The Little Classicist & the Fall of the Churches
Nearly everyone close to small children has had, I would imagine, the experience of reading one of their favored books to them and getting something wrong—skipping or mispronouncing a word, or in some other way altering the text. Those who have made such mistakes normally take pains not to do it again, for they are not tolerated. The child will call out the error immediately, and the right word will be vigorously insisted upon. If such carelessness persists, the reader will be marked as unreliable and no longer permitted to serve in that capacity.
Thus, every child knows the Rule behind lex orandi lex credendi: the language of worship, considered in its broadest sense, defines the faith of the worshiper, for he knows that a change in a received text is a change in the Story itself, which he senses as a transgression of the structure of the reality with which he is constantly struggling to come to terms. No one needs to quote Heidegger to him that "language is the house of being," for of this he is intuitively aware in the same way he knows at the deepest level that "in the beginning was the Word." Changes in wording break the windows of the house of meaning he has been trying to build, letting in the cold and killing airs. However innocent the transgression may have been on the part of his lector, the child feels the prick of spiritual pain and reacts accordingly. If he is reasonable, and some children are, he may be open to an explanation, if there is one: "Daddy said 'dwarf' instead of 'goblin' because this story was first written in French, and the right translation of the French word is 'dwarf.'" The child is not happy about this, but may accept it and blame the stupid translator instead of his father—but blame there is, and it must be placed as a simple matter of justice.
In a Bible given to me by my grandparents on my seventh birthday one will find parts marked whose interpretation by my church I did not understand, for it did not seem to follow the plain meaning of the text I had been taught was so important. My pastors, when they reached these places in their preaching, got suspiciously technical and referred to their meanings in the original languages, which I did not know. I have now learned those languages and can confirm my childhood suspicions that the door of understanding was kept closed upon me by our scribes, a door they feared to enter themselves. It was the distress of being ignorant of Important Things that started me on a long pilgrimage, a quite deliberate (when I could manage it) tour of the churches and their teachers in the attempt to satisfy a childhood hunger to know which of them was telling the all-important Bible Story right to its children.
I have now been at it for more than sixty years, and although I have not finished the tour, and will not in this life, I have made what I believe to be an important observation, which is that in all churches with which I have become familiar (I cannot say all churches), change itself, change such as distresses the child who is badly read to, has become an instituted and profoundly demoralizing quality in the last several generations—and should be regarded as deeply implicated in the loss of the credibility of the churches as carriers of the Word of God, which is intuitively understood by all to be changeless.
The overwhelming impression of which I am speaking, however, is not that of good change—a difficult thing which normally requires years of prayerful deliberation—but the disturbing tinkering of scribal experts—theologians, liturgists, and the "creative"—who in their constant adding and subtracting to the language, music, and architecture of worship, replace what is better with what is worse, the richer with the impoverished, the deeper with the shallower, the orthodox with the heretical, what is fuller of meaning with what is reduced in it, the richer meats with pabulum, the difficult with the easy when the Difficult is required by the Real, the classical with the modern—for they take as a First Rule that the Scriptures, liturgy, music, and architecture are to be made "meaningful" to the average—that is, severely depleted—person of our own place and generation, an unchallenged commonplace among so many of the evangelically minded.
The exceptions to this rule, which governs the changes, are so rare as to be inaccessible to the vast majority of malnourished Christians. How many Edwardses are out there to stop it? How many Wesleys? How many Spurgeons? How many Sheens? How many Chrysostoms? None? One, maybe, in the next state? But there are legions trained in the priestcraft of change in the service of pleasant comprehensibility, who, unlike the insistent child in his reader's lap, have no conception of, much less love for or desire to seek, the Original at the Center.
The impression this leaves both within the churches themselves and to the profane who listen to church noises from outside their walls is that this promiscuity with which their authorities make and encourage change points toward their abandonment by anything that could pass for God, from whom one expects the same unchanged Word at all times and places, a Word—into whichever language it has been translated—that is guarded and preserved by people who would rather die than alter it and whose attitude toward proposed changes in the language of worship, including the language of the legion of new Bibles (always presented as improvements or good developments) is automatically negative, until at least they are subjected to the fires of testing that will be expected to kill most of them.
I do not speak here as an advocate of the mere traditionalism condemned by the Lord, but am pointing to a problem which is both subtle and deep, for which I have no answers peculiarly my own, and which turns upon questions of fact that have for centuries been points of dispute among the churches and may only be solved by holy wisdom and in its power. Those questions are: When is an alteration a re-presentation, a translation from one tongue to another, a chaste and lawful "development" (if there is such a thing), and when is it, on the other hand, a novelty, an addition to or subtraction from the Word of God, an unholy artifact of the Spirit of the Age, the work of false or incompetent teachers? When does refusal to change in the name of truth-preservation become the mark of a dead or sclerotic orthodoxy? When does free occupation with change in the name of making the Word understandable make it unbelievable to those who seek the "City which has foundations" instead of the Heraclitan river in which panta rhei?—now apparently one of the marks of the Church?
Returning to the observation about the child's reaction to any alteration of a story which to him is an elemental aspect of his being—for the child the change is simply wrong, grievously and intolerably so, and people who insist upon reading the stories he loves in novel ways are simply rejected. The point carries through to other aspects of the Beloved Narrative as well. The child who loves The Wind in the Willows or Winnie-the-Pooh with Ernest Shepard's illustrations will hardly be able to stomach the Disney counterfeits. He will seek other readers who are not careless or hostile, and if these cannot be found, he learns to read himself as best as he can and becomes as content as he can with an individualistic approach to the beloved Story, for which he can hardly be blamed when his sources have failed him. As an adult, he visits the churches, and not finding in them the God who has been speaking to his soul from his beginning, turns to his own readings in the sanctuary of Nature, for which the churches in their guilty ignorance blame him for abandoning them. He cannot hear the Voice of the Beloved in places committed to the constant improvement of what they once received—doing this because, ironically, they thought they were helping him hear it. It is for just such as these, and against their pervading rule of life, that it is written: "Thus saith the Lord: Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls."
Where are the old paths? Where is the unaltered text? Where is unalloyed worship? I firmly resist formulating the answers myself, for it is for these we are told to ask, as though they haven't yet been found in the midst of "the ways." I do know, however, the attitude we are to take in all this confusion where the Center no longer holds: to "seek the old paths, where is the good way." These are promised by the Lord as response to a knock animated by a desire to find them, and there have been times in my life when I have, in the company of other believers, sensed the blessed presence of the Changeless—although as time goes on, the partisans of Mere Change multiply in power and influence, and the urge to "create"—always for the advantage of others of course—overcomes the will to obey as naturally as night follows day.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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