A new history of Christian worship

A Sociological History of Christian Worship. Martin D. Stringer. Cambridge University Press. [pounds sterling]40.00 (US$75.00). viii + 268 pages. ISBN 0-521-81955-5.

This rather unusual book is by a social anthropologist who is Head of the Department of Theology and Religion in Birmingham University. Recognising the size of 'liturgy' as a field, he has confined himself to a series of essays discussing key periods in the history of Christianity--the first century (obviously), the Byzantines, the Reformation, the Evangelicals and the Pentecostalists and so on--and tries to relate the ways in which people's needs to communicate with God are reflected in the ways of worship. He adopts the concept of 'discourse' within 'discursive fields' set out by Michel Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge--briefly, that one does not look simply at the statements the Church made to the faithful, but at the whole interplay of buildings, art, dress, organisation and so on which form a sort of dialogue.

One hesitates to suggest an addition to a fifteen-page bibliography (Mr Stringer, I feel, has already read quite enough) but I think he might have gained by adding George Steiner to his list, especially After Babel, in which Steiner analyses the way in which the faithful absorb sacred texts, beginning with the idea that 'This looks as though it might be important' and ending with the 'return' of the text to its author with a superstructure of interpretation and significance. Without its texts, starting with the Epistles, Christianity is nothing--or very little; which is why the history of those texts is important. Martin Stringer stresses the sparsity of what we know about the first period, using texts written in three continents and years apart, and seems to lean towards those modernist critics who attack Christianity from the inside by arguing that we really know next to nothing about Jesus. I wondered what he would make of the late Professor Carsten-Peter Thiede, who demonstrated that the bits of St Matthew's Gospel now to be found in Oxford were written in 60-65 AD, that is, by a contemporary of Jesus, as near to the Resurrection as we are to the Heath Government, and probably an eye-witness.

The author's style is modern academic, that is to say, dense, defensive, loaded with footnotes and carefully avoiding even the palest purple patches. Only in the last few pages, where he reveals his commitment to Christianity and his warm tolerance of all the many diverse ways in which Christians have tried to tell God about themselves, does his writing come alive. I could have done with some of this earlier on. I am not sure about the width of his background knowledge; there is an odd introduction of Ignatius of Loyola as 'a Catholic student in Paris'--which he was, but in his forties; he had also been for many years a professional soldier, a fact which had a considerable influence on the Society of Jesus.

Nonetheless, there is a great deal of interest in the book; for example, in the discussion of how the Eucharist came to be the central event in Christian worship, then faded and then came back. It drew on the Passover, the Last Supper, and even the Greek tradition of the symposia; Jews had been brought up not to eat or drink with non-Jews (hence St Paul's problems in getting Greeks integrated into the Church). Mr Stringer might have discussed the statement in the sixth chapter of St John's Gospel, in which Jesus lays claim to the ownership--and more than the ownership--of the cosmos, and was understood by his audience to be claiming to be one of the pagan fertility gods--Attis, Osiris or Actaeon--so that he lost most of his disciples, 'who walked with him no more'.

For the Reformers, Stringer picks out Zwingli, who reformed the Church in Zurich, and discusses the different Reformers' attitude to music in services (Luther for, Zwingli against). He is cursory on the English Reformation, and fails to pick out the salient point, that by 1500 the Church had been battling for over a century against Lollardry. This was a form of early Protestantism which included an attack on abuses such as pilgrimages and pardons, and was quite capable of taking up arms to get its way. The Church had responded on two fronts: one was to enrich the splendour of what it offered--Perpendicular architecture, stained glass, drama, new festivals such as Corpus Christi (1460) while the other was to be violently repressive. The Constitutions of Oxford (1409) represent the high-water-mark of medieval obscurantism, and included, for example, the provision that it was capital heresy to know where an English Bible was and not denounce its owner to the authorities. This put a damper on any English religious writing more substantial than miracle plays and simple tracts. If the Reformers were to seize men's minds, and ensure that 'the boy that driveth the plough', in Tyndale's phrase, could take his proper place in the work of the Church, the language had to be made fit to carry serious discourse, and was made so first by Tyndale and then by Cranmer. The modern clergymen who think they are better than Cranmer say that we must advance from sixteenth-century English, not realising that no-one ever spoke in the majestic and resonant English of the Book of Common Prayer, that Cranmer was creating a 'register', and that his Communion Service is symphonic in form, in four movements, each with a major and minor subject, and a masterpiece.

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