Transcendentals and Church Services

The main Christian Sunday service has two predominant styles, albeit with various mixtures, the Rhetorical and the Liturgical.

    The rhetorical style is dominant among protestants and is characterized by the congregation sitting and listening to a learned sermon lasting about an hour.  A significant advantage of this style is its low performance/startup costs: all that is needed is one skilled public speaker with political savvy. The congregation, ideally literate, is also accustomed to this style from school and college. This style has its origins with Luther, Wesley, and other college professors. 

    I will represent the liturgical style, being less familiar to most, by the Byzantine rite of many Eastern Orthodox and Easter Catholics. This style goes back to the 5th century liturgy of Saints Chrysostom and Basil, which itself has roots all the way back to second temple Judaism. A significant advantage of this style is that the congregation need not be literate.  However more theatrical skill is required of the leadership.   If you are unfamiliar with this style here’s a link to such in the Portland Oregon area:  https://www.stgeorgepdx.org/

     The modern Roman Catholic and Anglican services attempt to use a combination of these two styles. Both rather unsatisfactorily in my opinion (with the  older Latin rite Roman Catholic Mass, now deprecated by the Vatican, being more liturgical than the modern novus ordu), and of very little interest to me. 

     Of course all of these styles have auxiliary support needs; however, I’m just focusing on the essentials (“Don’t get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein).

    The rhetorical style focuses on truth, the liturgical style focuses on beauty, while both are essentially supported by goodness, which is largely expressed outside the regular church services of the sanctuary.

While I take the three transcendentals to be equally important, the Internet can better support resources related to Truth than to Beauty, in my opinion (see, for example, https://instituteofcatholicculture.org/events ). Therefore, nowadays the main church service should give particular attention to Beauty. This has lots of consequences.

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