Some writers to the Outlook have assumed that I disagreed with James C. Goodloe that the righteous judgment of God is upon us. I agree, but for a different reason. I believe that we are reaping that judgment because of the spate of “topical preaching” that dominated the church in the twentieth century. With some notable exceptions, preaching during that period dealt first and primarily with topics for which the preacher then sought a text. Scripture was secondary, not primary.
There was a dearth of scriptural preaching. The preaching people heard did not have its focus on the Scriptures, on Jesus Christ or the work of the Holy Spirit in the Christian or in the church and the world. But don’t blame that on “the lectionary.”
WHAT IS A LECTIONARY? A lectionary is a systematic plan of Scripture reading. The Book of Common Worship says that a lectionary is “to provide for a disciplined use of the whole range of Scripture in the Church’s worship” (p.1034). It adds that a continua lectionary may provide “a responsible alternative to the use of the Common Lectionary . . .” The issue is what plan best provides for a balanced diet of Scripture for a contemporary congregation to hear in its preaching?
The only people who do not have a lectionary are those who use some other organizing principle for proclamation, such as the “topical preachers” whose topics suggest to them a Scripture passage that is subordinate to their topic.
When speaking of “lectionary” one must designate the specific lectionary to which one is referring. Customarily, it means the medieval Roman Catholic lectionary. This seems to be the lectionary to which Goodloe and Old are referring in their remarks about Lent and Advent (Presbyterian Outlook, June 21, 2004). It was this lectionary against which both Luther and Calvin railed. And so would I!
Simply to speak of “the lectionary” attributes by default far too much significance to the old medieval lectionary, thus predicating its faults to all lectionaries.
There was a subsequent Lutheran lectionary, an Anglican lectionary, a Mercersberg lectionary, a Scottish lectionary, and others. The New Roman Lectionary of the Second Vatican Council was radically new. Its three-year pattern superseded the medieval one-year Roman lectionary. It recovered the Psalter; it included readings from the Old Testament; it deleted a majority of Saints days; and it incorporated a continua component,
Yes, that continua component was only skeletal, but that skeleton was fleshed out in the Protestant revisions. Advent was no longer a “preparation for Christmas,” though it seems that neither Catholics nor Protestants have seemed to notice, as both continue in their old assumptions. In the new lectionary the lessons for at least three of the Sundays of Advent focus on the second coming of Christ, not on preparation for Christmas! And it sought at least to lighten the dominant penitential tone of the medieval Roman lectionary, another characteristic that the Protestant versions continued to attenuate.
Speak to concerns. Let me begin by speaking to concerns raised by my good friend and brother in Christ, Hughes Oliphant Old. He and I agree on almost everything. I think we really agree on this issue also, except that I have not yet convinced him of that. He is a superb scholar, an avid reader capable in Old French, Latin and “alte deutsche Schrift” and an authority on the preaching and worship of the Christian Church from the early church through the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. But I believe that both Old and Goodloe attribute to the Common Lectionary and to the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) the penitential and mandatory predilections of the medieval Roman lectionary.
Old says that “the lectionary” (which one?) pushes a stereotyped interpretation of Scripture. I suppose that every lectionary does do that. Yes, even, or especially, my personal, idiosyncratic lectionary. But it is evident that the hermeneutic incorporated in the New Roman Lectionary is quite different from the medieval Roman Lectionary. And the hermeneutic in the RCL is again quite different from both. (For an in-depth analysis of these varying hermeneutics, see the excellent book by Fritz West, Scripture and Memory: The Ecumenical Hermeneutic of the Three-Year Lectionaries, 1997, Pueblo Press). As Old says, the hermeneutic of the medieval Roman Lectionary “became a theological strait jacket” for centuries. That strait jacket was partially removed, or at least significantly modified, in the New Roman Lectionary. It was further removed by the Protestant versions of it. And, when speaking of the RCL, we must take cognizance of the different hermeneutics that guide the two tracks of that lectionary.
Old says that “the lectionary” was a burden for the people, because it demanded that businesses be closed for the plethora of commemorations imposed on them. At the same time, he states that the reformers preached every day, often from the Old Testament on weekdays and on the Gospels or other New Testament books on Sundays. But did the crowds come every day? What did the majority of the people of Geneva and Zurich actually hear preached? We can assume that most of them heard the Sunday sermons and fewer heard the sermons on weekdays. For the craftsmen to close shop daily to attend worship with sermon was no less a hardship than the old commemorations. The difference was that now it was not compulsory.
I have often marveled at the diligence of those early reformers in preparing all those sermons and their preservation by their followers. It gives evidence for the kind of scriptural scholarship that is woefully lacking in our time. But it does not really convince me that the majority of any congregation participated in that daily worship or heard all those sermons.
I have often said that congregations that have a significant portion of the congregation present for a Wednesday evening service, and for a Sunday evening service, as well as the Sunday morning service will certainly want to follow a continua lectionary for those non-Lord’s Day services. But in this twenty-first century, the majority of our congregations hear one Lord’s Day sermon each week. What of Scripture will they hear?
Lew Briner, in reviewing the completely revised New Roman Lectionary of 1969, saw in it a way to assure that a congregation would hear preaching based on the whole sweep of Scripture in a three or nine year cycle. He believed that this lectionary more closely expressed the desires of the reformers than any extant lectionary. He believed that the New Roman Lectionary could be revised, making “. . . such adaptations as are necessary to avoid conflict with Reformed understandings.” W. Sherman Skinner said: “… the new lectionary is more Reformed than any one we have ever had . . .. I am excited about the implications of our being able to use the Roman Catholic Lectionary, except where there are certain egregious venerations which we do not indulge in.”
Lew Briner further modified this radically changed New Roman Lectionary for Protestant use, resulting in the Common Lectionary. Horace Allen and the Consultation on Common Texts further revised it in the RCL. Each of these Presbyterians moved to make continua readings significantly more continuous.
Note that Briner and Allen did not move to legislate the readings, to make them mandatory or unchangeable. The lectionary was to be a guide to the coverage of Scripture. In my previous contribution I indicated that the RCL commits 23 successive Sundays in year A to the 16 chapters of Romans. No, you need not omit 1:18 – 2:29, unless you insist on seeing the lectionary according to the medieval model, as a legalistic demand rather than as a guide.
ON PASTORAL RESPONSIBILITY. A pastor is responsible for what a congregation hears being read and proclaimed in worship. A pastor is equally responsible for what the congregation fails to hear being read and proclaimed in worship.
Both Briner and Allen said that pastors need a measuring stick to gauge whether they are covering the whole of Scripture. In my estimation, the RCL does a fair job of that, although it may not be perfect, particularly with reference to the Old Testament.
Note that page 1033 the Book of Common Worship suggests flexibility in the length of readings. On July 1 we were celebrating the Lord’s Supper and I was preaching. The lectionary pointed to the washing of Na’aman in 2 Kings 5:1-19. It was a communion Sunday (as every Lord’s Day should be) so I began reading from 4:42, and thus included Elisha’s feeding of the one hundred, relating that to the feeding of the 5,000 and the 4,000. But we also dealt with Na’aman’s washing, relating that to the pool of Siloam. Thus we dealt with the basic unity of our sacraments, speaking about both baptism and the Lord’s Supper.
Only if one considers that the RCL is a policeman, which it provides a straitjacket, would one say that he or she would not be permitted to read the intervening verses in Matthew 6 on Ash Wednesday! (Now, as to whether we Presbyterians should be commemorating Ash Wednesday at all is a question that deserves discussion!)
I have suggested that if a pastor preaches 66 successive sermons on Isaiah, one each Lord’s Day, the congregation would certainly be undernourished in the New Testament. This would be so even if a complementary New Testament chapter were read and expounded with it. If, on the other hand one preached on only one of the lessons of the RCL each Sunday, pairing it with a complementary passage, in nine years one would have covered a major portion of Scripture, and well over half of that would have been done in a continua sequence. That would provide what I would consider a more balanced diet.
I remind readers that it is doubtful that a radical continua lectionary, one that disregards Pascha (Easter) and Pentecost, has ever been used. The lectionary seems always to have been a modified continua lectionary. Both Old and Goodloe speak of the “evangelical Christological festivals” that interrupted the continua readings for both the earliest church and for the reformers.
What I call a basic continua lectionary is what developed by the end of the fourth century of the Christian church. Old provides an excellent summary of the history of that development in his Guest Viewpoint of June 21. It is that lectionary pattern he has advocated for the last three or four decades.
I call the RCL a modified continua lectionary. It may not be modified enough for some, or modified too much for others. In my estimation it is the best that we have.
Goodloe admits that we all know that motives are never pure, and that the compilers of a lectionary include only some texts and exclude others. That affirmation certainly includes each one of us when we compile our own lectionary, our own pattern of readings. I know that that premise certainly defined me when I preached my version of a continua lectionary. That is the primary reason I am now willing to put myself under the righteous judgment of texts on which I never would have preached had not the judgment of the larger church pressed them on me. I may question that judgment and I may strike out on my own from time to time (as the Book of Common Worship suggests), but I believe that the RCL at least provides a more adequate guidance than I was ever able to provide for myself.
And in a culture in which most Presbyterian Christians hear only 40-50 Scripture passages or sets of passages read aloud to them and then proclaimed in a sermon each year (and where they participate in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper and are brought to the remembrance of the demands of their baptism far fewer times than that), the RCL provides better guidance than most of us would be able to provide on our own. And for those who do prefer a more basic continua lectionary, I suggest that from time to time they check their choices, both the choice of what their congregation hears and the choice of what the congregation does not hear. Do they hear at least 23 readings and proclamations from Romans every three or nine years? Do they hear sections of the Pentateuch, of the Davidic narrative, of the Elijah-Elisha cycle? What do they hear from the prophets?
And what do they not hear? If they have heard the letter of Jude proclaimed, and almost two years of the gospel of Matthew, what is it that they have not heard? A check against the Revised Common Lectionary would be a good starting point for this examination.
ARLO D. DUBA is Professor of Worship Emeritus, and retired Dean of the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, now living in Hot Springs, Ark.
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