Matthew van Maastricht

Over the past while, I have been making the sign of the cross during prayer, our family has been praying the morning and evening office while standing (often burning incense for the evening office), and using icons as aids in prayer. At one of my churches we’ve started practicing anointing of the sick once a week during our Sunday morning liturgy. I’ve also long been an advocate of the weekly celebration of the Eucharist.

So often the comments I get are “but that’s so Catholic!” Historically, many Protestants have largely defined themselves by what they are not. And this is never a healthy way to define oneself. In the sixteenth century, this is also why the Reformed had forbidden special services on Holy Week or Christmas, celebration of saints’ days, or weddings or funerals in the church. Why? “That’s what the Roman Catholics do,” is the essence of the answer.

There are two responses to this. First, “so what?” comes to mind. After all, something is not wrong just because our Roman Catholic siblings do it.

But there’s also a longer answer, and everyone who knows me knows that I always take the longer answer. And that longer answer is that things are not so “us” and “them” (or as clearly cut) as we like to imagine.

The Frequency of the Eucharist

Sometimes it’s even a completely invented rationale. Take the frequency of Eucharistic celebration for example. When I was a kid, the Roman Catholics had communion weekly, but we had it quarterly, so it could be “special” (so I guess praying, singing, and reading the Bible isn’t special). When I went to seminary I learned that Jean Calvin was a consistent advocate for the weekly celebration of the Eucharist, but the people of Geneva said no. So they settled on four times per year. At first, I assumed that the Genevans said no because that’s what the Roman Catholics did and they wanted to be different.

However, history opens up a fuller picture. At the time, the most common practice in the Roman Catholic Church was for laity to physically receive the Eucharist once per year, with regular gazing at the consecrated host (this is a much longer story for a different time). The reason that weekly reception of the Eucharist was too radical for the Genevans was because they were accustomed to a yearly participation. But since then, the Roman Catholics have moved to a Reformation ideal (which was to return to the ancient Christian practice) and too often the Reformed have taken the compromise as the ideal.

And this makes good sense, for Word and Sacrament are indivisibly linked in how one receives the fullness of Christ. Proclamation of Jesus the Christ comes through hearing and experiencing, through our mind and our body, through Word and Sacrament. A service of the Word without the Eucharist is, truly, half a proclamation.

So, in fact, a weekly celebration of the Eucharist is not specifically Roman Catholic. It is historically Christian (since the very beginnings of the Christian Church), and the Reformed sought to return to that practice, and in most cases we still haven’t.

The Reasons Are Important

Protestants have traditionally focused on doctrine, which has also been our major pitfall since the sixteenth century. They wanted to teach the people proper thinking about God. And for good reason. In the sixteenth century Roman Catholic liturgy was still universally in Latin, even though Latin was a dead language then. The old liturgies were beautiful and rich and meaningful, and the people couldn’t understand any of it.

Further, the success of Johann Tetzel, for instance, in raising money by selling indulgences shows how poorly catechized and taught the common people were by the church. Not to mention that a good number of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses were pointing out that the Roman Catholic Church was violating church law in its practices including, but not limited to, selling indulgences and simony.

The Christians who were protesting the very real abuses of the Roman Catholic Church at the time sought to remedy something that was wrong. The first generation of Magisterial Reformers were, normally, not intending to start a new branch of Christianity, rather it was an emergency step and supposed to be temporary and short-term: Reform the church and then it can be put back together. So they intended to strip away some of the things that were added to the Christian faith and practice over the centuries, and they sought to go back to the sources.

So they went back to Greek and Hebrew rather than Latin. They went back past Aquinas to Augustine. And most consequently, they went to the Bible as their central source rather than ecclesiastical tradition as a second source. Which does not mean they rejected ecclesiastical tradition or authority, not at all. But rather, the Bible was the un-normed norm by which church tradition was to be measured. (Nota bene: how well they did at returning to an idealized early church practice is entirely up for debate. But the point is, this is what they were trying to do.)

And in doing so, they really wanted to teach the people the Christian faith. And that, I think, is a noble endeavor. The sixteenth century Reformation often over-corrected, but at the time that over-correction was what was needed in that place, at that time.

However, when this is seen as the norm for all times, then we have a bit of a problem.

Rationalism with a Supernatural Appendix

I once heard Protestantism described as “rationalism but with a supernatural appendix.” While this was certainly not the view of the sixteenth century Reformers (you need to actually read their works), this is often what it has become. Both fundamentalism and classical liberalism fit this: Rationalism with a supernatural appendix. Yes, fundamentalism is just as modernist and rationalist as liberalism. And so what we are left with is ideas to agree to, things to affirm, but little actually supernatural in the experience.

For liberals, things like the bodily resurrection doesn’t make rational sense, so that is chucked and an emphasis on spiritual resurrection came into existence. For fundamentalists, the bodily resurrection must be affirmed because it takes its place in the logical forensic view of atonement by which we are mechanically made right with God in a nice and logically tight system.

But I am convinced that both of these are fundamentally flawed, and that the singular emphasis on what we think, on having all the doctrinal ducks in a row, has done more to harm Christianity than anything else. And we are seeing the chickens come home to roost.

Because if what matters most is what we think, then faith doesn’t actually have much meaning for our lives. And God becomes distant and “out there” and we remain “here,” and if faith is nothing but a self help (either here or after death) program, then what actual meaning does it have that can’t be found elsewhere?

Recovery of Ancient Practices

One of the things that has become very valuable for me in my own practice of faith has been the recovery of ancient practices. The sign of the cross, for instance, goes back to the very beginnings of Christianity. The use of incense goes back to the most ancient practice of Jewish worship. The use of Christian images as aids to but not objects of worship goes back very early in Christianity, as well. And these are all for good reason. After all, we have five senses, why do we only engage one or two of them? Why is most of our faith experienced with our mind and not with our whole being? And, most of all, we confess an embodied faith, one in which we were created with bodies, God entered the created order with a body, and eternity is experienced with a body, albeit a perfected one. Why would we not engage the body in our practices of the faith?

This is, I think, especially valuable today, when most of our existence has become disembodied. We consume content. We have most of our interactions in a disembodied virtual space. The pandemic has accelerated this development. In trying to make virtual spaces meaningful and legitimate, too often we have decided that such disembodied spaces are adequate. And, truly, for most people, they are. If the most significant aspect of our faith is to listen to music and hear a speech, then a disembodied engagement is more than sufficient.

But our faith was never intended to be disembodied, but always embodied. And that is why the historic Christian tradition includes icons to see, chanting to hear, incense to smell, intentional and meaningful body movements like prostrations, the sign of the cross, standing, and kneeling to feel. The Eucharist let’s us taste. Oil for anointing that we can see, and the individual can feel and smell (if it’s aromatic oil). And so much more. And in all of these, our entire existence, body, mind, and soul, encounters the divine.

I truly believe that our life is to be structured around our faith, and not the other way around. I truly believe that the Divine engages us in the totality of our being rather than just our ears and our mind. And I truly believe that the point of a Christian liturgy is to serve as a space where the divine and the human meet, and that many of these traditional practices and elements can aid to that end by engaging with our humanity, not ignoring it.

And so yes, in my study you will find an icon, an incense burner, and a prayer rope. At home we stand for prayer for morning and evening offices, using a prayer book and before icons. I think that the weekly celebration of the Eucharist is important, and I think anointing of the sick is a very meaningful pastoral act. Some may look at some of these practices and think they’re Roman Catholic. First: So what. And secondly, they are practices which are meaningfully and deeply rooted in the Christian tradition that served a function for centuries (this is precisely why these live on in the Roman Catholic–as well as many others, by the way–tradition), and can still serve an important function even today as we seek to experience the Divine, experience holy moments, and form our faith as the center-point of our lives around which everything else turns.

As a pastor, more than anything, I want people to leave on Sunday mornings and not say, “that sermon was interesting/uplifting/enjoyable/&c” or “that music was great/entertaining/pretty/exciting/&c,” But rather, “I encountered the Divine today.” And the practice toward that end, since ancient times, has been to engage the entire existence of the human condition.

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Addendum:

And here’s the thing: none of these are obligatory. And that’s part of the point, too. We have a host of things available to us. Do they help you to have a deeper experience of the faith? Great! Are they stumbling blocks for you? That’s fine too. We are all different, and it’s fine for our practices to be varied, too.