This is a very readable book with a clear, single idea behind it, no jargon and in short chapters. It was originally written for the annual Pentecost lectures at Pluscarden Abbey, which are open to the wider public (I first met Alister McGrath there, at Thomas Weinandy's Pentecost lectures in 1996, which I reviewed in this journal). We learn initially that there are ‘currently two forms of the Roman Missal authorized for use in the Catholic Church: the version of 1962, which is used in accordance with Benedict XVI's motu proprio Summorum Pontificum and the (2002) third typical edition of the Roman Missal first introduced by Paul VI in 1970’ (p. 16). The priority given to the 1962 Missal gives a signal that not only Professor McGrath but most RCs are not going to hear much about the liturgies they use, and what they do hear will not take the form of an encomium. The 1962 Missal is the latest version of what is now called the usus antiquior, or more commonly, the Tridentine Rite or, in the vernacular, ‘the Latin Mass’. By pp. 153–4 we have discerned that ‘If the liturgy is to have a future, it will be in rediscovering the riches . . . of its past. This past is not best enshrined in the rites of 1962 . . . but in the unreformed rites, prior to 1911’. That means, not only the ardent but tiny numbers of RCs who attend the Tridentine Rite, but an even smaller, and doubtless even more ardent, crew are the perfect audience for the book: those who hear mass according to the pre-1911 Missal and use a pre-1911 breviary for their daily recital of the Office. It is a shame that the book's baroquely narrow liturgical conspectus seems likely to confine its apparent interest and influence to a precious few. For it is very interesting theologically. If one is to contend that worship is revelation, then one must define the liturgy through which God reveals himself quite specifically, and Hemming certainly grasps that nettle.

The first chapter, ‘I Saw the New Jerusalem’, introduces the main themes of the book by arguing that theology is reflection on the ‘sacred liturgy’ and that, in Christ's appearance to the disciples described in John 20, is the making visible and tangible of the heavenly Jerusalem, of which the earthly church is the analogue. Since the prayer made in the Temple (of which Christ is the High Priest) is ‘atonement for the sins of the people’, Hemming also claims that ‘All . . . liturgical prayer . . . is rooted in the description of prayer as pleading of atonement by the Lord’ (p. 8). This idea shapes the eucharistic theology presented in the book. The second chapter contains the key contention: ‘The Spiritual hand that shaped the Roman liturgy over centuries did so in conformity with divine ordinances: it was itself a revelation’ (p. 11).

After explaining what the offices of the Breviary are, the book shows how they are ‘interlocked’ with the Missal, that is, how ‘the Mass and the hours of offices . . . is a single cycle’ (p. 20). This is important for Hemming's claim that, by recasting the Breviary, in 1911, Pius X opened the doors to the reformation which produced the 1970 Missal, or the ‘New Mass’. The argument that an abuse of the power of the papacy by Pius X lies behind the later reformation of the Missal was aired at length in Alcuin Reid's 2004 The Organic Development of the Liturgy. As Reid and, a little more politely, Hemming see it, ‘despite its resistance, the papacy has also been shaped by the metaphysical outlook that drives modern man to seek domination over all things . . . the papacy remains a place of resistance . . . of the . . . drive to instrumentalize all things to the will of man, but is still caught up in it’ (p. 28). I wonder whether liturgy buffs like Reid and Hemming consider the broader context of Pius X's revision of the Breviary: having been compelled by the loss of territorial power in 1870 to rewrite canon law in its entirety, it may have seemed natural and innocuous to revise the Breviary as well. Hemming doesn't look at it like that: rather, ‘This book argues that the call for liturgical reform, especially in the form that it began to take after 1903, and with full force in . . . 1965–70, was driven by an underlying rationalism’ (p. 24). A key issue is the use by Pius X of the term partecipazione attiva. From here down to the Vatican II Constitution, Sacrosanctum Concilium, the question is, what does ‘active participation’ by the laity in the liturgy mean? Hemming argues that it does not mean ‘the right and ability to say and perform the actions of the liturgy for ourselves’ but, rather, ‘to participate in what the rite itself participates in and makes us present to’. The liturgy makes us present to ‘the conversation . . . between Father and Son in the sacrifice of the cross and in Christ's rising again’ (p. 31). In other words, ‘active participation’ is not about ‘what we must be doing’, but rather what is ‘done to’ us when we are drawn into the life of the Trinity. The ‘rationalism’ against which Hemming writes conceives of active participation as ownership by means of intellectual understanding. For Hemming, this is Cartesian, and he explains what that means in a straightforward way for non-philosophically orientated readers. Many who disapprove of the common interpretation of ‘active participation’, like Aidan Nichols, think that the Liturgical Movement, the originally monastically led movement towards evangelisation through participation in the liturgy, played an ambivalent role, because their idea of bringing the people to the liturgy eventually morphed into the notion of bringing the liturgy to the people. For Hemming, there is no ambivalence: he characterises the Liturgical Movement's greatest thinker, Romano Guardini, as a full-fledged Cartesian, dedicated to the promotion of the ‘self-standing’ individual (p. 33). It is an example of where, perhaps in the interests of clarity and simplicity, Hemming goes over the top, and loses many potential sympathisers. Even given that anthropology was not Guardini's strongest suit (I find him, quite conversely, rather too collectivist), Hemming's judgement seems unnecessarily harsh. Making such an unfounded or at least extreme judgement on Guardini (a hero of Cardinal Ratzinger) creates an opportunity for readers to dismiss the book. I have met one such, an admirer of Hemming on Aquinas and Heidegger, in full, enraged flight against the ‘Cartesian’ labelling, or libelling, as he saw it, of Guardini. Different readers will object equally forcefully to Hemming's description of Aquinas as the polar opposite of Descartes, forsaking rational certitude in the pursuit of faith.

Protestants will object even more forcibly to Hemming's claim that ‘liturgy is even more basic than scripture, since it is the means by which the Word of God is uttered’ (p. 53). Protestants may hear in Hemming's statements of this type the idea that a divine revelation unconstrained by scripture is open to infinite change, with the future development of the liturgy. Pius X might object most forcibly of all, since he was a doughty excommunicator of modernists. Alfred Loisy's best known aperçu, ‘Jesus preached the kingdom and it was the Church that came’ (that is, that Jesus’ message is replete with potential unknown to the founder of the church) sums up the modernist problem: a revelation conceived as growing through the growth of the human spirit is somewhat lacking in ‘certainty’ as to its contents. It is important to see that making claims about the propositional content of the liturgy, and how it could change with the liturgy, is not what Hemming's book is about. When, drawing on Ratzinger's habilitation on Bonaventure, he claims that ‘revelation is not what scripture is, but what scripture contains’ and that therefore it is pre-eminently ‘the sacred liturgy in which God reveals himself in the person of his Son and through his Spirit to the believer’, Hemming is making an assertion about the divine character of the liturgy, not about its propositional content, nor what it teaches. The issue which would set many Protestant and some Pian Catholics’ hackles arising is not in his sights. His contention is rather the opposite of Loisy's, that ‘The liturgy is so suffused with scripture that in many ways the liturgy is the interpretation of scripture belonging to the Church. Here is a further reason why liturgy can never be “made” – it is part of what is “given” by God’ (p. 115). Hemming is simply making the somewhat ‘Barthian’ point that, regardless of its propositional content, sacred liturgy is an event in which God reveals God. So far as endless ‘development’ is concerned, as we've seen, Hemming's predilection is for returning to, or at least drawing on, older liturgical usages, not inventing new ones. What matters to him is that liturgy is given by God, not invented by human beings.

Ratzinger's 1950s work on Bonaventure, was allied to a rethinking of the nature of ‘tradition’ in its relation to scripture, which ultimately resulted in the downgrading of what he called the ‘mechanical’ idea of scripture and tradition as ‘two vessels’ of revelation, which had been prevalent since Trent. Ratzinger applauded the way in which this is replaced, in the Vatican II Constitution on Revelation, Dei Verbum, with a notion of the ‘living organic unity’ of scripture and tradition. What was apparently being quietly dropped was the notion of ‘oral tradition’ as secret information passed on by the early Christians alongside the scriptures. Theologians of Ratzinger's generation are prone to caricature the older notion as a ‘Chinese whispers’ notion of tradition. Hemming's approach is novel in that he draws on the notion of revelation as tradition in the broader sense favoured by the Conciliar fathers, but also seeks to rehabilitate the older notion of ‘oral tradition’. Here he takes as his evidential basis Margaret Barker's works on Christian origins, using them to argue that ‘much that we have presumed was simply “custom” or human invention turns out to have an origin that was believed to have been divinely commanded’ (pp. 75–6). Whether or not one is convinced by Barker's specific claims (and the guild of biblical scholars seems generally to have dismissed them as barking), Hemming is probably here representing a subtle change in Catholic attitudes to ‘pre-Vatican II’ conceptions of tradition. Through Ratzinger, he defends a ressourcement notion of tradition as the collective, liturgical mind of the church, but simultaneously he defends the older notion of tradition as a treasure of knowledge about Christ's intentions kept secret from the many.

For some, this acceptance of ‘secret knowledge’, taken together with the somewhat ‘fideistic’ cast of Hemming's notion of revelation, will be reminiscent of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ‘traditionalism’, which foreswore rational knowledge of God in favour of belief in an original divine ‘revelation’ transmitted through the ages. The look of ‘traditionalism’ could have been avoided by means of greater nuance, or a less staccato certainty of its own interpretations. Nonetheless, Worship as Revelation is thought-provoking and worth reading, the work of a first-class theological mind. It is to be hoped that its idiosyncrasies will not prevent readers from considering ‘The case this book makes . . . that the liturgy is the founding possibility for God's gift of faith – a foundation that cannot be displaced, either by the supposed claims of the priority of scripture, or the claims of reasons’ (p. 117). It is published at a time when many Catholics are returning to the perception that the liturgy and the way in which it is celebrated is the primary and most elemental way in which we learn about and are given the Christian faith. Lex credendi, lex orandi.