Liturgy and Spiritual Awakening, Part One

I recently came across a booklet written a full two decades before the outbreak of the current “worship wars,” but a booklet which is full of wisdom for today. It is the herdabrev, the bishop’s inaugural letter, of the late Rev. Bishop Bo Giertz, Bishop of Gothenburg, Sweden. The title of the herdabrev is “Liturgy and Spiritual Awakening” and is an appeal for the church to take both liturgy and spiritual awakening seriously.

The context is different, but there is still much we can learn. Bishop Giertz became bishop of Gothenburg in 1949 in a country where “high church Pietist” or “sacramental Pietist” was not a contradiction in terms, where those fervent to save people’s souls did not disdain the church, the sacraments, and the liturgy. This was the legacy of such theologians as Henric Schartau and even to some extent Carl Rosenius, who did not separate from the Church of Sweden even as they called for a renewal of it. In the United States, however, we have followed a different path, where spiritual awakening has always seen itself as the mortal enemy of previously established churches and their liturgies and sacraments. Indeed, spiritual awakening is seen as a quasi-sacramental experience and liturgy as a hindrance to it. Add to it the American love of consumerism and individualism as well as the American disdain for history, and you can see why the awakening movements in the United States have tended to create schismatic and wildly heterodox churches that foster a Platonic (if not crypto-Gnostic) disdain for the fully sacramental and liturgical life of the church. Given this environment, it is difficult for anyone who cares about creeds, liturgy, and rich theology to give a fair hearing to anything that comes out of the American revivalist scene.

And yet now might be a moment for those in America to reconcile awakening and liturgy. The past three decades have seen a growing number of Evangelicals dissatisfied with Evangelicalism’s shallow Christology, fluffy theology, disembodied ecclesiology, and contempt for the visible created world. Evangelicalism has not responded to the current crisis by all going in one direction, but one avenue for Evangelicals to express their dissent has been to join the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox or Anglican Church. They have recovered creedal orthodoxy and liturgical sensibilities, but usually at the cost of a Reformation understanding of justification. Lutherans—especially confessional Lutherans—are such a tiny percentage of American Christianity that few Evangelicals recognize it as an option, especially since Evangelicals think that Lutherans are Zwinglian in their theology and liturgical style.

But what if a person could be both an heir to the broad catholic tradition (including the liturgy) and to the Reformation recovery of the gospel (with its emphasis on justification by grace through faith)? What if one could see that the liturgy is not the enemy of genuine spiritual awakening and vice versa, but that the one leads to the other? In other words, what if we could be good Lutherans and recognize that both liturgy and awakening are part of our apostolic inheritance and shall be ours until our Lord returns? That is the question Bishop Giertz in effect addressed in his brief monograph, “Liturgy and Spiritual Awakening.”

In the next post I’ll look at some specific things that Bishop Giertz had to say about awakening and liturgy.