Doing my usual light reading and finding myself enjoying a great history of the Reformation (Diarmaid MacCulloch's "Reformation: Europe's House Divided"), looking for traces of PhD source material. I came across this little observation of his that during the Reformation, there was a shift in people's attitudes so that the Pope came to be seen as the devil's agent and the miracle of the Mass the most evil moment in their earthly experience. He likens it to a technique of German playright Berthold Brecht who would engender alienation ("Verfremdung") in his audience by making the familiar seem unfamiliar: a device to shock the audience into taking control of their perceptions of what was happening in front of them.
It's the classic tool of the revolutionary. What it does, though, is bring division, polarise opinion, and breaks connections where they ought to exist. We see it happening in history and in the church; what do you think of these possible "alienations"?
the reading of this liturgy is lifeless and devoid of faith.....scrap liturgy
daily Bible reading is a legalistic chore.....take or leave the Bible as a reference point for Christian faith
hymns and songs are impersonal, clinical and merely creedal......personalise and consumerise all worship,
local church isn't a real community......find church where I'm comfortable in community,
worship choruses are trite and shallow.......profound worship only happens during a meditation.
I could go on...I don't know whether these "swings" are fair, but it is a human trait and, let's be honest, "gets things changed". But I'm not convinced it's the way it ought to be. Sam Wells' "God's Companions" book talks of the church being a "community of memory and imagination". Our secular liberal worldview (the seeds of which were a motor for the Reformation) endeavours to wipe us free of memory. It's all one giant leap forward into the new and the better. Untrammelled postmodernity would wipe away any sense of the future, and reduce memory to a rosy-tinted heritage product.
I believe it's one of the great challenges for the church in our culture: to embrace a future with imagination whilst having full memories of who we are and where we came from. Those memories contain both the joys and pain, successes and disappointments of who we are. So, with respect to Brecht, let's be restless for change without having to demonise the present or erase the past.
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