Yes. We need culture. We need Christian culture to burst forth in book, sculpture, painting, song, dance, and feast. But when the church gathers as the church to worship her bridegroom, we must have Him, not the things we made with His gifts.
In James Smith’s Desiring The Kingdom, he makes a very good point. A point which many in the neo-liturgical worship style camp now stand on as axiomatic and indispensable. “Liturgies aim our love to different ends precisely by training our hearts through our bodies.” The principle is invoked regularly to justify the introduction or maintenance of what we could call extra-biblical elements in the corporate worship of the church. These concerns are often closely tied to developing a Christian culture, not a subculture, which I sincerely share.
Neither do I disagree with Dr. Smith’s main premise. That is indeed what liturgies do, whether the liturgist aims to or not, or whether anyone recognizes that a liturgy even exists. They educate desire. They inspire love for something. They shape our imaginations. The question is then, where should they come from and to what ends should they “point our love?”
Recently, a friend asked a good question in a Sunday School class about art in relation to the second commandment and culture. If the 2nd commandment (2nd half of the first for you Catholic and Lutheran folks) is so adamant that God is known by word and not picture, what of the beautiful painting of the prodigal son, by Murillo I think, which hangs in his home? Is it wrong, especially from a reformed point of view which places so much emphasis on literacy and word-centered worship?
My response was that a painting inspired by a parable of Christ on his living room wall was perfectly in keeping with a reformed understanding of culture and safely disconnected from worship. It was culture as the product of worship, not culture as the element of worship. The order was correct and that made all the difference.
Later in the week I thought of another analogy. Water is the most immediately important resource that humanity has had to procure. You will die from lack of water quicker than from a lack of food. Wars have been fought over “drinking water.” With that water our lives are sustained, our food is washed and cooked, our beer is brewed, our bread is made. I love bread. I love beer. But I don’t want either in my well.
There is a water in the church too. Living water. Water saves you (regeneration 1 Pet 3:21), and it sanctifies you (Eph 5:26). That water is the Word which Jesus personifies. When we learn of Christ from the Word of God, take hold of him by faith, and live to His glory, we bring the water of the Word with us from the well, the church, and go into the world, sprinkling and pouring it to make culture. That culture we make is distinctly Christian, because no matter the other ingredients which may be unique to our setting, the water of the Word has an effect that nothing else can. We should be grateful for the truly Christian culture, the “bread and beer” that a Word soaked people create.
We should also be very insistent that we not allow our bread and beer to be put into our well.
BTW, that picture is indeed a restaurant in an old church in London.
It’s like they anticipated my need for analogy.
How can this be? That will require an explanation of a term known as The Regulative Principle. The regulative principle of worship is summed up on Westminster Confession 21.1 with the following words. “[T]he acceptable way of worshiping the true God is instituted by himself, and so limited by his own revealed will, that he may not be worshiped according to the imaginations and devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representation, or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scripture.”
Proper worship pleases God and we are not allowed to guess at what that might be or insert whatever we like. That is to say, St. Michaelmas, Lent, holy orders, liturgical dance, and other performative arts, are not proper elements of corporate worship, because God gets to tell us how to worship. From day one Yahweh’s worship has been word centric, not image centric.
Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death makes the point that the 2nd commandment was a strange and radical idea for a people who, just like the rest of the world, were taught to know and worship god through images. Now God would command them to elevate their worship and knowledge to the realm of abstract ideas, regardless of any concern for “accessibility.”. Yes, there was a great deal of instruction on how embodied creatures were to carry out acts of worship, but God was to be known most informatively and immediately through His Word.
Postman also makes the point that Calvinism (reformed theology) demanded literacy. Pictures in stained glass windows would not do. The people must hear or read and understand. Because God is spirit and insensible, He would only be properly revealed when personally revealed, either through the verbal Word, or the enfleshed (incarnate) Word, Jesus. The most direct and unmediated contact with God is through Word-centric worship.
Reformed liturgy has thus been Word-saturated, the most Bible you can fit into one hour and not kill anyone (credits to Nick Bullock for that). It has also been spartan. Reformed architecture elevates the preacher and focuses auditory and visual attention on him; elegant but not distracting; purposefully centered on the pulpit.
Elements of reformed worship include the reading of the Word, the singing Psalms and Word-drenched hymns, the Word preached, and prayer in accordance with the Word and often in the allusory language of the Word. Reformed doxology, the study of worship, dictates that the church and her officers cannot legislate the elements of worship. We may not declare a pilgrimage to Geneva as an act of worship, or assume the display of a cross to be pleasing to God.
Kneeling and making the sign of the cross, burning incense and lighting candles, veneration of saints, kissing the altar or icon, the procession of the cross, dance productions, drama, rock shows, etc, are not proper elements of worship because they are at best the bread and beer, not water. The church calendar also pollutes by traditions, grouping otherwise proper elements into distorted elevated and less elevated categories. The bread and beer, things we may do or make with our knowledge of the Word, are not to replace or displace or fragment the water in the well, which is the Word in the church.
When we do so, we put on the veil of Moses (2 Cor 3:13). When liturgy does not conform to the regulative principle of worship, it gives human culture instead of the water of the word, and a partition is placed between God and the worshiper. Humans have a habit of doing this. Christ is to be the only mediator between God and man, yet man is generally far more comfortable when the mediator is kept at a distance, and does not disclose the secrets of the heart. Complex and culturally derived liturgies offer a feeling of religiosity, but are far less demanding, personal, and spiritual than Jesus, the Word.
But what of culture? What of Aesthetics? We are not simply brains on sticks! We are embodied!
Yes. We need culture. We need Christian culture to burst forth in book, sculpture, painting, song, dance, and feast. But when the church gathers as the church to worship her bridegroom, we must have Him, not the things we made with His gifts. If our cultural creations replace the culture-creating water of the Word, the bread and beer we should be making is no longer possible, and we start using other recipes which are only diluted reflections and shadows the real thing. We see this in the Catholic, Orthodox, and Evangelical worlds.
When I see my friend's painting, I am struck by what it represents, because I already know the story. The painting cannot teach me its meaning. I need to know the story. But if he and I know the story, we can gaze on the picture and share in a mutual realization of God’s grace, and our hearts are filled with worship and friendship. That’s culture. If a Chinese or Ghanaian Christian sees the painting, he might be foreign to the dress and hue of skin, but he’ll quickly realize the connection to the story, the Word. When the Word gives way to the cultural creation in the church, the culture is like a cut flower. The life is gone even if the recognizable form remains.
This is how the regulative principle of worship is ultimately the regulative principle of culture. Without it, the culture we produce will be less than Christian. The church must be the wellspring of the water of the Word so that whatever the cultural context, the bread, beer, cous cous, mantu, lavash, waayke, boorsch, or germknödel is truly and vivaciously Christian. There is a name for anything that comes between the Christian and the water: idol.
Up next, I want to discuss what I think is a HUGE cultural problem for Christians and provide a better diagnosis and remedy than the higher liturgy movement.
I love this one, Keith!!!!