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Text, Context and Performance: Hermeneutics and the Study of Worship

There has been a growing interest in recent years in the question of meaning as it relates to liturgical performance. There is a long tradition within liturgical writing of deriving some kind of theological meaning for the liturgy from the content of the text that is used. More recently, however, this understanding of ‘meaning’ has been considered too limiting. It treats the liturgy as a literary/theological text and ignores the fact that the liturgical text is only one small part of a much wider act of worship. Bridget Nichols, for example, in her book Liturgical Hermeneutics: Interpreting Liturgical Rites in Performance suggests that the traditional theological/literary meaning is misleading. The liturgical text is designed to be performed, it comes into existence in performance, and outside of that performance, it is nothing. Kieren Flanagan also claimed to address the question of meaning and performance in his book on Sociology and Liturgy: Re-presentations of the Holy. Nichols rejected this approach, however, because of what she claims is Flanagan's particular misreading of Hans-Georg Gadamer's writing on ‘play’. This led Flanagan to suggest that there is only one single ‘unitary’ meaning in liturgy which is constantly renewed in each and every act of worship. Joyce Ann Zimmerman has written a book entitled Liturgy as Language of Faith: A Liturgical Methodology in the Mode of Paul Ricoeur's Textual Hermeneutics but this also ignores the performative aspect of liturgy and, like Flanagan, asserts a definitive meaning for the text.