Liturgical minimisation in the Presbyterian Church of Australia

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)The Presbyterian Church in Australia, and in particular in the State of New South Wales, experienced a major disruption in 1977 with the formation of the Uniting Church of Australia. Since that time, under the influence of a revival of Puritan theology, the historic liturgical practices of the Church have been minimised to the point that older people such as myself no longer recognise many of the contemporary worship practices as Presbyterian. John Calvin’s notion of worship in which the worshipper is confronted with God’s unspeakable Majesty and Otherness, the divine transcendence of which leaves the soul awestruck and in a deep sense of humility has given way to informality and the absence of symbol. In what follows I shall argue that given this monumental paradigm shift the Church is facing a monumental crisis in its theological and philosophical assumptions. The awful tragedy is that there are many current ministers who are not aware that there is anything wrong. The crisis I allude to is changing the very nature of traditional Presbyterianism. Future generations will see this crisis as the watershed that changed the nature of the denomination and its institutional politics. In order to investigate the concept of liturgical minimisation, I will place the thesis in a historical context and then make explicit the implicit philosophical and theological underpinnings of this transitional period in the Church’s history. The liturgical minimisation process will be shown to have direct links to a specific epistemology that has its origins in the Enlightenment period. The application of an empirical based epistemology into the theological realm by scholars such as Thomas Chalmers, Charles Hodge, B.B. Warfield and Broughton Knox opens the door to theological distortions. This thesis argues that the Church needs to continue to develop and practise a specific Christian epistemology that is grounded in the love of Jesus Christ in order to move ahead with a coherent Gospel which brings real connectivity with God, nature, historical Christianity and with one other. Apprehending the philosophical and theological underpinnings I will argue that it is necessary to consider a serious reconstruction of Theological Education in which the conceptual framework is located in a specific Christian epistemology, engendering the Lordship of Christ and encouraging a spirit of transformative love and connectedness. It is only in this context that the theology of worship and the beauty and usefulness of liturgical forms can be appreciated