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The current focus on worship originating in the self is probably a reaction against truth without passion and is what happened to me as a result of the Enlightenment and what happened to me when my learning of Scripture through the scientific method left me dry. The traditional worship of the fifties is more confessional, concerning itself with making truth statements about God. Unfortunately, these truth statements often are based on an Enlightenment method that privileges reason, science, and fact. Consequently, worship based on these truths is often dispassionate, intellectual, and dry. Contemporary worship is more characterized by passion. It has to do with the heart, with relationship, with an intimacy; it elicits feelings, emotion, tears, and intensity; it lacks substance. Worship needs both truth and passion. Truth without passion is dry. Passion without truth is empty. Where do we go to find both truth and passion? I suggest recovering worship as the proclamation and enactment of God's story.

There seems to be a great deal of confusion about the purpose of worship. I talk to many men and women who think worship arises from inside themselves. Worship, like spirituality, springs forth from the story of God. Worship does God's story. It proclaims God's story in the reading and preaching of the Word; in prayer, the church prays for the world God has reclaimed; in the Eucharist, the church ascends into the heavens and experiences the consummation of God's story in the new heavens and the new earth. There is a personal dimension to worship. Worship is the contemplation, the delight in our own heart that comes from hearing and enacting the story of how God renews the face of the earth through his Son and Spirit. The other response to worship is the choice we make to participate in purposes of God for the world that worship celebrates. This is how song, Scripture, prayer, and Eucharist nourish our spiritual life.

The reading and preaching of Scripture in worship nourishes our spiritual life as it interprets the whole world through the story of God's embrace. 12 This means that we cannot read the Bible through any other story. We cannot embrace the story of rationalism and science, on the one hand, and bring it to the story of the Bible as if the story of the Bible needs the story of reason and science to shore it up and make it acceptable. The whole method of making the Bible sensible through other disciplines—be they reason, science, sociology, psychology, or whatever—must be turned on its head and seen for what it is. Scripture calls us to delight in the story as true, stand inside the story, and let the story interpret science, philosophy, sociology, and all other disciplines. Scripture sees everything in life through the story.

God does not say, "Come and read the Bible through existentialism or postmodern philosophy or sociology and see if you can make it fit." No. Scripture presents the story as true and says, "Look at the world and all its structures and relationships and dysfunctions through the eyes of God." Scripture says the story of God is itself a philosophy, an anthropology, a sociology, a reason, a science. Scripture frees the Christian to see the world through the eyes of God's story as a true commentary on the origin of life, the problem of evil, the restoration of true humanity, the meaning of life, the destiny of history.

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April (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51