New Theses for a New Reformation #5 Worship

We must take worship seriously.

He may be the most dangerous and still unrecognized among all the ghosts that haunt us. We are on guard against Darwin, Freud, Marx, and now even Derrida. Our antennae are alert for these worldview monsters. Our radar stands guard against their peculiar brand of folly. In the meantime, we march to the beat of Rousseau without even knowing it. We are all, whether moderns or postmoderns, romantics. And that’s not a good thing. It doesn’t mean we are given to walking on beaches during sunset. It means we are given to being taken for a ride by our emotions.

To the romantic mind, all that matters is the heart. The goal is emotional intensity. A romantic would rather be morbidly depressed than mildly happy. Worse still, the romantic believes that for emotions, (or anything for that matter) to be authentic, they must be spontaneous. That which is planned, ordered, formal, to the romantic mind, is of necessity insincere, inauthentic and interminable.

Romanticism, of course, did not begin with Rousseau. It began with the serpent. God said, “Don’t eat.” But Eve found that the fruit was pleasing to the eye, and desirable to make one wise. And she did eat. That same spirit was at work in the ministry of Nadab and Abihu. These two sons of Aaron had been given the plain and explicit instructions from God Himself regarding how He is to be worshipped. The young priests, however, found God’s instructions cramped their style. Surely what matters to God is the heart, they emoted. Surely if straying from His instructions draws us closer to Him, if such touches our hearts, it must be a good thing. And so they entered the tabernacle taking with them “strange fire.” They drew far nearer to God than they had planned. They had a far more emotional experience than they had hoped for. God killed them, on the spot.

And Moses said to Aaron, “This is what the LORD spoke, saying:

‘By those who come near Me
I must be regarded as holy;
And before all the people
I must be glorified.’”
So Aaron held his peace.

We have in our day the waning end of the worship wars. Those committed to a more modernist understanding of worship, wherein the goal is simply to convey information from the professional to the laity, have been roundly defeated by those with a postmodernist approach, wherein the goal is to create an emotional experience from the professional worship leaders to the audience. Both sides, however, have missed this text. We will not take worship seriously until we learn that He must be regarded as holy by those who come near Him. We have all lost the worship war because both sides have come to the war to get, rather than to give. Some want an intellectual experience, while others want an emotional one. Either way we have sought our own glory, rather than His. Both are strange fire.