Liturgical Reform and the Unity of Christian Churches

Abstract

The modern process of liturgical renewal and revision in the churches has proceeded hand-in-hand with the twentieth-century Ecumenical Movement, not least because both of them have been engaged to some extent in harnessing the past to their future. Within the dialogues that have taken place between the various churches, common ground has often been sought by trying to get behind the controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that in most cases had been the cause of their separation from one another, and building consensus upon biblical and patristic foundations on which they can agree. One may cite as an example the popularity of the New Testament term anamnesis in attempts to reach a shared understanding of Eucharistic sacrifice.1 Similarly, what was happening within the twentieth-century Liturgical Movement was also a return to patristic roots, an attempt to get behind what were seen as the accretions of later centuries, whether of the Middle Ages, the Reformation era, or the post-Tridentine period, to what was viewed as the purer air of the early centuries of Christianity, in order to recover insights that might be applied to their present-day worship patterns. The particular era on which attention was focused tended to be that of the late fourth century, a time when sources of information for liturgical practice were rather more plentiful than in the preceding centuries, and when the forms of worship in the newly built basilicas and ecclesiastical buildings of the post-Constantinian age more closely resembled those of modern congregations than did the ritual customs of the house-churches that had preceded them. It also appeared to scholars then to be the “golden age” of liturgical evolution, its crowning moment before it began to sink down towards