It is a thing plainly repugnant to the Word of God, and the custom of the Primitive Church, to have publick Prayer in the Church, or to minister the Sacraments in a tongue not understanded of the people.
by Ian Caveny
Of all the Articles of Religion, Article XXIV seems the most uncontroversial in our late modern context. To update its terms a bit, the Article simply states that it is perverse to lead worship and minister in a language the congregation cannot understand. There are two ends to which this Article aims: the first is to oppose a mode of worship that creates an intellectual hierarchy between priest and people, most specifically the Latin Mass of the Roman Catholic Church. Of course, today the oppositional aspect of this article has (mainly) dissolved, as the liturgical revisions of Vatican II shifted Catholicism away from a Latin-heavy to a vernacularized liturgy. In this sense, the Article as it was initially intended is no longer as ecclesially-identifying as it would have been in the time of the Reformation; maybe it has even been come to be taken-for-granted?
And, yet, I think there is a second aim toward which the Article proposes, along the same lines as its initial intent. One of the crises of the Catholicism of the late Renaissance – and one of the tensions in the Christianity throughout history – was the tension between a literate clergy and an illiterate congregation. If the Reformation-era purpose of this Article was to break down a barrier of comprehension between Latinate priests and vernacular laypersons, it ought to be remembered that that barrier was not just one of language, but one of status and access. Even if official doctrine declares that God has made Himself known to the people through Jesus Christ as the sole mediator and that His Grace has been made available to them, what kind of theological comprehension of that God comes across if His ministers make His Word inaccessible? If Latin bestows a kind of “high”-ness upon the clergy and, thus, by logic, a “low”-ness upon the laypersons? In short, there is a very real question on the theological formation of a congregation’s understanding of God at stake in this simple Article. Thus, the second aim of Article XXIV is not just to set an appropriate liturgical boundary around non-vernacular worship; it is to attest to the implied theology that is carried by those liturgical forms. How we worship affects how we understand who we worship. Is the God of the Christian religion someone who is far removed, who speaks another language, or who cannot be understood except by the literate elite? Or is He the kind of God who manifests Himself as one of us, who takes on human flesh, who identifies with the lowly?
With this second aim of the Article in mind, it is important to note, then, that success in following this Article in the life of the Church is far more difficult than rooting out inappropriate expostulations in Latin. That would be the letter of the law. Its spirit would be to root out any instances in our liturgy where we reify the standard of spiritual hierarchy[1] through piety that so often besets religious life. As anyone who has ever attended to the troubles of spiritualized hierarchies could tell you, this is more easily said than done.
Take, as an example, another language-based distinction that often occurs in the Pentecostal circles in which I first came to faith: speaking in tongues. If you’ve never been in a Pentecostal (or certain Charismatic) circles, then you might not be aware that there is a behind-the-scenes power dynamic that can unfold between those who have special gifts (like speaking in tongues, but also could include gifts of healing, gifts of prophecy, etc.) and those who do not. Sometimes a gifted leader will end up exalted above the “lay” in the congregation, and that gifted leader – who sees visions or dreams dreams – will be seen as someone who has “access” to God in a way that the average believer simply does not. Even in the best of situations, and I will freely note that my own experience was overall positive, even when a church’s leadership officially repudiates a theology of spiritual hierarchies, a sense can grow within the congregation that those who have the more spectacular spiritual giftings, those who speak in more tongues or have more prophesies or hear from the Lord more clearly, are somehow “set aside,” a different order of Christian than the rest of the church. And, of course, this becomes one of Pentecostalism’s stickiest ecumenical problems: a sense of higher-standing amid the charismatic elite opposed to the “spirit-less” non-charismatic churches.
I wish to be clear here, I am not raking Pentecostalism through the dirt (as the Apostle Paul once said, in a southern Illinois paraphrase, ‘I speak in more tongues than all y’all’)! What is at play in the case of charismatic gifts in, say, a Pentecostal or Charismatic church, is the same dynamic that is at play in a wide variety of other situations. In fundamentalist contexts, we hear of churches where a hierarchy of dogma is constructed, on the basis of a powerful leader’s puritanical excesses; but in the mainline the same appears under a different head, where new hierarchies of who follows the current political or theological trend. Are we inclusive enough? And are those who are not as inclusive as us really welcome here?
The truth is that the danger of spiritual hierarchy that Article XXIV targets has been a challenge for church-leadership since the dawn of the Church. In Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle observed this very same dynamic. Here, the “spiritual” leaders – the pneumatikoi – were boasting of their greatness whilst downgrading the lowliness of the more “common” believer. The especially “gifted” pneumatikoi felt they had the wisdom and knowledge and spiritual stature to be able to do things the common believer could not – including some issues Paul addresses in the first chunk of the letter, like eating at idol-worshipping festivals and sexual excesses. Beyond this, they felt entitled to some level of authority based on their tongue-speaking and prophecy-proclaiming. Paul’s famous dictum on spiritual gifts, where he asserts that we are all a part of Jesus’ Body together, bound by the Spirit and given unique roles in that Body, is actually a radical “leveling” of the spiritual playing-field: every gift of the Spirit, whether dramatic like tongues and prophesy or “mundane” like service or wisdom, are to be seen as gifted “by one and the same Spirit.”[2] Ernst Käsemann, who also once observed this dynamic, put the problem in this way: “Christianity is drowning, as the church in Corinth did in the past, in religious riches which are really a chaos.”[3]
The danger presented by these spiritual hierarchies is far more serious when they are hidden than when they are flushed into the open. A hierarchy of a Latinate clergy and vernacular congregation is, historically speaking, a thing of the past. But spiritual hierarchies of “intellectual vs. unlearned” or “prophecy vs. service” or even “justice vs. status-quo” still rear their ugly heads in congregations all the time.
Here I return to Article XXIV and its wisdom. As I mentioned before, this Article handles the matter of how the congregation receives theology through its worship practice. We are discussing, after all, not the language of the confessional or pastoral meeting, nor of the Bible study, nor the church potluck, but the language of “publick prayer” and “minister[ing] the Sacraments.” What the people receive in a Latinate Mass, no matter the official doctrine of the Church, is a theology of spiritual hierarchies. But if the Church of God is to represent Him, His character, His nature in an accurate way, then it must represent the Incarnational God, not the ineffable, untouchable, one. The God of the Scriptures, who fully manifests Himself in the Person of Jesus Christ, is the God who comes down to earth, takes upon flesh, and, in a very corporeal way, speaks our language. So, too, then, those who minister must speak the language of their congregations. If church leadership and congregation are to participate in the life of God together without spiritual hierarchies separating them, then it is critical for them to develop a common, shared language.
This goes far beyond speaking the same vernacular, in its most basic sense. For a few years I was a part of a well-educated, urban congregation that was full of graduate students, mainly Ph.D. candidates. It was in this context that I first learned how to preach. and while my sermons were not necessarily “academic lectures” (thank the Lord!) they used terms and ideas that were complex, nuanced, sometimes even multilayered. In that church, we talked about income inequality, homelessness, urban violence; about the Trinity, the Two Natures of Christ, Christian ethics. But later, when I preached regularly at a small, rural church, I found that I needed to adopt new language to communicate. The issue was not one of intelligence, nor capability, nor faithfulness; it was simply one of different languages. My urban friends lived where the word “gentrification” meant something quite concrete: a Target and a Whole Foods were colonizing the neighborhood! Our rural congregation, on the other hand, had other pressing issues in front of them that needed a different kind of language: an opioid and suicide crisis spurred by lack of opportunity and hopelessness. They had been trained in a different set of church-vernacular as well, and that required some “interpretation of tongues,” so to speak.
So far I’ve centered on Article XXIV in its sense of the preached ministry of the Word, but for Anglicans worship is more than singing songs and hearing a sermon, as it is in other worship settings. Worship involves the reading of prayers, the reciting of Creeds, the confession of sins, and, most importantly, the celebration of the Eucharist. And if there is any angle of Article XXIV’s “second purpose,” as I’ve called it, that strikes with a knife edge at the heart of Anglicanism, it is in its demand that prayers and the ministering of the sacraments be in the vernacular: sure, our services may be in English (or whatever the vernacular is in that particular location), and maybe our priest’s homilies manifest that incarnational sense of sharing a language with the congregation. But is our service comprehensible to the common person?
As an outsider to Anglicanism who is finding himself drawn along the “Canterbury trail,”[4] this is something that I often wonder when I visit a church: will I ‘get’ what’s happening? Will those leading the service use their voice to help those who are wandering in to understand the motions and the movements? Or is what I’m about to enter a club, dedicated to its own group of pneumatikoi? Will I find myself lost in a sea of “insider” language? (And what difference is “insider club” Christianity to a Latinate Mass, anyways?)
Historic Reformation resonances aside, Article XXIV is a standard by which a church’s leadership are to weigh themselves. First, do we see in our congregations spiritual hierarchies that parallel the Latinate and the non-Latinate? Do we see “Higher” and “Lower” Christians forming their ranks in our communities? Are there ways we can lean in to the way of Christ and remind each other of our co-participation in His Body, equal to one another? But, second, and this more difficult, do we see in our own leadership “inside” and “outside” language? Are our homilies and sermons and prayers written and said in a way that exalts Christ by reaching to the people sitting in our pews? To be clear, the challenge is not to denude our language for the lowest common denominator; it is, quite the opposite!, to enrich our language so that the whole community can participate in worship together. And, following this homiletical challenge, do we see worship as a language that only the initiated can know, or do we take our liturgical practice so seriously that we use whatever opportunities we can to teach those who feel “outside” how to join in and participate with us? This radical common language of the Church is, in my sense, the true heart of Article XXIV, and it does so by representing a true theology of the God we serve: incarnational, invitational, and missional.
Ian Caveny is a student at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
[1] To be very clear, I will be using “spiritual hierarchy” in a very specific way in this essay. This is not to say that all hierarchies of any kind are necessarily problematic. That would, after all, be a very strange thing to post in a series of essays celebrating the Articles of the Anglican Church, a church body ordered and organized by bishops!
[2] I Corinthians 12:11.
[3] Ernst Käsemann, “The Saving Significance of the Death of Jesus in Paul,” in Perspectives on Paul, trans. Margaret Kohl (Mifflintown, PA: Sigler Press, 1996), 53.
[4] In the words of Robert E. Webber.