"Out of worship are the springs of life."

Operating on the assumption that the Church is a polis and that a polis is given form by the inculcation of its myths and rituals, Peter Leithart makes the claim that:

Liturgy is the first form of Christian discipleship training, of paedeia, of induction into the culture of the Church.

This claim sounds appealing to liturgiphiles, and neophytes to more traditional expressions of Christian faith (especially for those coming from “non-liturgical” traditions). It sounds appealing because it seems to locate liturgy as the focal call of the Christian life and thus relativizes the importance of every other aspect of Christianity generally understood. It makes it sound almost as if the one thing the Church needs to get right to set it on the course to faithfulness is liturgical practice, and were it to do that well, then its primary task is complete. (This is sometimes the ethos of Anglo-Catholicism.)

But this is a misreading of the claim being made. To understand his point rightly, you have to already assume much of his earlier argument. Leithart has attempted to show us that vocabulary and language that we use to name and know the world is not arbitrary or insignificant. Choosing to call a pregnant mother’s child a “fetus” or to name it “a body part” is to predetermine the ethical decisions she will make about how she treats the child. Choosing to refer to the life conceived inside of her as a “child” will have clear implications as to her responsibility to that life as well. The basic vocabulary we use decides how we should live.

Additionally, Leithart has pointed out that each of the words and names we use together gain their own coherence and force from a larger historicized context – something he refers to as myth or narrative. Which is to say, there is no “child” in the abstract. Rather the word “child” carries with it a story of its origins, its past, its present, and its destiny. In fact, “child” implies a narrative of other characters, too. It implies a mother, a father, and all the details of their relationship, both biologically and socially understood. In fact, the word “child” implies already in itself, not a monadic singularity, but a social history of relations that we may refer to as a “family.” To choose to name a child otherwise, to refer to it as something else, such as a “body part” or even a “disease” is to erase the structural implications of “childhood” and thus to offer a radically different view of world that we live in, as well as to imply a series of alternative practices that are appropriate to living according to that reality. This intricate account of the world that embeds itself throughout language can be described as a culture’s narrative, story, or mythology.

A culture’s myth resists reduction to ahistorical axioms about the world because the nature of myths is that they are never merely about “the world” or “reality” or “how the world works” – rather, myths are the stories of a people, the stories in which they find themselves, the histories from which they derive their identity. Even one’s proper name is not neutral vocabulary because bound up in one’s name is the fact that their name was given to them which implies a sort of preexistent sociality. We are known first before we know others or even ourselves. And when we receive our name, we receive a sort of initiation into the cultural mythos in which we move and live and have our being.

The Gospel, as news, presents itself both as a narrative reality (and not merely a blunt “fact about reality”) and as a unique kind of narrative which presents itself as a change or alteration of a previous story. This means that the Gospel, as news, implies the birth of a new language, a way in which the world is known, named, and indwelt. The public declaration of the Gospel is the public crossing out of old language about the world and the rewriting of it in a new language, a new sociality, a new way of being human. And as such, discipleship is the act of learning this new language.

If all this is true, then that means that Church’s mission to go into the world and make disciples of all nations is a charge to teach a new language. This is no little task. Fortunately, the Great Commission comes with instructions on how this global linguistic conversion is to take place: baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This implies two things:

1) That the Commision entails spreading a new vocabulary, a new way of naming the world – specifically, naming according to the name of the Father, the name of the Son, and the name of the Holy Spirit. Through this naming of the world, naming the world according to the pattern of the Trinity, the Church receives her mythos, her story.

2) That this naming involves more than the pervasion of words: The Great Commission makes disciples by the enacting of ritual practices – in this case, the ritual of conversion involves washing with water – the rite of baptism.

In discipling the world according to the name of the Trinity, we give it a history, the history we read about in the Creeds, a history that finds its origins in the gracious creation of the Father almighty, that finds its embodiment in the life of the incarnate Son, and the lives in the future hope of glory that the Spirit of consummation works all things together towards. In discipling the world through ritual baptism, we mark explicitly the break from the narrative of the old creation, binding the baptized in Christ’s name to walk presently according to Christ and his Cross, and hold forth the promise of the future life, where sins are put away once and for all. In baptism, Christ’s name becomes your own – and all that is true of him by nature becomes true for you by grace – his story becomes your story.

Word and Sacrament together convert the world as the myth and ritual that remake the world by renaming it. But what is key here is that this linguistic rewrite is linguistic. And that means that the first form of Christian discipleship training, the first way in which “men” become “Christian men” is through Christian myth and Christian ritual, through Word and Sacrament – which is to say through liturgy. (And if you think that “liturgy” is what certain types of disciples do after they’ve come to understand and believe all the truths about God or the Gospel, and then choose to express their celebration of those truths in some agreed upon script, consider first of all that the Great Commission was instituted after the disciples were already worshiping Jesus – which means “liturgy” is the Great Commission’s presupposition, not its consequence. Secondly, consider what that would mean linguistically. If liturgy is the inculcation of the speech of the Gospel, to expect someone to be able to “speak Gospel” without being trained in the liturgy is like expecting someone to praise the name of Christ without hearing its public pronunciation, to love one’s neighbor without hearing that Christ names the stranger “neighbor.”)

“Out of worship are the springs of life,” Leithart writes. Liturgy – worship – is not the only form of Christian discipleship training. But it is the first. “To name is to know” and so, if it is our intention that all men come to know God, our first task in discipling them is teaching them his name and the manner and way in which he gives himself to be known by us, training them in how we rightly sing the praises of his name together, speaking not in the language of dying men, but in the cadence of his holy ekklesia, who look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.