here we go again

Every couple of hundred years or so, depending on how you count, the state invents a different way to try and muscle in on the territory of the church.

In the 1600s, the question was whether the king had the right to call himself the head of the church on earth. Penalty for saying he didn’t: fines, imprisonment, execution. Google Covenanters. But eventually it was established that the king is not the earthly head of the church. The state had overreached itself.

In the 1800s, the question was whether the civil courts had the right to force church courts to ordain ministers against the will of the church courts. Eventual outcome for those who said they didn’t: vilification, loss of income, homelessness. Google Disruption. But eventually it was established that civil courts have no right to interfere with the church’s decisions about who to ordain or induct. The state had overreached itself.

In the 2000s, the question is whether the government has the right to to force ministers to give blessings on relationships defined by the government. Penalties for those who say it doesn’t: are likely to include vilification, demotion, arrest, fines, imprisonment. The state is again overreaching itself.

It wasn’t especially exciting for the Covenanters when they were being hunted on the moors and shot dead in the doorways of their own homes. There wasn’t all that much glamour attached to secretly attending illegal conventicles and the population at large didn’t noticeably applaud their stubborn consciences or rise up as one to thank them for their robust stance on safeguarding civil and religious liberties for their own and future generations.

Ditto for the early Free Church, when snobby landowners were refusing them permission to meet for worship amid the sneering of the tabloid presses of the day.

Fact is, it’s always a bit tricky for people who want to affirm the rights of the church when these clash with the government’s latest fashionable ideology. That is, the right of the church to say who can/can’t be recognised as having authority in the church, to say who can/can’t be ordained, to say who can/can’t be the recipient of church privileges (the sacraments, and church ‘blessings’). These are rights which belong to The Church, and fall nowhere near the remit of the State. Yet again, Christians in Scotland need to brace themselves against a State succumbing to an intolerant, illiberal, aggressive secular ideology, and it’s not a bonny sight.

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speaker as hearer

[Language post]

I’ve been impressed by the boldness of Fernández and Smith Cairns in devoting a chapter to “The Speaker” ahead of the chapter on “The Hearer” in their textbook Fundamentals of Psycholinguistics.

It’s one of the great fundamentals that there isn’t really a good model of how speech production works from a psycholinguistic perspective. The best established and most influential models of speech production certainly deal with linguistic units such as syllables or phonemes, but they don’t go any closer to articulation than that. These units serve as the input to whatever motor processes generate speech movements, but the motor processes themselves are generally treated as quite separate, if not trivial. (Fernández and Smith Cairns’s diagram of speech production has “articulatory system” well outside the box of interesting processes in their diagram at the start of the chapter.) The ‘perception’ side is generally much better understood than the ‘production’ side of things, so tackling production ahead of perception/comprehension is an interesting step.

But more striking – there’s a whole section of the Speaker chapter devoted to Producing Speech After It Is Planned. So might this be a place to find new insights linking mentally represented symbols to articulation? even tentatively, as befitting an introductory text?

Well, no – the section is acoustic, not articulatory. Shame! There’s a head diagram with the articulators labelled, but the diagrams are waveforms and spectrograms, not x-ray pellet tracings or EPG outputs. Not even so much as a diagram of a mass on a spring to help the reader feel warm and fuzzy.

It’s a perfectly fine section on the acoustic properties of consonants and vowels, I should add, but it does make you wonder what they’re going to talk about in the “Hearer” chapter now that all this talk of sine waves and formant transitions is out of the way.

in praise of the traditional communion

After casually asserting the other day that there are plenty of benefits to the customary preparatory services around a communion, I suppose it might be worth identifying what some of these benefits are.

So the programme is:

• Thursday – a day for confession of sin (literally a fast day in the not desperately distant past)
• Friday – a day for self-examination (including the ‘question meeting’)
• Saturday – a day for preparation (themes like the dying love of Christ for his people)
• Lord’s Day – administration of the sacrament (following the  ‘action sermon’, typically focusing on something like the atonement, the counter-imputations of sin and righteousness, the sufferings and glory of the Redeemer, or similar) (with the evening service a call to the unconverted)
• Monday – thanksgiving (for the gospel proclaimed in word and sacrament, and often with the additional theme of encouragements to perseverance)

And the immediately noteworthy bundle of advantages is that (i) it gives you so much time to prepare for the sacrament (ii) in such a structured way (iii) with lots of practical assistance.

(i) Preparation of some form or another is necessary for any religious exercise, from personal prayer to corporate worship, and the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is special for various reasons (it’s a nurturing ordinance, so a prerequisite for participating is that you have faith to be nurtured; it’s a public ordinance, so the profession that you publicly make there needs to be in harmony with the rest of your public and private life; it’s an ordinance which deals directly with the greatest mystery of the faith, namely Christ’s substitutionary atonement, so it’s not something to get involved in lightly, etc). Sometimes you have no option but to dive into something without any time for reflection or thought, and the good Lord can pardon those who prepare their heart to seek God even when they are not cleansed according to the purification of the sanctuary. But normally it takes t i m e  to turn the juggernaut of  your mental focus away from the trivial and on to the spiritual, away from the mundane and on to the heavenly, away from the routine and on to the gospel. So when things are scheduled to allow you whole days at a stretch (you’re working in the day? then whole evenings) to prepare, that’s an opportunity to grasp with both hands.

(ii) The particular kind of preparation which is specified in 1 Corinthians 11 is self-examination, and so there is a day devoted to self-examination, but there is also some sort of fittingness about taking the opportunity to consider and confess the sin of our nature and the sin of our practice and how seriously and in how many ways this sacrament and the blessings it represents are the very opposite of what we deserve. There is also value in considering directly the unmerited love of Christ in coming to suffer and die for his people – how much he suffered, and how much he loved – as a highly appropriate topic for thought and admiration around the time of this sacrament. Etc. So there is a structure to these religious activities – they are a coherent series of steps bringing you purposefully towards the one main event.

(iii) Ministers know the routine, and they’re meant to preach sermons which are particularly geared towards the stated theme of a given day. You’re not left to your own devices – you’ll hear a sermon on forgiveness on Thursday, or Christian graces on Friday, etc, and if you’re momentarily at a loss in your own personal devotions as to what confession or self-examination involves, there should at least be food for thought in the sermon you’ve just heard.

Also, you’re not left to your own devices in the sense that you’re joining together with the rest of your congregation as you all prepare together as a body of believers for the sacrament which above everything else expresses the unity that you have among each other in that particular congregation. Your own personal faith is the basic thing, but its context of flourishing is the communion you participate in with the rest of the congregation. Your own personal engagement with the Word and the sermon is essential, but you didn’t turn up to be an audience of one for that sermon – you gathered with everyone else to attend to a sermon preached to/for you all.

One other aspect of not being left to your own devices – this is even true on the congregational level, since normally, the congregation whose communion it is will be supported by visitors from other congregations attending the services and the sacrament. This means you have contact around the gospel ordinances with other believers who you might not see very often, who can bring a fresh perspective to things, who bring their own religious experiences and insight into doctrine, who bring along their own prayers and faith in the true minister of the sanctuary. Visitors often provide a boost to local morale simply by their presence in church, and even more so, in the scenes of legendary hospitality interspersing the church services, as there’s really nothing quite like home-made broth and pancakes for making in-depth Christian fellowship happen.

Obviously, it is not in the least bit obligatory for the Lord’s Supper to be celebrated in this way. These extra services and their accessories are both traditional and culture-specific. Never let anyone tire of saying that these services are non-compulsory (since the only thing which the church can warrantedly demand that people attend is the Lord’s Day worship) and never let anyone tire of saying that the sacrament itself consists simply of the giving and receiving of bread and wine with thanksgiving and prayer in connection with the preaching of the Word (ie, excluding the fencing and excluding the table addresses). But when this great array of opportunities is available, it’s natural to feel that you need all the help you can get – it would be a bit odd for someone to decide that they can easily do without the bonuses that everyone else in their congregation is taking advantage of.

Further, it’s one thing for generation upon generation of believers to accustom themselves and their families to spending the best part of a week in and around church services every few months, with all the associated logistics (arranging days off work, accommodating overnight guests, providing hospitality on a grand scale…). None of this is any chore for people who are well used to it – clearly the opposite, since attendances even at the weekday communion services are usually at least as good as attendances at the regular midweek prayer meetings, and visitors from other congregations are welcomed with open arms. But it’s not something that you can reasonably expect to be replicated in different contexts – it grew out of particular circumstances and has developed into its current form under various social and historical influences, and it is not mandated in Scripture.

There are, finally, various drawbacks to doing things this way – some obvious, some more subtle. But it is not a mere routine – not just a series of formalities which we grimly keep up for the sake of preserving ancient customs – it’s something that our congregations continue to do heartily and intelligently. And it’s not a cover for sentimental extravagances, as though we need to spend days on end reaching some pitch of religious excitement without which life wouldn’t be complete. If sobriety and reverence are to be seen anywhere, surely it must be in the hush around the sacrament as believers focus on the person and work of Christ revealed in Scripture, and partake in the sacrament of his body and blood, ordained for the perpetual remembrance of the sacrifice of himself in his death.