personal trainer

the word in worship

Give Praise to God: A Vision for Reforming Worship: Celebrating the Legacy of James Montgomery Boice (P&R Publishing: 2003) contains a helpful essay by Terry L. Johnson and J. Ligon Duncan III entitled "Reading and Praying the Bible in Corporate Worship."  I'll just comment on the first half of that scheme for this post, that is, the practice of reading scripture during formal worship. 

For the most part, I have grown up in a tradition that got through everything in the "pre-service" fairly quickly in order to get to the so-called main thing, which was the preaching of the Word.  The churches of my youth and early ministry were influenced by a degree of Presbyterianism and so usually included the reading of the sermon text and a lengthy pastoral prayer.  Sometimes the prayer would include scripture, but for the most part is was more of a scripturally informed prayer, laced with theology, thinly-veiled exhortation, and intercession.  Real intentionality, especially as it relates to a systematic reading of the word over an extended period of time, didn't exist.  That kind of reading was encouraged in the lives of individual congregants, but it was expected the work would be done outside of the context of public worship. 

In a pursuit of worship that is more God-centered, theologically correct, historically informed, and characterized by beauty and excellence to a significant degree, we find ourselves including more and more scripture.  For example, the call to worship is typically a responsive reading with the congregation from the Psalms.  This is followed by a prayer of confession and an assurance of forgiveness also lifted directly from the text.  Here is what last week's service looked like following this pattern:

Call to Worship:

Leader: God be with you!
People: And also with you!
Leader:  The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.
People:  This is the LORD’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.
Leader: This is the day which the LORD has made;
People: Let us rejoice and be glad in it (Ps. 118:22-24).

Leader:  Lift up your heads, O Gates!  And be lifted up, O ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in.  Who is this King of glory?  The LORD, strong and mighty, the LORD, mighty in battle!  Lift up your heads, O gates!  And lift them up, O ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in.  Who is this King of glory?  The LORD of hosts, he is the king of glory (Psalm 24:3-4 ESV)!

Confession of Sins: 

Leader:  O LORD, You have searched us and known us. 
People:  You know our sitting down and rising up; You understand our thoughts afar off. 
Leader:  Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my anxieties; and see if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. 
People:  I acknowledged my sin to You, and my iniquity I have not hidden.  I said, I will confess my transgressions to the LORD, Amen.

The Blessing of Forgiveness: 

Leader:  If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (I John 1:9).

I know this is child's play when compared to a congregation trained in careful liturgical worship, but it is a good growth process for a non-denominational congregation unaccustomed to lengthy responsive passages and significant worship participation.  The great value of opening the worship hour with these texts is that our minds are immediately engaged by Scripture.  For those whose hearts are prepared and Spirit-led, the ongoing process of mind-renewal (Romans 12:1-2) continues from the outset.  This is far better than some comment upon the weather, a current event, or worse yet, the home team's victory on the gridiron the day before.  Nevertheless, it is still hard for some who think we have lost something vital when we lose spontaneity.  The spontaneous worship leader tends to devolve to self, humor, theological jargon, or some other religious-speak to help the congregation along.

Of course, great attention must be given to the formal public reading of scripture as well (1 Tim. 4:13).  No command regarding congregational worship could be more clear, and yet how paltry the attention given in many evangelical churches to this vital aspect of our gathering before God.  I am especially challenged by Johnson & Duncan's essay here.  Where I normally read the text to be exposited, with some explanation and context setting at the front end, the authors challenge the shepherd to consider a much more systematic and thorough reading of scripture.  So I think one of our goals next year will be to read through one of the gospels in our congregational reading.  Here are their encapsulated points:

1.  When the public reading of scripture is neglected an essential aspect of worship is irreparably lost.
2.  The public reading of scripture is a means of grace.
3.  The public reading of scripture ought to be done by those responsible for the preaching.
4.  The minister ought to endeavor to read all of scripture to his people.
5.  The minister ought to read from the best available translation.
6.  The minister ought to exercise common sense in deciding how much scripture to read at once.
7.  The minister ought to keep a balance of reading between the two testaments.
8.  The minister ought to develop an orderly plan for reading the scripture.
9.  The minister ought to pick up where he left off.
10.  The minister ought to make regular use of exceptionally edifying portions of scripture like the psalms.
11.  The minister ought to make brief explanatory remarks about the reading.

Flotsam & Jetsam (8.30.06)

On liturgy, as observed in Israel's failure at the Golden Calf Incident:

"...The Apostasy is more subtle.  There is no obvious turning away from God to the false gods.  Outwardly, the people remain completely attached to the same God.  They want to glorify the God who led Israel out of Egypt and believe that they may very properly represent his mysterious power in the image of a bull calf....And yet it is a falling away from the worship of God to idolatry.  This apostasy, which outwardly is scarcely perceptible, has two causes. 

First, there is a violation of the prohibition of images.  The people cannot cope with the invisible, remote, and mysterious God.  They want to bring him down into their world, into what they can see and understand.  Worship is no longer going up to God, but drawing God down into one's own world.  He must be there when he is needed, and he must be the kind of God that is needed.  Man is using God, and in reality, even if it is not outwardly discernible, he is placing himself above God. 

This gives us a clue to the second point.  The worship of the golden calf is a self-generated cult.  When Moses stays away for too long, and God himself becomes inaccessible, the people just fetch him back.  Worship becomes a feast that the community gives itself, a festival of self-affirmation.  Instead of being worship of God, it becomes a circle closed in on itself: eating, drinking, and making merry.  The dance around the golden calf is an image of this self-seeking worship.  It is a kind of banal self-gratification.  The narrative of the golden calf is a warning about any kind of self-initiated and self-seeking worship.  Ultimately, it is no longer concerned with God but with giving oneself a nice little alternative world, manufactured from one's own resources. 

The liturgy really does become pointless, just fooling around.  Or still worse it becomes an apostasy from the living God, and apostasy in sacral disguise.  All that is left in the end is frustration, a feeling of emptiness.  There is no experience of that liberation which always takes place when man encounters the living God."

Bonus points if you can identify the author.

On Confession

For a period of time last year we added lengthy and sometimes specific times of confession to our worship service.  This focus usually consisted of a responsive reading that ran something like the following:

Leader: Let us humbly confess our sins to Almighty God.   

All: Most Holy and merciful Father, we confess to you, to one another, that we have sinned against you by our own fault in thought, word and deed; by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart, and mind, and strength. We have not loved neighbors as ourselves. We have not forgiven others, as we have been forgiven.

Leader: We have been deaf to your call to serve as Christ served us. We have not been true to the mind of Christ. We have grieved your Holy Spirit.

All: We confess to you, Lord, all our past unfaithfulness: the pride, hypocrisy, and impatience of our lives.

Leader: Our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people, 

All: Our anger at our own frustration, and our envy of those more fortunate than ourselves. 

Leader: Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts, and our dishonesty in daily life and work, 

All: Our negligence in prayer and worship, and our failure to commend the faith that is in us, 

Leader: Accept our repentance, Lord, for the wrongs we have done; for our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty, 

All: For all false judgments, for uncharitable thoughts toward our neighbors, and for our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us. 

All: Restore us, good Lord, and let your anger depart from us; Hear us, Lord, for your mercy is great.

However, some of the congregants thought it disinguenuous to consider sins they did not think they had committed.  So we adopted a more general kind of confession, resembling what you may find in the Book of Common Prayer:

Out of the depths we cry to You, O Lord; in Your mercy, hear our prayers. 

All: We confess that formerly we were dead in sin, cut off from You, cut off from each other, rebels wandering in a wilderness of our own making. We long to put off the sin that so easily entangles, but in our own strength, Lord, we cannot. 

Leader: Father in heaven, deliver us from temptation!

All: The human heart is deceitful above all things; how dare we trust in ourselves? Pride and greed make their home within, and we so quickly turn to worship anything but You. 

Leader: Answer my prayers, O LORD, for your unfailing love is wonderful. Turn and take care of me, for your mercy is so plentiful. 

All: Finally, I confessed all my sins to you and stopped trying to hide them. I said to myself, “I will confess my rebellion to the LORD.” 

Leader: And you forgave me! All my guilt is gone.  The Lord says, “I will guide you along the best pathway for your life. I will advise you and watch over you.” 

All: So open our eyes that we may see wonderful things out of your word.

Though I understand the difficulty of confessing a sin or sins that one does not necessarily believe they have committed, I think it healthy to ponder sins we may not always consider our own.  Is it possible the Holy Spirit may use such a naming to cleanse us of hidden faults?  I see the wisdom of confessing the glittering generalities in the BCP, but I also found it wholesome to stick a needle in now and then to see if it draws blood.

Confession as an Act of Worship

We have a fairly intentional order to our worship service on Sunday mornings.  We are not overly liturgical, but for a congregation made up of people from mostly non-liturgical backgrounds it is a work in progress.  Part of this order includes a time for personal confession of sins.  Often this will be a responsive reading from one of the penitential psalms, and include a time for silent personal reflection.  This past week the following responsive prayer was rehearsed by the congregation before our scripture reading:

Pastor: Most Holy and merciful Father, we confess to you, to one another, that we have sinned against you by our own fault in thought, word and deed; by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart, and mind, and strength. We have not loved neighbors as ourselves. We have not forgiven others, as we have been forgiven.

All: We have been deaf to your call to serve as Christ served us. We have not been true to the mind of Christ. We have grieved your Holy Spirit.

Pastor: We confess to you, Lord, all our past unfaithfulness: the pride, hypocrisy, and impatience of our lives.

All: Our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people,

Pastor: Our anger, frustration, and our envy of those more fortunate than ourselves.

All: Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts, and our dishonesty in daily life and work,

Pastor: Our negligence in prayer and worship, and our failure to commend the faith that is in us,

All: Restore to me the joy of Your salvation, and uphold me by Your generous Spirit. Then I will teach transgressors Your ways, and sinners shall be converted to You. Open our eyes, that we may see wonderful things out of your law. Amen.

A couple members in our congregation were not comfortable with the text.  It seemed to imply they were guilty of sins they did not think they had committed.  What if a visitor came in and found a congregation going on like this, wouldn't they consider us morbid?  How would you respond, and how does this fit in with the regulative principle, as recently reviewed by Bauder?  Should we just stick to a biblical text?  Should a congregation spend time in confession of sins at all?  At least, you may (or may not) be relieved to hear I do not offer absolution (in the name of Christ).

Recovering Mother Kirk: Reflections

This evening I found most of the entire first chapter of Hart's work in an essay at Touchstone here. You can decide if my summaries have done it justice.  The purpose of this post is to look back on the chapter and share some thoughts.

Hart is obviously appealing for low-church Presbyterians to move toward a high-church model.  This is removed from where we are as a free-church congregation.  I was raised in a non-denominational bible church founded by a man that came out of mainline Presbyterianism in the 1930's.  Many streams fed that first church:  revivalism, pietism, a loose form of Presbyterian polity mixed with Baptist congregationalism, fundamentalism, militant separatism, dispensationalism, an infrequent, but reverent observance of the Lord's table, and a mixture of Calvinism and Arminianism.   

The church that I pastor would be considered a third generation descendent of that church.  We are more reformed in doctrine, elder-rule in polity, more mildly dispensational, concerned for demonstrating both the purity and the unity of the church (realizing there is not one without the other), and baptistic in our view of the ordinances (not hung up on mode of baptism, though we practice immersion).  The list could be extended.

Having grown up in the "free-church" all my life, and having pastored for fifteen years (as an assistant for 8 yrs, and as an elder/pastor who is compensated for laboring in the word for 7 yrs--still a short time, I know), I find myself with several concerns for our local assembly.  Many of these have to do with finding a reference point outside of ourselves to which we are accountable, and that will sustain us in future generations. 

Of course, Christ is the Lord of the Church.  He is the Head of the Body, and we must be yielded to the Holy Spirit as we are led into truth through the process of study and illumination.  We must trust Him implicitly to be our Guide and Anchor.  The Word contains all the instruction we need for faith and practice; it is our inerrant and God-breathed authority.  We have the foundation of the Apostles and prophets upon which to build. 

It is just this foundation to which we find ourselves drawn, as well as to the work of others who have long labored in the same love.  Here is what we are finding important: 

--expositional preaching (dependent upon a second rate expositor and communicator at present)
--the maintenance of church discipline
--guarding a regenerate membership
--body life as expressed in small groups and "one another" relationships--here is where discipleship and accountable relationships can/should take place
--a more careful liturgy (praying scripture, confession, reciting the Apostle's Creed, moments of silence, music that is God-centered, theologically accurate, sung in a style appropriate to the occasion, and characterized by beauty and excellence to a significant degree, more frequent observance of the Lord's table, etc)
--a life lived transparently between two worlds (eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we live) from which one may witness authentically to the Gospel, etc.

We are far from Hart's high church model, but we are drawn to the roots of creed and confession.  We are not sacramental, but we want to repent of our self-sufficiency and lack of gospel-centeredness.  We are not denominational, but we are so radically independent, that the Church (capital C) is too far removed from our thoughts, prayers, and lives.  We do not believe that adopting a set liturgy or form will rejuvenate Christ's Body (either locally or more broadly), but we have been far too careless in how we worship our Lord and nurture faith in our community. 

Our congregation represents a breadth of church affiliations.  Though we are small, we have members and adherents from these groups:  ELCA, PCA, OPC, LCWS, SBC, Methodist, Roman Catholic, Mormon, Independent Baptist, Independent Bible, and unchurched.  I am sure there are others.  We enjoy the diversity in our group, but we also have a healthy unity around the creed and our core confession.  It enables us to be transparent about our differences where some denominations might demand uniformity.  I believe we have been able to draw from a number of denominational backgrounds because we are more careful in our liturgy.  Though we do not strictly follow the BCP, or the church year, or various rites, there is enough formality and carefulness in worship and philosophy of ministry to guard it, by God's grace, from becoming overly enthusiastic, programmatic, seeker-driven, or worldly.   

That is where we are in our journey.  There are some aspects of congregational life with which we are quite satisfied, but others that are burdensome and imbalanced.  For example, it will take some time to drive fundamentalism’s internal focus and fear out of our hearts so that we can truly love and give ourselves for those different than we are.  I appreciate the overall emphasis of Hart's work without sensing a need to adopt the high-church view he advocates. I don’t have reference points in his world (no doubt that blinds me to some of the implications of what he is saying). Some aspects of our theology won't let us go there anyway.  And at the end of the day, we don't want to replace a man-centered congregational life with a Spiritless dead orthodoxy (not that this is where high-church liturgy implicitly leads).  As others have noted before, we seek orthodoxy (right doctrine), orthopraxy (right practice--wisdom), and orthopathy (right affections).  God help us to find our way, but the point is, we tread where others have walked, and we do so on their shoulders.

Recovering Mother Kirk (pt 6)

    The last section of the first chapter of D.G. Hart's book, Recovering Mother Kirk, is entitled:  Church as Mother or Personal Trainer?  I must admit to a special affinity for the heading (for obvious reasons); it is a unique comparison (the previous five entries concerning the book can be found under this heading).

    Hart contrasts two ways in which congregants may view their local assembly, either as nurturer or coach.  If the latter, then church is a hub of activity in which "God requires good works to be performed."  While the citizens of Christendom go about the business of being good Christians in Vanity Fair, they stop in at the church once or twice a week to recharge their batteries, display their energy and enthusiasm, and get fired up through pep talks and personal enrichment classes.   If on the other hand, church is viewed as mother, pilgrims come to her seeking the grace of God through the ordained means of preaching, sacrament, and life under authority.  There is no life without an intimate relationship to her. 

    Hart rightly points out that one's view of the church is intimately connected to one's view of self.  "Chances are that an impoverished estimate of the church stems directly from an overly high estimate of one's self....Less confidence about our abilities and a greater recognition of our infirmities would lead to a different view of the church."  As an illustration to reveal our true heart's position, Hart wonders how desirous we are of regular observance of the Lord's Table.  Do we really believe that we stand in need of God's grace as revealed on the Cross (skip whether or not you believe real grace is offered in the partaking--my interjection not Hart's)?  If so, then that need will be expressed in a regular attendance at the Table, a need to be there.  Hart is critical of low-church Presbyterians who only celebrate the sacrament twelve times a year.  If the Israelites had ceased eating the manna because it was the same meal everyday, they would have perished in the wilderness. 

    Hart recognizes that simply adding forms or high-church liturgy to worship will not produce a dependence on mother church.  If we are to recover the idea of church as mother, then a change of heart is required.  Congregants "need to learn that the ministry of the church is a means of grace."  Correct words, forms, prayers, hymns, and sermons are essential, and God promises to use them, but "high-church liturgy requires a high-church piety."  Hart commends a return to the appetite Christ commends in John 6--a hunger for the very Bread of Life.

"For there is no other way to enter into life unless this mother conceive us in her womb, give us birth, nourish us at her breast, and lastly, unless she keep us under her care and guidance until, putting off mortal flesh, we become like angels" (John Calvin).

Recovering Mother Kirk (Not Mother Fundamentalism) (pt 5)

You can find the previous entries to this subject here (pt 1), here (pt 2), here (pt 3), and here (pt4). 

In D.G. Hart's work, Recovering Mother Kirk: The Case for Liturgy in the Reformed Tradition, he posits that those in the Reformed tradition accomplish the opening theme ("the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever") of the Westminster Shorter Catechism in one of three ways: by emphasizing doctrine, by stressing the comprehensiveness of the Reformed worldview to all of life, and by embracing a Reformed piety (experimental Calvinism).

I've noted in the former posts that Hart is contending for a high-church view of worship dedicated to a reformed liturgy.  Hart believes that many (most?) Presbyterian congregations have abandoned their high-church view of worship and replaced it with a low-church mentality.  The low-church tradition is the result of the influence of Puritanism, the effects of pietism, and an attachment to revivalism.

The influence of Puritanism:  The Puritans were champions of the regulative principle--the idea that only what is prescribed in Scripture should find place in our public worship, and that other forms, even though not sinful in themselves, should be excluded.  One of their primary motivations in adopting this viewpoint is the idea of individual conscience.  Since the order of worship is something in which everyone in attendance must participate, the church must be careful not to include extra-biblical elements that may offend some worshipers. Only scripture can bind the conscience, so only those elements of worship expressly commanded in scripture should be employed in the worship of God.   This is all well and good, but the Puritans also had an aversion to outside authority and disdained set forms of prayer and liturgy because they were thought to bind the consciences of those responsible for worship.  So the Puritans opposed the Book of Common Prayer and any hint of Catholic liturgy in worship, resulting in a loss of the liturgical uniformity that John Calvin encouraged.  It is ironic that Presbyterians find unity in theology (Westminster Confession) and polity (Form of Government and Book of Church Discipline), but not in liturgy. 

The effects of pietism and revivalism:  Hart believes the aversion to liturgical order for the sake of liberty of conscience is often a "smokescreen for an experiential piety that is at odds with the formality inherent in set liturgies."  He traces this current back to the revivals of the eighteenth century when the idea was propagated that sincerity and set forms were incompatible.  Hart quotes Charles Hodge regarding written prayers, "tend[ing] to formality, and [they] cannot be an adequate substitute for the warm outgoings of the heart moved by the spirit of genuine devotion."  The churches turned from set forms, tradition, and ordinances to an antiformalism expressed by "an affair of the heart" and a "yoke of enthusiasm." 

Hart holds this practice up to closer scrutiny.  If a church member can sing the words of a poet, read the words of an apostle, and hear the words of the pastor, why can they not pray the words of another?  Indeed, if our worship is going to be done decently and in order, we should pray in unison in the same manner we sing in unison, or I should embrace the words of my pastor as he prays, for it is an intercessory prayer for the whole congregation.  At the end of the day Hart does not believe Evangelicals are opposed to expressing devotion through the words of another, they are opposed to the hierarchical authority implicit in a set liturgy. 

Contemporary Presbyterians become edgy at the prospect of submitting to present-day church officers.  Such submission appears to be a breach of the priesthood of all believers.  Yet if they can acknowledge that God appoints human authorities to oversee the civil and familial realms, why do they see ecclesiastical authorities as inherently suspect?....The answer, obviously, points to the strong tie between hostility to liturgy and to anticlericalism.  More often than not, Presbyterians oppose liturgy because they refuse to acknowledge the legitimate authority of church officers.

Hart concludes that Evangelical Presbyterians have replaced the genius of the Reformation with the experience of revivalism.  The key to church health is not a large number of conversions or earnestness on the part of adherents, it is the Word faithfully preached, the sacraments faithfully administered, and the congregation rightly disciplined. 

The evangelical concept of dead orthodoxy was virtually unknown prior to the revivals of the eighteenth century. Instead, the issue was whether a church was false or true.  In the minds of Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer, the way to distinguish the true church was by looking above all at the forms used in worship and the ways in which ordination took place.  These matters were unambiguous....But to tell whether a church or person was spiritually alive, revived, or dead was not so certain, and unfortunately, ever since the First Great Awakening, Presbyterians have been more attentive to the invisible work of the Spirit rather than the visible work of the church, a form of alertness that is doomed to frustration because of the Spirit's mysterious movements.

On Beauty

Over the course of the last four weeks we have been pursuing the concept of beauty during our Sunday AM worship service.  I will not attempt to go into any detail here, but I will present some skeletal thoughts for your consideration and further reflection.  Please take the time to look at the attached jpeg.  It is an attempt to put some of these ideas into a model to aid discussion.  These are just seminal thoughts...meant to be corrected, built upon, etc.

Suggested references:   Ps. 27:4; 90:17; 96:6,9; John 1:14, 18; 14:6; 17:17; Rm. 12:1-2; I Cor. 2:6-16; 2 Cor. 3-4; Phil. 1:3-11; 4:8; Col. 2:16-3:4; 1 Jn. 2:15-16

1.   Truth, beauty and goodness exist supremely in the Triune God

"Too late came I to love thee, O thou Beauty both so ancient and so fresh" (Augustine).

"Nothing so beautiful except the true; the true is worth loving; it should reign everywhere, even in fables" (Boileau).

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever, its loveliness increases, it will never pass into nothingness" (Hyperion). 

2.  Truth, beauty, and goodness are revealed perfectly in the person of Jesus Christ.

"Whether you know it or not, all the longings of your life for beauty are longings for this:  the light of the gospel of the beauty of Christ who is the image of God" (John Piper). 

3.  Elements (remnants) of truth, beauty, and goodness are to be found in natural revelation (creation) and culture (human creativity).

4.  Truth, beauty, and goodness may be known to some degree and pursued by both regenerate (illuminated) and unregenerate (common grace) persons.

5.  Regenerate man must seek to discern truth, beauty and goodness in every aspect of life under the sun and embrace them; they reflect the glory of the Creator.

6.  Regenerate man may discern what is not truth, goodness and beauty and guards against a world system seeking to re-create the believer in its own image.

7.  A process of discernment:

1.  The reproduction (music, art, literature, film, etc) is considered judgmentally (objective standard) and sentimentally.  Taste is perceiving, enjoying, judging (Burch).

2.   Does it embody the qualities of aesthetic excellence?

3.   We have different capacities for discerning these qualities (knowledge/experience); we can improve these skills in any given field.

4.   Experts (people who know most about a given field) are excellent reference points for making informed choices.

Summary:  Truth, beauty, and goodness exist ideally in God alone.  God may be known in creation, and natural law, but especially in the revelation of Jesus Christ--the embodiment of all of God's attributes incarnate; the supreme portrait of God.  Since beauty is especially apparent in the relationship of God's attributes to one another (the landscape of His character), Jesus Christ is the exegesis of God's beauty (John 1:18).  We see the beauty of God in the person and work of Christ.

The believer is to set his affection on things above; he is to pursue those things that are excellent as his knowledge increases with wisdom and all discernment; he is to be changed into the glory of Christ as he meditates on the mind of Christ as given him in the Word.  This fleshes out in a pursuit of the qualities listed in Phil. 4:8:  true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, good repute, excellence, and praiseworthy. 

True           Thought           Theory              Mind              Orthodoxy 

Good         Action               Praxis               Will              Orthopraxy

Beautiful    Passion           Creativity          Emotion          Orthopathy

This should serve as a good launching point to pick up our discussion of taste again.  How is taste molded, shaped, formed, refined by this process?  Thoughts?

Recovering Mother Kirk (pt 4)

In Recovering Mother Kirk: The Case for Liturgy in the Reformed Tradition, D. G. Hart asks the question, "Can Presbyterians be high-church?"  I think many mainstream Evangelicals would be confused by that question, thinking Presbyterians already are too formal, too authoritarian, and too liturgical.  Hart, however, believes Presbyterians of all stripes have sold their theological birthright for low-church views typical of American Protestantism as influenced by pietism and Puritanism.  Hart maintains it is a distortion of history to assert the Reformers had a high disdain for correct forms of liturgy, polity, or the role of the ordained ministry of the church.

The clearest distinction between high-church and low-church views is in the area of worship.  Hart says, "High-church liturgy is more formal and reserved, using approved forms and rituals, than low-church worship, which tends toward spontaneous and folksy expressions of devotion."  A search of the historical records of the first two hundred years of Reformed history (16th & 17th century) reveals worship that is carefully constructed and uniform; liturgical unanimity was as much the norm in some Reformed congregations as in English congregations following the Book of Common Prayer.  A number of European churches patterned their worship after the order established by Calvin in Geneva:

Invocation, Confession of Sins, Prayer for Pardon, Singing of a Psalm, Prayer for Illumination, Lessons from Scripture, Sermon, Collection of Offerings, Prayer of Intercession, Apostle's Creed, Words of Institution, Instruction and Exhortation, Communion, Prayer of Thanksgiving, Benediction

Save for the Presbyterians who have adopted a Praise & Worship liturgy (30 minutes of singing followed by 30 minutes of preaching), most Presbyterians follow this order to some degree, but neglect the high-church norms of composed prayer and other memorized forms.  Calvin wrote prayers for use in both church and home, and up until as late as 1987, the Christian Reformed Church included these in its denominational hymnals.  Most of us are quite uncomfortable with pre-written prayers, thinking them a sure sign of spiritual death, but Calvin lists reasons for preferring them:  1) some pastors just can't pray, 2) creates harmony between churches, and 3) eliminates giddiness and innovations. 

The practice of observing the Lord's Supper on a weekly basis is also an element of high-church worship, as well as Calvin's view of the real presence of Christ at the Table.  Hart notes some view the primacy given the sermon as intruding on the regular observance of the Table.  Since Calvin regarded baptism and the Lord's Table as visible expressions of the Word, he did not relegate them to a secondary place behind the sermon.  Those who stand in the Reformed Tradition should be quite comfortable with the language reflecting the sacraments as a means of grace, and not shrink from associations with sacerdotalism.  Hart says, "The Supper does not automatically confer grace, though something always happens, either in the form of blessing or curse....The good rituals are the Word and the sacraments; the bad ones are any rite or ceremony devised by human wisdom, no matter how well intended, that have no sanction in Scripture."

An emphasis on Sacrament certainly does not mean those in the Reformed tradition view preaching with low regard.  In fact, many regard thirty-minute sermons as too short and too tame.  The sermon is "a holy conversation between God and His people....Preaching is not simply a common act of speech through which the minister tries to get across a particular moral or doctrinal truth.  It is a holy activity that God has ordained to reveal himself in worship." 

This naturally leads to a high view of pastoral ministry.  Hart believes the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers has produced a "perverted" understanding of the role of ministers.  "If preaching really is the Word of God and if the sacraments really communicate the benefits of redemption, then the people who perform such acts are clearly different from other believers and should be set apart (ordained) to perform such holy tasks."  Or perhaps, Hart suggests, as believers go about their lives fulfilling the Great Commission they should carry a bit of water along with their Bibles to perform baptisms.  Right along with a high view of the ministry comes a high regard for church membership, the church calendar, and the Lord's Day. 

Hart concludes this section by acknowledging that many (most?) Presbyterian churches have abandoned their high-church heritage for a low-church mentality.  In the next section, he'll discuss how that happened. 

Recovering Mother Kirk (pt 3)

You can find the previous two entries on this topic here and here.

In D.G. Hart's work, Recovering Mother Kirk: The Case for Liturgy in the Reformed Tradition, he posits that those in the Reformed tradition accomplish the opening theme ("the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever") of the Westminster Shorter Catechism in one of three ways: by emphasizing doctrine, by stressing the comprehensiveness of the Reformed worldview to all of life, and by embracing a Reformed piety (experimental Calvinism).

Hart is not very satisfied with how the Presbyterian Church is accomplishing the task in worship, and addresses the issue in a chapter entitled "Is High-Church Presbyterianism an Oxymoron?" He begins by attempting to place the Presbyterian Church on an interesting scale: Baptists are Methodists with shoes, Presbyterians are Baptists who can read, Lutherans are Presbyterians who can drink to excess, and Episcopalians are Lutherans who know when to say when!

So for Hart, Presbyterians inhabit the moderate middle on Protestant ideas of liturgy and ministry. Baptists on the way up the scale need only deal with infant baptism to enter the Presbyterian Church, while some Presbyterians looking for high church forms find themselves in Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic traditions (Hart finds it strange that Lutheranism is seldom an option). Hart believes there is a high-church tradition in historical Presbyterianism that is "every bit as divinely appointed and liturgically well conceived as the best of the other traditions higher up the churchly scale."  Low-church Presbyterianism is the real oxymoron.

To be continued.