Learning Theology through the Church's Worship

An Introduction to Christian Belief

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781493415663
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

This book introduces students to theology with sustained attention to how Christian beliefs and the church's worship interact, both historically and in practice. Dennis Okholm approaches the subject from the necessary intersection of theology and liturgy, showing that learning the church's doctrine apart from its worship undermines both. The book flows as if the reader were participating in a service of worship. It features illustrative charts and figures that complement challenging concepts and includes suggestions for assignments at the end of the book.

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Liturgical Ophthalmology, or Why Christian Theology and Ethics Begin and End with Worship

We Enter by “Gathering”

Your eye is the lamp of your body. If your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light; but if it is not healthy, your body is full of darkness. Therefore consider whether the light in you is not darkness. If then your whole body is full of light, with no part of it in darkness, it will be as full of light as when a lamp gives you light with its rays.

—Luke 11:34–36

The God Christians worship is known through initiation into the practices of a tradition that are necessary to know how rightly to name God.

—Stanley Hauerwas, In Good Company1

When I was four years old my parents took me to the ophthalmologist, suspecting that my vision wasn’t up to par. I remember that the doctor and my parents took me over to the window, pointed toward something, and asked if I could see “that flag.” I tried and tried, but I couldn’t see what they were talking about. That led to a forty-seven-year series of increasingly thicker glasses until I got my eyes lasered to correct my nearsightedness—all so that I could see what I was looking at. I needed thick lenses to see what only those with good eyesight could see.

The consequences of uncorrected vision can be significant. In one episode of Seinfeld, George loses his glasses, yet, through squinting eyes, he thinks he sees Jerry’s girlfriend kissing another man across the street. Jerry is suspicious and accuses his girlfriend on two occasions before they eventually break up. Of course, George was mistaken, something he learns when he again thinks he sees Jerry’s girlfriend kissing another man until he puts on his new glasses and actually sees a policewoman nuzzling her horse.

Centuries before my ophthalmology appointment and any episodes of Seinfeld, John Calvin drew out the theological significance of these anecdotes with a wonderful analogy: “Just as old or bleary-eyed men and those with weak vision, if you thrust before them a most beautiful volume, even if they recognize it to be some sort of writing, yet can scarcely construe two words, but with the aid of spectacles will begin to read distinctly; so Scripture, gathering up the otherwise confused knowledge of God in our minds, having dispersed our dullness, clearly shows us the true God.”2 The point is this: We do not see merely by looking. We do not see reality the way God created it and is in the process of redeeming it merely by looking at our lives and the world. Seeing requires correction—in this case, correction made possible by God’s revelation in the incarnation, in Scripture, and in Christ’s church.

If seeing were merely a matter of looking, then the centurion’s assessment of the crucified Jesus—that “truly this man was God’s Son” (Matt. 27:54)—would have been shared by the entire Roman garrison that day. If seeing were merely looking, then Paul would be wrong to say that the same cross that is foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews is the saving power of God to those who believe (1 Cor. 1:18–25). If seeing were merely looking, then Jesus would not have asked his host, Simon the Pharisee, “Do you see this woman?” since Simon was looking at her; yet apparently he saw not a woman, but merely a prostitute (Luke 7:44), and his reactions to the situation were based on what he saw.

Anyone who has suffered from an ailment like myopia knows what Simon was experiencing: how and what you see has a lot to do with how you act. In fact, a number of theologians have taken up Iris Murdoch’s pithy remark: “You can only act in the world you can see.” If that is true, then what we need to realize is that the way a Christian acts has less to do with determining right from wrong, and more to do with seeing the world Christianly.

And it’s not only acting that flows from what we see. We become what we see. Hopefully that truth will become more obvious the further we get into our discussion.

Learning to See the World Christianly

Let’s start with what should be self-evident: seeing is always from a perspective. There is no view from nowhere. If I witness an accident that takes place in a busy intersection, I can recount what took place from my vantage point on one corner, while another person on the opposite corner will recount what took place from her perspective. Both of us may provide accurate accounts of what took place, but there will be variations between our accounts due to our different perspectives. We interpret reality from somewhere; we cannot do it from nowhere.

While that should be obvious, it is not always admitted in our modernist milieu. The modernist assumption is that neutrality and complete objectivity are not only possible, but desirable. The claim is that we should look at the world without presuppositions or assumptions or culturally shaped perspectives because our modern Western scientific way of looking at the world is the only way any self-respecting, rational human being would look at the world. The Declaration of Independence makes this claim: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal,” even though the author of this statement had African slaves, and women would not be allowed to vote in this “equal” society for nearly 150 years after these words were written. Presumably to any “right-thinking rational” person, this statement about males of European origin was true. Even some zealous defenders of Christian apologetics and morality argue with unbelievers under the assumption that if the non-Christian disagrees, it is only because the other person is being irrational. Modernists who make these assumptions need to be brought up to speed by what I once heard Dallas Seminary’s Howard Hendricks say, “You can’t teach a person to walk before they’re born.”

If we really hear what the apostle Paul is saying in 1 Corinthians about perceptions of the cross, then we should realize that the biblical story—the true story of the world—does not make its appeal to some supposed universal rational assessment for legitimation. Augustine knew this when he articulated what most of his peers held: “faith seeks understanding.” Centuries later, Anselm would be explicit as well, though he meant something slightly different by “understanding”: “I believe in order to understand. And I believe that if I do not believe, then I cannot understand.”

In his book The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, Robert Wilken narrates how early Christians did not rely so much on demonstration or argument or proof, as the philosophers did, but on witnesses to what happened; as he puts it, they were concerned with “the ability to see what is disclosed in events and the readiness to trust the words of those who testify to them.”3 And he shows how much of this was accomplished through the church’s liturgy,4 as we will demonstrate below.

But first we need to establish how the perspective from which we see as Christians is developed.

Communities cultivate perspective. They shape the way we see the world. For instance, consider why you believe that everything that surrounds you is composed of atomic and subatomic particles that you have never seen, or that the earth is spinning even though to all appearances it seems that the sun rises rather than that the earth turns each morning, or that our planet is orbiting the sun at an incredible speed, which you do not feel. Traditioned scientific and educational communities that you trusted taught you to see and experience the world in these counterintuitive ways to the point that you would consider someone a fool or “uneducated” who did not see things this way.

Of course, adopting this perspective of things required you to learn a language. You learned about protons, electrons, and neutrons rather than simply referring to “little things that make up atoms.” You even had to learn the words atom, earth, planet, sun, orbit, and so on. And the more you mastered the language, the more embedded in the community and its view of the world you became.

So, what we see and how we interpret and articulate what we see has much to do with being part of a language-using community—a linguistic culture. In fact, language operates as the filter through which we experience the world. Early on, perhaps with the help of Sesame Street, you learned to call “the one that is not like the others” a “triangle.” Later, when painting the interior walls of your house, you learned that white isn’t just white, but eggshell white, seashell white, ivory, and cosmic latte.

In the book The Giver by Lois Lowry, Jonas couldn’t understand what he was perceiving when he looked at Fiona’s hair until the Giver gave him the word red. Once he had a word to interpret his experience, he began to see the color associated with the word—something that had been lost because the dystopian community in which he was reared had intentionally changed the language and altered the perception of reality.

These interpretive communities are known by the language they use. For example, if you heard “Play ball,” you would associate that with baseball. “Start your engines” would conjure up images of a speedway. If you heard the phrase “Let us pray,” you would surmise you were in some Christian worship context.

But only those who have been reared in a specific community know the language more deeply because they have been shap...