Posted: 01/13/2005
I research in and teach liturgical history and theology because
in the Church's liturgy, with the Eucharist as its summit, all
of reality is ritually brought to its fullness in Jesus Christ
through his saving life, death, and resurrection accomplished
2,000 years ago. It is primarily in prayer that one comes
to know the Christian God who reveals Self, not as an objective
phenomenon, but as a Thou through personal encounter. As
ecclesial prayer, the Church's liturgy has the additional, indispensable
function, in its verbal and gestural symbolic language of the
life of faith, of establishing and maintaining Christian identity
by mediating the meaning whereby the Church community is held
together and grows. Accordingly, since all theology is ultimately
in service of the Church and its mission to the world, and since
the principle of intelligibility in systematic theology is the
relation of one aspect of the revealed mystery of salvation to
all the others, the ultimate task of any branch of theology is
to demonstrate how it contributes to a better understanding and
practice of the Church's communal worship. I see the teaching
of the Theology of Liturgy, then, as an essential component in
the Department's overall endeavor to provide a classical education
in Christian Theology.
