What is the Unchanging Principle? A Discussion of the Eucharistic Ordo in Anglicanism

Anglican Theological Review, Spring 2004 by Bates, J Barrington

Chauvet points to another aspect of this question when he suggests that to say that one must have read these texts is also, partly, to indicate how one must read them.24 Here, he alludes to the unseen, unwritten, even unexpressed ordo governing the church's worship. he likewise points to the centrality of the Christian community when he says the local assembly of Christians is not simply a part of the unique church of Christ, but rather its integral realization in the particularity of a group and culture.25 he stops just short of saying that the Bible on a shelf at the local lending library is just another bookwhereas that same book in the context of a worshiping assembly, gathered in the house of the church, proclaimed in the light of faith, and seen through the lens of tradition becomes something holy, something sacred, something other than simply another book.

In a discussion of the reconciliation of a penitent, Chauvet proposes four important realities-the church gathered, the Word proclaimed, the sacrament itself, and the thanksgiving and ethical practice which conclude the celebration.26 he thus lays out in this example a notion of structure for this or any rite as "a whole formed of coordinated phenomena, such that each depends on the others and could not be what it is without its relation to them."27 The concept of ordo one can extrapolate from this, therefore, fits with the theological method of this essay-for it requires an overall perspective, a contextual understanding, or-in the vocabulary of computer programming-a systems approach.

If the Bible ceases somehow to hold its fullest sacred character outside the context of the gathered faithful, then certainly the printed ordo loses something of its essence outside this setting. The question, therefore, requires much more than a discussion of language alone. Culture, context, instruction, common assumptions, implicit understandings: this is the meat of Chauvet's ordo. Chauvet, of course, has much to say about language, and the concept of the "failure to master meaning"28-among many other similarly perplexing and intriguing concepts-must go unexplored here. He sees language as a compensating factor for our human inadequacy, from a narrative viewpoint. If the carrying out of a program of thanksgiving happened by itself, he says, there simply would be no need of a text. The fact that there is a text signifies at the outset we are not competent to carry out such an action.29 The text, he says, allows us to gain this competence, requiring us to follow a particular itinerary which seeks to provide for the assembly's conversion.30

To Chauvet, the textual aspect of the ordo serves as an additional or perhaps even accidental element. The essence of the eucharist is the assembly's conversion, the words serving simply as the vehicle for this transformation. Chauvet calls for a fundamental revision of theological terms, those of language and symbol and no longer those of cause and instrument.31 Finite creatures require such symbolic texts, not because the words themselves matter, but because without them we simply are not competent to render thanks to God.