Nielsen’s Nook

Webber, Robert E. Ancient-Future Worship : Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008 $14.99 (paperback) 192 pages. “Worship does God’s story,” writes Robert Webber. Those four words are the rubric for the entire book published as the final volume of the Ancient-Future series. Written on the popular level, Webber argues for a return to the ancient paradigm for worship as the way forward.

Ancient-Future Worship is a decent introduction to the liturgical world. The book is directed to Evangelicals who are perhaps weary of over-programmed church-growth oriented church life. Its aim is to call Christians to a worship that “discloses the work of Jesus Christ.”[1]

The book is divided into two parts, preceded by an introduction that serves as a summary to the book as a whole. The first part, Rediscovering God’s Story in Worship, seeks to inform the reader of the scriptural and historical basis for the four pillars of worship in Webber’s paradigm. Worship is the reenactment of God’s redemptive work in space and time and in this sense worship does God’s story. Worship also remembers the past and anticipates the future works of God in the present. Consequently, the fullness of worship encompasses the fullness of the biblical witness in both the Old and New Testaments.

The second part of the book deals primarily with the application of the rediscovery of Part One to the tripartite transforming worship of the Christian Church (i.e., Word, Eucharist and Prayer). Webber explains that the role of the Word of God in worship is to transform participants by implicating them into the Divine Narrative in History. The Eucharist transforms worshipers as they participate in the presence of God. The section on prayer seeks to return the reader’s paradigm towards public prayer. “The story of God,” Webber writes, “is the substance of the inner content that shapes the outer form of public prayer. Worship prays God’s story.”[2]

In his conclusion, Webber informs the reader of the primary and secondary sources that have impacted him in his journey towards “Ancient-Future Worship.” Church Fathers such as Ignatius and Athanasius have composed the ancient component of Webber’s sources, while his contemporary influences are almost exclusively Eastern Orthodox. Last, the Appendix is a call to Evangelicals to turn away from the modern and cultural trappings that “camouflage God’s story or empty it of its cosmic and redemptive meaning.”

Each chapter employs a reader friendly layout, using headings and including summary sections at the conclusion of each chapter.

The recapitulation of redemptive history is set forth as a core purpose of worship. As such, an emphasis on Trinitarian worship comes to the fore. Redemptive history entails God’s work in the Garden of Eden to Christ Jesus’ Second Advent bringing Paradise with Him. Consequently, worship is the convergence of the past and the future into the present, concentering divine transcendence and immanence.

There is iterative concern for the fullness of God’s story being brought to bear upon Christian worship. Webber reflects on why congregants may struggle with liturgical worship saying, “one reason is because we tend to be New Testament Christians rather than Bible Christians.” [3] To put it another way, embracing the entire Christian metanarrative in Sunday worship is an exercise of implicating oneself (participating) in God’s story and shaping one’s worldview for worshiping the Lord in the mundane.

Related to the Christian metanarrative in Scripture is a welcomed emphasis on the objective nature of worship. This objective worship is embodied not merely propositional, a corporate endeavor not a private enterprise, a weighty calling not comfortable entertainment. “The primary focus of worship then and now is not me, the worshipper, but God, who redeems the world.”[4]

This reader deeply appreciates the concern given to the worship of God in Ancient-Future Worship. Webber circumscribes the liturgical question of how form relates to content and provides constructive avenues for Christians concerned about historical worship to traverse.

While the discussion and interaction with the Divine Liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church is fruitful, Webber’s more or less exclusive commitment to the Eastern Liturgy seems arbitrary and at times dismissive of the Western Tradition, which ironically shares much of the same liturgical traditions. This is especially true in Western Rite Orthodox and Eastern Rite Catholics.

Evangelicals from a certain Reformed perspective more oriented to Redemptive History may inadvertently feel a bit slighted. The emphasis on the Christian metanarrative has historically been central to theologians like John Calvin, Gerhardus Vos, and more recently in the field of worship, Hughes Oliphant Old.

Overall, Ancient-Future Worship is worth the read. Its irenic tone will engage the reader in a much needed conversation with the self, the contemporary culture, and the Church as God’s people have worshiped the incarnate-risen-and-exalted Christ throughout the centuries.

[1] Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship : Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 108.

[2] Ibid., 151.

[3] Ibid., 67.

[4] Ibid., 97.

ChurchYear.net has put together what looks to be a very helpful reading plan for Lent, composed of readings from the Church Fathers. It is available for download.

The Church Liturgy is divided into two parts: 1) the Word Spoken and 2) the Word Broken. In the first part one will experience the reading and preaching of the Word of God. There is in our church an Old Testament reading, the singing of a Psalm, the Epistle reading and then the reading from the Gospel. There is a processional from the altar to the middle of the sanctuary, in the midst of the people, where a formation occurs and the reading of the Holy Gospel occurs. The formation looks something like this:

The crucifer (i.e., the person carrying the crucifix) stands at the head of the formation. The torch bearers stand to either side and forward, shining light upon the Gospel Book held by the Lay Reader in between them. And at the foot of this cruciform formation stands the priest who reads the Gospel. Something is profoundly and purposefully communicated to both clergy and laity, that is to everyone, at this point. Whatever the Gospel is, we come to it at the foot of the Cross. It is a visible lesson on hermeneutics, that we must always seek to understand Jesus at the foot of the Cross. We cannot read His book on any other terms than the terms that were given at the foot of the Cross. Thus, it is that St. Paul has told us that he decided to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified. (1 Corinthians 2:2).

Want to learn more about Christian Liturgy? Check out Thomas Howard’s Liturgy Explained.

I am preaching on Psalm 70 several times over the next month. This is a psalm that was referenced by many Eastern writers in the third and fourth centuries as a great aid to prayer. In fact the monks included it in their “hours” of prayer. It does seem to be a prayer that one is wise to pray always, whether at the heights of faith or at the depths of despair. No one stays on the mountaintop. We are broken by sin and will take the blessing of God’s presence and grow content. Indeed we are all poor and needy.

It is precisely this idea of repetitiveness that the Enemy uses to torment Christ’s sheep. We fall and fall and fall. We find that we wrestle with the same stinking stuff every day. Satan would have us believe that the struggle is a sign of death and infidelity. Christ has declared that it is a sign of the new Life beating back sin and death in us. So John Calvin comforts those who will hear:

Although I was miserable and poor, God did think upon me. As according to the extent in which any one is afflicted, so is he despised by the world, we imagine that he is disregarded by God, we must, therefore, stedfastly maintain that our miseries in no respect produce on the part of God a feeling of weariness towards us, so that it should become troublesome to him to aid us.¹

Humanity’s Relationship to God
The Image of God that every human being is represents the basic building block in understanding our relationship to God even after the Fall. The redemption of fallen humans required that Christ take on the same ’stuff’ as they were and are. St. Athanasius writes, “The death of all was being accomplished in the body of the Lord, and on the other hand, death and corruption were destroyed by the Word which dwelt in that body.” (p 118)

This dynamic of dying and purification lead us to the spiritual relationship of humanity to God in Christ. Major aspects of this Spirituality can be summarized as such:

• Original participation
• Analogous Freedom of the Image of God
• Sin as a consequence of servitude to the demonic
• Redemption as a recapitulation of the human nature in the risen Christ

Meyendorff, again, warns his Western readers that Anselm or the Augustinian vs. Pelagian controversy are alien paradigms to these Eastern concepts. Reading these alien paradigms into the Eastern will inevitably result in skewing our understanding of what the East is actually saying on their own terms.¹

During the time of the great controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries, the monks focused on the incarnation of the church in its heavenly aspect as opposed to the institutional structures rooted in this world [Dualism?]. They were preoccupied with realizing the participation in the divine life, from which Adam was deprived and which became accessible again in Christ.

As mentioned in previous chapters, Evagrius employed Platonic thought (viz. Metaphysics) explaining the Fall of the νους from its original dignity being now consigned to a bodily state. His system and terminology are based first of all on a distinction between praxis (πρακτική μέθοδος) and theoria (or γνωσις). The praxis was double edged. First there was the fight against the passions and second the practice of the evangelical commands. “The passions” (τά πάθη) were not simply a state of the soul but a means of the devil to enslave humanity. (p 119)

In speaking of this fight against the passions, Evagrius intimates that humans are most vulnerable when they are idle. Temptation is external to the human being who is the victim of the passions. All can be vanquished by faith which leads to continence and ultimately to apatheia (απάθεια), the supreme aim of the praxis. It is this arrival at impassibility in which a human being would find herself free to develop in herself the divine agape, consecrating herself entirely to theoria, “of which ‘intellectual’ and perpetual prayer is the most adequate expression.” (p 120)

While for Evagrius the state of prayer is an impassible state, as a state of liberation it also implies dematerialization [neo-Platonic metaphysic]. Thus prayer for Evagrius is the ‘prelude to the immaterial gnosis’ (προοίμιον της αϋλου γνώσεως). “…[A]s for Origen,” writes Vladimir Lossky, “the ψυχή (soul) would be for Evagrius a distortion of the νους (intellect), which moves away from God by becoming material.” (p 121) Once liberated, the intellect can engage in theoria without being distorted by the passions which once held the intellect captive. Now the intellect contemplates in light of the Logos.

Ultimately the liberated can contemplate and know God himself, being predicated on the Origenist metaphysic that drew a “natural kinship” between the divine and intellectual. (p 121). In great (and this writer would say problematic) divergence from the Cappadocians and Pseudo-Dionysius, Evagrius blurs the distinction between Creator and creature when he writes, “God does not transcend the intellect; once purified, detached from matter and ’simple’ in its contemplation, the intellect sees God as he is, in his essence.” (p 122) The result being an extreme form of Pelagianism, being seen most extremely in the Isochrist monks, “who claimed that they became ‘equal to Christ’ by the restoration of their minds in contemplation of God…” (p 122)

Alternately, a tendency that excluded Platonic dualism enjoyed great influence, seeing humanity’s way towards deification in a Christ-centered sacramental spirituality. The so called St. Macarius of Egypt (some think him to be Symeon of Mesopotamia).

The asceticism of Evagrius and Macarius must be understood in a more full orbed context, incorporating the assumptions about the nature of sin, the original destiny of humanity and salvation in terms of deification. For example, Evagrius taught that the passions were manifestations of the corruption of human nature. In other words, sin as an external action only manifests our “passionate” state. (p 123) This way of viewing sin gave way to the role of the “spiritual father”, being a guide for the journey through this world.

Many aspects of the ascetical tradition of the Christian East can present to the Western observer a Pelagian aspect…. [If] one remembers the conception of the image of God as it prevails in the Greek Fathers, the problem of the relationship between grace and human freedom is on a different level from that which opposed Augustine to Pelagius in the West. Nature, and therefore true freedom, presuppose communion with God in grace…. It is not the blasphemous juxtaposition of divine grace and human effort but the concrete realization in Jesus Christ of man’s primitive image. (p 124)

Or as Gregory of Nyssa writes, “What has been made in all aspects in the image of the divinity must undoubtedly possess in its nature a free and independent will, in order that participation in the divine advantages should be the prize of virtue.” This doctrine of synergism (συνεργεία) is developed further in Marcarius:

The more one loves, the more one gives oneself to the fight, in one’s body and in one’s soul, in order to accomplish the commandments, the greater the communion one achieves with the Spirit into the spiritual growth of the renewing of the mind; acquiring salvation by grace and divine gift, but receiving by faith, by love, and by the effort of free choice, progress and increase in the measure of this spiritual age….Thus, eternal life will be inherited by grace, but also in all righteousness, since it is not only through the divine grace and power without human collaboration (συνεργεία) and effort that progress is made… (p 125)

A passage like the one from Macarius above will sound Pelagian or semi-Pelagian unless Eastern notions of participation and communion accepted. Human freedom and effort are to be understood as entailing participation in the divine life. This in turn assumes real communion with the Archetype of whom humanity is image. This is what the Christian East calls deification. This is for Athanasius and Cyril the very basis of the Gospel.

Deification implies then that the soul becomes one with God. Humanity is called to participate in God, without there ever being any confusion between God’s nature and that of the person, without any diminution of human freedom. In this a person fulfills the destiny for which humanity was created.

Byzantine monastics sought to fill their minds with God pressing forward towards the goal of deification. One significant manifestation of this thought is seen in the Jesus Prayer an essential element of Byzantine hesychasm (’ησυχία rest or contemplation). Thus constant prayer is the mark of a mind truly freed from the passions. Isaac of Nineveh writes:

When the Spirit establishes his dwelling in man, the latter can no longer stop praying, for the Spirit never ceases praying in him. Whether he sleeps or stays awake, prayer is not separated from his soul. (p 127)

It is in Christ that humanity recovers his original destiny, rediscovers true freedom which perished in its slavery to Satan. In Christ humanity makes use of this regained freedom, working with the Holy Spirit, that a person may love and know God. It is deification (θέωσις) that gives the mystical character to Byzantine spirituality. ‘Mystical’ here is referring not to the subjective experience but the objective reality of union with Christ. As a person is the image of God, deification is the free and conscious participation in the divine life, which is proper only to humanity. As St. Athanasius gives in his great patristic principle: “If God did not become man, man cannot become God.” (p 129)

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¹ I might add here how much I have enjoyed the interaction with Acolyte4236. While Meyendorff’s point is well taken here, I - as a Westerner - do not know how to gain this understanding with out extended dialogue with those who do have these categories already in place.

The first five chapters considered the successive problems of Eastern Christianity from the fifth century C.E.:

1. Christological Crisis
2. Origenism
3. Integration of neo-Platonic thought

In the context of these crises at least three basic truths of the Christian religion were at stake:

1. Salvation of humanity
2. Humanity’s relationship with God
3. Humanity’s final destiny

The full force of St. Athanasius’ polemic against Arianism would evaporate if the Word were nothing more than a glorified creature. Thus he could say, God “became man in order that man might become God in him.” (p 113)

Salvation of Humanity
Three elements are key to understanding the Eastern conception of salvation:

1. Image of God in humanity and the destiny of that image
2. Original Sin
3. Redemption

The Image of God and Its Destiny
There is no consensus patrum for the exegesis of Genesis 1:26-27. Both the depth of what the image consists and the breadth of its distinctions must be considered. On the one hand, St. Irenaeus argued that image included the whole person (material and immaterial, body and soul). On the other hand, a later tradition, influenced by Platonic anthropology, said that image only pertained to the νοῦς (mind). Regarding the breadth of distinctions, we are considering two terms: εἰκών (image) and ὁμοίωσις (resemblance). Irenaeus and Origin saw a fundamental distinction between the two words, while Cyril of Alexandria and Athanasius regarded them as synonyms.

There is an “absolute consistency” in the Greek patristics that asserts that the image of God is not something external to humanity, that is received by humanity, and preserved by human nature as some kind of property independent of its relationships with God. “Image implies a participation in the divine nature.” (p 114)

So even Adam in the garden had to go beyond himself and receiving “illuminating grace”. For the Eastern Church the notion of “grace is identified with that of participation; grace is never a created gift but is a communion with divine life.” Or as R. Leys writes about St. Gregory of Nyssa, “grace makes man in the image of God….the world was created by grace.” Nature and grace presuppose one another in the Fathers. “Nature stops being really ‘natural’ if it abandons its own destiny, which is to communicate with God and to rise ever higher in the knowledge of the Unknowable.” (p 115)

Freedom then, being entailed in image, presumes participation in the divine life. St. Basil tells us that Adam received from the Creator a free life (αὐθαίρετον ζωήν). Thus, neither nature or freedom are opposed to grace; rather, they suppose it. St. Cyril explains that since we understand the Diety to be free, and humanity is His image, then originally humanity was free.

But original freedom also supposes the possibility of the fall, which the Fathers interpreted as a revolt against God and therefore as a sort of suicide, for a crime directed against God [archetype] necessarily deals a blow at man [ectype] himself. (p 116)

Original existence presupposed free participation in God through the intermediary of the intellect; the fall enslaved humanity to Satan through the intermediary of the passions on account of separation from God.

Sin is thought of as a deadly illness (φθορά) contracted by Adam and passed on to his posterity. The consequences of sin may be transmitted to others; however, the guilt of sin remains with the culpable individual. The human race possess the corrupted human nature passed down from Adam; however, the race does not partake of Adam’s guilt, but merely imitates it. Sin simply darkened the image and limited human freedom.

The redemption of human nature accomplished by Christ the new Adam consisted essentially in the fact that a sinless hypostasis, even that of the Logos, freely took over human nature in the very state of corruption in which it was (and this implied death) and by the resurrection re-established its original relationship with God. In Christ, man participated again in the eternal life destined for him by God. … In the same way in which corruption appeared to the Greek Fathers as a disease contracted by man rather than a punishment inflicted by divine justice, so are the death and resurrection of the incarnate Word (the sacrifice for which Christ was both priest and the victim) understood by them as, first, the accomplishment in Christ of our common destiny, and then as a new creation that could not be achieved unless the human nature of Christ had really become ours, in death itself. (p 117)