03 — Liturgical Theology

Schmemann’s central scholarly claim: that the Church’s leitourgia is not a source from which theology quarries proof-texts but is itself the Church’s primary theological act. This section sets out the thesis and the historical argument of Introduction to Liturgical Theology (Russian 1961; English 1966) on which it rests — and marks where later liturgiology has contested that argument.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

This is the section on which Schmemann’s standing as a scholar depends, and it is the one that has drawn the most sustained criticism. The thesis itself — lex orandi as the Church’s first theology, worship as the place where the Church becomes herself — has been enormously fruitful and is now a standard category in Orthodox and Western theological education alike. The historical reconstruction that Schmemann built to support it is another matter: a three-stage account in which an original eschatological ordo was overlaid first by the sacral, “mysteriological” piety of the Christianized Empire and then by the monastic reshaping of the Church’s services.

The two files here keep those apart deliberately, because the criticism does. Liturgy as Theology expounds the thesis; The Ordo and the Byzantine Synthesis expounds the history and flags its vulnerabilities. The full both-sides treatment of the criticism is in Section 08 (see The Liturgiological and Traditionalist Critique).

Contents

File Description
Liturgy as Theology Leitourgia, the Liturgy as the Church’s self-realization, and the eschatological structure
The Ordo and the Byzantine Synthesis Introduction to Liturgical Theology: the ordo, the Constantinian overlay, the monastic reshaping

See Also