Witness, Liturgy, Modernity

Richard Fenn writes, “In secularized Western societies . . . many individuals are caught in a double-bind. On the one hand, they take seriously the role of the credible witness, and seek, on grounds of their own testimony, to be taken seriously, whether they are reporting what they saw on Mulberry Street or whether they are reporting the results of carefully controlled experiments. But in many secular contexts, their credibility as witnesses depends on their ability to report data ‘coded’ in a fashion that makes sense within the context of the court or within the classroom. Their authority as witnesses, furthermore, depends on their ability to code the data of personal experience or of scientific experiments in terms of a theory.”

So long as the theory is a scientific one, they “receive academic and juridical credit for their testimony.” But a religious theory doesn’t carry weight. Prophetic “disturbers of the peace” have to conform their prophetic witness to the reigning discourse of law or science to be taken seriously. Thus, with “the professionalization of procedures for reliable and authoritative testimony, most individuals face the likely prospect of being tried and found wanting in the classroom, in the doctor’s office, in the employer’s office, as well as in the courtroom itself. As Kafka pointed out, a life of continuous trial is potentially dispiriting.”

This, Fenn argues, is a result of “the secularization of biblical themes” that treats life as a “perpetual trial.” At the same time, the biblical theme of witness is crossed and infected by what he calls “Hellenistic” view of witness, which is shorthand for the decay of what he later describes as “eventful” and prophetic speech.

But what Fenn is ultimately getting at is that the pressures of life-as-perpetual-trial finally result from the loss of liturgy. Liturgy is an intervention of final, transcendent judgment: “The judgment that takes place in the liturgy supersedes all secular judgments. Found acceptable in the liturgical context, the individual need not honor the claims of secular authorities to be taken more seriously than the liturgy itself would warrant.”

In short, “the trial and the liturgy are the poles of sacred and secular authority. The polarity between the liturgy and the trial creates the dynamic tension between sacred and secular authority in modern societies.”