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Church Review

Holy Communion (Anglican). St Paul's Cathedral, 12.15pm, Wednesday, 28 April. Reviewed by Owen Gager.

A celebration of Communion in St Paul's is very different from anything else happening in Wellington at the same time on a Wednesday. The contrast between what is happening outside St Paul's and what is happening inside is so marked that one must ask whether this is really intended. Even when the congregation, somewhat melodramatically, confess that the weight of their sins is so grievous that they have an overwhelming fear of the wrath of God, the language they are using is so impersonal that one begins to wonder whether they believe that they are talking about themselves.

No doubt there is a case for a distinctively religious language, in which acts of evil are always described in the most abstract terms possible, and the Anglican liturgy used in this service can be viewed as an attempt to develop such a language. But the penalty for the use of such a terminology is that it becomes, finally, escapist: committing a sin becomes so idealised a concept that one begins to wonder whether it has any relevance to the Public Service office routine that most of the congregation must have been going back to. 'Sin in the Public Service,' a phrase which should have a plain matter-of-fact meaning if the language of the Anglican liturgy was at all realistic, instead has implications of prurience and sensationalism which are usually associated with a Truth or Censored billboard. When those who think and write most about sin are on the editorial staff of Truth, it is surely time for the language of the liturgy, if it is to retain any immediate meaning, to become more concrete.

Associated with this tendency to grandiose abstraction is an extraordinary mixture of prose styles. This again heightens the contrast between events inside and outside the Cathedral: it is simply impossible—even for someone with an adequate grasp of changes in the English language since the fourteenth century—to follow closely every twist of meaning in rather difficult theological statements couched in various archaic English dialects, especially when no clue is given when we shift from one century to the next. One is almost tempted to believe there is a deliberate attempt to confuse the worshipper. Where the Epistle and the Gospel is read apparently from the twentieth-century New English Bible, the creed is at least sixteenth-century, and the various sections of the Prayer Book used elsewhere seem to range from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. If the decision has been made that the King James Version, or its seventeenth-century revision, is too difficult for the average congregation, it is strange that the Creed—which one would assume the congregation would want to understand very clearly—and most of the liturgy would remain unchanged in their language. It must be admitted that, to me at least, neither the Epistle nor the Gospel in their twentieth-century dress read as particularly Perspicuous pieces of English, and I would hazard a guess that most of the congregation did not understand the Epistle, which concentrated a rather abstruse argument around a particularly unconventional use of the word 'advocate'.

If the readings at the service were typical of the English of the New English Bible, I must reluctantly conclude that if my old family Bible was good enough for King James, it's good enough for me. But one must of course allow for St. Paul being a particularly bad writer in any translation. The main problem here however is consistency. There is no real argument for the view that sixteenth-century English is better than twentieth-century English, but, if one accepts this view, the twentieth century should be kept completely out of religion if it doesn't belong there. There is, however, no point in using twentieth century English if it turns out to be as unintelligible as seventeenth-century English to the average layman.

What was most surprising, after this sustained use of archaic abstract English, was the sermon. It was as deliberately informal as the surrounding liturgy was formal. Perhaps the priest had decided, not unwisely, that the congregation could not survive the whole service on the [unclear: plane] of undiluted seventeenth-century theology, and thought some counterpoint in ordinary, unaffected English was necessary. But this did not, unfortunately, add balance to the service, or help explain what the liturgy meant in terms of the congregation's daily lives, since the subject was the reference in the creed to 'one baptism for the remission of sins' and the priest began by saying he had always found the doctrine he was expounding virtually incredible. He can have done nothing

When Church services are not redeemed theologically, they are usually redeemed musically and I was hoping for some good pre-nineteenth century church music as a Divine grace for enduring the sermon. I must warn intending worshippers that they will not have music while they commune. A National Orchestra lunchtime concert featuring (say) Bach would do any Christian more spiritual good than the little ceremony at St Paul's, on Wednesdays. Perhaps it would all have been better chanted in Latin. Then there would have been no patches of intelligible sound to puzzle the outsider.

to add to his listeners' understanding of it, since inasfar as his sermon was coherent, he appeared to be expounding the Zwinglian doctrine of the sacraments which the Creed clearly disavows.

If even priests cannot understand the Creed, there seems little point in continuing its recitation: though liturgies were presumably ordained to ensure that some Christian doctrine was expressed in the order of service even in an age where priests are corrupt or apostate, and it may be that the proper course would be to dispense with the sermon rather than the creed. In this particular service, the disappearance of the sermon would certainly have been no loss. But churches being what they are, as the Jehovah's Witnesses point out in their periodical visits to my back door, the Creed is apparently being renegotiated (though not. I understand, with God). The best we can hope for, therefore, is better preachers, and judging by last Wednesday's performance this is a pretty forlorn hope.