participation in borrowed language transforms us and redeems our speech. It should be regarded
as having a salvific and not merely a bare pedagogical purpose. Brian Daley puts it well: ‘The
Psalms ... do not simply command us to repent of our sins, to bear suffering patiently, or to
praise God for his gifts; they actually give us the words by which we can say and do these things
for ourselves.’
In handing ourselves over to a language that has been handed over to us in tradition we confess
that we do not have the words that are sufficient to approach God. Our verbal works are sinful
and poor, so they are not the sacrifice of praise our tongues present to God. The words that we
bring are words that have been given to us, words that are not our own. The shared language of
liturgy is thus a natural extension of the doctrine of justification by faith alone.
When we strive for spontaneity in speech and resist faithful imitation we also fail to hand
ourselves over to each other. Worship ceases to be truly public and gradually reduces to the
voices of many individuals expressing their private spirituality in front of others. Our private
spirituality becomes something of public show. Whether we intend to receive praise from other
men or not, private prayer belongs in the private place. When it is brought into the public place it
can easily draw attention to the one who prays and away from the One to whom the prayer is
addressed. Public prayer is not to be the creation of individual rhetorical brilliance, but the gift of
shared speech. The loss of robust liturgies and the rise of individual rhetoric would also seem to
have had some effect in the rise of individualistic understandings of the Christian faith. Lacking a
shared language we have not handed ourselves over to each other. Our spirituality is a ‘heroic’
spirituality; a spirituality of me and Jesus, without the need for any other.
Within evangelicalism our worship services are primarily about our own speech. The focus of the
service is not on the shared language of the liturgy, but on the words of the preacher. It is the
preacher who composes the words of the sermon and the words of the prayers. Consequently, the
person of the preacher becomes far more central than the priest ever became within medieval
Catholicism. In the case of medieval Catholicism it was the office of the priest that became
central. However, as the language and rituals performed by the clergy were ‘borrowed’, it was
not the priest as a particular person that became central. Within modern evangelicalism it is the
pastor (or — heaven help us — the worship leader) that becomes central as a particular person
and not merely as an office. Churches become centred on a particular person in a way that is
deeply unhealthy.
One of the things that the Church could really benefit from today is a downplaying of preaching
within the context of the liturgy and a denial of the primacy of the preacher. The pastor need not
stand to teach (although we ought to stand for the reading of the Scriptures); he is not engaging in
a rhetorical display. All he needs to do is explain the passage in simple language and make some
applications. Under such teaching people will have their lives informed by God’s Word, without
the personality of the preacher becoming central (as it tends to do in, for example, the Spurgeon
style of preaching). A further thing that is important is to retain the primacy of the reading of
Scripture. The sermon is in service of the read Scripture, rather than vice versa. The reading of
the Scriptures should not merely consist of the passage that the preacher has chosen for his
message.
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