Dimensions of Baptism Biblical and Theological Studies

ELLIS The Baptism of Disciples 335

grounded structure that links these churches and comes to expression in

their gatherings. To be part of the assembly, then, is to be part of the

church. To interpret the meaning of the assembly is to interpret the meaning

of 'church' and the church's faith.^4

The Church is seen here as a community which acts as a subject in the

event of worship. This is not to deny the belief that God is also a subject,

perhaps the primary one in worship, but what is being asserted is that

worship is communal and that it is an action of the Church acting

corporately. Thus the Constitution of the Sacred Liturgy in the Second

Vatican Council affirmed the principle that liturgy is an ecclesial action.^5

Commenting on this, Yves Congar claimed that here was 'a retrieval of the

ancient tradition that the ecclesia, the Christian community, is the subject

of the liturgical action'.^6 This activity of the Church in worship is both an

expression of what the Church believes and an expression of what the

Church is, and is becoming. Thus Margaret Mary Kelleher, in her appli-

cation of the work of Bernard Lonergan on subjectivity and meaning,

claims that 'liturgical action discloses the beliefs, values, commitments,

relationships, memories and hopes which are constitutive of the Church as

a community'.^7 She argues that liturgy is an 'instrumental act of meaning'

and that

Liturgy is not to be understood as an instrument for putting theories into

practice. It is rather to be understood as an action in which the Christian

collective subject performs its shared meaning, appropriates its common

memory and hope and continually creates itself as a community of mean-

ing. Liturgical praxis is an example of incarnate meaning.^8

This collective action is on the one hand an expression of what the Church

is in its historical actuality, its humanness. On the other hand, the liturgical

action demonstrates the eschatological hope of what the Church seeks to

be, while also providing a means by which the Church attempts to move

4. Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress
   Press, 1993), p. 9.


5. Documents of the Liturgy: 1963-1979, Conciliar, Papal and Curial Texts
   (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1982), i.e. see nos. 2, 7, 26, 41 and 42.


6. Yves M.J. Congar, 'Ecclesia ou communaute chretienne, sujet integral de
   Faction liturgique', in J.P. Jossua and Y. Congar (eds.), La Liturgie apres Vatican II
   (Paris: Cerf, 1967), quoted in M.M. Kelleher, 'Liturgy: An Ecclesial Act of Meaning',
   Worship 59 (1985), pp. 482-97 (482).


7. Kelleher, 'Liturgy', p. 491.


8. Kelleher, 'Liturgy', p. 492.