From seeing to hearing: a different kind of knowing

Why should this be a poor thing? The answer usually given is that Jesus did not know about liturgy or vestments or incense or stained glass or beautiful organs. Israel had no art but the psalms. But Israel also built the temple and restored it after it was destroyed. It also had elaborate instructions that described the proper worship of God. Primitive Christianity was primitive originally because it was alienated from the culture of Greece and Rome but it did not remain primitive for long. The history of high art in Europe is inextricably intertwined with the Church.

The centre of Christian worship is celebration. Of course we expect to learn something but it is not a learning that easily belongs to the world. It is a learning that is aided by art. When we describe art in terms of our response to it we determine and restrict it making it dependent upon human subjectivity. But when the purpose of art is to glorify God we escape that determination that has become so suffocating for us.

Art is the celebration of the useless as befits God’s useless servants. In an age of outcomes and responsibility and accountability art is an antidote to our seriousness, perhaps that is why it found no place in the Puritan, mind which was above all, serious.

The use of high art in Christian worship does not mean that it is entertainment. When the Mass became a musical piece a line was crossed, we could now have religion as edifying art in a similar way that we can have Ely cathedral as heritage. Christian worship is serious business, to quote that theological bomb thrower, Stanley Hauerwas:

One reason why we Christians argue so much about which hymn to sing, which liturgy to follow, which way to worship is that the commandments teach us to believe that bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics. You begin by singing some sappy, sentimental hymn, then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know you have murdered your best friend.

Liturgy is important because it forms us. When we cheapen church music to the level of a failed Eurovision Song contest entrant we do real damage to our sensibilities. When we tailor make worship to what we think the congregation can cope with, or what the “man in the street” will find acceptable, it becomes platitudinous and boring and loses its ability to strike at our lives.

Atheism is a continuing problem for the church. Not the self-professed kind that has recently become so prominent. Arguments about the existence of God as supernatural being are largely irrelevant to what the church proclaims. No, it is the atheism that hides in the souls of sincere and dedicated church men and women (myself included) who go about the business of the church as if it is their creature.

There are some pointers to this reality. Whenever you see a church toiling to produce a mission statement or conceive of a new strategic plan or wondering if pastoral care is adequately given, there you see a church that has ceased to act out of its formation in Word and Sacrament. Here we find the intentionally cerebral of the Puritan mind, an attempt to become something other than what the Holy Spirit can produce in us. We attempt to manage the church in the same way that business manages it enterprises, for growth and success. We have yet to realise that the church growth movement has failed.

Christian worship is profoundly subversive of the present age because it de-centres the human person. It demands that our attention be drawn away from ourselves (after the prayers of confession are done) and focused on the glory of God.

Worship is an antidote to our self obsession that prioritises our wellbeing over everything else and turns us into resentful children. There is a direct correlation between the weakness of worship or its absence and the superficiality of contemporary culture. Would a people formed by authentic Christian worship be at all interested in Big Brother?

The challenge to the church is of course to be faithful to its Lord but it is also to stand in the tradition of how that faithfulness has been best expressed in the past. The church, like Israel, lives with the forefathers before them; it lives out of its history and finds its future in that history.

This is a history with many twists and turns, Puritanism being one of them. While we have learnt from it, we also acknowledge that it fails to be a total expression of the faith, what is missing is sensual delight as an expression of the worship of God.