Your answers
Why has it become the tradition in the Western Catholic Church for the Creed to be said rather than sung, when it is well-known that singing unites the people?
Singing does indeed unite the people . . . when they all know the tune. Even as an ordained minister, I have attended churches where I have found myself unable to affirm my faith publicly alongside the rest of the congregation because I didn’t know the setting to which the creed was sung.
Perhaps churches are recognising the need to be accessible to newcomers.
(The Revd) Rich Cresswell
Muxton, Shropshire
Congregational settings that were very widely known and easy to pick up are still heard at traditional-language sung eucharists (usually Merbecke or Martin Shaw’s Anglican Folk Mass, and occasionally plainsong), but have not had their successors for contemporary-language liturgy, although congregational settings of the Creed have been composed. In the Roman Catholic Church, we understand, the Creed is still sung by congregations, but mainly at Latin masses, e.g. to Missa de Angelis. Editor
Your questions
Did God really abandon Jesus on the cross as many worship songs and sermons assert, mainly, it seems, on the basis of Mark 15.34 and Matthew 27.46? Many commentators point to Psalm 22.24, and to Habakkuk 1.13. Is the activity of the Father in our redemption being misrepresented? [Answers, 24 February]
The simplest way to ascertain whether “the Father turned his face away” from Jesus on the Cross, assumed from Jesus’s cry of Psalm 22.1, is to read Psalm 22.24, which says: “For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him” (NRSV).
Jewish practice in the Mishnah and Talmud is to quote the first line, and that is taken to imply the rest of the passage. Perhaps Jesus was doing the same?
This theology does violence to the union of humanity and divinity, moves away from orthodox understandings of the hypostatic union, was resisted in the Early Church as leading to Christological heresy,
and is spurned by the Orthodox Churches.
The only way it seems to me to make sense as imagery (not biblical imagery) is to say that God turns away in sadness and pain at the hideous violence happening on the Cross. But in Reformed Protestantism that view is probably less likely to be the one assumed or intended.
(The Revd) Marc Cooper
Fishtoft, Lincolnshire
What preparations are being made to mark the centenary of the Enabling Act of 1919? Will there be a celebration of the contribution of C of E lay people and the advantages of synodical government over parliamentary micro-management? Or will the carpers (because the system doesn’t deliver all that they want as soon as they want it) prevent it?
A. M.
Do any UK churches yet have a “contactless” system for taking the collection? Should they? P. P.
Can someone identify the exact quotation for an Anglo-Catholic statement that England would not be converted until the Sacrament had been exposed on every altar?
A. P.
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