An essential complement to his now classic Until Justice and Peace Embrace, the forthcoming Love and Justice, and Justice, this book makes clear why Wolterstorff is one of the church’s most incisive and compelling voices. Between the Times invites us not simply into new ways of thinking, but a transformational way of life.
An essential complement to his now classic Until Justice and Peace Embrace, the forthcoming Love and Justice, and Justice, this book makes clear why Wolterstorff is one of the church’s most incisive and compelling voices. Between the Times invites us not simply into new ways of thinking, but a transformational way of life.
Hearing the Call: Liturgy, Justice, Church, and World
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Hearing the Call: Liturgy, Justice, Church, and World
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Overview
An essential complement to his now classic Until Justice and Peace Embrace, the forthcoming Love and Justice, and Justice, this book makes clear why Wolterstorff is one of the church’s most incisive and compelling voices. Between the Times invites us not simply into new ways of thinking, but a transformational way of life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802865250 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company |
| Publication date: | 01/10/2011 |
| Pages: | 450 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Mark R. Gornik is director of City Seminary of New York. He served previously as the founding pastor of New Song Community Church in Baltimore and is also the author of To Live in Peace: Biblical Faith and the Changing Inner City.
Read an Excerpt
Hearing the Call
LITURGY JUSTICE CHURCH and WORLDBy Nicholas Wolterstorff
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Copyright © 2011 Nicholas WolterstorffAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-6525-0
Chapter One
Trumpets, Ashes, and Tears
Every Sunday morning for almost 2,000 years now we Christians have left our beds, our tables, our fireplaces, and gone out onto the paths and roads and streets of our world, by foot, by horse, by bicycle, by car, from the dispersion of our daily existence to our liturgical assemblies. Then, after our divine service is finished, we go back again over the paths and roads and streets to our homes and places of work and recreation. Christian existence has from its beginnings followed this pattern of gathering and dispersing, this systolic-diastolic beat of contracting and expanding, assembling and scattering. The pattern is familiar to all. But what does it mean?
Also from the very beginnings of Christian existence this heartbeat of gathering and dispersing has followed the temporal one-plus-six rhythm of Sunday plus Monday-through-Saturday. Into the otherwise uniform flow of time has been introduced a septuple cadence, rather as the train traveller finds herself introducing into the uniform meter of the click of the wheels rolling over the joints in the track a rhythm of strong and weak. A systolic-diastolic heartbeat in a septuple cadence of one plus six — this from age to age has characterized the Christian way of being in the world. In my book Until Justice and Peace Embrace I inquired into the meaning of the septuple rhythm. Here I want to look into the meaning of the heartbeat. Specifically, what do the parts of the beat — the gathering and the dispersing — have to do with each other?
One can readily discern standard patterns of Christian thought on the matter. Some regard these two phases as not having anything at all to do with each other. They see them as jointly essential to the full Christian life but functioning side by side, not serving or conditioning or fulfilling or interpenetrating each other. The point has been made in various ways. Some say that the active life is jointly indispensable with the contemplative life for the full Christian existence. Others prefer to say that worship and work, liturgy and labor, must complement each other.
Most people who have reflected seriously on the matter have not been content with this side-by-side picture. They have tried to discern some inner connection between our life as gathered and our life as dispersed. Traditional Catholicism, for example, has thought along the following lines: Most of us throughout our daily lives are immersed in the sphere of the secular. But on Sundays, by our participation in the Eucharistic liturgy, we enter the sphere of the holy. In the liturgy we adore and bless God, and God's grace is sacramentally infused into us and Christ made bodily present before us. The contemplative adoration of God is the highest action we can perform in this our earthly existence; nonetheless, it is incomplete. We look forward to the beatific vision of God vouchsafed to the saints in heaven. To this end, the sacramental infusion of grace is indispensable. Our participation in the liturgy represents, then, both the beginning of our life of contemplation and the means of its completion. The fundamental significance of our life in the secular is that it preserves this present material and social existence of ours, which in turn enables us to participate in the liturgy. The active life enables the contemplative life; our lives as dispersed make possible our lives as assembled.
Traditional Reformed thought has often turned this model from traditional Catholicism on its head. Where the traditional Catholic saw Monday through Saturday as being for the sake of Sunday, the Reformed have seen Sunday as being for the sake of Monday through Saturday. Where the Catholic saw the significance of work as lying in its enabling of worship, the Reformed have seen the significance of worship as lying in its enabling of authentic work. Liturgy is for the sake of labor. Authentic earthly life does not consist in ordering our existence so as to catch as much as we now can of the Vision of God and receive the sacraments so that in heaven we shall experience the whole; it consists of struggling to serve God in the establishment of God's Kingdom here on earth. It consists, if you will, of the struggle to make our lives and our world holy. The assemblies are the place where the King's directives for the week are heard and where nourishment for the task is received. Our lives as assembled are instrumental to our lives as dispersed.
Tacit in both of these one-directional instrumentalisms is of course a priority as between the church gathered and the church dispersed, as between liturgy and labor, worship and work. In traditional Catholicism, the reception of grace and the adoration of the bodily-present Christ that together constitute the core of the liturgy are what is of supreme importance in life: our work in the world is in service of that. In the traditional Reformed view, our work in the world whereby we serve God in the obedience of faith is the supremely important thing: the liturgy is in service of that. But it is also possible to think in these hierarchical terms — that is, to think of worship as superior to work or of work as superior to worship — without viewing the relationship in an instrumental way. It is possible to think in terms of lower and higher without thinking of the significance of the lower as simply that of serving or enabling the higher.
Certainly Vatican II and the thought inspired by it does not limit the significance of our work in the world to its enabling of the liturgy. It grants to such work its own intrinsic significance. Yet quite clearly a priority remains. The formula toward which Vatican II gravitates is that the liturgy is source and summit of the Christian life. The liturgy nourishes our daily lives while being also the summit of the Christian life. That is clear, for example, in these passages from the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of Vatican II:
Every liturgical celebration, because it is an action of Christ the Priest and of his Body, which is the Church, is a sacred action surpassing all others. No other action of the Church can equal its efficacy by the same title and to the same degree....
The sacred liturgy does not exhaust the entire activity of the Church. Before men can come to the liturgy they must be called to faith and to conversion.... To believers also the Church must ever preach faith and penance; she must prepare them for the sacraments, teach them to observe all that Christ has commanded, and encourage them to engage in all the works of charity, piety and the apostolate, thus making it clear that Christ's faithful, though not of this world, are to be the lights of the world and are to glorify the Father before men.
Nevertheless the liturgy is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; it is also the fount from which all her power flows. For the goal of apostolic endeavor is that all who are made sons of God by faith and baptism should come together to praise God in the midst of his Church, to take part in the Sacrifice and to eat the Lord's Supper.
Though I know of no corresponding passage on the Protestant side that is quite so crisp as this from Vatican II, a great many Protestants in our century have indeed reversed this Catholic model of priorities. They would not reduce the significance of the liturgy to its service of our life in the world any more than contemporary Catholics would reduce the significance of our life in the world to its service of the liturgy. Yet they would say that the church is most fully realized as the body of Christ in the world, or performs the actions of supreme importance, at those points where a cup of cold water is given in the name of Christ — at those points where the poor hear good news, where the captives are sprung free, where the blind recover their sight, where the oppressed are liberated, and where all the dwellers on earth experience something of the shalom of the Year of Jubilee.
Up to this point I have been sketching out models — ways of thinking, patterns of thought. Let me now begin to engage the issues by suggesting that we must resist choosing between these two positions. The body of Christ on earth is realized just as much in its struggle for justice and peace in the world as in its worship of the God of justice and peace. Its calling is fulfilled just as much in its adoration of the Holy One as in its struggle to make the world holy.
Jesus performed the works of healing and preaching, but also the works of praying and worshiping. And his Sonship was manifested no more in the one than in the other. It is true that when asked whether he was the long-expected one of Israel, Jesus pointed to his deeds of healing and preaching. But one of the decisive occasions on which he pointed to these messianic signs was during his attendance at the synagogue. Every faithful Jew was faithful in prayer and blessing, and every faithful Jew expected the Messiah to be faithful in these as well. These, though characteristic of the Messiah, would not be a distinguishing mark of him. Doing the works of shalom would be that. But if our Lord's Sonship is brought to realization both in his healing and in his praying, in the one no more than in the other, can we as his body be realized in any other way?
Yet surely we must go beyond this recognization of equal ultimacy. The relation of assembly to dispersal, worship to work, liturgy to labor, is not that of merely being side by side. The traditional Catholic who argued that the dispersion is in the service of the assembly and the traditional Reformed who argued that the assembly is in service of the dispersion both discerned something important. Both discerned that in some way these two phases of the heartbeat of the church, the systolic and the diastolic, are interrelated.
One way in which they are interrelated — and here I plant my feet firmly in the Reformed tradition — is that the liturgy does indeed serve our life in the world. It both directs and nourishes it. The liturgy is not just an instrument of the grace that gets us to heaven; it is also an instrument of the grace that guides and empowers us for our work as covenant partners with God in the coming of God's Kingdom. In Scripture and sermon we are confronted with God speaking; only someone who has heard almost nothing of the speech of God can doubt that that speech guides and directs our lives as dispersed. In the Lord's Supper we are, as the Reformed confessions put it, nourished and refreshed; only someone who has never experienced such nourishment and refreshment can doubt that this empowers us for our lives in dispersion.
But though this direction of the relationship of assembly and dispersal is profoundly important, I do not wish here to develop it further. The reality of liturgy pointing to life needs to be enriched, and our thought about it deepened; yet few today, at least in the Reformed camp, doubt that liturgy must point to life. A good many people, however — so it seems to me — are oblivious of the fact that life must also point to liturgy. Without denying the importance of liturgy pointing to life, I wish here then to reflect on life's pointing to liturgy.
We leave our homes, our offices, our playgrounds, and assemble for the liturgy. But we do not leave behind our experience in our lives of dispersion. We carry that experience along with us. A fundamental dimension of the liturgy is that in it we give expression, in concentrated and condensed ritualized form, to our experience in the world and our response to that experience. Let me point out three fundamental ways in which that is true.
We can begin with a fundamental theme in the thought of John Calvin. As Brian Gerrish, church historian at the University of Chicago, remarks in one of his essays on the thought of Calvin, to be human is for Calvin to be one of those points in the cosmos where God's goodness finds its response in gratitude. Thousands of passages could be cited as illustrations of this pervasive Calvinian theme. Here is just one, from near the opening of the Institutes: "Although our mind cannot apprehend God without rendering some honor to him, it will not suffice simply to hold that there is One whom all ought to honor and adore, unless we are also persuaded that he is the fountain of every good ..." (I, ii, 1). The thought is clear. Considering God's mighty attributes may fill us with the conviction that this being ought to be honored and adored, and this in turn may induce us to render some honor to this mighty being. But this will not suffice for full-hearted honoring and adoring. We also need to be persuaded that this mighty being is good to us. In other passages Calvin makes clear that being persuaded of God's goodness is as much a matter of perception and experience as of intellectual conviction. If our devotion is to be full and authentic, we must not only be intellectually convicted of God's goodness and might but must apprehend the goods of the world as gifts of God. Whereas the secularist sees in the food that comes our way nothing other than something good, the Christian apprehends those goods as gift — rather in the way in which, when we are guests at a dinner, we experience the dinner not only as delicious but as a gift.
Though this theme of experiencing the goods of the world as a gift of God is indeed fundamental in Calvin, we should not allow our focus on it to make us lose sight of the other, neighboring, theme at which he hinted in the passage quoted and which he develops at length in other places. We honor God also because we experience the world as God's glorious work. The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork. Just as we, in looking at the work of an artist, do not apprehend it merely as a beautiful object but as the admirable work of an artist, so too the believer, in walking through the world, apprehends its wondrousness as the glorious work of God.
In short, for Calvin, to be a believer is to experience this world as a manifestation, a revelation, an epiphany of God. It is to experience it as a "sacrament" of God—not in some indefinite way but in the quite specific way of experiencing it as a gift to us and as God's glorious work. To such experiences, says Calvin, the only appropriate response is gratitude and adoration.
This same theme was eloquently developed in his own way by the late Russian Orthodox theologian, Alexander Schmemann. At creation, says Schmemann, "God blessed the world, blessed man, blessed the seventh day (that is, time), and this means that He filled all that exists with His love and goodness, made all this 'very good.'" To this act of God, Schmemann continues, "the only natural (and not 'supernatural') reaction of man, to whom God gave this blessed and sanctified world, is to bless God in return, to thank Him, to see the world as God sees it and — in this act of gratitude and adoration—to know, name and possess the world." Schmemann goes on to say that
all rational, spiritual and other qualities of man, distinguishing him from other creatures, have their focus and ultimate fulfillment in this capacity to bless God.... "Homo sapiens," "homo faber" ... yes, but, first of all, "homo adorans." The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest. He stands in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God—and by filling the world with this eucharist, he transforms his life, the one that he receives from the world, into life in God, into communion with Him. The world was created as the "matter," the material of one all-embracing eucharist, and man was created as the priest of this cosmic sacrament.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hearing the Call by Nicholas Wolterstorff Copyright © 2011 by Nicholas Wolterstorff. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface ix
The Grace That Shaped My Life 1
Part 1 Liturgy
Trumpets, Ashes, and Tears 19
The Tragedy of Liturgy in Protestantism 29
Justice as a Condition of Authentic Liturgy 39
Liturgy, Justice, and Holiness 59
If God Is Good and Sovereign, Why Lament? 80
Part 2 Justice
Why Care about Justice? 95
For Justice in Shalom 109
The Wounds of God: Calvin's Theology of Social Injustice 114
Lest Your Brother Be Degraded in Your Sight 133
An Evening in Amman 136
Death in Gaza 140
The Troubled Relationship between Christians and Human Rights 148
Six Days in South Africa 155
Seeking Justice in Hope 170
Hondurans Seek Justice 188
Part 3 Church
"When Did We See Thee?" 199
The Bible and Women: Another Look at the "Conservative" Position 202
Hearing the Cry 210
Letter to a Young Theologian 218
The Theological Significance of Going to Church and Leaving and the Architectural Expression of That Significance 228
The Light of God's Love 241
Thinking about Church Architecture 245
Thinking about Church Music 254
Playing with Snakes: A Word to Seminary Graduates 268
Part 4 World
Can a Calvinist Be Progressive? 275
The Moral Significance of Poverty 287
Love it or Leave It 297
Reflections on Patriotism 299
Contemporary Christian Views of the State: Some Major Issues 308
The Political Ethic of the Reformers 328
Theological Foundations for an Evangelical Political Philosophy 346
Has the Cloak Become a Cage? Love, Justice, and Economic Activity 372
Justice, Not Charity: Social Work through the Eyes of Faith 395
Afterword
An Interview with Nicholas Wolterstorff 413
It's Tied Together by Shalom 423
How My Mind Has Changed: The Way to Justice 430
Acknowledgments 439