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====The Challenge====

To construct a theology of worship turns out to be a difficult task. In
addition to the ordinary difficulties associated with constructing an
informed, balanced, and reasonably comprehensive theology of almost
any biblical theme, the preparation of a theology of worship offers special
challenges.

1. At the empirical level, the sad fact of contemporary church life
is that there are few subjects calculated to kindle more heated debate
than the subject of worship. Some of these debates have less to do with
an intelligible theology of worship than with mere preferences for certain
styles of music (older hymns versus contemporary praise choruses)
and kinds of instruments (organs and pianos versus guitars and drums).
Other flash points concern the place of “special music” (the North
American expression for performance music), congregational singing,
liturgical responses, clapping, drama. All sides claim to be Godcentered.
The moderns think the traditionalists defend comfortable
and rationalistic truths they no longer feel, while the stalwarts from
the past fret that their younger contemporaries are so enamoured of
hyped experience they care not a whit for truth, let alone beauty.
Sometimes one senses that for many there are only two alternatives:
dull (or should we say “stately”?) traditionalism, or faddish (or should
we say “lively”?) contemporaneity. We are asked to choose between
“as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever more shall be, world without
end,” and “old is cold, new is true.” The one side thinks of worship
as something we experience, often set over against the sermon (first
we have worship, and then we have the sermon, as if the two are disjunctive
categories); while the other side thinks of worship as ordered
stateliness, often set over against all the rest of life.

In fact, the issues are more complicated than this simplistic polarization
suggests. One must reckon with the propensity of not a few
contemporary churches to reshape the corporate meetings of the
church to make them more acceptable to every sociologically distinguishable
cultural subgroup that comes along—boomers, busters, Gen
Xers, white singles from Cleveland, or whatever. Although one wants
to applaud the drive that is willing, for the sake of the gospel, to remove
all offenses except the offense of the cross, sooner or later one is troubled
by the sheer lack of stability, of a sense of heritage and substance
passed on to another generation, of patterns of corporate worship
shared with Christians who have gone before, or of any shared vision
of what corporate worship should look like. This in turn generates a
swarm of traditionalists who like things that are old regardless of
whether or not they are well founded. They cringe at both inclusive
litanies and guitars and start looking for an “alternative to alternative
worship.”<ref>The quip is from Martin Marty in his foreword to Marva J. Dawn, ''Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down: A Theology of Worship for the Turn-of-the-Century Culture'' (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995). </ref>

Moreover, to gain perspective on the possible options, one must
reflect on some of the historical studies that examine the worship practices
of some bygone era, sometimes explicitly with the intention of
enabling contemporaries to recover their roots or rediscover past
practices.<ref>To mention a few quite diverse examples: Paul F. Bradshaw,'' The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy'' (Oxford: University Press, 1993); James McKinnon, ed., ''Music in Early Christian Literature'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Melva Wilson Costen,'' African American Christian Worship'' (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993); Horton Davies, ''The Worship of the American Puritans'', 1629–1730 (New York: Peter Lang, 1990); idem, ''Worship and Theology in England'', vol. 1, ''From Cranmer to Baxter and Fox'' (1534–1690); vol. 2, ''From Watts and Wesley to Martineau'' (1690–1900); vol. 3, ''The Ecumenical Century'' (1900 to Present) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996). Cf. James F. White, ''A Brief History of Christian Worship'' (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993); J. G. Davies, ed., ''A New Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship'' (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1987); Gordon S. Wakefield, ''An Outline of Christian Worship'' (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998); Andrew Wilson-Dickson, ''The Story of Christian Music'' (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996); Hughes Oliphant Old, ''The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church'', vol. 1, ''The Biblical Period''; vol. 2,'' The Patristic Age''; vol. 3, ''The Medieval Church'' (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998–99). </ref> Intriguingly, many of the new nontraditional services have
already become, in some churches, entrenched traditions—and, on a
historical scale, arguably inferior ones.

What cannot be contested is that the subject of worship is currently
“hot.” The widespread confusion is punctuated by strongly held and
sometimes mutually exclusive theological stances that make attempts
to construct a biblical theology of worship a pastorally sensitive
enterprise.

2. The sheer diversity of the current options<ref>See, for instance, the useful analysis of Mark Earey, “Worship—What do we think we are doing?” ''Evangel'' 16/1 (Spring 1998): 7–13.</ref> not only contributes to the sense of unrest and divisiveness in many local churches but leads
to confident assertions that all the biblical evidence supports those
views and those alone. Contemporary attempts at constructing a theology
of worship are naturally enmeshed in what “worship” means ''to us,'' in our vocabularies and in the vocabularies of the Christian communities
to which we belong. Ideally, of course, our ideas about worship
should be corrected by Scripture, and doubtless that occurs
among many individuals with time. But the opposite easily happens as
well: we unwittingly read our ideas and experiences of worship back
into Scripture, so that we end up “finding” there what, with exquisite
confidence, we know jolly well ''ought'' to be there. This is especially easy
to do when, as we shall see, the semantic range of our word worship,
in any contemporary theory of worship, does not entirely match up
with any one word or group of words in the Bible. What it means to be
corrected by Scripture in this case is inevitably rather complex.
The result is quite predictable. A person who loves liturgical forms
of corporate worship often begins with Old Testament choirs and
antiphonal psalms, moves on to liturgical patterns in the ancient synagogue,
and extols the theological maturity of the liturgy in question.
A charismatic typically starts with 1 Corinthians 12 and 14. A New
Testament scholar may begin with the ostensible “hymns” of the New
Testament and then examine the brief texts that actually describe some
element of worship, such as the Lord’s Supper. And so it goes. It is not
easy to find an agreed-upon method or common approach to discovering
precisely how the Bible should re-form our views on worship.

That brings us to some of the slightly more technical challenges.

3. Unlike ''Trinity'', the word ''worship'' is found in our English Bibles.
So one might have thought that the construction of a doctrine of worship
is easier than the construction of a doctrine of the Trinity. In the
case of the Trinity, however, at least we agree on, more or less, what we
are talking about. Inevitably, anything to do with our blessed triune
God involves some hidden things that belong only to God himself (cf.
Deut 29:29); nevertheless, in terms of the sphere of discussion, when
we talk about the doctrine of the Trinity we have some idea to what
we are referring, and we know the kinds of biblical and historical data
that must feed into the discussion. By contrast, a cursory scan of the literature
on worship soon discloses that people mean very different
things when they talk about worship. To construct a theology of worship
when there is little agreement on what worship is or refers to is
rather daunting. The task cries out for some agreed-upon definitions.

But although the word ''worship'' occurs in our English Bibles, one
cannot thereby get at the theme of worship as easily as one can get at,
say, the theology of grace by studying all the occurrences of the word
''grace'', or get at the theology of calling by examining all the passages
that use the word ''call''. Of course, even in these cases much more is
involved than mere word study. One wants to examine the context of
every passage with ''grace'' in it, become familiar with the synonyms,
probe the concepts and people to which ''grace'' is tied (e.g., faith, the
Lord Jesus, peace, and so forth). We rapidly recognize that different
biblical authors may use words in slightly different ways. As is well
known, ''call'' in Paul’s writings is effective: those who are “called” are
truly saved. By contrast, in the Synoptic Gospels the “call” of God
means something like “invitation”: many are ''called'' but few are chosen.
Still, it is possible to provide a more or less comprehensive summary
of the various things the Bible means by ''call'' simply by looking at
all the examples and analyzing and cataloguing them. But the same
thing cannot be done with ''worship'', not least because for almost any
definition of worship there are many passages that have a bearing on
this subject that do not use the Hebrew or Greek word that could be
rendered by the word ''worship'' itself. Moreover, the Hebrew and
Greek words that are sometimes rendered by the English word ''worship''
sometimes mean something rather different from what ''we'' mean
by worship. So we cannot get at this subject by simplistic word studies.
We shall need to arrive at definitions that we can agree upon.

4. Constructing a theology of worship is challenging because of the
different kinds of answers that are provided, in this case, by biblical theology
and systematic theology. This observation is so important and lies
so much at the heart of this chapter that a fuller explanation is warranted.

I begin with two definitions. For our purposes, ''systematic theology''
is theological synthesis organized along topical and atemporal lines.
For example, if we were trying to construct a systematic theology of
God, we would ask what the Bible as a whole says about God: What is
he like? What are his attributes? What does he do? The answers to
these and many similar questions would be forged out of the entirety
of what the Bible says in interaction with what Christians in other generations
have understood. We would not primarily be asking narrower
questions, such as: What does the book of Isaiah say about God? How
is God progressively revealed across the sweep of redemptive history?
What distinctive contributions to the doctrine of God are made by the
different genres found in the Bible (e.g., apocalyptic literature, parables,
poetry, and so forth)?

By contrast, ''biblical theology'' is theological synthesis organized
according to biblical book and corpus and along the line of the history
of redemption. This means that biblical theology does not ask, in the
first instance, what the Bible as a whole says about, say, God. Rather,
it asks what the Synoptic Gospels say about God, or what the gospel of
Mark or the book of Genesis says. It asks what new things are said
about God as we progress through time.<ref>That the ''order'' in which something is revealed may be extremely important if we are to understand the Bible aright is made very clear in chapters like Romans 4 and Galatians 3, where the apostle’s argument several times turns on which events happened first.</ref> Biblical theology is certainly
interested in knowing how the biblical texts have been understood
across the history of the church, but above all it is interested in inductive
study of the texts themselves (including such matters as their literary
genre: for instance, it does not fall into the mistake of treating
proverbs as if they were case law in some insensitive, proof-texting
approach), as those texts are serially placed against the backdrop of the
Bible’s developing plotline.

How, then, do these considerations bear on how we go about constructing
a theology of worship? If we ask what worship is, ''intending our question to be answered out of the matrix of systematic theology,''
then we are looking for “whole Bible” answers—that is, what the Bible
says as a whole. That will have one or more effects. On the positive
side, we will be trying to listen to the whole Bible and not to one
favorite passage on the subject—say, 1 Corinthians 14. At its best, such
attentiveness fosters more comprehensive answers and fewer idiosyncratic
answers. On the other hand, if we try to read the whole Bible
without reflecting on the distinctions the Bible itself introduces regarding
worship, we may end up looking for the lowest common denominators.
In other words, we may look for things to do with worship that
are true in every phase of redemptive history and thus lose the distinctive
features. For example, we might say that worship is bound up
with confessing the sheer centrality and worthiness of God. That is
wonderfully true, yet it says nothing about the place of the sacrificial
systems in Old Testament worship or the role of the choirs David
founded, and so forth.

Alternatively, if we use the whole Bible indiscriminately to construct
our theology of worship, we may use it idiosyncratically. For
instance, we note that the temple service developed choirs, so we conclude
that our corporate worship must have choirs. Perhaps it
should—but somewhere along the line we have not integrated into
our reflection how the Bible fits together. We do not have a “temple”
in the Old Testament sense. On what grounds do we transfer Old Testament
choirs to the New Testament and not an Old Testament temple
or priests? Of course, some of the church fathers during the early
centuries did begin to think of ministers of the gospel as equivalent to
Old Testament priests. The New Testament writers prefer to think of
Jesus as the sole high priest (see Hebrews) or, alternatively, of all Christians
as priests (e.g., 1 Pet 2:5; Rev 1:6). But even if we continue to
think of contemporary clergy as priests, sooner or later we will have to
ask similar questions about many other elements of Old Testament
worship that were bound up with the temple—for example, the sacrifices
of the Day of Atonement and of Passover. All Christians understand
these sacrifices to be transmuted under the new covenant, such
that they are now fulfilled in the sacrifice of Christ.

But the point is simply that the “pick-and-choose” method of constructing
a theology of worship from the whole Bible lacks methodological
rigor and therefore stability. Thus, constructing a theology of
worship out of the matrix of systematic theology may actually ''define''
what we mean by “worship.” The methods and approaches characteristic
of the discipline (more precisely, they are characteristic of the discipline
of the kind of systematic theology that is insufficiently informed
by biblical theology) will to some extent determine the outcome.

If we ask what worship is, ''intending our question to be answered out of the matrix of biblical theology,'' then we are looking for what distinct
books and sections of the Bible say on this subject and how they
relate to one another. Inevitably we will be a little more alert to the
differences; in particular, we will be forced to reflect at length on the
differences one finds when one moves from the Mosaic covenant to
the new covenant (on which more below). The dangers here are almost
the inverse of the dangers of a systematic approach. Now we may so
focus in a merely descriptive way on this or that corpus that we fail to
construct an adequate theology of worship. For a theology of worship
erected out of the matrix of biblical theology must still be a “who
Bible” theology in the sense that the diverse pieces must fit together.
Loss of nerve at this point will produce description with antiquarian
interest but no normative power.

To summarize: The construction of a responsible theology of worship
is made difficult by strongly held and divergent views on the subject,
by a variety of linguistic pressures, and by the sharp tendencies to
produce quite different works, depending in part on whether the theologian
is working out of the matrix of systematic theology or of biblical
theology.

====Toward a Definition====

Before pressing on to a definition, it may be worth taking two preliminary
steps. First, it is worth thinking about our English word worship.
Both the noun and the verb form have changed in meaning significantly
over the centuries. Although from the tenth century on the word
worship often had God as its object, nevertheless from the 1200s on it
was often connected with the condition of deserving honor or a good
reputation or with the source or ground of that honor. Chaucer, for
instance, can say that it is a great worship to a man to keep himself
from noise and strife. Knights win worship by their feats of arms. In the
fifteenth century a “place of worship” may be a good house, and a
“town of worship” is an important town. By easy transfer, worship came
to refer to the honor itself that is shown a person or thing. That usage
goes back a thousand years, and it is by no means restricted to God as
the object. For example, in the marriage service of the old English
Prayer Book the groom tells his bride, “With my body I thee worship”—
which certainly does not make her a deity.

In all such usages one is concerned with the “worthiness” or the
“worthship” (Old English weorthscipe) of the person or thing that is
reverenced. From a Christian perspective, of course, only God himself
is truly worthy of all possible honor, so it is not surprising that in
most of our English Bibles, “worship” is bound up either with the worship
of God or with the prohibition of worship of other beings,
whether supernatural (e.g., Satan in Matt 4:9) or only ostensibly so
(e.g., the sun).
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18
What makes this even more difficult is that there are several underlying
words in both Greek and Hebrew that are sometimes rendered
“worship” and sometimes not. In other words, there is no one-to-one
relationship between any Hebrew or Greek word and our word worship.
For example, the Greek verb proskyneomis rendered “to worship”
in Matthew 2:2 (“We saw his star in the east and have come to worship
him”). Herod too promises to “go and worship him” (2:8), though
certainly he is not thinking of worship of a supernatural being. What
he is (falsely) promising is to go and pay homage to this child born to
be a king. However, in the parable of the unmerciful servant in
Matthew 18:26, when the servant turns out to be bankrupt and his
family is threatened with slavery, he “fell on his knees [pesonm . . . prosekynei]
before [his master]”: certainly there is no question here of
“worship” in the contemporary sense. Thus, our word worship is more
restrictive in its object than this Greek verb but may be broader in the
phenomena to which it refers (regardless of the object). In any case,
the construction of a theology of worship will not be possible unless
we come to reasonable agreement about what we mean by worship.
The second preliminary step that may prove helpful is to reflect on
a few books and articles that exhibit one or more of the challenges
involved in writing a theology of worship. Each of these pieces is competent
and thoughtful. If I raise questions about them, it is not because
I am not indebted to them but because this interaction will help to
establish the complexities of the subject and prepare the way for what
follows.
Andrew Hill has written an informative book whose subtitle, Old
Testament Worship for the New Testament Church, discloses the content.
5 Most of its chapters are devoted to one element or another of
worship in the Old Testament: the vocabulary of worship in the
Hebrew canon; the nature of the “fear of the Lord” (which Hill ties to
personal piety); historical developments; the sacred forms, sacred
places, and sacred times of worship; sacred actions such as the lifting
up of the hands; the roles of priest and king in worship; the place of the
D. A. Carson
19
5. Andrew E. Hill, Enter His Courts with Praise! Old Testament Worship for the
New Testament Church (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993).
tabernacle and temple; and the significance of the Psalms and of artistic
decoration for worship. Hill concludes his book by trying to establish
the legitimate connections between these Old Testament patterns
and New Testament worship. Six appendices include treatments of the
Hebrew religious calendar, sacrifice and music in the Old Testament,
and the use of psalms for today’s church. The book is full of useful
information, thoughtfully presented.
One may quibble about this or that point, but for our purposes the
greatest questions arise out of Hill’s last chapter. He argues that Jewish
patterns of worship were stamped on the nascent church primarily
by two means. First, the synagogue structure and liturgy were largely
duplicated by the early church. For example, Hill says, a typical synagogue
liturgy, both ancient and modern, runs as follows: call to worship
(often a “psalmic blessing”); a cycle of prayers (focusing especially on
God as Creator and on God’s covenant love for Israel); recitation of
the Shema (Deut 6:4–9) and other texts (Deut 11:13–21; Num 15:37–
41), which served as both a confession of faith and as a benediction; a
second cycle of prayers, usually led by someone other than the ruler of
the synagogue and including both praise and petition along with the
congregational recitation of the Eighteen Benedictions; Scripture
reading (including translation if necessary and even brief exposition)
from at least one passage in the Torah, one in the Prophets, and perhaps
one from the Writings; a benediction (often from the Psalms);
the sermon; and the congregational Blessing and Amen. Following
W. E. Oesterley,6 Hill then ticks off the various ways in which the early
church allegedly mirrored synagogue practices in its own worship: call
to worship, credal affirmation, prayer, reading and exposition of Scripture,
and so forth. Hill adds a few additional links: a covenant community
gathering for worship, baptism, the concept of corporate
personality within the community, alms collection/monetary offerings,
liturgical benedictions, and lay participation.7
Second, Hill appeals to typology. The New Testament writers read
the Old Testament as an incomplete and still-imperfect revelation that
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20
6. W. E. Oesterley, The Jewish Background of Christian Liturgy (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1965), 111–54.
7. Hill, Enter His Courts, 232–33.
is fulfilled in the new covenant and reread the sacred text from a christological
perspective. Hill briefly notes some of the obvious typological
connections: the sanctuary of the Mosaic covenant becomes the
sanctuary not made with hands (Heb 9:1–23), the “sacrificial worship”
of the Mosaic covenant by the single sacrifice of Christ (Heb 9:23–
10:18), and so forth. From this Hill infers that the book of Hebrews in
particular “provides a window into the spiritual principles implicit in
Old Testament worship.”8 For example, “the Old Testament prophetic
charge to do justice and love mercy instead of offering animal sacrifice
takes on new meaning in light of Paul’s command to the believer
in Christ to be a living sacrifice (Hos 6:6; Amos 5:21–24; cf., Rom
12:1–2).”9
A plethora of questions arises. On the first point, the relationship
between the church and the synagogue: (1) To what extent does the
synagogue liturgy reflect Old Testament theology? Our actual sources
for synagogue liturgy postdate the New Testament, emerging from a
period of systematic reflection after the fall of the temple and the rise
of Christianity. At this point the synagogue no longer exercised the
relatively restricted role it occupied while the temple was still the center
of the Jewish world; the synagogue now necessarily replaced it.
Inevitably there arose important and influential theological strands
that had to compensate for the loss of the temple and with it the loss
of the entire sacrificial system. Oesterley’s work is now very dated,
and much scholarship since then has warned against anachronism.
Jewish lectionaries, for example, come from a period later than the
latest New Testament writing.10 (2) By the same token, we have no
detailed first-century evidence of an entire Christian service. Doubtless
there are things to learn from the patristic sources, but they
should not be read back into the canonical sources. Certainly the New
D. A. Carson
21
8. Ibid., 237.
9. Ibid.
10. If all we are saying is that early church corporate worship mirrored the synagogue
in (1) reading the Scripture; (2) singing; (3) praying; and (4) a homily, that is
doubtless true. It is the attempt to ground entire liturgical structures in the New Testament
or in first-century Jewish synagogues that proves so elusive and finally so
anachronistic.
Testament documents do not themselves provide a “model service” of
the sort advocated by Hill (however admirable that model may be), nor
do they command that the church adhere to a synagogal liturgy (of
whatever date). (3) At least some of the parallels Hill finds between the
synagogue and the early church—a covenant community gathering for
worship, monetary offerings, lay participation—are either so generic
as to be meaningless (What religion does not collect money? How many
religions foster some form of lay participation?) or at least raise some
fundamental questions about the implicit definition of worship. Under
the new covenant, for instance, is it true to say that the community gathers
for worship? I shall return to that question in a moment.
On the second point, the nature of typology, although I heartily
agree that a properly defined typology lies at the heart of a great deal
of the New Testament’s use of the Old, slight adjustments in one’s
understanding of typology or in the exegesis of particular texts will
result in a rather different theology of worship from the one Hill is
advocating. For instance, while some interpreters think of typology as
an interpretive method that provides us with nothing more than “spiritual
principles” (which presupposes an atemporal relationship), others—
myself included—think that several forms of typology embrace
a teleological element, a predictive element. In that case, one must ask
what those Old Testament patterns of worship are pointing toward.
This shift in interpretive priority tilts toward biblical theology.
Turning from Hill’s important work, we may more briefly reflect
on several other discussions of worship of very different complexion.
Many studies have focused on the theme of worship in a particular
biblical corpus—on some element of the Psalms,11 on a
critical Old Testament chapter,12 or on Matthew,13 Hebrews,14 or
WORSHIP BY THE BOOK
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11. E.g., Terence E. Fretheim, “Nature’s Praise of God in the Psalms,” Ex Auditu
3 (1987): 16–30.
12. E.g., John W. Hilber, “Theology of Worship in Exodus 24,” Journal of the
Evangelical Theological Society 39 (1996): 177–89.
13. E.g., Mark Allan Powell, “A Typology of Worship in the Gospel of Matthew,”
Journal for the Study of the New Testament 57 (1995): 3–17.
14. E.g., John Dunnill, Covenant and Sacrifice in the Letter to the Hebrews, Society
of New Testament Studies Monograph Series, vol. 75 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992).
Revelation.15 Inevitably, such essays vary considerably. Some are
contributions to the theology of the particular book; others are
attempts to get behind the book to the worship patterns and priorities
of the ostensible community served by the book. Until such
studies are integrated into a larger sweep, they have the important
but limited function of opening our eyes to aspects of worship we
might overlook, even though they cannot themselves impose a unified
vision. Thus, we may value one of the observations of Marianne
Meye Thompson regarding the book of Revelation:
Worship serves the indispensable function of uniting us with “all the
saints,” living and dead. In fact one of the most important things that
worship accomplishes is to remind us that we worship not merely as a
congregation or a church, but as part of the church, the people of God.
John reminds his readers that their worship is a participation in the
unceasing celestial praise of God. So too, the worship of God’s people
today finds its place “in the middle” of a throng representing every
people and nation, tribe and tongue.16
Perhaps the volume that most urgently calls for thoughtful evaluation
is the biblical-theological study written by David Peterson.17 His
important book not only traces out the development of worship in the
Old Testament but also highlights the vivid contrast introduced by the
New Testament. From Moses on, the heart of Old Testament worship,
Peterson insists, is connected with the tabernacle and then with the
temple. But what is striking about the New Testament is not only that
Jesus is explicitly worshiped and that the theological impulses of the
New Testament documents draw many Old Testament strands into
Jesus himself (thus he is the temple, the priest, the Passover lamb, the
D. A. Carson
23
15. E.g., Donald Guthrie, “Aspects of Worship in the Book of Revelation,” in Worship,
Theology and Ministry in the Early Church, Journal for the Study of New Testament
Supplement Series, vol. 87 (Sheffield: Academic Press, 1992), 70–83;
Marianne Meye Thompson, “Worship in the Book of Revelation,” Ex Auditu 8 (1992):
45–54.
16. Thompson, “Worship,” 53.
17. David Peterson, Engaging with God (Leicester: Apollos, 1992). See also the
early essays in Worship: Adoration and Action, ed. D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids: Baker,
1993).
bread of life) and thereby necessarily transmute Old Testament
patterns of worship, but that worship language moves the locus away
from a place or a time to all of life. Worship is no longer something
connected with set feasts, such as Passover; or a set place, such as the
temple; or set priests, such as the Levitical system prescribed. It is for
all the people of God at all times and places, and it is bound up with
how they live (e.g., Rom 12:1–2).
We shall briefly survey some of the evidence below; it is very
impressive. But one of the entailments is that we cannot imagine that
the church gathers for worship on Sunday morning if by this we mean
that we then engage in something that we have not been engaging in
the rest of the week. New covenant worship terminology prescribes
constant “worship.” Peterson therefore examines afresh just why the
New Testament church gathers, and he concludes that the focus is on
mutual edification, not on worship. Under the terms of the new
covenant, worship goes on all the time, including when the people of
God gather together. But mutual edification does not go on all the
time; it is what takes place when Christians gather together. Edification
is the best summary of what occurs in corporate singing, confession,
public prayer, the ministry of the Word, and so forth. Then, at
the end of his book, Peterson examines his own denominational heritage
(Anglican) and enters a quiet plea for continued and proper use
of the Book of Common Prayer.
It will soon become obvious that I am very sympathetic to much of
Peterson’s exegesis. Especially in his examination of praise vocabulary
and the “cultic” vocabulary in the New Testament—words for priestly
service, sacrifice, offering, and so on—Peterson is very convincing. I
am not sure he always captures the affective element in the corporate
worship of both Testaments; moreover, I shall suggest a slight modification
to his way of thinking of the meetings of the church.
With respect to his attachment to the Book of Common Prayer, he
is of course following the great Anglican Richard Hooker, who argued
that where the Bible neither commands nor forbids, the church is free
to order its liturgical life as it pleases for the sake of good order. If
Hooker’s principle is followed, Peterson says in effect, let the ordering
be done well with rich theological principles in mind. Yet one must
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24
wrestle with the competing claims of Hooker’s principle and the Presbyterian
Regulative Principle (on which more below). Furthermore, it
is difficult to avoid the feeling that there is something of a “disconnect”
between Peterson’s conclusions on the Prayer Book and the rest of his
work. By this I do not mean that his judgments on Anglican worship
are inappropriate or theologically unjustified. Rather, the bulk of his
book is supported by close exegesis of Scripture and is testable by the
canons of exegesis, while the material on the Prayer Book is necessarily
disconnected from such exegesis and therefore has more of the flavor
of fervently held personal opinion (regardless of how theologically
informed that opinion is). Moreover, after so vigorously defining new
covenant worship in the most comprehensive categories embracing all
of life, Peterson finds he wants to talk about what we shall call corporate
worship in the regular “services” of the church after all.
Peterson, of course, allows that when the people of God gather
together corporately, they are still worshiping. What he insists is that
the distinctive element of their corporate meetings is not worship but
edification. Inevitably, there are some who go farther. Observing not
only how “cultic” language is used in the New Testament to refer to
all of Christian life, and noting the lack of any mention of worship
when the New Testament writers provide purpose clauses as to why
the people of God meet together, these scholars conclude that we
should stop thinking of “worship services” and meeting together “to
worship” and the like.18 They make some good points, but a good part
of their argument turns on a definition of worship that is tightly tied to
cultus.
So I must come to a definition. After the definition, much of the
rest of this chapter will be an exposition of that definition, followed by
some practical suggestions.
D. A. Carson
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18. See, with various emphases, I. Howard Marshall, “How far did the early Christians
worship God?” Churchman 99 (1985): 216–29; A. Boyd Luter Jr., “‘Worship’ as
Service: The New Testament Usage of latreuo,” Criswell Theological Review 2 (1988):
335–44; and the discussion between John P. Richardson, “Is Worship Biblical?”
Churchman 109 (1995): 197–218; idem, “Neither ‘Worship’ nor ‘Biblical’: A Response
to Alastair Campbell,” Churchman 111 (1997): 6–18, and Alastair Campbell, “Once
More: Is Worship ‘Biblical’?” Churchman 110 (1996): 131–39.
Definition and Exposition
Robert Shaper asserts that worship, like love, is characterized by intuitive
simplicity (everybody “knows” what worship is, just as everyone
“knows” what love is) and philosophical complexity (the harder you
press to unpack love or worship, the more difficult the task).19 Worship
embraces relationship, attitude, act, life. We may attempt the following
definition:
Worship is the proper response of all moral, sentient beings to God,
ascribing all honor and worth to their Creator-God precisely because
he is worthy, delightfully so. This side of the Fall, human worship of
God properly responds to the redemptive provisions that God has graciously
made. While all true worship is God-centered, Christian worship
is no less Christ-centered. Empowered by the Spirit and in line
with the stipulations of the new covenant, it manifests itself in all our
living, finding its impulse in the gospel, which restores our relationship
with our Redeemer-God and therefore also with our fellow imagebearers,
our co-worshipers. Such worship therefore manifests itself
both in adoration and in action, both in the individual believer and in
corporate worship, which is worship offered up in the context of the
body of believers, who strive to align all the forms of their devout
ascription of all worth to God with the panoply of new covenant mandates
and examples that bring to fulfillment the glories of antecedent
revelation and anticipate the consummation.
Doubtless this definition is too long and too complex. But it may
provide a useful set of pegs on which to hang a brief exposition of the
essentials of worship. This exposition is organized under an apostolic
number of points of unequal weight that arise from the definition.
1. The first (and rather cumbersome) sentence of the definition
asserts that worship is “the proper response of all moral, sentient
beings to God.” There are two purposes to this phrase. First, the inclusive
“all” reminds us that worship is not restricted to human beings
alone. The angels worship; they are commanded to do so, and in a passage
such as Revelation 4, they orchestrate the praise offered in
heaven. Among other things, this means that worship cannot properly
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19. Robert Shaper, In His Presence (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1984), 13.
be defined as necessarily arising out of the gospel, for one of the great
mysteries of redemption is that in his wisdom God has provided a
Redeemer for fallen human beings but not for fallen angels. The angels
who orchestrate the praise of heaven do not offer their worship as a
response borne of their experience of redemption. For our part, when
we offer our worship to God, we must see that this does not make us
unique. The object of our worship, God himself, is unique in that he
alone is to be worshiped; we, the worshipers, are not.
Second, by speaking of worship as the proper response “of moral,
sentient beings,” this definition excludes from worship rocks and
hawks, minnows and sparrows, cabbages and toads, a mote of dust
dancing on a sunbeam. Of course, by understandable extension of the
language, all creatures, sentient and otherwise, are exhorted to praise
the Lord (e.g., Ps 148). But they do not do so in conscious obedience;
they do so because they are God’s creatures and are constituted to
reflect his glory and thus bring him glory. In this extended sense all of
the created order “owns” its Lord. As all of it now participates in death
and “groans” in anticipation of the consummation (Rom 8:22–23), so
also on the last day it participates in the glorious transformation of the
resurrection: our hope is a new heaven and a new earth. In this
extended sense, all creation is God-oriented and “ascribes” God’s
worth to God alone. But it is an extended sense. For our purposes, we
will think of worship as something offered to God by “all moral, sentient
beings.”
2. Worship is a “proper response” to God for at least four reasons.
First of all, in both Testaments worship is repeatedly enjoined on the
covenant people of God: they worship because worship is variously
commanded and encouraged. God’s people are to “ascribe to the LORD
the glory due his name. Bring an offering and come before him; worship
the LORD in the splendor of his holiness” (1 Chr 16:29). “Come,
let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker;
for he is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under
his care” (Ps 95:6–7). “Worship the LORD with gladness; come before
him with joyful songs” (Ps 100:2). When he was tempted to worship
the devil, Jesus insisted, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve him
only” (Matt 4:10). It follows that the worship of any other god is simply
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idolatry (Ps 81:9; Isa 46:6; Dan 3:15, 28). It is a mark of terrible judgment
when God gives a people over to the worship of false gods (Acts
7:42–43). In the courts of heaven, God has no rival. No homage is to
be done to any other, even a glorious interpreter of truth: “Worship
God” and him alone (Rev 19:10).
Second, worship is a “proper response” because it is grounded in
the very character and attributes of God. If worship is repeatedly
enjoined, often the link to the sheer greatness or majesty or splendor
of God is made explicit. In other words, the “worth” of God is frequently
made explicit in the particular “worth-ship” that is being considered.
Sometimes this is comprehensive: “Ascribe to the LORD the
glory due his name” (1 Chr 16:29; cf. Ps 29:2)—that is, the glory that
is his due, since in biblical thought God’s name is the reflection of all
that God is. That text goes on to exhort the reader to “worship the Lord
in the splendor of his holiness.” That is tantamount to saying that we
are to worship the Lord in the splendor of all that makes God God.
Like white light that shines through a prism and is broken into its colorful
components, so this truth can be broken down into its many parts.
Many elements contribute to the sheer “Godness” that constitutes holiness
in its purest form. Thus, people will speak of “the glorious splendor
of [his] majesty” (Ps 145:3–5). If 2 Kings 17:39 commands the
covenant community to “worship the LORD your God,” it gives a reason:
“it is he who will deliver you from the hand of all your enemies.”
But all of the focus is on God.
Third, one of the most striking elements of God’s “worth-ship,” and
therefore one of the most striking reasons for worshiping him, is the
fact that he alone is the Creator. Sometimes this is linked with the fact
that he reigns over us. “Come, let us bow down in worship,” the
psalmist exhorts, “let us kneel before the LORD our Maker” (the first
element); “for he is our God and we are the people of his pasture” (the
second element) (Ps 95:6–7). If we are to worship the Lord with gladness
(Ps 100:2), it is for this reason: “It is he who made us, and we are
his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture” (v. 3). Nowhere, perhaps,
is this more powerfully expressed than in Revelation 4. Day and
night the four living creatures never stop ascribing praise to God:
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to
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come” (4:8). Whenever they do so (and we have just been told that
they never stop), the twenty-four elders “fall down before him who sits
on the throne, and worship him who lives for ever and ever” (4:10).
Moreover, “they lay their crowns before the throne” (4:10), an act that
symbolizes their unqualified recognition that they are dependent
beings. Their worship is nothing other than recognizing that God alone
is worthy “to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all
things and by your will they were created and have their being” (4:11,
italics added). Worship is the proper response of the creature to the
Creator. Worship does not create something new; rather, it is a transparent
response to what is, a recognition of our creaturely status before
the Creator himself.20
Fourth, to speak of a “proper response” to God calls us to reflect on
what God himself has disclosed of his own expectations. How does
God want his people to respond to him? Although God always
demands faith and obedience, the precise outworking of faith and obedience
may change across the years of redemptive history. Suppose
that at some point in history God insisted that believers be required to
build great monuments in his honor. For them, the building of such
monuments would be part of their “proper response” precisely
because it would have been mandated by God. Once the Mosaic
covenant was in place, the people of Israel were mandated to go up to
the central tabernacle/temple three times a year: this was part of their
proper response. What this means for members of the new covenant
is that our response to God in worship should begin by carefully and
reflectively examining what God requires of us under the terms of this
covenant. We should not begin by asking whether or not we enjoy
“worship,” but by asking, “What is it that God expects of us?” That will
frame our proper response. To ask this question is also to take the first
step in reformation. It demands self-examination, for we soon discover
where we do not live up to what God expects. This side of the Fall,
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20. This is the sort of theme that is often movingly treated by Marva J. Dawn, A
Royal “Waste” of Time: The Splendor of Worshiping God and Being Church for the
World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999). But because she does not set her discussion
within the context of biblical theology (see below), she rather consistently reduces
worship to what we have called “corporate worship.”
every age has characteristic sins. To find out what they are by listening
attentively to what the Bible actually says about what God demands
will have the effect of reforming every area of our lives, including our
worship. Cornelius Plantinga makes the point almost as an aside:
If we know the characteristic sins of the age, we can guess its foolish
and fashionable assumptions—that morality is simply a matter of personal
taste, that all silences need to be filled up with human chatter or
background music, that 760 percent of the American people are victims,
21 that it is better to feel than to think, that rights are more important
than responsibilities, that even for children the right to choose
supersedes all other rights, that real liberty can be enjoyed without
virtue, that self-reproach is for fogies, that God is a chum or even a
gofer whose job is to make us rich or happy or religiously excited, that
it is more satisfying to be envied than respected, that it is better for
politicians and preachers to be cheerful than truthful, that Christian
worship fails unless it is fun.22
3. We worship our Creator-God “precisely because he is worthy,
delightfully so.” What ought to make worship delightful to us is not, in
the first instance, its novelty or its aesthetic beauty, but its object: God
himself is delightfully wonderful, and we learn to delight in him.
In an age increasingly suspicious of (linear) thought, there is much
more respect for the “feeling” of things—whether a film or a church
service. It is disturbingly easy to plot surveys of people, especially
young people, drifting from a church of excellent preaching and teaching
to one with excellent music because, it is alleged, there is “better
worship” there. But we need to think carefully about this matter. Let
us restrict ourselves for the moment to corporate worship. Although
there are things that can be done to enhance corporate worship, there
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21. At this point Plantinga refers to an essay by John Leo, who has observed that
“a lot of Americans qualify for victim status in multiple ways: they are victims of AIDS,
the press, rock music or pornography, warped upbringing, anti-nerd bias, public hostility
toward smokers, addiction, patriarchy, being black, being white, belonging to
male bonding groups that beat drums in the woods, and so on” (“A ‘Victim’ Census for
Our Time,” U.S. News and World Report, 23 November 1992, 22).
22. Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 126–27 (emphasis mine).
is a profound sense in which excellent worship cannot be attained
merely by pursuing excellent worship. In the same way that, according
to Jesus, you cannot find yourself until you lose yourself, so also
you cannot find excellent corporate worship until you stop trying to
find excellent corporate worship and pursue God himself. Despite the
protestations, one sometimes wonders if we are beginning to worship
worship rather than worship God. As a brother put it to me, it’s a bit
like those who begin by admiring the sunset and soon begin to admire
themselves admiring the sunset.
This point is acknowledged in a praise chorus like “Let’s forget
about ourselves, and magnify the Lord, and worship him.” The trouble
is that after you have sung this repetitious chorus three or four
times, you are no farther ahead. The way you forget about yourself is
by focusing on God—not by singing about doing it, but by doing it.
There are far too few choruses and services and sermons that expand
our vision of God—his attributes, his works, his character, his words.
Some think that corporate worship is good because it is lively where it
had been dull. But it may also be shallow where it is lively, leaving
people dissatisfied and restless in a few months’ time. Sheep lie down
when they are well fed (cf. Ps 23:2); they are more likely to be restless
when they are hungry. “Feed my sheep,” Jesus commanded Peter
(John 21); and many sheep are unfed. If you wish to deepen the worship
of the people of God, above all deepen their grasp of his ineffable
majesty in his person and in all his works.
This is not an abstruse theological point divorced from our conduct
and ethics. Nor is it an independent point, as if there were two independent
mandates: first of all, worship God (because he deserves it),
and then live rightly (because he says so). For worship, properly understood,
shapes who we are. We become like whatever is our god. Peter
Leithart’s comments may not be nuanced, but they express something
important:
It is a fundamental truth of Scripture that we become like whatever or
whomever we worship. When Israel worshipped the gods of the
nations, she became like the nations—bloodthirsty, oppressive, full of
deceit and violence (cf. Jeremiah 7). Romans 1 confirms this principle
by showing how idolaters are delivered over to sexual deviations and
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eventually to social and moral chaos. The same dynamic is at work
today. Muslims worship Allah, a power rather than a person, and their
politics reflects this commitment. Western humanists worship man,
with the result that every degrading whim of the human heart is honoured
and exalted and disseminated through the organs of mass
media. Along these lines, Psalm 115:4–8 throws brilliant light on Old
Covenant history and the significance of Jesus’ ministry. After describing
idols as figures that have every organ of sense but no sense, the
Psalmist writes, “Those who make them will become like them, everyone
who trusts in them.” By worshipping idols, human beings become
speechless, blind, deaf, unfeeling, and crippled—but then these are
precisely the afflictions that Jesus, in the Gospels, came to heal!23
Pray, then, and work for a massive display of the glory and character
and attributes of God. We do not expect the garage mechanic to
expatiate on the wonders of his tools; we expect him to fix the car. He
must know how to use his tools, but he must not lose sight of the goal.
So we dare not focus on the mechanics of corporate worship and lose
sight of the goal. We focus on God himself, and thus we become more
godly and learn to worship—and collaterally we learn to edify one
another, forbear with one another, challenge one another.
Of course, the glories of God may be set forth in sermon, song,
prayer, or testimony. It is in this sense that the title of one of Mark
Noll’s essays is exactly right: “We Are What We Sing.”24 What is clear
is that if you try to enhance “worship” simply by livening the tempo or
updating the beat, you may not be enhancing worship at all. On the
other hand, dry-as-dust sermons loaded with clichés and devoid of the
presence of the living God mediated by the Word do little to enhance
worship either.
What we must strive for is growing knowledge of God and delight
in him—not delight in worship per se, but delight in God. A place to
begin might be to memorize Psalm 66. There is so much more to know
about God than the light diet on offer in many churches; and genuine
believers, when they are fed wholesome spiritual meals, soon delight
all the more in God himself. This also accounts for the importance of
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23. Peter Leithart, “Transforming Worship,” Foundations 38 (Spring 1997): 27.
24. Christianity Today, 12 July 1999, 37–41.
“re-telling” in the Bible (e.g., Pss 75–76). Retelling the Bible’s story
line brings to mind again and again something of God’s character, past
actions, and words. It calls to mind God’s great redemptive acts across
the panorama of redemptive history. This perspective is frequently lost
in contemporary worship, where there are very few elements calculated
to make us remember the great turning points in the Bible. I am
thinking not only of those bland “services” in which even at Easter and
Christmas we are deluged with the same sentimental choruses at the
expense of hymns and anthems that tell the Easter or Christmas story,
but also of the loss of hymns and songs that told individual Bible stories
(e.g., “Hushed Was the Evening Hymn”). Similarly, whatever else
the Lord’s Table is, it is a means appointed by the Lord Jesus to
remember his death and its significance.25 The Psalms frequently retell
parts of Israel’s history, especially the events surrounding the exodus,
serving both as review and as incentive to praise. Paul recognizes that
writing “the same things” may be a “safeguard” for his readers (Phil
3:1). Written reminders may stimulate readers to “wholesome thinking”
(2 Pet 3:1), for Peter wants them “to recall the words spoken in the
past by the holy prophets and the command given by our Lord and
Savior” through the apostles (3:2). In this he mirrors Old Testament
exhortations, for there we are told that we must remember not only
all that God has done for us, but every word that proceeds from the
mouth of God, carefully passing them on to our children (Deut 6, 8).
All of this presupposes that retelling ought to prove formative, nurturing,
stabilizing, delightful.26 Equally, it presupposes that even under
the terms of the old covenant, everything that might be embraced by
the term worship was more comprehensive than what was bound up
with the ritual of tabernacle and temple.
Perhaps it is in this light that we ought to wrestle with the importance
of repetition as a reinforcing pedagogical device. If mere traditionalism
for the sake of aesthetics is suspect, surely the same is true
of mere innovation for the sake of excitement. But there must be some
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25. Cf. Tim Ralston, “‘Remember’ and Worship: The Mandate and the Means,”
Reformation and Revival 9/3 (2000): 77–89.
26. Cf. Eugene H. Merrill, “Remembering: A Central Theme in Biblical Worship,”
JETS 43 (2000): 27–36.
ways of driving home the fundamentals of the faith. In godly repetition
and retelling, we must plant deeply within our souls the glorious truths
about God and about what he has done that we will otherwise soon
forget.
4. “This side of the Fall, human worship of God properly responds
to the redemptive provisions that God has graciously made.” The brief
glimpse afforded of human existence before the Fall (Gen 2) captures
a time when God’s image-bearers delighted in the perfection of his
creation and the pleasure of his presence precisely because they were
perfectly oriented toward him. No redemptive provisions had yet been
disclosed, for none were needed. There was no need to exhort human
beings to worship; their entire existence revolved around the God who
had made them.
At the heart of the Fall is the self-love that destroys our Godcenteredness.
Implicitly, of course, all failure to worship God is neither
more nor less than idolatry. Because we are finite, we will inevitably
worship something or someone. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky
was not wrong to write, “So long as man remains free he
strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone
to worship.” Yet because we are fallen, we gravitate to false gods: a god
that is domesticated and manageable, perhaps a material god, perhaps
an abstract god like power or pleasure, or a philosophical god like
Marxism or democracy or postmodernism. But worship we will. Most
of these gods are small and pathetic, prompting William James to
denounce the “moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the
bitch-goddess success.”
Worse yet, we stand guilty before God, for our Maker is also our
Judge. That might have been the end of the story, but God progressively
discloses his redemptive purposes. As he does so, he makes
demands about what approach is acceptable to him, what constitutes
acceptable praise and prayer, what constitutes an acceptable corporate
approach before him. Thus, worship becomes enmeshed, by God’s
prescription, in ritual, sacrifice, detailed law, a sanctuary, a priestly system,
and so forth. Three important points must be made here.
First, the changing and developing patterns of God’s prescriptions
for his people when they draw near to him constitute a complex and
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subtle history.27 The first human sin calls forth the first death, the death
of an animal to hide the nakedness of the first image-bearers. Sacrifice
soon becomes a deeply rooted component of worship. By the time
of the Mosaic covenant, the peace offering (Lev 17:11ff.) was the
divinely prescribed means of maintaining a harmonious relationship
between God and his covenant people. The sin offering (Lev 4) dealt
with sin as a barrier between the worshipers and God. This sin offering
was a slaughtered bull, lamb, or goat with which the worshiper had
identified himself by laying his hands on its head. When the blood of
the victim, signifying its life (Lev 17:11), was daubed on the horns of
the altar, symbolizing the presence of God, God and the worshipers
were united in a renewed relationship. Under the terms of the prescribed
covenantal relationship, there could no longer be acceptable
worship apart from conformity to the demands of the sacrificial system.
By this system, God had prescribed the means by which his rebellious
image-bearers could approach him. “Worship was thus Israel’s
response to the covenant relationship and the means of ensuring its
continuance.”28
There were many variations both before and after Sinai. In the
patriarchal period, clans and individuals offered sacrifice in almost any
location and without a priestly class. The Mosaic covenant prescribed
that offerings be restricted to the tabernacle, a mobile sanctuary, and
that they become an exclusive prerogative of the Levites; but both
restrictions, especially the former, were often observed in the breach.
With the construction of Solomon’s temple, covenantal worship
became more centralized, at least until the division of the kingdom.
The high feasts brought pilgrims onto the roads by the thousands,
going “up” to Jerusalem, the city of the great king. Choirs were in
attendance, and musical instruments contributed to these festal occasions.
Worship was powerfully tied to cultus.
The division of the kingdom and the spiraling degeneration of both
Israel and Judah soon broke up even this degree of uniformity. The
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27. See the relevant sections of Peterson, Engaging with God; Y. Hattori, “Theology
of Worship in the Old Testament,” in Worship: Adoration and Action, 21–50.
28. J. G. Davies, “Worship,” A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature,
ed. David Lyle Jeffrey (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 851.
exile dispersed the northern tribes to sites that made access to the temple
impossible; in due course, exile reached the kingdom of Judah and
witnessed the utter destruction of the temple. The revolution in thinking
that accompanied this obliteration of the central reality of the cultus
is shown in many Old Testament texts, not least in the vision of
Ezekiel 8–11, where it is the exilic community—not the Jews remaining
in Jerusalem who are about to be destroyed along with the
temple—who constitute the true remnant, the people for whom God
himself will be a sanctuary (11:16). Such realities relativize the temple
and with it the covenantal structure inextricably linked with it. The
same effect is achieved by promises of a new covenant (Jer 31:31ff.;
Ezek 36:25–27). As the author of Hebrews would later reason, the
promise of a new covenant made the old covenant obsolete in principle
(Heb 8:13). The restoration of a diminished temple after the exile
did not really jeopardize these new anticipations, for neither the highpriestly
line of Zadok nor the Davidic kingdom was ever restored.
Thus, the first point to observe is that however enmeshed in cultus,
sacrifice, priestly service, covenantal prescription, and major festivals
the worship of Israel had become, that worship kept changing its face
across the two millennia from Abraham to Jesus.
Second, there is no reason to restrict all worship in ancient Israel
to the cultus. The Psalms testify to a large scope for individual praise
and adoration, even if some of them are addressed to a wide readership
and even if some were intended for corporate use in temple services.
The Old Testament provides ample evidence of individuals
pouring out their prayers before God, quite apart from the religion of
the cultus (e.g., Hannah, Daniel, and Job).
Third, and most important, a remarkable shift takes place with the
coming of the Lord Jesus and the dawning of the new covenant he
introduces. Under the terms of the new covenant, the Levitical priesthood
has been replaced: either we are all priests (i.e., intermediaries,
1 Peter), or else Jesus alone is the high priest (Hebrews), but there is
no priestly caste or tribe. Jesus’ body becomes the temple (John 2:13–
22); or, adapting the figure, the church is the temple (1 Cor 3:16–17);
or the individual Christian is the temple (1 Cor 6:19). No church building
is ever designated the “temple” (e.g., “Temple Baptist Church”).
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The pattern of type/antitype is so thorough that inevitably the way we
think of worship must also change. The language of worship, so bound
up with the temple and priestly system under the old covenant, has
been radically transformed by what Christ has done.
We see the change in a well-known passage like Romans 12:1–2. To
offer our bodies as “living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God” is our
“spiritual act of worship.” In other words, Paul uses the worship language
of the cultus, except that his use of the terminology transports
us away from the cultus: what we offer is no longer a lamb or a bull
but our bodies. We see the change again in another well-known passage.
Jesus tells us we “must worship in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24).
This does not mean that we must worship “spiritually” (as opposed to
“carnally”?) and “truthfully” (as opposed to “falsely”?). The context
focuses our Lord’s argument. Samaritans held that the appropriate
location for worship was at the twin mountains, Gerizim and Ebal;
Jews held that it was Jerusalem. By contrast, Jesus says that a time is
now dawning “when the true worshipers will worship the Father in
spirit and truth. . . . God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in
spirit and in truth” (4:23–24). In the first instance, then, this utterance
abolishes both Samaria’s mountains and Jerusalem as the proper location
for the corporate worship of the people of God. God is spirit, and
he cannot be domesticated by mere location or mere temples, even if
in the past he chose to disclose himself in one such temple as a teaching
device that anticipated what was coming. Moreover, in this book—in
which Jesus appears as the true vine, the true manna, the true Shepherd,
the true temple, the true Son—to worship God “in spirit and in
truth” is first and foremost a way of saying that we must worship God
by means of Christ. In him the reality has dawned and the shadows
are being swept away (cf. Heb 8:13). Christian worship is new covenant
worship; it is gospel-inspired worship; it is Christ-centered worship; it
is cross-focused worship.29
Elsewhere in the New Testament, we discover that Paul could
think of evangelism as his priestly service (Rom 15). Jesus is our
Passover lamb (1 Cor 5:7). We offer a sacrifice of praise (Heb 13:15),
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29. On all these points, Peterson, Engaging with God, is very good.
not a sacrifice of sheep. Our worship is no longer focused on a particular
form or festival. It must be bound up with all we are and do as the
blood-bought people of God’s Messiah. We offer up ourselves as living
sacrifices. Augustine was not far off the mark when he wrote, “God is
to be worshiped by faith, hope, and love.” This is something we do all
the time: under the terms of the new covenant, worship is no longer
primarily focused in a cultus shaped by a liturgical calendar, but it is
something in which we are continuously engaged.
To sum up: “This side of the Fall, human worship of God properly
responds to the redemptive provision that God has graciously made.”
But because of the location of new covenant believers in the stream
of redemptive history, the heart of what constitutes true worship
changes its form rather radically. At a time when sacrificial and priestly
structures anticipated the ultimate sacrifice and high priest, faithful
participation in the corporate worship of the covenant community
meant the temple with all its symbolism: sacrificial animals, high feasts,
and so forth. This side of the supreme sacrifice, we no longer participate
in the forms that pointed toward it; and the focus of worship language,
priestly language, sacrificial language has been transmuted into
a far more comprehensive arena, one that is far less oriented toward
any notion of cultus.
5. Nevertheless, so that we do not err by exaggerating the differences
between the forms of worship under the Mosaic covenant and
under the new covenant, it is essential to recognize that “all true worship
is God-centered.” It is never simply a matter of conforming to formal
requirements. The Old Testament prophets offer many passages
that excoriate all worship that is formally “correct” while the worshiper’s
heart is set on idolatry (e.g., Ezek 8). Isaiah thunders the word
of the Lord: “‘The multitude of your sacrifices—what are they to me?’
says the LORD. ‘I have more than enough of burnt offerings, of rams
and the fat of fattened animals; I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls
and lambs and goats. . . . Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Your
incense is detestable to me. New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations—
I cannot bear your evil assemblies. . . . When you spread out your hands
in prayer, I will hide my eyes from you. . . . Take your evil deeds out of
my sight! Stop doing wrong, learn to do right!’” (Isa 1:11–17). “Will
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you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to
Baal and follow other gods you have not known, and then come and
stand before me in this house, which bears my Name, and say, ‘We are
safe’—safe to do all these detestable things?” (Jer 7:9–10). “Without
purity of heart their pretense of worship was indeed an abomination,”
says Robert Rayburn. “Even the divinely authorized ordinances themselves
had become offensive to the God who had given them because
of the way they had been abused.”30
This may clarify a point from Peterson that can easily be turned
toward a doubtful conclusion. Peterson rightly points out, as we have
seen, that the move from the old covenant to the new brings with it a
transmutation of the language of the cultus. Under the new covenant
the terminology of sacrifice, priest, temple, offering, and the like is
transformed. No longer is there a supreme site to which pilgrimages
of the faithful must be made: we worship “in spirit and in truth.” This
transformation of language is inescapable and is tied to the shift from
type to antitype, from promise to reality, from shadow to substance.
But we must not therefore conclude that, apart from instances of individual
worship, in the Old Testament the formal requirements of the
cultus exhausted what was meant by public worship.
In any legal structure there has always been a hierarchy of priorities.
Jesus himself was quite prepared to deliver his judgment as to which
was the greatest commandment in “the Law”: “Love the Lord your God
with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matt
22:37; cf. Deut 6:5). It follows that the greatest sin, the most fundamental
sin, is to not love the Lord our God with all of our heart and soul
and mind. The connection with worship, as we have defined it, is transparent.
We cannot ascribe to the Lord all the glory due his name if we
are consumed by self-love or intoxicated by pitiful visions of our own
greatness or independence. Still less are we properly worshiping the
Lord if we formally adhere to the stipulations of covenantal sacrifice
when our hearts are far from him. To put the matter positively, worship
is not merely a formal ascription of praise to God: it emerges from my
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30. Robert G. Rayburn, O Come, Let Us Worship (Grand Rapids: Baker Book
House, 1980), 19.
whole being to this whole God, and therefore it reflects not only my
understanding of God but my love for him. “Praise the LORD, O my soul;
all my inmost being, praise his holy name” (Ps 103:1).
Thus, the transition from worship under the old covenant to worship
under the new is not characterized by a move from the formal to
the spiritual, or from the cultus to the spiritual, or from the cultus to
all of life. For it has always been necessary to love God wholly; it has
always been necessary to recognize the sheer holiness and transcendent
power and glory and goodness of God and to adore him for what
he is. So we insist that “all true worship is God-centered.” The transition
from worship under the old covenant to worship under the new
is characterized by the covenantal stipulations and provisions of the
two respective covenants. The way wholly loving God works out under
the old covenant is in heartfelt obedience to the terms of that
covenant—and that includes the primary place given to the cultus,
with all its import and purpose in the stream of redemptive history;
and the implications of this outworking include distinctions between
the holy and the common, between holy space and common space,
between holy time and common time, between holy food and common
food. The way wholly loving God works out under the new
covenant is in heartfelt obedience to the terms of that covenant—and
here the language of the cultus has been transmuted to all of life, with
the implication, not so much of a desacralization of space and time and
food, as with a sacralization of all space and all time and all food: what
God has declared holy let no one declare unholy.
There is a further implication here that can only be mentioned, not
explored. In theological analysis of work, it is a commonplace to say
that work is a “creation ordinance” (the terminology varies with the
theological tradition). However corrosive and difficult work has
become this side of the Fall (Gen 3:17–19), work itself belongs to the
initial paradise (Gen 2:15), and it continues to be something we do as
creatures in God’s good creation. That is true, of course, but under the
new covenant it is also inadequate. If everything, including our work,
has been sacralized in the sense just specified, then work itself is part
of our worship. Christians work not only as God’s creatures in God’s
creation, but as redeemed men and women offering their time, their
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energy, their work, their whole lives, to God—loving him with heart
and mind and strength, understanding that whatever we do, we are to
do to the glory of God.
This does not mean there is no place for corporate gathering under
the new covenant, no corporate acknowledgement of God, no corporate
worship—as we shall see. But in the light of the completed crosswork
of the Lord Jesus Christ, the language of the cultus has
necessarily changed, and with it our priorities in worship. What
remains constant is the sheer God-centeredness of it all.
6. Christian worship is no less Christ-centered than God-centered.
The set purpose of the Father is that all should honor the Son even as
they honor the Father (John 5:23). Since the eternal Word became
flesh (John 1:14), since the fullness of the Deity lives in Christ in bodily
form (Col 2:9), since in the light of Jesus’ astonishing obedience
(even unto death!) God has exalted him and given him “the name that
is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth” (Phil 2:9–10), and since
the resurrected Jesus quietly accepted Thomas’s reverent and worshiping
words, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28), contemporary
Christians follow the example of the first generation of believers and
worship Jesus without hesitation.
Nowhere is the mandate to worship the Lord Jesus clearer than in
the book of Revelation, from chapter 5 on. In Revelation 4, in apocalyptic
metaphor, God is presented as the awesome, transcendent God
of glory before whom even the highest orders of angels cover their
faces. This sets the stage for the drama in chapter 5. There an angel
issues a challenge to the entire universe: Who is able to approach the
throne of such a terrifying God, take the book in his right hand, and slit
the seven seals that bind it? In the symbolism of the time and of this
genre of literature, this is a challenge to bring to pass all God’s purposes
for the universe, his purposes of both blessing and judgment.
No one is found who is worthy to accomplish this task, and John the
seer is driven to despair (5:4). Then someone is found: the Lion of the
tribe of Judah, who is also the Lamb—simultaneously a kingly warrior
and a slaughtered Lamb—emerges to take the scroll from the right
hand of the Almighty and slit the seals. But instead of approaching the
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41
throne of this transcendent and frankly terrifying God, he stands in the
very center of the throne, one with Deity himself (5:6). This sets off a
mighty chorus of worship addressed to the Lamb, praising him because
he is worthy to take the scroll and open its seals (5:9). What makes him
uniquely qualified to bring to pass God’s purposes for judgment and
redemption is not simply the fact that he emerges from the very throne
of God, but that he was slain, and by his blood he purchased men for
God from every tribe and language and people and nation (5:9). In
short, not only his person but his atoning work make him uniquely
qualified to bring to pass God’s perfect purposes.
Thereafter in the book of Revelation, worship is addressed to “him
who sits on the throne and to the Lamb,” or some similar formulation.
For in our era, Christian worship is no less Christ-centered than Godcentered.
7. Christian worship is Trinitarian. This point deserves extensive
reflection. One might usefully consider, for instance, a Trinitarian biblical
theology of prayer.31 But for our purposes it will suffice to repeat
some of the insights of James Torrance. He writes:
The [Trinitarian] view of worship is that it is the gift of participating
through the Spirit in the incarnate Son’s communion with the Father.
That means participating in union with Christ, in what he has done for
us once and for all, in his self-offering to the Father, in his life and death
on the cross. It also means participating in what he is continuing to do
for us in the presence of the Father and in his mission from the Father
to the world. There is only one true Priest through whom and with
whom we draw near to God our Father. There is only one Mediator
between God and humanity. There is only one offering which is truly
acceptable to God, and it is not ours. It is the offering by which he has
sanctified for all time those who come to God by him (Heb. 2:11; 10:10,
14). . . . It takes seriously the New Testament teaching about the sole
priesthood and headship of Christ, his self-offering for us to the Father
and our life in union with Christ through the Spirit, with a vision of the
Church which is his body. . . . So we are baptized in the name of the
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31. See, for instance, the important essay by Edmund P. Clowney, “A Biblical
Theology of Prayer,” in Teach Us To Pray: Prayer in the Bible and the World, ed. D.
A. Carson (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1990), 136–73.
Father, Son and Holy Spirit into the community, the one body of
Christ, which confesses faith in the one God, Father, Son and Holy
Spirit, and which worships the Father through the Son in the Spirit.32
This is very helpful, especially if it is not taken to refer to what must
pertain only at 11:00 A.M. on Sunday morning. The justifying, regenerating,
redeeming work of our triune God transforms his people: that
is the very essence of the new covenant. New covenant worship therefore
finds its first impulse in this transforming gospel, “which restores
our relationship with our Redeemer-God and therefore with our fellow
image-bearers, our co-worshipers.”
8. Christian worship embraces both adoration and action.33 By
referring to both, I do not mean to reintroduce a distinction between
the sacred and the common (see section 4 above). It is not that we
withdraw into “adoration” and then advance into “action,” with the former
somehow gaining extra kudos for being the more spiritual or the
more worshipful. We are to do everything to the glory of God. In offering
our bodies as living sacrifices, which is our spiritual worship, we
do with our bodies what he desires. Indeed, there may be something
even more aggressive about this “action.” As Miroslav Volf puts it,
“There is something profoundly hypocritical about praising God for
God’s mighty deeds of salvation and cooperating at the same time with
the demons of destruction, whether by neglecting to do good or by
actively doing evil. Only those who help the Jews may sing the Gregorian
chant, Dietrich Bonhoeffer rightly said, in the context of Nazi
Germany. . . . Without action in the world, the adoration of God is
empty and hypocritical, and degenerates into irresponsible and godless
quietism.”34 Conversely, Christian action in this world produces incentive
to adore God (i.e., 1 Pet 2:11–12).
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32. James B. Torrance, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace
(Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 20–22. This book often proves very
insightful, even though in my view Torrance sometimes attacks a Zwinglian view of
the Lord’s Supper that is little more than a straw man.
33. See especially the essay by Miroslav Volf, “Reflections on a Christian Way of
Being-in-the-World,” in Worship: Adoration and Action, 203–11, to which I am
indebted for some elements of this section.
34. Ibid., 211.
On the other hand, mere activism is not a particularly godly alternative
either; for like active evil, it may be impelled by mere lust for
power, or mere commitment to a tradition (no matter how good the
tradition), or mere altruism or reformist sentiment. To resort to periods
of adoration, whether personal and individual or corporate, is not,
however, to retreat to the classic sacred/profane division, but it is to
grasp the New Testament recognition of the rhythms of life in this created
order. Jesus himself presupposes that there is a time and place
for the individual to resort to a “secret” place for prayer (Matt 6:6).
The church itself, as we shall see, is to gather regularly.
In short, precisely because Christian worship is impelled by the
gospel “which restores our relationship with our Redeemer-God and
therefore also with our fellow image-bearers, our co-worshipers,” precisely
because the ultimate triumph of God is a reconciled universe
(Col 1:15–20), our worship must therefore manifest itself in both adoration
and action.
9. Similarly, if the New Testament documents constitute our guide,
our worship must manifest itself both in the individual believer and in
“corporate worship, which is offered up in the context of the body of
believers.”
This corporate identity extends not only to other believers here and
now with whom we happen to be identified but also to believers from
all times and places. For the fundamental “gathering” of the people of
God is the gathering to God, “to Mount Zion, to the heavenly
Jerusalem, the city of the living God. You have come to thousands upon
thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn,
whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge
of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, to Jesus the
mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood, that speaks a
better word than the blood of Abel” (Heb 12:22–24; emphasis added).
The local church is not so much a part of this church as the manifestation
of it, the outcropping of it. Every church is simply the church.
Thus, whatever it is we do when we gather together—something
still to be discussed—we do in the profound recognition that we
believers constitute something much bigger than any one of us or even
any empirical group of us. We are the church, the temple of God
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(1 Cor 3:16–17).35 One of the entailments of such a perspective is that,
however much we seek to be contemporary for the sake of evangelistic
outreach, there must also be a drive in us to align ourselves with
the whole church in some deeply rooted and tangible ways. What it
means to be the church was not invented in the last twenty years. The
demands of corporate rootedness must be melded with the demands
of living faithfully and bearing witness in a particular culture and age.
The New Testament speaks of the gathering or the coming together
of the people of God in many contexts (e.g., Acts 4:31; 11:26; 14:27;
15:6, 30; 20:7–8; 1 Cor 5:4; 11:17, 33–34; 14:26).36 “The church in
assembly not only provides encouragement to its members but also
approaches God (Heb 10:19–25),” writes Everett Ferguson.37 But this
could equally be put the opposite way: the church in assembly not only
approaches God, but it provides encouragement to its members. Even
in Ephesians 5:19 we speak “to one another” when we sing; and in
Colossians 3:16, the singing of “psalms, hymns and spiritual songs” is
in the context of teaching and admonishing one another—part of letting
“the word of Christ dwell in you richly.” This means that the purist
model of addressing only God in our corporate worship is too restrictive.
On the other hand, while one of the purposes of our singing
should be mutual edification, that is rather different from making ourselves
and our experience of worship the topic of our singing.
10. This body of believers strives “to align all the forms of their
devout ascription of all worth to God with the panoply of new covenant
mandates and examples.” This will be true in the arena of conduct, to
which the Apostle Paul devotes so much space. Again and again he
exhorts his younger colleagues to help believers learn how to live and
speak and conduct themselves.
But my focus here will be on the church in its gathered meetings.
What does the New Testament mandate for such meetings, whether by
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35. The context shows that in this passage the temple of God is the church, unlike
1 Corinthians 6:19–20, where in quite a different figurative usage the temple of God
is the body of the individual Christian.
36. See the important work of Everett Ferguson, The Church of Christ (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), esp. 231ff.
37. Ibid., 233.
prescription or description? Is it the case, under the terms of the new
covenant, that it is wrong to say that our purpose in coming together
(for instance, on Sunday morning) is for worship? Some, as we have
seen, reply, “Yes, it is clearly wrong.” Nor is this some newfangled iconoclasm.
William Law, in his justly famous A Serious Call to a Devout
and Holy Life, written more than two centuries ago, insists, “There is
not one command in all the Gospel for public worship. . . . The frequent
attendance at it is never so much as mentioned in all the New
Testament.” In the light of the New Testament’s penchant for deploying
all the old worship terminology in fresh ways, no longer bound up
with temple and feast days but with all of Christian living, to say that
we come together “to worship” implies that we are not worshiping God
the rest of the time. And that is so out of touch with New Testament
emphases that we ought to abandon such a notion absolutely. We do
not come together for worship, these people say; rather, we come
together for instruction, or we come together for mutual edification.
Yet one wonders if this conclusion is justified. Of course, if we
spend the week without worshiping God and think of Sunday morning
as the time when we come together to offer God the worship we have
been withholding all week (to set right the balance, as it were), then
these critics are entirely correct. But would it not be better to say that
the New Testament emphasis is that the people of God should worship
him in their individual lives and in their family lives and then,
when they come together, worship him corporately?
In other words, worship becomes the category under which we order
everything in our lives. Whatever we do, even if we are simply eating or
drinking, whatever we say, in business or in the home or in church
assemblies, we are to do all to the glory of God. That is worship. And
when we come together, we engage in worship in a corporate fashion.
Some are uncomfortable with this analysis. They say that if worship
is something that Christians should be doing all the time, then
although it is formally true that Christians should be engaged in worship
when they gather together, it is merely true in the same sense in
which Christians should be engaged in breathing when they gather
together. It is something they do all the time. But the analogy this
makes between worship and breathing is misleading. We are not com-
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manded to breathe; breathing is merely an autonomic function. But
we are commanded to worship (e.g., Rev 19:10). And although it is true
that the technical language of worship in the Old Testament is transmuted
in the New from the cultus to all of life, there are odd passages
where the language also refers to the Christian assembly (e.g.,
proskyneô in 1 Cor 14:25).
Moreover, just as in the light of the New Testament we dare not
think we gather for worship because we have not been worshiping all
week, so also it is folly to think that only part of the “service” is worship—
everything but the sermon, perhaps, or only the singing, or only
singing and responses. The notion of a “worship leader” who leads the
“worship” part of the service before the sermon (which, then, is no part
of worship!) is so bizarre, from a New Testament perspective, as to be
embarrassing.38 Doesn’t even experience teach us that sometimes our
deepest desires and heart prayers to ascribe all worth to God well up
during the powerful preaching of the Word of God? I know that “worship
leader” is merely a matter of semantics, a currently popular tag,
but it is a popular tag that unwittingly skews people’s expectations as
to what worship is. At very least, it is misleadingly restrictive.39
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38. Scarcely less bizarre is the contention of some that we should distinguish
between services for worship and services for teaching (e.g., Robert E. Webber, in a
generally helpful book, Worship Old and New [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982], 125,
194).
39. Perhaps this is the place to reflect on the fact that many contemporary “worship
leaders” have training in music but none in Bible, theology, history, or the like.
When pressed as to the criteria by which they choose their music, many of these leaders
finally admit that their criteria oscillate between personal preference and keeping
the congregation reasonably happy—scarcely the most profound criteria in the world.
They give little or no thought to covering the great themes of Scripture, or the great
events of Scripture, or the range of personal response to God found in the Psalms (as
opposed to covering the narrow themes of being upbeat and in the midst of “worship”),
or the nature of biblical locutions (in one chorus the congregation manages to
sing “holy” thirty-six times, while three are enough for Isaiah and John of the Apocalypse),
or the central historical traditions of the church, or anything else of weight. If
such leaders operate on their own with little guidance or training or input from senior
pastors, the situation commonly degenerates from the painful to the pitiful. On
this and many other practical and theological points, see the wise and informed counsel
of David Montgomery, Sing a New Song: Choosing and Leading Praise in Today’s
Church (Edinburgh: Rutherford House and Handsel Press, 2000).
So what should we do, then, in corporate worship so understood?
Although some might object to one or two of his locutions, Edmund
Clowney provides one of the most succinct summaries of such evidence
as the New Testament provides:
The New Testament indicates, by precept and example, what the elements
of [corporate] worship are. As in the synagogue, corporate
prayer is offered (Acts 2:42; 1 Tim. 2:1; 1 Cor. 14:16); Scripture is read
(1 Tim. 4:13; 1 Th. 5:27; 2 Th. 3:14; Col. 4:15, 16; 2 Pet. 3:15, 16) and
expounded in preaching (1 Tim. 4:13; cf. Lk. 4:20; 2 Tim. 3:15–17;
4:2). There is a direct shift from the synagogue to the gathering of the
church (Acts 18:7, 11; cf. 19:8–10). The teaching of the word is also
linked with table fellowship (Acts 2:42; 20:7, cf. vv. 20, 25, 28). The
songs of the new covenant people both praise God and encourage one
another (Eph. 5:19; Col. 3:15; 1 Cor. 14:15, 26; cf. 1 Tim. 3:16; Rev.
5:9–13; 11:17f; 15:3, 4). Giving to the poor is recognized as a spiritual
service to God and a Christian form of “sacrifice” (2 Cor. 9:11–15;
Phil. 4:18; Heb. 13:16). The reception and distribution of gifts is
related to the office of the deacon (Acts 6:1–6; Rom. 12:8, 13; cf. Rom.
16:1, 2; 2 Cor. 8:19–21; Acts 20:4; 1 Cor. 16:1–4) and to the gathering
of believers (Acts 2:42; 5:2; 1 Cor. 16:2). The faith is also publicly confessed
(1 Tim. 6:12; 1 Pet. 3:21; Heb. 13:15; cf. 1 Cor. 15:1–3). The
people receive God’s blessing (2 Cor. 13:14; Lk. 24:50; cf. Num. 6:22–
27). The holy kiss of salutation is also commanded (Rom. 16:16; 1 Cor.
16:20; 2 Cor. 13:12; 1 Th. 5:26; 1 Pet. 5:14). The people respond to
praise and prayer with the saying of “Amen” (1 Cor. 14:16; Rev. 5:14;
cf. Rom. 1:25; 9:5; Eph. 3:21 etc.). The sacraments of baptism and the
Lord’s Supper are explicitly provided for. Confession is linked with
baptism (1 Pet. 3:21); and a prayer of thanksgiving with the breaking
of bread (1 Cor. 11:24).40
One might quibble over a few points. Some might say that explicit
permission must be opened up for tongues as restricted by 1 Corin-
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40. Edmund P. Clowney, “Presbyterian Worship,” Worship: Adoration and Action,
ed. D. A. Carson, 117. Cf. also Hughes Oliphant Old, Themes and Variations for a
Christian Doxology: Some Thoughts on the Theology of Worship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1992); Michael B. Thompson, “Romans 12:1–2 and Paul’s Vision for Worship,”
in A Vision for the Church: Studies in Early Christian Ecclesiology, ed. Markus N. A.
Bockmuehl and Michael B. Thompson (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998), esp. 129–30.
thians 14, for example. Still, Clowney’s list is surely broadly right. But
observe:
a. To compile such a list is already to recognize that there are some
distinctive elements to what I have called “corporate worship.” I am not
sure that we would be wise to apply the expression “corporate worship”
to any and all activities in which groups of Christians faithfully engage—
going to a football match, say, or shopping for groceries. Such activities
doubtless fall under the “do all to the glory of God” rubric and therefore
properly belong to the ways in which we honor God; therefore,
they do belong to worship in a broad sense. Yet the activities the New
Testament describes when Christians gather together in assembly,
nicely listed by Clowney, are more restrictive and more focused. Doubtless
there can be some mutual edification going on when a group of
Christians take a sewing class together, but in the light of what the New
Testament pictures Christians doing when they assemble together,
there is nevertheless something slightly skewed about calling a sewing
class an activity of corporate worship. So there is a narrower sense of
worship, it appears; and this narrower sense is bound up with corporate
worship, with what the assembled church does in the pages of the
New Testament. Yet it is precisely at this point that one must instantly
insist that this narrower list of activities does not include all that the
New Testament includes within the theological notion of worship in the
broader sense. If one restricts the term worship to the list of churchassembly
activities listed by Clowney, one loses essential elements of
the dramatic transformation that occurs in the move from the old
covenant to the new;41 conversely, if one uses the term worship only in
its broadest and theologically richest sense, then sooner or later one
finds oneself looking for a term that embraces the particular activities
of the gathered people of God described in the New Testament. For
lack of a better alternative, I have chosen the term corporate worship—
but I recognize the ambiguities inherent in it.
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41. This, of course, is the use of the word worship found in most older studies or in
recent studies that do not take into account the redemptive-historical developments within
the canon. See, for example, D. E. Aune (“Worship, Early Christian,” in Anchor Bible
Dictionary 6.973–89), who ties worship to such activities and responses as these: acclamation,
awe, blessing, commemoration, confession, doxology, fear, hymn, invocation, offering,
praise, prayer, prophecy, prostration, sacrifice, supplication, and thanksgiving.
b. It is worth reflecting on how many of the items listed by Clowney
are related, in one way or another, to the Word. Joshua is told that the
Word will be with him wherever he goes if he but meditates on the
law day and night, careful to do everything written in it (Josh 1:5–9).
The book of Psalms opens by declaring that the just person is the one
who delights in the law of the Lord and meditates on it day and night
(Ps 1:2). Jesus asserts, in prayer, that what will sanctify his disciples is
the Word (John 17:17). Doyle puts his finger on this integrating factor:
The characteristic response we are to make to God as he comes to us
clothed in his promises, clothed with the gospel, is faith. In the context
of the New Testament’s vision of what church is to be, this faith
most appropriately takes the form of confession. To each other we confess
and testify to the greatness of God. We do this by the very activity
of making God’s Word the centre of our activities—by reading it,
preaching it, making it the basis of exhortation, and even setting it to
music in hymns and praise. The Spirit uses all this, we are assured, to
build us up in Christ. Praise is integral to our activities in church,
because it is another form of our response of faith. It is part of our
whole life of worship, but only one part of it.42
What this also suggests, yet again, is that an approach to corporate
worship that thinks of only some of the activities of assembled Christians,
such as singing and praying, as worship, but not the ministry of
the Word itself, is badly off base. Worse yet are formulations that are
in danger of making “worship” a substitute for the gospel. It is not
uncommon to be told that “worship leads us into the presence of God”
or that “worship takes us from the outer court into the inner court” or
the like. There is a way of reading those statements sympathetically
(as I shall note in a moment), but taken at face value they are simply
untrue. Objectively, what brings us into the presence of God is the
death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. If we ascribe to worship
(meaning, in this context, our corporate praise and adoration) something
of this power, it will not be long before we think of such worship
as being meritorious, or efficacious, or the like. The small corner of
truth that such expressions hide (though this truth is poorly worded)
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42. Robert Doyle, “The One True Worshipper,” The Briefing, (29 April 1999), 8.
is that when we come together and engage in the activities of corporate
worship (including not only prayer and praise but the Lord’s Supper
and attentive listening to the Word, and the other items included
in Clowney’s list), we encourage one another, we edify one another,
and so we often feel encouraged and edified. As a result, we are
renewed in our awareness of God’s love and God’s truth, and we are
encouraged to respond with adoration and action. In this subjective
sense, all of the activities of corporate worship may function to make
us more aware of God’s majesty, God’s presence, God’s love. But I
doubt that it is helpful to speak of such matters in terms of worship
“leading us into the presence of God”: not only is the term worship
bearing a meaning too narrow to be useful, but the statement is in danger
of conveying some profoundly untrue notions.
c. Although the elements Clowney lists are obviously the elements
of corporate worship mentioned in the New Testament, there is no
explicit mandate or model of a particular order or arrangement of
these elements. Of course, this is not to deny that there may be better
and worse arrangements. One might try to establish liturgical order
that reflects the theology of conversion, or at least of general approach
to God: confession of sin before assurance of grace, for instance. Nevertheless,
the tendency in some traditions to nail everything down in
great detail and claim that such stipulations are biblically sanctioned is
to “go beyond what is written” (to use the Pauline phrase, 1 Cor 4:6).
It is at this point that perhaps I should comment on some
Reformed parodies of popular evangelical corporate worship services.
One that is circulating nicely on the Web at the moment is several
pages long: there is space here to include only some excerpts:
Fellowshippers shall enter the sanctuary garrulously, centering their
attention on each other, and gaily exchanging their news of the past
week.
If there be an overhead projector, the acolytes shall light it.
The Minister shall begin Morning Fellowship by chanting the greeting,
“Good Morning.” Then shall not more than 50% and not less
[sic] than 10% of the fellowshippers respond, chanting in this wise,
“Good Morning.” . . .
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The Glad-handing of the Peace: Then may the Minister say: “Why
don’t we all shake hands with the person on our left and on our
right and say ‘Good morning.’” . . .
The Reading: Then shall be read an arbitrary Scripture passage of the
Minister’s choosing, so long as it does not relate to the time of the
Church year. . . .
And much more of the same, becoming progressively more amusing.
But before we laugh too hard, we should perhaps analyze why this is
funny. It is amusing because there is an obvious clash between the categories
of traditional, liturgical worship (with copious references to
acolytes “lighting” something, chanting, slightly dented allusions to traditional
segments of the service, etc.) and the sheer informalism of
much evangelical corporate worship. But the plain fact of the matter
is that the liturgical template on which the evangelical informalism has
been grafted in order to construct this amusing piece has no particular
warrant in the New Testament.43
This is not to deny that experience may teach us better and worse
ways of leading corporate worship, or that there may be profound and
interlocking theological structures that undergird certain decisions
about corporate worship. It is to say that the New Testament does not
provide us with officially sanctioned public “services” so much as with
examples of crucial elements. We do well to admit the limitations of
our knowledge.
d. There is no mention of a lot of other things: drama, “special”
(performance) music, choirs, artistic dance, organ solos. Many churches
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43. It is at this point that I have most trouble with Robert E. Webber, Blended
Worship: Achieving Substance and Relevance in Worship (Peabody: Hendrickson,
1994). Webber usefully describes the corporate worship practices of a great breadth
of traditions and appreciates them all, movingly writing of his own participation in
many of them. Unfortunately, he offers very little biblical or theological justification
for his choices and recommendations, other than that he felt God was disclosing himself
through this or that service. The theological rootlessness and subjectivism of the
book are stunning, even though they are partially hidden behind transparent piety. In
some ways his later book, Planning Blended Worship: The Creative Mixture of Old
and New (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), is better. What a lot of people mean by “blended
worship” is not so much a blend as a lumpy stew. Webber is helpful in moving us
beyond our narrow horizons without succumbing to painful dissonance.
are so steeped in these or other traditions that it would be unthinkable
to have a Sunday morning service without, say, “special music”—
though there is not so much as a hint of this practice in the New Testament.
44 Some preferences are conditioned not only by the local
church but by the traditions of the country in which it is located. The
overwhelming majority of evangelical churches in America, especially
outside the mainline denominations, offer performance music almost
every Sunday. The overwhelming majority of denominationally similar
churches in Britain never have it.45
Occasionally attempts have been made to justify a “bells and smells”
approach to corporate worship on the basis of some of the imagery in
the Book of Revelation. In Revelation 5, for instance, incense is wafted
before God by the elders, and the incense is identified as “the prayers
of the saints.” Granted that this is an instance of the rich symbolism of
the Apocalypse, does it not warrant us to introduce similarly symbolladen
realities as aids to corporate worship? But this reasoning is misguided
on several fronts. So much of the symbolism of this book’s
apocalyptic is deeply rooted in the Old Testament world. In this case,
it calls to mind passages such as Psalm 141:2: “May my prayer be set
before you like incense; may the lifting up of my hands be like the
evening sacrifice.” In other words, the comparison is drawn between
David’s private prayers and the central institutions of the tabernacle
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44. By “special music” I am including not only the solos and small groups that a
slightly earlier generation of evangelical churches customarily presented but also the
very substantial number of “performance” items that current “worship teams” normally
include in services. These are often not seen by the teams themselves as “special
music” or “performance music,” but of course that is what they are.
45. There are many entailments to these cultural differences beyond the differences
in the corporate services themselves. For example, Britain, without much place
for “special music” in corporate worship, does not have to feed a market driven by the
search for more “special music.” Therefore, a great deal of intellectual and spiritual
energy is devoted to writing songs that will be sung congregationally. This has resulted
in a fairly wide production of new hymnody in more or less contemporary guise, some
of it junk, some of it acceptable but scarcely enduring, and some of it frankly superb.
By contrast, our addiction to “special music” means that a great deal of creative energy
goes into supplying products for that market. Whether it is good or bad, it is almost
never usable by a congregation. The result is that far more of our congregational pieces
are dated than in Britain, or are no more than repetitious choruses.
(and later temple)—which is precisely what is done away under the
new covenant. One avoids the obvious hermeneutical quagmires by
patiently asking the question, “So far as our records go, did Christians
in New Testament times use incense during corporate worship?”
e. Historically, some branches of the church have argued that if
God has not forbidden something, we are permitted to do it, and the
church is permitted to regulate its affairs in these regards in order to
establish good order (the Hooker principle, mentioned above). Others
have argued that the only things we should do in public worship are
those that find clear example or direct prescription in the New Testament,
lest we drift from what is central or impose on our congregations
things that their consciences might not be able to support (the
Regulative Principle, also mentioned above).
To attempt even the most rudimentary evaluation of this debate
would immediately double the length of this chapter. Besides, these
matters will surface again in later chapters. But four preliminary observations
may be helpful. First, historically speaking, both the Hooker
principle and the Regulative Principle have been understood and
administered in both a stronger and a more attentuated way, with
widely differing results. Some have appealed to Hooker to support
changes far beyond the appropriateness of prescribing or forbidding
vestments and the like; others have appealed to Hooker in defense of
a church-ordered prayer book. Some have appealed to the Regulative
Principle to ban all instruments from corporate worship and to sanction
only the singing of psalms; others see it as a principle of freedom
within limits: it recognizes that we are not authorized to worship God
“as we please” and that our worship must be acceptable to God himself
and therefore in line with his Word. In short, both the Hooker
principle and the Regulative Principle are plagued by complex debates
as to what they mean, today as well as historically.46 For many of the
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46. For example, the Regulative Principle, well articulated by the Westminster
divines, opposed the introduction of new observances in worship but does not deny
culturally appropriate arrangements of the circumstances of worship—which has generated
no little debate on what is meant by “circumstances.” See the discussion in
Clowney, “Presbyterian Worship,” 117ff.; and John M. Frame, Worship in Spirit and
protagonists, their interpretations are as certain, as immovable, and as
inflexible as the Rock of Gibraltar. Second, it must be frankly admitted
that both the Hooker principle and the Regulative Principle have
bred staunch traditionalists. Traditionalists who follow Hooker argue
that according to this principle the church has the right to regulate certain
matters, and endless innovation is a denial of that right. So stop
tampering with the Prayer Book! Traditionalists who follow the Regulative
Principle not only tend to adopt the simplest form of public worship
but tie it to traditional forms of expression (e.g., they will always
find fault with psalms set to contemporary music, preferring the metrical
psalms sung centuries ago).47 Third, both camps have also bred
pastors who are remarkably contemporary, thoroughly evangelical in
the best sense of that long-suffering term, and innovative in their leading
of corporate worship. In the Anglican tradition, for instance, one
thinks of John Mason’s duly authorized “experimental service” in Sydney,
which deserves circulation and evaluation among evangelical
Anglicans;48 in the Presbyterian tradition, one thinks of Tim Keller in
New York (but here I will say little for fear of embarrassing a fellow
contributor). Fourth, for all their differences, theologically rich and
serious services from both camps often have more common content
than either side usually acknowledges.
f. There is no single passage in the New Testament that establishes
a paradigm for corporate worship. Not a few writers appeal to
1 Corinthians 14. Yet the priorities of that chapter are set by Paul’s
agenda at that point, dealing with charismata that have gained too
prominent a place in public meetings. There is no mention of the
Lord’s Supper and no mention of public teaching by a pastor/elder—
even though other passages in Paul show that such elements played
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Truth (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1996), though on the latter, cf. the
review by Leonard R. Payton in Reformation and Revival 6/3 (1997): 227–35.
47. On these and related points, see John Frame, Contemporary Worship Music:
A Biblical Defense (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1997). See also Lee
Irons, “Exclusive Psalmody or New Covenant Hymnody?” at http://members.aol.com/
ironslee/private/Psalmody.htm.
48. John Mason, A Service for Today’s Church (Mosman: St. Clement’s Anglican
Church, 1997).
an important role in the corporate meetings of churches overseen by
the apostle.
g. First Corinthians 14 lays considerable stress on intelligibility. The
issue for Paul, of course, is tongues and prophecy: his concern is to
establish guidelines that keep undisciplined enthusiasm in check.
Frame49 applies the importance of intelligibility to the music that is
chosen. Although that is scarcely what the apostle had in mind, I doubt
that he would have been displeased by the application. Nevertheless,
there are complementary principles to bear in mind. Paul speaks of
“psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.” We may debate what is the full
range of musical styles to which this expression refers, but psalms are
certainly included—whether they are judged intelligible for our biblically
illiterate generation or not. Corporate meetings of the church,
however much God is worshiped in them, have the collateral responsibility
of educating, informing, and transforming the minds of those
who attend, of training the people of God in righteousness, of expanding
their horizons not only so that they better know God (and therefore
better worship him) but so that they better grasp the dimensions
of the church that he has redeemed by the death of his Son (and therefore
better worship him)—and that means, surely, some sort of exposure
to more than the narrow slice of church that subsists in one
particular subculture. The importance of intelligibility (in music, let
us say) must therefore be juxtaposed with the responsibility to expand
the limited horizons of one narrow tradition.50 Incidentally, the punch
of this observation applies both to churches trying to be so contemporary
that they project the impression that the church was invented yesterday
and to churches locked into a traditional slice that is no less
narrow but rather more dated.
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49. Worship in Spirit and Truth, passim.
50. One wishes, for instance, that more leaders were aware of a work such as
Andrew Wilson-Dickson, The Story of Christian Music: From Gregorian Chant to
Black Gospel. An Illustrated Guide to All the Major Traditions of Music in Worship
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996). This is not to suggest that every church should try
to incorporate every tradition: there is neither adequate time for, nor wisdom in, such
a goal. But if we are to transcend our own cultural confines, we ought to be making a
significant attempt to learn the traditions of brothers and sisters in Christ outside our
own heritage.
11. Numerous matters cry out for articulation in greater detail—
the various functions of the Lord’s Supper in the New Testament, for
example. But the primary focus of this section is to demonstrate and
illustrate ways in which the body of believers in corporate worship
strives “to align all the forms of their devout ascription of all worth to
God with the panoply of new covenant mandates and examples.”
Properly understood, this takes place “to bring to fulfillment the
glories of antecedent revelation.” In other words, the richest conformity
to new covenant stipulation is not some Marcion-like rejection
of the Old Testament but the fruit of a biblical-theological reading of
Scripture that learns how the parts of written revelation interlock along
the path of the Bible’s plotline. The result is a greater grasp of what
God has revealed and, ideally, a deeper and richer worship of the God
who has so wonderfully revealed himself.
12. At the same time, such worship is an “anticipation of the consummation.”
The climax of the massive theme of worship in the book
of Revelation lies in chapters 21–22. The New Jerusalem is built like
a cube—and the only cube of which we hear in antecedent Scripture
is the Most Holy Place. In other words, the entire city is constantly and
unqualifiedly basking in the unshielded glory of the presence of God.
There is no temple in that city, for the Lord God and the Lamb are its
temple. God’s people will see his face.51
But we must conduct ourselves here in the anticipation of this end.
Biblically faithful worship is orientated to the end. Even the Lord’s
Supper is “until he comes” and thus always an expectation of that coming,
a renewal of vows in the light of that coming. As Larry Hurtado has
put it:
More specifically, Christian worship could be re-enlivened and
enriched by remembering the larger picture of God’s purposes, which
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51. Cf. N. T. Wright, For All God’s Worth: True Worship and the Calling of the
Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 7: “The great multitude in Revelation which
no man can number aren’t playing cricket. They aren’t going shopping. They are worshipping.
Sounds boring? If so, it shows how impoverished our idea of worship has
become. At the centre of that worship stands a passage like Isaiah 33: your eyes will
see the king in his beauty; the LORD is our judge, the LORD is our ruler, the LORD
is our king; he will save us. Worship is the central characteristic of the heavenly life;
and that worship is focused on the God we know in and as Jesus.”
extend beyond our own immediate setting and time to take in all
human history and which promise a future victory over evil and a consummation
of redeeming grace. Apart from a hope in God’s triumph
over evil, apart from a confidence that Jesus really is the divinely
appointed Lord in whom all things are to find their meaning, Christian
acclamation of Jesus as Lord is a stupid thing, refuted and mocked
by the powerful, negative realities of our creaturehood: the political
and economic tyrannies, religious and irreligious forces, and social and
cultural developments that make Christian faith seem trivial and our
worship little more than a quaint avocation.52
Some Practical Conclusions
The brief list in this concluding section is suggestive rather than comprehensive.
Much more practical wisdom is provided in the remaining
chapters of the book.
1. If the line of argument in this chapter is biblically faithful, we
ought to avoid common misunderstandings of worship. Ferguson
identifies four of them: an external or mechanical interpretation
of worship, an individualistic interpretation, an emotional uplift
interpretation, and a performance interpretation.53 We might add
interpretations that restrict worship to experiences of cultus and, conversely,
interpretations of worship that are so comprehensive that no
place whatsoever is left for corporate worship.
2. Hindrances to excellent corporate worship are of various sorts.
For convenience, they may be broken into two kinds. On the one hand,
corporate worship may be stultified by church members who never
pray at home, who come to church waiting to be entertained, who are
inwardly marking a scorecard instead of participating in worship, who
love mere tradition (or mere innovation!) more than truth, who are so
busy that their minds are cluttered with the press of the urgent, who
are nurturing secret bitterness and resentments in the dark recesses
of their minds.
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52. Larry W. Hurtado, At the Origins of Christian Worship: The Context and
Character of Earliest Christian Devotion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 116.
53. The Church of Christ, 227–29.
On the other hand, corporate worship may be poor primarily
because of those who are leading. There are two overlapping but distinguishable
components. The first is what is actually said and done.
That is a huge area that demands detailed consideration, some of
which is provided in later chapters. But the second component, though
less easily measurable, is no less important. Some who publicly lead
the corporate meetings of the people of God merely perform; others
are engrossed in the worship of God. Some merely sing; some put on
a great show of being involved; but others transparently worship God.
It is worth pausing over this word “transparently.” By asserting that
“others transparently worship God,” I am indicating that to some
extent we can observe how well we are being served by those who lead
corporate worship: their conduct is “transparent.” The way they lead
must in the first instance be marked by faithfulness to the Word of
God: that is certainly observable, in particular to those who know their
Bibles well. But the way they lead can be measured not only in terms
of formal content but also in terms of heart attitudes that inevitably
manifest themselves in talk, body language, focus, and style. Some pray
with strings of evangelical clichés; some show off with orotund phrasings;
others pray to God out of profound personal knowledge and bring
the congregation along with them.54 Some preach without punch; others
speak as if delivering the oracles of God.
What is at stake is authenticity. Some wag has said that Americans
work at their play, play at their worship, and worship their work. But
sooner or later Christians tire of public meetings that are profoundly
inauthentic, regardless of how well (or poorly) arranged, directed, performed.
We long to meet, corporately, with the living and majestic God
and to offer him the praise that is his due.
3. The question of authenticity in corporate worship intersects with
some urgent questions of contemporary evangelism. First, one of the
passions that shapes the corporate meetings of many churches (especially
in the “seeker-sensitive” tradition) is the concern for evangelism,
the concern to tear down barriers that prevent particular people
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54. I am referring now, of course, not to a particular style, but to a Spirit-anointed
authenticity that in large part transcends matters of style.
groups from coming and hearing the gospel. The “homogeneous unit”
principle, at one time associated with particular tribes, has now been
extended to generations: busters cannot be effectively evangelized with
boomers, and so forth. But somewhere along the line we must evaluate
what place we are reserving in our corporate life for tearing down
the barriers that the world erects—barriers between Jew and Gentile,
blacks and whites, boomers and busters. How does our corporate life
reflect the one new humanity that the New Testament envisages? Is
there not some need for Christians from highly different backgrounds
to come together and recite one creed, read from one Scripture, and
jointly sing shared songs, thereby crossing race gaps, gender gaps, and
generation gaps, standing in a shared lineage that reaches back through
centuries and is finally grounded in the Word? This does not mean that
everything has to be old-fashioned and stodgy. It does mean that those
in the Reformed tradition (for instance) do well to wonder now and
then what would happen if John Calvin were an “Xer.”55
Second, one of the most compelling witnesses to the truth of the
gospel is a church that is authentic in its worship—and here I use the
word worship in the most comprehensive sense but certainly including
corporate worship. A congregation so concerned not to cause
offense that it manages to entertain and amuse but never to worship
God either in the way it lives or in its corporate life carries little credibility
to a burned-out postmodern generation that rejects linear
thought yet hungers for integrity of relationships. Because we are concerned
with the truth of the gospel, we must teach and explain;
because we are not simply educating people but seeking to communicate
the glorious gospel of Christ, the authenticity of our own relationship
with him, grounded in personal faith and in an awareness not
only of sins forgiven and of eternal life but also of the sheer glory and
majesty of our Maker and Redeemer, carries an enormous weight.
4. Not every public service can fruitfully integrate everything that
the New Testament exemplifies of corporate meetings. Not every
meeting will gather around the Lord’s Supper, not every meeting will
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55. That line comes from Scot Sherman, “If John Calvin Were an ‘Xer’. . . . Worship
in the Reformed Tradition,” re:generation 3/1 (Winter 1997): 22–25.
allow for the varied voices of 1 Corinthians 14, and so forth. But that
means that, in order to preserve the comprehensiveness of New Testament
church life, we need to plan for different sorts of meetings.
5. In every tradition of corporate worship, there are many ways in
which a leader may greatly diminish authentic, godly, biblically faithful
worship. Those in more liturgical traditions may so greatly rely on
established forms that instead of leading the congregation in thoughtful
worship of the living God, the entire exercise becomes mechanical
and dry, even though the forms are well-loved and well-known expressions
that are historically rooted and theologically rich. (Consider the
pastor who, right in the middle of holy communion, interrupts his flow
to tell the warden to shut a window.) Those in less liturgical traditions
may retreat into comfortable but largely boring clichés: the freedom
and creativity that is the strength of the “free church” tradition is
squandered where careful planning, prayer, and thought have not gone
into the preparation of a public meeting. Indeed, such planning may
borrow from many traditions. I recently attended a Christmas service
in a Reformed Baptist church in which there were not only the traditional
Christmas Scripture readings and Christmas carols, but the corporate
reading, from the prepared bulletin, of the Nicene Creed, the
prayer of confession from Martin Bucer’s Strasbourg Liturgy, and a
prayer of thanksgiving from the Middleburg Liturgy of the English
Puritans.
6. Small ironies surface when the essays in this book are read
together. Sometimes churches that have the strongest denominational
heritage of liturgies and prayer books, aware of the dangers of mere
rote, and newly alive to the demands of biblical theology, become the
vanguard that warns us against mere traditionalism. Knowing how Old
Testament terminology has so often been abused when it has been
unthinkingly applied to the church, they become nervous about using
the term “sanctuary” when referring to the biggest room in the church
building and will never speak of a “service.” Conversely, churches from
the most independent traditions, aware of the dangers of open-ended
subjectivism and spectacularly undisciplined corporate meetings, and
newly alive to the glories of public worship as a reflection of entire lives
devoted to the living God, incorporate increasing solemnity, liturgical
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responses, corporate readings, and the like. They do not hesitate to use
terms like “sanctuary” and “service”—not because they associate such
terms with either Old Testament structures of thought or with sacramentarianism,
but (rightly or wrongly) out of respect for tradition.56
But perhaps the most intriguing irony is how much the best of the
corporate meetings of both traditions, matters of terminology aside,
resemble each other in what is actually said and done. Nowadays, the
actual shape of a Sunday morning “service” (meeting?) varies more
within denominations (from the seeker-sensitive party to the charismatic
party to the more Reformed party) than across denominations
when comparing similar parties. For those (like the writers of this volume)
committed to “worship under the Word,” minor differences in
terminology and strategy surface here and there, while the fundamental
priorities are remarkably similar, as is also the shape of their
Sunday morning meetings.
7. Not long ago, after I had spoken on the subject of biblical worship
at a large metropolitan church, one of the elders wrote to me to
ask how I would try to get across my main points to children (fourth to
sixth graders, approximately ages ten to twelve). He was referring in
particular to things I had said about Romans 12:1–2. I responded by
saying that kids of that age do not absorb abstract ideas very easily
unless they are lived out and identified. The Christian home, or the
Christian parent who obviously delights in corporate worship, in
thoughtful evangelism, in self-effacing and self-sacrificing decisions
within the home, in sacrificial giving for the poor and the needy and
the lost—and who then explains to the child that these decisions and
actions are part of gratitude and worship to the sovereign God who has
loved us so much that he gave his own Son to pay the price of our sin—
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56. One correspondent pressed further and asked what would happen if we could
somehow put all our histories and traditions to one side and begin from scratch and
then tried to label and speak of our corporate life, judging only by the terminology
and theology of the New Testament. I take his point—but that is precisely what we
cannot do. All of us speak and think and interact within a historical context, a context
that needs reforming by the Word but that cannot be ignored. Moreover, I wonder if
my interlocutor would like to construct all of his theology without benefit of historical
insight, good and bad.
will have far more impact on the child’s notion of genuine worship than
all the lecturing and classroom instruction in the world. Somewhere
along the line it is important not only to explain that genuine worship
is nothing more than loving God with heart and soul and mind and
strength and loving our neighbors as ourselves, but also to show what
a statement like that means in the concrete decisions of life. How
utterly different will that child’s thinking be than that of the child who
is reared in a home where secularism rules all week but where people
go to church on Sunday to “worship” for half an hour before the
sermon.
“Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our
Maker; for he is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the
flock under his care. Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your
hearts” (Ps 95:6–8).
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