Call it an age of outrage; call it a culture of contempt; call it a politics of polarization. Whatever phrase you happen to use, there is little denying the prevalence of the spirit of moral judgment and mutual indignation in our public life today. Indeed, it seems impossible to escape. It pervades our social-media feeds. It permeates the tone of journalists and professional pundits. It seeps into our everyday conversations with friends and colleagues. We are a nation divided by deep disagreements, but it’s more than that. Because the real conviction underlying our hostility and anger is that those with whom we disagree are not simply wrong, they are wicked. They aren’t just mistaken. They are contemptible.
And let’s be clear. This attitude of moral outrage is not a phenomenon which is somehow limited to the secular spaces of American public life. It has taken hold in the church as well. Christians often appear to be just as quick to pronounce condemnation and just as slow to show mercy as any of their non-believing neighbors. And for Christians, this should be a cause for serious concern. For doesn’t this behavior violate Jesus’ prohibition of condemnation (Mt. 7:1-2) and Paul’s admonition to bless and not curse those who persecute you (Rom 12:14)? How can the church bear witness to the mercy of God when it is so frequently caught up in our culture’s prevailing mood of merciless critique?
Of course, few Christians would defend these cycles of outrage and opprobrium. We know that such judgmentalism does not become us. But the cultural currents in which we swim are powerfully formative. How can we not be caught up in them? What resources can help us resist their sway?
I recognize that this may sound a bit cliché coming from an Anglican, but I would suggest that one of the primary resources for counter-formation in our cultural moment can be found in the liturgy of Christian worship. When Anglicans talk about the formative power of liturgy, we often like to cite a Latin phrase—lex orandi lex credendi—which basically says that the way we pray shapes the way we believe. This phrase has been so frequently repeated that it’s easy to forget its original context. It derives from a remark made by Prosper of Aquitaine in his defense of St. Augustine’s doctrine of grace.[1] But Prosper was not the first to make the connection between prayer and an Augustinian understanding of grace. Augustine himself grounded his doctrine of original sin on the practice of Christian prayer, arguing that the daily petition for “forgiveness of debts” serves as a regular reminder that no one, no matter how advanced in the Christian life, can fully free herself from the need for mercy.[2] Or as one of my seminary professors used to put it: I got problems; you got problems; all God’s children got problems.
We need this kind of formative prayer today. Because the cultural moment in which we live is characterized not only by moral outrage, but also by moral self-righteousness. Which isn’t terribly surprising. After all, in a world divided up between the wicked and the righteous, it should come as no great shock that our condemnation of our opponents is simultaneously an exoneration of ourselves.
The liturgy, however, works against such self-righteousness by teaching us to judge ourselves more truthfully. Every week in my church’s worship, the entire congregation joins together in a common prayer of confession. We confess that we have sinned “in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.” I don’t know how often people give due attention to those words, but over time they do have a cumulative effect. They teach us to think and speak about ourselves more accurately. They remind us that we are not a tribe of the righteous, but rather, to quote Francis Spufford, a “league of the guilty.”[3]
Later in the worship service, after that prayer of confession, we celebrate the Eucharist and this, too, is a deeply formative experience. For here, at the center of our worship, stands the memory of the unjust death of a crucified man. And as Miroslav Volf reminds us, that memory shapes our response to a world rent by injustice and wrongdoing. As we remember our crucified Lord, we find ourselves called to address ongoing realities of injustice and oppression. Yet, at the same time, to celebrate the Eucharist is to remember that we ourselves are the “ungodly” for whom Christ died.[4] There is no room at the altar rail for the self-righteous. All who come forward are wrongdoers in need of forgiveness. We are not the blameless. We are the guilty.
Perhaps that seems like a rather bleak lesson to draw from the liturgy. Shouldn’t Christian worship and prayer be a matter of joy and not of sorrow? How is self-accusation an appropriate practice for a community who have been set free from the curse of the law?
Several months ago, I had a conversation with an older member of our church who expressed precisely this concern. She told me that she was bothered by the penitential thread running through our service and she wished that we could just be more up-beat. Other parishioners have voiced similar thoughts to me and I sympathize with their worries, but I think that the criticism is mistaken.
C.S. Lewis once preached a sermon in which he addressed some of these exact same concerns. Within his own context, he was attempting to defend the seemingly grim language found in the prayers of confession in the Anglican liturgy, with its description of Christians as “miserable offenders” and its description of their sins as “unbearable.” The charges against such language in his day were similar to the ones I myself have heard. Such prayers are “gloomy” and seem to encourage a “morbid introspection.” To this, however, Lewis responded:
The alternative is much more morbid. Those who do not think about their own sins make up for it by thinking incessantly about the sins of others. It is healthier to think of one’s own. It is the reverse of morbid. It is not even, in the long run, very gloomy. A serious attempt to repent and really to know one’s own sins is in the long run a lightening and relieving process.[5]
Lewis was right. Christian liturgy reminds us that we are sinners, but this is not a result of morbid or gloomy introspection. It is simply what is required if we are to speak truthfully about ourselves. And in the process, our liturgical acts of confession keep us from the much worse prospect of thinking incessantly about the sins of others.
As Christians living in an age of outrage, we could all use a healthy dose of this kind of introspection and truthful prayer. Such a liturgy need not prevent us from making honest and truthful appraisals of the errors of our neighbors, but it will assist us in engaging them with a little more charity.
This resource is part of the series Made Like Him: Reflections on Formation and Gathered Worship. Click Here to explore more resources from this series.
Notes:
[1] Prosper of Aquitaine, De vocatione omnium gentium 1.12. The original phrase is ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi (“that the law of prayer establishes the law of believing”). For further discussion, see Geoffrey Wainwright, Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine and Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 225-226.
[2] Augustine, De natura et gratia 70. Jesus also made a connection between prayer and the proper perception of the self as sinner in the parable of the Pharisee and the publican (Luke 18:9-14).
[3] Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christian Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense (New York: HarperOne, 2013).
[4] Miroslav Volf, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 110-128.
[5] C.S. Lewis, “‘Miserable Offenders’: An Interpretation of Prayer Book Language,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 124. This essay was originally preached as a sermon at St. Matthew’s Church in Northampton on April 7, 1946.
Jonathan Bailes is Cathedral Theologian at Christ Church in Plano, TX. After earning his MDiv at Beeson Divinity School, he completed a PhD in Theology at Boston College, where he wrote a dissertation on the fourth-century church father, Gregory of Nyssa. Jonathan is a member of the 5th Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
