BENSON. B. E. (2020) The Primacy of Liturgy in Christianity (Art)

Religious Studies, Page 1 of 18 © The Author(s), 2020.
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The primacy of liturgy in Christianity
BRUCE ELLIS BENSON

School of Divinity, University of St Andrews, KY16 9JU, UK
e-mail: beb5@st-andrews.ac.uk
Abstract: I argue that liturgy is primary to the Christian faith. By ‘liturgy’,

however, I do not mean merely what happens on Sunday morning. Instead, I
distinguish between ‘intensive’ and ‘extensive’ liturgies, those that occur when the
body of Christ meets together and when that body disperses. All of this together
constitutes Christian liturgy. My thesis is not that practice is more primary than
theory, for that presupposes the possibility of drawing a sharp line between them –
an impossible task. Rather, liturgy is a variety of embodied cognition through which
we know God and our neighbours. Theology is something that arises from our
liturgies and is itself liturgical in nature. We may believe the Nicene Creed, but
saying it aloud is performative in nature. I end by examining the relation of
phrone ̄sis and theōria in Aristotle and then consider the way Heidegger uses this
distinction to argue that ‘know-how’ (Verstehen) is the most basic kind of human
knowledge.
Introduction
Nicholas Wolterstorff opens his recent book Acting Liturgically:

Philosophical Reflections on Religious Practice with the following paragraph:
In recent decades there has been an extraordinary surge of interest in philosophy of religion
within the analytic tradition of philosophy. Those who have participated in this movement –
myself included – have focused almost all of their attention on just four topics: the nature of
God, the epistemology of religious belief, the nature of religious experience, and the problem
of evil. If someone who knew nothing about religion drew conclusions about the religious
mode of life from this literature, she would come to the view that, apart from the mystical
experiences of a few people, the religious life consists of believing things about God. She would
have no inkling of the fact that liturgies and rituals are prominent within the lives of most
adherents of almost all religions . . . Between the priorities of analytic philosophers of religion
and the priorities of most religious adherents there is a striking discrepancy.
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 BRUCE ELLIS BENSON
There is much to celebrate about the ‘surge of interest’ of philosophy of religion in

the analytic tradition. Exactly the kinds of topics Wolterstorff mentions have
received much helpful attention. Yet he is likewise right in pointing out that
there is a discrepancy between work being done by philosophers of religion and
‘the priorities of most religious adherents’ (I assume Wolterstorff is speaking pri-
marily about Christians). While Christians are by no means unconcerned with
questions about the nature of the divine and the justification of their beliefs in
God, the vast majority of them are far more concerned with living out their
faith, which is largely about certain practices. Consider what Charles Taliaferro
writes:
It is regrettable that mainstream, contemporary philosophy of religion has largely ignored the
role of ritual in Christian life and practice. Very few standard anthologies today in philosophy
of religion contain any material on prayer, the sacraments, meditation, fasting, vigils, religious
hymns, icons, pilgrimages, the sacredness of places or times, and so on, and yet these play
different roles in much religious life. A neglect of this terrain results in an excessively intel-
lectual or detached portrait of religion.
Turning to liturgy and ritual, then, is a very important step in the right direction
and I find Wolterstorff’s account of liturgy to be fundamentally correct. My goal
here is to follow Wolterstorff’s lead by taking his observations further and thinking
more broadly about what we mean by the term ‘religion’, specifically, the Christian
religion. In what follows, I intend to show how Christian theology grows out of and
is grounded in liturgical practice. Put more sharply, I believe that liturgy is more
foundational to Christianity than its doctrine, even though doctrine is always
necessary as a codification of Christian experience.
Here it is important to be clear about how I am using the term ‘liturgy’. The term
usually takes one of two particular senses. First, traditions such as Roman
Catholicism and Anglicanism are often described as ‘liturgical’. More often than
not, this use is vague at best, since it can refer to using candles or incense,
bowing and genuflecting, and ringing bells. Wolterstorff also uses the term in a
second sense – that of a ‘script’ prescribing the order of service. Regarding this
second sense, it would be hard to think of a religious tradition in Christianity
that does not have some sort of script. For some, this is codified by book or text.
But simply having an order of service – written or not – ends up being a liturgy,
meaning that ‘non-liturgical’ traditions are not lacking in liturgy. Wolterstorff pro-
vides an excellent exposition and analysis of both worship and script, and my
intention here is neither to criticize nor to undermine that analysis. However, I
am using the term in a way that includes the liturgical practice that takes place
on Sunday morning but places that in the broader liturgical context of our lives.
Historically, the term ‘liturgy’ has been much richer and encompassing than the
relatively narrow use of the term today. Restricting the use of the term loses an
important connection with its ancient meaning, going back to the ancient
Greeks and to the early church.
The primacy of liturgy in Christianity 
Let me put my view in analytic terms. I would label Wolterstorff’s position, as

well as that of Terrence Cuneo, as L: liturgy as defined primarily in terms of a
weekly gathering of Christians. To be sure, much (and perhaps most) writing on
liturgy falls into this category, so Wolterstorff and Cuneo are in good company.
In category L, I would place the view of someone like Jean-Yves Lacoste, particu-
larly as expounded in his text Experience and the Absolute. For Lacoste, liturgy is
‘the logic that presides over the encounter between man and God writ large’.
On this view, liturgy is not restricted to a particular day of the week nor a particular
action in which human beings engage. Instead, it concerns all of the ways in which
human beings engage – or even do not engage – with God. Liturgy for Lacoste aims
not merely at seeing and knowing God but at putting ourselves at God’s disposal.
Thus, the movement of liturgy for Lacoste is threefold: () from the everyday life of
being-in-the-world, () to becoming new beings in the image of Christ, and ()
back to serving our neighbours. To explicate Lacoste’s position further is beyond
the scope of this article. What is important is the way in which he broadens the
conception of liturgy.
Following Lacoste but going beyond his position, I see my position – which I
label L – to be about the fundamental structure of human existence. We are,
quite simply, liturgical beings. One could explicate this in many different and com-
plementary ways. From an Augustinian view, we might say we are what we love.
That is, our loves have the most profound effect upon our lives. For instance,
Augustine says: ‘When we ask whether somebody is a good person, we are not
asking what he believes or hopes for but what he loves’. Being a Christian is pri-
marily about following Jesus in daily life. I do not mean my view to be exactly that
of Augustine, but I think this very broad way of thinking about liturgy is correct.
Here I simply provide this very brief account to situate my position.
If the claim that liturgical practice takes precedence over doctrine is correct,
then future work on ‘philosophy of liturgy’ done by Christians should be devel-
oped in such a way that it takes into account the entire range of liturgical practices
in which Christians engage – from Sunday to Sunday. A further aspect of placing
the emphasis on liturgy in Christianity might mean that future work on the phil-
osophy of the Christian religion should at least broaden and perhaps even reorient
its focus from being almost exclusively concerned with doctrine to being consid-
erably more concerned with how belief is embodied in practice. In any case, if I
am right that the lives of Christians are more focused on the practices than
beliefs, then philosophers of Christian religion need to take considerably greater
interest in those practices. That in no way means that philosophers of Christian
religion should give up work on proofs for God’s existence or examinations of
God’s attributes. It simply means that philosophy of religion has other rich and
relatively untouched areas to cultivate. What I say here may well be applicable
to other religions and I suspect that – mutatis mutandis – it probably is to some
extent. However, that would be a different sort of project from the one I am
attempting to undertake here.
 BRUCE ELLIS BENSON
Religious experience and theological belief
If we go back to the quotation from Wolterstorff, he mentions that the ques-

tion of religious experience has been taken up by philosophers. But he qualifies
this by noting that it has largely concentrated on ‘the mystical experiences of a
few’. The implication is that there is a small group of select people who connect
to God in some important or profound way. Yet studies of ordinary people in
ordinary circumstances show exactly the opposite. For instance, The Madonna
of 115th Street gives an account of ‘the lived religious experiences’ and ‘the devo-
tional logic of presence’ of Italian Catholics. One could just as easily examine the
lived experience or devotional presence of global south Pentecostals or North
American evangelicals. As it turns out, many Christians around the world have reli-
gious experiences.
Wolterstorff also notes that anyone who only reads the analytic philosophy of
religion literature would think that religion is about ‘believing things about
God’. Taliaferro puts the problem of emphasizing religious belief over religious
practice in terms of two things: () being ‘excessively intellectual’ and () being
‘detached’. While I am a philosopher by training and trade, I don’t think religion
is primarily ‘intellectual’ in nature. To be sure, it involves thinking, but Christian
beliefs – the kind formulated by creeds and catechism – are only one kind of think-
ing, and not the most important way of thinking at least for the vast majority of
Christians. There are people for whom religion is primarily cerebral – and many
of them are philosophers of religion – but they are very few in number in compari-
son to the roughly  billion Christians around the world. To make that point stron-
ger, consider Ninian Smart’s taxonomy of the seven different dimensions of
religion: () ritualistic, () experiential, () mythic, () doctrinal, () ethical, ()
social, and () material. While we need not be concerned here with the exact con-
tours of Smart’s taxonomy, it does show us that doctrine is a relatively small aspect
of religion. If we take Smart’s taxonomy at face value, doctrine is /th of what con-
stitutes religion. However, if one considers the contours of the discipline known as
‘philosophy of religion’ – particularly in the analytic philosophical tradition – then
it quickly becomes clear that these six other dimensions have been given remark-
ably little attention, both in general and proportionally. As Kevin Schilbrack inci-
sively notes:
The doctrinal dimension of religions has received the lion’s share of the attention from phi-
losophers of religion. But the task of developing and defending religious doctrines tends to be
the work of literate elites, typically from a leisured class and typically male . . . the interest in
religious doctrines and arguments is a relatively small fraction of the lives of religious people,
even in those communities that do make such issues central.
If we were speaking of religions in general, it seems safe to say that most religions
are not concerned with expounding and inculcating doctrines. But, even within
Christendom, the number of groups or denominations that define themselves pri-
marily in terms of specific doctrines is limited. Further, even in groups that have
The primacy of liturgy in Christianity 
strong doctrinal traditions, the average person in the pew is either not very familiar
with them or else has only a limited understanding of what they are supposed to
mean. Consider the distinction Catherine Bell makes between what she calls
‘orthodoxic’ and ‘orthopraxic’ forms of religion. Of course, she recognizes that
the distinction between these two forms of religion is a matter of emphasis,
rather than a concern with one against the other.
Whether a community is deemed orthodoxic or orthopraxic can only be a matter of emphasis,
of course, since no religious tradition can promote belief or ritual at the total expense of the
other, and many would never distinguish between them at all. Moreover, whatever the overall
emphasis in a tradition as a whole, it is easy to find subcommunities stressing the opposite
pole . . . terms like ‘orthodoxy’ or ‘orthopraxy’ cannot be used effectively if accorded too much
rigidity or exclusivity.
Most Christians would not even be able to explain the difference between ortho-
doxy and orthopraxy. Still, Bell claims the following about Christianity: ‘As a
result of the dominance of Christianity in much of the West, which has tended
to stress matters of doctrinal and theological orthodoxy, people may take it for
granted that religion is primarily a matter of what one believes.’ To be sure,
there are people who think of Christianity as a set of beliefs to which one sub-
scribes. However, most people who identify as Christians would be hard pressed
to explain in much detail even the most basic Christian doctrines. Having
watched a number of my students become Roman Catholics because they find
the idea of a church that has answers to all religious questions in the form of a cat-
echism quite appealing, I have often reminded them that their comfort in having
all theological matters decided by the Magisterium is not shared by most people in
their pew.
Here it’s helpful to return to Taliaferro’s points out about belief being
‘detached’. The question here is: what’s detached from what? The simplest
answer is that theological belief is detached from religious practice. I suspect
this is what Taliaferro intends. But it’s a question of how it is detached.
Taliaferro seems to imply that, if we only focus on belief and neglect ritual, then
we have a conception of religion that is somewhat impersonal: religion as
signing on to a collection of doctrines. I think this is certainly a danger. But
Alvin Plantinga points out that, if belief in propositions were the only thing at
issue, then the demons would be believers (Ja. :). The difference, says
Plantinga, is one of affections: the believer believes but also loves God.
Plantinga is exactly right on this point, and he sounds quite Augustinian. These
affections and these beliefs are formed, nurtured, and put in action by Christian
liturgy. But I think the affections are more fundamental than the beliefs.
Consider this statement: ‘Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection
of dogmas, or a moralism. Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story; it is
an event.’ That quotation comes from someone one might not expect:
Cardinal Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict. Given Benedict’s nickname
 BRUCE ELLIS BENSON
while Cardinal – God’s Rottweiler – it is safe to conclude that this statement could
hardly mean that doctrine or dogma is unimportant. His time as Cardinal Prefect at
the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (–) was marked by a vig-
orous defence of the faith and denunciation of many for their heretical views. So, at
least in his case, there is nothing like a ‘choice’ between ‘lived’ theology and what
we might call ‘academic’ or ‘speculative’ theology. Instead, it becomes a question
of emphasis or primacy: namely, what really is the driving force behind
Christianity?
Benedict is right that Christianity is an encounter and love story, which can only
be understood by doing and being. It is not incidental that Benedict’s first encyc-
lical is Deus caritas est, which begins as follows:
‘God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him’ ( Jn. :).
These words from the First Letter of John express with remarkable clarity the heart of the
Christian faith . . . Saint John also offers a kind of summary of the Christian life: ‘We have come
to know and to believe in the love God has for us’.
Understanding the doctrine of Christianity is highly dependent upon love being

lived out. Rightly understood, doctrine grows out of practice, for it is a kind of for-
malization of liturgical experience. Liturgy simultaneously relates us to God and to
our neighbour, and community is more fundamental to Christian faith than
dogma, both historically and logically. I will follow that order – history and
logic – by first sketching out the earliest days of Christian history and then turn
to the logic of liturgy and doctrine. Working out all the implications of the thesis
that liturgy is primary to Christianity is a task that that I can only begin here.
However, before going any further, I need to make clear that my thesis does not
boil down to something as simple as ‘practice is more fundamental than theory’.
The reason for this is simple: I do not believe that the practice/theory distinction
can hold in any strong sense. There is no practice without theory or theory without
practice. So any attempt to separate them into independent parts is impossible.
Aristotle was the first to make a distinction between theōria and praxis, and it is
a useful distinction – at least to some extent. The problem with the distinction,
though, is that it could imply that there either is or could be something like a
theōria divorced from praxis or a praxis divorced from theōria. Aristotle never
makes such a claim. Neither do I. For instance, theōria is something we do,
making it ultimately a form of praxis. Put otherwise, thinking about God and
making arguments for God’s existence are practices. The Nicene Creed can be
viewed as a set of propositions but saying the Nicene Creed each week is performa-
tive in nature. Even believing in God is something that we do. Thus, there can be no
simple distinction between theory and practice or belief and practice.
In saying that ‘liturgy’ is primary for Christians, I am saying that lived out beliefs
have a primacy over beliefs found in catechisms and creeds. Anthropologists have
made it clear that religious practices across the world are not merely rote,
irrational, and meaningless (an assumption that seems to have arisen from
The primacy of liturgy in Christianity 
Protestant Christians). Practices always embody theory. They are ways of knowing.
My point is that theory is dependent upon practice for its meaning. By saying that
liturgy is the primary element of Christian life, I am saying that it is more basic to
Christianity than official statements of belief found in creeds and catechisms. Or,
put differently, how we interpret creeds and catechisms is always in light of litur-
gical experience. Put more strongly, when liturgical practice is at odds with creeds
and doctrines, those either implicitly change (we interpret them in a different way)
or they are explicitly amended to reflect the liturgical life of believers.
In the final section of this article, I will show how Aristotle sees the connection
between practical wisdom (phrone ̄sis) and theoretical wisdom (sophia). For the
moment, though, we can simply say that one cannot have sophia without phrone ̄sis.
One of the ways in which analytic philosophy and phenomenology can be seen as
complementing one another is by the recognition of something that is often called
‘embodied cognition’, which is the idea that cognition is not something that only
takes place in the brain but is actually undertaken by our entire body. The
basis for such a conception of knowing is provided by recent discoveries in cogni-
tive science. One way of putting this connection is that of Mark Johnson, who
argues that cognitive ‘patterns emerge as meaningful structures for us chiefly at
the level of our bodily movements through space, our manipulation of objects,
and our perceptual interactions’. A fuller definition can be given as follows.
Cognition can be said to be embodied in that it
arises from bodily interactions with the world. From this point of view, cognition depends on
the kinds of experiences that come from having a body with particular perceptual and motor
capacities that are inseparably linked and that together form the matrix with which reasoning,
memory, emotion, language, and all other aspects of life meshed.
Assuming cognitive scientists and phenomenologists are at least right about the
intimate connection between cognition and bodily movement, it should come
as no surprise that our bodily comportment towards God and our neighbour is
crucial to our knowing both God and neighbour. Practices such as kneeling for
prayer, bowing before the altar, and extending a hand for the peace are not
simply practices. They are embodied ways of knowing. It is with this qualification
in mind that I argue that liturgy has primacy over doctrine, not that liturgy can or
should exist without doctrine.
Liturgical practice in Christianity
If one goes back to the beginnings of Christianity – before it even becomes

‘Christianity’ and Jesus is just another rabbi – one might be tempted to say, as
Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, CA, ‘there’s no there there’. By this,
she meant, nostalgically, that what she had experienced in Oakland as a child
had disappeared, so there was nothing to return to. But I think we – as
Kierkegaard’s disciples at second hand – tend to have the opposite problem to
 BRUCE ELLIS BENSON
that of Stein: presuming there was a ‘there’ there when there really wasn’t much
there.
What ‘doctrine’ – what theological belief – was there to believe? Certainly, one
doctrine found in both Judaism and early Christianity was simply that God exists.
Every first-century Jew reciting the Shema would surely have affirmed God’s exist-
ence. A belief in God is fundamental to many, though certainly not all, religions.
However, the religion that grows out of the teachings of Jesus is one that reshapes
Jewish beliefs in rather substantial ways. The first gospel – Mark, going back to AD
– – presents the disciples as continually confused about who Jesus is. ‘Who do
people say that I am?’ asks Jesus (Mk. :). He gets answers such as John the
Baptist, Elijah, and one of the prophets. Then he asks ‘who do you say that I
am?’ (my italics) and Peter answers: ‘You are the Messiah’ (Mk. ). Since the cat-
egory ‘messiah’ was highly contested in terms of its content, that Peter recognizes
him to be such doesn’t – on its own – tell us much more than that Jesus was recog-
nized as someone very special. But what exactly does Jesus teach? While the basic
message boils down to something like ‘follow me’, what that means gets defined –
by Jesus himself – in continually different terms. Whereas conservative Protestants
tend to favour the born-again metaphor, Jesus also heals and forgives the sins of
the paralytic because of the faith of his friends. It’s not his faith but their faith
that counts in this story. To give another example, Jesus says to the tax collector
Zacchaeus that ‘today salvation has come to this house’. What prompts this
response? Zacchaeus says he would give half his possessions to the poor and
repay anyone he’d defrauded fourfold. In this account, there’s nothing even men-
tioned about his ‘faith’. Instead, it’s a concrete action, a similar action to the one
that Jesus had required of the rich young ruler (sell all you have and give the
money to the poor). Jesus often praises people for their faith, but the content of
that faith – at least in the gospel texts – is significantly underdetermined. In fact,
the one place in which Jesus speaks about judgement and the separation of believ-
ers from unbelievers – Matthew  – only makes reference to how they have lived.
Those who have taken care of the stranger, the hungry and thirsty, the sick, and
those in prison are told they will ‘inherit the kingdom’ (Mt. :). There is no
mention of any doctrines or propositional beliefs, let alone the need to affirm
them.
Yet there is another way of thinking about faith that makes sense of what Jesus
means when he says that his followers must have faith in him. In Hebrews :, we
read that ‘without faith it is impossible to please God, for whoever would approach
him must believe that he exists and rewards those who seek him’. The term trans-
lated as ‘believe’ here is pisteusai, which is not about believing a proposition about
God but believing in God. In both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, such a
term never means intellectual assent to a proposition for which there is insufficient
empirical proof. Instead, as Wilfred Cantwell Smith points out, to have faith in
Jesus means ‘to hold dear’ or ‘to be loyal to’ or ‘to value highly’ – or, simply, ‘to
love’ Jesus. For Jesus’ disciples to believe in him, they would certainly have
The primacy of liturgy in Christianity 
had to believe that he existed; that would have been a necessary but not a sufficient
condition. However, their belief in Jesus was not a commitment to a proposition
but a commitment to him. To follow Jesus meant choosing a way of being and
the choice here was whether to pledge one’s allegiance to Jesus or else to refuse
to do so.
The pericopes I’ve mentioned above give us encounters with Jesus. For the dis-
ciples, as well as those who become his close followers, this is a love story. As is
well known, to follow Jesus was originally designated as being part of ‘the way’.
Jesus identifies himself as ‘he hodos’ – the way – in Jn.:. In Acts :, Luke tells
us that Saul was looking for anyone ‘who belonged to the Way [te ̄s hodou]’
(NRSV, capitals in the translation). What, though, is the meaning of this term
‘hodos’? In short, it has a very concrete meaning – in which it can mean such
things as road, path, journey, expedition, and way. Yet it likewise has a much
richer, metaphorical meaning as the sense of life’s direction or motivation.
When Jesus asks the twelve, ‘Do you also wish to go away?’, Simon Peter
answers, ‘Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life’ (Jn.
:–). In effect, Jesus is saying: are you going to follow me? Have you thrown
in your lot with me? With some rather significant lapses along the way, they did
follow him to his death, resurrection, and ascension. So then what? In his classic
study on early Christianity, Wayne A. Meeks points out that the church’s ‘begin-
nings and earliest growth remain in many respects mysterious’. We don’t
know all that much about what exactly Christians believed in these early years,
though we do know that beliefs varied widely and that many early beliefs came
to be seen as heretical, even though it often took decades or centuries for a
specific belief to be identified as a heresy. Further, it was not as if those early fol-
lowers of Jesus had no doctrines at all, since they were Jews and would have faith-
fully gone to the synagogue just as Jesus himself did. All that Jesus taught them was
set within the Jewish liturgical context of belief. For them to recognize him as
Messiah required a thoroughly Jewish context. Yet, even in the years depicted in
the book of Acts, that Jewish context is already changing. Certainly, the vast
system of doctrines that came to be part of Christianity over centuries simply
did not exist for the early church, which means that there was no way in which
they could have believed them. What propositional content could the thief on
the cross have had about Jesus? He simply says: ‘Jesus, remember me when you
come into your kingdom’ (Lk. :).
Even with little explicitly ‘Christian’ doctrine, the early Christians had liturgy – a
way of being. The best account of the very early church comes from Acts . That
chapter begins with the story of Pentecost, in which , converts were reportedly
baptized. Then Peter preaches a sermon in which he says that Jesus is Lord and
Messiah and that in order to follow him they need to change their direction in
life, be baptized, and be filled with the Spirit. He tells his astounded listeners
that Jesus forgives sins, that he is God’s son, and that he had risen from the
dead. These teachings would have been the propositional backbone of early
 BRUCE ELLIS BENSON
Christian liturgy – and one can say that they are still an encapsulation of basic
Christian belief. Which is to say that liturgy needs some kind of beliefs in order
to function. But what is liturgy? The term comes from the Greek leitourgia (a com-
pound of leito = public – from laos = people and ergon = working or service). The
usual translation of this term is ‘the work of the people’, though the translations
‘public service’ or ‘public works’ are much more accurate. What was this work?
Originally, it was the wealthy people of Athens providing funding for sporting
events, banquets, and religious ceremonies. Such persons were called ‘liturgists’
(leitourgoi).
Given that ancient Greece was thoroughly religious, one’s service was by defini-
tion a religious service. This broad sense of liturgy is likewise to be found in the
Christian scriptures. Variants of ‘liturgy’ are used to describe such actions as ‘min-
istering’ or ‘ministry’, along with ‘service’ and ‘serving’. For instance, Paul praises
the Philippians for their ministry (leitourgias) to him (Ph. :) and the Corinthians
for their financial leitourgias ( Cor. :). Luke at one point uses the term in a way
that’s closer to the way it is used today, for he describes the church in Antioch as
‘worshipping [leitourgountōn] God’ (Acts :). But what exactly was this ‘worship-
ping God’? If we go back to that account in Acts , we find that these early followers
of Jesus ‘devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the break-
ing of bread and the prayers’ (Acts :). This formula is about as close to ‘word
and sacrament’ as one can get. But their ‘liturgy’ doesn’t end there. We are also
told that ‘all who believed were together and had all things in common’, that
they ‘spent much time together in the temple’, and that ‘they broke bread at
home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and
having the good will of all the people’ (Acts :, –). What is striking about
Luke’s account is that he doesn’t make any distinction between what we today
would consider the ‘worship service’ bits and the ‘serving the community’ bits.
Or, better put, all of this together constitutes their worship. Spending time in the
temple, breaking bread together, and sharing things in common are all part of
their liturgy.
One of the reasons for examining the birth of Christianity is that we can see how
Christian theology grows out of liturgical experience. Of course, theology is itself a
liturgical practice: it is a way of worshipping God by using the mind. In this respect,
the term ‘orthodox’ (orthos + doxa) is instructive. In ancient Greek, doxa had to do
with belief or opinion. But, in the Septuagint, doxa is used to translate the Hebrew
word for glory. So ‘orthodoxy’ takes on a dual meaning, both proper belief and
proper praise. In the Christian scriptures, these meanings are totally intertwined:
doxa always means a good opinion of someone that results in honour, praise, and
worship. Put another way, the problem with heretics is that they are not worship-
ping God but idols, and thus breaking the first commandment.
Let me provide a concrete example of how liturgy leads to theology. With the
conversions of Barnabas and Paul, the faith spread considerably wider and this
expansion required a new conception of liturgy and a new ethnic conception of
The primacy of liturgy in Christianity 
who could be included in the ekkle ̄sia. The problem was entirely practical and
entirely theological. As long as Christianity remained simply a Jewish sect, being
part of it required taking up Jewish practice. However, when Paul proclaims that
‘there is no longer Jew or Greek’ (Gal. :), he makes possible a new liturgical
identity and practice. Greek converts would not be required to engage in classic
Jewish rites (such as circumcision) nor abstain from eating foods forbidden to
Jews. Of course, this transition from Jewish sect to world religion does not come
without a fight. Even after Peter’s vision in which he comes to see that the
euangelion was for Gentiles as well as Jews (Acts ), some Jews in Jerusalem
still insisted that Gentile converts needed to observe Hebrew customs. Yet
Paul responds that there is a fundamental difference between following Torah
and following the euangelion. To follow the latter is to be freed from the former.
Is this reversal on Paul’s part ‘theology’? Of course. But it grows out of a liturgical
context – the very real existential problem of Jews and Gentiles worshipping
together and asking which Jewish customs Gentiles would need to follow to be
part of the community. It would not be difficult to analyse various Christian doc-
trines to show how they grow out of liturgical practice – how worshipping Jesus as
Lord must inevitably lead to questions about his divinity and humanity or how the
Holy Spirit’s appearance on Pentecost would naturally lead to questions of how
the Spirit relates to the Father and the Son. But, for our purposes, these examples
are sufficient.
The primacy of practice
One important thing that Terrence Cuneo does in his book on liturgy is
point out that Bell’s characterization of Christianity as primarily orthodoxic in
nature is, at best, only partly true. He writes: ‘Christianity comes in many varieties,
and not all are all belief-centred in the way that Bell describes. This is certainly true
of various forms of the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Mennonite traditions, for
example – and might also be true of so-called non-liturgical traditions such as
Quakerism.’ He goes on to say that his tradition, Eastern Christianity, is particu-
larly orthopraxic in nature and that it ‘has much in common with Bell’s description
of Judaism and Islam’ (both of which Bell identifies as largely concerned with prac-
tice). More importantly, Cuneo recognizes the following:
For Eastern Christians, the liturgy functions as the centerpiece of the Christian way of life. It is
the paradigmatic expression of the tradition’s mind – the sense of the term ‘mind’ referring not
simply or even primarily to various doctrines or claims but also to ways of conducting oneself
and viewing the world, whose rich character and significance might be difficult and perhaps
impossible to capture in wholly propositional terms.
While I think what Cuneo says applies to far more of Christianity than simply
Eastern Christians, I see three important points in this quotation. First, Cuneo
rightly understands that Christianity is first and foremost a way of life. It’s about
 BRUCE ELLIS BENSON
one’s very being. Second, liturgy is not primarily about affirming a set of doctrines
but about ways of seeing and being in the world, which would clearly include doc-
trines but is not be limited to them or even have them as a primary focal point.
Third, and closely connected to the second point, liturgical practices are central
to the ‘mind’ of the Christian – they are ways of knowing that perhaps cannot be
reducible to propositions, even though the church has always worked to explain
its liturgical practices by way of theological beliefs.
While Cuneo speaks of liturgy as ‘ways of conducting oneself and viewing the
world’, his book still ends up talking mainly about what we do on Sunday
morning, albeit something that in Eastern Christianity lasts quite considerably
longer than an hour. However, our conception of liturgy needs to be expanded
from a few hours to each and every day. In trying to think about how such a
broader conception of liturgy might go, it is helpful to follow the distinction
made by two Episcopal priests regarding what they call two kinds of liturgy.
They speak of ‘intensive liturgy’ as ‘what happens when Christians assemble to
worship God’. In contrast, ‘extensive liturgy’ is ‘what happens when Christians
leave the assembly to conduct their daily affairs’. Of course, they immediately
qualify this distinction by saying that ‘the two types are mutually dependent’.
In fact, they are so dependent that one cannot be thought without the other.
Intensive liturgy alone results in what my Southern Baptist friends in Texas
called ‘Sunday Christians’ (not meant as a compliment). Conversely, extensive
liturgy alone would result in lone individuals divorced from the kind of community
needed to sustain them. Thus, ‘as our intensive liturgies drive us into the world to
do our extensive liturgies, so our extensive liturgies bring us back week by week to
the Christian assembly’.
Let me begin with extensive liturgy, although it will quickly be seen that it con-
nects to intensive liturgy. Central to the gospel is the idea of metanoia. If we simply
extrapolate from ‘meta’ and ‘nous’, the roots of this term, we come up with the
literal meaning of ‘afterthought’. But the real meaning is ‘changing one’s mind’.
The Gospel of Mark opens with John ‘preaching a baptism of metanoios’
(Mk. :). Similarly, Jesus speaks of ‘metanoian’ in Lk. :. The usual translation
is ‘repent’ or ‘repentance’. Tertullian insisted that ‘paenitentiam agite’ (confession
of sins or repentance) was an incorrect translation of metanoia and many have
agreed that ‘repent’ is a bad English translation, despite the fact that it is
common. The first problem is that metanoia doesn’t really carry the idea of
sorrow or looking back upon one’s life with regret. There’s a good Greek term
for that and it’s metamelomai. The second problem is repentance doesn’t begin
to go far enough. You could simply be sorry about how you’ve lived your life
but not sorry enough to do anything about it. Instead, metanoia is really about a
change of mind or heart. It is conversion. To be converted is not merely to think
differently but to act differently. Conversion requires a ° turn in one’s way of
being.
The primacy of liturgy in Christianity 
Pierre Hadot reminds us that philosophy for the ancients and the mediaevals
was first and foremost about living well – a way of life. There were many theories
involved in this, to be sure. But the theories were formulated precisely so that one
can live a better, more fulfilled life. Central to achieving such a life was aske ̄sis, a
Greek term which he translates as ‘spiritual exercises’. For Hadot, ancient philoso-
phy was concerned precisely with practising such exercises so that we ‘let our-
selves be changed, in our point of view, attitudes, and convictions. This means
that we must dialogue with ourselves, and hence do battle with ourselves.’ The
result of such a dialogue is ‘a conversion which turns our entire life upside
down, changing the life of the person who goes through it’. What’s odd about
all this, of course, is that we tend to think that philosophy is really about theory
and that practice is, at best, secondary. If Hadot is correct (and I think he is), it
is rather the other way around.
In Romans, Paul talks about presenting one’s body ‘as a living sacrifice’ and he
defines this act as ‘spiritual worship’ (:). Romano Guardini writes: ‘The practice
of the liturgy means that by the help of grace, under the guidance of the Church,
we grow into living works of art before God.’ Lest this be thought a strange way of
thinking, consider that Paul also speaks of human beings as God’s ‘poie ̄ma’. While
this is usually translated as ‘workmanship’, one could instead say that human
beings are God’s poem or else work of art. Indeed, this way of thinking about
the human persons as works of art is as old as the ancient Greeks and as recent
as Nietzsche and Foucault. Here is how the Greek church father John
Chrysostom puts it:
As therefore happens in the case of painters from life, so let it happen in your case. For they,
arranging their boards, and tracing white lines upon them, and sketching the royal likeness in
outline, before they apply the actual colors, rub out some lines, and change some for others,
rectifying mistakes, and altering what is amiss with all freedom . . . Consider that your soul is
the portrait; before therefore the true coloring of the spirit comes, wipe out habits which have
wrongly been implanted.
J. J. von Allmen says the following: ‘A superficial reading of the New Testament is
sufficient to teach us that the very life of Jesus of Nazareth is a life which is, in some
sense, “liturgical” ’ and he goes on to say that Jesus led ‘the life of worship’. This is
as clear a statement of how Jesus himself lived the liturgical life as one could
imagine.
On phronē sis and theō ria
Here I want to make good on my promise to ground my claim that practice

is more fundamental than theory by way of Aristotle and Heidegger.
Consider the distinction that Aristotle makes between phrone ̄sis and praxis, on
the one hand, and sophia and theōria, on the other hand. There are three compo-
nents of phrone ̄sis. One must () know what is important, () know how to bring
 BRUCE ELLIS BENSON
this important thing about, and () actually do so. Aristotle insists that anything
short of action does not demonstrate phrone ̄sis. With its emphasis on action,
phrone ̄sis is about specific and concrete truths. To exercise phrone ̄sis one must
know ‘what is fitting . . . in relation to the agent, and to the circumstances and
the object’. Yet Aristotle also believes that someone with phrone ̄sis can discern
truth about one’s life as a whole. ‘It is thought to be the mark of a man of practical
wisdom to be able to deliberate well . . . about what sorts of things conduce to the
good life in general.’ When I ask ‘how should I live my life?’ there is a universal
component to the answer (for such virtues as temperance and courage are
unchanging). While phrone ̄sis guides us in terms of practical action (or praxis),
sophia is about theoretical reasoning and so would not seem to be connected to
practical action. It results in knowledge of that which does not change, what we
would call universal and necessary truths. These truths are what we usually call
‘science’. Yet such a quick distinction between phrone ̄sis and sophia cannot actu-
ally be made, for at least two reasons. One is that, while the intellectual virtues
(those which have to do with nous or mind) are higher than practical virtues,
the latter are needed in order to have the former. A stronger way of putting this,
though, is that happiness and wisdom require both kinds of wisdom in the
sense that sophia is dependent upon phrone ̄sis. Thus, phrone ̄sis turns out to be
more fundamental than sophia, since sophia is grounded upon phrone ̄sis.
This order of precedence gets repeated in Heidegger, who lectured on Aristotle
over a number of years while at the University of Marburg before the appearance of
Being and Time in . While teaching a course on Plato’s Sophist, Heidegger
began by lecturing on Aristotle, devoting a good deal of space to the term phrone ̄sis.
Aristotle sees phrone ̄sis as something that simply increases over time – one
becomes more and more of a phronimos, a moral expert or seasoned moral pro.
Quite famously, he has great trouble with the notion of ‘incontinence’, not an
aisle at a pharmacy but the idea of the phronimos committing a gross misdeed.
All Aristotle can conclude is that such a person was never truly virtuous in the
first place. In contrast, Heidegger (having been influenced by Kierkegaard and
having been brought up in the Christian tradition) thinks that things are much
more precarious than this. ‘A person can be concerned with things of minor sign-
ificance; . . . so wrapped up in himself that he does not genuinely see himself.
Therefore, he is ever in need of the salvation of phrone ̄sis . . . [which] cannot at
all be taken for granted; on the contrary, it is a task’ and Heidegger speaks of
this task as ‘circumspection’ (Umsicht).
I see phrone ̄sis – practical wisdom – as something one cultivates in the same way
that one cultivates one’s life as liturgy. As we have seen, liturgy is highly practical in
nature. So I think there is an analogous pattern to that of the relationship of liturgy
and doctrine. The pattern becomes clearer when we see how phrone ̄sis gets devel-
oped in Heidegger. While still speaking of Aristotle, Heidegger claims that phrone ̄sis
is ‘the highest mode of human knowledge, namely insofar as one can say that it is
the gravest of all knowledge, since it is concerned with human existence itself’.
The primacy of liturgy in Christianity 
Here it is helpful to see the contrast Heidegger has in mind. In paragraph thirteen of
Being and Time, he makes the claim that ‘knowing the world’, by which he means a
‘theoretical’ sense (Wissen), is a ‘founded mode’. Despite that, Heidegger claims
that ‘no sooner was the “phenomenon of knowing the world” grasped than it got
interpreted in a “superficial,” formal manner’. The connection here to the argu-
ment that I have been making in this article should now be clear. In same way
that sophia and theōria get privileged over phrone ̄sis and praxis, so doctrine and
dogma are often privileged over liturgy. The theoretical is seen to be more funda-
mental than the practical. Of course, scientific knowing – theory – has often put
itself forward as the way of knowing, even though it is actually grounded in
phrone ̄sis.
What, then, does this mean for Heidegger? Hans-Georg Gadamer talks about
attending Heidegger’s lectures on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in  and
says the following:
We studied the analysis of phronesis . . . Today it is clear what Heidegger found in it, and what
so fascinated him in Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s idea of the Good and the Aristotelian concept
of practical knowledge. They described a mode of knowledge (an eidos gnōseōs) that could no
longer be based in any way on a final objectifiability in the sense of science. They described, in
other words, a knowledge within the concrete situation of existence.
Heidegger thinks of human existence in terms of Dasein, or being-in-the world.

That is, one always already relates to the world. So, then, it is merely a question
of the how. Heidegger sees the primary ‘how’ as this practical relation to the
world, what we might call ‘getting around in the world’ that is based on ‘know
how’ (Verstehen, a term used by Heidegger for phrone ̄sis). It is our most basic rela-
tionship to the world and every other mode of relating to the world is founded
upon it. To put this another way, thinking about the world is not fundamental
but doing and acting. The world is where Dasein exists or dwells; it is Dasein’s
Umwelt (environment). Given that we dwell in the world, we see (understand)
the world in terms not of mere objects or things but as equipment or tools. The
structure here is that things are understood as ‘for-the-sake-of which’, along the
lines of Dasein’s concerns. It is this part of Being and Time that contains the
well-known hammer example. Before we start hammering, we do not sit down
and do some sort of metaphysical research into the thing or describe its chemical
make-up or attempt to determine the hammer’s place in the great hierarchy of
being of Plotinus. Instead, a hammer has for us the character of Zuhandenheit
(readiness-to-hand); it is a tool that we use. One could do any of these other
things, of course, but they would come under the rubric of theōria. Although in
theōria the Zuhanden becomes ‘thematized’ (i.e. one focuses upon it), theōria is
abstract rather than concrete for it lacks the character of Umsicht – it is ‘non-cir-
cumspect’, for it does not take into account the context and the uses of the
hammer (and thus understands the hammer in a one-sided way).
 BRUCE ELLIS BENSON
Conclusion
I agree with Aristotle and Heidegger that phrone ̄sis is more properly basic
than theory, not the other way around. Theorizing is only possible if we have
phrone ̄sis. Apart from being immersed in liturgy, doctrine can only be seen as
detached and theoretical. But here is the most important point. If Aristotle and
Heidegger are right about phrone ̄sis being more basic than theōria, then the div-
ision of practice and theory is about two kinds of knowledge. In terms of liturgy,
the very distinction between something like ‘liturgical practice’ and ‘theological
belief’ does not boil down simply to practice versus theory, action versus
thought. Action is also a way of knowing. When I say that liturgy is more funda-
mental to theology, I am merely saying that one way of knowing is more properly
basic than another way of knowing. If one looks at the classic forms of the liturgy, it
is immediately apparent that they are a total integration of forms of knowing that
involve both body and mind. Or, better yet, liturgy shows us that the bodily knowl-
edge is fundamental to ‘knowing’. Again, it is instructive to note that Schilbrack
speaks of ‘ritual knowledge’ and his idea is designed as a corrective to those
who hold ‘that speculative thinking is limited to what goes on in texts or in
minds’. Instead, ritual is a way of knowing that is cognitive. By way of ritual,
one is able to experience even the most abstract of beliefs. To experience here,
of course, does not necessarily mean ‘completely understand’. It’s probably safe
to say that it never does. To be sure, ritual also has important social functions
that establish or question boundaries, hierarchies, and distinctions. But
Schilbrack contends that ‘rituals give rise to metaphysical thinking when they
induce participants to experience features of the ritual as features of the human
condition generally’. If this point is correct, and I think it is, then ritual is simul-
taneously about action and knowledge.
Cuneo points out that ‘knowing God consists in (although is not exhausted by)
knowing how to engage God’. This engaging with God is what Cuneo believes
liturgy does. I think he’s right about that. But, if Schilbrack is correct, then it
does even more than this. It allows thinking about the divine in a cognitive way
that is fully embodied. What I have tried to argue is that this embodied way is actu-
ally the more basic form of human knowing.
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Notes
. Wolterstorff (), .
. Taliaferro (), .
. Lacoste (), .
. For an excellent primer on Lacoste’s view of liturgy, see Schrijvers ().
. Augustine (), ..
. Orsi (), xvi.
. That the role of Christianity in Europe and, now even the United States, is on the wane should in no way
make us forget that, in much of the world, Christianity is growing exponentially.
. The first six of these dimensions are found in Smart (). The seventh appears in later texts, such as
Smart ().
. Schilbrack (), . While I am making a more specific claim here than does Schilbrack in his book
(namely, about Christianity in particular rather than religion as a whole), my claim deeply resonates with
Schilbrack’s work and I have found his account helpful in multiple ways.
. Bell (), .
. At one point, I taught at a conservative college that required all of its employees to sign a detailed doctrinal
statement as a condition of employment. That requirement included the janitorial night crew, most of
whom were recent asylum seekers and did not understand any English. It’s hard to imagine what signing a
document written in a language one does not understand could possibly be affirming other than some-
thing like ‘whatever these people believe, I’m sure I believe the same’.
. Bell (), .
. Plantinga (), .
. Ratzinger (), .
 BRUCE ELLIS BENSON
. There are many places to find this encyclical. Here is one: <http://w.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/
encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc__deus-caritas-est.html>.
. For example, see Gallagher & Zahavi ().
. Johnson (), .
. Thelen et al. (), .
. Stein (), .
. In one sense, the point I am making about Christianity could be made – even more strongly – about the
origins of Judaism. If Abraham is the quintessential historical Jewish figure, what distinctly Jewish doctrine
or beliefs would have been available to him? The Hebrew scriptures depict him as believing in God and
being obedient to God’s commands. The writer of Hebrews in the Christian scriptures commends him for
having ‘faith’ in God (Hebrews :). But what Jesus was later to call ‘the law and the prophets’ were
completely unknown to him because they had not yet been written. Whatever constituted his faith, it could
not have included following the Levitical law or saying the Shema.
. Smith (), .
. Meeks (), .
. Note that Luke’s account of this dispute in Acts  is considerably more sanguine than Paul’s in Galatians
. There is good reason to think this quarrel was not easily or quickly put to rest.
. Cuneo (), .
. Price & Weil (), .
. Ibid., .
. Hadot (), , .
. Guardini (), .
. John Chrysostom (), ..
. von Allmen (), , .
. Nicomachean Ethics a –.
. Ibid., a –.
. Heidegger (), .
. Ibid., .
. Heidegger (), –.
. Gadamer (), –.
. Schilbrack (), .
. Ibid., .
. Cuneo (), .

BENSON. B. E. (2020) The Primacy of Liturgy in Christianity (Art)

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BENSON. B. E. (2020) The Primacy of Liturgy in Christianity (Art)

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Religious Studies, Page 1 of 18 © The Author(s), 2020.

Published by Cambridge University Press

The primacy of liturgy in Christianity

BRUCE ELLIS BENSON

Abstract: I argue that liturgy is primary to the Christian faith. By ‘liturgy’,

Nicholas Wolterstorﬀ opens his recent book Acting Liturgically:

There is much to celebrate about the ‘surge of interest’ of philosophy of religion in

Let me put my view in analytic terms. I would label Wolterstorﬀ’s position, as

Religious experience and theological belief

If we go back to the quotation from Wolterstorﬀ, he mentions that the ques-

Understanding the doctrine of Christianity is highly dependent upon love being

Liturgical practice in Christianity

If one goes back to the beginnings of Christianity – before it even becomes

The primacy of practice

On phronē sis and theō ria

Here I want to make good on my promise to ground my claim that practice

Heidegger thinks of human existence in terms of Dasein, or being-in-the world.

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