7. The Liturgy Trap: The Bible Versus Mere Tradition in Worship by James Jordan

I have benefited a great deal from James Jordan’s writings. In some places he has articulated things that I have grasped independently simply from reading Scriptures. In other places, teaching me things in Scripture I had not previously seen. In this book he gives an intelligent and worth-while engagement on various liturgical issues. He points out how Rome, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Anglo-Catholicism have gone too far. I have dealt with the issues I have with Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy in another series. But in that series I don’t deal with many liturgical issues because I am unsure about them. I sympathize more with Jordan than I do with Rome, the East, and Anglo-Catholicism. But I am not as convicted as Jordan is on these issues. I would be hesitant to say some of these practices are idolatrous. And those who do say they are idolatrous don’t actually treat these Christians as idolators, so that diminishes the strength of their arguments, in my mind.

I grant that I may be wrong and pray that God would bring greater clarity to me and the broader Church on these issues. Jordan remains evangelical and essentially Puritan in much of his objections, and yet he is also someone who has advocated and created a more traditional and ceremonial form of worship than your average evangelical or reformed worship service. And so it’s a worthwhile read from that perspective.

“I think that the reason my position and that of other liturgical Calvinists is misunderstood is this: for many people, liturgical worship is desirable because it feels good. Thus, the more fulsome the worship, the more desirable it is. Church traditions, smells and bells, lovely robes and decorations, corporate fasts and feasts, all these things are viewed as aesthetically desirable – and so why not just go for them? The power of this line of thinking is real because (a) God is a God of glory and beauty, (b) God indicates in the Bible that His house is to be glorious and beautiful, and (c) God has made us to appreciate glory and beauty. Thus, it is a very real thing to be sick and tired of the cultivated ugliness of evangelical worship, and to desire something of real beauty.

I wish it were so simple. Christian worship, however, is not a technique for obtaining grace, but is a response to truth. That means that worship must always be governed by truth. It means that worship is under law, under the gracious regulation of the Holy Scriptures. True worship must develop out of rigorous truth and be a response to that truth. A liturgy that contradicts truth is especially dangerous because it gives a distorted answer to a genuine need. The need for beauty and vigor in worship is a very real need, just as a starving man has a very real need for water. But just as the starving man will be tempted by poisoned water, so the sensitive evangelical will be tempted by dangerous and distorted liturgics.” (pp. xiii – xiv)

Definitely some solid insights here. I am not convinced the sins of Rome, the East, and Anglo-Catholicism are primarily liturgical, though they may be, I remain somewhat agnostic here. Their main problems are doctrinal, primarily their claims to exclusivity. Their One-True-Churchism is what I think is their main issue.

6. Against Christianity by Peter Leithart

This is a solid book. Leithart is pushing back against various errors in the Church. And does so convincingly. This is a short book, but very worthwhile. He essentially is casting a vision of the Church as fully transformational of all society.

“The Church can cut across the grain of existing human social and cultural life only if she bears some likeness to existing societies. If she is a completely different sort of thing, then societies and nations and empires can go on their merry way ignoring the Church, or, equally deadly, find some murky alleyway to push her into.

But if the Church is God’s society among human societies, a heavenly city invading the earthly city, then a territorial conflict is inevitable.” (p. 19)

Leithart develops all this more in the book. I am only providing snippets.

“Paul was mounting a polemic against the imperial ideology, affirming that Jesus, not Caesar, is ‘Lord’ and ‘Savior,’ both prominent terms in imperial propaganda. Paul’s claim that Christians are citizens of a heavenly politeuma further indicates that the Philippian Christians are to consider themselves a colony of heaven more than a colony of Rome….In short: throughout Philippians, which some identify as one of the least political of Paul’s letters, Paul was treating the Church as an alternative to the politico-religious organization of the city and of the empire.” (p. 31)

There is so much confusion over what the Church is, and Leithart brings some clarity here.

“Ekklesia was used in the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation of the Old Testament. There, it described the assembly of Israel for covenant-making at Sinai (Deut. 4:10; 9:10; 18:16), for the dedication of the temple (1 Kgs. 8:14, 22, 55, 65), for public repentance, for dedication of the city after the exile (Neh. 5:7, 13; 7:5, 66), and for other religious and national purposes (Judg. 20:2). At times, it refers to a permanent institution of Israelite social and political life (Deut. 23:1). By taking over the LXX usage, the Church was claiming to be the true assembly of Yahweh, the fulfillment of the Sinai assembly, the people who had returned from exile, and the new nation of Israel.

In the Greek world, ekklesia referred to the assembly of citizens of the polis. When Aristotle spoke of the sovereing ‘assembly’ in Greek democracy, he spoke of the ekklesia. When any important business faced the city-state, the citizens would gather in the theater or other public space as the ekklesia to deliberate.

In short: The Church presented herself not as another ‘sect’ or cult that existed under the umbrella of the polis; she was an alternative governing body for the city and the beginning of a new city.” (p. 32)

“O’ Donovan has pointed out, in a critique of Hauerwas, that the idea of a permanent martyr church misses on of the key elements of the martyrs’ vision: vindication. A church forever martyred without relief is a cross without a resurrection.

Ultimately, Hauerwas’s oversight is one of theology proper: God is not the God of the dead, or of the dying; He is God of the living, of the living again. As Jesnon says, he is the God who is faithful to death, and then ‘yet again faithful.’

Therefore: no cross without resurrection, no martyrdom without vindication, no exile without return, no (martyr) church without (converted) Constantine. Or God is not God.

And vice versa as well: no resurrection without the cross, no vindication without martyrdom. The Church can gain victory only on the other side of the cross. She finds her way to the city center by first being led to the gibbet outside the city walls.

Rene Girard is right in this case at least: the scapegoat driven from the city is in fact the savior, who returns to inhabit the temple in the agora.

Without the shedding of blood there is no new city…

The modern church is in exile; we have chosen exile, and the Lord has delivered us to our desires. But we do not worship the God of permanent exile. We worship the God of exodus.

He calls us to faith, and that means renouncing Christianity and all its works and all its pomp. It means clinging to the gospel, believing the gospel, preaching the gospel, living the gospel as the Church, even to the shedding of blood.

Perhaps Ephraim Radner is correct. Perhaps the Spirit has abandoned the Church.

But when He abandons Jerusalem, He always reappears with the exiles in Babylon (Ezek. 8-11); when He leaves the synagogue behind, He’s found in the Church. He always returns, somewhere. He always returns.

When He does, and where He does, the wilderness blossoms like a rose, parched land flows with springs, and dry bones come to life.

For God is not a God of the dead, but of the living – the God of the living again.” (pp. 154-156)

5. The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography by Alan Jacobs

Fantastic book. I don’t know if Jacobs is a Christian or if he’s Anglican. But he writes as objectively as one can. He shows us the strengths of the Prayer Book, but also its weaknesses, and dispels certain myths about it. For example, he shows how many people and churches in England did not like or use the Prayer Book. He shows how Cranmer’s creation of the Prayer Book is fully Protestant and Reformed. And how subsequent generations sought to make it more Roman Catholic. He shows the faults in not permitting the Prayer Book to adapt to the needs of the people. He goes over so much in the book and I think it’s a superb and informative biography the Book of Common Prayer.

“In the world of the prayer book, then, the individual Christian stands completely naked before God in a paradoxical setting of public intimacy. There are no powerful rites conducted by sacerdotal figures while people stand some distance away fingering prayer beads or gazing on images of saints whose intercession they crave. Instead, people gather in the church to speak to God, and to be spoken to by Him, in soberly straightforward (though often very beautiful) English. Again and again they are reminded that there is but one Mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ. None other matters; so none other is called upon. The one relevant fact is His verdict upon us, and it is by faith in Him alone that we gain mercy at the time of judgment. All who stand in the church are naked before Him together, exposed in public sight. And so they say, using the first-person singular but using it together, O God, make speed to save me; O Lord, make hast to help me.” (p. 38)

4. A House for My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament by Peter Leithart

Fantastic overview from Leithart. Bringing to light many of the typological elements found in the Old Testament. Showing its unified whole, and toward the end connecting it to the New Testament.

“In his lovely study of medieval monasticism, Jean Leclercq notes that the medieval monks studied and commented on the Old Testament even more than the New. They did this not because they confused the Old and New but because of their understanding of what God was doing in the Old Testament. For the medieval monks, the Old Testament was not merely a prefiguration of salvation in Christ, but the beginning of that salvation, albeit in a veiled form…

Though the Reformation departed in a number of ways from the medieval methods of biblical interpretation, the Reformers treated the Old Testament in much the same way. Calvin insisted, along with the medieval theologians, that the Old Covenant saints communed with Christ and were saved in and by Him. The Old Testament, as Calvin understood it, was an exhibition of the gospel under the veil of figures and shadows. As with the medieval monks, Calvin’s goal in studying the Old Testament was to know Christ and to serve Him, promptly and sincerely.” (pp. 17-18)