In a lecture at the 1979 conference on Liturgy in Reformed Worship at Calvin College entitled, “Choir & Organ: Their Place In Reformed Liturgy,” Nicholas Wolterstorff stated the following:

Characteristically we Reformed people think of going to church as going to sermon. And we think of the sermon as marching orders. In what we do Monday through Saturday, we say, lies the proof and worth of Sunday. For us, the fundamental question to put to the liturgy is always: What did we get out of it?

But in biblical perspective there is clearly a second fundamental reason to assemble for the performance of the liturgy. It is right and proper—in the words of the old Latin Mass, dignum et justum—for us to acknowledge God’s majesty and goodness’s right and proper to sing praises to God for his works of creation and redemption, and for our status as new creatures in Jesus Christ. It’s right and proper to confess our sins. It’s right and proper to continue celebrating the supper of our Lord in memorial of him until he comes again. I know of course that it’s also right and proper to care for the poor of society, to work for peace, to build bridges, to create paintings. It must be said to the Reformed person—emphatically, because he’s so much inclined to forget it—that it is also inherently right and proper to perform the liturgy. This too is obedience. There’s profound truth in speaking of what takes place in our assemblies as a worship service. Worship, let’s not forget it, is part of our rightful service to God. Not only is liturgy for building us up unto obedience. Liturgy is for acknowledging God, in a tone of chastened celebration.

I said that one question to ask of the liturgy is: What did we get out of it? In light of what I’ve just said it’s clear there’s another, namely, How did we do? How did we do in our attempt to acknowledge God with praise and confession, with thanksgiving and intercession? Did we do it at all adequately?

In other words, worship, or the divine service of liturgy, is good in and of itself. Though they do receive as much, it needs no justification on the basis of what effect it has on the sinful agents involved. By extension, the Sabbath day, the day in which we both perform and receive the service, is good in and of itself, needing no justification for either its existence or observation. Worship is obedience. Worship is the primary and principle good work of the individual believer and corporate Church. Granted, Wolterstorff’s transformationalism zigs from two-kingdom zags with all that business about bridges and paintings. Eventually, this line of thought takes huge chucks away from his larger argument. Nevertheless, the point still stands however better propped up by two-kingdom views: the divine service, and its given day, is inherently, intrinsically, naturally and objectively good.

This seems fairly over against more modern notions that demand to know just what we get out of the Sabbath. It gives rise to what I call “Sabbath-as-recharge.” In this schema, the Sabbath is really not much more than a glorified day off. True enough, Sabbath can be located in creation and has its rightful place for creational rest. But as believers we have a citizenry in both kingdoms, it seems to me, and we must emphasize the redemptive bearing the Sabbath has. Sabbath-as-recharge seems to do several things.

First, it tends to neglect the redemptive dimension of the Sabbath for the creational one. In a post-resurrection age, the first day of the week for those who are believers is less about not mowing the lawn and more about living in obedient response to what it means to partake in the age to come. As needful as it may be to a certain extent, I find myself queasy when I hear believers prattling on about certain non/activities on the Sabbath, what should or should not be done. It seems to me that not only do these discussions over-emphasize creational concerns against redemptive ones, but more importantly, they sound like the concerns of latent legalists who forget that the gospel is about a life of response to the Law of God as covenant-keepers. Most assuredly, I am not one to think that duty and grateful response are mutually exclusive terms. Just ask my kids what their father expects every Sabbath. But whatever disdain I have for any notion of grace militating against obedience, I am equally appalled by legalism of any brand.

Second, as it emphasizes our creational existence, Sabbath-as-recharge seems to end up casting a negative light on our six days. But the fourth commandant begins, does it not, with the command to work and labor? The point may very well be on keeping the Sabbath, but the point also seems built upon an affirmative command. And are we not also commanded to “be in the world but not of it”? The thrust may be to not be of the world, but it also is built upon a positive and good thing, namely to be in the world. Sabbath-as-recharge almost seems to depend on a formulation of our six days as a necessary evil. It is heard that Monday begins that steady decline into a labor hell bent on taking something precious out of us, looking ahead to the coming Sabbath to refresh and enliven us once again. Yet, as Calvinists we should know there is nothing precious within that deserves such coddling. Also, it is interesting to note that when God ordained the Sabbath he did so retrospectively, not in an anticipatory manner; after having worked, God rested. Moreover, just as the Pauline antithesis is between this age and the age to come instead of the Gnostic duality between body and soul, it would seem that our six days and Sabbath deserve the same distinction: the problem with this age—in which we find our six days—is that it is passing away, not that it is inherently evil. The Sabbath points us beyond this passing age to an enduring one. In this way, Sabbath-as-recharge seems to have more in common with a Gnostic dualism than a Pauline antithesis.

Third, if it is not busy casting our six days as a necessary evil, it ironically wants us to see the Sabbath as subservient to them. Like Wolterstorff says, “In what we do Monday through Saturday, we say, lies the proof and worth of Sunday.” In other words, what really matters is how we live our lives, not how we worship God. Some have observed this as the “worship-as-homeroom” perspective, where we are simply checking in to get our instructions for the coming week. Our six days and the Sabbath are flattened out, the latter being a glorified former in order to bolster them. This is where we get the bias against those who have a high view of the Sabbath as being “hypocrites who only care about what they do on Sunday but live the way they please the other six days.” Here the concepts of liberty are chucked for the tyranny of “what a good Christian should look like” on common days.

The Sabbath, then, does not “recharge” us, at least, not the way the sarx naturally thinks of such things. True enough, Wolterstorff rightly acknowledges the question, What did we get out of it? There is much to be said for the fact that sinners “get something” out of the divine service. We do well to counter that which one finds in the contemporary religious landscape that seems more in keeping with a spirituality of performance than a piety of response: “Ask not what God can do for you, ask what you can do for God” is more American than Christian.

That said, however, it should be rather odd to hear confessionally Reformed believers talk about the Sabbath and worship the way they talk about an activity done in creation. Many amongst us eschew, rightly, a worship service that apes forms of entertainment that are centered on meeting some inward and subjective felt need of sinners. Yet these same folks can be heard saying they “just can’t get enough word and sacrament.” Some are heard to defend morning and evening services to say, “The question shouldn’t be why two services but why not three or four or more!” In such utterances it seems that what ailed Aaron’s sons may be afoot; one thinks of that other Americanism, “If one is good, two is better!” But like the physician to his patient, God has prescribed what he has to sinners for specific reasons. We are certainly nourished by the Sabbath and its resident activities, but not in the way we naturally think of being nourished. It seems to always be God’s way. In the theology of the Cross God is revealed by hiding. Paul speaks of God’s magnification through his own diminution. And we feast on proclaimed word, water, wafers and wine. In the same way that we are being sanctified, not improved, the Sabbath has its own objective value not readily discerned by sinners.

[This was originally something that appeared in the Diaries section of Modern Reformation’s July/August 2007 issue. Here is what I did with it when I wanted to take it another direction for our church Courier]

It might sound odd to say, but I like the fact that my kids can find church to be a turn-off. Our time assumes that a thing’s final value can and should be measured by subjective, personal enjoyment. Witness the church-growth movement. It is really nothing new and classically American in the sense that it is the natural evolution of that very presumption. Ever since Winthrop and Whitefield landed and helped tear the Gospel from its churchly contours, American Evangelicalism generally has wanted to “meet the felt needs” of the populace. And American Liberalism specifically declared that “the world sets the church’s agenda.” Little wonder we fret that when Billy and Suzie are bored we have let them down. Instead of patiently expecting them to grow into something they don’t naturally understand, we race to appease them so they won’t end up hating church. Instead of letting them be comfortable with the discomfort of growing up that something like staid liturgy demands, we are tempted to prolong adolescence by appealing to the least common denominators resident within the stuff of entertainment. But since Scripture regards us as aliens it seems there ought to be antithesis between what we experience in our six days and the Sabbath day. However vulnerable to a thousand qualifications, perhaps a good thumbnail test may be that if your kids are bored something is being done right.

A question in such a context of discomfort may be, “Why do we go to church?” The inquiry seems inevitable for those of us who are covenantal parents. And, just like the boredom that should be embraced rather than feared and avoided, this direct question should be welcomed and capitalized on. I might do well to back up before I go further.

I was not formally reared in faith. My parents are baby boomers. And even though Dad was raised by a faithful Episcopalian mother, one famous trait endemic to this generation is how they turned tail on organized religion. At some point and for whatever reasons the boomers got antsy and decided they had gone too far.

So round about junior high my younger brother and I were yanked from our Sunday morning TV cartoons, forced to wear monogrammed sweaters and trucked across town to the well-established and mainline-mega United Methodist Church.

The whole awkward foray back into the pew was very short-lived. Suffice it to say that as good as it may seem in the drawing boards of parents’ minds, springing religion on un-churched and thoroughly uninterested pre-pubescent boys is nothing if not packed with learning curves.

Memories of this are few and sketchy. One clear memory I have is asking my father this very question: “Why are we going to church?” I will readily admit that my question at the time was grounded more in supreme adolescent annoyance than in an honest quest for objective truth. And in looking back, his answer seems to speak volumes with regard to how we understand that counterintuitive thing called the Gospel, the thing “going to church” is supposed to be about. He said, “To learn how to be better people.” While neither one of us would have understood it back then, I have come to see that his answer was grounded firmly in that other more intuitive thing called Law. After all, true religion “makes bad people good and good people better,” right?

I am not so sure. There are several problems with this Law-laden answer. The first is logic. Just as the world is, in fact, not getting any better or worse as time either progresses or retreats (Ecc. 1:9-14), going to church does not make one essentially any better or worse than anyone else. I have been at it for almost as long as I wasn’t, and I am no better or worse than when I first began. Second, why Christianity? If the point is to improve individuals or society in some way then plenty of religions, organizations, therapies, programs and philosophies will do the trick. Third, his answer assumed we were somehow presently not up to snuff, perhaps even bad. But my father himself was a pillar of the community, a good man publicly and even better privately. We were law-abiding and quite functional citizens. And we were such with no direct help from church or any formal religion, thank you very much. What was it exactly we needed to learn that we didn’t already know? If God is mysterious then it doesn’t follow that His institution is about the obvious or intuitive. I can agree we go to learn something, but what, how and why?

I would suggest that we don’t go to learn Law or, as dad put it, how to be good or better people. Rather—through the rituals of sound liturgy, confession and Creed, Word and sacrament—we actually go to learn the Gospel. Nobody in his right mind makes efforts to go and learn what he already knows. He must learn what is alien to him. Which statement is natural and which is not: “Stay out of debt, be a good spouse, encourage your kids, seek peace, don’t be a racist, love God and man” or “There is a great exchange whereby Christ’s obedience, by faith alone, is applied to us while our sin is applied to Him and we are thereby reconciled to God and owe Him a life of gratitude”? The former makes sense. Christians and non-Christians alike, in their equal access to Law, can do that theology in their sleep. Like fish on bicycles, it’s the latter that is so weird and unnatural. By nature we wake up each day trying to do the right thing well before we wonder how we might be reconciled to God and what that subsequently demands of us. So what we learn is the gospel.

If we have answered what then the next question might be how. I think learning the gospel is revelatory and declarative. Learning Law seems a very academic affair. While not exhaustive, one helpful sign that we may not be properly learning the Gospel is if we find ourselves at church sitting amongst legions of furious note-takers instead of simple yet intent hearers. If so, we are likely writing out our own prescriptions for more law. If we are more familiar with the conditional language of “steps, principles and challenges” than pronouncement language like “confession, declaration and benediction”; if we are focused on invoking and applying some new idea or exercise to improve ourselves and our world; if something has to be achieved or a lesson to be learned that we could have figured out while sitting at home on Sunday; if there is something to work at either behaviorally or mentally; if we are familiar with hard law (hellfire and brimstone) or soft law (biblical principles) or some hybrid of the two, we may have been seriously derailed from the gospel. But when one sits under a declaration he simply hears it. Little wonder the language of Scripture is one of both proclamation and hearing. In the Christian religion the gospel is “preached” and we are to “hear the good news” of it. The Reformed tradition speaks of “receiving, resting, and relying.”

Along these lines, as my children get older and sit in worship I encourage them to exercise the muscle of faith—their ears. Listen to the words sung and prayed and said. Much as I esteem quality preaching, it has never seemed to me that a sermon is so much designed to make students as it is to confirm and compel believers. Ours seems a more organic project than a mechanical, academic one.

But to those hungry for law this seems a rather weak image. “Yes, yes, that sounds very good and pious, but aren’t there programs to inaugurate, principles to grasp and behaviors to employ? Isn’t there a self to improve and a world to save?” If we ask such questions, it seems the gospel has once again been lost on us. The gospel is excruciatingly alien to us, which is why it seems we must learn it over and over again with our ears and not our hands.

As I have moved from my secular rearing, into and out of broad Evangelicalism and finally into Reformation Christianity, I have seen that the gospel is very hard to come by. I believe the Reformed expression is the superior one in all of the Christian landscape, purely capturing the gospel. But even where it is formally confessed it can be hard to find, which only seems to prove its perfect alienness, its ability to resist any trapping of men. I have also come to be suspect of those who might deny it outright yet imply they have the gospel easily grasped, imploring us to now move to bigger and better things, as if we could or as if something greater actually existed.

If we have answered what and how maybe the next question is why. Of course, the best of the confessional Reformed tradition understands there is now a life of gratitude, tutored by the Law, to be led: in light of what has been done for you, go and do what you already know to be right. Our tradition believes strongly that there is most assuredly a place for law. While Christianity is not a way of life there most certainly is a way of life resident within it. Finding it all over in Scripture, our tradition speaks of an indicative declaration and subsequent imperatives. The latter is married to the former and cannot be divorced. This is what is so glorious about the Heidelberg Catechism. Its structure is that of Scripture: guilt, grace, and gratitude. What more can be said? The pursuit of Law here seems to be the back-end result of something, not the front-wheel drive.

But when law, instead of gospel, drives us it seems to characterize us as well. Law seems to characterize most of American culture and cult, from diverse self-improvement gospels to various intensities of cultural-political gospels, left and right. It seems to be in the DNA of American piety and very hard to resist. But no voice that presumes to speak on behalf of God earns the right to spur us to any measure of law if the true gospel has been one iota circumvented. And it has always seemed to me that if a voice is genuine in this way it ironically seems to become less and less concerned for any measure of mere self or social improvement. There seems to be at once a fine line and wide gap between a piety bent on betterment and one driven by an inglorious yet sincere gratitude. One tends to be boisterous and brash, the other, well, not so much.

These are likely concepts well beyond the typical covenant child. But I have never been discomforted by the idea of anyone having to grow into something beyond his immediate or complete understanding. Whatever else the sacrament of baptism signs and seals it seems to suggest at least that much. And much as my answer might befuddle them when they ask why we go to church, it is one thing to be temporarily confused by a right answer but another to be eternally mis-lead by a wrong one.

Some disparage it as the “holy huddle” syndrome. But others counter that the success of a church can, more or less, be measured much the same way one’s golf game (an appropriate analogy, since everyone knows “the good walk spoiled” was invented in the land of Presbyterians): the least strokes you take the better you’re doing. Likewise, the least peripheral stuff you’re taken up with the better you’re doing.

When I was growing up as a hit-or-miss mega-mainline Methodist golfing was what the churchly power brokers (AKA ministers) did when grooming their cultural clout. We lowly parishioners did it because we descended from a semi-long line of midwestern golfers. But Willimon proves that not all mainline Methodist ministers are clueless (do some even nurture an inner Presbyterian?). The Reformed Reader has the scoop.  And here is a related post.

Chapter twelve of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s “Until Justice and Peace Embrace” is entitled, “The Tragedy of Liturgy in Protestantism.”  With plenty to otherwise unpack, I was particularly struck by the following:

“When one looks at the actions that constitute the liturgy of the church, one sees that they comprise two different directions, two different orientations. Some are actions directed toward us: God addresses us and we are the recipients. There are the actions of proclamation, central to which are of course the reading of the Scriptures and the preaching of the sermon. But there are also actions directed toward God: We address God and God is the recipient. These are the actions of worship in the true sense. The Christian liturgy is an interchange between actions of proclamation and the actions of worship.

“Even a brief glance at the history of the Christian liturgy makes clear how difficult it has been for the church to hold these two directions in balance. The Roman and Orthodox traditions have historically found it difficult to give due weight to the dimension of God’s addressing us in judgment and grace—in short, to proclamation. The Protestant tradition has historically found it difficult to give due weight to the dimension of our addressing God in love and devotion—in short, to worship. Of course no liturgy has ever been entirely one or the other. Yet liturgies do differ profoundly in their emphases; and the tragedy of liturgy in Protestantism—and particularly in the Reformed tradition—is that the worship dimension is suppressed, sometimes radically so. The liturgy is no longer ‘Eucharistic,’ and a fundamental dimension of the life of the church and of the existence of the Christian is thereby stunted.

“…What naturally results from the diminution of the worship dimension in liturgy is that incredible starkness so characteristic of much of Protestant liturgy and its setting. So little of the multifaceted richness of our humanity is here manifest! So many renunciations! Here words rule all. What also results from the suppression of the worship dimension of liturgy is seriousness, a sobriety, an absence of joy that is contrary to the spirit of the divine rest and the people’s liberation that we are intended to echo. When proclamation overwhelms worship in the liturgy, then I think we must expect joy to be diminished.”

Wolterstorff puts into words here an impression I have always had myself yet unable to articulate. I think he begins to help make the distinction between simple worship and simplistic worship.

Simplicity is surely something coveted in the Reformed tradition, and for good reason. But is simplicity really the same as simplistic, stripped down and bare? When did we get it into our collective Protestant heads that liturgy had to make the choice between proclamation and worship, with the former winning out? How did we get to that place where we see the liturgy as virtually negligible to proclamation, with all that precedes the sermon to be a rising action to it and all that follows a gentle denouement? Is the sermon really the climax instead of the center (with sacrament as climax)? How did we become so…low?

When I have visited Reformed or Presbyterian churches with what I consider exquisite Reformed liturgies that also include the regular means of grace called the Lord’s Table, I have always found them to be at once simple and yet quite rich—not simplistic, stark or bleak. The Gospel seems both purely preached and administered. The liturgy in these places are intensely dialogical, the worshipers jealous to do the work of the service and not leaving any aspect of it to any cordoned off group or individual; its regard is properly sober yet balanced with expectant hope and joy. They all seem to grasp what it means to balance proclamation and worship in Reformed liturgy. This seems over against so much of those who claim even the faintest ancestry to Reformed Protestantism which impress as bare-bones. Some have called it the difference between three-to-five songs and a lecture and integral liturgy. The former is antiseptic, clinical and mechanical; the latter is organic, primal and seminal.

I am sure causes as to this relative inability to balance proclamation and worship are quite fraught, with the bamboozling of revivalism serving no small role as culprit. But I have seen that it can be done in Reformed and Presbyterian circles, despite whatever lies in our history that militates against it. Not only should praise go to these churchly and properly confessional and Protestant expressions which prove that proclamation and worship can characterize in an age so dead set against it, but a burden should be felt by those too lazy or otherwise unmoved—and I daresay irresponsible—to recognize what duty therein lies for any bold enough to claim a confessional Protestantism.

A friend of mine pastors a young church plant in my hometown about two hours northwest of Little Geneva. Though I am not a little thankful that Traverse City finally has a faithful and sane Reformational outpost, I have been routinely struck at how a church such as Redeemer Presbyterian has taken root while the ground around here seems stonier than ever.

Dan has always insisted that what makes Redeemer’s expression of worship characteristic and distinguished is her weekly communion. That may be why when the local experimenting evangelicals who visit (which include several of my own family members) conclude that “it’s way too Catholic.” But I have always wondered if the liturgical expression there has just as much to do with that.

Under the guidance of John Meuther, who suggested he develop the thesis of it being the fourth mark of the true church, Dan has recently finished a little pamphlet which takes up the topic of worship. After spending thirty-some pages rendering a diagnosis of the contemporary landscape, he begins to offer a biblical-historical perspective which includes a treatment of just what is meant by liturgical reform and renewal. It isn’t as reductive and underdeveloped as taking down the big screens and adopting a flinty countenance, some modern version of Zwinglian white-washing. It actually has to do with adopting fixed liturgical forms—with a smile. Gasp.

Obviously, it is quite fraught as to cause. But after suggesting that today’s disdain for liturgical form could be a carry-over from the late medieval abuses which had devolved into a “complicated, mystical and allegorized mass,” he writes,

The answer for the reformers was not to abandon liturgy but rather to return to the simple, faithful, and rightly motivated orders of worship. The great reformer John Calvin is often painted as one who advocated places of worship being stripped bare and worship services that were devoid of liturgy while focusing almost exclusively on the word read and preached.

He then quotes Frankie Schaeffer as Schaeffer recounts his trek from Protestantism to Eastern Orthodoxy,

If we were Reformed Presbyterians, we stuck to our Calvinist tradition—church consisted of four white walls and a lengthy sermon—and ‘worship’ was the feeling you got if the sermon was good.

Unfortunately, I know exactly what he is talking about. I can attest that the trail-heads of Rome, Canterbury and even Constantinople can be quite tempting in the midst of the stark barrenness of low-church Protestantism that seems more low than church. But if Nicholas Wolterstorff is right that truer forms of Calvinist Protestantism really do know how to balance “proclamation” and “worship” in liturgy, it could be that “Frankie spent too much time in Hollywood.” In other words, given to caricature and some sensationalism, modern interpretations on historical data are not always the most reliable. Calvinists aren’t really low-churchers.

After all, does the following, coupled with the fact that he desired weekly celebration of the Lord’s Supper (of which he also said, “I’d rather experience it than understand it”), really sound like a man who would prefer three-songs-and-a-lecture to make sure the gospel be not obscured:

I highly approve of it that there be a certain form…from which the ministers be not allowed to vary: that first, some provision be made to help the simplicity and un-skillfulness of some; secondly that the consent and harmony of the churches of the churches one with another may appear; and lastly, that the capricious giddiness and levity of such as affect innovations may be prevented.

In a lecture at the 1979 conference on Liturgy in Reformed Worship at Calvin College entitled, “Choir & Organ: Their Place In Reformed Liturgy,” Nicholas Wolterstorff stated the following:

Characteristically we Reformed people think of going to church as going to sermon. And we think of the sermon as marching orders. In what we do Monday through Saturday, we say, lies the proof and worth of Sunday. For us, the fundamental question to put to the liturgy is always: What did we get out of it?

But in biblical perspective there is clearly a second fundamental reason to assemble for the performance of the liturgy. It is right and proper—in the words of the old Latin Mass, dignum et justum—for us to acknowledge God’s majesty and goodness’s right and proper to sing praises to God for his works of creation and redemption, and for our status as new creatures in Jesus Christ. It’s right and proper to confess our sins. It’s right and proper to continue celebrating the supper of our Lord in memorial of him until he comes again. I know of course that it’s also right and proper to care for the poor of society, to work for peace, to build bridges, to create paintings. It must be said to the Reformed person—emphatically, because he’s so much inclined to forget it—that it is also inherently right and proper to perform the liturgy. This too is obedience. There’s profound truth in speaking of what takes place in our assemblies as a worship service. Worship, let’s not forget it, is part of our rightful service to God. Not only is liturgy for building us up unto obedience. Liturgy is for acknowledging God, in a tone of chastened celebration.

I said that one question to ask of the liturgy is: What did we get out of it? In light of what I’ve just said it’s clear there’s another, namely, How did we do? How did we do in our attempt to acknowledge God with praise and confession, with thanksgiving and intercession? Did we do it at all adequately?

In other words, worship, or the divine service of liturgy, is good in and of itself. Though they do receive as much, it needs no justification on the basis of what effect it has on the sinful agents involved. By extension, the Sabbath day, the day in which we both perform and receive the service, is good in and of itself, needing no justification for either its existence or observation. Worship is obedience. Worship is the primary and principle good work of the individual believer and corporate Church. Granted, Wolterstorff’s transformationalism zigs from two-kingdom zags with all that business about bridges and paintings. Eventually, this line of thought takes huge chucks away from his larger argument. Nevertheless, the point still stands however better propped up by two-kingdom views: the divine service, and its given day, is inherently, intrinsically, naturally and objectively good.

This seems fairly over against more modern notions that demand to know just what we get out of the Sabbath. It gives rise to what I call “Sabbath-as-recharge.” In this schema, the Sabbath is really not much more than a glorified day off. True enough, Sabbath can be located in creation and has its rightful place for creational rest. But as believers we have a citizenry in both kingdoms, it seems to me, and we must emphasize the redemptive bearing the Sabbath has. Sabbath-as-recharge seems to do several things.

First, it tends to neglect the redemptive dimension of the Sabbath for the creational one. In a post-resurrection age, the first day of the week for those who are believers is less about not mowing the lawn and more about living in obedient response to what it means to partake in the age to come. As needful as it may be to a certain extent, I find myself queasy when I hear believers prattling on about certain non/activities on the Sabbath, what should or should not be done. It seems to me that not only do these discussions over-emphasize creational concerns against redemptive ones, but more importantly, they sound like the concerns of latent legalists who, clamoring for rules,  forget that the gospel is about a life of response to the Law of God as covenant-keepers. Most assuredly, I am not one to think that duty and grateful response are mutually exclusive terms. Just ask my kids what their father expects every Sabbath. But whatever disdain I have for any notion of grace militating against obedience, I am equally appalled by legalism of any brand. I tend to think that those who see the Sabbath as recharge or therapeutic have children who “love church” because it has been re-fashioned for them and their felt needs; it is not understood as a spiritual discipline which can cause just as much angst as relief. I cannot help but think these may be the same parents who, taking them for little fools, tell their children broccoli tastes like candy. But children have a way of seeing through silly devices and vain attempts to circumvent obedience as a virtue.

Second, as it emphasizes our creational existence, Sabbath-as-recharge seems to end up casting a negative light on our six days. But the fourth commandant begins, does it not, with the command to work and labor? The point may very well be on keeping the Sabbath, but the point also seems built upon an affirmative command. And are we not also commanded to “be in the world but not of it”? The thrust may be to not be of the world, but it also is built upon a positive and good thing, namely to be in the world. Sabbath-as-recharge almost seems to depend on a formulation of our six days as a necessary evil. It is heard that Monday begins that steady decline into a labor hell bent on taking something precious out of us, looking ahead to the coming Sabbath to refresh and enliven us once again. Yet, as Calvinists we should know there is nothing precious within that deserves such coddling. Also, it is interesting to note that when God ordained the Sabbath he did so retrospectively, not in an anticipatory manner; after having worked, God rested. Moreover, just as the Pauline antithesis is between this age and the age to come instead of the Gnostic duality between body and soul, it would seem that our six days and Sabbath deserve the same distinction: the problem with this age—in which we find our six days—is that it is passing away, not that it is inherently evil. The Sabbath points us beyond this passing age to an enduring one. In this way, Sabbath-as-recharge seems to have more in common with a Gnostic dualism than a Pauline antithesis.

Third, if it is not busy casting our six days as a necessary evil, it ironically wants us to see the Sabbath as subservient to them. Wolterstorff again with some disapproval, “In what we do Monday through Saturday, we say, lies the proof and worth of Sunday.” In other words, what really matters is how we live our lives, not how we worship God. Some have observed this as the “worship-as-homeroom” perspective, where we are simply checking in to get our instructions for the coming week. Our six days and the Sabbath are flattened out, the latter being a glorified former in order to bolster them. This is where we get the bias against those who have a high view of the Sabbath as being “hypocrites who only care about what they do on Sunday but live the way they please the other six days.” Here the concepts of liberty are chucked for the tyranny of “what a good Christian should look like” on common days.

The Sabbath, then, does not “recharge” us, at least, not the way the sarx naturally thinks of such things. True enough, Wolterstorff rightly acknowledges the question, What did we get out of it? There is much to be said for the fact that sinners “get something” out of the divine service. We do well to counter that which one finds in the contemporary religious landscape that seems more in keeping with a spirituality of performance than a piety of response: “Ask not what God can do for you, ask what you can do for God” is more American than Christian.

That said, however, it should be rather odd to hear confessionally Reformed believers talk about the Sabbath and worship the way they talk about an activity done in creation. Many amongst us eschew, rightly, a worship service that apes forms of entertainment that are centered on meeting some inward and subjective felt need of sinners. Yet these same folks can be heard saying they “just can’t get enough word and sacrament.” Some are heard to defend morning and evening services to say, “The question shouldn’t be why two services but why not three or four or more!” In such utterances it seems that what ailed Aaron’s sons may be afoot; one thinks of that other Americanism, “If one is good, two is better!” But like the physician to his patient, God has prescribed what he has to sinners for specific reasons. We are certainly nourished by the Sabbath and its resident activities and non-activities, but not in the way we naturally think of being nourished. It seems to always be God’s way. In the theology of the Cross God is revealed by hiding. Paul speaks of God’s magnification through his own diminution. And we feast on proclaimed word, water, wafers and wine. In the same way that we are being sanctified, not improved, the Sabbath has its own objective value not readily discerned by sinners.

If Darryl Hart’s A Secular Faith is downright scandalous when it comes to how modern Protestants conceive of both the nature of and relationship between church and state, his Recovering Mother Kirk is perfectly (and deliciously) delinquent when it comes to how a truer Presbyterian godliness is both expressed and nurtured.

In the course of making his broader case for a churchly expression of Reformed piety in which, by way of contrast, “some proponents of the Reformed faith under the influence of evangelicalism are caught off guard” by the suggestion that in question and answer 85 the Shorter Catechism’s prescription to escape God’s wrath and curse includes not only faith and repentance but also a diligent use of the means of grace, Hart brings to bear just how triumphant the pragmatic architects of heart religion really are:

“They have so emphasized either conversion or doctrine that they have abstracted the Christian religion from the Christian practices that mark the body of Christ.”

He then begins to explore how the “virtue of nominal Christianity” is essential to the making of an observant Protestantism:

In conversations about specific Roman Catholics or Jews, it is common to hear them described as either observant or nonobservant. In both cases, the line between observance and nonobservance is easy to spot because the person either does or does not practice the ceremonies and religious routines that constitute the commonality of faith. Protestantism, however, has no such language. Instead, discussions along these lines about Protestants usually employ the words genuine, nominal, authentic, or dead…Since the rise of pietism in the seventeenth century and the Anglo-American revivals of the following century, the goal among God-fearing Protestants has been to eliminate observant Protestantism.

From the more obscure notion that what constitutes proper Sabbath observance can be guided by the principle of “whatever is conducive to worship” (i.e. be worshipful), to the rather ubiquitous idea even in Reformed circles of the Sabbath-as-recharge, to the clearly under-tutored practice of physically fasting in order to get the full effect of the sacraments, it seems there is quite a lot stacked up against the conception of an observant Protestantism. I recall some years back listening to a very prominent and popular Reformed figure describe worship and my own instinctual hesitation. Quite absent his description was any mind toward getting worship correct but rather the soul’s preparation before (extended all the way back to Saturday afternoon, in fact), its intense and undivided attention during and just as earnestly sustained reflection after worship. The fulcrum in all of this, to my mind, is an emphasis on the inward effect on the worshiper instead of seeing to it, first, that the stated worship of God is correct and, second, that such worship is faithfully attended.

Some in the Calvinist tradition have even coined the lingo of an “experimental Calvinism,” as if the stuff of intellect and affect or love and duty were indeed mutually exclusive and in need of a helping hand if ever to meet again. (Closer readers of the Outhouse know that I don’t have any particular ideological ax to grind, but this must be what consistent ideological conservatives feel like as neo-cons prance about with all their faith-based initiatives. Experimental Calvinism is to Calvinism what “compassionate conservatism” is to conservatism.)

But, while admittedly zealous for the edification of the saints, the best of the Reformed tradition has never seemed to be so worldly about just how that edification is effected. Such strategies seem to be more consistent with the doings of pietism. If something like Sabbath-as-recharge is any measure, it would seem that the general victory of pietism to greater or lesser degrees is what keeps even confessional Protestants from seeing the benefits of a nominal Christianity that only an observant Protestantism can yield.

Jesus said that tares and wheat must be allowed to abide with each other and without any human interference. Where an observant Protestantism would seeks to be so faithful, pietism will have none of it. Instead of being content for the dividing lines between belief and unbelief to peacefully co-exist—a peace only to be disturbed when unbelief rears its own head in doctrinal or moral apostasy—pietism desires to up the ante and erase the lines. Of course, the problem for pietism is that, just as a tradition of anti-traditionalism becomes its own tradition, what inevitably follows in pietism is exactly what it seeks to circumvent in an observant religion. Feigning true piety is not bypassed by making up new practices, however seemingly sincere in nature. Just as many that can faithfully but unbelievingly attend God’s stated worship may also bluff heart religion. A child, for example, can just as easily parrot his parents’ inward religiosity as he can hypocritically utter the Creed. In point of fact, it may be more dangerous to defraud heart religion as it seems the only alternative a doubting soul might have is blatant rebellion. An observant religion is kind and long-suffereing enough to let doubt inhabit its sanctuary. After all, the opposite of faith isn’t doubt but sight; and Calvin remarked that we all go to our deaths with an unbeliever abiding within yet. If that is true, much as it might think so, pietism has absolutely nothing on the staid wisdom of an observant religion.

The question becomes which template is the right one to act as the fulcrum between belief and unbelief? Is it experientialism or confessionalism? It might be helpful to consider what Jesus said about how he planned to build his church. He didn’t ask Peter how often he nurtured Jesus in his heart; he asked him who he said Jesus was. He didn’t ask Peter how well he’d groomed his inner life; he asked Peter for his confession of faith. And when Peter answered correctly this was to be the basis for the church. Even so, that same Peter would go on to deny Jesus and even get it wrong with Paul as to just how circumcision figured into justification by faith. An observant Christianity doesn’t fool itself in light of this by inventing another way in order to shield itself from such an apparently troubling contradiction. It actually endures doubt as a necessary part of true faith and lives with the paradox. This gives new meaning to not snuffing out a smoldering wick (or maybe not so new).

Mary as a model of faith always sounds good and pious, but this essential message is really quite far from the point of historical Christianity. Are we really to come away with yet another moral or spiritual lesson designed to merely help us get through our days, weeks and lives? In these scenarios one of the theses in Reformed theology once again is made true: the Gospel is not our natural inclination. It is very hard “to do” the Gospel because it is not natural to us. It is easier and more natural to cull out naturalistic messages from the Bible, or the “timeless principles” such as the Application-Bridge model implores us to do. This is because timeless principles, naturalistic messages or moralistic and spiritualistic truisms all fall under our natural inclination, namely that category of Law. We get Law. We understand “do this and you shall live.” We were programmed for such things. We were hard wired to fulfill the covenant of works. That natural programming has never been extinguished. The problem is that our ability was. Thus, to hear “sit back and watch God do it on your behalf,” is aggravating, frustrating, and angering. So it is not natural to read Mary’s Magnificat as the otherworldly announcer of Christ for the forgiveness of sins, the justification of the wicked and the conduit for the age to come. That message is too foreign to the flesh, which furls its brow and asks, “What’s that got to do with me? That’s all too impractical, too lofty and transcendent to be of any earthly good. Please, just tell me what to do, how to live. Give me principles and tools and guidelines. I have a lot to figure out in my particular life, so just write it all down and let me get on with it.”

But instead of pulling God down into our own narratives and making God “relevant and practical” to our lives as we demand He be, the Redemptive-Historical approach seeks to show how we are caught up in the biblical narrative of God’s redemption as He has declared it. Coming away from Advent messages that tell us that the whole point is to pull God down into our individual narratives is weak, to say the very least. Biblical figures point us (and even them) away from our narratives to Christ the Messiah which is God’s narrative.

The biblical narrative is like a rainbow that arches above us, a thing that surpasses our particular experiences as individuals and goes on “above our heads,” so to speak. This is because, like a rainbow, it is God’s work. It then reaches down and sweeps us out of our particularities and sets us all on equal ground together. The truth narrative of Christ’s work for us becomes ours; we are grafted into it together. Gone are the individual experiences amongst us that serve only to divide us. Gone are John’s particular pains and my this-worldly pleasures. The themes that unite us are those otherworldly themes of sin and grace. Gone are any impulses to examine what is going on in our lives these days and how God fits into it, and they are replaced with what God has done and how we fit into that.

Mary’s Magnificat beckons us to enjoin with Mary and “magnify the LORD” that He is about to fulfill what He declared through the prophets: the fulfillment of the promises to justify His chosen people, His race of faith, His elect. He is about to clothe Himself in flesh and blood, come down and actually dwell amongst His people. The Light is about to flicker and remind us all that He is ready to make the way of salvation and to do His work as promised, to usher in the next age. Ours is a dual task: we celebrate His first coming and what it accomplished in order that we might look ahead to His second.

With Part One as the backdrop, let’s return to Mary. During Advent it is Mary’s turn to be held up as the model. And, according to the Application-Bridge model, we once again must find a moral lesson to learn instead of joining her in anticipation.

“Mary is a model of faith. We ought to submit ourselves, like she did, to the will of God for our lives and to trust God in our daily lives.” In keeping with an Application-Bridge model, this is usually the bottom line message we can anticipate. It is the one we are intended to internalize in our contemporary day.

I have always felt weird when any Bible character is displayed for me to follow. Using Mary to buttress my own sense of general vocation or plodding out the Christian life in the here and now is no less weird. What follows is an attempt to explain why can’t I easily link up that message with Mary’s Magnificat.

First, the mode of the Magnificat. How does Mary receive the message? It’s via an audible and visual display by the angel of the LORD. Though we all might wish we could have this sort of direction when trying to make daily decisions, most of us do not have the angel of the LORD reveal to us what our daily duties and responsibilities shall be. Here is the first disconnect I have with Mary. To Mary it was pretty much unmistakable just what God had in store for her. I have never once had any sort of revelation in this life (and, much as it might be useful, I really hope I never do). Most of us have to figure out our lives the old-fashioned and painfully ordinary way. Some may claim God has shown them this or that, guided them hither and yon. But upon such reports I get that same weird feeling. Images of a sanctified Ouji board come to mind. But for Mary it was extraordinary. It had been some 400 years since God had spoken in such a way. This fact is not lost on Mary, since her response is one of fear. God must not have ordinarily come to Mary in this way. People today who like to claim they have discerned the “will of God for their lives” talk about it as if it is a common occurrence. It seems that even the mother of God herself does not take such guidance so lightly. Perhaps more contemplation of DT 29:29 might be in order: “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.”

Many people these days are simply not satisfied with the revealed will of God as given in Scripture. It just isn’t exciting enough. Many want His secret will, that which He has declared simply unknown to man and only for Him to know. Paul Simon seemed to get it better than many Christians do: “God only knows when God makes His plan; the information’s not available to the mortal man.” Contemporary and upwardly mobile concerns such as what house to buy, what person to marry, what to major in, what job to take, what to say to someone, how to spend our money, what pastor to call or any other host of daily and ordinary decisions are for us to make without direct access to the mind of God. Praying honestly for wisdom and guidance in these situations is far different than doing so and concluding that God directly revealed this or that. As painfully unspiritual as that may sound, God has declared it so. But many are still eerily at ease with declaring what God has not. John Calvin himself wrote that the secret will of God is “a labyrinth from which there is no return.” How one jumps from Mary’s clear visitation from the LORD with regard to her task to how we need to discern God’s will for our lives always leaves me quite stumped. I imagine Mary trying to make sense of such a message. While God is indeed sovereign over all things, I truly wonder if she would say the point was to “trust God with our daily lives.”

Second, the content. Mary was given the task of giving birth to and rearing the Son of God. Here is more disconnect for me. And as important to God as I consider my life and those around me, they seem quite ordinary when compared to Mary’s task. I should be clear. Ordinary does not mean “less important.” It simply means that a task like Mary’s is quite distinct from yours or mine—it is extraordinary. This fact also was not lost on Mary, for she declares, “As the LORD has spoken, may it be!” God has not declared something ordinary to her, like where to send Jesus to school. It’s important for Mary and Joseph to decide where Jesus will be educated, but it is doubtful they will exclaim, “As the LORD has spoken, may it be!” when landing on a decision. Mary is just like you and me. She had an equal number of ordinary minutes in her life, except for however many it took to receive this message. The only thing distinguishing Mary from us is the mode and content of her Magnificat experience. She, like us, must take her extraordinary experience into her own ordinary experience. But, again, is the point that she herself should “trust God in her daily life”? Think of this: Mary will enjoy no more extraordinary messages from God. True enough, her task will continue to be extraordinary through to the day she sees Jesus crucified. But mainly she will have a very ordinary life. As with us, God does not break in at every milestone of Mary’s with an angel of the LORD to spell it all out. And if ever there was someone who may be prone to thinking she had some sort of access to the mind of God for the secret things, we never see Mary pretending that she has. So if Mary doesn’t get any special revelation about her ordinary life, why should we expect any?

When it comes to Mary’s Magnificat, I find that I cannot take away the messages often proffered. Both the mode and content of her revelation will never be afforded me in any sense whatsoever. God will never speak directly to me, and I will never be mother to the Son of God. Trying to sort of mimic Mary’s experience in order to be relevant or to connect with her just doesn’t cut it. How can I relate to her if I can’t connect with having the angel of the LORD tell me I will bear and rear the Son of God? Perhaps if I don some otherworldly lenses it will make more sense.

In Part Three, I will take up Mary’s Magnificat from a Redemptive Historical model.

This is a re-post from last year. It was originally printed in the July/August 2007 issue of Modern Reformation, back when they still had their Diaries column. This is the tweaked version. I have three reasons for re-posting: 1) As my kids mature I find that I am running into this question a lot more, 2) The picture is very Thanksgiving-y looking and I am nothing if not relevant, and 3) I am trying to keep up with my self-imposed rule about having two posts a week but failing for various reasons, thus resorting to stealing from myself. Let this last reason be a lesson, children, in the errors of legalism.

It might sound odd to say, but I like the fact that my kids can find church to be a turn-off. Our time assumes that a thing’s final value can and should be measured by subjective, personal enjoyment. Witness the church-growth movement. It is really nothing new and classically American in the sense that it is the natural evolution of that very presumption. Ever since Winthrop and Whitefield landed and helped tear the Gospel from its churchly contours, American Evangelicalism generally has wanted to “meet the felt needs” of the populace. And American Liberalism specifically declared that “the world sets the church’s agenda.” Little wonder we fret that when Billy and Suzie are bored we have let them down. Instead of patiently expecting them to grow into something they don’t naturally understand, we race to appease them so they won’t end up hating church. Instead of letting them be comfortable with the discomfort of growing up that something like staid liturgy demands, we are tempted to prolong adolescence by appealing to the least common denominators resident within the stuff of entertainment. But since Scripture regards us as aliens it seems there ought to be antithesis between what we experience in our six days and the Sabbath day. However vulnerable to a thousand qualifications, perhaps a good thumbnail test may be that if your kids are bored something is being done right.

A question in such a context of discomfort may be, “Why do we go to church?” The inquiry seems inevitable for those of us who are covenantal parents. And, just like the boredom that should be embraced rather than feared and avoided, this direct question should be welcomed and capitalized on. I might do well to back up before I go further.

I was not formally reared in faith. My parents are baby boomers. And even though Dad was raised by a faithful Episcopalian mother (and a rather unobservant Roman Catholic father), one famous trait endemic to this generation is how they turned tail on organized religion. At some point and for whatever reasons the boomers got antsy and decided they had gone too far.

So round about junior high my younger brother and I were yanked from our Sunday morning TV cartoons and Atari joysticks, forced to wear monogrammed sweaters and trucked across town to the well-established and mainline United Methodist Church.

The whole awkward foray back into the pew was very short-lived. Suffice it to say that as good as it may seem in the drawing boards of parents’ minds, springing religion on un-churched and thoroughly uninterested pre-pubescent boys is nothing if not packed with learning curves.

Memories of this are few and sketchy. One clear memory I have is asking my father this very question: “Why are we going to church?” I will readily admit that my question at the time was grounded more in supreme adolescent annoyance than in an honest quest for objective truth. And in looking back, his answer seems to speak volumes with regard to how we understand that counterintuitive thing called the Gospel, the thing “going to church” is supposed to be about. He said, “To learn how to be better people.” While neither one of us would have understood it back then, I have come to see that his answer was grounded firmly in that other more intuitive thing called Law. After all, true religion “makes bad people good and good people better,” right?

I am not so sure. There are several problems with this Law-laden answer. The first is logic. Just as the world is, in fact, not getting any better or worse as time either progresses or retreats (Ecc. 1:9-14), going to church does not make one essentially any better or worse than anyone else. I have been at it for almost as long as I wasn’t, and I am no better or worse than when I first began. Second, why Christianity? If the point is to improve individuals or society in some way then plenty of religions, organizations, therapies, programs and philosophies will do the trick. Third, his answer assumed we were somehow presently not up to snuff, perhaps even bad. But my father himself was a pillar of the community, a good man publicly and even better privately. We were law-abiding and quite functional citizens. And we were such with no direct help from church or any formal religion, thank you very much. What was it exactly we needed to learn that we didn’t already know? If God is mysterious then it doesn’t follow that His institution is about the obvious or intuitive. I can agree we go to learn something, but what, how and why?

I would suggest that we don’t go to learn Law or, as dad put it, how to be good or better people. Rather—through the rituals of sound liturgy, confession and Creed, Word and sacrament—we actually go to learn the Gospel. Nobody in his right mind makes efforts to go and learn what he already knows. He must learn what is alien to him. Which statement is natural and which is not: “Stay out of debt, be a good spouse, encourage your kids, seek peace, don’t be a racist, love God and man” or “There is a great exchange whereby Christ’s obedience, by faith alone, is applied to us while our sin is applied to Him and we are thereby reconciled to God and owe Him a life of gratitude”? The former makes sense. Christians and non-Christians alike, in their equal access to Law, can do that theology in their sleep. Like fish on bicycles, it’s the latter that is so weird and unnatural. By nature we wake up each day trying to do the right thing well before we wonder how we might be reconciled to God and what that subsequently demands of us. So what we learn is the Gospel.

If we have answered what then the next question might be how. I think learning the Gospel is revelatory and declarative. Learning Law seems a very academic affair. While not exhaustive, one helpful sign that we may not be properly learning the Gospel is if we find ourselves at church sitting amongst legions of furious note-takers instead of simple yet intent hearers. If so, we are likely writing out our own prescriptions for more Law. If we are more familiar with the conditional language of “steps, principles and challenges” than pronouncement language like “confession, declaration and benediction”; if we are focused on invoking and applying some new idea or exercise to improve ourselves and our world; if something has to be achieved or a lesson to be learned that we could have figured out while sitting at home on Sunday; if there is something to work at either behaviorally or mentally; if we are familiar with hard Law (hellfire and brimstone) or soft Law (biblical principles) or some hybrid of the two, we may have been seriously derailed from the Gospel. But when one sits under a declaration he simply hears it. Little wonder the language of Scripture is one of both proclamation and hearing. In the Christian religion the Gospel is “preached” and we are to “hear the good news” of it. The Reformed tradition speaks of “receiving, resting, and relying.”

Along these lines, as my children get older and sit in worship I encourage them to exercise the muscle of faith—their ears. Listen to the words sung and prayed and said. Much as I esteem quality preaching, it has never seemed to me that a sermon is so much designed to make students as it is to confirm and compel believers. Ours seems a more organic project than a mechanical, academic one.
But to those hungry for Law this seems a rather weak image. “Yes, yes, that sounds very good and pious, but aren’t there programs to inaugurate, principles to grasp and behaviors to employ? Isn’t there a self to improve and a world to save?” If we ask such questions, it seems the Gospel has once again been lost on us. The Gospel is excruciatingly alien to us, which is why it seems we must learn it over and over again with our ears and not our hands.

As I have moved from my secular rearing, into and out of broad Evangelicalism and finally into Reformation Christianity, I have seen that the Gospel is very hard to come by. I believe the Reformed expression is the superior one in all of the Christian landscape, purely capturing the Gospel. But even where it is formally confessed it can be hard to find, which only seems to prove its perfect alienness, its ability to resist any trapping of men. I have also come to be suspect of those who might deny it outright yet imply they have the Gospel easily grasped, imploring us to now move to bigger and better things, as if we could or as if something greater actually existed.

If we have answered what and how maybe the next question is why. Of course, the best of the confessional Reformed tradition understands there is now a life of gratitude, tutored by the Law, to be led: in light of what has been done for you, go and do what you already know to be right. Our tradition believes strongly that there is most assuredly a place for Law. While Christianity is not a way of life there most certainly is a way of life resident within it. Finding it all over in Scripture, our tradition speaks of an indicative declaration and subsequent imperatives. The latter is married to the former and cannot be divorced. This is what is so glorious about the Heidelberg Catechism. Its structure is that of Scripture: Guilt, Grace, and Gratitude. What more can be said? The pursuit of Law here seems to be the back-end result of something, not the front-wheel drive.

But when Law, instead of Gospel, drives us it seems to characterize us as well. Law seems to characterize most of American culture and cult, from diverse self-improvement gospels to various intensities of cultural-political gospels, left and right. It seems to be in the DNA of American piety and very hard to resist. But no voice that presumes to speak on behalf of God earns the right to spur us to any measure of Law if the true Gospel has been one iota circumvented. And it has always seemed to me that if a voice is genuine in this way it ironically seems to become less and less concerned for any measure of mere self or social improvement. There seems to be at once a fine line and wide gap between a piety bent on betterment and one driven by an inglorious yet sincere gratitude. One tends to be boisterous and brash, the other, well, not so much.

These are likely concepts well beyond the typical covenant child. But I have never been discomforted by the idea of anyone having to grow into something beyond his immediate or complete understanding. Whatever else the sacrament of baptism signs and seals it seems to suggest at least that much. And much as my answer might befuddle them when they ask why we go to church, it is one thing to be temporarily confused by a right answer but another to be eternally mis-lead by a wrong one.

It has been rightly observed that the more mindful Presbyterian must do his homework when out of town over a Lord’s Day and looking for a place of worship. With no less insight, it has been further observed that this is something of a height in irony. After all, does it really makes sense that the one tradition that has resident within it something like the regulative principle in worship should have adherents who instinctively know they can’t walk into any given Presbyterian church, while virtually any other tradition just needs an address? It is not as if a Pentecostal, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox or broadly evangelical leaves his church service surprised. But the typical Presbyterian knows exactly what Forest Gump means about the proverbial boxa’ chocolates and never knowing what ya gonna get. How is it exactly that a Pentecostal church, premised on spontaneity, is painfully predictable, while a Presbyterian church, premised on prescription, isn’t?

Such was my lot several years ago. My family and I traveled to Florida to visit my retired parents. To my delight I discovered that just a few miles away from my folk’s home was a little PCA. In the course of further research, and to my utter delight, I found that the liturgy was sane, dialogical and Reformed. Not only that, but the Lord’s Supper was observed every week. Like a kid who finds the answers in the back of the book, I had no idea it would be that easy. (One searches in vain to find as much in the burned-over district which is Grand Rapids, that cradle of Dutch Reformed orthodoxy; but a few clicks from Google and Venice, Florida surfaces with Reformation.) I was so pleased I contacted the pastor to tell him so. As we back-and-forthed, I wondered if he could tell me how he would characterize his preaching. “I emphasize living the Christian life; I don’t spend much time making my flock little theologians.” I hesitated. But no matter; he informed me that, unfortunately, while he would be present and looked forward to our visit he would not be in the pulpit. Instead, a student of Martin Lloyd-Jones would be preaching.

Fast-forward to Sunday morning in the pew. Ignore with me the fistful of papers given upon entering the sanctuary, which included a glossy flier promotion for a “keep ‘em pure with a silver ring” program and the pro-life march slated in coming days. Instead, imagine an otherwise exquisite Reformed liturgy adversely punctured by a visiting revivalist. As he directly contradicts, even mocks, the very notion of an institutional church and a liturgical worship, can you feel your upper lip getting moist? As he makes up for his obvious disorganization and ill-preparations by simply leaning on pure sentiment and repetitive sloganeering, does your heart race? Are you doing your level best to remain seated as he makes up for no content by simply going on and on and periodically shouting, while also time and again making sure you know he was a close protégé of the good Doctor? And, by the end of this colossal waste of time, are you utterly flabbergasted that instead of anything remotely close to the gospel you are simply goaded to do better? Well, don’t worry, from the adoring look on the pastor’s face and the disorderly peanut gallery “Amens!” it’s all good. Your task now is to explain to your father who accompanied you just how the Old School Presbyterian preaching you keep contrasting to his mainline Presbyterianism is really any different from, well, anything else he sees in contemporary Protestantism. If you can’t muster anything beyond, “That preaching was a train wreck whose only redemption is that it serves as a stellar example of how good liturgy hems us in from bad preaching,” don’t feel too bad. After all, you are right.

But Scott Clark’s Recovering the Reformed Confession sheds some light that might be more helpful to explain why revivalism still influences even ostensibly stalwart enclaves of the Reformed tradition. In contrast to both Ian Murray, Martin Lloyd-Jones and even Jonathon Edwards as they understand revivalism, Clark begins from the idea that, while they may have had some important relative distinctives, those things dubbed the First and Second Great Awakenings finally had no difference. In fact, they “were subspecies of the same genus, namely the QIRE [quest for illegitimate religious experience].” Those who find distinctions with differences are really up against it. Murray, for example, “appeals to providence to explain good revivals (those he likes) but ignores providence when describing the bad revivals (those with which he disagrees).”

In the same way, Jonathon Edwards,

“…gave himself the nearly impossible task of trying to delineate proper religious experience from improper religious experience….he had to defend the right sort of ecstasy from the wrong sort and the right sort of visions and ‘strong and pleasing imaginations’ from the wrong…Though he later warned against it in the Distinguishing Marks, it is hard to see how Edwards was not forced to attempt what cannot be done, that is, to interpret the providence of God…If Lloyd-Jones is correct, that to criticize the 1859 revival as hysteria is blasphemy, then what should we say of Edwards’ assumption that he could determine, from the appearance or disappearance of certain extraordinary phenomena, the presence or absence of God the Spirit? Does anyone know the secret movement of God’s Spirit (John 3:8)?”

Good points, and even better questions.

But for those of us who categorically reject the idea that Reformed confessionalism has any stake whatever in the language of “revival,” and further wonder how it is that otherwise stout Reformed environs have come to appear compromised, even more compelling, at least to me, was this line of thought:

“My objections are more like those of the Old Side leader, John Thomson (c. 1690-1753). In 1741 he argued in his essay The Government of the Church of Christ that the revivalists were guilty of alienating the affections of the congregations for their ministers. The revivalists made life impossible for ordinary ministers by charging that the latter were unregenerate, mentioning Tennent’s sermon explicitly. How exactly does one defend oneself against the charge that one is unregenerate, especially when the charge assumes as its major premise that the regenerate will support the revival? If one points to one’s piety, then one is guilty of the sin of pride. In other words, the only way to extricate oneself from the complaint that one is not regenerate is to support the New Side.”

Extortion explains a lot. Even Tony Soprano has been known to take the edge off the ruthless in his extortion and let a guy go. But I guess the Godfather of New Jersey has nothing on certain sultans of the Spirit. True enough, Tennent did come to repentance for his infamous 1740 sermon The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry. But if my own experience at that little Presbyterian church is any measure and troublesome revivalists are allowed to scandalize Reformed pulpits, the old maxim is true: it is very hard to un-ring bells—especially when they toll against the eternal status of those who dare to raise their hands, as it were.

If Darryl Hart’s A Secular Faith is downright scandalous when it comes to how modern Protestants conceive of both the nature of and relationship between church and state, his Recovering Mother Kirk is perfectly (and deliciously) delinquent when it comes to how a truer Presbyterian godliness is both expressed and nurtured.

In the course of making his broader case for a churchly expression of Reformed piety in which, by way of contrast, “some proponents of the Reformed faith under the influence of evangelicalism are caught off guard” by the suggestion that in question and answer 85 the Shorter Catechism’s prescription to escape God’s wrath and curse includes not only faith and repentance but also a diligent use of the means of grace, Hart brings to bear just how triumphant the pragmatic architects of heart religion really are:

“They have so emphasized either conversion or doctrine that they have abstracted the Christian religion from the Christian practices that mark the body of Christ.”

He then begins to explore how the “virtue of nominal Christianity” is essential to the making of an observant Protestantism:

“In conversations about specific Roman Catholics or Jews, it is common to hear them described as either observant or nonobservant. In both cases, the line between observance and nonobservance is easy to spot because the person either does or does not practice the ceremonies and religious routines that constitute the commonality of faith. Protestantism, however, has no such language. Instead, discussions along these lines about Protestants usually employ the words genuine, nominal, authentic, or dead…Since the rise of pietism in the seventeenth century and the Anglo-American revivals of the following century, the goal among God-fearing Protestants has been to eliminate observant Protestantism.”

From the more obscure notion that what constitutes proper Sabbath observance can be guided by the principle of “whatever is conducive to worship” (i.e. be worshipful), to the rather ubiquitous idea even in Reformed circles of the Sabbath-as-recharge, to the clearly under-tutored practice of physically fasting in order to get the full effect of the sacraments, it seems there is quite a lot stacked up against the conception of an observant Protestantism. I recall some years back listening to a very prominent and popular Reformed figure describe worship and my own instinctual hesitation. Quite absent his description was any mind toward getting worship correct but rather the soul’s preparation before (extended all the way back to Saturday afternoon, in fact), its intense and undivided attention during and just as earnestly sustained reflection after worship. The fulcrum in all of this, to my mind, is an emphasis on the inward effect on the worshiper instead of seeing to it, first, that the stated worship of God is correct and, second, that such worship is faithfully attended.

Some in the Calvinist tradition have even coined the lingo of an “experimental Calvinism,” as if the stuff of intellect and affect or love and duty were indeed mutually exclusive and in need of a helping hand if ever to meet again. (Closer readers of the Outhouse know that I don’t have any particular ideological ax to grind, but this must be what consistent ideological conservatives feel like as neo-cons prance about with all their faith-based initiatives. Experimental Calvinism is to Calvinism what “compassionate conservatism” is to conservatism.)

But, while admittedly zealous for the edification of the saints, the best of the Reformed tradition has never seemed to be so worldly about just how that edification is effected. Such strategies seem to be more consistent with the doings of pietism. If something like Sabbath-as-recharge is any measure, it would seem that the general victory of pietism to greater or lesser degrees is what keeps even confessional Protestants from seeing the benefits of a nominal Christianity that only an observant Protestantism can yield.

Jesus said that tares and wheat must be allowed to abide with each other and without any human interference. Where an observant Protestantism would seeks to be so faithful, pietism will have none of it. Instead of being content for the dividing lines between belief and unbelief to peacefully co-exist—a peace only to be disturbed when unbelief rears its own head in doctrinal or moral apostasy—pietism desires to up the ante and erase the lines. Of course, the problem for pietism is that, just as a tradition of anti-traditionalism becomes its own tradition, what inevitably follows in pietism is exactly what it seeks to circumvent in an observant religion. Feigning true piety is not bypassed by making up new practices, however seemingly sincere in nature. Just as many that can faithfully but unbelievingly attend God’s stated worship may also bluff heart religion. A child, for example, can just as easily parrot his parents’ inward religiosity as he can hypocritically utter the Creed. In point of fact, it may be more dangerous to defraud heart religion as it seems the only alternative a doubting soul might have is blatant rebellion. An observant religion is kind and long-suffereing enough to let doubt inhabit its sanctuary. After all, the opposite of faith isn’t doubt but sight; and Calvin remarked that we all go to our deaths with an unbeliever abiding within yet. If that is true, much as it might think so, pietism has absolutely nothing on the staid wisdom of an observant religion.

The question becomes which template is the right one to act as the fulcrum between belief and unbelief? Is it experientialism or confessionalism? It might be helpful to consider what Jesus said about how he planned to build his church. He didn’t ask Peter how often he nurtured Jesus in his heart; he asked him who he said Jesus was. He didn’t ask Peter how well he’d groomed his inner life; he asked Peter for his confession of faith. And when Peter answered correctly this was to be the basis for the church. Even so, that same Peter would go on to deny Jesus and even get it wrong with Paul as to just how circumcision figured into justification by faith. An observant Christianity doesn’t fool itself in light of this by inventing another way in order to shield itself from such an apparently troubling contradiction. It actually endures doubt as a necessary part of true faith and lives with the paradox. This gives new meaning to not snuffing out a smoldering wick (or maybe not so new).

One of the following announcements recently appeared in the bulletin of a United Reformed church (URCNA). The other, while based on real accusations, I made up for this post in order to make my case. Take a wild guess as to which one of these corporate practices some URC congregants were encouraged to rally against:

Signature Table: McDonalds Corporation uses profits from your hamburgers and meal purchases to support gay events and has contributed at least $20,000 to be a member of the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, and organization that is working to pass gay rights legislation, including same sex “marriage” and legislation that would prohibit Christian schools and other employers from terminating employees for reasons of perverse sexual behavior. Next week after the morning and evening service, you will have an opportunity to sign a letter of protest to McDonalds.

Or

Signature Table: The Nike brand shoes that you buy are made by exploited workers in Indonesia. Workers in Nike factories in Asia are mostly underage children who are paid wages insufficient to meet their basic needs, are not allowed to organize independent unions, and often face health and safety hazards. They encounter sexual abuse, starvation, malaria, football-sized rats, fist-sized cockroaches, and massive burning of toxic shoe rubber. Next week after the morning and evening service, you will have an opportunity to sign a letter of protest to Nike against their deplorable practices.

It is probably clear which one actually appeared in a UR church’s bulletin and which one is made up. Many “conservative” Reformed folk would probably scratch their heads if they came across the second announcement, wondering why on earth the church would have us be involved in such a non-churchly matter. But what makes the first more churchly?

I am not trying to make the case that the set of values in our churches need to be expanded to include more causes to get behind; my point is that neither one of these sociopolitical items should be decried at church. I wish it wasn’t easy to figure out which announcement was in the bulletin of a confessionally Reformed body because one might expect the first to appear at a fundamentalist Bible church and the second at a so-called “progressive” congregation. Neither one of these (alleged) corporate practices should capture the attention of a congregation as it gathers to worship on the Lord’s Day. Encouraging and facilitating social and political activism is not a function of the Church of Jesus Christ.

During my years with the Christian Reformed Church the days I could endure dominated over those I couldn’t. In the last few years there has been a reversal of sorts. This morning served to affirm not only to be a prime example of a day I cannot endure, but also just how bad things can get when an institution exchanges its confessional heritage for a seat under the Big Top. (Do bread and lentil stew just taste better under a circus tent?)

This week, evidently, is Disabilities Week in the CRC. Amongst many things, this means that the Sunday services of confession and assurance are co-opted by a political correctness designed around the dictum’s of inclusiveness. It is not the gospel which should bring flesh of every tribe (and ability) together for the sake of God’s glory alone, rather it is wisdom of men that needs to be invoked in order that everyone might, ahem, get along. This is the “social” version of church growth. If we aren’t busy meeting the felt needs of the general populace by adopting the ways of entertainment in worship we are showing just how culturally relevant we are by pandering to yet another demographic.

But whether it is the irony of specially treating those with disabilities as we speak about treating them ordinarily, or it is the political correctness of Sanctity of Life Sunday (are you listening, John Piper?), Constantinianism appears to still be reaping the spoils of the victorious Christian life in America—at least when it comes to anything from soft social or hard political policy. Jesus is politely told to move over a skosh in his throne so that room might be made for whatever man deems as terribly urgent and needful of heavenly sanction. Whether we need to plead forgiveness on behalf of a nation for its unfaithfulness to Psalm 139, or we should resolve to do better at removing the barriers between the wheelchair and front door, either way, we show just how long, deep and wide our blind spot is when it comes to the unfettered gospel.

It is bad enough that American religionists of the Christian persuasion—Reformed notwithstanding—are fairly well clueless about how to ordinarily go about the common projects of cultural, social and political work. Typically, they seem predominantly wooed by pragmatism and largely only conversant with the extraordinary stuff of activism. And heaven forbid they should lose the day, admit that they could be wrong or (gasp!) have to live with a proximate justice over against their notion of an exact one. That is one thing, and what a thing it is to be quite sure. But it is when they allow the more obnoxious varieties of cultural belligerence to infiltrate the church and distract from the gospel it is beyond merely a supreme annoyance. Baptizing ideologies is nothing short of sacrilege. Ideologies may flame in shades of red and blue in America, but nothing compares to the white heat of heaven.

So after a recent post about under-realizing the Ascension, a joking comment about the possibility of an Ascension Day service (which happens to by definition be a Thursday thing) turned into a question of what the RPW has to say about midweek services. In snippet form, the exchange went:

Bruce: How does this fit in with the RPW?

MGB: And where is the command that the elders are only permitted to call the congregation to worship on the Lord’s Day?

RubeRad: That’s not how RPW works. You’re supposed to ask “Where is the command for what I’m doing?”, not “I want to do something. Is it forbidden?”

MGB: Read my sentence again. It’s Calvinistic, not Lutheran.

Bruce: Do you hold a midweek service because it is commanded in scripture or because it is not forbidden by scripture? Or is there some third option?

MGB: I see no command in Scripture that limits worship to the Lord’s Day only.

It would seem we’re talking past each other somehow. Zrim, trying to break the logjam, linked to two articles by OHS Hyde.  I checked them out, and I have some thoughts.

First of all, the second article is not helpful to the question, except that it helps define the RPW as what we already know it to mean, namely that we don’t get to make up the ways we worship.

Second of all, most of the first article is not helpful. Stipulating that the early reformers may well have enthusiastically observed “Evangelical Feast Days” like Easter Monday or Good Friday or Ascension Thursday, that’s not an answer to the question “How does this fit in with the RPW?” Nor is an explanation of “The Benefit of the Practice.” The RPW question is identical to the question “Where’s the scriptural command?” so the only kind of answer that actually adresses the question is in the form of chapter and vesre. As far as I can see, the closest the article gets to answering the question is to note that “Hey, the Jews observed the extra-Mosaic feasts of Purim and Dedication.”

So in an attempt to answer the question (at least in the form I would be satisfied to call an answer), I suggest a discussion of Acts 2:42-47, which describes the life of the brand-spanking new Christian Church. In v42, “they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers,” which I think is commonly understood narrowly to be describing elements of worship. V46 describes that “day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts.” So (unless there are other scriptures that come to bear, but I can’t think of any) it would seem that the question turns on whether v46 “day by day” applies way back in v42, and whether “breaking bread” in v46 is the same as in v42, or merely Horton’s “creation work” of “having friends over for dinner.”

Now personally, I have nothing against churches doing things midweek. That’s how I was raised, and even today, we’ve got home bible study on Friday, choir rehearsal on Thursday, and “Family Night” on Wednesday. But even Family Night — the closest thing we have to a midweek service — would not be described by anyone as a “worship service.” The study of the bible is in a more informal, interactive mode, led by unordained men, so it’s definitely not the Preaching of the Word. There’s usually some singing, but Col 3:16 is an admonition for Christians’ everyday interactions. There’s no question of administering Sacraments, and I bet somebody could articulate a qualitative difference between the elder-led Sunday morning Prayer of the Church, and whatever prayer happens on Wednesday night.

So as I see it, the kind of midweek less-than-services that I’m used to are not big-W-Worship, and are thus not subject to RPW. But (short of a favorable exegesis of Acts 2:46), that doesn’t help me with the concept of a Good Friday or Ascension Thursday service, which seems more like it would be full-on administration of Word, Sacrament and Prayer.

So how does that fit in with the RPW?