In the book ' Toward Ritual Transformation: Remembering Robert W. Hovda,' The founder of The National Association of Pastoral Musicians Virgil C. Funk, [14] wrote on page 31: "Without a basic celebrative model and a common experience, we learn by doing. Lex orandi statuat legem credendi: How we pray shapes what we believe. By our diverse singing, we believe in diversity of belief."
Diversity of belief? Isn't this what the Unitarians boast of? Isn't this what comprehensive Anglicanism means by "high, low and broad"? In other words, for Funk, the connection between doctrinal orthodoxy and orthopraxis in the liturgy is explicitly and formally rejected. That the liturgy judges us, and that we do not judge the liturgy, is set aside in favor of novelty, [15] a reversal of all we have known and done in the sacred liturgy. "Diversity of belief" represents the age-old contest between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Any pretense at unity in the church is consequently annihilated. If there is no truth, then there is no heresy, echoing Karl Barth. On this question the liturgists of Catholic heritage seemed doomed in the 1970s to repeat the mistakes of the Liberal Protestants of the nineteenth century. As Kelly wrote years later and in another place, "Doctrinal purity and discipleship go together—injury to one weakens the other—hardly a desirable condition for the Mystical Body of Christ." [16]
What makes Chant the ideal, given the above quotation, is that it is sing-able by regular people
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