We find then in the New Testament
a reminder that worship is a response to the gracious divine initiative, and
that it is enabled by God. But we find that the mediatory means of the Old
Testament – the temple, the sacrificial system, the torah – are now made redundant by the new and singular focus and
locus for worship, Jesus Christ himself. The theological reflection already
beginning in the pages of the New Testament about the unity of Jesus Christ
with the Father flowered into the new and distinctively Christian
identification of God as triune. This naturally is of considerable importance
for an understanding of the notion of Christian worship since it relates to who is the one being worshipped. The
Christian answer would become: the one God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
In his book 1996 Worship, Community and the Triune God of
Grace, the Scottish theologian James Torrance very helpfully shows how
worshipping the God who is triune makes a substantial difference to what
worship actually is. The doctrine of the Trinity means that worship is ‘the
gift of participating through the Spirit in the incarnate Son’s communion with
the Father’. Our union with Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit is the basis
for this sharing of God’s people together in the divine life of God. We stand
to worship God by means of the mediatory ministry of Jesus before the Father,
to which we are drawn by the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. As our great high
priest, he sanctifies us by his blood which he himself offered. This understanding
of our relationship to the triune God was in part responsible for the
Reformation’s rejection of the medieval concept of priesthood – since Christ is
our supreme and exclusive mediator before God. As Torrance puts it, ‘the
doctrine of the Trinity is the grammar of this participatory understanding of
worship and prayer.’[1]
To the Trinitarian understanding
of worship, Torrance contrasts two faulty alternatives. The first is that of
nineteenth century Protestant liberalism, represented in Torrance’s account of
the great historian of the church, Adolf von Harnack, and by the 20th
century theologian John Hick. Essentially, on this view, religion is about the
each soul’s individual and immediate relationship to God. Jesus, like Israel,
had a direct encounter with the divine which is the model for our encounter
with God today. He does not mediate worship; he simply exemplifies it. He is
certainly not the object of worship.
Naturally, this view of worship
is a direct attack on the doctrine of the Trinity, since it has no place (and
no need) for a representative or substitionary act of atonement to reconcile
human beings to God. It has no need to proclaim the church as a fellowship of
the Spirit, since the emphasis is entirely on the individual’s dealings direct
with the divine. It results, as Torrance shows, in a moralistic Christianity –
noble in its aspiration for the human spirit, but doomed to fall on the barbed
wire of no-man’s land in World War One.
The second alternative view is
called by Torrance the ‘existential, present-day experience model’. Torrance
cites Rudolph Bultmann as the chief exponent of this view, although it has had
its impact on Christianity at a popular level. The work of Christ for us is not
denied; indeed, it is essential on this view. But it is connected to us through
the event of faith arising in us, which becomes the emphasis. What Jesus did is
more important than, or disconnected from who he was. The doctrine of the
incarnation and of the Trinity fades in importance, and my religious experience
surfaces. Much contemporary Christianity is fixated by the search for
individual religious experience. The language of ‘personal relationship with
God’ can be distorted in this direction, with talk about my conversion, my decision
and my response. As Torrance
complains, the reduction of Christian worship to this two-dimensional system –
meaning that it is just about me and God here now – communicates simply that
our response is what really matters. What it overlooks is that, in Christ, God
has ‘provided for us that Response which alone is acceptable to him – the
offering made for the whole human race in the life, obedience and passion of
Jesus Christ’.[2]
The witness of the gospels is to
a very different form of worship. Jesus is above all depicted as having a
unique relationship with the Father – signaled at his baptism by his anointing
by the Holy Spirit and the declaration of the divine favour (‘…this is my
Son…’). This is the Spirit that is poured out on the people of God at
Pentecost, so enabling them to share in the fellowship, or communion, between
the Father and the Son. As John says ‘Truly our fellowship is with the Father
and with his Son Jesus Christ’ (1 John 1:13).
Communion with God the Father in
Christ by the Holy Spirit is thus the fundamental – and only - basis for a
doctrine of the church, and by extension, the only basis for an understanding
of their corporate practices of worship. Like Israel, the church is constituted
and given an identity on the basis of nothing other than the work of God. The
church is the church of the Holy Trinity: called by the Father, purified by the
Son and gathered together by the Holy Spirit. As Peter writes: ‘Once you were
not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy,
but now you have received mercy (1 Peter 2:10). Note the parallelism: the basis
for the common identity of the church is the mercy that comes through the grace
of God which is in Christ Jesus and his mercy-bringing death. Peter’s opening
address to the scattered believers is illustrative of their Trinitarian
constitution:
…chosen
according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work
of the Spirit, to be obedient to Jesus Christ and sprinkled with his blood. (1 Peter 1:2)
If this is the theological
architecture of the church, then what difference does it make for how it
understands its acts of worship – or indeed, for how it decides what acts of
worship in fact are? The people of God are still called, as of old, to ‘sing
the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light’ (1
Peter 2:9). They meet on the basis of the Lordship of Christ articulated
through his merciful sacrifice, and in the knowledge that he stands as a
perfect mediator between them and God. They are enabled, then, to do draw near
to God confident in the prior working of God in drawing near to them in Christ.
They can view their adoration of the God as a sacrifice fully pleasing to him
(Heb 13).
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