3-4 yeats ago, I ‘stumbled upon’ Terence Cuneo’s book Ritualized Faith in Durham University’s Bill Bryson Library.
I read parts of it, and found it to be reasonably good, though it is firmly placed in the tradition of analytic theology, which is not my tradition. However, it is not my intention to speak about the book itself but about its title, Ritualized Faith. When I found the books, I quickly borrowed it, since it seemed relevant for my PhD Thesis – on the understanding of active participation in the liturgy – but before I even started to read the book, I started discussing the title with myself. It’s always fun to discuss things with yourself, isn’t it? For some reason your opponent always agrees with you.
I was critical, and am still critical, of this term, ‘ritualised faith.’ For what is faith? And what is ‘ritual’? It seemed to me, and still seems to me, that when you speak of ‘ritualised faith,’ you introduce a distinction between the two, and it seems that you treat faith as somehow prior to, or different from, ritual. It seems to treat faith as a list of propositions – a body of teachings, if you will – that you can then celebrate, explain, show forth, and so forth, through ritual. You believe God is three and one, therefore you make prayers to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, to take one example.
But this is in fact not how theology works, and it is manifestly not how theology developed. Theology comes from praise and practice. It’s not the other way around. The Church developed her teachings on God and on Christ because she fist worshipped.
But can’t this be what’s behind a term like ‘ritualised faith’? Well, yes, but in our society we often take ideas as central and practice as just an outer expression. But what if I told you that faith is, in some sense, a ritual? For what is a ritual, in the Christian sense? What is liturgy? It is an act of worship by which we show who we put our trust in. That’s why Martin Luther said that idolatry isn’t just to publicly and visibly worship someone or something else than the one true God, but to trust someone else over and against Him. In his Large Catechism, he begins with a reflection on the first commandment, “You are to have no other gods before me,” and says:
A “god” is the term for that to which we are to look for all good and in which we are to find refuge in all need. Therefore, to have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe in that one with your whole heart. As I have often said, it is the trust and faith of the heart alone that make both God and an idol. If your faith and trust are right, then your God is the true one. Conversely, where your trust is false and wrong, there you do not have the true God. For these two belong together, faith and God. Anything on which your heart relies and depends, I say, that is really your God.
When you have faith, you have trust, and that trust is your worship of God. Christian public rituals are then faith, pure and simple. And the reason for that is that we aren’t angels or spirits. We are material beings and as material beings we worship by material means. In a sense we can therefore speak of ‘ritualised faith,’ but I still think this term is a bad one and needs too much unpacking. Because when it comes to it, ritual is faith and faith is ritual, yet the term ‘ritualised faith’ makes it seem like there could be any such thing as ‘unritualised faith.’ But there is no such thing. If we have faith, if we trust, we are worshipping, and therefore we are involved in a ritual, whether an inner or an outer one.
Faith is an act through which we put our trust in God. But that trust is not something we have made ourselves. This trust is the gift of God, it is God himself working in us. Consider John, chapter 6. The people have just witnessed Jesus feeding five thousand people with five loaves of bread, two fishes, and one miracle (it usually only takes one), and they track him down afterwards to probe him. And he says, in verse 27: “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.” And the people ask him, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” Now, in some translations Jesus answers something like this (in v.29): “This is the deed God requires—to believe in the one whom he sent.” (This is the NET Bible translation). Or consider the Living Bible translation: “This is the will of God, that you believe in the one he has sent.” Here it seems that the will of God is that we should perform a work – faith – which will in turn satisfy God. And even worse, in the Message translation: “Sign on with the One that God has sent. That kind of a commitment gets you in on God’s works.” Yes, the Message translation is just flat out works righteousness. But a much more accurate translation, such as the NRSV, shows us how Christ subverts the question by shifting focus over on what God does to us and through us: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” This is the work of God. Faith is the work of God. Ritual, liturgy, praise, prayer, and worship is the work of God.
We do not have to perform a deed that God requires of us, as if we were still under the Law. No, we are made one with Him, and in Him we are made capable of worship, and we are made to worship, not under the Law but in freedom.
So ‘ritualised faith’ may be a good term. But just remember this: it is in a very real sense a redundancy, a pleonasm. And remember that it is not your work. It is the gift of God. And no, there is no such thing as an ‘unritualised faith.’
We are all sinners, we are all idolators, who need saving faith, who need the grace of the one true God so that we can put our trust in him, so that we can worship, that is, have faith in, him. And that is not something we can do ourselves. That is, and will always remain, the pure gift of the God who made us, who loves us, who redeemed us, and who calls us to be his children, as St. Paul says in Ephesians 2:1-10:
And you he made alive, when you were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. Among these we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of body and mind, and so we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God— not because of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
Notes:
Terence Cuneo, Ritualized Faith: Essays on the Philosophy of Liturgy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). The book is part of the Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology.
A good discussion on this can be found in Knut Alfsvåg’s (unfortunately Norwegian) article “Luthersk spiritualitet: Om lære og liv i den éne, kristne kirke” (Dansk Tidsskrift for Teologi og Kirke 40:1, 2013): 42-56.
Martin Luther, Large Catechism, I, 2. For the English translations of the Lutheran confessions, see The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, eds. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2000). For the Latin and German texts, see Die Bekenntnisschriften der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche, vollständige neuedition, ed. Irene Dingel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014).
For a discussion of the notion of inner ritual, see Crystal Addey, Divination and Theurgy in Neoplatonism: Oracles of the Gods (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 173-180, 199-211. Also see Zeke Mazur, “Unio Magica: Part II: Plotinus, Theurgy, and the Question of Ritual” (Dionysius 22, 2004), 29-56, esp: 44: “In certain cases, these techniques are accompanied by corresponding physical acts, but given this new definition, inner ritual would need no overt physical expression for it to be considered “ritual.”.”
Really enjoyed reading it!