Book Review: Evangelical versus Liturgical? Defying a Dichotomy

Abstract

Evangelical versus Liturgical? Defying a Dichotomy. By Melanie C. Ross. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing, 2014. 148 pp. $17.00 (paper).For Christians at a historic inflection point, any attempt to mitigate division between and forms of Christianity deserves consideration. Melanie Ross's book, if not seamless, poses good questions about what those two traditions of practice and theology hold in common, and where they may differ in important ways.One might reasonably expect that defiance of a dichotomy would work from both sides of it; however, while the book does commend what both traditions have to offer each other, its emphasis is a defense of evangelical Christianity from putative misconstruals by liturgical theologians. Ross means to challenge liturgical studies to both more historical and more theological in its assessment of evangelical worship, which in turn will require a rethinking of the evangelical-liturgical (p. 6). In chapter 1 she provides an informative history of the liturgical of evangelical worship with the intention of showing that evangelicals have moved beyond that ordo that runs through Charles Finney into the seeker services of the megachurches, now on the wane. Along the way, Ross nicely captures some of the cross-denominational and pragmatic characteristics of evangelical worship. Later, two cases (chapters 2 and 5) mean to thicken the readers appreciation for exemplary evangelical liturgical practices today. Even if the case descriptions do not entirely persuade that something substantively different than the frontier is going on there, Ross does successfully show that mission outcomes liturgical theologians hope will flow from robust liturgy are impressively alive in those evangelical churches and clearly connected, in their practitioners' reflections, with their worship life.Chapter 3 offers an account of the relationship between scripture and liturgy. Placing Aidan Kavanagh and Louis-Marie Chauvet in dialogue with John Webster, Ross shows common concern among evangelical and liturgical theologians that the Bible not be interpreted naively, while protecting the evangelical claim that the Bibles meaning is not an ecclesial-liturgical creation but a discovery empowered by the Spirit. This point is well articulated, even if one thinks that the difference between Roman Catholic and Protestant ecclesial cultures better explains the differences at work in her dialogue partners than the evangelical-liturgical dichotomy. Placing Gordon Lathrop in dialogue with Kevin Vanhoozer on the shared recognition of the metaphoric, symbolic, and mythic content of biblical material, Ross defends evangelical attention to its propositional and confessional content. One who knows Lathrop's work may be inclined to say that his work takes account precisely of the interplay of all biblical genres, including the propositional. …