Category Archive: Theology – Liturgical
The Catholicity of Jesus
Was there ever anyone with more integrity, and who made greater demands, than Jesus Christ? Yet look at the catholicity of His practice: He ate with publicans, harlots, and sinners, and He took nursing infants into His arms and thus to Himself. Who complained about all this? The Pharisees.
How could Jesus, the spotless Son of God, associate with such evil people? Simple: They were (a) members of the visible church, even though that church was borderline apostate (run by Sadducees and Pharisees). They were (b) not excommunicate from that visible church. They were (c) willing to listen to what He had to say.
Now, of course, after they listened for a while, most of them departed, not willing to persevere. They excommunicated themselves. But initially, they were welcomed according to the catholic principle we have outlined.
Notice that Jesus ate and drank with them. It requires a clever bit of nominalism to miss the sacramental implications of this. Pharisees, beware! — James B. Jordan, The Sociology of the Church, 15.
Transfiguration and the Lord’s Day Service
The story of the Mount of Transfiguration tracks, to some degree, with what happens in the Lord’s Day service.
Jesus ascends a high mountain, which in the Bible is often associated with drawing near to meet with God (Mount Eden, Mount Sinai, Mount Zion, Mount Moriah). In every offering, the animal dies and then ascends the mountain and goes up to God in smoke. Hebrews 13 tells us that we have come to the heavenly Mount Zion.
That’s what’s happening in worship. We gather with the church all over the world on the heavenly Mount Zion. We ascend together into heaven. And on the mountain, we read the Law and the Prophets, the whole of the Scriptures, and they all point us to Jesus.
Here, we see Jesus in all His glory. Here, we hear the heavenly voice declaring: “This is my beloved Son. Hear Him!” Here, our ears are trained and opened to listen to Jesus. And here we are transfigured, from glory to glory, as we eat the bread which is Jesus’ body *together with one another* and become more and more one body with Him.
But we can’t stay. Moses has to go down the mountain to Israel, his face shining with God’s glory. Jesus and the disciples have to go down the mountain to a demon-possessed boy who needs help. We have to go down the mountain, out to the world, like the rivers from Eden, like the waters flowing from the temple, like the disciples after the transfiguration, flowing out to transform the world, not with programs and theories but with the gospel, with the proclamation of Jesus alone whom we have learned to hear.
Evangelistic Preaching
The Great Commission speaks not only of bringing sinners to the baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, but also expressly of teaching the converted — indeed, all persons — to obey everything that our Lord has commanded. The week-by-week instruction of God’s people in what they are to believe and what God is asking them to do in this life is evangelism.
From a covenantal perspective, every sermon is an evangelistic sermon. Not only parents and other adults, but also the children of the covenant must be evangelized. By that we mean they must be taught to think of themselves as the people of God and must be trained to be the people God called them to be when he laid his claim on them in baptism and separated them from the unbelieving world. — Norman Shepherd, “Growing in Covenant Consciousness.”
Circumcision of Jewish Christians?
I’m reading Doug Wilson’s To a Thousand Generations for the first time and I’ve come across something that puzzles me. As part of his argument for infant baptism, Wilson points to the ongoing practice of circumcision among Jewish Christians after the death and resurrection of Jesus. In fact, says Wilson, Jewish Christians were required — obligated by God — to circumcise their children. “Baptism was required to display the unity of believing Jews with believing Gentiles (Eph. 4:5), and circumcision was required to show the unity of believing Jews with Abraham (Rom. 4:11-12)” (p. 78).
I have no trouble imagining that a Jewish Christian might have had his newborn son circumcised. But was he obligated to do so? Timothy wasn’t circumcised by his Greek father and so Paul has him circumcised, but it does not seem as if he was obligated to be circumcised; it seems like a concession, because the Jews knew that Timothy’s father was a Greek (Acts 16:1-3).
What about other things that were once required in the Old Covenant? Would a Jewish Christian have been obligated to keep the dietary laws? Would it have been sinful for him to eat some crawfish or a link of boudin before AD 70? I can’t see that it would have been. It might not have been wise to flout his liberty in front of unbelieving Jews. But would it have been sinful?
Would a Jewish Christian have been required by God to continue to bring offerings to the temple? It’s true that Paul takes a Nazirite vow, and so we can conclude that a Christian might bring an offering in Paul’s day. But were Jewish Christians obligated to do so?
Would a Jewish Christian be required by God to keep the laws of clean and unclean? To redeem their firstborn? To present firstfruits at the temple? To keep the laws relating to the land and inheritance?
Well, as a matter of fact, we know that the Jewish Christians didn’t keep the laws relating to the land. They sold their property (Acts 4:34). They didn’t maintain their inheritance, as faithful Jews once strove to do. There’s no hint that the nearest kinsman redeemed their land or anything like that. They sold it — and when persecution heated up, they moved away.
So, again, I can certainly imagine that many Jewish Christians did have their sons circumcised and that it took some time for that practice to fade away. But it’s not clear to me that Jewish Christians were required by God to keep doing until AD 70.
Helper & Helpee?
In Reforming Marriage, Douglas Wilson quotes Genesis 2:18 (“It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him”) and 1 Corinthians 11:9 (“Nor was man created for the woman, but woman for the man”) and then draws this conclusion:
As a result of the creation order, men and women are oriented to one another differently. They need one another, but they need one another differently. The man needs the help; the woman needs to help. Marriage was created by God to provide companionship in the labor of dominion. The cultural mandate, the requirement to fill and subdue the earth, is still in force, and a husband cannot fulfill this portion of the task in isolation. He needs a companion suitable for him in the work to which God has called him. He is called to the work and must receive help from her. She is called to the work through ministering to him. He is oriented to the task, and she is oriented to him (p. 19).
I’ve read this book several times and have used it in premarital counseling, but as I read it this afternoon this passage stood out to me and a bunch of questions came to mind.
Are we to think here of men and women, in general, or only of a husband and his wife? Presumably it is the latter. Though the opening sentence speaks of “men and women,” it goes on to speak of how they are “oriented to one another,” and in the context that would be in marriage. Still, it is possible to (mis!)read the next sentence (“The man needs the help; the woman needs to help”) as if it were speaking about every man and every woman, as if women exist to help men. One could wish the wording were clearer to guard against that misreading, but a close reading does suggest to me that Wilson has in mind only husbands and wives.
Still, some questions remain. Is it true that husbands need to be helped and women need to help, and not the other way round? Is Genesis 2 making a blanket statement about husbands and wives, teaching us that the husband is to do the work and needs help in doing it, while the wife is only to assist in the work as her husband’s helper? Does a wife never do the “the labor of dominion” directly, but instead takes part in it only “through ministering to” her husband? May she not be involved in some “labor of dominion” that is distinct from her husband’s particular labor, that she does without ministering to him? Is the husband not to be oriented to her? Is she not in any way oriented to the task (or even to a task that is not her husband’s task)? Is this orientation thing an either/or, either an orientation toward work or an orientation to a spouse? Can it not in some way be both?
Surely “the labor of dominion” in Genesis 1 includes procreation. The command-blessing there is “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” That, as Wilson says on the next page, is something a man cannot do on his own. But is procreation something that the husband does with the assistance of his wife? Is she only helping him do his task of being fruitful and multiplying? Is she involved in procreation only “through ministering to him”? Is he “oriented to the task” of procreation, while “she is oriented to him”?
On the contrary. In the Bible, the mandate given as a blessing in Genesis 1 is given only after the creation of Woman (that is, chronologically after what is reported to us in Genesis 2) and is given to both Adam and Woman:
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen 1:26-28).
Both of them are created in God’s image. Both of them, male and female, are blessed. To both of them God gives the mandate to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it, to have dominion over the fish and birds and animals. There is no hint here that this mandate is given to the man, with his wife in only a helping role. She receives the mandate too. She is to be fruitful and multiply as much as he is, and they take part in this calling together. He helps her and she helps him. He receives her help and she receives his help.
What is true of procreation, of being fruitful and multiplying, is true of the other aspects of this mandate, subduing the earth and having dominion over the creatures. As James Jordan has written, “The cultural mandate is given equally to men and women (Gen. 1:28). In cultural life, the man is to help the woman as much as the woman helps the man.”
It is not only that “The man needs the help; the woman needs to help.” It is also that “The woman needs the help; the man needs to help.” Both the husband and the wife are involved in carrying out the mandate God gave, and both need each other’s help in various ways.
What about Genesis 2, then? Doesn’t God say that he is making the woman to be a “helper comparable to” Adam? It certainly does. But a helper with what?
In Reforming Marriage, Wilson links the help with the “labor of dominion,” but that isn’t mentioned in the context in Genesis 2. At the time God created the woman, the cultural mandate had not yet been given; it wasn’t given, according to Genesis 1, until after the woman was created and then it was given to them both. What about procreation? Again, nothing is mentioned about that in Genesis 2.
One might think more generally of companionship. After all, God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone.” There is a certain sort of companionship, a certain sort of help, that the wife gives to her husband, a kind of help that he cannot receive from another man or from one of the animals, a kind of help for which he needs someone similar but different, fully human and “comparable to him” but not exactly the same.
That’s true enough. But note, too, the flow of events in Genesis 2. God created Adam first and then created the Garden and put Adam into the Garden to serve it and to guard it, tasks that are later associated with the work of priests. The Garden is God’s sanctuary, the place where God will meet with his people. Adam does not have dominion over it and is not going to subdue it. It is not Adam’s Garden but God’s, and Adam is in it as a priest, a palace servant, commissioned to serve and guard it. That priestly task is given to Adam, along with the gift of all the trees of the Garden (including, obviously, the Tree of Life) and with the warning not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Only at that point does God say that it is not good for the man to be alone and that he needs “a helper comparable to him.” If we are to associate the Woman’s role as “helper” here with any task given to Adam, it is not the task of dominion or of procreation or of cultural development, the tasks that hadn’t been given yet, but the priestly task, the task of serving and guarding the Garden, the task of worship and care for God’s sanctuary — and that’s how Paul applies the creation order in 1 Timothy 2: not to all of life, not to cultural work or the “labor of dominion” but to the sphere of liturgy and worship (see the provocative discussion here; my link does not, of course, necessarily imply agreement with everything in this article).
Genesis 2, then, is not talking generally about men and women or husbands and wives and doesn’t indicate that husbands are to be oriented toward their work, while their wives are to be oriented toward them and help them in their work. It’s talking, rather, about a specific sphere, a specific sort of work and help in that work. But the broader mandate, the mandate to fill and subdue and rule the world, God gave to men and women, husbands and wives, alike. Each works, each needs help in many ways, each gives help.
Amen!
“The people must not be present at worship only in the capacity of hearer and spectator, nor even merely to follow in thought what is pronounced by the minister of the church, but they must also speak from their side and at least they must respond Amen to what is said in the name of the congregation” — Osterwald’s preface to the liturgy of Neuchatel (1713), cited in Richard Paquier, Dynamics of Worship, 63n10.
A Voice for the World
The church of Christ, the first fruit of the new creation, expresses in articulate and intelligible words the silent sighing of nature subjected to corruption and waiting for deliverance (Rom. 8:19-23). Its “liturgy” of gratitude for the deliverance received through Christ and for the hope of the manifestation of the glory to come, lends a voice to the entire world.
Christian worship carries to the throne of God, through Christ the supreme liturgist, the praise and supplication of all humanity and of the whole creation — Richard Paquier, Dynamics of Worship, 56-57.
Confessionalism
All narrow confessionalism and all complacency in any local ecclesiastical tradition must hear the apostolic judgment: “What! Did the word of God originate with you, or are you the only ones it has reached?” (1 Cor. 14:36) — Richard Paquier, Dynamics of Worship, 52n9.
Common Prayer
In the Lord’s service, we pray together, so that each individual who is taking part in the prayer focuses not on himself and his own needs and interests but on the community as a whole, even if those other needs and interests don’t really move him emotionally much at all.
R. Guardini puts it this way:
He will have to get out of his circle of customary ideas and appropriate a whole world of thoughts infinitely broader and richer. He will have to leave and go beyond the horizon of his own little interests, of small private and personal profits…. He will have to address to heaven some of the requests that do not touch nor interest him directly; he will have to hold up before God these requests with as much devotion as if they were his own, even though they are far from his interests and dictated only by common concern (cited in Richard Paquier, Dynamics of Worship, 50).
Subject and Object
“God can be the object of our worship only if he is first the subject, that is, the one who gives us the worship” — Richard Paquier, Dynamics of Worship, 4.
Royal Majesty
The church is not only the spokesman of Christ the Prophet, not only the organ of Christ the Sacrificer, it is also the army of Christ the King. And something of the royal majesty and glory of the Risen One who ascended to heaven has to come through in the worship of the church. Worship has to reveal partly in its liturgical forms the royal glory of Christ, the triumph and present power of the Head of the church, who was once the crucified, and who is now the living, the conqueror.
By its hymns, candles, the beauty of the ornaments of the sanctuary, and all the dignity and fullness of the divine service, the church makes known to the world that its Lord reigns in the midst of it in his divine beauty. — Richard Paquier, Dynamics of Worship, pp. 22-23.
Christ Praying in Our Prayers
When the church prays, it is Christ who prays in it. Christ extends his prayer in the church.
Thus all the petitions and praises that the body of Christ presents to God through its members are valuable only when passing through him who is the Head of the body, the Son of God. All the prayers of the church are offered to God “through Jesus Christ our Lord” or “in the name and for the sake of Jesus Christ.”
This is why the church must be careful how it expresses its prayers; they ought to be worthy, grounded and shaped in him who is truly “the hearer. The church must give to its prayers rigorous thought, right intention, spiritual fullness, and a propriety of tone and beauty of form that are in harmony with the divine person of Christ and his holy prayer, both in John 17 and Matt. 11:25-27 and in the Lord’s Prayer, Matt. 6:9-13 — Richard Paquier, Dynamics of Worship, 22.