Quote:
Originally Posted by Evangelical
If you want to define liturgy as anything we do every week that is routine or common, such as arriving at 9 am for the meeting every Sunday, then I guess it is a liturgy.
But I use the normal use of the term liturgy to refer to the churches which are known as conducting "liturgical church services".
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Actually, you use the term "liturgy" in a pejorative way. It is designed to evoke a sense of inferiority because it is old, at least somewhat set, or both.
But you make that judgment without any actual understanding of the content of such a meeting, or the spiritual significance or impact it has on its participants.
And you make that judgment without actually understanding what a liturgy is and presuming that your meetings are not full of liturgy and even tradition. Yet you demean both in complete ignorance of what they actually bring to the participant.
And participate they do. You think that your form of meeting is the only participatory form of any consequence. Actually, yours is the effect of the Church in Corinth deciding that they know better than Paul and setting aside his limitations on how they should conduct their meetings.
But the most significant thing about your post is that (once again) you did not respond to my most significant charge that your analysis of scripture is undertaken with an eye for how to segregate Christians into us v them rather than to find our commonality in Christ. How you do your meetings, no matter how much I think that you have completely misconstrued the edicts Paul gave in 1 Cor. 14, is not the important thing. Neither is how others do their meetings. It is the common faith in the one Christ, one God and Father, on Spirit, one baptism, etc. It is not in who are the elders in our assembly, nor the identifier we place on our group so as to be findable, nor who our elders are, no who are the ones that we take our teachings from.
The most significant thing is that you are elevating items within each of those categories such that you have given yourself the right to dismiss everyone else as deficient. Yet you are blind to the fact that this is exactly what Paul was chastising the Corinthians for in the opening chapters of his first letter to them. Not for having names (and thus your constant blathering about denominations). But for taking their preference for certain teachers to the point that they split up over it.
And you like to point to the fact of certain theologians in the center of these various groups — like Luther — are included in the names of the groups that came to follow them. Yet you agree with the split from the RCC that surrounded those people. So you are happy for the separation from the RCC caused by Luther, but are unhappy that those who still follow his teachings are identified by his name in any way. But that identification is not about the person, but the teachings that he brought. And you are more than happy about those teachings.
So when Christ Redeemer Lutheran Church changes its name to "church in [city]" what do you have to say about that? Is it now qualified for inclusion in your group? Or will you start looking into something else as a disqualifier? (In other words, is the whole "church in [city]" think just a first line of attack?)