Speaking Christianly

The following is an excerpt from Dr. Peter Leithart’s book Against Christianity (Canon Press, 2003). The book is available for purchase from Canon Press. The entire book can also be read online here.

Several years ago, I happened to be visiting my parents when a longtime friend of my mother died. As l left the funeral, I spoke briefly to the woman’s son and in parting said, “The Lord be with you.” Without hesitation, she responded, “And also with you.” We had not seen one another in nearly a decade, but in that moment our common training in the Lutheran liturgy gave us words to say–Christian words–words of comfort and encouragement in the face of death.

Our common training in liturgy had taught us, in that moment at least, to speak Christianly.

Worship is Psychology class

The following is an excerpt from Dr. Peter Leithart’s book Against Christianity (Canon Press, 2003). The book is available for purchase from Canon Press. The entire book can also be read online here.

Worship is Psychology class.

The Psalms, Calvin said, are a virtual textbook of the human soul, the central text in biblical psychology. As such, the Psalms give expression to all the experiences of the Christian life; they give words to our pains, joys, afflictions, despair, and by giving language to our experience they bring those experiences under description, make them knowable as our Father’s loving care for us.

The Psalms are also a textbook of prayer, frequently employing language that is unnerving in its vehemence. Psalms indicate that an overwhelming desire for justice should animate our prayers, that we should express our disappointments with honesty, that prayer is not “quiet time” but a time of wrestling and passion. Contemporary hymnology, by contrast, gives us words for a small segment of our experience, the happy, fluffy, light experiences of life. If we are trained in prayer by contemporary praise choruses, when we face the pains and tests of life, we will lack the vocabulary to name them.

Singing the Psalms makes the biblical story and biblical language part of us, knits it into the fabric of our flesh.

Worship is Political Science 101

The following is an excerpt from Dr. Peter Leithart’s book Against Christianity (Canon Press, 2003). The book is available for purchase from Canon Press. The entire book can also be read online here.

Worship is Political Science 101.

In every worship service, the Christian ekklesia is renewed in her unique story and language, her unique political experience and vocation. Every worship service is a challenge to Caesar, because every Lord’s Day we bow to a Man on the throne of heaven, to whom even great Caesar must bow. O’Donovan claims that all political order rests on a people’s homage to authority, which is to say, on an act of worship. Every Lord’s Day, the Church is reconstituted as a polity whose obedience is owed to Christ, and we are taught to name Jesus as King of kings and Lord of lords.

Speaking Bible does not come naturally

The following is an excerpt from Dr. Peter Leithart’s book Against Christianity (Canon Press, 2003). The book is available for purchase from Canon Press. The entire book can also be read online here.

Speaking Bible does not come naturally; it is a foreign language. We have to learn to name the world Christianly, and we do this chiefly in worship. Worship is language class.

Preaching is instruction in Christian language. In his stimulating little volume, Peculiar Speech: Preaching to the Baptized, William Willimon points out that preaching cultivates “those insights, means of describing, and vocabulary with which Christians describe the world.”

But we do not learn foreign languages by listening to someone talk about the language. Teaching is essential, but so is drill, repetition, dry rote.Worship is training in godly habits, habits of speech as well as godly habits of conduct. If biblical language is to become the idiom of the Church’s speech, Christians must not only listen to but also say and sing and recite the Scriptures in worship. Many evangelicals object to repetition in worship because they consider it “dry rote.” Jesus did, of course, warn against “vain repetition,” but repetition itself is unavoidable, and Christian worship needs a great deal more dry rote.That is precisely what we need in order to learn a new and alien language.

This perspective underscores the wisdom of the tradition of structured liturgy, with a fixed ordinary of spoken and sung Scripture. Traditional liturgies, with their “boring” and “hidebound” recitation of Psalms, creeds, and rote prayers, drill converts in their new language. Worshipers are made part of the culture of the Church, and, more importantly, that culture is made part of the worshiper.

Worship is history class

The following is an excerpt from Dr. Peter Leithart’s book Against Christianity (Canon Press, 2003). The book is available for purchase from Canon Press. The entire book can also be read online here.

Worship is history class.

Israel was a people with a shared stock of memories, a people defined by stories about deliverance from Egypt, wandering, conquest, apostasy, exile, and return. To be inducted into lsrael involved making these memories one’s own and directing one’s life by the signposts provided by these stories. Children who did not live through the Passover and Exodus were to be instructed about the significance of the Passover meal and the Lord’s demand of the firstborn (Ex. 12-13).Through this instruction and participation in these rites of memory, they were molded into a new generation of Israel.

Throughout the book of Deuteronomy, Moses exhorts the people to remember what the Lord has done for them (5:15; 7:18; 8:2, 18; 9:7, 27; 15:15; 16:3, 12; etc.). For Moses, memory was not nostalgia and often involved more than merely recalling past events. Memory involves memorializing the past works of Yahweh in His presence, and this both called on Yahweh to act again and encouraged Israel for her future tasks. Israelites were to remember what the Lord did to the Egyptians so they would be encouraged to conquer Canaanites. Memory was also to guide Israel in how they were to behave once they settled in the land. Remembering they had been brought out of slavery, they were to treat slaves and sojourners and the poor with generosity and kindness.

Hearing the stories of God’s works as they are read from Scripture, listening to the preaching of the Word, singing about Yahweh’s heroics against Philistine and Canaanite, reciting the creeds, and commemorating Christ’s victory on the cross at the Lord’s table, we, the new Israel, are renewed in the story of God. ln worship, the gospel becomes the narrative atmosphere in which we live and move and have our being.

Worship is remembering and celebrating God’s savings acts, and therefore worship is history class.