Comments on a post by The Native Tourist
I think you've misunderstood my posts, Dave. I'm not denying that work is significant and that glorifying God in one's six-day work is in a "very real sense" worship. All I'm doing is calling attention to the biblical distinction between our work and our special worship with the assembly of God's people on the Lord's day. There are some who toss around the slogan "all of life is worship" in order to minimize the centrality of corporate, formal worship. In my posts I was trying to unpack the very real difference between what we do during the week at work and what we do on Sunday in church. Making a distinction between worship and work is quite biblical and need not be a return to some form of medieval dualism.
Jeff, I agree with you, as long as you are making the distinction between work and "formal worship". That is where the distinction really lies. The phrase "all of life is worship" must be seen as true; clearly to say all of life formal worship is silly. I don't think anyone is saying that. But to see that our cultural endeavors are a type of worship distinct from the type of worship we offer on Lord's Day is vitally important. It is one of the great reformed distinctives.
Sure.
But just remember that you are using the word "worship" in a way that it is not normally used in the Bible. As I tried to make clear in my posts and in my book the word translated "worship" in our English Bibles refers to the physical act of prostrating oneself or bowing down. All of life is most definitely not "bowing down" or "kneeling."
Through out the week we are walking, sitting, grasping, turning, pulling, typing, etc. Occasionally, maybe even regularly, we drop to our knees or bow our heads in prayer, or even lift our hands in praise. These ritual acts are done at specific times and places. Performing these acts of worship define and consecrate the work of service we do in our individual callings.
Most importantly, these acts of worship are done with the assembly of God's people on the Lord's Day. We run the risk of gnosticizing "worship" with our overly mental/attitudinal view of worship. As I said in my post: all of life is worship in a metaphorical sense. That doesn't make it any less *real,* but it does remind us that the worship we engage in on the Lord's Day in assembly with God's people - bowing, kneeling, singing praises, raising our hands, eating and drinking, etc. - is _sui generis_.
All of life is worship comes to fruition every Lord's Day when we physically offer our tribute, the token of the work of our hands during the week, to the Lord at the offertory. This ritual act makes what we have done during the week an act of worship. By DOING this on the Lord's Day we offer everything we have done during the week to the Lord for his evaluation and pleasure. That act, then, affects our frame of mind, our mental attitude, as we go back into the world to work for God's glory during the week.
My problem is that people are using the phrase "all of life is worship" as a club to flatten out time so that the Lord's Day is no different than, no more important than any other day of the week.
What people are saying to me is that all your talk about how the Sunday service should be ordered and how important what is done in the assembly is, well, this is all wrong because "all of life is worship."
Or I say that the Lord's Day assembly is central and that what happens in "formal worship" orients one's entire life. The naysayer says, "No, all of life is worship." And I say that the Sunday service is special and the critic then says, "That's wrong because all of life is worship!"
You don't know how many times I've heard this phrase used as a way to relativize, even neutralize the significance of the Sunday assembly. This highlights a dangerous tendency towards individualizing and mentalizing "worship." If an individual can "worship" God in everything he does, then worship has become something individuals do in their heads rather than what they DO - hearing, speaking, singing, kneeling, standing, eating, drinking, etc. - WITH the body of Christ in the assemb
As I argue in the Postscript of my book, I believe that Christian culture is largely possible because we weekly consecrate ourselves on the Sabbath -- the day on which we cease from our creational labors. Thus concecrated (and fed and rested) we are able to return to our cultural endeavors and peform them unto the Lord.
As a Christian artist paints a picture, he may not (as you point out) physically bow down as applies brush to canvas, but surely he must have the attitude of being bowed down to the Lord in his thinking, attitudes, worldview, etc. As he paints he seeks to glorify his Maker. If he does not have such a bowed-down attitude, his art making would have to be necessarily idolotry. There is no other alternative.
It seems to me that you might have it backwards: that the physical bowing down is in fact a metaphor for what our heart attitude should be (which is by far more important), not the other way around. As we surrender the the Word of God preached and signified in the sacraments, we are thus (bu God's grace) put in heart posture that will (hopufully) carry through the rest of the week in our "ordinary" endeavors. In this way all our life will be indeed worship.
We don't really disagree, Richard. But you might want to consider the equal ultimacy of heart attitude and bodily actions. Bodily posture not only expresses what is in our hearts, it also often determines how we think and feel. This is how we are constituted as psychosomatic beings. Just as a rod applied to the body can drive out foolishness "from the heart" (Prov. 22:15), so also kneeling and bowing can form the heart in ways that mere "information" cannot. Just a thought. Thanks for the interaction. The Lord bless your service to him!
Attempt at some new phraseology: All of life is offered to someone, an idol or the true God.
But not all of life consists in the ceremonial offering of one's life to this idol or the true God.
Contemporary idols tend to minimize ceremony in certain ways (thought one can argue it pops up anyway). As a result, Christians tend to forget about ceremony and simply think about who one should offer one's life to. It doesn't occur to them that they need to think in premodern categories and actually go through the formal ritual of offereing their life to God....
OK, I give up. This looked like a good idea when I started it.
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