Ship of Fools: Enculturation: What did the Liturgical Movement have in mind?

Thread: Enculturation: What did the Liturgical Movement have in mind? Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by S. Bacchus (# 17778) on :

Enculturation was a real buzz word of the Liturgical Movement, and it's a topic that's come back to prominence now in part because of Pope Francis.

Of course, in one sense, all liturgy (like all art and indeed all human experience) has to be enculturated: it can hardly exist outside culture.

Some of the earlier examples of music produced in the wake of the liturgical movement, including the (Latin) Missa Luba and the (vernacular) Missa Criolla are to my mind excellent and have clearly enriched the liturgical life of the church. Excellent.

But at some point, 'enculturation' has seemed to come to mean less embracing diverse influences and more turning away from traditions. One might argue, one SHOULD argue, that 'culture' in France should have been interpreted to mean organ masses, and in Italy to include Palestrina and perhaps some really soppy Romantic music (much of it Marian).

Yet, in practice, there seemed to be a turning away from these things. In England (and in the Church of England), we have generally kept much of the music (deo gratias!), but have often 'reordered' our beautiful buildings in ways very unsympathetic to their original design. Isn't a Comper high altar as much a part of English culture as a Vaughan Williams hymn? The answer must be 'yes', so why do the former so often sit unloved in dark corners in the brave new design of liturgical furniture, particularly in our cathedral and large parish churches?

Surely this isn't what the liturgical movement wanted?

[fixed code]

[ 30. November 2013, 09:19: Message edited by: seasick ]

Posted by Beeswax Altar (# 11644) on :

Browbeating everybody else in to doing liturgy the peculiar way a group of scholars decided it should be done?

Posted by CL (# 16145) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Beeswax Altar:
Browbeating everybody else in to doing liturgy the peculiar way a group of scholars decided it should be done?

The old joke: what's the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist? You can negotiate with a terrorist.

Posted by Ad Orientem (# 17574) on :

Inculturation. Bongos and dancing innit?

Posted by sonata3 (# 13653) on :

I've always thought of liturgical inculturation as adapting Western rites to non-Western cultures; the classic example being the Zaire Mass in the Roman Catholic Church. Examples of its celebration can be seen on YouTube.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaire_Use

Posted by Olaf (# 11804) on :

A Catholic Church down the road from me had an excellent music program--one of the best I've ever seen in a suburban parish. They had choirs for various age groups and a superb adult choir that provided music weekly at a couple of Masses. Their music was perfectly acceptable and appropriate for Catholic masses, and they ordered their materials from Catholic publishing houses. Even the people in the pews would sing along with the hymns.

Then a priest with a penchant for Gregorian chant was assigned, and fueled by the zeal of the last decade he disbanded the music program in its entirety, as they refused to sing only chant. Now the place is like a ghost house, and the priest presses "play" on a Gregorian chant CD before Mass begins.

It seems to me this is a sort of inculturation battle. The priest was trying to inculturate the ancient traditions of the church, but dramatically failed with his heavy-handed, father-knows-best approach. A sensitive and collaborative approach, taking into account the strengths and desires of the parish, would have met with far greater success. Had the situation been dealt with diplomatically, I have little doubt that the priest would have been able to bring back a little bit of chant here and there. Unfortunately for him, he basically ruined it for his flock. Embracing the culture of the parish, and finding where it meets with the wider church would have been far more effective in the long-run.

Posted by stonespring (# 15530) on :

Is inculturation supposed to be a temporary aid to missionary work, and will traditional liturgies be introduced to newly evangelized people once it would be more acceptable to them? Is that what the documents of Vatican II intended?

As a Catholic stickler for traditional liturgy, I still wonder whether it is right to expect traditional Western Liturgy to ever be adopted by people from countries that had western languages, religions, culture, etc. (along with slavery, colonialism, and a whole lot of negative things) hoisted upon them by the West and regional cultures that cooperated with the West in subjugating other cultures. If Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, etc., all got to develop their own "Rites" in the early Church, why cannot regions of the world evangelized later in time also develop their own Liturgical Rites that have no necessary connection to previous ones (although that is difficult now, because just about every corner of the world has been reached by missionaries bringing with them Roman, Orthodox, or Anglican liturgies - or non-Liturgical worship that still follows Western styles).

Posted by Mockingbird (# 5818) on :

quote:
Originally posted by S. Bacchus:
Enculturation was a real buzz word of the Liturgical Movement,

I dispute this. The Liturgical Movement goes back to the early 20th century. I never heard the words "enculturation" or "inculturation" until fairly recently. The concept (though not the word) I remember first encountering in the 1970s.

At its best, the concept is a recognition of what is stated in Article 34:

quote:
It is not necessary that the Traditions and Ceremonies be in all places one, or utterly like; for at all times they have been divers, and may be changed according to the diversity of countries, times, and men's manners, so that nothing be ordained against God's Word....Every particular or national Church hath authority to ordain, change, and abolish, Ceremonies or Rites of the Church ordained only by man's authority, so that all things be done to edifying.

That is the concept at its best. It is not always found at its best. Louis Weill's A Theology of Worship, for example, contains an absurd and silly exposition of the concept.

Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on :

S. Bacchus I've been puzzling how to respond to your OP for some days. I partly agree with you, but in a way that I suspect you'll disagree with.

Suppose we start from the assumption that the purpose of liturgy, ecclesiastical building and ecclesiastical furniture is to enable the faithful to worship. A more modern person than I suspect either you or I are might say 'to enhance their worship experience'. That though is missing an important ingredient in that when we worship (I hope) we approach God rather than just enjoy our spiritual preferences.

I take inculturation as recognising that people who don't inhabit the same culture as existing forms of worship presume, are likely to find worship that is already inculturated in a culture that is alien to them, gets in the way of their being able to respond to the kingdom of heaven.

The past is a foreign country. Sad though some people may find this, others find a Comper high altar so inculturated in its own time and place that it now gets in the way of their spiritual engagement. We are not earnest young Edwardians.

Comper was in his time, part of our culture. For most English people, he probably isn't now.

Nor is there any fundamental spiritual principle that to approach God In Christ, one must first let oneself be redesigned as an earnest young Edwardian, an evangelical ordinand in 1955, an Oxford undergraduate of the late 1830s, the wife of a late C15 East Anglian wool merchant, or (more relevant now) a member of a Californian megachurch.

Liturgy is important. It matters. That's why people argue so vehemently about it. Good liturgy is something both that we can engage with and which stretches us, makes us more the person God calls us to be. Bad liturgy can be all sorts of things, trite, incomprehensible, infatuated with form rather than substance, precious and much else.

If tradition encourages us to approach the throne of grace with reverence and fear/awe, then it is good. If it gets in the way of our doing that, is so difficult to do that no one does it any more, or means that most people won't bother to approach at all, its day is past.

Posted by stonespring (# 15530) on :

First, some quotes:

From Vatican II, Lumen Gentium, 1964:

From 13: "the Church or people of God in establishing that kingdom takes nothing away from the temporal welfare of any people. On the contrary it fosters and takes to itself, insofar as they are good, the ability, riches and customs in which the genius of each people expresses itself. Taking them to itself it purifies, strengthens, elevates and ennobles them."

Also from 13: "Moreover, within the Church particular Churches hold a rightful place; these Churches retain their own traditions, without in any way opposing the primacy of the Chair of Peter, which presides over the whole assembly of charity and protects legitimate differences, while at the same time assuring that such differences do not hinder unity but rather contribute toward it."

From 17: "Through her [the Church's] work, whatever good is in the minds and hearts of men, whatever good lies latent in the religious practices and cultures of diverse peoples, is not only saved from destruction but is also cleansed, raised up and perfected unto the glory of God, the confusion of the devil and the happiness of man."

From John Paul II, Catechesi Tradendae, 1979 (note this is all about catechesis, teaching the gospel to people previously untaught it, and not so much about liturgy for Christian comunities once they are long established):

"The Message Embodied in Cultures

53. Now a second question. As I said recently to the members of the Biblical Commission: "The term 'acculturation' or 'inculturation' may be a neologism, but it expresses very well one factor of the great mystery of the Incarnation."(94) We can say of catechesis, as well as of evangelization in general, that it is called to bring the power of the Gospel into the very heart of culture and cultures. For this purpose, catechesis will seek to know these cultures and their essential components; it will learn their most significant expressions; it will respect their particular values and riches. In this manner it will be able to offer these cultures the knowledge of the hidden mystery(95) and help them to bring forth from their own living tradition original expressions of Christian life, celebration and thought. Two things must however be kept in mind.

On the one hand the Gospel message cannot be purely and simply isolated from the culture in which it was first inserted (the biblical world or, more concretely, the cultural milieu in which Jesus of Nazareth lived), nor, without serious loss, from the cultures in which it has already been expressed down the centuries; it does not spring spontaneously from any cultural soil; it has always been transmitted by means of an apostolic dialogue which inevitably becomes part of a certain dialogue of cultures.

On the other hand, the power of the Gospel everywhere transforms and regenerates. When that power enters into a culture, it is no surprise that it rectifies many of its elements. There would be no catechesis if it were the Gospel that had to change when it came into contact with the cultures.

To forget this would simply amount to what St. Paul very forcefully calls "emptying the cross of Christ of its power."(96)

It is a different matter to take, with wise discernment, certain elements, religious or otherwise, that form part of the cultural heritage of a human group and use them to help its members to understand better the whole of the Christian mystery. Genuine catechists know that catechesis "takes flesh" in the various cultures and milieux: one has only to think of the peoples with their great differences, of modern youth, of the great variety of circumstances in which people find themselves today. But they refuse to accept an impoverishment of catechesis through a renunciation or obscuring of its message, by adaptations, even in language, that would endanger the "precious deposit" of the faith,(97) or by concessions in matters of faith or morals. They are convinced that true catechesis eventually enriches these cultures by helping them to go beyond the defective or even inhuman features in them, and by communicating to their legitimate values the fullness of Christ.(98)"

Stonespring: Ok, so we're not all Roman Catholics, but the ideas above were very influential in the ecumenical movement called "inculturation." Does the description above describe what has actually been played out in terms of incluturation in the liturgy, both for newly evangelized parts of the world, and for evangelism to "unchurched" people and ethnic minorities in the West?

As you can see above, incluturation has often been described in a way that makes it sound temporary, as a form of catechesis, ie., teaching the gospel. (I included the pit on particular Churches, ie, Churches with Eastern Liturgies in Communion with Rome, who have a permanent arrangement allowing them to be different in liturgy but I know that the documents on inculturation generally do not apply to them since their rites are ancient like the Roman Rite.)

Why can't inculturation result in new Particular Churches? New permanent Liturgical Rites? I guess this question makes most sense in a Roman Catholic context, since the individual Anglican provinces all are largely independent and get to make their own liturgical texts, but you could argue that all of their Books of Common Prayer still seem "based" largely on the prayer books of one or more Western countries. Why not let a Liturgical Rite develop for an African, Asian, Pacific, or Native North or South American culture from scratch? Is this even possible now since Roman, Othrodox, Anglican, and Protestant liturgies shape everyone's idea of what liturgy should be?

I am also interested to see what Orthodox people here think about inculturation.

Posted by Zappa (# 8433) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Mockingbird:
I never heard the words "enculturation" or "inculturation" until fairly recently. The concept (though not the word) I remember first encountering in the 1970s.

I first heard the word in missiological contexts. It's segue into liturgiological contexts though is not surprising and is appropriate - and there should I think be a chronological as well as a sociological dimension to that. Which means that while ancient high altars should not be burned - God forbid - contemporary expressions of liturgical faith should not be spurned, either - with the rider these must be both christologically anchored and as it were eschatologically soaring ... for that is the task of liturgy.

Posted by Jade Constable (# 17175) on :

Enoch - [Overused]

Posted by Ad Orientem (# 17574) on :

For me inculturation should extend only to things like using the vernacular or introducing feasts of local saints. I would be highly suspicious of anyone one essentially trying to invent a new rite, the result being something akin to some of the stuff seen in Africa or Latin America which is basically semi-pagan.

Posted by stonespring (# 15530) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ad Orientem:
For me inculturation should extend only to things like using the vernacular or introducing feasts of local saints. I would be highly suspicious of anyone one essentially trying to invent a new rite, the result being something akin to some of the stuff seen in Africa or Latin America which is basically semi-pagan.

And the Roman Rite isn't semi-pagan?

Posted by Ad Orientem (# 17574) on :

In short, no, though of course I refer only to the old Roman Rite (I have no time for the new rite).

[ 03. December 2013, 15:06: Message edited by: Ad Orientem ]

Posted by stonespring (# 15530) on :

I never understood the idea that the influences of Greco-Roman/Hellenistic paganism and other mystery cults of the Mediterranean and Middle East, not to mention the Pre-Christian Paganism of Western Europe, on Christianity is all ok because Plato and Aristotle were guided in some way by God but not to the full truth or something like that, but the paganism of the rest of Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas is evil and can't be allowed to corrupt Christianity. Like my quotes from Lumen Gentium and JPII said, let the Church draw what is good from the cultures of the world, and heal what is bad. (Of course, this has to be done with the consent of any people interested in becoming Christian, without any coersion whatsoever, which is much more difficult in practice than in theory.)

Posted by Ad Orientem (# 17574) on :

First you'd have to demonstrate that they directly influenced the faith and worship of the ancient Church. Greek philosophy certainly helped to articulate the faith to the Greek speaking world, but that is something entirely different, and to claim anything more than that would be pushing it, I would argue. And don't get me started on John Paul II or the documents of Vatican. Really, don't.

[ 03. December 2013, 16:15: Message edited by: Ad Orientem ]

Posted by Pancho (# 13533) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ad Orientem:
the stuff seen in Africa or Latin America which is basically semi-pagan.

What stuff would that be exactly?

Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on :

But we don't live in a late antique Greco-Roman/Hellenistic culture. Nor for that matter a sixteenth century Northern European or Italian one.

So why should our worship carry on being designed so as to relate to the inhabitants of such cultures? Why should there be any special merit in its being so designed? And why should designing worship that is inculturated to fit the cultures people currently inhabit only be an interim stage so that they can then be reinculturated to a form of worship designed for a Sitzimleben that nobody has inhabited for several centuries?

Posted by Ad Orientem (# 17574) on :

We still practice the ancient liturgies because by continuous use over the centuries we can be sure that they have the approval of the Holy Spirit and are orthodox. That's why we shouldn't change them or invent new ones.

Posted by Ad Orientem (# 17574) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Pancho:

quote:
Originally posted by Ad Orientem:
the stuff seen in Africa or Latin America which is basically semi-pagan.
What stuff would that be exactly?

Haiti is a good example where voodoo has been incorporated into Christian worship, even with the approval of Rome, it seems. Yes, paganism, the worship of idols and demons.

Posted by ken (# 2460) on :

Haiti is neither Africa nor what is normally called Latin America. (Would you call northern Maine or New Hampshire "Latin America"?)

And Voodoo is no more encultured Christianity than Odinism is.

Posted by ken (# 2460) on :

Mainstream Protestantism is precisely orthodox Christianity encultured in early modern northern Europe.

Posted by Ad Orientem (# 17574) on :

quote:
Originally posted by ken:
Mainstream Protestantism is precisely orthodox Christianity encultured in early modern northern Europe.

Yeah, whatever... [Roll Eyes]

Posted by Basilica (# 16965) on :

The problem with inculturation is that it tends to deny the fullness of the Incarnation.

This probably seems like a surprising statement, because most people who advocate inculturation say that it follows "incarnational principles", i.e. getting inside a community and living there, rather than preaching at it from the outside. Which is a fair point, to an extent.

However, this reduces the Incarnation to an abstract principle. The Incarnation becomes about cultural solidarity, whereas I struggle to see that as evident in the Bible. Inculturation, taken to an extreme, denies that there is anything specific and special about the cultural situation of Jesus Christ. That is to say, his being Jewish and all that that entails is irrelevant: it only matters that he was incarnate in a cultural situation; which cultural situation is irrelevant.

This is problematic theologically. Part of being human is existing in a specific time and space. If you say that you can take Jesus Christ out of his context and recontextualise/reinculturate him elsewhere, you deny that he was really and genuinely incarnate in a specific situation. It denies the full humanity of Christ in the Incarnation.

So this means we have to be very careful when dealing with the introduction of the Gospel to a new culture. That doesn't mean we shouldn't make changes or adaptations, merely that we should take care in so doing.

Furthermore, we should be careful in changing our liturgy so as to deny its origin in the Christian tradition of centuries. We don't do theology de novo: we do it based on the theology and hermeneutics that we have inherited. In the same way, we shouldn't do liturgy (or indeed mission, preaching or any other expression of Christianity) de novo: it is tightly bound up with our theology. We should be careful about making modifications that are in accordance with the traditions of the Christian faith.

Posted by CL (# 16145) on :

quote:
Originally posted by ken:
Mainstream Protestantism is precisely orthodox Christianity encultured in early modern northern Europe.

Utter tripe.

Posted by CL (# 16145) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ad Orientem:

quote:
Originally posted by Pancho:

quote:
Originally posted by Ad Orientem:
the stuff seen in Africa or Latin America which is basically semi-pagan.
What stuff would that be exactly?
Haiti is a good example where voodoo has been incorporated into Christian worship, even with the approval of Rome, it seems. Yes, paganism, the worship of idols and demons.

More utter tripe.

Posted by ken (# 2460) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ad Orientem:

quote:
Originally posted by ken:
Mainstream Protestantism is precisely orthodox Christianity encultured in early modern northern Europe.
Yeah, whatever...

Coming from someone who seems to think that Africans aren't clever enough to be real Christians, I can only take that as a compliment.

Posted by Ad Orientem (# 17574) on :

When did I say that?

Posted by ken (# 2460) on :

quote:
Originally posted by CL:

quote:
Originally posted by ken:
Mainstream Protestantism is precisely orthodox Christianity encultured in early modern northern Europe.
Utter tripe.

I see no cattle stomachs here. I think you need to explain what you mean.

I can explain what I meant quite easily (though its so obvious It would probably be a waste of time).

Posted by dj_ordinaire (# 4643) on :

CL (and to a lesser extent Ad Orientum and ken):

This board is a place for respectful debate. Robust discussion is fine but I hardly need add that simply proclaiming that something is 'utter tripe' doesn't fit that category.

Keep the discussion civil or take it to Hell.

dj_ordinaire, Eccles host

Posted by stonespring (# 15530) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ad Orientem:

quote:
Originally posted by Pancho:

quote:
Originally posted by Ad Orientem:
the stuff seen in Africa or Latin America which is basically semi-pagan.
What stuff would that be exactly?
Haiti is a good example where voodoo has been incorporated into Christian worship, even with the approval of Rome, it seems. Yes, paganism, the worship of idols and demons.

Ok - kindly explain how images of the Madonna and child were not influenced by images of Isis and Horus, how images of God the Father were not influenced by images of Zeus/Jupiter, and how a Jewish person of Christ's day would not have been scandalized by seeing the veneration of statues that occurs in Catholic churches (veneration which I do frequently) and would not compare it to the erection of a statue of a pagan emperor/god in the temple. And as for Western/Northern Europe, you have the date of Christmas, the name "Yule," the practice of decorating Christmas trees, the name "Easter," decorating eggs at Easter, the date of the Solemnities of All Saints and All Souls - all influenced, sometimes intentionally as a means of evangelization, by pagan practice. Do you honestly think that dipping the Paschal candle in and out of the baptismal font during the Easter Vigil has no relation whatsoever to pagan fertility rites? Oh, but this is all ok because it was the world that Christ incarnated into. Other cultures weren't as lucky so they have to give up all of their traditions and take on Western ones.

Inculturation has been going on for centuries through colonialism: the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Catholic Church architecture in colonial New Mexico, depipictions of the Blessed Virgin Mary as Pacha Mama in Peruvian colonial art - all influenced by pagan, non-Western practices.

I agree with the people here who dislike having liturgical experts, often Western or products of a Western education, composing inculturated liturgies for the developing world. Liturgy composed from scratch (or taking a basic framework from tradition and then adding all kinds of innovations based on a liturgist's whims) based on "anthropological research" is rarely good liturgy.

I think a better form of inculturation is grass-roots rather than top-down. If the people start their own practices in worship, influenced by their non-Western cultures, and these practices help rather than hinder their Christian faith, then allow them and if they are used in Liturgy often enough codify them in the rubrics as locally authorized options. Gradually, new liturgical uses will develop, and in time these new uses might become entirely separate liturgical rites. Isn't this largely how the ancient Christian Rites developed? Isn't this how different uses of the Roman Rite developed in the Middle Ages? What is it that Armenia, Ethiopia, India, and the other far corners of the Early Christian world that have ancient Liturgical Rites that made them "part of the world that Christ incarnated into" any more than the places where inculturation continues today? I just do not get the Orthodox argument that if a liturgical practice isn't ancient enough or hasn't continued in use up until the present day it must be unpermissible. This inevitably results in Evangelization being Eurocentric, Occidento-centric (is that a word?), if not outright imperialistic. And I am saying this as a stickler for sky-high Liturgy!

Posted by Pancho (# 13533) on :

quote:
Originally posted by CL:

quote:
Originally posted by ken:
Mainstream Protestantism is precisely orthodox Christianity encultured in early modern northern Europe.
Utter tripe.

I'd like to take a guess at what CL meant.

I think he disputes that Mainstream Protestantism is orthodox Christianity in the first place. I also think he disputes that Mainstream Protestantism is encultured in early modern northern Europe, given that northern Europe was Christianized centuries before the Reformation. Rather, much of the culture of northern Europe (edited to add: of the present day) is a result of the Protestantism that arose in early modern northern Europe.

If you really want to see what Christianity encultured in northern Europe looks like you should look at northern Europe in the Middle Ages, full of saints and pilgrimages and processions and holy places like the lands around the Mediterranean. A few years ago a local t.v. channel ran the t.v. series for Simon Schama's History of Britan. I remember there was a bit where they showed an English church as it looked now and then showed how it would have looked before the Reformation. The walls and pillars were painted in numerous bold colors and patterns in a style that high-and-dry churchman might call “garish”.

I've read that Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter, besides being an excellent novel, is supposed to be a very vivid depiction of life in medieval Norway.

quote:
Originally posted by ken:
Haiti is neither Africa nor what is normally called Latin America. (Would you call northern Maine or New Hampshire "Latin America"?)

I've seen the French-speaking Caribbean classified as being part of Latin America in at least one schoolbook that I can remember.
It's not common to do so, but Romance language speakers fall under the broad definition of “Latins” like the Portuguese and even the Romanians do.

quote:
And Voodoo is no more encultured Christianity than Odinism is.

I would say it has syncretized elements.

quote:
Originally posted by Ad Orientem:

quote:
Originally posted by Pancho:

quote:
Originally posted by Ad Orientem:
the stuff seen in Africa or Latin America which is basically semi-pagan.
What stuff would that be exactly?
Haiti is a good example where voodoo has been incorporated into Christian worship, even with the approval of Rome, it seems. Yes, paganism, the worship of idols and demons.

If you can show where Rome has approved incorporation of voodoo into Christian worship then that would be helpful.

If you could provide or at least describe an example of this incorporation then that would be helpful too. I don't know of any houngans(voodoo priests) that have been allowed to conduct their rites in churches. I don't know of any loas (voodoo spirits) that are publicly worshiped in Catholic churches (a voodoo practitioner who identifies the saints with the loas is a different thing).

I think you're confusing “enculturation” with “syncretization”. Christianity has always done the former, the latter is what happened when African religions were brought to the New World.

[ 05. December 2013, 20:22: Message edited by: Pancho ]

Posted by Jade Constable (# 17175) on :

The Celtic church is surely a good example of orthodox Christianity enculturated in Northern Europe - it had its own particular cultural markers, but was also perfectly orthodox (and not the semi-pagan hippyish Christianty modern people often imagine).

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