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INTRODUCTION

What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

—FRANCIS BACON, “OF TRUTH,” 1625¹

How does it matter what Christians do in church? What harbor do they voyage for, and why in this company? How might more fellows journey there, and why should they choose to ? After six decades plotting one course through Anglican waters, I cruised parish ports seeking such answers. Yet even at friendly coffee hours, not many layfolk volunteered reasons. Worshippers told me how they chose this ship or ship line above others, but seldom why they sailed on a church craft at all, or would impress unchurched friends to come aboard. None claiming family tradition explained how that loyalty withstood the waves washing others off decks. Today conventional church charts seem to guide fewer journeymakers over life’s undersea mountains and trenches. Therefore this exploration will re-draw those routes, so that a wider spread of passengers and crew can talk and plan together. And here, as in much church life, lay people’s voices will have the last words.

The lay teacher Origen of Alexandria (d. 290 CE) was the most influential Christian writer after Paul of Tarsus, and his theological map quickened nearly all later guides, orthodox or not. As the late Richard Norris taught, Origen set our course thirteen centuries before Luther rediscovered it: Christian theology is commentary upon scripture. The present book joins two nautical charts lately folded apart, hoping that our ships can sail together again before fresh breezes. Fifty years back, explorers like Benedict Green, CR,² navigated both scriptural and liturgical criticism at once, while scouts brought fresh evidence aboard. But more recent Bible scholars steer off liturgical practice as a devotional morass, while liturgical writers row apart from shifting biblical swells. Some captain ritual renewal, and others, missionary innovation. Yet both navies must pilot among the currents of world faiths now, which no longer flow safely far away.

Our flotilla can follow fresh pilot charts from Gregory of Nyssa, a creative Kurdish thinker. Bishop Gregory Nyssen led debates at fourth-century church councils, but for medieval ages his humanism and universalism made mystics his chief followers. Today those very virtues—and Gregory’s deep biblical learning—draw admirers inside church and out. He saw every created life as an endless ethical progress. Gregory’s final plea to put away rewards and punishments, and only become God’s friend, resonates in our era honoring personal expression free from social conformity.

The Episcopal Diocese of California organized St. Gregory of Nyssa Church at San Francisco in 1978, to press further the liturgical renewal that had produced a new Book of Common Prayer. St. Gregory’s Church worship and government stress congregational participation, employing insights from modern social research as well as traditions rediscovered. Eastern Christianity has much to teach us from an unbroken history of vernacular popular worship. Indeed, learning from the East has been our Anglican tradition since medieval times. Critical scholarship is also essential for our task, and informs sermons and study groups. Through four decades Donald Schell, Paul Fromberg, and I have served as St. Gregory’s parish rectors, testing the innovations recommended on these pages.

Scripture fills them. This book began as an invited response to a journal article opposing Open Communion before Baptism (there mislabeled “without” Baptism), which St. Gregory of Nyssa Church has practiced for forty years, since our founding. Perhaps typically, that article recruited liturgical and philosophical writings without once quoting a Bible text. Another longtime friend sporting the label “conservative” protested against my appeal to Jesus’s example, “But Jesus is gone; he’s not here; we have Christ now.” I replied: then he must jettison the gospels altogether, since they were written to tell us who it is that is here. Even the growing body of Open Table congregations too rarely offer scripture for their rationale. Nevertheless, the Bible reveals what our worship is for. That basic question confronts worshippers today over many issues beyond the Eucharist. It calls for fresh reflection on what we do together in church, and on all those rites classically called signs of grace.

Consulting the Bible today requires historical learning and language skill. Readers will encounter here the important name “Septuagint” marking an ancient Alexandrian translation of Hebrew scripture by Greek-speaking Jews. All New Testament writers knew the Septuagint, although Jesus and his Aramaic hearers likely did not. The name is Latin for “seventy,” so abbreviated by the Latin numeral LXX. It springs from a legend that seventy Hebrew translators emerged from seventy locked rooms with seventy identical Greek texts, proving divine guidance. Jewish scripture scholar Nahum Sarna quips, “It would have been a greater miracle if seventy rabbis meeting in the same room had come up with one translation!” This book will draw from four English versions sharing a critical approach.³ For simplicity, God’s Hebrew name will appear here in consonants YHWH as received, without adding conjectured vowels.

These chapters will also touch upon Christian apologetic among world religions, as parishioners increasingly require. Ecumenical dialog has influenced our ritual talk before now. Church discourse tracked ancient Hellenistic philosophers for centuries through Renaissance schisms, but now it lacks a missionary future without engaging other faiths as broadly. Christians want allies in today’s secular world, and may have more allies than our forebears knew.

Today the very text reshapes our troop lines on land. A century’s critics have striven over what sayings prove Jesus’s “authentic” authorship and on what grounds, like an old battlefield where new-cut paths pass live buried materiel. Other scholarly terrains have also been lumbered and charted anew during the past century. Rehearsing so many campaigns would treble this book’s length. Instead let me adapt the Komodo dragon’s hunting strategy to worship renewal. Earth’s grandest reptile (see illustration), the Komodo dragon bites just one limb; then she waits for her prey to succumb to the spreading infection. I hope that instead of corrupting readers’ faith, my single bites will spread desire to explore further so many island jungles of knowledge.

Where my opinion counters others longer or more widely held, I revere the faithful intent that shaped those. Revisionism diverges by definition; nevertheless my predecessors’ devotion toward the Bible and our classical Christian conversation matches any today. And their industry so far surpasses my own that I must end this Introduction with my thanks.

Richard Fabian

Rounding Cape Horn, Patagonia, southern spring 2017

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1. Francis Bacon, “Of Truth,” Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral, ed. Richard Foster Jones (New York: Odyssey, 1937), 4.

2. CR: The Anglican monastic Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield, Yorkshire, UK, includes several eminent scholars and a theological college seminary.

3. New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), New English Bible (NEB), New American Bible (NAB) and New Jerusalem Bible (NJB), and rarely my own renderings.