32. Protestant Worship: Traditions in Transition - James F. White

White surveyed the nine Protestant worship traditions/distinctives/historical development using seven categories: piety, time, place (circumstances of worship), prayer, preaching, music (acts of worship, and people. p.16
-In trying to be a 'descriptive' instead of 'normative' historian, White did not tell the history of Protestant worship in terms of eucharistic texts/liturgical texts. "A liturgical theology that gives preferential treatment to some forms over others is highly dubious." p.15
-"People are the primary liturgical document." p.16
-piety is the traditional term for spirituality. p.18
-Place "We must look at the relationship of the basic spaces for worship: gathering, movement, congregational, choir, baptismal, and altar-table. p.19
-Tradition: we mean inherited worship practices and beliefs that show continuity from generation to generation. ...Worship traditions, then, are specific ways of and attitudes toward doing worship that are passed on from generation to generation. p.21

16th C. Anabaptist, Reformed, Anglican, Lutheran
17th C. Quaker, Puritan
18th C. Methodist
19th C. American Frontier
20th C. Pentecostal

The Reformation era:
-"The insistence today in many parts of the Reformed tradition on beginning all worship with confession is a good instance of late-medieval penitential piety still flourishing." p.27

The future of Protestant worship:
-"If convergence becomes too prominent, we must ask whether some of the richness of the variety of Protestant worship will suffer. The richness of Protestant worship consists in its diversity and its consequent ability to serve a wide variety of people." p. 212
-new traditions will develop
-"...when more study and research are given to understanding the process, all the churches will benefit. Very little has been done to conceptualize the process of transmission of the various traditions down to the present, ..." p. 216

P: I appreciate the author's look at the historical development of Protestant worship through the lenses of people: what they do and the circumstances (space!) because this is closer to what I am used to when doing research as learned in my musicology course. However, as a Christian historian, I find very little evidence of describing God's Hands in the course of how these evolved. The book does provide a good survey of the important key moments and charts the events and people that shaped the different traditions--whether by reform or by holding onto their central theological beliefs/interpretations. White also acknowledged how certain elements of other traditions are borrowed and incorporated into one, e.g. how Methodist hymnody are adopted by the Anglicans.

26-29 Sep 2017
Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989

2. Gifted Response: The Triune God as the Causative Agency of our Responsive Worship-Dennis Ngien

-"how worship is our participation in God's causative agency... how the creature redeemed by grace is a passive recipient of God's grace that enables our response in worship."
-"It is not incidental that a Greek Father, two Latin doctors, and two Reformers all identify trinitarian agency as central to Christian worship."--foreword by Ralph Del Colle

Introduction:
"Much of the contemporary Church's emphasis on worship has been concerned primarily with what we do in the act of worshipping God. The focus has been on the 'how-to' aspect of worship and the discussion has been largely devoid of theological underpinning." (p. xv)
-Analysis of the theo-logic of worship in the major thinkers of each period.
-The unifying theme: "worship is God's gift, in which we participate. It is primarily God's causative action in us, and secondarily our corresponding response to him, the former being logically prior to the latter." (p. xv)

I. Basil of Caesarea's De Spiritu Sancto: not only is the Spirit the legitimate object of worship, the one who receives our praise, but also the perfector [of our worship], the one through whom worship offered in the Son joins with the heavenly choir of angels." (p. xvi)

II. Anselm's Proslogion: God is "that than which nothing greater can be thought" (the divine superlative) and must be worshipped as such. "The moment of understanding is precisely the moment of doxology."
-rational reflection and meditative prayer-Prayers and Meditations: "to stir up the mind of the reader to the love or fear of God or to self-examination." "Anselm habitually places more emphasis on I-thou encounter with God, without undermining the I-it aspect of knowing God...His intent is to issue a transposition from faith seeking understanding to understanding seeking worship, the latter being his chief end." (pp. 43-44) "the unsurpassable perfection...-demands a fiduciary response that is necessary, natural and proper to a being like God." (p. 44)
-a relationship of wonder, not a friend because of the hidenness of God. Anselm: "The truth is, I am darkened by myself and also dazzled by you. I am clouded by my own smallness and overwhelemed by your immensity; I am restricted by my own narrowness and mastered by your wideness."(p. 46)
-"Just as our knowledge of God is hindered by sin, so it is with our worship. The worshipping experience as ascent to God is rendered ineffectual, unless by the intervening grace of God the 'Re-creator'." (p.46)
-God as the object of faith->object of adoration/delight. John 16:24 not the joy that the Lord has but "a subjective one: the joy that the Lord is." (p.60) "joyous entrance into the superlative fullness" "to know God is to love him; to love him is to enjoy him. The more he knows God the more he loves him; the more he loves him the more he rejoices in him" --enabled through the counsel of the Holy Spirit (p.61).

III. Bernard of Clairvaux's sermons on the Song of Songs: "worship is comprehended in the groom's kiss, which is shared with the bride in the efficacy of the Spirit, the unitive kiss between the Father and Son." [thinking about God in these pictures is quite foreign to me and so I find it difficult to comprehend-unfamiliar concepts...]
-3 kiss: 1. feet (repentance of sin and forgiveness) 2. the hands: liberality bc it gives generously & fortitude imparts the power to persevere and adorn with virtues (contrition, thanksgiving and pious deeds are the 3 ointments of worship by which the bride is anointed, which please the groom." (p. 71) growth in His grace, intimacy
3. mouth-"The kiss that the Bridegroom offers is the gift of the Holy Spirit, by which the bride is drawn into the infinite sweetness or embrace between the Father and the Son." "The Holy Spirit as the Bond of Love" (Augustine in De Trinitate); "the kiss of the kiss (the Spirit)"-for the bride, participated kiss instead of the constitutive kiss, which belongs to God's divine life (intra-Trinity) p.80
-"We learn to accustom ourselves with the gift of redemption and praise God through the merit of the cross, for making possible all intimacy with him." (p. 93)
-meditating on the groom's wound "while the kenotic movement (kissing humanity) of the Son sent by the Father to die constitutes the motive of worship, the ascending movement of Christ's resurrection and ascension is the completion of worship, as the bride reaches 'that holy hiding place, that hidden sanctuary, to look upon the Son in th eFather and the Father in the Son.'" (p.100)

IV. "the theme of worship is ontologically constitutive of Luther's theologia crucis... The creatures, of their own reason and strength, cannot ascend to heaven, obligating God and causing him to be gracoius. Thus..god alone must begin and lay the first stone (grace, we are passive recipients; God is the causative agency of our responsive worship of him)". "our worship reaches the heavenly sanctuary not by means of our response but by Christ's efficacious response (imputed to us through the Holy Spirit.) Worship then is a performative action in which God is both subject and object." (p. xvii)
-the 'performative authority' of the Word of God being preached (p.119) "For Luther, 'to hear God's Word and believe it,' Hughes Oliphant Old writes, 'is the essence of worship.'" (p.121)
-"Because hearing and believing God's Word is worship at its highest, ... God reveals himself in a hidden manner, under the visible, earthly means of creation in order to effect his presence for us." [Lord's Supper] (p.122)
-"True worship is communion with God, which therein includes a humble, reverent, thankful appropriation of his sacramental provision for our need of him." (p.125)
-Christ the Mediator, priestly role, the representative (p.133)

V. Calvin's theology of worship in his Institutes (1559): "Christ's mediation is the theological basis of the believer's active response to God: in his person, in his Name, our worship has access to God." As Basil, the double-movement in worship: "the God-humanwardness, in which God first descends to us in his Son, reveals himself by the Holy Spirit as the object of our worship; and the human-Godwardness, in which the Spirit elevates us to Christ's Ascension, to participate in the incarnate Son's communion with the Father" (p. xvii)
-God is the Giver of all" (p.139)
-"The true knowledge of God is always accompanied by reverential acknowledgement of him in that there is no speech about God without worship." (p.143) to know God and yet not worship him is idolatry, or using our own efforts to worship him is wrong too.
-"Christ's mediation does not derogate human agency, but inspires it." (p.156)
-"A proper theology of worship takes into consideration the two divine movements in Trinity: the God-humanward movement-God from the Father through the Son by the Spirit to us, and conversely, the human-Godward movement - we by the Spirit through the Son to the Father. This is not an ordo essendi, of essence, but an ordo cognoscendi, of experience." (p.162)

7-8 Dec, 2016
Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008.

-Q: What is 16th century Protestant magisterial theology?
-Meditate on what Lex orandi, lex credendi (prayer and doctrine) means.