A Few Words On Worship

 The pull towards the glamorous and the exciting suggests that modern Christians continue to believe that the action is where the frenzy is. Worshipers still want the titillating, filled as it is with emotion. This accounts for why the local church service in the last 40 or so years has aped the tent revival feel with emotionally arresting music, vapid self-help sermons, and “spirit led” eccentricities. The reports one will get from such a “service” is how powerfully the spirit moved or how one could feel God’s presence.

I wonder though if God more often find us in the seemingly most barren of worship settings where a small group of people are gathered to sing simple psalms, in response to God’s greeting? Is the worship service characterized by Word and Sacrament more to be desired than the “worship” service that has all the glitz and glory that can be collected by drama teams, praise bands, and liturgical dance?

Rarely, does someone talk about how awe-inspiring it was to attend a Sunday worship service where God greets His people, where God’s people are privileged to hear God’s law, where confession of sin is made and where God speaks gospel absolution through His minister to comfort His contrite people. Rarely, do we hear people talk about the glory found in the Word faithfully broken from the pulpit, or about the presence of God in an infant baptism or in the fact that God condescended to lift us into the heavenlies so as to feed us eternal life in the Eucharist.

Christ meets us in the humblest of circumstances. He meets us in water. He meets us in bread and wine. He meets us in the Word preached. These are where Christ promises to feed us unto life eternal. It’s not as if those realities can’t be present in the context of large gathering… they certainly can be. However, more often than not all the marketing, sociology, polling and crowd psychology that goes into attracting large numbers means that the theology of the cross has been emptied out before the theology of glory show begins.

Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing automatically superior about small churches. They can fail just as spectacularly as large churches. The difference however is often in the mindset found in larger churches in the need to put on a show. Larger churches that have to pack them in, in order to keep the lights on are more prone to give a theology of glory in order to keep the wheels turning.

When it comes to worship maybe the simple and comparatively weak elements of a vertical liturgy, combined with Word and Sacrament are more to be desired than creating a mood via music and the most recent sociological technique known to really pack them in. It seems like we expect so much from our worship teams and yet we receive so little.

Years ago I read a letter by J. R. R. Tolkien to his son Christopher. The gist of it was counsel from a father to his son to look for God in places of worship that would be defined by our standards as weak and beggarly. It is often in the unexpected places that the Lord Christ condescends by His Spirit to revive the hearts of the weary by the means of water and bread and wine and the Word preached. This is the theology of the Cross. This is God using the foolishing things of the world to confound the wise and the things that are not to confound the things that are.

God is not interested in our emotions except as those emotions are the residue of minds that have clenched down hard on the Word preached. The Lord Christ is not primarily interested in what we get from worship. The Lord Christ is primarily interested in His people giving Him glory, honor and praise in worship. Worship is not about us. Worship is about the triune God, the sovereign over the whole universe. Yet, though Worship is primarily about our giving of praise, God condescends and comes near to us and bless us with Word and Sacrament and feeds us unto life eternal. Only in such a manner is our faith increased with the result that we become a blessing to God and to others.

Our Christianity in the West is a thousand miles wide but a quarter inch deep and this is in large part because there is no substance to us. As C. S. Lewis put it, “We are men without chests.” We are a shallow people and we are shallow, in part, because we have pursued in our worship a theology of glory over being satisfied with a theology of the cross. We are a shallow people in part because in our current worship arrangements we do not feast on the Word, preferring instead to pursue sugar highs found in vacuous music and simpleton horizontal sermons. A people will never rise higher than the god they serve and the god we serve in the West right now is a very small god as seen in and by the worship that we are attracted to and that we offer up. Our theology communicates a small god and our doxology reflects that.

In the words of an anonymous writer on social media;

“Luther diagnosed this long ago. The reason we flock to the spectacular and ignore the ordinary is because we are drawn to a theology of glory—we seek God in what dazzles, impresses, and moves our emotions. But God does not promise to be found in the showy things of our own making. He hides Himself under weakness. This is the theology of the cross. Baptism looks like nothing—just water. Preaching sounds like just words. The Supper appears as simple bread and wine. And the church? Small, unimpressive, overlooked. But these are the appointed places where the living Christ gives Himself to sinners. These are the means by which the Holy Spirit delivers salvation. These are the true high places of worship. The tragedy is that what God calls precious, we often find boring. What heaven calls glorious, we treat as mundane. God is not hiding in stadium lights and fog machines. He is found where He has promised to be—among the humble means of grace, in the midst of His visible Church. Do not despise the weak-looking things. That’s where Christ is.”

 

The One & The Many and Our Cultural Moment

For Christianity the cosmos was orderly because the Christian God is a God of order. In God’s creation the parts and the whole served one another in a diversity in unity and unity in diversity symphony — neither the particular nor the universal having dominion over the other. The universals recognized the need for the particulars and the particulars understood the need of the universals.

However, with the rebellion against God in favor of a time plus chance plus circumstance cosmos there is no longer an inherent given coherence to reality. With the abandonment of the eternal One and Many, the temporal one and many loses its way and where there previously been harmony between the temporal one and many there is now a conflict of interest between the temporal one and many.

What this looks like in the social order is a contest between tyranny and anarchy. Having thrown off God in favor of chaos, tyranny seeks to impose itself as a universal before which all particulars must bow. The tyrannical triumph of the temporal one over the temporal many means all things are defined in terms of the temporal one. Diversity is eclipsed in favor of unity. Social order and culture becomes a machine in which undistinguishable men and women and men from women works as universal cogs to support the Universal tyrannical one.

This social order and cultural unitarianism does not allow for mediating cultural institutions. All must serve and exist as derivative of the Tyrannical One (often the State). Everything is for state and nothing is outside the state. Individuality is lost in favor the Mao suit, the Phrygian cap… the comrade and the citoyen. Men become chameleons who all fade into the background provided by the tyrannical state.

On the other hand the triumph of the many is likewise a tyranny but it is a tyranny of the particular (many) over the one. In a anarchistic tyranny the unity (temporal One) is found in hyper-disunity (temporal Many). Each man does what is right in his own eyes. There is no harmony of interest because there is no Universal wherein one can find a harmony. Ironically enough, this leads right back to a beleaguered sameness that is found in the tyranny of the One, although instead of a unitarian motif found in dull sameness one gets the unitarian motif found in the dull sameness one finds in a garbage truck or scow. Precisely because there is no harmony the harmony is found in the lack of harmony, just as garbage in a garbage truck by having no relation to the sundry garbage there is a unity that is found in the negation of unity.

In cultures and social orders who have raised its fist to God the consequence is that often one will find both the anarchistic and the tyrannical temporal one and many operating in the social order and/or culture. In these kind of instances the tyrannical and the anarchistic serve as limiting concepts for one another in their ongoing attempt to have the pre-eminence with the result that there is a fluctuating dialectic that exists between the temporal godless one and the temporal godless many.

We see this phenomenon in our own social order culture. We see the temporal chaotic anarchistic many in the pursuit of much of the citizenry to be completely independent of any unifying social norms or mores. In that anarchistic pursuit away from social conventions people look increasingly the same with their slovenly dress, their tatted up appearance, and their guttural music. They have found a anarchistic unity of meaning in the embrace that there is no meaning.

At the same time we have the State here constantly seeking to provide a temporal tyrannical unitarian/uniformitarian meaning. From the continued increase of the surveillance state to the desire to have operate as a top down control mechanism (think pursuit of social credit arrangements, 15 minute cities, electric cars that can be remotely turned off, Artificial Intelligence, etc.) the Temporal One is seeking a tyrannical arrangement wherein all the anarchy is controlled so as to serve the tyrannical state.

The church likewise is caught in this push me – pull you with its embrace of alienism. By its refusal to understand the temporal one and many in light of the eternal one and many much of the Church today is embracing a unitarian/uniformitarian understanding of race/ethnicity so that the temporal many is swallowed up by the temporal one. The refusal to understand that there can be races in the context of the human race — races that are to be recognized and honored as unique — the Church in the West is currently joining in with the rebellion of the larger culture by denying the impact of the understanding of the temporal one and many in light of the eternal one and many. The Church is in lockstep with the culture insisting that diversity in unity and unity in diversity can not be allowed to exist.

Examining Doug Wilson’s Argument For The Differences Between Races

“Not that many centuries ago, my ancestors were engaged in idolatry, human sacrifice, and mindless superstitions… [but] their descendants would be building cathedrals and writing symphonies. The gospel is the issue—grace, not race.”

Doug Wilson

Wilson exposes his Gnosticism with this quote. However there is some truth in what Wilson writes here as seen in I Peter 1:18

Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers;

I Peter 1:18

However, Wilson tries to make these kinds of texts prove too much. Wilson’s problem here is that he wants to insist that culture is only a product of what occurs in the thinking that goes on between people’s ears without taking into consideration that men in their variegated existence are composite beings whose genetic inheritance impacts the way that thinking they do is processed.

Wilson’s naked fathers once visited w/ the Gospel are not going to build cultures that look the same as the culture that Mongolians or Hutus build who are visited by the Gospel. History has demonstrated that white people visited with the Gospel build superior cultures compared to non-white people who have been visited with the Gospel. By God’s grace alone White people have been the civilizational carriers of Christianity. This explains why white people are so hated. They are so hated because they are perfumed with the perfume of Christ on a civilizational basis that has never been true of other races.

Herein we find the Gnosticism in Wilson’s (and others) thinking. They refuse to take the manishness of man in his diversity seriously. They think that if all men think all the same way (if they all think Gospel thoughts) they will be all the same building all the same exact cultures.

THAT is both GNOSTIC & IDIOTIC.

Yes, Wilson’s later ancestors (well, the non-Jewish ones … Doug likes to boast of his Jewish admixture) were building Cathedrals and writing symphonies and yes that was all of God’s grace. However, God’s grace was not only found in their regeneration and so change of thinking patterns. That grace was also found in the genetic inheritance (race) that God in creation and in His providential ordering determined they would have. To deny this is Gnostic, and frankly, on this subject, Doug is Gnostic.

Christ’s Death And Ours

God came near in flesh and blood
Which to Adam was a snare
And in that now incarnate state
Adam’s fall, is now repaired

And with this divine remedy
The Redeemer does provide
A death for us as substitute
For in His death we died

In Union now with Christ our head
His Resurrection secures
The healing of Adam’s wound
And warriors who endure

Ephesians 6:1 & Infant Baptism

Ephesians 6:1 Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 2 “Honor your father and mother,” which is the first commandment with promise: 3 “that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth.”

1.) The phrase, “in the Lord” marks the identity of the children as being the Christian children of Christian parents which points to the inclusion of these children in the new and better covenant just as they were included in the old and worse covenant. If the children were not included in the new and better covenant Paul could not command the pagan children to obey their parents “in the Lord.”

2.) This reading then correlates to I Corinthians 7:14 where the same Apostle under the same inspiration of the Holy Spirit says that the children of even one believing parent are indeed “Holy.”

“Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy.”

Children are set apart by their relation to the covenant. At the very least they are outwardly related to the covenant, though we extend them the judgment of charity by believing that they have the essence of the covenant (Christ) until such a time, (may it never be), when they forswear their covenant privileges and obligations.

3.) Since that is the way the Apostle speaks of the children (“obeying parents in the Lord,” and “not being unclean but holy,”) it is without dispute that infants should be baptized with the sign and seal of their inclusion. They cannot obey their parents “in the Lord” unless they are “in the Lord,” – which is what the sign and seal of Baptism proclaims, and they can only be considered “holy” by having the sign and seal of the covenant.

4.) The continuity between the old covenant and the new and better covenant which we are insisting should find infants baptized is seen also in the fact that the promise of the old and worse covenant (“that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth.”) remains in the new and better covenant. This is a lesser to greater argument. If the promise remains to Christian children as articulated in the Old Covenant “that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth,” then how much more so should it be obvious that the promise is extended to only those who have been first given the sign and the seal of inclusion into the covenant of grace?

The New Testament makes no sense unless their is a covenantal unity that is presupposed between the old and new covenant.