This Is Only A Test...

The Episcopal Emergency Broadcasting Network (EEBN) is either a useful resource or a mildly humorous schtick. Either way, stay tuned. (FYI: The blogger is Fr. Harding's son, not Fr. Harding. You probably knew that, but it comes up a lot among those who have discovered the junior ACN crowd.)

It Would Have Been A Good Idea at the Time

Bls and I have been discussing the perils of liturgical local option. It occurs to me that I am torn between two very different views of ecclesiology, one very Rahnerist, emphasizing the importance of local ecclesial cultures contributing to a diverse but universal whole. This view is quite popular today and probably will be expressed most deeply at Taize in the future. On the other hand, I worry about how absorption in our local ecclesial cultures conditions us to be very inflexible if our own personal circumstances change. The compromise is to promote a national ecclesial culture, since personal mobility is typically limited most to the national level and is very Anglican. However, national ecclesial culture tends to become authoritarian per English tradition and even from experience in the United States. Perhaps, the alternative would be to found ecclesial culture on the urban level (Diocesan) as it was in the Church before Nicaea. The churches pretty much did what they wanted liturgically but sought some unity theologically. The purpose of Councils was to ensure that the Bishops (who were in charge of the liturgy ultimately) had sufficient theological unity. So perhaps the Roman idea of universal liturgy as a mark of catholic unity is an abuse of the pre-Nicene tradition? Well, there's one problem with this idea. Indeed, it's an epistemological problem I constantly encounter. Let there be some particular practice Y, which appears to follow from some principle X. Well, if you see Y, isn't an X a principle? The problem is that the inversion is non-unique. The practice could follow from some other principle, be due to technological or epistemological limits, or be completely unconscious. Inferring principle from praxis is an ill-posed problem, and the only way to constrain it is to understand exceptions carefully and look for someone justifying Y by X. Well, you're in a lurch if the practice is unconscious. For instance, bls claims that common prayer was called so because it belonged to the people. Well, Edward VI's regents did make some effort to put the BCP in the hands of the people, but did they do so because they believed the liturgy derived from their preferences, needs, or authority or because they were propagandizing the Reformed religion? Well, I would guess the latter, but I really can't say.

The central question I'm posing here is whether our present epistemological frameworks can be considered superior to those in the past that we can assume that our X would be the explanation chosen to justify Y if it had been an option for our ancestors. Or indeed are our epistemological frameworks so superior that we believe our X's are objectively superior justifications for Y? The latter sounds ridiculous, but a tremendous amount of scholarship is founded on the latter principle. Indeed, the natural sciences make the latter a key foundation of their methods. I keep running and running around this question, because the insistence that epistemology is progressive seems to be the key principle of modernism. Oh, and post-modernism is completely useless here, since it insists that the problem is always ill-posed.