Tozer for Tuesday

When a Christian breaks through the religious routine and experiences God’s presence for the very first time, he no longer wishes to go back. He has found something so utterly satisfying that he loses his former attraction to the world and the things around him.—A.W. Tozer, Experiencing the Presence of God, 137

Sing . . . with enthusiasm!

393 Thanksgiving and Praise

Thanksgiving and praise are to be the major elements in our singing. It is possible to give thanks and praise God individually but if any congregation took time to let everyone do that, it would take all day. . . . Singing is something we can do together. So through the ages the believers in God both of the Old and New Testament have sung their praises and thanksgiving. . . . It is the reason we should be careful not to sing in a desultory manner. There is nothing more conducive to dullness in a service than half-hearted singing. So the exhortation here is most appropriate. “O, come, let us sing to the Lord: "let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.”
                         Ray Stedman
                         Hymns for the Family of God

Tozer for Tuesday

Our worship services should be so holy and so filled with a sense of God’s presence that unholy men will be very uncomfortable. Now we have done it the other way around. The most unholy person in town can come into the church and feel quite comfortable. People should come to a church worship service not anticipating entertainment but expecting the high and holy manifestation of God’s presence.—A.W. Tozer, Experiencing the Presence of God, 134

Religious rattles

The carnal Christian cannot worship without religious rattles and toys; otherwise, he gets bored and loses interest.

For the mature Christian, any unlovely place is suitable for worship if the heart is right and the Spirit dwells within. Worship and communion with God can be real and can be unaffected, and the tranquility can remain the same, because the spiritual Christian does not rest in the external.—A.W. Tozer, Reclaiming Christianity, 123

God in the midst? (Tozer for Tuesday)

We have bushels of religious gatherings but only once in a great while is God in the midst. I would walk through mud up to my knees to get to a group where nobody was showing off, where only God was present. The Early Church prayed—talked to God. When they sang, they talked to God and sang about God. Today we have programming, that awful, hateful word “programming”; but God is absent.

The Early Church were worshipers; and when an unbeliever came in among them they said, “God is among them, of a truth.” It was not the personality of the speaker; they might not have even had one. It was the presence of the Lord that made them fall down and worship. I will join anything, any group, when I can go in to and spend 10 minutes and come away relaxed and say, “I’ve been where God was.” They were like that in apostolic times.—A.W. Tozer, Reclaiming Christianity, 59–60

A look back

I was looking back at some of the first posts I ever made, trying to see how long I've been blogging (almost 18 years) and ran across an interesting early post. I'll save you the trouble of clicking through by reposting the relevant part here:

As a matter of fact, the purest worship—like the purest gift—has little or nothing to do with the satisfaction fo the worshiper or the giver, but with the satisfaction fo the recipient. We seem to have a good deal of misunderstanding at this point. So frequently we judge worship by the pleasure or fulfillment it gives us. There could hardly be a more dramatic perversion. Worship is not about me; it's about God. When I become absorbed with how much worship benefits my person, I make myself the object of worship rather than the God I profess to adore. If in my worship of God I happen also to be blessed it is a happy coincidence, and I can indeed see it is a blessing, because it isn't the point of worship and I am fortunate therefore to receive it. But God is the issue of worship, not I or my pleasure.—J. Ellsworth Kalas, Grace in a Tree Stump: Old Testament Stories of God's Love, 17

Good words that need to be heard even more today than when they were penned eighteen years ago!

Grow? Or shrink? Choose one

So what happens when you worship the creator God whose plan to rescue the world and put it to rights has been accomplished by the Lamb who was slain? The answer comes in the second golden rule: because you were made in God’s image, worship makes you more truly human. When you gaze in love and gratitude at the God in whose image you were made, you do indeed grow. You discover more of what it means to be fully alive.

Conversely, when you give that same total worship to anything or anyone else, you shrink as a human being. It doesn’t, of course, feel like that at the time. When you worship part of the creation as though it were the Creator himself—in other words, when you worship an idol—you may well feel a brief “high.” But, like a hallucinatory drug, that worship achieves its effect at a cost: when the effect is over, you are less of a human being than you were to begin with. That is the price of idolatry.—N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, 148 (emphasis original)

You become what you worship

This brings us to the first of two golden rules at the heart of spirituality. You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship. Those who worship money become, eventually, human calculating machines.Those who worship sex become obsessed with their own attractiveness or prowess.Those who worship power become more and more ruthless.—N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, 148 (emphasis original)

Amos on Worship

M. Daniel Carroll R. has an article on Amos and worship at Christianity Today. You definitely should read it! (HT: Jim Eisenbraun)

To whet your appetite, here's a couple of snippets (but, really, you should read the whole thing!):

Amos leaves no doubt that separating worship and social justice is distasteful to God. Other passages in this prophetic book confirm that truth and reveal the more central issue.

Ironically, in chapter 4, the people are told to go to those same sanctuaries, Bethel and Gilgal … but to sin (4:4)! The prophet mocks their piety, their rituals of thanksgiving and celebration.

Then comes the dagger: “for this is what you love to do” (4:5). Their worship activity ultimately was only about them. They felt good about what they were doing, praising the goodness of the Lord. They did not realize that, in God’s eyes, their worship was sin.

and

Theirs also was a faith compromised by national ideology. The people were convinced that God was on their side and would bring Israel victory against its enemies (5:18–20).

What a foolish miscalculation. The Day of the Lord, the prophet says, would not be the light of triumph; it would be the darkness of judgment from which they could not run or hide.

and

The Lord will not tolerate the worship of a false Yahweh, worship that ignores injustice and sociopolitical compromise and shouts praises in the midst of so much suffering. Worship, social concerns, and political realities are inescapably woven together.

More importantly, what is at stake in worship is the very person of God. The Lord is involved in every dimension of human existence, and the picture of God presented in worship must reflect this. It must present God as he truly is. Worship must bring prayer, confession, lament, and praise to this God and shape a people to reflect this God.

and

The God of Amos (our God) does not accept worship that fails to engage the challenging realities of life and the sins of society. We need to grasp that the demand for justice is central to the very person of God. The God of mercy and righteousness is the one we worship!

Really, you need to read the whole thing!

The redeemer is on his throne!

176 S. M.
The Redeemer on his throne.

ENTHRONED is Jesus now,
   Upon his heavenly seat;
   The kingly crown is on his brow,
   The saints are at his feet.

2 In shining white they stand,—
   A great and countless throng;
   A palmy sceptre in each hand,
   On every lip a song.

3 They sing the Lamb of God,
   Once slain on earth for them;
   The Lamb, through whose atoning blood,
   Each wears his diadem.

4; Thy grace, O Holy Ghost,
   Thy blessed help supply,
   That we may join that radiant host,
   Triumphant in the sky.
                   T. J. Judkin
                   Methodist Episcopal hymnal (1870 edition)

<idle musing>
This seems an appropriate hymn for what has been going on at Asbury recently.

For those of you who don't know: I graduated from Asbury College and attended Asbury Theological Seminary for three semesters back in the late 1970s–early 1980s. We lived in Wilmore for six years. More later … maybe.
</idle musing>

Worthy of ceaseless praise!

111 C. M.
Worthy of ceaseless praise from all his creatures.

PRAISE ye the Lord, ye’ immortal choirs
   That fill the worlds above;
   Praise him who form’d you of his fires,
   And feeds you with his love.

2 Shine to his praise, ye crystal skies,
   The floor of his abode;
   Or veil in shades your thousand eyes
   Before your brighter God.

3 Thou restless globe of golden light,
   Whose beams create our days,
   Join with the silver queen of night,
   To own your borrow’d rays.

4 Thunder and hail, and fire and storms,
   The troops of his command,
   Appear in all your dreadful forms,
   And speak his awful hand.

5 Shout to the Lord, ye surging seas,
   In your eternal roar;
   Let wave to wave resound his praise,
   And shore reply to shore.

6 Thus while the meaner creatures sing,
   Ye mortals, catch the sound;
   Echo the glories of your King
   Through all the nations round.
                  Isaac Watts
                  Methodist Episcopal hymnal (1870 edition)

Lord, haste the day!

Reading in Revelation this morning and this verse jumped out at me:

And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea—I heard everything everywhere say,

“Blessing, honor, glory, and power
belong to the one seated on the throne
and to the Lamb
forever and always.” Rev 5:13 (CEB)

Note that it says "everything, everywhere" is praising God. Lord, haste the day!

In summary

At the most basic level, whether we ask these kinds of questions of our congregations or of our individual selves, the New Testament christological hymns have the potential to challenge contemporary Christians to consider whether our view of Jesus is expansive enough. The remarkable portrait of reality painted by the New Testament christological hymns is that of an imaginal world—a real world but one that cannot yet be perceived in the visible space around us—in which Jesus is Lord of all, the unique agent of God’s work of redemption inclusive of Jews and Gentiles, inclusive of all people. If the church was born in the matrix of worship, and worship was centered on the crucified, risen, and exalted Jesus to the glory of God, then Christian vitality depends on growing and maturing in relationship with these origins. The New Testament christological hymns bring us with laser focus to the birth and infancy of the early church as it wrestled with its culture, its traditions, and its message of good news for all people. Our deep reflection and appropriation of the meaning of the New Testament christological hymns today could be a catalyst to a renewal and rebirth that is needed in the present moment as much as it ever has been.—Matthew Gordley, New Testament Christological Hymns, pp. 234–35

<idle musing>
And so ends this book. I hope you enjoyed it, even though it was a bit dragged out. My take on the book, if you are interested, is that it's not what I thought it would be. And that's a good thing. I was looking for it to be a bit more forceful, presenting questionable evidence to claim great things about christological hymns in the NT. It doesn't. It has more modest, attainable goals. It claims that there is enough evidence that there are hymn-like sections in the NT that might be preexisting hymns, or they might have been composed for the book itself. They might give us insight into early Christian worship.

So, it is a better book than I anticipated it being, although not as thrilling. Maybe that's why it took me longer to get through it?

New book, starting tomorrow. We've been in the NT for a while, so let's head to the OT for a bit, but first we'll sidetrack for a couple of days into the wild and woolly world of the ANE with Robert Miller's latest book, Baal, St. George, and Khidr, a fun little book, but very difficult to extract stuff from; you really need to check it out of your local library (OK, probably have to ILL it) and read.
</idle musing>

What I read this week

or, around the web in a few links.

Why keep excavating when we have so much buried in our museums already? That's the question that Hyperallergic raises, bringing up the issue of the recent Museum of the Bible fiasco of someone (probably Obbink) selling papyri that weren't his to them. The article reasons that it is because universities reward the wrong behavior. Might well be; read it yourself to decide.

Meanwhile, the issue of the stolen papyri gets even murkier, as someone looks at the metadata (the information buried inside a file that gives details of creation, etc.) of a PDF flyer of the Sappho papyrus from a few years back. Seems the dates inside the file don't agree with the stated timeline. Can you say "stolen" again?

But, let's back up to the issue of universities rewarding wrong behavior. A Times Higher Ed article claims we should stop treating universities like businesses (I agree), and instead treat them like (in good British) Sporting Clubs. Huh? Yep. Think about it:

So what does the sports club analogy entail for university management? First, small and medium-sized clubs derive their support from their local communities. If they are consistently successful, such as the mega football clubs of Europe, their brands expand worldwide. Likewise, for universities, the first rule must be to serve their local populations, both in terms of student recruitment and research prioritisation. If they become consistently successful in regional, state, provincial or national terms, it becomes appropriate to expand the brand and seek to recruit students from a wider area. Efforts to lure students to a university they have never heard of are likely to be largely wasted.

After the players, the best-known people at sporting clubs are the coaches. These people set the strategy, hire the staff and provide the motivation. For me, a key strategy is to organise universities such that the equivalent of coaches – heads of departments or faculties – have the time and skills to fashion their “players” into a loyal and complementary team.

Well, worth thinking about anyway. And while we are in academia, Roger Olson asks if science has buried God. He says no, and cites a well-known retired Oxford professor of mathematics and philosophy of science, John Lennox. Do read it.

Somewhat related, N.T. Wright asks about knowledge: "In many spheres, the question not just of what we know but of how we know is urgent and vital. I have tried to develop the notion of love as the ultimate form of knowledge and to explore its wider relevance." Good stuff; worth the relatively long read.

Shifting gears a bit, apparently when women take a leave of absence after giving birth, the wealthier ones (read Ivy League grads) tend to extend that stay—by years! A book was written about it and it's been reviewed at the link. The reviewer takes a few shots at the philosophical point of view of the authors. . .read the review for more info.

What about the idea of a "dry January"? Never heard of it? Neither had I, but apparently it's a real thing. You don't drink alcoholic beverages the entire month of January. The Anxious Bench takes a look at it:

Current reports champion this experiment in abstinence without a whiff of irony. For me it rankles a little that Dry January gets the nod from fashionable press and people who might otherwise contemn the long history of temperance and like movements in the United States before. Ken Burns gave us an interesting documentary about Prohibition and scholars do not necessarily cling to the caricatures. But the efforts of many earlier Americans, many of them with Protestant motivation and quite a few of them female, to convince fellow citizens that all would prosper if they drank less, can be cast as dour, ham-fisted, tyrannical, ill-advised, ludicrous, and destined to fail, even if well-intentioned.
...
Dry January looks individualistic and narrow in contrast. It’s a DIY temperance movement, one chosen, maintained, and interpreted by yourself. If Dry January has become popular because it relies on achievable goals and personal choice—you opt out of liquor rather than being shoved by law or peer pressure—its benefits are correspondingly limited. A month off of alcohol might make you feel better, make you abler to reach personal best as you see it, but barely tries to imagine how your private choices in consumption and expenditure might bear on others.

Promoters of temporary temperance come so close to old language without noting the resemblance. NPR’s Allison Aubrey insists, “you can cheers, you can toast with some seltzer water. You don’t have to have alcohol in the glass to feel a sense of celebration.” As many a tee-totaler across the centuries might have told you. Dry January aims to help people become more conscious about their drinking and help them drink less—goals undergirded by the assumption that both of these are objective goods. The new-ish label “sober curious” rebrands abstention as self-fashioning, made even more attractive by keeping it noncommittal, admirably tolerant and open. (emphasis original)

OK, while you are digesting that, think about the word "Puritan." What do you think of? Wrong! John Turner gives us the real background on the word.

And what about women preachers? Wade Burleson takes a quick run through the history of Wheaton, Moody Bible Institute, and Baptists in the late 1800s. You'll be surprised at what he found. Well, maybe not surprised, but I'll bet you didn't know a good bit of it. (You did read it, didn't you?)

What happens when a preacher takes a month-long vacation and reads through the Torah/Pentateuch? Stephen McAlpine writes about it. Not what you would expect, speaking of the death of Aaron's sons, and worship in the OT in general:

Whoops. Seems like God is pretty strict about this sort of stuff. There’s a lot of worry when it comes to the worship of the God of Israel. We start to realise that He sets the boundaries for how He is to be approached. The common reframe in this worship package set up is that “Moses did all that the LORD had commanded.” It’s said again and again and again. There’s no occasion where God asks:

“Well Moses, what do you think? How should the people approach me? After all it’s a much more modern age than when you were back in Egypt.”

There’s no leeway. No wiggle room. No ifs. No buts. There’s a lot of worry in worship when you are permitted to worship the true and living God, and have Him dwell in your midst like Israel did. Get it right? Blessing! Get it wrong? Toast!

Read his conclusion. It's breathtaking in it's assurance. It takes the pressure off the necessity of emotional highs that so much worship hype seems to require. And while you are on his blog, read this one, too, on church. Good stuff.

OK. Let's jump into the current mess of evangelicalism. Ron Sider explains why he still uses the term. As a friend of mine said, "When we have to go to that length to define what this term OUGHT to mean, the jig is up. Game over. Move on." Sadly, I have to agree with him. But, the Christianity Today editorial is still making waves: Richard Mouw, president emeritus of Fuller Seminary, weighed in:

When Trump’s evangelical supporters tell us that in presidential elections we are not voting for candidates for sainthood, I agree. I have been voting in elections for more than a half-century now, and I have frequently cast my ballot for folks whose personal lives fall far short of sainthood. I have never insisted that candidates for public office get high scores in “What would Jesus do?” tests. But Christians do have a responsibility to promote the cause of moral leadership in public life. And I do want Christian leaders to be guided in their decisions by keeping the “What would Nathan do?” question clearly in mind. The writer of the Christianity Today editorial has now done just that in the case of President Trump. I am grateful for the prophetic message.

Missio Alliance asks if the church is too political. They say no, just political in the wrong way. Read it. And this one on what Johnny Cash's version of the gospel can teach us. And while you are reading along those lines, Mark Galli, the just retired CT editor who wrote that editoral, asks "What if":

What if conservative Christians of any stripe, Catholic or Protestant, tried to conserve the teachings of their faith by living them–those words about loving the enemy, turning the other cheek, serving the poor, giving up one’s life for the neighbor?

What if, instead of waving the battle flag of success and victory, they lifted high the cross of Christ as the paradigm of their faith?
...
What if conservative Christians were known less for their politics and more for their mercy, so that when they spoke about the saving work of Jesus Christ, that message would not be mocked but, by God’s grace, believed?

What if conservative Christians strove to conserve—“kept in a safe or sound state”—the great teachings of our Lord, in both word and deed?

Indeed!

And what is a weekly roundup without something about Amazon? I could post about their recent dust-up with Fed Ex that they settled, but that's too mundane. They just used that as a pressure technique to get a better discount is my guess. Old trick. No, I'm more concerned about their recent moves into publishing. Where is the antitrust department? They broke up the movie studios monopoly hold on theaters for less than what AZ is doing with their Cloud Services, delivery services, third-party selling monopoly, etc!

On that note, buy local. Jeff Bezos and his $11 billion dollar nontaxed profit won't miss a few bucks from you. But if enough of us do it, he might...and your local business person will stay open, which means they, at least, will be helping you with the taxes. Bezos won't ever do that willingly, which is why I tend to lean socialist—you will never get a rich person to willingly part with their ill-gotten gains. No, not even a christian one. I heard a rich christian business man give a chapel message once where he accused the government of being socialist because it had the nerve to tax him! Seems his Bible was missing a few texts. OK, enough said. Have a great week!

And how do we rank?

[A] deeper understanding of these texts in their cultural contexts can facilitate our asking new questions about our own practices. From the observations above about what the hymns tell us about early Christian worship, we can pose and initial set of basic questions about the extent to which contemporary hymnody or liturgical song or worship music reflects the features of the earliest Christian hymns. These questions might be seen as taking inventory of the state of our worship without necessarily passing any judgment on the findings. For example, how does today’s worship through song demonstrate a connection to inherited tradition? In what ways does it engage with current cultures? How does it resist competing ideologies that embody values contrary to the way of Jesus? Does it acknowledge and celebrate the reality of the new era inaugurated by Jesus? To what extent are the cross, resurrection, and exaltation features of contemporary worship songs? The spirit of these questions is not evaluative or judgmental. Rather, these are descriptive questions that ask us to think about the ways in which our worship currently reflects these dynamics.—Matthew Gordley, New Testament Christological Hymns, p. 233

<idle musing>
And how does most contemporary music rate on this scale? Pretty much a zero, isn't it? Sad.
</idle musing>

What is worship?

We have worked from an understanding that worship is more than just spoken words or ritual actions or inner thoughts and beliefs. Worship certainly can include those things, but it also cannot be reduced to any one of them. Instead, worship is, in its broadest scope, an intentional practice of affirming, proclaiming, and confessing an allegiance to God that, among other things, enables the worshiper to see himself or herself as part of a reality that is larger than the visible reality on offer within the world in which the worshiper lives. Worship, in this sense, would include words, actions, and rituals, together with an overall pattern of values and priorities that constitute the orientation of one’s life. Within this broad way of thinking about worship, one can worship God through song, prayer, sacrament, and meditation in a congregational or other religious setting (1 Cor 14:26; Col 3:16). But one can also worship God through the performance of one’s day—to—day responsibilities. Even the most mundane of activities can be considered worship of God when acted out with an awareness that it is being done “in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col 3:17; cf. Rom 12:1).—Matthew Gordley, New Testament Christological Hymns, p. 232

Christocentric worship

To begin with, it is clear that early Christian worship was centered on Christ. This conclusion seems not at all surprising or even all that interesting given that I have chosen here to explore christological hymns. Still, the fact that the early Christian milieu was generative of passages that offer hymnic declarations about Christ in elevated style and poetic form is foundational for this study. In a range of ways these passages invite readers to embrace a particular view of reality centered on the events surrounding the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. I suggest that it is not these hymnic passages alone that give rise to this dynamic. What we know of early Christian worship as a whole indicates that much of it was similarly centered on Christ. Though we have little direct evidence of early Christian worship, there are good reasons to see these passages as a reflection of an already widespread emphasis on the centrality of Christ among these communities. Apart from the existence of such a prevalent christological perspective within the Christian communities, it is difficult to imagine a scenario that would result in such diverse yet related Christ-centered passages with hymnic features embedded throughout the New Testament writings.—Matthew Gordley, New Testament Christological Hymns, 222–23

<idle musing>
Sadly, I fear that is not the case in what passes for Christian worship today. A deadly mixture of me-centered, tuneless songs, repeated ad nauseum, followed by a sermon that most frequently is devoid of any scriptural foundation, if not outright heresy. And don't forget about the flag worship and the rampant nationalism.

How the mighty have fallen. Lord, have mercy!
</idle musing>

So, is he or is he not?

Finally, does the prologue suggest that Jesus is the appropriate object of worship? In key places in the Gospel, a growing understanding of the identity of Jesus leads to belief in him, or in his name, and also to worship (e.g., the man born blind). Thomas’s confession is the climactic expression of a clarified understanding of Jesus’ identity: “My Lord and my God!” (Jn 20:28). This belief in Jesus is what is already espoused in the prologue. The prologue constitutes a confession of Jesus as uniquely participating in the divine (Jn 1:1-2), the source of light and life (Jn 1:3-5), revealing God’s glory in his flesh (Jn 1:14), and the source of grace and truth (Jn 1:16-17). Recognizing that other Second Temple—period psalms embody the worshipful result that their authors promote (e.g., Sir 39:12-35; 4Q437; Pss. Sol.), it is not a stretch to imagine that the prologue itself reflects this same dynamic.” The prologue embodies the confession of an appropriate response by one who has seen God’s glory in Jesus and become a child of God. As a hymnic confession it models for the reader an appropriate response of worship. Even if not a preformed hymn itself, it nevertheless reflects the kinds of acclamations of praise that were the appropriate response of the community to the presence of the risen Jesus among them. The prologue does not tell us about early Christian worship; rather, it invites us into the narrative about Jesus and models a confessional response to the revelation of the glory of God in Jesus.—Matthew Gordley, New Testament Christological Hymns, pp. 175–76 (emphasis original)

Birthing of the Church

The Christian community was embryonically fomed within the womb of worship.—John Anthony McGuckin, Paths of Christianity, 815, as quoted in Matthew Gordley, New Testament Christological Hymns, p. 37

Pastors and leaders

Then we have celebrities who are leading our so-called worship today. This mirrors the culture around us. To be a leader in the Church, a man does not have to have spiritual qualifications as much as a personality and a celebrity status. The converted football player wields more influence in churches today than the man who is before God on his knees with a broken heart for his community. Celebrities are now leading us, but they are not leading us down the same pathway the Fathers Of the Church established.—A.W. Tozer, The Dangers of a Shallow Faith, 19–20