Category Archive: Theology – Liturgical
Highest Form of Theology
In the comments on a post on the De Regno Christi blog, James Jordan writes something that’s worth a blog entry of its own:
When I was in school, long ago, it was commonly thought that Systematics was the queen of theology. Exegesis led to Biblical Theology and finally climaxed in Systematics. Well, I submit that this is very seriously wrong. For me, this is a form of gnosticism. The true goal is Practical and Liturgical Theology. Systematics gives us boundaries (it’s really Polemical theology), and this helps Biblical Theology, but the goal of all of it is Exegesis, the ability to explain a given pericope to PEOPLE so that PEOPLE are transformed. To do full justice to a given text, not explain it away because it does not seem to fit our tiny systems. Jesus came to save and to glorify people, not to bring an ideology. Way too often Reformed people take our great Confessions as ideologies, ignoring their many fuzzy edges, and forgetting that the men who wrote them were Bible-centered, not Confession-centered. They expected more Confessions to be written in the future, and the Covenanters and Associates were faithful to this notion. The State churches and later American denominations were not. My own study was in Systematics, and I still do plenty of it in my writing and teaching. But the highest form of theology is preaching and liturgics.
Personally, I’ve always disliked the idea that the highest pinnacle of a pastor’s success would be to be appointed to teach at a seminary: “Sure, you’re pastoring now for a few years. But I think one day, pastor, they’re going to hire you at the seminary!” they say, as if they’re saying, “You’re going to go places, boy!” But the seminary exists to serve the church and to serve by training pastors for the churches, and they could do a better job in teaching seminarians the Word and training them in liturgy. Jordan is right: “The highest form of theology is preaching and liturgics.”
Solempne
In the midst of a discussion of epic poetry, C. S. Lewis says something that our culture, not least our church culture, needs to hear. It has to do with the Middle English word solempne:
This means something different, but not quite different, from modern English solemn. Like solemn it implies the opposite of what is familiar, free and easy, or ordinary. But unlike solemn it does not suggest gloom, oppression, or austerity. The ball at the first act of Romeo and Juliet was a “solemnity.” The feast at the beginning of Gawain and the Green Knight is very much a solemnity. A great mass by Mozart or Beethoven is as much a solemnity in its hilarious gloria as in its poignant crucifixus est. Feast are, in this sense, more solemn than fasts. Easter is solempne, Good Friday is not.
The Solempne is the festal which is also the stately and the ceremonial, the proper occasion for pomp — and the very fact that pompous is now used only in a bad sense measures the degree to which we have lost the old idea of “solemnity.” To recover it you must think of a court ball, or a coronation, or a victory march, as these things appear to people who enjoy them; in an age when every one puts on his oldest clothes to be happy in, you must re-awake the simpler state of mind in which people put on gold and scarlet to be happy in.
Above all, you must be rid of the hideous idea, fruit of a widespread inferiority complex, that pomp, on the proper occasions, has any connexion with vanity or self-conceit. A celebrant approaching the altar, a princess led out by a king to dance a minuet, a general officer on a ceremonial parade, a major-domo preceding the boar’s head at a Christmas feast — all these wear unusual clothes and move with calculated dignity. This does not mean that they are vain, but that they are obedient; they are obeying the hoc age which presides over every solemnity. The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather, it proves the offender’s inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual. — C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, p. 17 (paragraph breaks added).
This particular book was published in 1942. Imagine what Lewis would say today if he saw the clothes that are worn, not just by congregants but by pastors. We have embraced the casual and we have almost completely lost any sense of solempne. Even the examples that Lewis provides probably sound archaic to many of us.
About the only time we experience solempne today at all, I suspect, is at a wedding. For the most part, brides and grooms still want their weddings formal. They want the bride to be glorious in white, the groom next to her in black, the wedding party, not in shorts and T-shirts but in more glorious clothing (except for those cruel brides who choose ugly dresses for their bridesmaids). As well, we still expect to hear certain formal words during the service (“till death do us part” or “so long as you both shall live” or something like that), though even here we find the encroaching grubbiness of our obsession with casualness, as couples have started writing their own vows and generally doing a sloppy job of it.
Still, weddings give us a taste of solempne. The wedding isn’t gloomy. We’re rejoicing. But a hush falls over the audience as the couple exchanges vows, and few people would think it an improvement if the pastor cracked a joke at precisely that moment. During the couple’s first dance, no one would appreciate hilarious commentary from the DJ. Weddings may be the closest we come to solempne.
Church services used to be and certainly were in Lewis’s time, but they aren’t any longer. There are churches that sing solemnly in the sense that they sing gloomily. Songs about joy can be slowed down enough that the true joy comes when the song is finally over. But such churches are rare and getting rarer all the time. Today, it isn’t strange at all to see a minister in a Hawaiian shirt making jokes and telling stories in front of a congregation or to find that the service itself has little formal order and that every effort is made to make things seem informal and easy-going.
The older emphasis on solempne had to do with the specialness of the occasion and that had everything to do with who was present and what was being done on that occasion. Today, it seems, we want special occasions without special language or special clothing or special behavior. Lewis might conclude that that simply means that we don’t want any occasion, least of all a church service, to be truly special.
Yes, the special language would sound stilted over coffee at Starbucks. Yes, the special clothing would be uncomfortable at the beach. Yes, that sort of behavior would look strange at the mall. But on this occasion we aren’t at those places; we’re here, now, doing this special thing at this special time and the only way it becomes special is through the activities and garments and diction that are associated with solempne.
Later, Lewis writes:
The desire for simplicity is a late and sophisticated one. We moderns may like dances which are hardly distinguishable from walking and poetry which sounds as if it might be uttered ex tempore. Our ancestors did not. They liked a dance which was a dance, and fine clothes which no one could mistake for working clothes, and feasts that no one could mistake for ordinary dinners, and poetry that unblushingly proclaimed itself to be poetry (p. 21).
Will anyone claim that our lives are all the richer for having lost the solempne our forefathers rejoiced in?
Screwtape on Prayer
Glancing through The Screwtape Letters, I realize that my temptation is to quote large sections. For instance, the third letter, in which Screwtape instructs Wormwood on how to mess up the patient’s relationship with his mother, is worth reading and re-reading but I’m not going to quote the whole thing here. But I will quote a couple things from later letters.
And so here’s Screwtape on prayer:
The best thing, wehre it is possible, is to keep the patient from the serious intention of praying altogether. When the patient is an adult recently re-converted to the Enemy’s party, like your man, this is best done by encouraging him to remember, or to think he remembers, the parrot-like nature of his prayers in childhood. In reaction against that, he may be persuaded to aim at something entirely spontaneous, inward, informal, and unregularised; and what this will actually mean to a beginner will be an effort to produce in himself a vaguely devotional mood in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part….
At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls….
If this fails, you must fall back on a subtler misdirection of his intention. Whenever they are attending to the Enemy Himself we are defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so. The simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him toward themselves. Keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by the action of their own wills. When they meant to ask Him for charity, let them, instead, start trying to manufacture charitable feelings for themselves and not notice that this is what they are doing. When they meant to pray for courage, let them really be trying to feel brave. When they say they are praying for forgiveness, let them be trying to feel forgiven. Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling; and never let them suspect how much success or failure of that kind depends on whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at the moment (pp. 24-26; I’ve added a paragraph break).
African Hymns
Here are a couple of hymns from Africa, quoted by Philip Jenkins in his recent The New Faces of Christianity (p. 104), which I glanced through a while back in Barnes & Noble. (Someday, I’ll have to read this one and the others in this trilogy: The Next Christendom and the brand-new God’s Continent.)
First, this one from the Transvaal:
Jesus Christ is Conqueror.
By his resurrection he overcame death itself.
By his resurrection he overcame all things.
He overcame magic.
He overcame amulets and charms.
He overcame the darkness of demon possession.
He overcame dread.
When we are with him
We also conquer.
The emphasis on Christ’s victory in the holy war against evil is even stronger in this hymn by Afua Kuma from Ghana:
If Satan troubles us,
Jesus Christ,
You who are the lion of the grassland,
You whose claws are sharp,
Will tear out his entrails
And leave them on the ground
For the flies to eat.
Why Sacraments?
On Saturday, I raised a couple questions for Calvin about his theology of the sacraments. I thought I’d drag a couple items out of the comments on that blog entry and present them here.
First, my friend Duane asked if Calvin meant things the way they sound in Ferguson’s summary (or my summary of Ferguson’s summary). I do think Ferguson’s summary is accurate. Calvin approves of Augustine’s description of the sacraments as visible words: “Augustine calls a sacrament ‘a visible word’ for the reason that it represents God’s promises as painted in a picture and sets them before our sight, portrayed graphically and in the manner of images” (Institutes 4.14.6).
More disturbingly, he also writes this in his section on the sacraments:
God’s truth is of itself firm and sure enough…. But as our faith is slight and feeble unless it be propped on all sides and sustained by every means, it trembles, wavers, totters, and at last gives way. Here our merciful Lord, according to his infinite kindness, so tempers himself to our capacity that, since we are creatures who always creep on the ground, cleave to the flesh, and, do not think about or even conceive of anything spiritual, he condescends to lead us to himself, even by these earthly elements, and to set before us in the flesh a mirror of spiritual blessings. For if we were incorporeal … he would give us these very things naked and incorporeal. Now, because we have souls engrafted in bodies, he imparts spiritual things under visible ones (Institutes 4.14.3).
I have to admit that this statement puzzles me. Is Calvin talking about post-fall man, weakened by sin? That’s possible. If so, he’s part of a long tradition. As Peter Leithart pointed out to me,
The notion that sacraments are a result of sin comes up in Hugh of St. Victor’s De Sacramentis and is probably earlier than that. It seems connected with the notion that original sin is essentially about our obsession with carnality and materiality, along with the notion that Adam in the garden had a purely “inward” communion with God — come to think of it, I believe that Augustine says that kind of thing. The movement of redemptive history from a inner communion (Adam) through various sorts of accommodated outward forms of communion (from garden to consummation) but leading to a final restoration of purely inner communion.
In a recent blog entry, Leithart also notes that “Thomas …denies that sacraments were necessary in Eden, since there was no need to remedy sin (ST 61, 2).” So if this is what Calvin is thinking, then he’s in line with many theologians before him.
But if Calvin wants to say that sacraments became necessary because of our sinful (or at least, sin-induced) weakness, then what about those trees in the Garden of Eden? Before the Fall, God didn’t simply bestow life and the knowledge of good and evil on man apart from means. He determined to use created means, the fruit of two trees. Those trees were as sacramental as the Lord’s Supper, and yet they were present in the Garden before man’s sin.
I’m not sure, however, that Calvin really is saying that it’s sin that weakened man. He might be, but the last two sentences quoted above seem to indicate that he’s simply talking about physical man, apart from the Fall. We need sacraments, Calvin says, because we “cleave to the flesh.” But then he says that the reason God “imparts spiritual things under visible ones” is “because we have souls engrafted in bodies.” The necessity for the sacraments, then, is not that we are impaired and weakened by sin, but rather that our souls are engrafted in bodies.
On the other hand, perhaps Calvin is still speaking about a weakness brought about by sin but is trying to say that because we’re embodied God uses earthly things to strengthen our faith. It’s not as if God sees that in our weakness and sin we “cleave to the flesh,” and so He cures that by using non-earthly, non-physical means. After all, we are embodied. We are physical. And so God uses physical means to bring about the cure and to strengthen our weak faith. That’s about the best I can do with this passage.
The worst interpretation, then, is that Calvin thinks God uses sacraments because being physical itself constitutes a sort of weakness. I can see how someone might conclude that from this paragraph. But the best interpretation, I think, is that Calvin thinks sin has brought about our weakness, making it necessary to strengthen our faith with something more than just His word, and that God strengthens our faith by physical things because we are ourselves physical.
(Even on this reading, though, I still get a sense from the last two sentences that Calvin thinks there’s something “condescending” about God’s use of physical things, as if it might have been better to be non-physical and not to need physical sacraments. That’s just a sense, and I can’t prove it.)
As I’ve indicated above, I don’t buy Calvin’s view. I don’t believe that the sacraments are in any sense the result of sin or the weakness resulting from sin. In part, I don’t believe that because there appear to have been sacraments before the Fall. But my rejection of his view also stems from my embrace of the goodness and physicality of the creation.
I don’t believe that for God to use physical means — and speech is no less physical than food, since it involves physical vibrations in the atmosphere and in the ear — is condescension and certainly not condescension in the sense of “lowering oneself,” as if it’s somehow beneath God’s proper dignity to involve himself with physical stuff. As C. S. Lewis says somewhere in Mere Christianity (I’m paraphrasing): God likes matter; He invented it.
That’s why we have sacraments. God made us physical creatures. He likes us as physical creatures. He wants us to have bodies for all eternity.
And so He gives us physical food. He could, of course, simply zap us and give us, by His Spirit, all the energy and strength we need to live. Food doesn’t have the power in itself to give life. We eat things that aren’t alive (like plants); we even eat things that are dead (like steak). Life comes from the Spirit. But God gives us life as we eat physical food.
So it is with the sacraments. The question “Why sacraments?” is no harder to answer than the question “Why baths?” and “Why food?”
Just as food isn’t the result of the Fall, so the sacraments aren’t the result of the Fall. Just as God gave life through all the fruit of all the trees of the Garden, God would give special life through the fruit of the Tree of Life. Just as God gives you life through your dinner every day, so God also gives you life — the life of Christ — through the Lord’s Supper.
Having said all of that, I do want to add this. Put in a pastoral way, there is something to be salvaged from Calvin’s approach and from the approach of, for instance, the Belgic Confession, Article 33, which says that “our gracious God, mindful of our insensitivity and weakness, has ordained sacraments….” That “insensitivity and weakness” is not the ultimate reason for the sacraments, but it is a pastoral occasion for the assurance that the sacraments give.
It’s not wrong, therefore, for a pastor — following the lead of Calvin and the Belgic Confession — to say something like this to a guy who is struggling with his faith, struggling perhaps to believe that his sins are really forgiven: “Look, God proclaims Sunday after Sunday that your sins are forgiven. He tells you again and again that He loves you. He says it in one way or another in virtually every sermon
“But He doesn’t just say it to you. That ought to be enough to give you comfort. But God is so good that He’s done more than that. He also had you baptized into Christ. Maybe you think God isn’t really speaking to you in the sermon or the declaration that your sins are forgiven. Well, what about your baptism? Do you think that water was meant for someone else? No! He called you by name. He had that water administered to you. You don’t need to doubt Him. His love and His forgiveness and His grace are as real as your baptism.
“And as if that isn’t enough, what about the Lord’s Supper? Every Sunday, that bread and that cup are passed to you personally. That’s Jesus’ love right there. He’s giving you His body. He’s giving you His blood. Take it. Don’t doubt but eat and drink. Yes, your faith is weak. But God gave you not only His Word but also baptism and the Lord’s Supper and a host of other things, including your pastor and your fellow brothers and sisters, by which He strengthens your faith.”
That’s how I read the Belgic Confession’s use of that “insensitivity and weakness” language: It’s not providing an explanation for why God gave sacraments in the first place, but it’s pastorally pointing to the comfort of having not only the Word but also the sacraments for the assurance of our faith.
Questions for Calvin
Sinclair Ferguson’s contribution to Serving the Word of God is an essay entitled “Calvin on the Lord’s Supper and Communion with Christ.” The essay’s okay, though I don’t know if it breaks any new ground. But it raises two questions I wish I could pose to Calvin:
1. Ferguson points out that Calvin, together with the Augustinian tradition (so I guess the question may really be for Augustine!), views the sacraments as “visible words” (pp. 204-205). He says, summarizing Calvin’s view,
The signs display or exhibit Christ to the eyes and to the sense of vision, just as the word displays Christ to the ears and to the sense of hearing as the Spirit takes what belongs to Christ and shows or exhibits it to us (p. 208, emphasis mine)
and later he refers to the function of pictures.
We find something similar in the Heidelberg Catechism,though interestingly enough only in connection with the Lord’s Supper: “As surely as I see with my eyes the bread of the Lord broken for me and the cup given to me….” (Q&A 75).
My question for Calvin and the whole Calvinian (or Augustinian) tradition is simply this: Why the emphasis on sight? Why are the sacraments defined primarily as things that we see?
My guess is that it has it has to do with defining the sacraments as signs and symbols. The progression, I imagine, goes like this: The sacraments are signs, a sign is a picture, a picture is something you see, and therefore the sacraments are something you see.
There are, however, a number of problems with this approach.
First, not everyone sees his own baptism; not everyone sees the Supper. I’ve baptized babies who had their eyes closed and weren’t watching the baptism take place. I’ve also baptized adults who were kneeling in front of me, and I can assure you that they didn’t have eyes on the tops of their heads to see the baptism taking place. Furthermore, some people are blind and cannot see either baptism or the Lord’s Supper.
But that doesn’t matter. A baby whose eyes are closed is still baptized. A blind man who takes the Supper is still eating the Supper. The fact that he can’t see the bread doesn’t matter.
Second, the Bible never mentions the importance of seeing the water of baptism being applied or the bread being broken or the cup being given. The Heidelberg Catechism seems to make seeing these things important, but the Bible doesn’t. I’m not at all sure why the Catechism doesn’t simply say “As surely as the bread is broken for me and the cup given to me.”
Third, it’s not just that the Bible doesn’t emphasize sight; it’s also that the Bible’s emphasis is elsewhere. Baptism is simply not something that you gaze on. Rather, it’s a ritual that happens to you. What’s important is not whether you can see it happening to you; what’s important is that it happens to you.
It’s the same with the Supper. It doesn’t matter if you can see the Supper. It doesn’t matter at all if you see the minister break the bread. You might be able to see the bread and wine on the Table or in the tray being passed; you might also be able to see your fellow church members jaws working as they chew the bread or their Adam’s apples bobbing as they swallow the wine. Or you might not. Who cares? What’s important is that you eat the bread and drink the wine, and that you do it together.
Is it visible? Yes, but that’s an unimportant aspect of it. It’s also audible: if you listen closely enough, you might be able to hear someone chewing; I’ve often heard people cough after they drink the wine. But the fact that it’s audible is irrelevant to the sacrament, and so is the fact that it’s visible. The bread and wine aren’t just visible; they’re edible, and it’s the eating — and the eating together — that makes the Supper.
In this regard, I suspect that our term “sacrament” may mislead us. We tend to lump baptism and the Lord’s Supper together into one category which we then turn into a matter of theology and church life, abstracted from real life, and so we forget that baptism is a bath and that the Lord’s Supper is a meal.
Is a bath visible? Yes. You can watch a bath taking place. (“Can,” not “may”: I don’t want you in my bathroom.) Is a meal visible? Yes. You can watch people eating. But surely the visibility of these things is the least important part. I’ve bathed my daughter while she’s asleep. She didn’t see it happening, but that didn’t matter. She was bathed and now she’s clean. If the power goes out during dinner and the whole house is dark, you can’t see how beautiful the food and the place settings are, let alone see the others at the meal, but you can still eat together.
And so it is with baptism and the Supper. Visible? Yes. But that isn’t important. What’s important is the ritual itself: the washing and the eating.
Fourth, I wonder what sort of understanding of baptism and the Lord’s Supper undergirds this emphasis on sight and what sort of approach to them it leads to. It appears to me to be a sort of intellectualism.
Sight is the least intimate of our senses. Taste is the most intimate, of course, because you actually take part of something into your body. Touch is very intimate. Smell is quite intimate, but you can smell from a distance without touching. Hearing is less intimate, since you can hear from a distance. But sight is the sense that lets you stand farthest away. You can see farther than you can hear. (How far can you see? I can see several light years. I see stars at night, after all.)
The emphasis on sight, then, is an emphasis on something that doesn’t involve physical contact. Furthermore, sight in the Bible is associated with judgment. (Think of lines like “right in his own eyes.”) We stand at a distance and we evaluate.
And when we make the sacraments primarily something to be seen, when we emphasize their visibility, it tends to put us at a critical distance from them. They become something to think about, something to evaluate. Small wonder, then, that at least one Reformed tradition taught that the sacraments work on the mind through reasoning:
The signes and visible elements affect the senses outward and inward: the senses convey their object to the mind: the mind directed by the holy Ghost reasoneth on this manner, out of the promise annexed to the Sacrament: He that useth the elements aright, shall receive grace thereby: but I use the elements aright in faith and repentance, saith the mind of the believer: therefore shall I receive from God increase of grace. Thus, then, faith is confirmed not by the worke done, but by a kind of reasoning caused in the mind, the argument or proofe whereof is borrowed from the elements, being signes and pledges of God mercie (William Perkins, cited in E. Brooks Holifield, The Covenant Sealed, p. 53, emphasis Holifield’s).
Against Perkins, Calvin, and this whole tradition, I submit that we need to drop the emphasis on the sacraments as “visible words” and the emphasis on the importance of seeing anything happen to the bread and cup. Whether you see it or not doesn’t matter. The Lord’s Supper isn’t something to gaze upon; it’s a meal we eat together.
In keeping with this strange emphasis on sight, I’ve even heard people say that children who aren’t allowed to eat the Lord’s Supper are still partaking of it. How? By seeing things. They get to see the bread broken (though not for them). They get to see the cup handed out (though not to them). They get to see the bread and wine being passed and others taking them. And so, these people say, they get the Lord’s Supper.
The best response may simply be to invite such people over for a meal, to let them look at the table full of food, to pass it around in front of them, but not to let them actually eat any. After all, by their own theology, they’re partaking of the meal just as much as the rest of us. That’s nonsense, of course, but it’s nonsense for every meal, including the Lord’s Supper.
2. My second question for Calvin and the Calvinian tradition is related to the first. Ferguson sums up Calvin’s view this way:
In the preached word, then, Christ speaks to us and we respond in faith to his living voice. This in itself is enough for us; but God recognizes that our faith is weak and in need of his strengthening. So he further provides the visible words of baptism and the Lord’s supper where Christ puts his grace on display in order to bring us to a more assured communion with him through the Spirit’s work and our responding faith (p. 205, emphasis mine).
Later, Ferguson adds:
Calvin sees sacraments as appendices to the promise of the gospel, confirming it to faith. Pictures may display what the weak in faith are not able to read easily in the word. They thus help us remove our ignorance and doubt of God’s grace toward us, and strengthen our weak faith (p. 208, emphasis mine).
Notice that Calvin links the sacraments with our weakness. I grant that the sacraments help our weak faith. But that’s not what Calvin is claiming. He’s claiming that it’s because of our weakness that we have sacraments. From Ferguson’s first summary above, it sounds as if Calvin is saying that the Word ought to be enough for us, but, because we’re weak, the Word isn’t enough, and so we need something visible.
Here’s my question for Calvin: Is it really the case biblically that we have sacraments because our faith is weak? I don’t think so. I see no biblical support for such a claim.
Perhaps the argument is simply that God speaks and then often adds a sign. So God establishes His covenant with Abraham and then adds circumcision. But that doesn’t prove that God added circumcision because Abraham’s faith was weak, does it?
The Tree of Life appears to have been sacramental in some way, and God planted it in the Garden before the Fall. Either that means that we must say that Adam’s faith was weak and that its weakness is not the result of sin (unless we want to say there was sin before the Fall) or we must say that sacraments aren’t given only because we’re weak in faith.
Again, as with the previous question, I wonder what sort of theology flows out of this view of the sacraments. Perhaps its a sacramental theology like that of the Puritan William Bradshaw, who wrote:
Hence also it appears, that we specially eate the flesh of Christ, and drink his bloud, when with a beleeving heart and mind, we effectually remember and in our remembrance, we seriously meditate of, and in our meditations are religiously affected, and in our affections thoroughly inflamed with the love of Christ, grounded upon that which Christ hath done for us, and which is represented and sealed unto us in this Sacrament (cited Holifield, p. 59).
On Bradshaw’s view, it seems, the real partaking of the sacrament happens in our hearts and minds through our meditation and the feelings that meditation stirs up in us. That meditation is sparked by what Christ has done for us, which is “represented and sealed unto us in” the Supper. But do we need the Supper if our real communion with Christ is up in our minds, brought about by our thinking and not by our actual eating of the bread and drinking of the wine?
I’m afraid this Calvinian tradition easily gives rise to the idea that the Supper isn’t really necessary. After all, Calvin seems to be saying, the Word ought to be enough. Of course, he’d add that none of it is ever strong enough to do without the sacraments. But we ought to be. If you understand the story, you don’t need the pictures to help you. And many Reformed churches reinforce this idea by doing without the Supper most Sundays in the year.
Greek in the Pulpit?
There are preachers, generally of the expositional sort, who frequently refer to the original languages in the sermons. They build their theologies from the tense of Greek verbs (“The verb here is the aorist which refers to punctiliar action in the past”) and spend time in their sermon on word studies (“The word here is ekklesia, which is derived from ek, which means ‘out’ and the verb kalein, which means ‘to call’….”).
Sometimes what they say may be in error. But even when it’s not, I still wonder how helpful such appeals to the original language really are in a sermon. In exegesis? Yes, it helps to know the original language and to do word studies and so forth. In a sermon? Not so much.
But here’s the main reason I rarely refer to the original languages when I preach:
But the congregation were wrong, I think, in imputing fault to the sermons of Dean Drone. There I do think they were wrong. I can speak from personal knowledge when I say that the rector’s sermons were not only stimulating in matters of faith, but contained valuable material in regard to the Greek language, to modern machinery and to a variety of things that should have provded of the highest advantage to the congregation.
There was, I say, the Greek language. The Dean always showed the greatest delicacy of feeling in regard to any translation in or out of it that he made from the pulpit. He was never willing to accept even the faintest shade of rendering different from that commonly given without being assured of the full concurrence of the congregation. Either the translation must be unanimous and without contradiction, or he could not pass it. He would pause in his sermon and would say: “The original Greek is ‘Hoson,’ but perhaps you will allow me to translate it as equivalent to ‘Hoyon.'” And they did. So that if there was any fault to be found it was purely on the side of the congregation for not entering a protest at the time. — Stephen Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, p. 83.
Emerging Worship 3
A while back, I read Dan Kimball’s Emerging Worship and made a few comments about it. The book is due back at the library soon, so I guess I’d better finish up what I want to say about it while I still have the chance.
There were some things that pleased me about what Kimball says.  He points out that a lot of contemporary worship is man-centered, not Christ-centered (95). I appreciate that his congregation places the worship band in the back so that the musicians aren’t “on stage” as if they were performing for the congregation but are rather with the congregation, assisting them in singing (92).
I’m delighted to hear that the emerging churches often partake of the Lord’s Supper every week and that it’s becoming a central part of worship again (94).  I was glad to read that there’s “a revival of liturgy,” and an interest in the music of the past (92). Kimball says,
Interestingly, among emerging generations there is a fascinating revival of interest in singing hymns as part of worship. The lyrical content of many hymns is rich and deep, something emerging generations desire. The fact that we can become part of the church’s story by singing songs that are hundreds of years old demonstrates that Christianity is not a modern religion, but has deep historic roots. Some nineteenth and twentieth century lyrics are steeped in modernity, but many beautiful ancient hymns are worth including in emerging worship (pp. 93-94).
All of that was encouraging to me as a guy who’s trying to plant a liturgical church that sings lots of psalms and pre-19th century hymns. And yet….
At times it sounds as if Kimball and the emerging churches he’s describing are simply grabbing at whatever looks good to them. I notice that when Kimball talks about liturgy, he talks about it as an ancient practice. He speaks of the emerging generations’ “desire to seek the ancient” (92) and a sentence later uses the word “backlash,” which is what I’m afraid this is. It sounds as if the emerging church, in a backlash against sterile modernism (e.g., the church in a building that looks like a gym with a pastor in a business suit) is hungry for “cool old stuff.”
“Cool old stuff,” I say. It’s not just that they want everything ancient. It’s not that they want to adopt, for instance, the Book of Common Prayer and use that. It’s more that they think candles are cool or that Celtic crosses are cool or that prayer stations are cool or that “liturgy” is cool. It may be a backlash against modernism, but it doesn’t always appear to me from what Kimball says that it’s a backlash against the pursuit of the cool.
Another term for this “pursuit of the cool” might be the one Alexander Schmemann uses: mysteriological piety. In the mystery religions, people performed certain rituals because those rituals would create a sense of something “special,” something mysterious, something transcendent, or whatever.
The early church fell into this kind of piety when, for instance, it stopped doing baptisms immediately upon conversion or upon the birth of a covenant child and instead made Easter the day for baptisms. Why? Because baptism symbolizes death and resurrection and wouldn’t it make it more special to be baptized on the day we celebrate Jesus’ resurrection? Wouldn’t that make the symbol all that much more glorious, meaningful, and (if I may say it) “cool”?
Though Kimball says early in the book (I’ve lost the page) that he and his elders studied the Scriptures and jotted down all kinds of things from the Bible about worship, that study of Scripture is not evident in his discussion of worship. The Bible is rarely mentioned, in fact.
There are lots of quotations of Scripture in the margins, along with quotations from men such as A. W. Tozer, John Piper, and even John Calvin (“Lawful worship consists in obedience alone”: 149). But Kimball doesn’t present a biblical argument for any (that I can recall) of the practices he mentions, leaving the impression that what you do in worship is simply up to you. You might ransack history to find things you think are worthwhile if you have that “desire for the ancient” or you might dream up something new.
There are good reasons for some of the “ancient practices” Kimball mentions. There are good biblical reasons for weekly communion, for having candles on the communion table, and for following a liturgy (and not just any old liturgy), but there are also good biblical reasons for not following some ancient practices, reasons that our forefathers were right to point out. But Kimball doesn’t seem interested in reasons; he seems interested merely in reporting and celebrating diverse practices, and that’s disappointing.
What’s also disappointing to me is the individualism that pervades the emerging churches’ worship as Kimball describes it. He talks about churches allowing people to paint or write poetry or draw or sculpt clay during worship (85), which, I’m afraid, reminds me a bit of an elementary school art class, not worship. He mentions prayer stations: people move around the room and go to little enclosed areas where they can pray, and each one has something different in it, an object to handle or a project to do or a passage of Scripture somehow related to the theme of the service (86).
He stresses the importance of prayer in the service, but again it’s largely individual and spontaneous prayer: “Plenty of time is given for people to slow down, quiet their hearts, and then pray at various stations and with others” (94). Interestingly, he seems to associate the Spirit with contemplation and slow, meditative music (89, 94), though in the Bible the Spirit produces vigorous rhythmic music to say nothing of corporate music.
Later in the book, he describes a service at a church called Matthew’s House, where “They also take communion each week, and people can partake in communion at any time in the service when they are prepared to do so” (203). In other words: It’s up to you to partake if and when you want.
As he describes emerging churches in England, Kimball notes that there’s even less overt teaching and corporate singing than in North America. People are encouraged to “discover things for themselves” (214), which may fit with Kimball’s earlier statement that “Emerging preachers see themselves as fellow journeyers. Preaching is no longer an authoritative transferring of biblical information” (87).
Furthermore, these English emerging churches, Kimball says, have informal beginnings and endings. You come and go as you please. There’s some corporate stuff, but “it’s typical to say at the beginning that people don’t have to take part in anything if they don’t want to…. The event becomes a worship experience that one walks into and stays as long as one wants to” (214).
It strikes me that if Kimball truly wants a backlash against modernism, then this might be the place to start, with this sort of modern individualism with which our society is poisoned. Instead of fighting that poison and providing an antidote, however, these sorts of churches seem to be encouraging it. People are to come and feel free to do as they please; they aren’t to be compelled to join in a corporate song or a corporate prayer or a corporate anything.Â
Which is to say, they aren’t functioning in worship as a body.  They draw near to God and worship, not as the one body of Christ, acting corporately, doing things together whether they feel like it or not because it’s what the body is doing and it’s what Christ the head wants the body to do, but as individual marbles who happen to be in the same bag at the same time.
It may be that these churches work well as a body during the week. They may exhibit more “body life” than many other churches. I don’t deny that. But the individualism that pervades Kimball’s description of emerging worship is at odds with the church’s true nature as the body of Christ.
The good news may be that if there truly is a backlash against modernity, if people are open to “the ancient” and to liturgy and to Christ-centered preaching and to great old songs and to history, then there’s a great opportunity for the emerging church, perhaps after some adolescent struggles, to break free from the pursuit of the “cool,” to escape mysteriological piety, and most importantly to escape individualism and discover biblical corporate liturgy. If you put their zeal for authentic biblical community together with authentic biblical liturgy, you could have a potent combination.
Emerging Worship 2
Last week, I finished Dan Kimball‘s Emerging Worship. I’m not going to go through the book chapter by chapter and discuss it, but I do want to touch on a few things.
In the third chapter (entitled “Why This is a Dangerous Book to Read”), Kimball warns about treating the “weekend worship gathering” as the most important thing that the church does. The church, he says, isn’t a place you go or a meeting or Christians who go to a meeting; it’s Jesus’ disciples wherever they are, and especially as they gather throughout the week and as they are involved in mission together all week long.
I appreciate his desire to keep people from thinking that church is just a place you go on the weekend and that being a Christian is simply a matter of going there (or even, as is often the case, a matter of going to “church,” listening to the Christian radio station, reading Christian novels, and having your daily devotions). I appreciate his emphasis on the church’s mission in the world.
But it seems to me that Kimball is needlessly pitting worship and mission against each other. Maybe I’m more aware of that because I recently finished rereading Peter Leithart‘s The Kingdom and the Power. It’s not as if our worship is a break from our work in the world. On the contrary, our worship is itself mission.
As James Jordan has pointed out in the most recent Rite Reasons (“How to Stop the Killing in Darfur, Part I”), the priests in the Old Covenant were engaged in holy war. They killed animals that represented sinners, for one thing. They offered sacrifices to God on behalf of the seventy nations of the world (Gen. 10; Num. 29; Zech. 14:16-21). But in particular, they sang the Psalms, calling on God to avenge His people, to make the nations know Him, and so forth.
And that’s what we see in Luke 18, when Jesus tells us to pray for vengeance and not lose heart. It’s what we see in Revelation, as the church worships God and God pours out His vengeance on those who oppress His people. As Jordan says, “God promises to change the world, to turn the world upsidedown, when His people come into His presence during worship and pray for vengeance.”
It’s not just vengeance, of course. We’re praying also for the salvation of the world, as the priests offered sacrifices for the nations. Our worship is largely “common prayer,” and it isn’t a break from our mission in the world. It is the primary way in which we carry out that mission. Activism says that we work hard in the world, and that’s where our mission is accomplished, but we take breaks sometimes to rest and worship God. The Bible teaches us that worship is itself our work, our highest calling, and it is the primary way in which we carry out our work in the world.
If we want our neighbors converted, what’s the primary thing we have to do? Make friendships? Get involved in service projects? Those things are important. But what’s primary is surely drawing near to God, receiving His gifts (or else how can we work during the week?), praising Him (and when He is lifted up on our praises, our enemies are scattered), and praying to Him to save our neighbors.
None of that leaves room for us to think that if we simply show up in church as spectators, we’ve carried out our calling as Christians. In fact, there’s no room for spectators in our worship. Reformed congregations easily fall into the trap that Kimball is warning against, since it often seems as if the minister does everything: there’s a heavy emphasis on the sermon, while the congregation sings and recites a creed but doesn’t itself pray the prayers. But biblical worship isn’t a spectator sport.
And biblical worship may not be divorced from service in the world around. What happens in the Lord’s Day service (please, not “weekend worship gathering”) is the most important thing. It’s more important than your private Bible readings and prayers, more important than your evangelistic or service work in the community, but it isn’t divorced from those things. Rather, it is the heart of the church’s life, the time when we are served by God so that we can serve Him in return in the liturgy and then, flowing from it, all week long.
Emerging Worship 1
Today, I started reading Dan Kimball‘s Emerging Worship. Kimball is one of the major players in the emerging church conversation and so, having spotted this book in the library, I thought I’d give it a quick read to see what Kimball thinks worship ought to be like.
After a meandering foreword by David Crowder (why did he even bother writing it?), Kimball starts by talking about what an “emerging worship service gathering” is. He makes the point that when many evangelical Christians hear “worship” they think “music.” When people say, “The worship at my church is great!” they usually mean “The worship band rocks!”
(I’ve sometimes said that the difference between evangelical churches and specifically Reformed churches is that the former say, “What did you think of the music?” and the latter say “What did you think of the sermon?” which is not necessarily better.)
Kimball rightly maintains that worship is broader than just music (p. 2).  Furthermore, he’s right to insist that worship is not all about doing something that makes us feel good (pp. 2-3). But then he stumbles when he says about a worship service: “It is not about God’s service to us. It is purely our offering of service and worship to God — offering our lives, offering our prayers, offering our praise, offering our confessions, offering our finances, offering our service to others in the church body” (p. 3).
While I grant that worship is what we do and that it’s okay to apply the term “worship” to the whole of what we do in the service (even though the biblical words translated “to worship” generally mean something like “to bow down”), I’d want to maintain that worship isn’t the whole of the service. Or, to put it another way, we aren’t the only ones who are doing the serving when we assemble as a church. In fact, our service is not the primary service. God serves us first and we serve Him (and each other) in response.
It’s not wrong to come to church wanting to receive something. All of us come to church needy. Specifically, as James Jordan has pointed out, we need the three gifts that God gives in the liturgy: glory, knowledge (or wisdom), and life. While it sounds better to say “We don’t worship to get; we worship to give,” it isn’t accurate. We have nothing to give until we first get. We come needy, God supplies our needs, and then we give in response.
All of which is to say that, while I appreciate Kimball’s call for a more holistic understanding of worship — one which goes beyond just the music — I don’t think Kimball goes far enough. We need an understanding of the service which goes beyond worship, beyond what we do, to what God does for us.
On another note, Kimball’s call for churches to move “away from a preaching-and-singing-a-few-songs worship service model to a multi-sensory approach to worshiping God” (p. 5) suggests to me that much of what he appreciates is a reaction to a rationalistic sort of model (church is a lecture hall with some pre-lecture and post-lecture songs). It’s a reaction to the approach which emphasizes only the sense of hearing and (primarily) the posture of sitting.
In short, it’s a reaction to the church’s failure to practice a fully-orbed, biblically-based liturgy, a liturgy with various postures (sitting, kneeling, standing) and with lots of congregational involvement (not just in singing but also in the prayers), a liturgy which culminates every week in the Lord’s Supper. And so, when he presents questions for church leaders to ask about their services, one of them is this: “Did we take the Lord’s Supper together as a church regularly?” (p. 10).
Worship
The life of Adam and Eve was … to be completely circumscribed by worship. On the first day, they were to appear before the Lord in the Garden to worship and commune with Him, to enter into His sabbath rest. Empowered by God’s blessing, they were to go about their royal tasks for six days, only to return at the end of the week to offer themselves and their works to the Lord for His evaluation and judgment and to be refreshed for another week of royal labor. The life of Adam and Eve displays human history in miniature. Human history began in the Garden with Adam and Eve worsihping God, and will end with the church gathered in a glorious temple-city. Worship is the alpha and the omega of human life and history. — Peter Leithart, The Kingdom and the Power, pp. 27-28.
By the way, in case you’re wondering about “the first day” here, I think what Leithart means is that Adam and Eve were created on the sixth day, and so their first full day of life would have been the seventh day, when they, as the children of the Father, would have shared in the Father’s rest.
I’m not sure Adam and Eve did actually worship God on the seventh day or had a proper first week. I suspect the Fall happened right away instead. But Leithart is correct that the pattern set up here in Genesis is the pattern of world history, beginning and ending with worship and rest.
Rituals
Some people, romantics at heart, like to think that early Christian worship was purely spontaneous and improvised. They like to imagine the first believers so overflowing with enthusiasm that praise and thanksgiving just overflowed into profound prayer as the Church gathered to break bread….
I beg the patience of my romantic friends as I say that order and routine are not necessarily bad things. In fact, they are indispensable to a good, godly, and peaceful life. Without schedules and routines, we could accomplish little in our workday. Without set phrases, what would our human relationships be? I’ve yet to meet parents who tire of hearing their children repeat that ancient phrase, “Thank you.” I’ve yet to meet the spouse who’s sick of hearing “I love you.”
Faithfulness to our routines is a way of showing love. We don’t just work, or thank, or offer affection when we really feel like it. Real loves are loves we live with constantly, and that constancy shows itself in routine.
Routines are not just good theory. They work in practice. Order makes life more peaceful, more efficient, and more effective. In fact the more routines we develop, the more effective we become. Routines free us from the need to ponder small details over and over again; routines let good habits take over, freeing the mind and heart to move onward and upward.
The rites of the Christian liturgy are the set phrases that have proven themselves over time: the thank-you of God’s children, the I-love-you of Christ’s spouse, the Church — Scott Hahn, The Lamb’s Supper, pp. 40-41.