Lord, Defender
In the days of your corruptible flesh
You suffered all
Passing through shame like a sickness
Pain like a fire
Passing among the shadows of death
Into death's mouth.
Now out of death have You come, Incorruptible!
Now You captain the ship of our salvation.
Made like us,
Pity our plight.
Guard us from folly
And folly's end.
Guard us from slander
And slander's sting.
Guard us from hatred
And hatred's loss
Guard us from pretense
Guard us from the trap laid by falsehood.
Hear us, O Lover of Men.
Hear us, O Ruler of All.
Made like us,
Make us like You.
Guard us from idols;
Keep us in the love of God.
Hear us, O God-loving Man;
Hear us, O God, loving man.
Blessed is He who comes
Named with the Name of Jehovah.
We Bless you, Adored of the Father.
We bless you, Father
and Son consubstantial
And Spirit coequal.
Amen. Amen. Amen.
Showing posts with label Worship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Worship. Show all posts
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Friday, July 20, 2007
And Furthermore...
Josh says that he is not quite where I am on everything I said in yesterday's "Saints" post, but he will be posting comments in order to clear that up and keep the discussion going.
To continue from yesterday, I'm moving into slightly more speculative territory for me.
I said yesterday that in any worship practice we ask the important question: "How good is this?"
What I want to point out today is that there is a proper methodology for coming to answers on such questions. And it's a related method to the proper way of coming to doctrinal conclusions.
What makes worship good? What makes anything good? These questions have been explored by philosophers at length, but two important answers stand out.
First, to be good any object or phenomena in the physical world must partake to a larger extent than not of some absolute or timeless virtue from the spiritual or nouminal world. That means that pure spiritual "good" has an existance of its own, and we or the things around us are only good to the extent that we have that original good in us. The good exists and has its immutable nature apart from us and now we take part in it. Of course the final existance of any virtue is in God's being.
Second, to be good something must be proper. That means that it must have characteristics that belong to the class of things which it claims or is intended to be a part of.
What beauties of the spiritual world must imbue our songs for them to qualify as "spiritual songs?" Likewise, what belongs to worship? What is proper to the Christian's approach to God?
Ladies and Gentlemen, we are a long way from understanding these questions fully and tracing them to their final answers.
But just as a new Christian is not expected to formulate the doctrine of the trinity on his own, but rather to submit to the formulation which the church agreed upon and has held since Athanasius, so he should not be expected to invent a whole new program of worship, especially not for the Church as a Body.
What I am saying is that there is an orthodoxy to worship just as there is to doctrine. It is not enough to "hold to" the creeds and confessions of the church catholic if we do not worship with her. Until we have obeyed, experienced, and understood the long-standing practices of the church in worship, we are not ready to add to that tradition.
I'm sure Josh will have more to say on this subject. Perhaps in another post sometime soon I will describe a liturgical service for those who are not sure exactly what is being discussed here. Meanwhile there are many other discussions of this topic even on the web that anyone can find and read for more information.
To continue from yesterday, I'm moving into slightly more speculative territory for me.
I said yesterday that in any worship practice we ask the important question: "How good is this?"
What I want to point out today is that there is a proper methodology for coming to answers on such questions. And it's a related method to the proper way of coming to doctrinal conclusions.
What makes worship good? What makes anything good? These questions have been explored by philosophers at length, but two important answers stand out.
First, to be good any object or phenomena in the physical world must partake to a larger extent than not of some absolute or timeless virtue from the spiritual or nouminal world. That means that pure spiritual "good" has an existance of its own, and we or the things around us are only good to the extent that we have that original good in us. The good exists and has its immutable nature apart from us and now we take part in it. Of course the final existance of any virtue is in God's being.
Second, to be good something must be proper. That means that it must have characteristics that belong to the class of things which it claims or is intended to be a part of.
What beauties of the spiritual world must imbue our songs for them to qualify as "spiritual songs?" Likewise, what belongs to worship? What is proper to the Christian's approach to God?
Ladies and Gentlemen, we are a long way from understanding these questions fully and tracing them to their final answers.
But just as a new Christian is not expected to formulate the doctrine of the trinity on his own, but rather to submit to the formulation which the church agreed upon and has held since Athanasius, so he should not be expected to invent a whole new program of worship, especially not for the Church as a Body.
What I am saying is that there is an orthodoxy to worship just as there is to doctrine. It is not enough to "hold to" the creeds and confessions of the church catholic if we do not worship with her. Until we have obeyed, experienced, and understood the long-standing practices of the church in worship, we are not ready to add to that tradition.
I'm sure Josh will have more to say on this subject. Perhaps in another post sometime soon I will describe a liturgical service for those who are not sure exactly what is being discussed here. Meanwhile there are many other discussions of this topic even on the web that anyone can find and read for more information.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
...And in the Communion of the Saints...
Last week my family's two-year experiment with housechurching came to a close, leaving the Roberts family with a whole new set of sensibilities about Christian worship and no place to take them. My family went back to the Baptists after finding a pastor they hope will be able to minister successfully to their teenagers.
I'm not entirely sure about the others' reasons for entering on our experiment in the first place, but Josh and I believed we had been materially damaged in our ability to worship and to understand God's will. We wanted to pare off the extra-biblical elements of our religious practice. I even went so far as to say that many of those elements amounted to "false religion" because they are required of people to be considered righteous. (For people listening closely I clarified that I did not mean that fundamentalism and so on was a false religion.) We wanted to pare down to essentials, to find out what they were and what was their power. If a practice wasn't specifically named in scripture as an activity of the church, then we weren't going to do it.
So, after two years practicing a very primitive form of Christianity how did we come out with a desire to join a liturgical church? Isn't liturgy a non-essential, an extra-biblical element? Isn't it false religion?
To answer those questions I need to talk about what we learned during our experiment.
First of all, we learned what the church really is. The church has both an essence and a continuance - an origin, an irreducible core of being on the one hand, and a sphere of growth and development on the other. Our minimalist or primitive experiment clarified for us that the essence of the church is as follows.
The church is most basically a gathering; specifically, a gathering of Christian disciples. It is also the group or society, with an identity, formed by the regular communion of such a gathering. At the same time the church is mystically what Christ has designated and created it through his death and resurrection - his body and his bride.
A true church, fully birthed, functions through an orthodox preaching ministry and the ministry of the sacraments or ordinances, and through the commonality of worship, faith and love. By these activities it gives glory to God as an individual can never do.
In our housechurch we believed that we had a nascent church - that we were obeying the command not to abandon "your gathering". Although we never reached the fully formed stage I spoke of above, we were that gathering and that group, and we believed that we were in spiritual communion with the Church.
But the fact remained that however we might have tried to reproduce the church's t primitive origin, the True Church already began two millenia ago and it has developed since then.
We realized that the church in regard to its order could never have limited itself to explicit statements of scripture. If it had there would be no church government, for though the scriptures speak of various officers, little explanation is given as to their structure or function. Likewise with hymns. We are told to sing hymns but do not find the names or texts of these hymns in scripture. We are told to celebrate the Lord's Table and baptism but find no manual for how to approach them. Moreover if we are going to do these things all in one meeting, they have to be done in a specific order. But that order is not given in scripture.
A question began to grow in our minds. Should the things not addressed by scripture be left to happenstance and thoughtless custom? Should the way the clergyman presents the elements of the Supper be imbued with symbolism and agreed upon beforehand? Or should he be left to give them any way he deems suitable? Should the worship leader announce the hymn in whatever way comes to his mind? Or should he have words to use that convey the significance of what he is asking us to do when we turn to page 55?
Answering these questions is where our two-year wilderness journey helped us most. What came to us was not so much the answer to these questions as the knowledge of how to frame them properly. To a fundamentalist, every question begins with "Should...?" I don't wish to pick on S. A., but an article of his is the most recent example I've seen. He wants to prove that print media is better than visual media. The possibility that anyone could do that interested me and I began to read the article. But he named his ultimate goal as demonstrating that thoughtful people "should" choose print when they have the choice between the two. The fundamentalist always wants to extend his argument into a ruling that binds the conscience of another. That is the function of a his ever-present consciousness that anything he cannot defend explicitly with a verse of scripture will be attacked. Perhaps it is also a function of a lingering progressivist or activist sensibility from fundamentalism's 19th century roots.
Be that as it may, Josh and I hope that we can ask better questions now. We don't need to prove that a Christian "should" cross himself when he is performing a sacred act. Indeed, we would not wish this requirement to be forced on anyone. That would be false religion indeed. But we do want to know why the church developed this custom. What does it express? Ultimately the real question for us is this: "Is this practice a good one?"
We thank the Baptists for setting us on the path to so many truths, not the least of which is soul liberty and the importance of the individual conscience. I will never give up, I hope, the belief that spiritual leaders must never require of their people that which their Lord and Master has not required of them.
What Josh and I are beginning to sense, however, is what it means for the Church to be a society and a communion. The excellence of a Free Society, which is what Soul Liberty makes the Church, is that its people can corporately develop good practices and prune back false or unhelpful ones. I'm not talking about a business meeting to institute the reciting of the apostle's creed. I already know that would be voted down in every church I've ever joined. What I mean is that in such a society, a common feeling can grow. Out of such a social apprehension of the truth and through the body's trust in its spiritual leadership can come practices that are there not because they are required, but because they are helpful and truly good.
So why do I still object to VBS, church drama, invitations, pool-party baptisms, many Bible translations, and a host of other modern church practices? Don't we have the right to do them?
Aside from the fact that these practices simply do not tend to the church's mission, the ironic thing about them is that they spring from church groups who were formed to ostensibly cleanse themselves of extraneous and idolatrous practices of liturgical churches. These are the ones that had the ideal of a return to a more primitive practice. They claim descent from the Puritans, many of who would not even sing a hymn unless it was written in Scripture. But instead of returning to "the pure church," they've simply replaced the old, thoughtful order with a new, pragmatic one.
The fact is that every church must develop customs and practices. That is the nature of human society and culture. It's inescapable. So why does today's church pride itself on the newness and separateness of its practices and on being spiritual descendants of those who overthrew the old ones? Are its representatives sure they understand what ancient sentiment and knowledge was contained in the ancient expressions of piety? Did the men who gave us our definition of the trinity know nothing about adoring it? Are we sure we are doing better without them than we would with them? Are we sure our leaders are providing us with inventions truer to the spirit of Christ, the scriptures, and the saints and angels in heaven?
What Josh and I mainly desire is to worship God in communion with his body. We wish to kneel; to gaze on objects of contemplation that remind us of the nature of Him we worship; to sing only the best hymns; to hear music in church that says "God transcends you - Fear Him;" to have the forgiveness of our sins not only preached as a possibility but pronounced as a certainty; to say with all the saints, "I believe in God, the Father Almighty...and in His Son, Jesus Christ...and in the Holy Ghost."
These are desires that we share with most of the church through the ages.
What we object to is the slandering of these activities by people who furtively follow an impoverished, unwritten, unapproved, incommunicant order of their own. If a reader here really believes in primitive religion, I would not take that from him. But let us at least see in him the fruits of Puritanism before he condemns our search for traditional piety.
I'm not entirely sure about the others' reasons for entering on our experiment in the first place, but Josh and I believed we had been materially damaged in our ability to worship and to understand God's will. We wanted to pare off the extra-biblical elements of our religious practice. I even went so far as to say that many of those elements amounted to "false religion" because they are required of people to be considered righteous. (For people listening closely I clarified that I did not mean that fundamentalism and so on was a false religion.) We wanted to pare down to essentials, to find out what they were and what was their power. If a practice wasn't specifically named in scripture as an activity of the church, then we weren't going to do it.
So, after two years practicing a very primitive form of Christianity how did we come out with a desire to join a liturgical church? Isn't liturgy a non-essential, an extra-biblical element? Isn't it false religion?
To answer those questions I need to talk about what we learned during our experiment.
First of all, we learned what the church really is. The church has both an essence and a continuance - an origin, an irreducible core of being on the one hand, and a sphere of growth and development on the other. Our minimalist or primitive experiment clarified for us that the essence of the church is as follows.
The church is most basically a gathering; specifically, a gathering of Christian disciples. It is also the group or society, with an identity, formed by the regular communion of such a gathering. At the same time the church is mystically what Christ has designated and created it through his death and resurrection - his body and his bride.
A true church, fully birthed, functions through an orthodox preaching ministry and the ministry of the sacraments or ordinances, and through the commonality of worship, faith and love. By these activities it gives glory to God as an individual can never do.
In our housechurch we believed that we had a nascent church - that we were obeying the command not to abandon "your gathering". Although we never reached the fully formed stage I spoke of above, we were that gathering and that group, and we believed that we were in spiritual communion with the Church.
But the fact remained that however we might have tried to reproduce the church's t primitive origin, the True Church already began two millenia ago and it has developed since then.
We realized that the church in regard to its order could never have limited itself to explicit statements of scripture. If it had there would be no church government, for though the scriptures speak of various officers, little explanation is given as to their structure or function. Likewise with hymns. We are told to sing hymns but do not find the names or texts of these hymns in scripture. We are told to celebrate the Lord's Table and baptism but find no manual for how to approach them. Moreover if we are going to do these things all in one meeting, they have to be done in a specific order. But that order is not given in scripture.
A question began to grow in our minds. Should the things not addressed by scripture be left to happenstance and thoughtless custom? Should the way the clergyman presents the elements of the Supper be imbued with symbolism and agreed upon beforehand? Or should he be left to give them any way he deems suitable? Should the worship leader announce the hymn in whatever way comes to his mind? Or should he have words to use that convey the significance of what he is asking us to do when we turn to page 55?
Answering these questions is where our two-year wilderness journey helped us most. What came to us was not so much the answer to these questions as the knowledge of how to frame them properly. To a fundamentalist, every question begins with "Should...?" I don't wish to pick on S. A., but an article of his is the most recent example I've seen. He wants to prove that print media is better than visual media. The possibility that anyone could do that interested me and I began to read the article. But he named his ultimate goal as demonstrating that thoughtful people "should" choose print when they have the choice between the two. The fundamentalist always wants to extend his argument into a ruling that binds the conscience of another. That is the function of a his ever-present consciousness that anything he cannot defend explicitly with a verse of scripture will be attacked. Perhaps it is also a function of a lingering progressivist or activist sensibility from fundamentalism's 19th century roots.
Be that as it may, Josh and I hope that we can ask better questions now. We don't need to prove that a Christian "should" cross himself when he is performing a sacred act. Indeed, we would not wish this requirement to be forced on anyone. That would be false religion indeed. But we do want to know why the church developed this custom. What does it express? Ultimately the real question for us is this: "Is this practice a good one?"
We thank the Baptists for setting us on the path to so many truths, not the least of which is soul liberty and the importance of the individual conscience. I will never give up, I hope, the belief that spiritual leaders must never require of their people that which their Lord and Master has not required of them.
What Josh and I are beginning to sense, however, is what it means for the Church to be a society and a communion. The excellence of a Free Society, which is what Soul Liberty makes the Church, is that its people can corporately develop good practices and prune back false or unhelpful ones. I'm not talking about a business meeting to institute the reciting of the apostle's creed. I already know that would be voted down in every church I've ever joined. What I mean is that in such a society, a common feeling can grow. Out of such a social apprehension of the truth and through the body's trust in its spiritual leadership can come practices that are there not because they are required, but because they are helpful and truly good.
So why do I still object to VBS, church drama, invitations, pool-party baptisms, many Bible translations, and a host of other modern church practices? Don't we have the right to do them?
Aside from the fact that these practices simply do not tend to the church's mission, the ironic thing about them is that they spring from church groups who were formed to ostensibly cleanse themselves of extraneous and idolatrous practices of liturgical churches. These are the ones that had the ideal of a return to a more primitive practice. They claim descent from the Puritans, many of who would not even sing a hymn unless it was written in Scripture. But instead of returning to "the pure church," they've simply replaced the old, thoughtful order with a new, pragmatic one.
The fact is that every church must develop customs and practices. That is the nature of human society and culture. It's inescapable. So why does today's church pride itself on the newness and separateness of its practices and on being spiritual descendants of those who overthrew the old ones? Are its representatives sure they understand what ancient sentiment and knowledge was contained in the ancient expressions of piety? Did the men who gave us our definition of the trinity know nothing about adoring it? Are we sure we are doing better without them than we would with them? Are we sure our leaders are providing us with inventions truer to the spirit of Christ, the scriptures, and the saints and angels in heaven?
What Josh and I mainly desire is to worship God in communion with his body. We wish to kneel; to gaze on objects of contemplation that remind us of the nature of Him we worship; to sing only the best hymns; to hear music in church that says "God transcends you - Fear Him;" to have the forgiveness of our sins not only preached as a possibility but pronounced as a certainty; to say with all the saints, "I believe in God, the Father Almighty...and in His Son, Jesus Christ...and in the Holy Ghost."
These are desires that we share with most of the church through the ages.
What we object to is the slandering of these activities by people who furtively follow an impoverished, unwritten, unapproved, incommunicant order of their own. If a reader here really believes in primitive religion, I would not take that from him. But let us at least see in him the fruits of Puritanism before he condemns our search for traditional piety.
Today's Flippancy Award...
For spectacular flippancy about conversion to the Christian faith, and for being the ultra-anabaptists, we hereby recognize The Orchard.
