The flock’s worship of the Shepherd who gives His gifts
Yesterday, the protestant news site Protestia tweeted a clip where the Christian musician Brandon Lake criticises worship which has too much “Christianese” language, such as “Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty.” See the tweet and the longer article on the Protestia website.
I usually do not agree with Protestia on just about anything,1 but I am glad that they have pointed towards this, as it gives me an opportunity to write some points about worship.
In the clip, Brandon Lake states that he would “love to see more worship sets, more churches, kind of keep Bubba in mind.” Bubba is the name he gives a random man who is there because his wife dragged him with here. Lake continues:
And I just don’t know if, like, when your opening song or the most of your songs have so much Christianese language, I think he has a hard time going like, “can I sing that? Like I’m not there yet.” I think he hears a (Hard Fought Hallelujah) and I’m not, I’m not saying Hard Fought is the answer, but like, I love like, like when your first song is like, Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.’ I think he’s going like, “What does ‘holy’ mean? Like holy crap? what? I don’t know.” Obviously that’s where we want to get to in a worship set is where it’s just every eye is fixated on him. Right. And it’s just like everyone- it’s like vertical. But like give Bubba some language. He can be like “alright, I find myself in that song. I feel like that’ you know?” And and hopefully that’s what some of my music can continue to do.
The problem here, I think, is that this expresses a misunderstood concept of what the gathering of the Church is for. And in response to the tweet, I tweeted: “The Divine Service is not evangelistic outreach, it is the flock’s worship of the Shepherd.” As Confessio Augustana says (in art. 7), the Church is “the assembly of saints in which the gospel is taught purely and the sacraments are administered rightly.” You are brought into this community through baptism, which is salvific (art. 9), but the point of the assembly itself is that is a assembly of those who are saved. In other words, it is not a place where “Bubba” goes to “find himself in that song,” but where his wife goes to worship the thrice holy Lord God Almighty who has saved her. Yes, the Church should do missionary work and evangelistic outreach, but the Divine Service is not the place for that.
Now, my tweet could have been worded a little bit better, because it did not include a crucial part of the Divine Service, as noted by this response: “More than that, though, it is first and foremost not what we do, but what God does for us. The Lord’s Service is his service to us, which in turn enables our service in response to him.”
And that is completely true. The Divine Service, which is the more traditional name we use in the Lutheran church, as it also includes services of the word and not just masses (which we also use, cf. Confessio Augustana, art. 24), is first and foremost a divine gift. So in one sense, it is outreach, from God. But it is a gift principally for the flock, the assembly of saints, which creates in us a response of worship. We celebrate the Eucharist, for example, which strengthens the faith given to us. In Christian Platonist terms, it is theurgy, the divine work, which results in hierurgy, the flock’s re-enactment of the divine work.2 But it is, and remains, for the flock. And having been given this, and having responded in worship, we are sent out into the world to do evangelistic outreach, to reach “Bubba” so that he can become part of the flock worshipping the thrice holy Lord God Almighty. Do not turn the sanctuary into a class room. That is not its purpose.
On their about page, they say that their name is a “a hat-tip to the Protestant Reformation and all writers, contributors, and volunteers who serve our publication are Protestant Christians who mostly subscribe to one of the following Confessions of Faith,” and the confessions are The Westminster Confession of Faith, the First London Baptist Confession of Faith (1643, 1644), the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), the Abstract of Principles, the Belgic Confession, and the Augsburg Confession (or Confessio Augustana). The irony here is, of course, that at least the last one, the Lutheran one, completely condemns the Baptist confessions for their view on the sacraments, particularly baptism (cf. Augsburg Confession 9; Second London Baptist Confession 29). These confessions do not all teach the same thing, and Lutheranism is closer to Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox theology than to Baptist theology. For the text of Confessio Augustana, see The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, eds., Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Fortress Press, 2000), 27-107 (for the entire confession, with parallell translations from German and Latin), as well as Die Bekenntnisschriften der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche, vollständige neuedition, ed., Irene Dingel (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 63-225 (for the Latin and German, with introductions).
See this interview with Dr. Clelia Attanasio on the Dionysius Circle podcast, as well as her paper “Dionysius’ Application of the Role of Theurgist on the Figure of Moses,” in Platonism and its Heritage: Selected Papers from the 19th Annual Conference of the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, eds., John F. Finamore, Ioanna Patsioti, and Giannis Satamatellos (Chepstow: The Prometheus Trust, 2023), 131-145. Also see Sarah Klitenic Wear and John Dillon, “Hierourgia and Theourgia in Sacramental Activity,” in Wear and Dillon, Dionysius the Areopagite and the Neoplatonist Tradition: Despoiling the Hellenes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 99-115.