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It may sound as though what I am advocating is some sort of liturgical free-for-all in which "anything goes." If that is the impression you have formed, let me try to disabuse you. What I want to suggest is that we should not seek to settle disputes about the correct way to order our worship merely by appeal to historical precedent, in which the most ancient trumps all others: "My practice is older than yours, so it wins!" First, in many instances we do not know what the earliest practices actually were. Second, where we do know what went on, we encounter diversity more often than uniformity, which makes it impossible to claim that one way of doing things is the only right way. Third, now that we can no longer use the ancient character of the supposed Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus as a bridge to connect later practices to earlier ones, we can recognize more clearly that at least as many discontinuities exist as continuities between the liturgical traditions of the period before the fourth century and those of the late fourth century onwards;often what emerges is a compromise, a hybrid, or a mutation rather than the preservation of what went before.17 No. History alone cannot settle matters. In any case, the supposed appeal to history by liturgical reformers has always been highly selective. We have found in ancient liturgies the things that we wanted to find, and ignored and passed over those that did not suit our current needs. I see my job as turning the spotlight on the full range of early Christian worship practices in order to discourage such a subjective approach and to reveal just how varied what the early church did really was. Liturgical CriteriaSo, then, what are the criteria that we should use in evaluating or shaping our worship practices? I suggest that four principal factors ought to be employed. First among them I would still include fidelity to our historical tradition. While history alone cannot be the final arbiter, it still has a place in conjunction with the other factors that I will mention. No generation of Christians can simply re-invent itself or its worship. Human beings are inevitably shaped to a large measure by their past, and Christianity in particular is rooted in specific historical events. So it is from our past that we must always begin. We cannot merely borrow the liturgical clothes of other traditions and imagine that they will fit us perfectly if we just slip them on: we need to grow into them in order for them to be authentic. And we need to understand and appreciate the worship tradition out of which we spring—but the tradition in all its breadth, fullness, and diversity, and not just a selective slice of it.18 Second, we need a truly theological critique of worship practices. The justification for anything that we do liturgically must be grounded in sound theology and not merely in historical precedent. After all, you can find almost anything that you want somewhere in history, but whether it should be regarded as a good or a bad development requires theological scrutiny. Just because the church has been making the same mistake for a very long time does not make it right, nor does the enthusiasm of some to restore certain supposed ancient customs immediately justify their being regarded as normative. Let me give a simple example. We are often told that Easter baptism ought to be regarded as normative because it is what the early church did. But I have argued that:
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