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A Better Way
A Better Way: Rediscovering the Drama of God- Centered Worship by Michael Horton Baker Books, 2003 256 pp. $15.99, paper |
At first glance, Michael Horton's A Better Way: Rediscovering the Drama of God-Centered Worship may appear to be just another jeremiad. Having listened too much to the world, Horton charges, believers have come to script their lives and even their worship according to our culture's self-centered expectations. Citing Neal Gabler's Life the Movie, Horton suggests that contemporary entertainment has "conquered reality" by beguiling each of us to think of ourselves as the star of our own show. We take it that God is at our disposal. We assume that worship is the way to get God into our script, and perhaps into that of an unbeliever. No wonder, then, that some strains of worship have become increasingly subjective. No wonder that some have the ring of tv talk-shows. No wonder that some employ any gimmick in order to effect communion with God.
Yes, yes, the reader may mutter impatiently, I've heard this indictment before. But it would be a mistake to dismiss Horton's book as merely a rehash of familiar themes. These habits of contemporary worship, Horton suggests, are the expression of an "over-realized" eschatology. God's transcendence is preempted by God's immanence. Weary of waiting for the fulfillment of a promise, we try to force our future—our eschatological communion with God—on the present "by 'staging' our own spectacle."1 In this way, says Horton, we seem not to trust God's promise to get to us through the ordinary means of Scripture and sacrament. So we contrive extraordinary means, figuring we will get to God through them.
There are also those who hold to an "under-realized" eschatology, who despair of God's inclination and power to do anything about sin and misery, here and now, in this fallen world. Admittedly, says Horton, this is the more likely vice of "traditional" churches, whose worship may be theologically erudite and yet "indifferent to the reality that God has come among us in Jesus Christ and remains with us until the end of the age by his Spirit."
Liturgically, these two contrasting perspectives are equally regrettable. In both settings, God's glory is trivialized, God's "weightiness," as the Hebrew renders it, is put off. In both settings, historical-redemptive reality is diminished, its drama is missed. Worship's function and form are disintegrated, neither imparting the reality of salvation nor orienting us to our place within it. For these reasons, says Horton, Christian worship needs reform—the primary source of which must be Scripture.
If Christian worship is to be truly understood, says Horton, we must not turn merely to the Old Testament, nor to the New, but to the whole of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, from creation to consummation. The truth of salvation in Christ entails the reality of the creation, the fall, and the flood; the calling of one man and his wife from Chaldea; the exodus of a nation from one captivity and its exile into another; a virgin birth, a cross, and an empty tomb; Pentecost and parousia. The point of being a Christian, says Horton, "is not to find a place for God in our story but to receive the good news that God has found a place for us in his. There is a seat for us at the table of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," and it is God in Christ who has made room for us there.
While Christ is the story's central figure, "covenant" is its central feature. In ancient Near Eastern culture, covenants were "treaties," royal agreements binding mutual loyalty between a sovereign and that sovereign's peers or subjects. God, the Sovereign of sovereigns, made such agreements with, among others, Abraham and his descendants: I am your God, and you are my people. So gracious and solemn an agreement was not to be forgotten, so God regularly renewed the covenant with his people: at the foot of Mt. Sinai, on the plains of Moab, after the conquest of Canaan, and upon return from exile.
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