Worshipers and the Wrathful God, Part 2

The question of the worthiness of God's wrath as a cause for worship was introduced in the previous post.  The subject is complex and there is no doubt blog posts are not the venue for detailed theological discourse and analysis.  Here I will simply raise two questions:

Worshipers in the Hands of an Angry God

Worship and the Book of Revelation

We give You thanks, O Lord God, the Almighty, who are and who were, because You have taken Your great power and have begun to reign. “And the nations were enraged, and Your wrath came, and the time came for the dead to be judged, and the time to reward Your bond-servants the prophets and the saints and those who fear Your name, the small and the great, and to destroy those who destroy the earth. 

It is easy to assume anger is a negative thing. 

I Am Not a Temple of the Holy Spirit

       I am not a temple of the Holy Spirit?

       I am a part of that one temple.  But, not one of millions of little temples.
       That needs a little more explanation.  Or, of course, you could just proclaim me a heretic and start looking for firewood.  Okay, so, while somebody gathers some branches and kindling, bear with me and read the rest of this post. 

Theological Education: Why Waste the Money?

       Education does not really matter.  

       Whether everyone accepts that or not is irrelevant.  In today's world, we know that it's true.

       So, the six people in the search committee looked at each other around the table.  They knew they'd found their man.

Hauerwas Critiques Contemporary Worship

In 2001 Time magazine called Stanley Hauerwas America's best living theologian (Hauerwas wryly responded, "Best is not a theological category.")

Here's a link to a brief video in which he expresses his dismay over the ugliness of contemporary worship.  Always challenging. Sometimes outrageous.  Consistently Christ centered and radical.  Hauerwas' observations need to be watched and serious discussed by anyone interested in pursuing worship that is faithful to what God intended to the church to be about.


Hauerwas on Contemporary Worship

Misreading Romans 12:1

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. 

Romans 12:1 (KJV)

      One rationale some use to downplay the importance of going to church (gathering to sing praise, hear scripture, share Eucharist, etc) is the insistence that the NT never associates the Christian assembly with worship.  A parallel argument, then, is that worship is actually what we do outside of church.  This post is the first of two that will address the question: Is Sunday morning worship actually worship?

Baptism: The Elephant in the Room

      Baptism.  It is the elephant in the room – something everyone thinks about and no one talks about.  In major works on Christian worship, however, baptism is one of the topics covered.  So, I guess I need to talk about the elephant.

      Let’s be honest.  For many people, it is the first thing they search out to read in a church's "What We Believe" statement. 

Do We Worship One God?

Second post in the series: Binitarian Worship

In the first post (posted on May 28) on this multi-post topic, Binitarian Worship, I related the fact that neither the Bible nor the early church provides an example of believers addressing (praying to, speaking to, singing to) the Holy Spirit.  In this second post, I want to explore and emphasize the implications of Trinitarian monotheism.  As we will see, the question of praying to the Spirit is intertwined with how we are thinking about the nature of God.         

        It is one God and only one God we gather to worship.

        “Here, O Israel, the Lord our God: the Lord is One God.” (Dt 6:4)

        “I am the Lord and there is no other.  Besides me there is no God. (Is 45:5)

        “For there is one God.” (1 Tm 2:5)

        However we ultimately define what we mean by Father, Son, and Spirit we must begin with this essential and unchangeable affirmation:  It is one God we worship.  The one God who is God.  It is to this God and no other that we direct our praise and prayer.  Get this wrong, or even get is just partly wrong, and we have utterly lost our way.

A Church Where no one Worshipped the Spirit

In the early church, no Christian offered praise to the Holy Spirit.  No prayers to Him are recorded.  No praises to Him can be found.  No one thanks Him or asks Him for anything.  Not a single phrase of a single song.  Not once.  It is just not there. 

This blog post will be the first of several posts (not in a row) that will address this thorny issue. 

Larry Hurtado, in his insightful book, Early Christian Worship, makes note of this.  He refers to this as the Binitarian nature of early Christian worship. 

Jesus Did Not Want to Die

At least at one point, Jesus did not want to die for your sins.

Central to historic orthodox faith is the assertion that Christ is "the only Son of God" and is "God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God."  This unique nature of eternal Logos incarnate in human flesh is a central claim of Christianity.  A second assertion, also held to be central and essential, is that Christ is "truly man" (or, in a more contemporary wording, "really human").

Escaping Zurich: Why Evangelicals Get Communion Wrong

Escaping Zurich: Why (many) Evangelicals Get Communion Wrong

The language we use when talking about Communion has a great deal more to do with our history than our Bibles. 

[note: Although written primarily for churches of the Stone-Campbell Movement that practice weekly communion with an assumed Zwinglian theology, the following is also broadly applicable to most American Protestants]

A quick review of any English Bible will demonstrate words like memorial or emblematic or symbolic are not actually found in any of the passages about Communion.  So, where do they come from and why do we hear them so often?  The flip side of that question might be: why are there a number of biblical phrases and teachings about the Lord’s Supper we rarely hear?

United We Stand, Divided We Worship

My earliest memories of Sunday worship are rooted in the simple Rawhide Primitive Baptist church just outside Keokee, Virginia. Most people today would find this tradition unfamiliar. No musical instruments were present. The men and women sat on different sides of the building. The singing was a slow wailing melody line (pretty much the same melody was used for all songs) with a "liner" cantillating the lyric phrases -- and all of this in the voicing used in Celtic and traditional Appalachian music.

One memory of those years that also seems to have gone the way of the dodo was the ongoing presence of children in worship. Look down any pew and you'd see adults, old people, teenagers, and children. Sure, some of children wiggled and there was a pretty steady stream of young ones pleading to take a trip to the outhouse (yep, when I said "primitive," I meant it).

Today, in American evangelical churches, families happily wave good-bye to one another as soon as they walk into the lobby, each group scurrying off to their own made-to-order education and worship experiences.