Is Religion about Truth?

The issue of Liturgy entitled “Future Renewals: Looking Toward the Next Fifty Years of Worship Scholarship and Practice,” was co-edited by Andrew Wymer, vice-president of the Liturgical Conference board and professor of worship at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, and me.

We solicited essays from a range of members of the North American Academy of Liturgy (NAAL) looking at what has changed in liturgical scholarship and liturgical practice in the years since NAAL was founded in response to the Second Vatican Council.

Here is an excerpt from an essay by Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman entitled “Liturgy’s Ethical Dilemma.” Dr. Hoffman was one of the founders of the North American Academy of Liturgy in 1975 and for many years the only Jewish scholar among Roman Catholics and Protestants. He looks to past experiences of discord and harmony to name a future trajectory for people of faith. –– Melinda Quivik

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When I was serving as a member of the executive Council of the North American Academy of Liturgy, I joined the other Council members in a visit to the city that was to host our annual meeting that year. Among other things, we attended worship in a church that might, we thought, serve as a venue for our meeting. All went smoothly until the homily that began with the preacher asking, rhetorically, “Have you ever felt less than Christian?” As the sole Jew in the assembly, I suppose I should have been offended, but I took the sermonic introduction in stride––I knew the preacher didn’t consciously intend to denigrate Jews. My Academy colleagues, however, noticeably cringed. On the way out the door, Horace Allen, the incoming president at the time, and a man not given to understatement, answered the preacher’s question. “Have I ever felt less than Christian? Never—until the moment I experienced that sermon!”

As I think back to that moment, it occurs to me that had we visited a synagogue, with my Christian colleagues sitting invisibly among the Jewish congregants, some unthinking rabbi might have asked the same question, “Have you ever been less than Jewish?” He (or nowadays, she) too would have intended no slight to the Christians by my side. But I, too, would have blanched in embarrassment.

I now take those two questions as indicative of a deep-seated ethical quandary that we have yet to face. The fact is that whatever progress we Christians and Jews have made since the time of Jewish-Christian animosity (my first story), we still pursue our liturgies as if, in the end (my second story), only one of us can be right.

The liturgical issue of “we are right and you are wrong” goes well beyond Jewish/Christian relations alone. Its ghostly presence haunts our relationships with other world religions even more. At least Jews and Christians are sister faiths—what I think of as a spiritual double helix in historical time, two parallel religious traditions with similar roots and history, circling around one another throughout the centuries, never joining together, but never free of one another’s mutual influence either. Sibling religions can more easily recognize one another. But how are we to think of religions more far afield: Islam, for example, or Hinduism, say, with its many manifestations of deity? For all practical purposes, we now greet one another with respect, but as a matter of theological rectitude, are we prepared to say that no single one of us can be right at the expense of the other being wrong?

The issue is not so much right/wrong as true/false, because in most of the things we do, being right does not automatically make the alternatives wrong. Think for example of preparing dinner, dressing for work, choosing a movie, or solving a puzzle. There may be better or worse ways to go about these tasks, but there is hardly just one right one. Religion, by contrast, sets up truths next to which rival faiths are simply false. . .

But what if religion does not really work that way? What if religion is not primarily a set of truths? And what if the truths that it does tell are not the sort of thing that we think they are?

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The full essay with full references is available now in the digital and print editions of Liturgy. All of the essays in Liturgy 38, no. 1 are available by personal subscription and through many libraries.

Lawrence A. Hoffman is professor emeritus of liturgy, worship, and ritual at Hebrew Union College, in New York. He is the author or editor of fifty books and past-president and Berakah Award recipient of the North American Academy of Liturgy to which he has belonged since 1975.

Lawrence A. Hoffman, “Liturgy’s Ethical Dilemma,” Liturgy 38, no. 1 (2023): 74–79.