Glimpses of the New Creation

Worship and the Formative Power of the Arts

W. David O. Taylor, Jeremy Begbie

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781467457217
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

How do the arts in worship form individuals and communities?

Every choice of art in worship opens up and closes down possibilities for the formation of our humanity. Every practice of music, every decision about language, every use of our bodies, every approach to visual media or church buildings forms our desires, shapes our imaginations, habituates our emotional instincts, and reconfigures our identity as Christians in contextually meaningful ways, generating thereby a sense of the triune God and of our place in the world.

Glimpses of the New Creation argues thatthe arts form us in worship by bringing us into intentional and intensive participation in the aesthetic aspect of our humanity—that is, our physical, emotional, imaginative, and metaphorical capacities. In so doing they invite the people of God to be conformed to Christ and to participate in the praise of Christ and in the praise of creation, which by the Spirit's power raises its peculiar voice to the Father in heaven, for the sake of the world that God so loves.

CHAPTER 1

The Meanings of Worship

Worship is a journey—a journey into God’s presence (gathering), of hearing from God (Word), that celebrates Christ (Table), and that sends us into the world changed by our encounter with God (sending).

Constance Cherry, The Worship Architect

In God’s Home there is an everlasting party. What is celebrated there is not some occasion that passes; the choirs of angels keep eternal festival, for the eternally present face of God is joy never diminished.

Saint Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms

The liturgical environment isn’t the artistic playground for even the most gifted of artisans. It is the sacred space in which liturgy is celebrated so that the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ unfolds.

Joyce Ann Zimmerman,
The Ministry of Liturgical Environment

The basic presumption of this book is that the arts ought to serve the worship of the church in their own ways but not on their own terms. The arts should always serve the church on the terms of corporate worship, whatever they may be for a given congregation. Art will not serve worship best, I argue, when it is done “for art’s sake.” Within a liturgical context, it is art not for experts’ but for worshipers’ eyes; it is art that aims not to draw attention to itself but “to impart the urge to pray.”¹ Only on these terms will the arts render their best service. In order for us to have a fruitful discussion about the ways in which art might serve corporate worship, however, we need first to be clear what we mean by worship and what we believe its purposes are (and are not).² Like much that is central to the Christian faith, of course, this is easier said than done. But the way we define the nature and purposes of worship directly informs how we integrate the arts in our liturgical contexts.

I should state up front that the goal of this chapter is not to recommend a single definition of worship; others have done that task already and their work deserves careful study.³ Nor is my goal to propose a normative order of worship that aims to be conclusive. This is not because I lack opinions or convictions on the matter—both will become evident throughout the chapter. I avoid an exclusive understanding of corporate worship, in part, because I assume a broad readership for the book and my aim is to offer readers a lens that might help inform decisions to include or exclude any one practice of art in their corporate worship. As such, this chapter is less of a constructive exercise than a diagnostic one, less a prescription for one form of worship than an interpretive frame. While the immediate goal of this chapter is greater clarity in our respective practices of liturgical art, the ultimate goal is more meaningful, vital, wholehearted worship that forms a congregation in the triune life.

The invitation of this chapter, then, is for readers to discover ways in which their understandings and practices of worship might support or hinder this formative work. More particularly, the invitation is for readers to discern how the arts might serve the actions and purposes of corporate worship in a manner that honors their congregation’s unique identity as a member of Christ’s worshiping body.⁴ For the sake of clarity I will be using the language of “corporate worship” interchangeably with the language of “liturgy.” On this reasoning all congregations have an identifiable liturgy: a way in which they order their public worship. Liturgical art, on these terms, is simply another way of saying art in corporate worship. Liturgical art is not to be reduced to visual art in worship; nor is liturgical art something only so-called liturgical churches do. Liturgical art identifies any practice of art in any church’s experience of corporate worship.⁵

The Determinative Patterns of Worship

With these definitions in mind, I wish to suggest that our understanding of corporate worship is informed by a series of determinative patterns that, in turn, generate a set of expectations and plausible applications for art in corporate worship. What is a pattern? A pattern involves the repetition of things that over time engender an identifiable character. This would include, for example, patterns of economic behavior, patterns of speech, or patterns in the weather. In the case of Holy Scripture, as the fundamental grammar for Christian worship, we discover, for instance, a pattern of language about the physical world. While any one passage may leave in doubt the goodness of the materiality of creation, the pattern of language in Scripture involves a consistently positive estimation of the physical cosmos.

Robert Webber argues, rightly I believe, that a theologian’s task is “to think about the biblical narrative and teachings and then to systematize these materials into a coherent whole.”⁶ A coherent picture is the ultimate goal. Jeremy Begbie elaborates on this basic task when he urges theologians “to live inside the world of these texts and inhabit them so deeply that we begin to recognize links, lines of association, and webs of meaning that may not always be laid out explicitly or at any length but that nevertheless give Scripture its coherence, contours, and overall directions.”⁷ Faithful ideas for corporate worship will not, I suggest, come by piling biblical texts one on top of the other. Nor will they come by simply collating all the prescriptive and proscriptive statements in Scripture.⁸

They will come, rather, by a judicious reading of the broad patterns and unifying threads in Scripture, as Begbie writes, and by being “alert to the themes and counterthemes that crisscross its pages” in order to discern the proper shape of the church’s liturgical life. To argue that patterns play a determinative role in our conception of true worship, then, is to argue that, while both prescriptive and proscriptive statements about worship are to be carefully heeded, along with any number of principles, they should also be interpreted in relation to relevant patterns that run throughout Scripture. It is also to argue that these patterns will suggest inertias and trajectories for practices of the arts in worship, rather than self-evident plans or formulae.

What specific patterns are determinative for Christian worship? Allow me to suggest the following patterns and to relate each one to the arts in corporate worship.

A Pattern of Starting Points

Where we begin to answer our definition of corporate worship is key. Do we begin with specific biblical texts? Do we begin with theological ideas? Do we begin with the priorities that characterize our ecclesial tradition or with the experiences that, like those of the disciples at Pentecost, fundamentally orient our sense of God? Departure points are always consequential. How a departure point issues in a series of methodical steps, informed by signature vocabulary, undergirded by basic assumptions and resulting in determined convictions—this also is key. For certain communities within the global church, Scripture will be regarded as the proper starting point for the discovery of the faithful use of art in worship.

If we choose to start with the Bible, however, where exactly do we begin? In Exodus 24? In Isaiah 6? In John 4 or Acts 2? With Romans or with Revelation? But how ought we to relate one passage to another—to weigh one over the other? And how exactly ought passages in Scripture serve to authorize a practice of liturgical art? The answer is rarely self-evident. If we build our idea of worship on the basis of key Bible terms, such as proskuneo or hishtahavah, worship might be viewed as a matter of kneeling in submission before God, which could be seen to undergird Anglican and charismatic practices of the body.⁹ Or if worship is perceived chiefly as a matter of reverence to a holy Sovereign who is “worth” such weorth-scipe, then practices of art may be restricted to solemn activities that befit a solemn encounter.¹⁰

It involves all such things, no doubt, but how we actually do worship does not simply result from an aggregation of terms. How Old Order Mennonites or Pentecostals do reverence is not merely a result of good exegesis. One could appeal to the words of Proverbs 1:7 (NIV), that “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge,” but other factors inevitably come into play to determine whether our fear-full, awe-filled worship is marked by “dignified” musical practices, drawing inspiration perhaps from Isaiah 6, or whether the fear of the Lord includes notions of familiarity, as the disciples repeatedly experienced with Jesus, and suggest more “homey” musical practices, oriented around intimately relational experiences.¹¹

The point is this: starting points in Scripture are never neutral; terms are never neutral; exegesis is never neutral. And to say that worship must be in “accord” with Scripture is far from self-explanatory. One is hard-pressed, in fact, to find any normative models for expressly corporate worship in the New Testament. Theological ideas always come into play. Why John Calvin parts ways with Martin Luther, for instance, on practices of public worship cannot be accounted for on strictly exegetical terms.¹² The fact that angels in heaven repeatedly blow trumpets, as we see in the book of Revelation, fails to factor in Calvin’s understanding of the eschatological dimension of worship.¹³ This is in contrast to Luther, who believed that the music of heaven directly influenced the music of the church on earth.¹⁴

In the sixteenth century, for example, the Anglican divine Richard Hooker argued that because God was spiritually excellent, the visible church ought to be sensibly excellent.¹⁵ To make his case, Hooker appealed to Scripture. Hooker’s argument rested, however, on a very particular reading of Psalm 96:9. Hooker linked the phrase “beauty of holiness” (KJV) to a theological emphasis on the royalty of God. Just as the Queen of England occupied a majestic house from which she governed the realm, he argued, so God must occupy a majestic house from which to govern the world. In short: the “beauty of holiness” was equated to a palatial church building befitting a heavenly monarch.

Whereas Anglo-Catholics today may continue to resonate with Hooker’s theologically and culturally inflected reading of the psalms, Pentecostal Christians take the same biblical text and draw from it a theologically different conclusion. The beauty of holiness matters, they might argue, but that beauty describes a singularly internal, rather than external, reality. To offer worship “in the beauty of holiness” requires no sumptuous architecture. It requires only a humble heart, as the human spirit enters into concourse with the unseen spirit of God. For both Anglo-Catholics and Pentecostals, a theological tradition represents a powerful inertia.

A congregation’s tradition includes a host of things that are assumed without question. Of course, the Episcopalian says, the “beauty of holiness” leads to resplendent buildings, even if, in actual fact, the Hebrew of Psalm 96:9 is more accurately translated as “holy splendor,” relating in no direct way to church architecture. Or of course, the Baptist says, worship “in spirit and in truth” emphasizes the sincerity of our heart’s worship, the internal over the external, the invisible above the visible, even if the context for Jesus’s exchange with the woman at the well argues the exact opposite—not for the spirit of the worshiper but for the worship that the Spirit of Christ makes possible.¹⁶

The inertia of a tradition of worship may make it nearly impossible to perceive biblical texts related to worship in any other way than the way they’ve always been perceived. For the charismatic believer, for instance, the experience of God as living and active, dynamically here and now, becomes a controlling factor in how biblical texts are related ...