neumatikos

Now that school is out, I actually have a little time to do some reading while frantically searching for employment and making plans to move.

I’m reading now through my set of Apostolic fathers my parents gave me a few years ago. Currently I’m reading the letters of Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch in the early 2nd century. He was martyred in Rome around 107, and wrote seven letters en route.

The curious thing is that we have two very different versions of every one of his letters. One set is consistently short, and the other is much longer. As of the publication of my book, there had been no consensus as to which set was the letters actually penned by Ignatius. The majority seems to favor the shorter versions, but there is a vibrant minority that will not let go of the latter. I’ll give you a sample, and maybe you can see why: Continue reading “Armchair Textual Critic”

The Holy Spirit in Worship (part 8)

This section is last and shortest, not because there is the least to say about it, but because it should be sufficient to merely point out that worship has real content. In the service, we use words which define our understanding of God: the trinity, his character, what he has done for us. These words, in turn, are bounded by scripture, which has been breathed by God (2 Tim 3:16). The role of the Spirit in the creation of scripture must be understood as something more than a “Postulate of Pure Practical Reason.” The work of Holy Spirit is always described in scripture as something that is immediately discernable, not something that is inferred after the fact. “Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). There would be no talk of a Holy Spirit, if people hadn’t had discernible experiences with him. In the same way, the existence of scripture itself is proof that experiences with the Spirit can be reduced to cognitive knowledge. As a result, reflecting on the worship experience, as I have been doing here, is itself also worship.

The Holy Spirit in Worship (part 7)

Baptism and communion are the most direct model we have of actions that we do, which the Holy Spirit invests with formative power. As the Westminster Larger Catechism states, “The sacraments become effectual means of salvation, not by any power in themselves, or any virtue derived from the piety or intention of him by whom they are administered, but only by the working of the Holy Ghost, and the blessing of Christ, by whom they are instituted.”

Baptism and the Lord’s Table are the only sacraments ordained by Jesus Christ, and the Protestant reformers fought to keep the list of sacraments limited to these two. However, I think it is possible to refer to certain acts of worship as sacramental in nature if they are an effective means, not necessarily of salvation, but of Christian formation, and they derive that effectiveness not “from the piety or intention of him by whom they are administered, but only by the working of the Holy Ghost.” Among these sacrament-like acts are particularly preaching and intercession.

One aspect of preaching described by Debra Murphy is imagination. By this she means “not that it is about the imaginary, but that it participates in the communal (rather than individual) practice of ‘construing reality according to a particular vision, in full awareness of other options.’” I’ve mentioned the possibility of understanding preaching as a form of prophecy, and to a certain extent, this idea of preaching as imagination fits this description. One of the functions of prophecy is to create the world that God envisions by proclaiming what they must become. In Ezekiel 37, God tells Ezekiel, “Prophesy over these bones” (verse 4) and as Ezekiel prophesies the word of the Lord, God creates the reality he told Ezekiel to declare.

Unfortunately, Ms. Murphy couches her understanding of preaching as imagination within the vision of the community, rather than the vision of God. Continue reading “Sacraments”

The Holy Spirit in Worship (part 6)

In my class this semester on the Theology of the Penteteuch, Dr. Gordon Hugenburger pointed out that covenants have two parts – a vow and a ritual act. For instance, in Abraham’s covenant with Yahweh in Genesis 15, God promises Abraham an heir and an inheritance of land, and then walks through the animals Abraham has sacrificed, as if symbolically to say “let it be to me as it is to these animals if I do not fulfill the words of this covenant.” In marriage we have the same double bond: way commit to a marriage vow, but the stronger bond, which makes the marriage real, is the actual consummation of the marriage. Robert Webber says this is the same thing that happened when Israel first assembled at Mount Sinai: in the act of worshiping him, and committing to follow his laws, they became the people of God. In the same way, “when believers come together, the church, as the people of the Christ event, becomes a reality…. In this way the church is actualized.” It isn’t that there are certain activities that we engage in because we are the church. Rather, the Holy Spirit works through these activities to establish us as the church. It is by performing that we are formed.

Debra Murphy takes this concept one step further in Teaching that Transforms. Her main thesis is that the primary place for catechism – learning what it is to be a Christian – is in congregational worship: “What we do, how we act, in the liturgical assembly shapes us in particular and powerful ways and is both formative of identity and catechetical in the most basic sense.” Ms. Murphy is right. However, throughout her book, despite her ability to point out that “The doctrine of the Trinity is foundational” and that “The truth of this doctrine… is not available for us outside of our own participation in the forms of life that bear witness to God as Trinity,” she doesn’t seem to have any clear view of God’s engagement with us in these forms of life. Nevertheless, she make some very good statements about the formative character of acting out the liturgy which I think only need to have added a more sacramental understanding.

The Holy Spirit in Worship (part 5)

There is a legend that C. H. Spurgeon, as he would climb the steps to his pulpit, would say “I believe in the Holy Spirit” at each step. The implication about the work of the Holy Spirit in preaching should be obvious: it is the preacher who speaks, but it is the Holy Spirit who must “convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment” (John 16:8). If he doesn’t speak through our words, then our words are useless.

However, I want to discuss as well the fundamental role of the sermon when the Holy Spirit becomes an active participant. In my class on worship, we discussed the idea that all worship functions around a template of revelation and response. There is a progressive revelation of God’s nature and his purposes, and at each successive revelation, there is an appropriate human response. Debra Dean Murphy, in her book Teaching that Transforms, pays special attention to this dynamic in the act of preaching (where revelation is expressly apparent) in a chapter titled “Proclamation and Response.” “The preacher,” she says,

Interprets the Word for the community, placing the day’s appointed texts within the larger narrative scope of the biblical witness; allowing Scripture to interpret Scripture; acknowledging the multistranded nature of any given text’s meaning for the life of the community; recognizing the partiality and self-interest that undergird all our interpretations of the biblical texts; and letting the Word of God interrogate the community as much as the community, through the preacher’s own hermeneutical practices, scrutinizes the text.

This is a fairly accurate description of what I am being trained to do in seminary, via classes on exegesis and preaching. As a preacher, my job will be to write the equivalent of a research paper each week on the biblical text, and then present my findings to the congregation on Sunday, couched in a way that communicates the key points directly in a way applicable to their lives.

However, in view of the Holy Spirit’s work in preaching, I am beginning to think her description is insufficient. Continue reading “Preaching”

The Holy Spirit in Worship (part 4)

It should be relatively easy to see the gifts of the Spirit, as described in 1 Corinthians 12 as activities in which we participate by means of the spirit. They are, after all, supernatural activities, which simply cannot be done unless the Spirit graces us with those abilities. What seems to be less clear is how these gifts are directly related to the content of the gospel. How does a word of wisdom recapitulate the resurrection of Jesus Christ? The answer is that these gifts model a correct understanding of the kingdom of heaven Jesus came to establish. This kingdom is: participatory (and even interactive), differentiated (not everyone has the same gifts, and some are “more gifted” than others), and humble (“a heart disposition [that] does not contend for supremacy with God”). An expression of the gospel is not complete which does not give a paradigm of what the redeemed life should look like. Churches which undervalue the gifts run the risk of doing this.

The Holy Spirit in Worship (part 3)

The music and singing of the church, of course, is the part of the service that is usually given the special status of “worship,” which isn’t entirely fair. But when we suppress communion to a rare occasion in the church, and eliminate any opportunity for Spiritual Gifts, we are left with two major activities in the church, one which seems active and another which seems passive. It becomes easy to think of one of them as “worship” and the other not. One solution to this dichotomy is simply to talk about how each part of the service is worship and how. But I think a better one would be to give more place to the other elements of worship and to emphasize the active role of the Holy Spirit working through us in these activities. If we see that we participate in worship through the Holy Spirit, then any activity in which the Spirit has a part should easily be seen as worship.

Ironically, it is the musical part of the service that it is most difficult to explain what part the Spirit must play in order to move us from mere activity into an active participation in the relationship of the Trinity. I think this is simplified, though, by thinking of singing as a form of prayer, set to music. With this in mind, we can see that the Spirit must be actively involved in our music. Romans 8:26 says, “… the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.” This verse, applied to songs, can be understood to say that the Holy Spirit invests his intercession into our songs, making up for the imperfections of the songs, and praying through them a more perfect prayer. This is an internally discernable experience, similar to reading the scriptures and having a particular verse “quickened” to you, or perhaps how it was for prophets to be “carried along” by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21). It might also be understood to apply to a special kind of singing that might resemble the groanings of the Spirit interceding through us. This kind of wordless singing could then possibly be understood under the heading of Paul’s references to singing “with my spirit” (1 Cor 14:15).