[As a young person] I noticed a book [on a clergyman’s shelves] with a thin spine and a severe-looking title – ‘On Liturgical Theology’. I had no idea that there was any such thing as a ‘liturgical theology,’ but I knew I loved liturgy, and the book by Aidan Kavanagh looked interesting…

The ancient Christian tradition ‘lex orandi, lex credenda’ translates into a truth that seems radical in our own suspicious, divisive and narrow-minded age: ‘Orthodoxy first means right worship, and only secondly doctrinal accuracy’.

The poet Jonathan Holden epitomized a common attitude when he wrote that because ‘religious doctrine delivers us an already discovered, accepted, codified system of values – “official truth”,’ a truth he defines as ‘static’, it can never attain the authenticity of a well-made work of art.

Kavanagh says the notion of ‘orthodoxy as “correct doctrine” was unheard of in Western Christianity’ until the mid-16th and early 17th centuries, when both the Catholic and newly formed Protestant churches found it prudent to standardize worship and dogma and thus establish distinct identities. This was politics, of course, but the root cause was fear.

But fears can be faced and overcome. It does not surprise me to discover that the Christian prejudice in favor of “correct doctrine” took hold as literacy increased and oral tradition faded. Theology moved from the mouth, ear and breath onto the page, – words set in stone, as it were…

I have learned that worship itself, which for years I had thought of as static and boring, might in fact be a kind of living poem. A poem of words-made-flesh, as it were, and far more authentic than anything I could have come up with on my own. A poem still in the making, in what the Christian creeds call the communion of saints, the ancient words rendered new each day among the quick and the dead.

– Kathleen Morris, excerpt from ‘Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith’, (Christian Century, December 3, 1997, p. 1131)