Charles Kamm
Where East Meets West: Two Sacred Works from the Baltics—Arvo Pärt's Berliner Messe and Einojuhoni Rautavaara's Vigilia
The incorporation of musical elements and artistic ideals of Eastern Orthodoxy, specifically from Russia, are considered in sacred choral works from the northern boundaries of Eastern and Western Christianity. Brief biographies of Arvo Pärt and Einojuhani Rautavaara highlight their personal intersections with Orthodoxy. Recorded examples of Byzantine chant and Russian bell-ringing, as well as images of Orthodox icons, illuminate the compositional goals and musical structures in Pärt's Berliner Messe and Einojuhani Rautavaara's Vigilia.

  Questions
  1. How do the trends discussed affect the total output of each composer?
  2. Is this music used liturgically? If so, in what tradition?
  3. Does the Lutheran music of that corner of Europe influence music in Russia?

Audrey Lin & Caleb Maskell
(Extra)ordinary: The Worship Life of the Hyde Park Vineyard Church
The presentation given by Audrey Lin and Caleb Maskell was a multimedia attempt at constructing a liturgical theology of the Hyde Park Vineyard Church in Chicago, Illinois. The presentation showed film footage of formal elements of the service space and of the service itself, as well as extensive interviews with members of the congregation. With all of this, we attempted to show the tight connections between the worship life of the HPVC and the Christian self-understanding of the church members. The service is, in the aspect which we highlighted, a reflection of the "ordinary" of life outside the walls of the church meeting. People come to the Vineyard just as they would come to school, or to a meeting with friends. Inside this constructed "ordinary" the Vineyard seeks, in each aspect of its service, to embody, teach, and celebrate the manner in which ordinary life is rendered extraordinary by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

  1. How do leaders of the musical worship prepare to lead, and can you tell as more about what are they trying to do as they are leading the worship?
  2. How is the prayer ministry team recruited and trained, and what kind of expectations do they and the people who come forward for prayer have during the prayer ministry time?
  3. What significant impact did your time at the church have on your lives?
  4. What are the psychological and/or theological implications of the absence of concrete liturgical formulae? Are you gnostics?

Andrea Olsen
Marriage, Sacrament, and Identity in Byzantium: A Case Study
In my presentation for the ISM Colloquium I addressed three issues regarding Byzantine marriage jewelry and its relationship to the liturgy. First, I pointed out the transitional nature of jewelry dated to the third through the fifth centuries, which indicates a Christianization of Roman customs such as the dextrarum iunctio ("joining of right hands," as for a pledge or contract). Second, I drew attention to the correspondence between the iconography of the jewelry and the Christian marriage liturgy, highlighting the importance of the crowning ritual in Byzantine marriage ceremonies. And third, I proposed an iconographic connection between a group of rings bearing scenes from the life of Christ and the Syrian Orthodox marriage rite.

B. J. Owens
"We may not keep silent...": The Barmen Declaration and the Rhetoric of the Confessing Church
"The old has passed away. The new has emerged. The church's political struggle is past. Now begins the struggle for the soul of the people."1 Reich Bishop Ludwig Muller, July 1933
In the years leading up to the Second World War, many thousands of German Protestant Clergy and lay church leaders—at times constituting a majority of Protestant leadership—sought to synthesize National Socialist ideology with Christian theology. Those leaders called themselves the "German Christians." In May of 1934, Protestant opponents gathered in Barmen to respond to the German Christians, whose influence had become widespread and catastrophic. The crisis was deeply theological and profoundly rhetorical: the conveners and leaders of the Barmen Synod—among them Karl Barth, Martin Niemoller, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer—gathered to respond confessionally to what the church in Germany had become. The result was the Theological Declaration of Barmen, a theological and exegetical response to a specific rhetorical situation.
This paper will first clarify what is meant by speaking of the Barmen Synod as a rhetorical situation. This is not to say that it was a moment for speech and not action, or to suggest that such speech is vacuous. Rather, to study rhetoric is to study the relationship of language and action, it is to study how persuasion is crafted to the level of art, and it is to study how speech demands reaction and response.
The task at hand is first to study carefully the theological rhetoric of the German Christians in order to understand what about it was so compelling to so many thousands of Christian leaders at that time, and second, to study the conditions and arguments of the response by the Confessing Church in order to gain insight into discourse that is both theological and rhetorical. To that end this paper will first give a brief historical background of the German Christians, followed by a study of the theological foundations of the German Christian movement. Finally, it will look carefully at the confessional response to see what conclusions can be drawn.
The Barmen Synod responded that given its current loyalties "the Church ceases to be the Church and the German Evangelical Church, as a federation of Confessional Churches, becomes intrinsically impossible...We may not keep silent"(italics added).2 Barmen was crafted as an exegetical response to a crisis of catastrophic isogesis: the church had become "intrinsically impossible" because it no longer sought to build a communal foundation upon revelation. Rather, the German Christian "church" tailored revelation to the foundation they had devised.
Barmen's response was, ultimately, an exercise in what Thomas B. Farrell calls "the rhetoric of critical interruption," in which a cultural and national reappraisal could take place on both civic and ecclesiological terms.3 Specifically, the interruption called attention to the nominally "Christian" foundations upon which the Nazi state was built.
In consideration for Barth, however, who did not hold the principle of "rhetoric as revelation" in high regard, and who helped to craft Barmen not as a definition of "us" or even "them," but instead as a definition of who God is, this paper will finally consider Barmen not only as an example of the rhetoric of critical interruption, but as a homiletic of critical interruption as well.
ENDNOTES
1. Ulrich Mauser, "The Theological Declaration of Barmen Revisited." Theology Matters 6 (2002), 4.
2. The Theological Declaration of Barmen, 8.07, 8.08
3. Thomas B. Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture. New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1993. p.258
Three questions I would like to have been asked:
  1. What can an evaluation of a rhetoric/homiletic of critical interruption teach us about discourse and controversy among faithful person and groups?
  2. In what ways is rhetorical culture made manifest in church bodies and parishes? How are we as ministers, musicians, and theologians called to shape, guide, and participate in that discourse?
  3. The immediate "result" of Barmen was not stellar: the government came down even harder on the churches, and the global conflict inflicted by German was in no way averted. Even decades later, how do we evaluate the success of something that didn't work at the time but informs our theological understanding in the present?

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