‘Face to Face with God’: Wolterstorff and Smith on Liturgies and Scripts in Worship

Each week, we participate in a sacred activity. As we turn our backs on the demands of the world and step into a worship service, we point ourselves and our attention to God. This observation was a key part of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s presentation at Calvin College last week.

“We turn around and come face to face with God. This is a change of posture,” said Wolterstorff, a former Calvin professor of philosophy who is now the Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale Divinity School. He recently published a new book titled Acting Liturgically: Philosophical Reflections on Religious Practice.

According to Wolterstorff, many things can happen in worship.

“When things are going well, one’s praises come out of a thankful attitude. Even when depressed or distracted, you assemble for worship to thank God anyway,” he explained.
 
During the event at the Calvin College Chapel, Wolterstorff spoke with James K. A. Smith, a professor of philosophy at Calvin who also holds the Gary and Henrietta Byker Chair of Applied Reformed Theology and Worldview.

Although they talked about Wolterstorff’s new book and what is in it, the two also discussed more broadly the meaning and value of worship — and especially the role liturgies can play.

Wolterstorff wrote his new book with philosophers of religion in mind because they have tended to ignore this topic, he said. The book is also for worship leaders and others to gain a deeper sense of what their religious practices mean.

“I took this on as a combination of call and fascination,” said Wolterstorff, who served on the CRC synodical task force that put together a report on liturgy and worship in the late 1960s.

“Over the past 40 years there has been an enormous resurgence in the philosophy of religion,” he said. “But if someone read the recent philosophy of religion literature who knew nothing about religion, she would come away thinking that religion was entirely about believing things concerning God. She would have no sense of the importance of liturgy.”

In tackling worship as a philosophical topic, Wolterstorff moves into territory that can’t be easily explained or defined. Even so, he looks at how worship brings us closer to God, who certainly cannot be easily defined or explained.

As a philosopher, Smith is also interested in the roles ritual and worship play in people’s lives. In his book Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works, he addresses issues such as how liturgical formation shapes and transforms us.

Smith also discusses the need to appreciate how our bodies interact with worship. “When we worship, we let God have all that we have inside of us,” and in worship that should include elements of asking for forgiveness and making clear our love for God, as well as the tears, the laments we feel, said Smith.

Imagination should also play a key role in worship — and this is especially true in the Orthodox tradition. For instance, said Wolterstorff, a lament is read during the Orthodox Great Lent in which Adam speaks of what he lost when he was banished from the Garden of Eden.

In one of these readings, Adam says: “My soul wearies for the Lord, and I seek him in tears. How should I not seek him? When I was with him, my soul was glad and at rest, and the enemy could not come nigh me; but now the spirit of evil has gained power over me, harassing and oppressing my soul. . . .”

“Adam’s lament is poetry,” said Wolterstorff. Unlike the Western church that has given more emphasis to the mind, he said, the Orthodox tradition uses ritual, art, and prayer to approach and worship God.

Wolterstorff pointed out that every form of worship has a script, a form that it follows.

In the early Roman Catholic Church, laypeople didn’t have a script to read; they had to memorize it. The pattern for worship changed after the Reformation because everyone had access to scripts to follow, often similar to those used today including a call to worship, confession of sins, assurance, a sermon, and other elements.

Such scripts, written or not, said Wolterstorff, are intended to take worshipers into the presence of God. “It is important to realize that a script is not the minister’s property. It is the congregation’s. They own it,” he said. “The script is the work of our worship together.”

Scripts vary and can change over time. In Pentecostal churches, worship tends to be emotional and spontaneous. Yet the people know there is a script, a path for worship, that they follow. Catholics have the Mass.

These scripts help to remind us of events, such as the crucifixion of Christ, that happened many years ago but “aren’t long ago in the mind of God,” said Wolterstorff.

Such things as the liturgical calendar that many churches follow, beginning with Advent and running through the death of Christ and beyond, are reminders for us as we worship.

A final chapter in his book ties worship into the search for justice.

“In worship, we have to face the injustice of the cross. It is in the middle of worship,” said Wolterstorff. “Just by looking at the cross, we are challenged to ask what it means to identify with Jesus.”

By paying attention to the cross and its meaning in all aspects and elements of worship, we don’t simply have empathy for Christ’s suffering, said Wolterstorff, “but we can see our suffering through the lens of Christ’s suffering.”

“We are reminded of our present relationship with God,” said Wolterstorff, by recalling the work God did in the past and is still doing today.

“What we do when we worship is to see the liturgies play out in our lives. We grow in the Christian life by having a deepening intention behind our worship,” he said. “We may not always understand why we do what we do, but that doesn’t mean God is not behind it.”