Modern Christian worship now stands almost two thousand years from the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 ce, and even farther away from the worship and rituals of Solomon’s temple. While one might think that such distance eliminates much of a relationship between these phenomena and current worship practices and language, western and eastern Christian liturgies still seek to root their worship in the language, institutions, and memory of Israelite and Second Temple worship. Upon reflection, the number of references to elements of Hebrew Bible ritual and worship in contemporary Christian liturgies is rather amazing—references to sacrifice, priests, offerings, sanctuary, altar, prayer, baptism as circumcision, to list only a few. As is well known, this impulse in Christian worship manifested itself from the earliest days of the church. In its writings, the early church demonstrates a penchant for transforming and coopting Jewish practices that had their basis in Hebrew Bible ritual. However, in their metaphorical interpretation and reapplication of Hebrew Bible worship, members of the early church paralleled practices found in other Second Temple Jewish groups at the same time and even within sections of the Hebrew Bible itself.
For those unfamiliar with modern liturgy, entry into the area can be fraught with confusion and complications. Periodic updates and new editions of worship books can cause those who stand outside a tradition to wonder about the most current form of any particular liturgy. Access to some rites in the eastern traditions can be quite difficult. All this also means that secondary literature on liturgies becomes dated when a tradition sanctions a new edition or makes simple updates, which may reflect a significant theological or aesthetic shift. A helpful listing and brief description of the multitude of worship books can be found in the entry titled “Books, Liturgical,” by multiple authors, in The New SCM Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship [ed. Paul Bradshaw, London: SCM Press, 2002]. However, as an example of the struggle to remain current in this area, in the same year of this dictionary’s publication a new edition of the Roman Missal commissioned by John Paul II appeared in Latin, followed by the United States English version in 2011. Besides these matters, for a non-specialist, worship books can resemble a liturgical puzzle. For example, the Roman Missal is a massive volume that basically requires guidance from a trained person in order to understand what sections are to be used, how they are to be used, and when they are used. The Anglican tradition also presents difficulties, as many churches in several nations have published their own prayer books.
In addition to the current version of the Roman Missal, my examination especially focuses on The Book of Common Prayer (USA version, 1979), the Lutheran Book of Worship (ELCA version, 1978), the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship (1993), and discussions about the meaning of worship and ritual within the Reformed tradition. The rites of the Eastern Churches present another set of complications. Johnson identifies seven “distinct living liturgical traditions” in the Christian east (Johnson, 2007: 269), each with its own complicated history. Pentiuc assesses the situation in this manner: “Given the wealth of liturgical material belonging to the Orthodox Church, much of it [is] yet to be touched by scholarly hands…[and] has been often underestimated or entirely overlooked” (Pentiuc, 2014: 199). Discussions on Eastern liturgy that follow will center on the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and St. Basil. Forms of these two liturgies conveniently appear on the official website of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America (https://www.goarch.org).
This essay will first concentrate on references to Hebrew Bible ritual and worship in the Eucharistic liturgies. References to sacrifice and altar, of course, abound in the Eucharistic liturgies. However, the liturgies will include references to other elements from Hebrew Bible worship or history. Baptismal liturgies can also be ripe with Hebrew Bible imagery. Third, several liturgies demonstrate a remarkable ability to imagine the offerings brought to the church as if they are offerings presented at the Jerusalem temple when it stood. Fourth, some attention is given to discussions about the understanding of the priesthood. Fifth, the essay offers a brief examination of features of Holy Week liturgies, especially within The Book of Common Prayer. Finally, I will consider the ways in which modern anthropological theories can illuminate the function of the references to Hebrew Bible ritual and worship within current liturgies.
Assumed throughout this discussion is the continuing role that prayer and songs play in Christian worship, both of which have their roots in Hebrew Bible worship and ritual. While the priests apparently performed no prayers during temple sacrifices (see Knohl, 17–30), certainly other Hebrew Bible texts depict people at prayer and sometimes connect prayer to the Jerusalem temple (see Miller 1994; Balentine 1993). For example, 1 and 2 Chronicles assign the Levites the roles of praying as well as offering songs of praise and thanksgiving at the temple (1 Chron 16:4–36; 2 Chron 7:6; 8:14; 29:25–30; 30:21).
Psalms also played a key role in Israel’s worship, and Christian liturgy is filled with linguistic influences from the collection. In addition, the Psalms are read during Christian services. William Holladay has provided a helpful summary of the use of the Psalms in Catholic and Protestant liturgies (Holladay, 1996: 265–280). He notes that the liturgical practices that developed after Vatican II include a psalm as an “entrance antiphon,” which the priests and the congregation may recite together in unison. Both the Sunday Mass and daily Mass include a “responsorial psalm” that occurs after the first biblical reading (Holladay, 1996: 273). On occasion, “a verse taken from the Psalms…is recited by the priest and congregation just before the Eucharist is distributed” (Holladay, 1996: 274). The daily office includes numerous readings from the Psalms. As a result, according to Holladay, priests and lay people become shaped by the Psalms (Holladay, 1996: 274–276). In the years after Vatican II, Protestants worked, sometimes together, to develop lectionaries that somewhat followed the Catholic lectionary. In 1983, several Protestant denominations published a “Common Lectionary,” which makes even more extensive use of the Psalms than the Catholic lectionary (Holladay, 1996: 278). Beyond Holladay’s observation about how the Psalms shape clergy and laity, their use also attempts to ground the themes of the Christian liturgical year in the psalter. As a result, worshippers hear the Psalms through a Christian filter, and the church leads the people to imagine a continuity between the worship of Israel and the church’s worship instead of a disjuncture.
The Eucharist stands at the heart of Catholic worship, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church links it to several elements in the Hebrew Bible. In part, the church situates the Eucharist within its understanding of creation theology and places the Eucharist into the category of a thanksgiving offering to God. This feature appears in the opening lines of the Liturgy of the Eucharist in the Roman Missal:
Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation,
for through your goodness we have received
the bread we offer you…
Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation,
for through your goodness we have received
the wine we offer you…(RM, 529)
The Catechism also in part explains the meal as an imitation of Israel’s practice of offering the “first fruits of the earth as a sigh of grateful acknowledgement to the Creator” (CCC, 1334; Ryan, 2002: 451). Further, “The Eucharist is a sacrifice of thanksgiving to the Father, a blessing by which the Church expresses her gratitude to God for all his benefits for all that he has accomplished through creation, redemption and sanctification. Eucharist means first of all ‘thanksgiving’” (CCC, 1360). Even here the Catechism has employed a sacrifice metaphor. This “sacrifice of thanksgiving” becomes possible, the Catechism clarifies, only through the work of and in Christ (CCC, 1361).
These opening blessings tie the Eucharist to the Passover. Some have noted that the blessings resemble in content and form the berakah-type prayers over the bread and wine in the Passover Haggadah (Bradshaw and Johnson, 2012: 312–13). The Catechism also identifies the Passover as the predecessor to the Eucharist. This, of course, is based on an understanding that the meal at which Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper was a Passover meal, which he reinterpreted. According to the Catechism, in the meal “Jesus gave the Jewish Passover its definitive meaning…[and the Eucharist] fulfills the Jewish Passover and anticipates the final Passover of the Church in the glory of the kingdom” (CCC, 1340). At this point, the Catechism strikes a note of supersessionism, which is often a danger in liturgies as they take over and “spiritualize” Hebrew Bible and Jewish practices. Readers will notice that this will not be the final incident of this in liturgies to be discussed in the remainder of this essay. Other scholars locate the origins of the Eucharistic prayer partly in the Jewish table prayer birkat ha-mazon (Ryan, 2002: 456). Others have noted that the blessings bear some resemblance to Didache 9 and 10 (cf. Ryan, 2002: 456).
Pope Paul VI introduced these formulae into the Eucharistic prayer, or anaphora, and, as mentioned earlier, they serve as “preparation” for the bread and wine to be “offered” as a “sacrifice” to God (Bradshaw and Johnson, 2012: 311–12). As Bradshaw and Johnson explain, besides cleaning up an ambiguity in the logic of a previous version of the mass (Bradshaw and Johnson, 2012: 311–12), the shift in language follows a more general trend in Catholic and Protestant liturgy through the 20th century of moving away from medieval scholastic language to more ancient traditions, whether from the church fathers or Jewish worship language (Bradshaw and Johnson, 2012: 298).
While several theological matters influenced the language of the Roman Missal, these blessings serve to link the liturgy and the worshippers to the earliest days of the church, to Judaism from which it emerged, to the Hebrew Bible, and to the work of Jesus Christ. These alterations, in part, add to the feel of antiquity in the liturgy and encourage worshippers to sense a link between themselves and the people of antiquity. More than this, this structure of the liturgy establishes the present moment—the moment of the pronouncement of the liturgy—as a pivot point between past and future. Far from diminishing the present and privileging history or eschaton, the present is joined to both—the Eucharist intends to link past history and the eschaton in the present at the moment of Eucharistic celebration.
According to the Catechism, the Eucharist is a sacrifice “because it re-presents (makes present) the sacrifice of the cross…” (CCC, 1366). As the Eucharistic celebration begins, the priest asks for God’s acceptance for the sacrifice to be offered in the Mass:
With humble spirit and contrite heart
may we be accepted by you, O Lord,
and may our sacrifice in your sight this day
be pleasing to you, Lord God. (RM, 529)
Then the priest washes his hands at the side of the altar and says the following words:
Wash me, O Lord, from my iniquity
and cleanse me from my sin. (RM, 530)
The action invokes priestly oblations like those in Leviticus 8 and 16. Further, the words for cleansing resemble Ps 51:2: “Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.” The liturgy then casts the people as bringing the gifts for the sacrifice, as they ask for God’s blessing and announce their preparation for the presentation through cleansing themselves.
Following the words of institution, the congregation hears the priest offering the following prayer that proclaims that the bread and the wine are both a memorial and re-presentation of Christ’s sacrifice (cf. Bradshaw and Johnson, 2012: 350–51), which is to be conveyed to the heavenly altar. Drawing on scenes of sacrifice from the Hebrew Bible, the liturgy asks God to accept the gift like God accepted the gifts of Abel, Abraham, and Melchizedek:
Therefore, O Lord,
as we celebrate the memorial of the blessed Passion…
this pure victim,
this holy victim,
this spotless victim,
the holy Bread of eternal life
and the Chalice of everlasting salvation.
Be pleased to look upon these offerings
with a serene and kindly countenance,
and to accept them,
as once you were pleased to accept
the gifts of your servant Abel the just,
the sacrifice of Abraham, our father in faith,
and the offering of your high priest Melchizedek,
a holy sacrifice, a spotless victim.
Bowing, with hands joined, he continues:
In humble prayer we ask you, almighty God:
command that these gifts be borne
by the hands of your holy Angel
to your altar on high
in the sight of your divine majesty,
so that all of us, who through this participation at the altar
receive the most holy Body and Blood of your Son,
may be filled with every grace and heavenly blessing. (RM, 641)
Eucharistic prayer III also emphasizes the sacrifice Christ offered through the sacrament through the images of reconciliation:
[W]e offer you in thanksgiving
this holy and living sacrifice.
Look, we pray, upon the oblation of your Church
and, recognizing the sacrificial Victim by whose death…(RM, 653)
As the bread is broken and a portion placed within the chalice, the people recite the following three times:
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world,
have mercy on us. (RM, 667)
The priest soon repeats the image as he says:
Behold the Lamb of God,
behold him who takes away the sins of the world.
Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb. (RM, 669)
Drawing on statements from the Council of Trent, the Catechism explains this in the following manner:
[T]he bloody sacrifice which he was to accomplish once for all on the cross would be re-presented, its memory perpetuated until the end of the world, and its salutary power be applied to the forgiveness of sins we daily commit (CCC, 1366)…The victim is one and the same: the same now offers through the ministry of priests, who then offered himself on the cross; only the manner of the offering is different. And since in this divine sacrifice which is celebrated in the Mass, the same Christ who offered himself once in a bloody manner on the altar of the cross is contained and offered in an unbloody manner…this sacrifice is truly propitiatory. (CCC, 1367)
The evocation of Hebrew Bible sacrificial language in the Mass is also found in the use of the term “altar,” the table on which the Lord’s Supper is presented. The Catechism explains that in the celebration of the Eucharist, the altar “represents the two aspects of the same mystery: the altar of the sacrifice and the table of the Lord” (CCC, 1182). In fact, the altar is “the symbol of Christ himself, present in the midst of the assembly of his faithful” (CCC, 1182). Later, the Catechism refers to the heart as an altar, and is, in part, connected to practice of the liturgy: “The spiritual writers sometimes compare the heart to an altar. Prayer internalizes and assimilates the liturgy during and after its celebration” (CCC, 2655).
In On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), Luther refutes the church’s doctrine of transubstantiation, in part claiming to follow in the protests of theologians John Wycliffe and John Hus (Luther’s Works, 30). Luther, an Augustinian monk, preferred Plato’s philosophy and abhorred Aquinas’s use of Aristotle, which had become the philosophical underpinning for the doctrine. He relentlessly attacks the doctrine as “pseudo philosophy” (Luther’s Works, 31, but see pp. 29–35). The reformer’s criticisms had first arisen, however, in his sermons (Cuming, 1982: 15; cf. White, 1989: 36–37). Luther’s position shook the foundations of sacramental theology established at the end of the Middle Ages, as White explains: “The treatise represents a paradigm shift, for it completely undercuts the ground on which the whole of medieval sacramental system stood” (White, 1989: 36–37). In the process, Luther also broke from the traditional understanding of the Lord’s Supper as a sacrifice, as he railed: “The third captivity of this sacrament is by far the most wicked abuse of all, in consequence of which there is no opinion more generally held or more firmly believed in the church today than this, that the mass is a good work and a sacrifice” (Luther’s Works, 35). The Lutheran tradition, along with the Reformed tradition, has remained “adamant in rejecting any kind of sacrificial or offering language with regard to the Eucharist” (Bradshaw and Johnson, 2012: 333).
These differences are apparent when comparing the liturgy in the ELCA Lutheran Book of Worship to the Roman Missal. As mentioned, any hint that the bread and the cup function as a sacrifice is completely missing from the service. The words the congregation either says or sings ring of eschatological victory: “This is the feast of the victory for our God. Alleluia…Worthy is Christ, the Lamb who was slain, whose blood set us free to be the people of God…Join in the hymn of all creation: Blessing, honor, glory, and might be to God and the Lamb forever. Amen” (LBW, 60–61; Setting One). The image and the language draw from the scene of the heavenly worship of the slain but victorious Lamb of God in Revelation 5. Of course, the sacrifice of a lamb originally springs from Israelite worship. The liturgy had already introduced the eschatological hope in the Offertory Hymn, which refers to the “cup of blessing,” “the bread of life,” the “presence” of God’s grace at the “table” as a “foretaste of the feast to come.” The difference between the Mass and the Lutheran liturgy at these moments in the service avoids any suggestion that the sacrifice is happening once again or being “re-presented.”
The Presbyterian Common Book of Worship assiduously avoids the kind of language found in the Mass and the Catholic Catechism. In typical reformed theology, one immediately finds the language of “memorial”: in the Eucharist “[t]he church is renewed and empowered as in thanksgiving it remembers Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and promised return” (BCW, 41–42). The Presbyterian manual continues by referring to the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but mostly speaks of that presence in terms of Christ’s activity: “The people of God are sustained by the promised presence of Christ, and are assured of participation in Christ’s offering. Christ’s love is received, the covenant is renewed, and the power of Christ’s reign for the renewing of the earth is proclaimed” (BCW, 42). Nevertheless, the Supper is more than a “reminder,” as “[i]t is a means, given by Christ, through which the risen Lord is truly present as a continuing power and reality until the day of his coming” (BCW, 42). In language resembling the Lutheran liturgy, the manual emphasizes that the Lord’s Supper is a participation in God’s victory and it “anticipates the great banquet of the new age in God’s eternal kingdom” (BCW, 42). Within the liturgy, in fact, the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship uses the same expression as the Lutheran liturgy: “This is the feast of the victory of our God” (BCW, 59). Also worth noting, in the Great Thanksgiving leading to the Eucharist, praises to God especially focus on events from the Hebrew Bible: “…[C]reating all things, the providence of God, establishing the covenant, giving the law, the witness of the prophets, God’s boundless love and mercy in spite of human failure…” (BCW, 42, see the liturgy on 69–70). The Proper Prefaces provide prayers with similar themes as these, but they are also tuned to the liturgical seasons (BCW, 133).
The Book of Common Prayer appears to focus on the memorial aspect of the ritual:
All glory be to thee, Almighty God, our heavenly Father, for that thou, of thy tender mercy, didst give thine only son Jesus Christ to suffer death upon the cross for our redemption; who made there, but his one oblation of himself one offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world; and did institute, and in his holy Gospel command us to continue, a perpetual memory of his precious death and sacrifice, until his coming. (BCP, 334, Rite I)
However, the liturgy does state that the people are receiving the body and blood of Christ: “[T]hat we…may worthily receive the most precious Body and Blood of thy son Jesus Christ” (BCP, 336, Rite I). In Rite II the celebrant offers the following prayer: “We celebrate the memorial of our redemption, O Father, in this sacrifice of praise of thanksgiving…Sanctify them [the gifts of the bread and the cup] by your Holy Spirit to be for your people the Body and Blood of your Son, the holy food and drink of new and unending life in him” (BCP, 363). This section of Rite II displays multiple interpretations of the Lord’s Supper—memorial, the real sacrifice as one of praise and not a literal sacrifice, and the bread and cup functioning as a symbol “for” the people. The Catechism in The Book of Common Prayer does not provide a thorough explanation about how the bread and wine convey the presence of Christ, and only offers this statement: “The inward and spiritual grace in the Holy Communion is the Body and Blood of Christ given to his people, and received by faith” (BCP, 859). The Catechism explains the nature of the Eucharist as a sacrifice for the following reason: “Because the Eucharist, the Church’s sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, is the way by which the sacrifice of Christ is made present, and in which he unites us to his one offering of himself” (BCP, 859).
Western liturgies claim that the worship taking place in the congregation somehow joins in the worship in the heavens in the reciting of the Sanctus. Taking up the words of the Seraphim in Isa 6:3 the congregation says, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” However, the Greek Orthodox liturgy seems to emphasize especially that the worship happening in the congregation is at one with the worship taking place in heaven. The “Entrance Prayer” immediately establishes this feature of the worship:
Master, Lord our God, Who has established the orders and hosts of angels and archangels in heaven to minister to Your glory, grant that holy angels may enter with us, that together we may celebrate and glorify Your goodness. For to You belong all glory, honor, and worship, to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, now and forever and to the ages of ages. (All quotations of Greek Orthodox liturgy are from https://www.goarch.org)
This prayer leads directly to the enunciation of the Trisagion Hymn. This hymn obviously develops from the scene of angelic worship in Isaiah 6: “O Holy God, Who is resting among the holy ones, praised by the Seraphim with the thrice-holy voice, glorified by the Cherubim, and worshiped by every celestial power.…” This tradition is not the same as the Sanctus, which occurs later in the liturgy during the Holy Anaphora. The cherubim mentioned in the Entrance Hymn of the liturgy must refer to the cherubim that stood on top of the Ark of the Covenant and those that appear in Ezekiel’s visions of the chariot throne. The liturgy claims that God grants humans, who are created in God’s image, access to the heavenly altar during worship: “You have granted us, Your humble and unworthy servants, to stand even at this hour before the glory of Your holy Altar of sacrifice and to offer to You due worship and praise.” The hymn itself is also Trinitarian: “Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us. Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, now and forever and to the ages of ages. Amen.” As this section of the liturgy concludes, God is praised as “enthroned upon the Cherubim always.”
The theme of participation in heavenly worship returns in the singing or chanting of the Cherubic Hymn: “Let us, who mystically represent the Cherubim and who sing the thrice-holy hymn to the life-creating Trinity, now lay aside every worldly care. So that we may receive the King of all.…” The liturgy then essentially transforms the whole system of Hebrew Bible worship into the worship of the church, which is accomplished without a sacrifice of blood. The priest’s words that proclaim this appear to be founded upon Heb 4:14–16; 5:1–10; 8:1–13: “You, as the Master of all, became our high priest and delivered unto us the sacred service of this liturgical sacrifice without the shedding of blood.” Now the priest, having been cleansed through grace and clothed with the priesthood, stands before the altar to celebrate the mystery of the Eucharist.
Much like liturgies in other traditions, the Offertory Prayer proclaims the offering is now a spiritual sacrifice, which nevertheless still requires God’s blessing and acceptance: “You accept the sacrifice of praise from those who call upon You with their whole heart, even so, accept from us sinners our supplication, and bring it to Your holy Altar of sacrifice. Enable us to offer You gifts and spiritual sacrifices for our own sins and the failings of Your people.”
The Liturgy of St. Basil also refers to worship with angels in the Small Entrance: “Master and Lord our God, You have established in heaven the orders and hosts of angels and archangels to minister to Your glory. Grant that the holy angels may enter with us that together we may serve and glorify Your goodness. For to You belong all glory, honor, and worship to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, now and forever and to the ages of ages. Amen.” The Trisagion Hymn soon follows. The Cherubic Hymn is part of the Great Entrance. During the petitions, the priest offers a prayer that God will accept the sacrifice of praise of the people as God accepted the physical sacrifices of figures in the Hebrew Bible: “…O God, and consider our worship; and accept it as You accepted the gifts of Abel, the sacrifices of Noah, the burnt offerings of Abraham, the priestly offices of Moses and Aaron, and the peace offerings of Samuel. As You accepted this true worship from Your holy apostles, accept also in Your goodness, O Lord, these gifts from the hands of us sinners, that being deemed worthy to serve at Your holy altar without blame, we may obtain the reward of the faithful stewards on the fearful day of Your just judgment.” The Sanctus stands within the Holy Anaphora.
Occasionally, traditions have understood baptism through the model of circumcision, although the image does not necessarily appear in liturgies attached to rite. The application of the circumcision model to explain baptism provided Christianity with a rite that functioned as both a rite of passage and initiation. Infant baptism effects a child’s entrance into the church, while circumcision joined male children to Israel’s covenant and served as the mark of the covenant.
This connection between circumcision and baptism can be observed in the writings of many early church theologians (see McNeil [Editor] and Battles [Translator], John Calvin: Institutes: 21:1326, n. 4, who cite O. Cullmann’s Baptism in the New Testament). Aquinas also associated the two in Summa Theo III. Ixx.1. 3. (McNeil and Battles, 21:1326, n. 4). Calvin accepted this correlation, as he states: “For circumcision was for the Jews their first entry into the church, because it was a token to them by which they were assured of adoption as the people and household of God, and they in turn professed to enlist in God’s service. In like manner, we also are consecrated to God through baptism to be reckoned as his people and in turn we swear fealty to him. By this it appears incontrovertible that baptism has taken the place of circumcision to fulfill the same office among us” (Inst. 4.16.4). This particular aspect of Calvin’s theology may appear in the Presbyterian baptism rite in the pastor’s words that follow baptism: “[Y]ou have been sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism, and marked as Christ’s own forever” (BCW: Pastor’s Edition, 20).
The Roman Catholic Church teaches that baptism was prefigured in the “Old Covenant” in scenes in which water is connected to salvation, e.g., the Spirit of God breathing on the waters of at creation, Noah’s ark, the Israelites crossing the Jordan, and especially the salvation through the Red Sea: “You freed the children of Abraham from the slavery of Pharaoh, bringing them dry shod through the waters of the Red Sea, to be an image of the people set free in Baptism” (CCC,1217–1222, quote 1221 and is found in Easter Vigil). Drawing on 1 Pet 2:5, the Catechism of the Catholic Church asserts that the baptized “become ‘living stones’ to be ‘built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood,’” and that baptism allows Christians to “share” in the “priesthood of Christ” (CCC,1268). This also affirms the use of Exodus 19 in 1 Pet 2:9 to describe the church as God’s elect people: “Baptism gives a share in the common priesthood of all believers” (italics original, CCC, 1268). Here, the Catechism’s language resembles Luther’s position. Nevertheless, it must be remembered that the two traditions still hold to very different understandings of sacrament and the place of clergy within their theological systems. The Book of Common Prayer also links the sacrament of baptism to the passage of the children of Israel through the Red Sea (BCP, 306). The Presbyterian baptismal liturgy draws on these same liturgical traditions, as it recalls the flood and the exodus passage through the sea, along with Jesus’s baptism and death and resurrection (BCW: Pastor’s Edition, 16, 28–29, 31, 49).
Liturgies may cast the offerings collected by the church into Hebrew Bible language, linking the congregants to ancient worshippers. In the ELCA liturgy, the people either sing or say the following at the time of the offering: “What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits to me? I will offer the sacrifice of thanksgiving and will call on the name of the Lord. I will take the cup of salvation and will call on the name of the Lord. I will pay my vows to the Lord now in the presence of all his people, in the courts of the Lord’s house, in the midst of you, O Jerusalem” (LBW, 86–87; Holy Communion Setting Two) The language of the liturgy comes from Psalm 116, which the worshippers have now applied to themselves and their own setting. With these words, the congregants’ gifts essentially become as the gifts brought to the first temple. The members of the congregation depict their own church building with the language that applied to that temple structure and its cult, and they speak as if the church is located within Jerusalem. In doing so, the liturgy affirms—or better, enacts—the continuity between the setting in the Hebrew Bible and the gathered church.
Other liturgies express a similar theology and seek the same effect. The Book of Common Prayer provides “Offertory Sentences” from the Psalms to be used by an officiant at the moment the church collects the people’s gifts: “Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and make good thy vows unto the Most High” (Ps 50:14); “Ascribe to the Lord the honor due his Name; bring offerings and come into his courts” (Ps 96:8). Once again, the gifts of the people become as the gifts brought to the first temple, and the church building functions as if it contains the courts of the first temple. While in this liturgy the people do not say these words, they nevertheless hear them and then engage in the bodily action of giving.
American evangelical services, which generally have no written liturgy—or maybe even disparage it, also frequently quote similar texts before collecting an offering. Especially popular is a passage from Malachi: “Will anyone rob God? Yet you are robbing me! But you say, ‘How are we robbing you?’ In your tithes and offerings!…Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in my house, and thus put me to the test, says the LORD of hosts; see if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing” (Mal 3:8–10).
As will be explained, from an anthropological perspective, language and action like this in the service have a powerful affect upon the participants, as it creates for them an “as if world” that they embody (Holland, 1998, see section: Ritual Theory and Use of Hebrew Bible Worship). Further, the act of giving when accompanied with the words of the liturgy connects the people’s lives outside of the worship—the daily work they do—to the moment of worship, and, in turn, makes their work sacred.
The designation “priest” has its roots in the Hebrew Bible. While the Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms the priesthood of the people of God based on Exod 19:6, “[B]ut you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation,” it also explains that God established a special priesthood among the people. This was made possible through the work of Christ, the “high priest and unique mediator,” another example of the influence of Hebrews on the church’s theology (CCC, 1546, 1548; see Heb 4:14–16; 5:1–10; 8:1–13). In this role, as Nichols states, “Jesus Christ can be called the eternal or the permanent high priest, through whose mediation we become immediately present to God. As the Letter to the Hebrews puts it: ‘He lives forever to make intercession for us,’ that is, to pray, effectively, that the barriers between God and ourselves may be cast down” (Nichols, 1991: 182–83).
The Catechism claims that Aaron and the Levitical priesthood in the Hebrew Bible “prefigures” the church’s priesthood (CCC, 1539, 1541). Drawing on a long interpretive tradition in the church, which has its roots in Hebrews 8, the Catechism asserts that the Levitical priesthood with its sacrifices and prayers could never effect a lasting salvation because the definitive act of God would only be accomplished through the sacrifice of Christ (CCC, 1540). As one might expect, the Church draws on the argument in Hebrews t that Christ follows in the priesthood of Melchizedek (Heb 5, 7; CCC, 1544). As the Catechism explains, prayers in the ordination services of bishops, priests, and deacons all connect the Church’s offices to the ministers at the tabernacle and the temple (CCC, 1540–1543). When priests carry out the function of their office, they represent Christ and the whole Church, and this becomes especially manifested in the “offering of the Eucharistic sacrifice” (CCC, 1552). In this way, the Church imagines them as mediators between God and the church, evoking the role performed by priests in the Hebrew Bible.
The Book of Common Prayer describes the office of priest in this manner: “The ministry of the priest is to represent Christ, particularly as the pastor of the people; to share with the bishop in the overseeing of the Church; to proclaim the Gospel; to administer the sacraments; and to bless and declare pardon in the name of God” (BCP, 856). As in the Catholic tradition, the Anglican tradition also understands Christ as high priest and asserts that bishops and priests join in that priesthood (Hatchett, 1995: 503).
In his effort to undo the whole notion of sacraments in the late medieval Catholic Church, Martin Luther included an attack on the church’s understanding of the priesthood. For Luther, all Christians shared in the priesthood, a position that he especially supported with 1 Pet 2:9:
If they were forced to grant that all of us that have been baptized are equally priests, as indeed we are, and that only the ministry was committed to them, yet with our common consent, they would then know that they have no right to rule over us except insofar as we freely concede it. For thus it is written in 1 Pet. 2[:9]: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, and a priestly royalty.” Therefore we are all priests, as many of us as are Christians. But the priests, as we call them, are ministers chosen from among us. All that they do is done in our name; the priesthood is nothing but a ministry. This we learn from 1 Cor. 4[:1]: “This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God”.
(Luther’s Works, 112–113).
The verse cited from 1 Peter is a reapplication of God’s statement in Exod 19:6, a text in which God tells Moses that if the people will obey God’s “voice” and “keep” the covenant, they will be a “kingdom of priests”—the people as a whole—before God. While Luther did not accept the Catholic sacramental understanding of priesthood, and, thus, the holy orders, he nevertheless still argues for continuity between Israel’s priesthood and the ministry shared by all Christians. Still, Luther sets apart a special office of ministers who also fulfill the position of priest, whose key role is to preach and teach the Word of God. He founds this argument on a text from Malachi: “For this is the way a priest is defined in Mal. 2[:7]: ‘The lips of a priest should guard knowledge, and men should seek instruction for his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts” (Luther’s Works, 113).
The penitential rite in The Book of Common Prayer for Ash Wednesday draws on several key Hebrew Bible passages and scenes of repentance. The 1549 Prayer Book actually began the rite with a curse against sinners based on Deuteronomy 27 (Hatchett, 1995: 219). In the current liturgy, chief among the assigned texts for the day is the mourning scene in Joel 2, and vv. 1–2, 12–17 are used, a warning that the “Day of the Lord” has arrived and that God’s people should declare a fast because of their sins. The passage in the Hebrew Bible most likely addressed a locust plague. The Book of Common Prayer indicates that the worship leader may also read Isa 58:1–12, which informs the congregation about the appropriate place of fasting (Hatchett, 1995: 220). The opening prayer, “Create and make in us new and contrite hearts,” also plays on language in Psalm 51 and Ezekiel 36: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me” (Ps 51:10); “And a new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you…” (Ezek 36:26). Psalm 103 occurs in the ritual as a way to praise God for forgiving sinners, while also stating that humans are but dust (Hatchett, 1995: 220). The celebrant issues the somber words from the expulsion from the Garden of Eden: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gen 3:19). These words are pronounced over the ashes and at the moment of imposition of the ashes on each person. Psalm 51 is read before the congregation, as was the case in early versions of the liturgy (Hatchett, 1995: 219), and then the people join in a Litany of Penitence. Several of these texts appear in the Common Lectionary for the day, and so are used in many different traditions.
This day that commences Holy Week is filled with language from psalms of ascent that celebrate victories. On some occasions Ps 11:18–29 is read. Apart from the Triumphal Entry passages from the gospels, the Hebrew Bible scriptures portend Jesus’s passion that will be commemorated later in the week (e.g., Isa 51:13–53:12; Ps 22).
The Book of Common Prayer casts the Great Vigil of Easter as the “Passover of the Lord, in which by hearing his Word and celebrating his Sacraments, we share in his victory over death” (BCP, 285). In the Liturgy of the Word for Holy Saturday, the Hebrew Bible lessons share a general theme of God’s deliverances in the past and future hopes within the framework of Christ’s work in his death and resurrection. The liturgy extensively recalls features of Passover: “Jesus Christ is our Lord; for he is the true Paschal Lamb, who at the feast of the Passover paid for us the debt of Adam’s sin, and by his blood delivered your faithful people” (BCP, 287). Appropriation of Passover elements continues with references to the Exodus from Egypt and the passage through the Red Sea. The Paschal Candle is lit, which customarily is lit through Pentecost, as an “evening sacrifice” that is to “shine continually to drive away all darkness” (BCP, 287).
Very similar language occurs in the Catholic Easter Vigil liturgy, with even more extensive references to the Exodus narrative, and the language displays allusions to the Passover liturgy:
These, then, are the feasts of Passover,
in which is slain the Lamb, the one true Lamb,
whose Blood anoints the doorposts of believers.
This is the night,
when once you led our forebears, Israel’s children,
from slavery in Egypt
and made them pass dry-shod through the Red Sea.
This is the night
that with a pillar of fire
banished the darkness of sin. (RM, 354)
While of course the theologies expressed in the liturgies and their official explanations should be honored, as well as comments from historians and theologians in each of the traditions, anthropological interpretations cast another light on the meanings and effects of the liturgical language and practices. Catholic theologians have become quite aware of this, as can be seen, for example, in Nathan Mitchell’s short introduction to anthropology and liturgy (Mitchell 1999).
Both practitioners in worship (emic) and observers (etic) recognize that liturgical language differs from daily speech, as well as from the rhetoric of the sermon or homily. Anthropologists have commented extensively on this feature of liturgy and ritual. For the typical worshipper, even without extensive training in its history and theology, the liturgy carries an air of antiquity and holiness not present in other kinds of speech. The images and language taken from the Hebrew Bible, because the practices can seem so remote, also contribute to the impression. Liturgy acquires an element of transcendence and timelessness, in part because it does not seem to resemble any other pattern of speech. The uniqueness of the ritual setting, with its other sounds, smells, sights, smells, and body movements, intensifies the effect of the language.
For the worshipper, ritual seems unchangeable and unalterable—it displays invariance, even though liturgies have been altered many times. In fact, the twentieth century witnessed several changes in liturgies, as segments of western Christianity brought their liturgies closer to one another, especially in their overall basic structures, but even in their language at certain moments (Bradshaw and Johnson, 2012: 293–357). The sensation of permanence and invariance can be achieved through basic materiality related to the liturgy. In the church setting, where the congregants use worship books, the materiality of the book itself adds to this impression. The words are printed and the repetition of the liturgy week after week leads the worshipper to conclude that countless prior generations have followed exactly the same actions and spoken the same words. Further, the location of the book in the pews, positioned beside a Bible and a hymnal, affirms the authoritative place of the words recited during the service. However, the move toward the use of digitized and projected texts and hymns in worship—even in mainline Protestant worship services—could eventually have some effect on this experience of antiquity and invariance.
In his exploration of ritual, Roy Rappaport explains other ways in which ritual conveys invariance. He notices that practitioners become acutely aware of this particular aspect of ritual on occasions when the ritual in which they are engaged does not actually communicate “the current physical, psychic, or social states of individual or participants, or of the body of participants as a whole, [which] are confined to the here and now” (Rappaport, 1999: 53). Thus, according to Rappaport, the incongruence between a worshipper’s current state and the apparent fixedness of the liturgy provides the participants with a sense that they are participating in something ancient and beyond themselves. In Rappaport’s words: “They [rituals] always include, in words and acts that have been spoken or performed before, orders, processes or entities, material, social, abstract, ideal or spiritual, the existence or putative existence of which transcends the present” (Rappaport, 1999: 53). As a result, the canonical aspect of rituals “represents the general, enduring, or even eternal aspects of universal orders” (Rappaport, 1999: 53; italics original). This aspect of ritual serves Christianity very well because it also confirms for the worshipper the timelessness of the church’s theology and teaching, what Rappaport labels the “postulates.” This feeling of antiquity, of invariance and canonicalism, is reinforced by the inclusion of language and images from the Hebrew Bible, and every liturgy includes this language. The language ties the worshippers not simply to the time of Jesus or the New Testament writings, but to the whole history of the people of God that stretches back into the Hebrew Bible. Even though the differences between the current church setting and the First Temple are vast, the liturgy has the effect of convincing the worshipper that a smooth and seamless continuity spans the millennia. As Pentiuc has stated, “From the outset, the Eastern Orthodox tradition has seen in the liturgy a powerful means to link the past, present and future…” (Pentiuc, 2014: 16). This is no less true or less recognizable in the other traditions discussed earlier.
These features resemble Dorothy Holland’s theories about “as-if” and “figured” worlds. These worlds, she explains, “are sociohistoric, contrived interpretations or imaginations that mediate behavior…and inform participants’ outlooks” (Holland, 1998: 52). Thus, participants take on the identity assigned to them in that figured world and they conceive of their practices and agency in that world through these roles and the relationships established within that imagined reality (Holland, 1998: 53). These worlds also typically “rely upon artifacts,” which become “psychological tools” to assist in functioning in the figured world (Holland, 1998: 60). For example, Alcoholics Anonymous awards poker chips as rewards for various accomplishments in its program. Outside of that world, the chip can mean something very different, or maybe even be worthless. However, within that world it possesses great value. As she states, “Figured worlds are evinced in practice through the artifacts employed by the people in their performances” (Holland, 1998: 61). In this way, practices and artifacts also shape people’s dispositions.
Current liturgy joins practice and artifacts. Bread and wine in some way become the body and blood of Christ, or at least movingly evoke the memory of Jesus’s Last Supper and death. The table becomes an altar. The water of baptism is like Israel’s passage through the sea, the chaotic waters upon which God breathes at creation, or Jesus’s baptism. Gifts to the church become as gifts to the Jerusalem temple when it stood, and the church building acquires the features of the temple’s structure. Songs, prayers, and gifts become sacrifices of praise. A song sung by the congregation is the song being sung in the heavenly worship, and the human world merges with the divine realm. The Hebrew Bible provides a treasure of potential practices and artifacts, albeit all of them transformed, re-interpreted, and re-imagined in the church, through a long history of interpretation. However, in this manner, for the worshipper the current liturgy seems to reach back to Israel and the past becomes present. The liturgy appears to transcend time and even space, but it accomplishes this through the embodied practices of the worshippers and the materiality of the liturgy’s artifacts.