📜 Worship — Unit 4: Worship in History II

I. The Medieval Darkening

By the Middle Ages, worship had drifted far from the simple service Justin Martyr described. The clergy and the people became detached from one another. The priest stood at the altar with his back to the people, performing the mass in Latin, a language the ordinary worshipper could no longer understand. The Scriptures remained in the hands of the priests, since few could read. This was, in a real sense, a return to Babel, the very opposite of Pentecost, where every man heard the gospel in his own tongue. Several theological developments deepened the darkness: Mariolatry made Mary an intercessor; confession became a system of prescribed forgiveness; indulgences were sold by men like Tetzel, whose crude slogan promised that when the coin in the coffer clinks, the soul from Purgatory springs; and transubstantiation taught that the bread and wine literally became the body and blood of Christ.

II. The Reformation and Its Reformers

Then God raised up the Reformation, and the Reformers tried to return worship to its New Testament pattern. They conducted services in the language of the people. They moved the altar into the view of the congregation. They put the Scriptures back into the hands of the members, and they rediscovered preaching, so that the sixteenth century became one of the great centuries of preaching. Above all they recovered the priesthood of all believers, which Luther so strongly stressed.

The reformers of worship differed among themselves. Martin Luther meant only to reform Rome, not to break with it, and he taught consubstantiation against transubstantiation. Ulrich Zwingli was the radical, treating the Lord's Supper as pure symbol and even abolishing music from his services. John Calvin instituted congregational singing, emphasized the Lord's Supper, and produced the Genevan Service Book that shaped Reformed worship across France, Switzerland, Holland, and Scotland.

Calvin deserves a special word, because he gave the Reformed tradition its enduring emphasis on the mind. Calvin was famous for organizing his teaching into points, subpoints, and sub-subpoints. The strength of this is that it appeals to the mind and takes the truth-half of John 4:24 with full seriousness. The weakness, when carried too far, is that it can become dry, points and subpoints that feed the head but may not reach the heart. And this brings us back to spirit and truth. Worship in spirit and in truth is the both-and. We humans are not one-dimensional. We give God our minds AND our praise, the carefully reasoned sermon AND the heart lifted up in song.

III. The Two Great Schisms

The Western church we have been describing is only half of Christendom, and most Protestants confuse two very different splits. The first split came in AD 451 at the Council of Chalcedon. Six ancient churches refused the council's formula that Christ is one Person in two natures, holding instead to miaphysitism, the doctrine that Christ is fully divine and fully human in one nature. These are the Oriental Orthodox churches: the Coptic of Egypt, the Ethiopian and Eritrean, the Syriac, the Armenian, and the Malankara of India. They have existed in unbroken continuity for more than fifteen centuries.

The second split came in AD 1054, the Great Schism, when the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Pope of Rome excommunicated one another. The east became the Eastern Orthodox Church; the west became the Roman Catholic Church. Those mutual excommunications stood for more than nine hundred years and were not lifted until 1965. There is also a third stream, the Eastern Catholic or Uniate churches, which kept the Eastern liturgical forms but returned to communion with Rome. To know worship, the Protestant student must know that the church is far wider and far older than his own tradition.

IV. Furniture, the Frontier, and the Black Church

One of the most visible changes of the Reformation was furniture, and the rearrangement was theology. The medieval Catholic sanctuary placed the altar at the center, the priest facing it, the sacrament supreme. The Reformers moved the pulpit to the center. This was not decoration; it was a confession. The medieval room said salvation comes through the sacrament; the Reformed room said salvation comes through the preached Word. We will return to this in Unit 10, for the room itself preaches.

Worship kept developing. In the nineteenth century, three forces shaped it: revivalism, which gave Baptists the invitation; romanticism, born at Oxford, which revived Gothic architecture; and denominationalism, which split many bodies over racial and other issues. And out of that painful history came one of the most important streams of all, the African American church. Forged first in the secret praise meetings of slaves, where worship was sometimes forbidden, it grew into a powerful tradition drawing on the spirituals, on call-and-response forms older than slavery, and on a theology of suffering and deliverance read straight out of Exodus and the Psalms. It became its own tradition, and we will say more of its worship in Unit 10.

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