Four-part harmony

With GAFCON, Lambeth and St Bartholomew the Great, there may not be much harmony these days in the Anglican communion. However, satirist Garrison Keilor harkens back to earlier days when harmony was the hallmark of Episcopalians.† Here is the excerpt relevant to hymnody:

We make fun of Episcopalians for their blandness, their excessive calm, their fear of giving offense, their lack of speed and also for their secret fondness for macaroni and cheese. But nobody sings like them. If you were to ask an audience in Des Moines, a relatively Episcopalianless place, to sing along on the chorus of "Michael Row the Boat Ashore," they will look daggers at you as if you had asked them to strip to their underwear. But if you do this among Episcopalians, they'd smile and row that boat ashore and up on the beach! ....And down the road!

Many Episcopalians are bred from childhood to sing in four-part harmony, a talent that comes from sitting on the lap of someone singing alto or tenor or bass and hearing the harmonic intervals by putting your little head against that person's rib cage. It's natural for Episcopalians to sing in harmony. We are too modest to be soloists, too worldly to sing in unison. When you're singing in the key of C and you slide into the A7th and D7th chords, all two hundred of you, it's an emotionally fulfilling moment. By our joining in harmony, we somehow promise that we will not forsake each other.

I do believe this, people: Episcopalians, who love to sing in four-part harmony are the sort of people you could call up when you're in deep distress. If you are dying, they will comfort you. If you are lonely, they'll talk to you. And if you are hungry, they'll give you tuna salad!

Episcopalians believe in prayer, but would practically die if asked to pray out loud. Episcopalians like to sing, except when confronted with a new hymn or a hymn with more than four stanzas.

Ruth Gledhill (of The Times of London) reprints the essay this week in her blog, but a quick Google search suggests it dates back at least to March 2007. It might just be an urban legend: the essay is widely attributed to Keilor — who grew up among Lutherans though now is an Episcopalian — but is nowhere to be found on his official website.

The other problem with harmony in TEC is that it’s being driven out of the liturgy. Hymnal 1982 removes the SATB from many of the hymns, including about half of the mass settings and all but two verses of the Vaughan Williams harmonies for Sine Nomine. Meanwhile, for the non-hymnal parishes, the easy listening “contemporary” worship music doesn’t get reused enough for the congregation to learn the parts.

† Given that Keilor is a financial supporter of Barack Obama, Al Franken and MoveOn.org, it seems likely that he sides with the TEC in America’s current Episcopalian/Anglican split.

Pharisees, tradition and modernism

Todd Wilken (of Issues Etc. fame) has written a stirring defense of traditional theology and practice, entitled “Playing the Pharisee Card”. It is filled with the same intelligent, cutting arguments that Pastor Wilken made for five years on his KFUO radio show against subordinating the church to popular culture, arguments that we will see again with the impending return of Issues Etc. under new ownership.

His piece is intended as a direct analogy to the “race card” or “gender card” used in modern American political arguments as an ad hominem attack to demonize opponents and stifle political debate. As Pastor Wilken writes:

Today, the label "Pharisee" is applied to many Christians just like me -- perhaps you're one of them. We are Christians who cherish God's Word, the Church's historic Creeds, confessions and practices. When we see the Church abandoning these things to follow the latest fads and entertainments, we lament. When we see the Gospel itself being left behind in the Church's rush to mimic popular culture, we are grieved. And when we question the Church's infatuation with the spirit of the age, we are labeled Pharisees.

He continues:

The Pharisee Card is also played in order to discredit Christians who refuse to abandon the historic practices of the Church in favor of the latest innovations. This too works beautifully. Those dealing the Pharisee Card know that, to avoid being labeled a Pharisee, many Christians will tolerate an endless succession of fads in worship, music and ministry. But Jesus never faulted the Pharisees for resisting change. On the contrary, He faulted them for introducing their own innovations and methods in the place of Godís Word.

Wilken notes that Jesus explicitly rejected modernization of belief for its own sake. He quotes from Luke 5:36-39, emphasizing verse 39:

36 [Jesus] also told them a parable: "No one tears a piece from a new garment and puts it on an old garment. If he does, he will tear the new, and the piece from the new will not match the old. 37 And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. 38 But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. 39 And no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, 'The old is good.' "

By the way, “New Wineskins” happens to be the name of an (orthodox) evangelical renewal movement within the mainline Presbyterian Church USA.

I’m with Pastor Wilken all the way, but wonder if we are on shaky ground for one point. I certainly prefer a parish that maintains traditional music and resists the pressures of the transient popular culture in liturgical music. My favorite Issues Etc. shows were those where Pastor Wilken interviewed Terry Mattingly (author of Pop Goes Religion) and others making exactly this point.

However, most of the Anglican Diocese of San Joaquin and the (soon to be) Anglican Diocese of Pittsburgh -- as well as AMiA -- have gone to modernized liturgy. Can we say these godly men of undisputed character are erring by bringing electric guitars into the sanctuary?

Issues Etc. coming back

For those who haven’t heard, Issues Etc. is coming back with Pastor Todd Wilken and his trusty sidekick Jeff Schwarz. But the Lutheran radio show about liturgy and worship is not coming back with KFUO, which abruptly sacked the two men back in March.

Instead, there’s plans to launch the show online in affiliation with Lutheran Public Radio and something called Brothers of John the Steadfast. The BJS group is marshalling a blue chip collection of advisors and participants, including Uwe Siemon-Netto (former UPI religion editor), Pastor Martin Noland (formerly head of the Concordia Historical Institute), and Get Religion blogger Mollie Hemingway.

This looks to be a nonprofit foundation and online portal of traditionalists unhappy with the drift of the LCMS. It has the potential to integrate all the efforts that (for continuing Anglicans) are fragmented between VirtueOnline, Stand Firm, and the Anglican Communion Network, among others.

Pastor Noland explains that John “the Steadfast,” Elector of Saxony, was the first German ruler to defend the Reformation, saving the Lutherans from a Hugenot-style massacre. John was also the first to sign the 1530 Augsburg Confession, one of the major pillars of the Lutheran faith.

On the Lutheran Public Radio website, Pastor Wilken offers a glimpse of what is planned, including the reiteration of his old tagline: “As always: Christ centered, cross-focused.” Stay tuned.

Favorite Whitsunday hymn

Today is Pentecost, née Whitsunday, a once major feast that has fallen into some neglect. Over on GetReligion, Lutheran Mollie Hemingway (one of the would-be saviors of Issues Etc.) had a very good article on the limited coverage of Pentecost, the birth of the church. At church today, we celebrated the occasion with birthday cake, although without the rector’s admonishment (as at our previous church) to wear the liturgical red that evokes the tongues of fire of the first Pentecost.

Today was the first time this year my wife and I got a chance to sing Vaughan Williams’ Salve Festa Dies. It is one of five Whitsunday hymns (plus two alternate tunes) in my favorite hymnal. (It is also one of eight Pentecost hymns — including alternate tunes — in the current PECUSA hymnal, although 33% of the verses have been lobotomized).

The music director at our current church refuses to schedule “Hail Thee Festival Day” at Easter, holding off to the last possible usage. My wife and I grew up singing it at all three major feasts — Easter, Ascension, and Whitsunday — so much that the feasts seem empty without it.

In his wonderful hymn companion, Ian Bradley notes that the Whitsunday version “is the most widely used nowadays, appearing in the hymnbooks of a number of different denominations and not just, as it once did, in those of a High Anglican persuasion.”

Dr. Bradley notes that the Fortunatus poem (reprinted in a 13th century Sarum missal) was the Easter version (the one that comes to mind when I hear the tune), translated for the 1906 COE hymnal by George Gabriel Scott Gillett. He concludes

All the Festival Day hymns owe much of their modern popularity to the vigorous unison tune Salve festa dies which Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) composed for their appearance in the English Hymnal in 1906.

Rome to Anglicans: time to end your fudge

Religion correspondent Ruth Gledhill of The Times of London had an explosive posting this week on her blog:

Hard words for Anglicans from the head of the Council for Christian Unity in Rome. Cardinal Walter Kasper has told the Catholic Herald that now, with Lambeth approaching, is the time for Anglicans to decide whether they are Catholic or Protestant.

'Ultimately, it is a question of the identity of the Anglican Church. Where does it belong?' he said. 'Does it belong more to the churches of the first millennium -Catholic and Orthodox - or does it belong more to the Protestant churches of the 16th century? At the moment it is somewhere in between, but it must clarify its identity now and that will not be possible without certain difficult decisions.'

The genius of Anglicanism has always been its ability to straddle the divide, but maybe the Cardinal is right and the Communion's present difficulties reflect the impossibility of continuing to do this.

The posting has attracted many comments, including a variety of political and theological perspectives. But let me quote two:

Hasn't this always been obvious to people [who disagree] that the [Anglican] failure to have a coherent theology is a genius, [but] rather [believe it to be] a crippling flaw.

If Anglicanism is Catholic then why are half the Anglican congregations not very Catholic at all, and if it is Protestant then what is Walsingham all about? Anglicanism does need to make up its mind, and maybe that will require that it become the 3 or 4 Churches it really is. It cannot be either Catholic or Protestant while it is trying to be both.

Another helpfully quotes the Cardinal himself:

Cardinal Kasper has already touched on the subject in his 2004 book, “That all may be one- the call to Christian unity today”

“Thus we are confronted with two different approaches: on the one hand, the universally-oriented, episcopal approach of the Anglicans and some Lutheran churches, inspired by ancient church tradition; and, on the other hand, a more local, community-centred, presbyteral approach.

Behind the two approaches lie different interpretations of the precise intention of the Reformation. Did the Reformers intend to renew the then universal Church, maintaining continuity with its fundamental structure, as the Augsburg Confession (1530) suggests? Or was the development of a new type and paradigm of the Church an inevitable and deliberate consequence of their actions? Is there a fundamental consensus or - as many state nowadays - a fundamental difference?

I would be inclined to agree with the Cardinal — like Gledhill and many of the commenters — that the “Anglican fudge” has reached the end, and that the fissures can no longer be papered over.

In England, there’s enough parishioners to split Anglicanism into 3 or 4 Churches, but in the US you couldn’t. However, part of PECUSA wants to be just like its bigger brother ELCA, so perhaps those two could merge. And the evangelical wing might align with the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, assuming they get to keep their bishops. Not sure where us Anglo-Catholics are supposed to go — become Anglican Rite Catholics?