assembly practice of Christian communities are related. The book itself—that is, the collection of books we call the Bible, the contents of which we identify as the canon or rule of scripture—is at root a liturgical book. Accustomed as we are to the individual ownership of books, we do not readily think of the fact that in the ancient world books were quite expensive and much rarer than is the case today. In ancient Christian communities, it is very likely that books that were regarded as essential to Christian faith belonged primarily to the community itself, only infrequently to individuals. The community came to encounter and know these books when it met, when it assembled. Even more, accustomed as we are to the books that make up the Bible being bound together in one volume, we do not readily remember that they were actually in origin separate books. The English title Bible comes from the Greek, τὰ βιβλία, the books, plural. That these books are bound together is the result of a long process, and that process, for Christians, had its primary home in liturgy.

That is, the list of books that make up the Bible, at its deepest level, is a list of the books that are read with authority in the Christian assembly. We have a Bible, primarily, because we thereby have, in one volume, the books that are used in liturgy. One of the earliest lists of the accepted books of what became the New Testament says this directly. The so-called Muratorian Fragment, which most likely dates from the late second century,[9] gives a list nearly identical to the list we have today.[10] Though the beginning of this fragment is lost, its purpose is made clear at the end in its discussion of two debated books (the Apocalypse of Peter and the Shepherd of Hermas): these books are not to be read in church, legi in ecclesia nolunt.[11] Subsequent fourth-century texts—the canons of the Synod of Laodicea in 364, the canons of the Council of Carthage in 397, and the Catechetical Lectures of Cyril of Jerusalem (4.36), for example[12]—make clear that the purpose of such lists is indeed to record what books have been accepted for reading in assembly. Thus, in the late nineteenth century, Theodor Zahn rightly said, What was later named ‘canonical,’ was originally called ‘read in corporate worship.’[13]

But we need to be careful here. First, decisions about what books should be read in assembly as scripture were only noted after the fact in councils and synods or by bishops and theologians. The process itself was longer, more communal, more organic. The councils and theologians are reporting on the results of that process, reporting on what books were received in the catholic churches. And, second, what was finally called the canon of scripture was not simply a list. It was a collection of collections, and it was itself a figure or image of the faith it was intended to evoke and serve.

We should say more about both points. To do so, a brief historical account of the formation process is in order. Then we need to consider a liturgical-theological account of the canon as image or shape. First, the history.

At the outset, the meetings of Christians were most likely meal meetings, supper clubs.[14] If the reading of texts occurred in these meetings, it would have taken place—on analogy to the way literary works were used at Hellenistic banquets generally—in the symposium part of the meeting, the symposion, the general sharing of wine, ideas, and songs that followed the meal itself, the deipnon.[15] Furthermore, at least from the evidence of Paul and of the Gospels, it is clear that some people in the earliest assemblies of Christians did care a great deal about the scriptures, by which they meant the whole range of ancient books that came to make up what we would call the Old Testament. The Letters of Paul and the four earliest books we call Gospels all use direct quotations from these scriptures and, even more, work creatively and intensely with intertextual references that depend on these same books.[16] It is not at all clear, however, that the communities that read Paul and the Gospels had copies of full scrolls of the Hebrew scriptures or of the Hebrew scriptures translated into Greek, the so-called Septuagint. What is more likely is that they had excerpts from these books, collections of extracts or testimonia,[17] perhaps committed to memory, perhaps written in the manner of notebooks. If the scriptures were publicly read in Christian assemblies, and not only recited or sung from memory,[18] it may well be that they were most commonly read from such a collection or notebook, at least at first. The first explicit mention of such a collection of extracts is found in a fragment of the writing of Melito of Sardis of the mid-second century, preserved in the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius (4.26.13–14), where Melito gives us the first attested Christian list of the books of the Old Testament and says explicitly that he went looking for them so that he could make extracts (ἐκλογάς) from them into six books,[19] books that he may well have made for another church or for a brother bishop.[20] But evidence of collected scripture excerpts certainly is to be found in the New Testament itself. For example, even though the Lukan image of a synagogue service (Luke 4:14–30) seems to include Jesus reading from a scroll of Isaiah, as would have doubtless been the case in a first-century Galilean synagogue, the use of scripture in the sermon that follows (scripture from 1 and 2 Kings as well as Isaiah) could very well reflect Luke’s own knowledge of a testimony collection. There are many other hints of such possible collections to be found in the New Testament books.[21]

What we know more surely, however, is that the Letters of Paul were indeed read in Christian assemblies, also most likely in the symposion. First Thessalonians 5:27 already has Paul requiring this and surrounding his urging of the reading of the letter with communal ritual acts: communal prayer (5:25), greetings and the kiss of peace (5:26), and a formal blessing (5:28). Those same ritual acts recur at the end of the Corinthian correspondence (1 Cor 16:19–24; 2 Cor 13:12–13), and while the direction to read the letters is missing there, it may certainly be assumed: it is the letter that carried the greetings and enjoins the kiss. The Letter to the Romans seems to bear within itself the expectation that it would be read in the several house churches in that city (Rom 16:1–16). Then all of the letters, with their communal address and their framing in patterns of thanksgiving and beseeching, can be seen as intended for assembly reading. Even Philemon, seemingly addressed primarily to an individual, was sent