Relocating To Elfland

“Christian worship is the voluntary and loving response of those who have been consciously delivered from the guilt, thraldom and penalty due to sin, and consciously restored to the favour and fellowship of God. There will exist a consciousness of freedom of access to the source of all needed help and blessing; but this freedom will always be accompanied by a deep sense of personal unworthiness. There will be a constant feeling of thankfulness for deliverance from the allurements of the unbelieving world. There ought also to be an assurance of ultimate victory over all the difficulties, dangers, temptations and trials which are all a necessary part of the discipline which the Christian must undergo in this present world.” (Roderick Campbell, Israel and the New Covenant, p. 252)

This will sound weird, but stay with me. I believe we don’t take the “small stuff” in life seriously enough; and the reason we don’t take it seriously enough is that we don’t see it as small enough.

Interpreted: I think most serious Christians experience moments when they look at their lives and say, “I’m just wasting my time on a lot of small stuff. My everyday life is consumed with things that really don’t matter.” But isn’t it in the everyday stuff (washing your car, emailing your boss, eating a tuna sandwich, waiting for the bus, sanding a porch rail, combing your hair, watching a ballgame, tickling your three-year-old) where you make or break the business of glorifying God in the world? It’s here, not in the prayer closet or the pew, where a lot of people screw up the whole business. The “small stuff” is vastly important.

But of course it’s only vastly important if you believe there really is such a thing as glorifying God in the world. It’s only if you see what a massive project God’s kingdom is, what a big deal His covenant is, what a lot God is up to in the long ages of His world, that you begin to see how tiny your life is; and precisely when your life gets shrunk down to this size, you see that you are part of something huge and eternally important, something that transcends your small life quite infinitely. And so everything you do matters. Not because it will be the most important thing ever in this world, but because it’s part of the most important thing ever.

Okay, got that off my chest. Back to the small stuff.

“There must be someone in this world – which rejected God and in this rejection, in this blasphemy, became a chaos of darkness – there must be someone to stand in its center, and to discern, to see it again as full of divine riches, as the cup full of life and joy, as beauty and wisdom, and to thank God for it. This ‘someone’ is Christ, the new Adam who restores that ‘eucharistic life’ which I, the old Adam, have rejected and lost; who makes me again what I am, and restores the world to me. And if the Church is in Christ, its initial act is always this act of thanksgiving, of returning the world to God.” (Schmemann, For the Life of the World)

“Feast means joy. Yet, if there is something that we – the serious, adult and frustrated Christians of the twentieth century – look at with suspicion, it is certainly joy. How can one be joyful when so many people suffer? When so many things are to be done? How can one indulge in festivals and celebrations when people expect from us ‘serious’ answers to their problems? Consciously or subconsciously Christians have accepted the whole ethos of our joyless and business-minded culture. They believe that the only way to be taken ‘seriously’ by the ‘serious’ – that is, by modern man – is to be serious, and, therefore, to reduce to a symbolic ‘minimum’ what in the past was so tremendously central in the life of the Church – the joy of a feast. The modern world has relegated joy to the category of ‘fun’ and ‘relaxation.’ It is justified and permissible on our ‘time off’; it is a concession, a compromise. And Christians have come to believe all this, or rather they have ceased to believe that the feast, the joy have something to do precisely with the ‘serious problems’ of life itself, may even be the Christian answer to them.” (Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy)

Strange as it may sound, I think some priority reading for today’s Protestant should be something like William Maxwell’s An Outline of Christian Worship: Its Development and Forms, or Bard Thompson’s Liturgies of the Western Church. We are ridiculously ignorant of how our forebears worshiped, and why. This is part, no doubt, of our broader malady in modern Protestantism: we have a fuzzy idea that we exist because something big happened around 1517, but little grasp of the issues that sparked the Reformation, almost no idea how the magisterial Reformers differed in responding to these issues, even less idea how they differed from the radicals of the time, no conception of anything worth learning from the pre-Reformation Christians (lost as they were in the Dark Ages) – and we tend to draw a straight line from 1517 to the Second Great Awakening, where just about everything we recognize as genuine Christianity got started.

Liturgy is the church’s worshipful reenactment of the drama of redemption. It is the way in which the church, at a particular time and place, ascends Mount Zion and joins in the worship of the heavenly Jerusalem (Heb 12:18–29). Arguably, therefore, the historical liturgies of the church are some of our best sources of insight into our fathers’ understanding of redemption, and sites at which we may crosscheck our own understanding against their wisdom. (Might it follow that our ignorance of their liturgies is an implicit statement of “chronological snobbery”?)

I am personally passionate about historically informed liturgical worship because I grew up in a church in which anyone, during the “praise and worship” portion of the service, could start any song that came to his or her mind (as one of the musicians, I well remember fumbling to find the key – sometimes it was necessary to stop everything and start over, in a singable signature), or speak forth anything the Holy Spirit ostensibly inspired. The chaos was quite remarkable. When I first experienced Reformed liturgical worship, the order alone won me over.

Since then, however, I have discovered that liturgy has to do with a lot more than order. Liturgy expresses a whole understanding of how we approach the Lord our God; it is an expression of a particular covenant theology (or lack thereof); it tells the story of God’s people in a particular way. I have sat through liturgical worship that is simply dreadful, either because it is haphazard (something that cannot be said of any of the great ancient liturgies), or because it is perfunctory, or because it is theologically anemic (an anemic theology always produces an anemic liturgy). This is why I increasingly insist on liturgy being historically informed. I like old liturgies for the same reason I like old theology – they are, to put it bluntly, of better vintage.

But there is more. If we Protestants could ever, ever begin to take biblical ecumenicity seriously (note the adjective, please; no, I’m not a fan of the World Council of Churches, etc.), we might consider whether a common liturgy is not the best tool in our belt. Common liturgy promotes a practical catholicity in the church, a sense of meaningful communion both with our ancient fathers (assuming we reference them occasionally) and with our brethren throughout the world. At present, we have difficulty establishing common liturgy even within denominational lines, let alone on a more worldwide scale, but I refuse to despair.

At the local level, over against much of what passes for “praise and worship” today, liturgy has the advantage of being genuinely participational. You don’t get to stand with your hands in the air, listening to a band and trying to follow along; you get to be the choir. You don’t spectate; you listen attentively so as to respond in the corporate Kyrie eleison or Sursum corda. You shout “amen” after the declaration of pardon. You eat and drink at the Lord’s Table after hearing His Word. You lift your hands to receive His benediction. It really keeps you awake.

Something else emerges in a congregation that worships this way. We and our children become accustomed to a common liturgical language. We suddenly find we have memorized the creed. We begin to anticipate (hungrily) the words, “Grace to you and peace.” In private seasons of repentance, there springs unbidden to mind, “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us.” We begin to hear our children singing our psalms and hymns in their beds at night (yes, it happens in my household). And not least in the glory of this: we are saying and singing the same words our fathers have said and sung since the earliest centuries of the church. Not that we don’t keep adding to the repertoire of the New Song – we do – but there is a deep continuity with the ancient forms, going all the way back to the songs of Moses, of David, and of the Lamb.

Okay, this can all degenerate into formalistic ritualism. I grant it. But I’ve got to say: I’ve heard the Aaronic blessing hundreds of times in worship, and I want to keep hearing it until the day I die. It never gets old. And if it ever does, the problem is with me, not with the church’s use of it for four thousand years. If good liturgy gets tired, it’s because we’re tired of God and the gospel. Shame on us, then. Kyrie eleison.

“The essence of leisure is not to assure that we may function smoothly but rather to assure that we, embedded in our social function, are enabled to remain fully human.” (Josef Pieper, “Leisure and Its Threefold Opposition”)

Recent exploration of the “covenant of life” has got me thinking about how all of human thought (epistemology) and all of human life (ethics) are covenantally conditioned. Here is the proposed exegetical background, followed by a few ruminations:

Traditional Reformed theology has understood the covenant of life to arise in Genesis 2:16–17, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” I wonder, though, if the exegetical basis for the covenant should be broadened to include Genesis 2:15, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” If all this was part of the covenantal arrangement, then it looked something like this: Man was to act as Yahweh’s king-priest, working (cultivating) in His sanctuary and guarding it against defilement (v. 15). In this work, he was to be sustained from the fruit of his labor (v. 16); but his thinking and acting were at every point to be subject to Yahweh’s word. Verses 15–16 describe the covenantal task of man, and the blessedness of it. Verse 17 sets forth the qualification, i.e., absolute submission to Yahweh. Autonomous thought and life are comprehensively (and graciously) prohibited.

This means that from the very beginning man was either keeping covenant or breaking covenant, both in his epistemology (autonomous interpretation of any fact apart from Yahweh’s word was sin) and in his ethics (autonomous work, whether cultivating or guarding, was sin). And this, in turn, helps us see why unbelievers are properly regarded as ignorant and wicked even where they know a great deal and accomplish great good: not to know and do all things under the authority of (in creaturely submissiveness to) God’s revelation is simply not to know and do according to the covenant – meaning that great knowledge and great accomplishments may yet be great sin. Man was made to know and to cultivate. In a sense he cannot help these things – they are in his nature. Yet his knowledge and cultural activity are rebellious if he knows anything apart from its revealed relationship to the Creator, or builds culture without regard for the Creator’s mandate to do so. What makes the unbelieving geneticist’s research “wrong” or “bad” is not technical errors but his insistence that genomes have nothing to do with God. What makes the pagan musician’s compositions “wrong” or “bad” is not their technical deficiencies (they may, in fact, be brilliant) but his refusal to make music in joyful response to the invitation of his Maker. The geneticist is ignorant of what is most fundamental about genomes; the musician is robbing God of His glory with every note.

I think this notion of covenantal conditioning may enable us to appreciate rather than depreciate the insights and cultural accomplishments of unbelievers, without thereby “sanitizing” them of their moral evil and culpability.

God “rested” on the seventh day, we are told (Gen 2:2–3), and “was refreshed” in the works of His hands (Ex 31:17). What makes this so remarkable is that we know God did not “rest” out of a deficit in His energies (the Almighty never wearies) but rather out of the surpluses of His joy; He set an entire day aside to punctuate His joyful pronouncement, “It is very good” (Gen 1:31). This suggests that in God’s very nature as God there is an “impulse” to savor things: not simply to do and fashion but also to delight in what has been done and fashioned. From this impulse the divine resting proceeded, not from any sort of fatigue after six days of labor.

What might this mean for those created in God’s image? We tend to think of the Sabbath as a much needed “break” after our draining labors in a sin-stricken world. It is this, but it is much, much more. The Sabbath as God conceived it takes its orientation not from exhaustion but from joy, not from the emptiness of the curse but from the excesses of divine blessing. We don’t need the Sabbath simply because we are fallen; we need it because we are made in the likeness of God. We need it for the same reason He “needs” it (so to speak): because it is in our nature, created and redeemed, to celebrate His goodness, to refresh ourselves in His beauty. Stretching to the horizon in every direction, we see by faith the works of the Lord – creation, redemption, resurrection, fruits of the Spirit. We stand at His side and pleasure ourselves in His doing and fashioning; and we glimpse in the glass of His promises still greater things to come. This is what the Sabbath is for. It was made for us, in conformity with our nature, because it conforms to the nature of God.

Would an all-Christian team win the 2010 World Cup? A friend recently asked me if Christian soccer players are better at soccer, by virtue of the particular grace of God at work in their lives. He noted the following from Henry Van Til’s Calvinistic Concept of Culture, in which Van Til is explicating Abraham Kuyper’s philosophy of culture: 

“In the broader cultural field there are certain activities that are not affected by particular grace, such as architecture and dentistry. Particular grace does not give a man a better understanding of such technical matters, nor does it give any additional knowledge or craftsmanship in any of the arts [citation omitted]. In science, for example, the difference between a natural and a spiritual man does not count when they are engaged in such simple activities as weighing, measuring, counting, etc. Observation is said to be non-scientific in nature, and Kuyper maintains that looking through a microscope or a telescope are forms of observation. Logic also is neutral. But when an attempt is made to interpret the facts empirically gathered, and to arrive at ‘the thought which governs the whole constellation of phenomena,’ then we may truly speak of science emerging. And in this field of interpretation the impact of particular grace is very great.” (Van Til, pp. 124–125) 

This is one of those issues within the Christ-and-culture constellation on which a ton of ink could be (and has been) spilled, but I will keep my response pretty modest. I think perhaps the problem lies in the question itself: what does it really mean to be “better” at soccer (or anything else in the artistic or technical fields, for that matter)? If we define the quality of a cultural product simply in terms of its technical character (e.g., footwork in soccer, brushstroke in painting, body control in a half pipe routine, precision with a scalpel or a chisel or a stringed instrument), then we must acknowledge that the mental and physical faculties of man have not been destroyed by the Fall; it is simply not the case that believers can walk, while unbelievers must crawl. It must, moreover, be acknowledged that the Creator has granted particular mental and physical gifts to particular people, and He showers these gifts on the just and the unjust. Tiger Woods has something I don’t have, and this fact is not altered in the least by the fact that I worship the true God while he does not. In fact, to think that just because I am born from above I possess every gift known to man, while those not so born are bereft of all gifts, is, to put it kindly, delusional. 

But of course the Bible does not define the quality of cultural products simply in terms of their technical character. All cultural products are the fruit of a total “vision” of reality. They reflect a certain view of relationships in the cosmos, and of man’s place within those relationships. They express particular motives, follow particular rules, and are directed to particular ends. It may be, therefore, that a neurosurgeon’s technical skills are impeccable and yet his medical practice be utterly impoverished, because he works his skill in rebellion against his Maker, and pursues a philosophy of life (including medicine) that, carried to its logical extreme, would undo all of the integrating dynamics in the cosmos upon which his technical skills are premised. Is his surgical work “better” than that of his less-gifted Christian colleague? In strictly technical terms, perhaps so, but the biblical view of culture encompasses much more than the strictly technical; its vision of the culturally “good” and “excellent” and “beautiful” cannot be reduced to utilitarianism (e.g., what will win a soccer game).