The Bible in Worship: Proclamation, Encounter and Response

By Victoria Raymer

Biblical proclamation is central to Christian worship. The Bible witnesses to the foundational experiences of the Church. Its proclamation invites worshippers into encounter with Christ, the living Word. "The Bible in Worship" seeks to make visible how the Bible is encountered in the worship of mainstream Western churches.

Focusing in turn on the Roman Catholic, Reformed and Anglican traditions, Victoria Raymer offers a detailed and lively consideration of the contemporary practices of proclamation in each, considers their respective patterns of reading the Bible as part of public worship, and reflects on the place the Bible takes in daily prayer. Raymer also draws our attention towards the role the psalms play in contemporary formal liturgy, and offers a chapter on how the Bible is weaved into less formal forms of worship, including contemporary sung worship.

Offering a truly holistic study of the scripture in worship, the book will resource readers to reflect on how proclamation invites response in understanding and resolve, and to consider how it might do so more effectively.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Oct 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9780334056492

Book preview

Preface

I am immensely grateful to people who have read portions of this book at various stages in its development, in the Cambridge Theological Federation to Philip Sheldrake, Anne Francis, Susan Durber, Alison Gray and Ally Barrett, in Cambridge University to Graham Davies and Niki Wilkes, among friends farther afield to Ann Callender, Mary Stewart and Ken Shrimpton. For editorial assistance I am also grateful to Susanne Jennings, who shared perplexities about when to capitalize Church, Word and numerous other chameleon terms required in this book. This book is dedicated to Andrew Mein, whose hard-to-answer question prompted it as a response.

Introduction

Clouded by incense and escorted by candles, thumped by preachers and thumbed by congregants, Bibles get a lot of attention in worship as physical volumes. As custodians of the word of God they are treated as objects that ‘create a real physical bond between people and God’.¹ That bond is maintained and renewed as the word is encountered in reading, in preaching, in singing and prayer. Embodied and vulnerable, the word judges. The word pleads. The word gives life. The word is entrusted to human communities for proclamation to the world. This book is concerned with the Bible in worship, with proclamation, interpretation and response as embodied social and ecclesial acts as well as cognitive and spiritual engagement.

Finite acts of human proclamation cannot convey the word without remainder. In the Bible is access to more wisdom and hope than human beings can control, indeed individually conceive. The Church is always at risk of speaking more than it listens. Yet it proclaims the word and trusts in the Holy Spirit to hear Christ speaking into its current situation. Communities of Christians enact proclamation in divers ways evolved to prompt expectation, influence interpretation and facilitate encounter and response, in worship and in the world.

Bible proclamation is generally investigated piecemeal by specialists in the areas of exegesis, preaching, liturgy and music, or in relation to the worship practices of single Christian traditions. When the material is drawn together, interdenominational and interdisciplinary patterns appear and distinctive intra-traditional patterns become easier to see. There is much ecumenical convergence of language and practice. Yet diversity perdures. Differences of practice represent different insights to contribute to shared ecumenical understanding.

Chapters 1−4 explore contemporary acts of proclamation. Analysis based on rites and liturgical commentaries presents patterns of practice and interpretation in three traditions – Roman Catholic, Reformed and Anglican. Enhancements to proclamation used across traditions in contemporary worship are then considered – club, café, sung worship, charismatic prayer and other social means of promoting attentiveness and openness to transformation, with renewed expectation of a graced experience of response. A further chapter outlines Scripture use in contemporary Roman Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran liturgical Daily Prayer.

Liturgiology is a comparative discipline.² Comparing similar patterns of practice makes divergences apparent. Christians share much theological language about proclamation at a level of generalities. Attention to actual practice and practical commentaries reveals significant differences in understanding. Comparing understandings of proclamation from the context of ceremonial, from what churches do habitually and how they explain what they are doing, makes it easier to notice differences that are less obvious in abstract theological writing.

Ceremonial practices frame a congregation’s proclamation with formal and informal actions. Ceremonies are meant to draw attention to the proclamation of the word, to create the context, not simply for the reception of information but for events of encounter. They are meant to shape the expectations with which a Christian assembly actually listens and responds. As the Reformed scholar Brian Gerrish expresses it, ‘The word is not simply information about God; it is the instrument through which union with Christ is effected and his grace is imparted.’³ From an Anglican perspective, Rowan Williams observes that practices of proclamation are more than ‘a matter of the exchange of ideas or the uttering of exhortations’. Rather, ‘the human body is receiving impressions with all its senses whose sole purpose is the restoration of the entire human being, spirit and body, in right relationship with God and the world.’ He identifies ‘a deep and powerful current in Christian Scripture which is about new creation, restored relationship . . . an ontological change of location and identity’, and maintains that in worship there is a process involving action as well as speech that enables this change.⁴

Thinking about worship needs to consider not only what worship practices are intended to achieve in informing and forming people but also what information and formation people are actually receiving. This book draws liturgical practices of proclamation together to offer a framework for asking the questions. Scholars of worship are in the process of adapting tools from social science to pursue the investigation of congregational reception much further. Material is offered here as a starting place of systematic information and a stimulus to questions.

Chapters 5−8 consider approaches to choosing what portions of Scripture are read and preached about on Sundays. It offers detailed critical analysis of the two Lectionaries most commonly used in contemporary Western churches. Chapter 9 explores approaches to the psalms.

The mid-twentieth-century ecumenical agreement on a widely shared plan of Bible reading at Sunday services has been a near-miraculous achievement. Nevertheless, the Lectionary for Mass, mandated by the Second Vatican Council, and its Protestant derivative, the Revised Common Lectionary, are used by people with widely differing interpretative assumptions. These assumptions affect how texts are proclaimed, heard, preached and prayed. Christological principles and formulations of the Second Vatican Council about the place of Bible reading in the Eucharist influenced the juxtapositions of texts and the exclusion of important parts of the Bible from the reading schemes of both of these two Lectionaries and, to a degree therefore, from the reading and preaching of Western churches. The underlying Christological foundations of the Lectionary for Mass, in particular, are not obvious to many users of forms of the Revised Common Lectionary.

Much was written about what have usefully been referred to as the Synoptic Lectionaries in the years between 1970 and 1997, when so many Western churches were adopting them. Their selections are now largely taken for granted. Further thought about what passages are being read is worthwhile. What important scriptural material is absent? What canonical texts have had their implications restricted by strongly reinforced seasonal associations or by severely shortened readings? How might a magnificent traditional yet innovative ecumenically shared plan be supplemented today to engage further with the Bible? Clergy and all who lead worship or interpret Scripture may be prompted to draw from the disciplines of hermeneutics, homiletics and liturgics to reconsider these questions.

The Psalter resources Christian worship with more versatility than other books of the Bible. Phrases from psalms provide language for prayers, chants and responses, words of God to God. The Psalter can also be read like other books, as words from God, a book traditionally read devotionally as King David’s words that also voice words of Christ. Interactively with God, liturgical recitation of psalms forms worshippers in an ongoing conversation that enables anger, sorrow and disappointment along with joy, thankfulness and praise to be acknowledged, expressed and performed as words from, to and with God.

Eucharistic preaching of psalms is complicated by their ambiguous Lectionary role as responses to readings that to many people are also themselves readings. Psalms can be chosen selectively as hymns. They can also be studied and preached on canonically as readings. Psalmists’ words of lament and imprecation are powerful yet problematic both in preaching and in liturgical psalmody. Debates about the liturgical importance of the Psalter engaged with canonically are still current. Practices of psalm translation raise contemporary issues of inclusivity. Less obvious but equally important are questions of underlying text choice. Should translations be based on ancient Hebrew documents interpreted to reflect ‘original’ meaning? Or should translators take account of ancient Christian versions, particularly in Greek and Latin, texts that resourced the Catholic Hildegarde, Anglican Coverdale and Lutheran Bach and are woven into the Western heritage of chant, anthem and oratorio?

Worship as Context for Proclamation

In worship Christians read the Bible not only to be informed but to be formed. The word ‘proclamation’ is used here, as often by commentators on worship, to refer not simply to kerygma, in the sense of the good news preached as new message, but to denote speaking, hearing and internalizing the good news of God ‘anew’ as part of a process of growing in engagement with the Gospel. This proclamation involves ‘communication’, in its fullest sense of a two-way process. It is used for the Church’s dialogic acts of speaking, reading, repeating, remembering, singing, praying, sharing and acting by which the participation in Christ of communities and individual worshippers is progressively deepened. In corporate proclamation of the word, Christians assist each other in occasioning encounter with Christ and open themselves to being formed by him.⁵ ‘Proclamation’ is used in this liturgical sense, to refer to formative acts of speech and response taken together, the word ‘bodied forth’.

Proclamation includes the actions of another party. As J. J. Von Allmen exclaimed, referring to the proclamation of the Word (as Christ the living Word), ‘It implies a divine miracle.’⁶ With divine assistance the biblical account of creation and redemption is enlarged as the good news is actualized in people’s lives and their response becomes part of what the scriptural narratives are about.

Liturgical proclamation of Christ guides believers in seeing and responding to the world in, through and with Christ. Christians understand the event of encounter with Christ as mediated by the Holy Spirit. Expectations of the Spirit’s work with the word include, with varying emphases, guiding the Church in its teaching, guiding preachers in interpretation and guiding worshippers in understanding and responding accord­ingly in the world.

Proclamation in a Christian community extends to the ‘liturgy after the liturgy’, worship followed through into engagement with the world.⁷ It involves the skills, the ‘habitus’ of discipleship and mission that the community shares, the ways members are enabled to respond in faithful living, wise observation and generous service.⁸ An emphasis in twentieth-century sacramental theology has been on the outworking of the sacraments to expand human sympathy and build human solidarity, to form believers in responses of active compassion.⁹ This approach is equally relevant to the Church’s expectations of liturgical proclamation – can truly dialogic proclamation glorify God and offer God’s grace without enlarging human hearts?

Commentators offer various explanations for the importance of hearing the word corporately. Writing as a Roman Catholic, Kevin W. Irwin emphasizes how proclamation in worship contributed to canonical recognition of the New Testament texts and how proclamation brings the word alive again in the context of a contemporary Christian assembly: ‘It is a rehearsed yet ever new event of salvation.’¹⁰ Using a concept important in the liturgical teaching of the Second Vatican Council, Irwin writes of a ‘dialogic’ encounter of repeated challenge and response that deepens people’s relationship with God.¹¹ Writing from an Anglican context of educational research, Andrew Village stresses the importance of community reading to balance individual interpretation: ‘Individuals who resist hearing or responding to community mores and interpretative wisdom may ultimately miss the authentic voice of God.’¹² Both these discussions express generic ideals for community proclamation.

Important also are each congregation’s particularities.¹³ Hearing the word in worship involves a challenge to act in accord with it, a selective response limited by what in the proclamation is actually taken to heart. In worship the receptivity of the individual and the receptivity of the community form one another reciprocally. Understanding of what is heard may be influenced by how one thinks other people are hearing and what one learns about their reactions and values. Preachers take account of what they assume are hearers’ attitudes. Imaginations are stretched (or shrunk) and formed by corporate assumptions and plausibility structures – expectations based on communities’ experiences of grace. They are informed by a community’s store of examples, sanctions and strategies for collective and individual response.¹⁴ The community’s context, the challenges it faces, the responses it has in repertory, the visions it sees, the risks it takes, the sacrifices and the compromises it makes, as well as the approaches it uses in its Bible study groups and in training its clergy, shape the interpretation of Scripture it proclaims at worship. A text that cries out against oppression can be resisted in hopeless, uncaring resignation in a context where nobody bothers with anything but the church fabric. A simple, ‘trite’ text or one with promises ‘too good to be true’ can take on hopeful new meaning uttered in the presence of a Desmond Tutu or a Pope Francis. Pioneering congregations, whether of elderly nuns or trendy young adults, may become innovators in community service where a traditional hermeneutic is received with expectant faith in answers to prayer based on shared experience of faithful action.¹⁵

Objectives and Approach

How the Church does its ministry of the word in worship is a question with infinite answers. The composite pictures emerging here will not fit anyone’s actual experience. Rather they seek to be recognizable characterizations. What this book attempts to do is to make visible present patterns of practice and understanding as a starting place for further observation, comparison and conversation. Offered are not the results of detailed and definitive research on particular topics but collected information that may make it possible to see big pictures and identify fresh questions. The absence of material from Orthodox and Pentecostal traditions is due to lack of capacity to do these traditions justice here.

Because there is no current detailed work on the general topic of the proclamation of the Bible, much of this book is descriptive. In order to infer what people believe from what they do, some significant minutiae have to be noted. Nuances of expression are important. Therefore voices from the separate traditions are brought into the conversation with substantial direct quotation.

Readers are offered this material for their own selective use. Some may value comparing the differing approaches of three traditions to the ministry of the word outlined in Chapters 1−3, reading swiftly and skimming the quotations that document the argument and expose variations in perspective for further investigation. Some readers, for instance Anglicans in search of ceremonial clarification, may want to consider details of Roman Catholic practice outlined in Chapter 1, reading the quoted liturgical directions and considering the Anglican modifications discussed in Chapter 3. Others may be interested in Reformed awareness of the essential role of the Holy Spirit in hearing and interpreting the word. Readers concerned with alternative worship may find that Chapter 4’s consideration of scriptural formation offers new perspectives. Readers mainly interested in preaching may focus on Chapters 7 and 8 to gain an overview of the Lectionaries from which they preach or are preached to. Those who value liturgical Daily Prayer may find aspects of the discussion of psalmody helpful.

To facilitate skimming and reference use, topics within chapters are identified in headings. Further information about technical terminology is provided in the Glossary. In the book as a whole there is an overarching argument for a Trinitarian hermeneutic to be reflected in experience of the word in worship, but it is not necessary to follow it to make use of much of the information collected here for convenient reference.

Sources

Sources for discussion of practice are rites and rubrics, liturgical commentaries, limited observation, student reports and responses of colleagues from different traditions represented in the Cambridge Theological Federation. I have used liturgical commentaries from the three representative traditions as primary texts, looking for clues about perspectives, assumptions, concerns and attitudes. Sometimes these are less hidden in advice to worshippers for practical use than they may be in considered theological statements. Engaging with commentaries makes for a somewhat uneven result: Roman Catholic sources are relatively uniform and prescriptive. They include the liturgical texts to be used (the ‘rites’), directions for ritual practice (the ‘ceremonial’) and magisterially promulgated interpretation, subtly reinterpreted by various commentators. Worship in the Reformed tradition is a matter of systematic doctrinal and biblical understanding and customary – but not mandatory – practice open to creative interpretation and performance. Reformed written sources include denominational directories and collections of specimen prayers. There are also commentaries that represent authors’ individual opinions and impressions of common practice. Anglican sources include church-authorized texts and directions for ceremonial as well as guides and commentaries, sources reflecting a wide divergence of practice and interpretation.

Ecumenism and Ecclesiology

Terminology is not straightforward. A number of churches are self-identified as Reformed. Where other traditions such as Anglican, Lutheran and Methodist might also be included in a statement, I have used the broader term ‘Protestant’. More difficult has been naming Catholics. Anglicans more explicitly than other Protestants identify their tradition as also Catholic and describe some of its adherents as Catholic or Anglo-Catholic because they favour Catholic elements in the Anglican inheritance. As an Anglican I sometimes have to use the term Roman Catholic to distinguish the church in Communion with Rome from other Catholic Christian bodies. Where this distinction seems unnecessary I have simply used ‘Catholic’ for Roman Catholic. I have used ‘church’ for ecclesial bodies and Church for formal names and for the universal Church understood more abstractly, compromising where possible with Roman Catholic resistance to understanding of ‘church’ in the sense of denomination.

Making the proclamation of the word in three traditions more visible for analysis and exposition may be as ecumenically beneficial by achieving more clarity about differences in understanding as by pointing to similarities of practice. In some cases growing similarities of practice may promote an insufficiently premeditated convergence. On the other hand, initial convergence of practice may lead to new convergence of understanding.

I hope that inevitable instances of an outsider’s misunderstanding of other traditions will at least be useful in highlighting possibilities for misinterpretation among newcomers and visitors and those enthusiastic members of many congregations whose pre-understanding is shaped by a different tradition.

Anglican sources for this book include, to a much greater degree than sources for the other traditions, my own experience, and I am able to offer a more detailed and critical account of the practice of my own tradition in the English and North American contexts with which I am familiar. I have ventured some observations and suggestions in relation to this tradition, taking the liberties of a fond and hopeful insider.

Notes

1 On material culture, see e.g. Nathan D. Mitchell, Meeting Mystery, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2006, p. 259, and Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 155–81.

2 As stated in Robert Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: The Origins of the Divine Office and its Meaning for Today, 2nd edn, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993, p. xii.

3 B. A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1993, p. 76.

4 Rowan Williams, ‘Introduction: Common Worship, Common Life: Defining Liturgy for Today’, in Nicholas Papadopulos (ed.), God’s Transforming Work, London: SPCK, 2011, pp. 1–13, 6–7.

5 See e.g. Taft, Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, pp. 336–9; Kevin W. Irwin, Context and Text: Method in Liturgical Theology, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994, pp. 88, 116–19. For Catholic preachers, William J. Hill uses kerygma to mean ‘the New Testament as read in the Church’, the Church’s normative verbal expression of the gospel. William J. Hill, ‘Toward a Theology of Preaching’, in Nadine Foley (ed.), Preaching and the Non-Ordained: An Interdisciplinary Study, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1983, pp. 91–109, 92.

6 Quoted by Leanne Van Dyk, ‘Proclamation’, in Leanne Van Dyk (ed.), A More Profound Alleluia: Theology and Worship in Harmony, Grand Rapids, IL: Eerdmans, 2005, pp. 55–82, 72.

7 For use of this term, see e.g. Ion Bria, The Liturgy after the Liturgy, Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1996.

8 For discussion in relation to a congregation of this concept as developed by Pierre Bourdieu, see Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Places of Redemption, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 41–52.

9 For a useful summary of this dimension of sacramental theology in the Catholic tradition, see e.g. Peter J. Casarella, ‘Catholic Sacramental Theology in the Twentieth Century’, in Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering (eds), Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 417–32.

10 Irwin, Context and Text, p. 89.

11 Irwin, Context and Text, pp. 88–9.

12 Andrew Village, The Bible and Lay People: An Empirical Approach to Ordinary Hermeneutics, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, p. 140.

13 See e.g. Leonora Tubbs Tisdale, Preaching as Local Theology and Folk Art, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1997, pp. 15–16 for observations about research on the ‘Idiom’ of particular congregations, referring particularly to the work of James Hopewell. The discussion is at a level of general attitudes of particular congregations, not applied to how Scripture is heard. Approaches of various homileticians are surveyed.

14 See Nathan D. Mitchell, ‘Ritual as Reading’, in Joanne M. Pierce and Michael Downey (eds), Source and Summit: Commemorating Josef A. Jungmann, S.J., Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999, pp. 161–81, 165, drawing on George Steiner’s Real Presences. On ‘The Significance of a Story-rich Life’, see also Ann Morisy, Journeying Out: A New Approach to Christian Mission, London: Continuum, 2004, pp. 67–93.

15 For descriptions of substantial innovative projects of congregations with traditional-hermeneutic preaching and ‘free’ liturgy, see Melanie C. Ross, Evangelical versus Liturgical? Defying a Dichotomy, Grand Rapids, IL: Eerdmans, 2014. I witnessed a small community of nuns, whose exegesis was unacademic, conceive and build England’s first children’s hospice (1980–2).

1

Proclamation of the Bible in the Worship of the Roman Catholic Church

The Word Proclaimed and Televised

The funeral Mass for Senator Edward Kennedy took place on 29 August 2009, at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Boston, Massachusetts. The Liturgy of the Word began with three readings from the Bible and a responsorial Psalm. Young family members successively walked up from the congregation to the single ambo in the sanctuary to read the first reading, lead the responsorial Psalm, Psalm 72, and read the second reading. They read from folded pieces of paper which they carried with them. The readings were announced by book (Wisdom, Romans), but not chapter and verse, and were concluded with, ‘The Word of the Lord’, to which the congregation responded, ‘Thanks be to God.’ The gospel book was then brought formally (but without candles or incense) from the altar to the ambo by a priest, a friend of the Kennedys, who was not presiding. Placing the book on the lectern of the ambo, he greeted the congregation: ‘Friends, the Lord be with you.’ He announced the Gospel, ‘A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew’, proclaimed the Gospel, concluding with ‘The Gospel of the Lord’, and lowered his head to kiss the text, which continued to rest on the lectern. The priest remained at the lectern to preach. The homily was followed by the Nicene Creed. To offer the Prayer of the Faithful, six or seven young family members gathered at the ambo and read sentences from Kennedy’s speeches fashioned into intercessions.

In this Mass the Liturgy of the Word was audible and unhurried; in the televised service it took up substantial time. It gave authority to lay Catholics to share in ministering the word. Both for members of the public watching with political or historical interest and for worshippers, the Liturgy of the Word served to rehearse Kennedy’s ‘story’ and place it in relation to the larger Christian story. The meaning and purpose of existence, understood in terms of creation and redemption by God in Jesus Christ, was proclaimed in the Mass both by the Liturgy of the Word and by the Liturgy of the Eucharist. In both there was an expectation of Christ’s presence with his people. The preaching was not expository in an academic sense. It drew on the Bible readings and, like the tributes given at the end of the service by Kennedy’s sons and President Barak Obama, was filled with biblical resonances, especially in relation to justice for the poor, as lived out in Kennedy’s political career.

On 18 September 2010, in Birmingham, England, another Massachusetts voice proclaimed the Gospel in a ceremonially similar televised ritual at the Mass for the beatification of John Henry Newman by Pope Benedict XVI. Deacon Jack Sullivan, beneficiary of Newman’s first Church-authenticated miracle, read the Gospel, from the lectern where lessons from the Old Testament and Epistle had been read by lay people. Deacon Sullivan, accompanied by candle-bearers and a thurifer, brought the gospel book in a procession from the altar, placed it on the lectern and censed it. At the end of the reading he took the gospel book to the Pope (who was presiding) to kiss and then bore it away, off camera, after the Pope had held it up and made the sign of the cross, blessing the people with it. After the Pope’s homily, the congregation were bidden, having listened to the word read and preached, to reflect on ‘the word of God spoken today’. The huge outdoor crowd then kept about two minutes’ silence.¹

The Context of Catholic Tradition

Catholic tradition shares ancient and ongoing Christian understanding of the Bible as primarily oral performance, spoken, chanted, preached, recited and, secondarily, written down as an aide-memoire.² Illuminated Bibles and Gospels, now treasured in libraries, were produced for liturgical proclamation.³ Proclamation of Scripture as the ‘normative witness of Christian faith’ has always been part of the ‘solemn celebration of the faith of the Catholic Church’.⁴ In addition to hearing the word at Mass, in celebrating the Liturgy of the Hours, clergy, religious and some lay Catholics engage daily in the systematic liturgical reading of Scripture. Preaching has been and remains an important element in Catholic worship.

Though audible reading of Bible passages forms an important part of today’s worship and an ecumenically shared Christian scholarly tradition is consulted in biblical interpretation, for Roman Catholics Scripture is ‘held’ by the Church. The Bible’s authority derives from its witness in conjunction with the Church’s tradition and teaching.

Particularly since the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), Catholics have been encouraged to study the Bible.⁵ But the Catholic Church expects them to be formed by Scripture as it enters their consciousness, not primarily through study of the Bible as a book, in its canonical order, or through Bible classes or systematic expository preaching, but through participation in the liturgy.⁶ A Bible in the sense of a single bound volume may not be visible in church at all. Instead, readings are likely to be proclaimed from a lectionary book containing the texts to be read from the Old Testament, Acts, Epistles and Revelation and from a separate gospel book.⁷ Just after Vatican II, Dutch Catholics took to reading directly from Bibles at the Eucharist. The practice did not last.⁸ If people follow printed readings, the text is likely to appear in missal books sometimes placed throughout the pews, with readings printed as extracts, or in ‘missalettes’ with the day’s readings on sheets of paper.⁹ In these formats, people see the words of the actual reading but not their canonical context. The extracts are generally identified in print but oral citation giving chapter and verse is not customary. Readings are short and often ‘filleted’, edited down to focus on particular elements in a passage or to reduce its length better to communicate the Church’s proclamation at a particular liturgy. Preaching at Sunday Mass is often – not always – a brief homily linking word to sacrament.

Throughout worship, Scripture is also instilled in people’s minds in expressions of penitence, in psalmody, in communion antiphons and as in phrases quoted in other liturgical elements.¹⁰ A test of the adequacy of new prayer texts has been ‘how congruent they are with the scriptural Word and imagery’.¹¹ The Catholic Scripture scholar Paul Joyce attests to the role of worship in his scriptural formation as a ‘cradle Catholic’. Until he came up to Oxford to study Divinity, this was the way he knew the Bible. He had encountered it in liturgy and preaching, ‘wrapped in the assumptions of Roman Catholic doctrine and practice’ but, whether or not there was a Bible at home somewhere, he says, ‘I had not encountered it first hand.’ Today, thanks to Vatican II emphasis on Scripture, such experience is less common in households that can afford Bibles.¹²

Biblical Texts used in Catholic Liturgy

Before the Second Vatican Council, the text of the Bible recognized by the Church as authoritative was the Latin version known as the (old) Vulgate, in the edition mandated by the Council of Trent (1545–63). The Vulgate Old Testament, apart from the Psalter, is based on translations made by St Jerome (c.342–420) from Hebrew texts. The Vulgate (‘Gallican’) Psalter is based on Jerome’s translation from a Greek text.¹³ An older, ‘Old Latin’ psalm version may be included separately. The Vulgate also includes Jerome’s translations of the Gospels and re-translations of the remainder of the New Testament into Latin by linguists unknown.

Early Christians searched the Hebrew Scriptures for Messianic prophecy, an approach visible in the Emmaus narrative (Luke 24.13–32). Greek-speaking Christians generally used Greek versions of Hebrew texts now known collectively as the Septuagint. The Christian Septuagint was a relatively unstandardized text adapted over several centuries from unstable Jewish ‘originals’, Greek translations from Hebrew texts themselves still in the process of formation and canonization in Judaism in the years before the fifth century ce.

Christian copyists favoured variant readings with Christological resonance, reproducing these, probably sometimes producing them. A famous example is words inserted in Psalm 96.10 (Vulgate 95.10) in some early (non-Vulgate) texts: ‘the Lord has reigned from the tree.’ This variant is echoed by Justin (c.100–c.165) and Tertullian (c.160–c.225) but not found in pre-Christian Septuagint texts. It is embedded in liturgy and quoted in Fortunatus’s (c.530–c.610) hymn, Vexilla regis, ‘The royal banners forward go’.¹⁴

Quoted in Tridentine liturgy are such ancient phrases, which differ from the Tridentine or ‘Sixto-Clementine’ text of the Vulgate (1592). These phrases were preserved in the Roman liturgy by Pope Clement