Replies

" One sacrifice for all sins for all time. One sacrifice for sanctification of our unworthy selves.

Once, for all time."

Absolutely. All the particular churches within The Church, the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, believe this.

The explanation of this involves "mystery". I have yet to meet a Protestant, except maybe some Anglicans in the old days and some conservative Lutherans, who have any understanding of what The Church has believed about the Liturgy for the past 2000+ years, which is a shame since at least as to Westerners, it is precisely and exactly what your Latin Rite ancestors believed and probably, I'm told, even Luther believed.

I think we can all agree that our Triune God is completely transcendent, totally ineffable and "eternal in the heavens". Indeed The Church teaches that God, being existence itself, does not "exist" in the same way that we exist. As such, His actions are not mundane, that is to say, in any fashion time bound. Thus His actions in our salvation, the Incarnation, the Cross, the Tomb and the Glorious Resurrection, while they appear to us to have occurred at discreet moments in time, in fact occur (not occurred) off any human time line. The Church teaches that the Divine Liturgy is just that, a DIVINE occurrence which IS the Incarnation, the Cross, the Tomb and the Glorious Resurrection which is "occuring" eternally. When we assemble to celebrate the Liturgy, we assemble not really in our home towns and parishes, but in "heaven" and off the timeline. When we, the priest and the people, chant, before the consecration:

"Priest (in a low voice):
It is proper and right to sing to You, bless You, praise You, thank You and worship You in all places of Your dominion; for You are God ineffable, beyond comprehension, invisible, beyond understanding, existing forever and always the same; You and Your only begotten Son and Your Holy Spirit. You brought us into being out of nothing, and when we fell, You raised us up again. You did not cease doing everything until You led us to heaven and granted us Your kingdom to come. For all these things we thank You and Your only begotten Son and Your Holy Spirit; for all things that we know and do not know, for blessings seen and unseen that have been bestowed upon us. We also thank You for this liturgy which You are pleased to accept from our hands, even though You are surrounded by thousands of Archangels and tens of thousands of Angels, by the Cherubim and Seraphim, six-winged, many-eyed, soaring with their wings,

Priest:
Singing the victory hymn, proclaiming, crying out, and saying:

People:
Holy, holy, holy, Lord Sabaoth, heaven and earth are filled with Your glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna to God in the highest."

we really are chanting with those angels, and all the saints in a celestial chorus.

GWB, this is very real for us in The Church, as real as this internet conversation is and the angels and the saints and the Throne of our God frankly more tangible than any of us here in cyber space are to each other.

This is a matter of faith and belief, GWB, and it is a gift of the Holy Spirit. Without that faith, there will be no belief like this. For us, every Liturgy is exactly what your NT quotes are speaking about.

The explanation of this involves "mystery". I have yet to meet a Protestant, except maybe some Anglicans in the old days and some conservative Lutherans, who have any understanding of what The Church has believed about the Liturgy for the past 2000+ years, which is a shame since at least as to Westerners, it is precisely and exactly what your Latin Rite ancestors believed and probably, I'm told, even Luther believed.

As one of those "Anglicans in the old days", I have to agree with you. But I think the problem is a little "thicker" than you indicate. It centers on the meaning of sacrament. I have the feeling that you probably don't care for Alexander Schmemann, but when I read his For the Life of the World twenty-five years ago, I was struck how familiar his writing seemed to me. In the last pages of that little book, he talks about "Sacrament and Symbol", and how the post-patristic church in the West lost the fullness of the meaning of symbol, and that this was true of many contemporary Orthodox as well.

He illustrates this dissolution of symbol with a brief discussion of the case of Berenger of Tours. The church condemned him because he said the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist are not real because they are symbolical. The Lateran Coucil of 1059 said they were real because they were not symbolical. In both cases the symbol has lost its ability to communicate reality.

Schmemann goes on to say that "the doctrine of transubstantiation, in its Tridentine form, is truly the collapse, or rather the suicide, of sacramental theology." I am of the opinion that unless Christians can recover the earlier understanding of symbol, we will continue to talk past each other.

we really are chanting with those angels, and all the saints in a celestial chorus.

I appreciate what you're trying to communicate here. But scripture does not offer much support for such practices being superior. There is no established order of worship prescribed other than the preaching and expounding of scripture and the singing of psalms and hymns.

My own natural tendency is to prefer the oldest hymns and be a little stiff-necked about it. Yet, we are all creatures of limited lifespan and God has placed us in a chaotic and ever-changing world. It seems to me that our faith can be well and truly practiced in many languages and there is considerable variety allowed within the orthodox (small-O) Christian faith.

I am not certain that your preservation of the ancient hymns are any more or less pleasing to God than a group of Korean Presbyterians or African Baptists singing passionately in their own tongues. Believing that the angels are singing with you is a sweet notion but not supported in scripture.

It's worth considering the point. After all, the New Testament was not written in Hebrew (or Latin!) and does have many indications that the apostles were flexible in adapting to varying cultures and to Greek and Roman culture. It's a constant example to us lest we become too comfortable in our own little sandboxes. I think God does not like us to be too comfortable in familiar ritual.

That is like what I have been taught about the liturgy. When the Divine Liturgy is sung, we are signing with the choir of heaven (imagine the organ they must have! :)

Funny thing is, on the uber conservative side, there are those who scream that the Liturgy is too "Papist" and that it was taken from Vatican II and from the Greek Orthodox.

Kind of amuses me a bit. Yes it came from the same source, which was the old liturgies and the liturgy of St. John Crysantomum, but that isn't a "bad" thing.

Very interesting post.

I agree about how when we worship, we are assembling with the saints in heaven. My pastor did a sermon on that very topic once.

It is unfortunate very few Protestants understand this, however.