Chapter 1
The Heart of Christian Worship
Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
In chapter 2, I will sketch out the formation of a distinctively Reformed pattern of worship in sixteenth-century England. However, this pattern was not pulled out of thin air. It was derived from a rereading, in the original languages, of the true source of Christian faith: the Holy Scriptures. Hence, my first task is to outline in this chapter a biblical and theological rationale for Christian worship. Biblical faith is not, as we shall see, romantic about the human religious spirit. On the contrary, human beings face something of a crisis of worship. On the one hand, we are made for worship, but, on the other, we are predisposed to worship gods of our own making. In the Old Testament, we are taught that the holy God demands exclusivity in worship. He commands how his name should be honored and provides the means by which he can be rightly worshiped. But the tragic history of Israel prepares the field for the appearance of the one who will, on behalf of all humankind, truly worship: Jesus Christ, Son of David by lineage and declared “Son of God” by the Spirit. Christian worship therefore needs to be understood in the light of Jesus’s worship. That necessarily leads us to think about Christian worship in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity—not simply that it is worship of the triune God but also that worship of the triune God has a distinct shape which is a critique of alternative forms of worship. This Trinitarian worship, as we shall see, has implications for Christian mission and for a Christian view of politics.
The Problem of Worship
If worship is the English term we use to describe the ways in which human beings seek to engage with God, then one rather disturbing feature of the Old Testament witness is its blistering attacks on some worship and worshipers. There is no hallowing of the human religious spirit. False or corrupt or heartless worship is as great an evil as the Old Testament writers can imagine. Listen to Deuteronomy 29:16–20:
Secular and biblical anthropologies seem to agree that human beings are predisposed to worship. They are by orientation likely to seek a transcendent other or others to whom to express adoration. If we are to believe some paleoanthropologists, even the Neanderthals had some form of religious practices. From the biblical perspective, the story of the original couple in Eden depicts them as walking in the state of complete communion with God for which they were created. Their terrible lapse resulted in the permanent compromise of that fellowship with God but did not remove their desire for it. From the point of view of the Old Testament Wisdom Literature, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Eccles. 3:11). Most poignantly, Paul outlines the human predicament in Romans 1:20–21:
Paul, who observed the blind religiosity of the Athenians in Acts 17, here explains that there is a kind of suppressed natural knowledge of God given to humankind. It amounts to a willful unknowing, a refusal to acknowledge what instinctively they know to be the case. Human beings are persistently religious; they seek to worship whenever they can.
Yet, according to the Old Testament, it is possible to worship a false god. “The nations” give devotion to gods like Baal or Asherah or Dagon—gods who did not create the heavens and the earth and are not worthy of worship. The famous challenge between Elijah and the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel, recorded in 1 Kings 18, is a pointed satire against the worship of a false god. The prophets of Baal dance and sing and even cut themselves in order to get the attention of Baal, but to no avail. Likewise, the statue of the Philistine deity Dagon falls flat on its face in a gesture of worship before the ark of the covenant in 1 Samuel 5. Worship of these deities is not simply wrong. It is foolish, since they are so obviously powerless.
In particular, the Old Testament reserves its greatest hostility for the practice of idolatry. Idol worship is ludicrous because the idol is impotent. In Isaiah 40–66, among the great declarations of the saving intentions of YHWH, we read a fierce indictment of the practice of idolatry:
To whom then will you liken God,
or what likeness compare with him?
An idol! A craftsman casts it,
and a goldsmith overlays it with gold
and casts for it silver chains.
He who is too impoverished for an offering
chooses wood that will not rot;
he seeks out a skillful craftsman
to set up an idol that will not move. (Isa. 40:18–20)
In Isaiah 44, there is an extended passage in which the author heaps ridicule on those who would make an idol with their own human hands and then in some way consider it divine. “All who fashion idols are nothing, and the things they delight in do not profit. Their witnesses neither see nor know, that they may be put to shame. Who fashions a god or casts an idol that is profitable for nothing?” (Isa. 44:9–10). The idol can do no good: it is simply dumb. Why would anyone do this? And yet, the habit is ingrained in human behavior. The idol-maker does not even seem to realize that the profane use he makes of the wood left over from his idol manufacture reveals the idiocy of his practice.
Israel itself is not guiltless of this kind of worship. The most famous incident is, of course, the episode of the golden calf: “And [Aaron] received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’” (Ex. 32:4). It is an absurd claim...
