The God We Worship: An Exploration of Liturgical Theology (Kantzer Lectures in Revealed Theology

by Nicholas Wolterstorff

In The God We Worship Nicholas Wolterstorff takes a ground-up approach to liturgical theology, examining the oft-hidden implications of traditional elements of liturgy. Given that “no liturgy has ever been composed from scratch,” Wolterstorff argues that the assumptions taken into worship are key to perceiving the real depths of historical Christianity’s understanding of God.

Across the liturgies of the Orthodox, Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran, and Reformed churches, Wolterstorff highlights theologically neglected elements of God, such as an implicit liturgical understanding of God as listener. A dissection of liturgy is not only interesting, Wolterstorff argues, but crucial for reconciling differences between the God studied by theologians and the God worshiped by churchgoers on Sunday.

Genres: Theology, Christianity

192 pages, Paperback

First published March 3, 2015

About the author

Wolterstorff is the Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology, and Fellow of Berkeley College at Yale University. A prolific writer with wide-ranging philosophical and theological interests, he has written books on metaphysics, aesthetics, political philosophy, epistemology and theology and philosophy of religion.

Reviews

[Jacob Aitken · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wolterstorff, Nicholas. The God We Worship: An Exploration of Liturgical Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015.

I usually get nervous when I read new books about liturgical theology. The experience reminds me of the old prayer, “Protect us from other people’s good ideas.” Fortunately, this is not Nicholas Wolterstorff’s aim. He isn’t “renovating” traditional liturgies. Rather, by bringing all of his philosophical acumen to bear, he explores what we mean by our conceptual statements within worship.

Wolterstorff defines liturgical theology as “the site where the church, by means of the work of its theologians and philosophers, arrives at a self-understanding of the theology implicit and explicit in its liturgy.” There is more in this claim than is apparent on its surface. This plays directly not only in the type of God we worship (e.g., his attributes and properties) but in what we are able to say about this God.

God’s excellence: What “grounds” God’s excellence? Wolterstorff suggests it is God’s glory, a theme common in the Psalms.

God’s holiness: for Jonathan Edwards God’s holiness is altogether attractive. It is “beauty and sweetness.” It’s certainly that, but when you look at Isaiah 6 that’s not really the picture we see. No doubt Isaiah thought God beautiful and sweet; nevertheless, in the passage he recoiled. Barth, on the other hand, says God’s holiness is in the judging actions of God’s love. Again, that might be true but that’s not what is evident in Isaiah.

Isaiah, by contrast, felt unclean. God’s holiness is God’s space.

The next chapter is titled “The God Who is Vulnerable.” This seems like we are already off to a bad start. Is Wolterstorff denying impassibility? Is he saying God can suffer? No. He isn’t saying God is vulnerable to passions, but that God is vulnerable to being wronged. Can we wrong God? Certainly. Does this mean he is suffering? I don’t think so. If we are duty-bound to God praise and glory to God, and we refuse to do so, are we not wronging God?

When we praise and speak to God, we are entering into the realm of speech-acts (and also raising the sometimes uncomfortable issue of whether God can respond). Wolterstorff makes the following claim:

(1) In our liturgy we are addressing God as one who is a listener.

Here we are starting to cut hard against a traditional type of theology, an extreme form of divine simplicity seen in Maimonides and some medieval Christians, that views God as a purely simple essence who can’t listen (or speak) because he already knows all possibilities. If God is the ground of being or the Unconditioned Condition why would he bother responding? Indeed, it’s doubtful he could speak.

We will return to Maimonides’ bad theology. For now, we should reflect on what it means to speak. In speech act theory we have several terms:

Locutionary act: It is raining. A locutionary act is the sentence.
Illocutionary act: My act of asserting “it is raining.”

The point is this: my locutionary act, as Wolterstorff points out is perceptible. You can hear me utter the sentence “It is raining” (or you can see me write it, etc). It functions akin to a universal. My act of making this, my illocutionary act, it’s imperceptible. What I think Wolterstoff is saying is that my illocutionary act is tied to intentionality. I am intending to make this statement (and I, in fact, do). You can’t see my intentionality.

The relationship between locutionary act and illocutionary act is not causal. One act doesn’t cause another. Wolterstorff suggests that the act is a “counting-as” act. “My performance of that locutionary act counts as my illocutionary act.” This will make more sense when we get to prayer and preaching.

Maimonides, having reduced almost all of the biblical statements about God to anthropomorphisms, had to address the problem of whether God could even hear us. This is related to but not identical with the Calvinist problem of why pray. Since God is immaterial and doesn’t have eardrums, can he “hear” our vocal vibrations in the air? We would say, “He doesn’t need to, since he can see our thoughts.” True enough, but then why pray aloud at all?

Speech-act theory offers a way of dealing with this issue. “To speak is not to express some mental state but to perform some illocutionary act,” so Wolterstorff says. Yes, most of the time the illocutionary act reveals my mental states, but the two aren’t identical. Strictly speaking whether God can hear my vocal words is irrelevant to the nature of speech, if speech is understood as an illocutionary act. The aim of these acts is that “God will attend to them, grasp them, and respond favorably.”

Pace Maimonides, they aren’t bodily actions. We perform them by doing something with our bodies. It doesn’t matter that God doesn’t have ears. Not even humans can bodily perceive illocutionary acts. If we say that God listens, we mean that “God attends to and understands imperceptible particulars of a certain sort, namely, illocutionary acts.”

If we say that God listens to our prayer, do we expect him to perform some speech act in response? Wolterstorff goes on to describe the distinction between analogical predication and analogical extension. As I understand him, analogical extension is when we use a predicate, “is f,” of something when we use it to say of something that “it possesses the property of either being f or something a good deal like it.”

If I say “My dog is a gem,” I am speaking analogically, meaning my dog is precious. He has little in common with the properties of “gem-ness.” Analogical extension is a bit stronger. This is what we mean when we say that God “attends to” or “grasps” our prayers.

Having successfully dispatched Maimonides’ first objection, Maimonides (or the tradition he represents) would respond, “Yeah, but does God speak to you? He doesn’t have vocal cords.” Further, would not God’s speaking (and hence acting in miracle) violate the causal order?

Wolterstorff dodges these questions. He responds with a fine exposition of the Lord’s Prayer but never really deals with Maimonides. He does deal with something like it. God speaks to us in the liturgy via the preaching of the word and the proclamation that our sins are forgiven. I suppose that deals with one angle of Maimonides’ objection, though it doesn’t address the claim of miracles and the causal order.

Without entering into the cessationist vs. continuationist debate, one line of response would be found in 1 Cor. 12-14 in terms of prophets’ hearing God speak. Of course, Wolterstorff in contrast to Barth deals with Old Testament prophets speaking on behalf of God (this would be similar to a “counting-as” relation). Further, given what Wolterstorff said earlier about illocutionary acts not being causal, would that not provide a line of response to Maimonides?

Notwithstanding the above observation, this is a fine and unique book on liturgical theology.

[Nathaniel Kidd · Rating 3 out of 5]

In "The God We Worship," Wolterstorff offers an idiosyncratic and uneven series of explorations in liturgical theology, interrupted by a long digression which takes him far from his topic and more into the realm of what it means for God to listen and speak to our corporate worship. While he offers a good approach to his subject and offers some solid insights, most of these are tangential to his topic, such that the total presentation leaves a lot to be desired.

The book begins with a promising methodological premise. W intentionally speaks to comment on the point of convergence, rather than the divergence, between the great streams of classical Christian liturgy (RC, Orthodox, Anglican, and Reformed). To this end, he quotes each of these sources to demonstrate the continuity in his study. He also seeks to deal with what is implicit in the liturgies -- what is implied in the liturgical scripts -- rather than what is explicit, viz., written in the scripts themselves. Following on this, his first two chapters are actually good, and I would recommend them as a good, concise introduction to the project of liturgical theology, and a possible starting point.

At Chapter 3, however, W goes of the rails by concluding that -- since our confession of sin acknowledges that we have wronged God, and that worship is not only "meet and right" but also our "bounden duty," not offering worship also wrongs God, that therefore, God is "vulnerable" to being wronged. There are other, less problematic ways of explaining this that W does not consider. He thinks he's discovered some unique insight his project in tension with a philosophical theology, and he geeks out about this with a protracted exploration of Maimonides. (And you see how we're beginning to move away from the stated project of the book!)

Chapters 4-8 focus on God as listener and speaker -- features implicit in the understanding of God implicit in the liturgy. As W notes, is probably his most significant contribution in the text. However, at this point, he has moved into some very abstract territory. Rather than engaging with any specific liturgical patterns, actions, or texts, he offers extended explorations from Aquinas, NT Wright, Barth, speech-act theory, and others to build a theory of speaking and listening that can help to elaborate on what is implicit in the speaking/listening actions of the liturgy. Interesting stuff, but not the liturgical theology I (at any rate) was looking for.

Chapter 9 gives an adequate summary of Calvin's Eucharistic theology in view of the idiom developed in the preceding chapters. This is a good thing to represent, since Calvin's Eucharistic theology is little understood and appreciated today, but it falls unfortunately far from the "convergence" aims articulated in the first chapter. In this context, W basically just gives up on that and offers an interpretation of his own parochial tradition.

What's particularly disappointing is that there is so much that could be explored in the grammar of worship -- in what we do with our bodies -- that is convergent in Christian traditions, and that could use a vibrent, lucid interpretation through the lens of an evangelical liturgical theology. Yet W -- perhaps laboring under the particular strengths and weaknesses of his tradition -- gets so wrapped up in the dialogical aspect that he glosses these points almost without mention.

What starts, then, as a promising project ends up falling flat -- not, it should be noted, without doing some good and valuable work, but falling fall short of the work that it had the potential to be.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

NW opens up a new field for theological reflection: What are we saying and doing when we worship, and what does all this imply theologically about God and ourselves?

Wolterstorff focuses on the good stuff, so to speak: what theology is encoded and embodied in great, centuries-old traditional liturgies. Alongside the exegesis of Scripture and reflection upon the great creedal symbols of the Church, that is, our liturgies also articulate and remind us of the great truths of the gospel--some of which, in fact, are not equally highlighted in those other sources. Thus "liturgical theology" is complementary and supplementary to these forms of theology.

Implicitly, of course, the book suggests that any liturgical practice can and should be scrutinized for its theological implications. Thus we may find that certain elements of contemporary or traditional worship (not to pre-judge the matter) may in fact be heretical, may in fact "work" only because those employing and enjoying them have deviant understandings of God and the gospel. (Take, for instance, the liturgical practices of flamboyant prosperity-gospel faith healers. But then move closer to home and see what emerges.)

Because Wolterstorff sticks to the great, time-tested liturgies, he can derive from them theology he is pretty confident is orthodox. And that seems sensible enough. I'm sure he would recognize, however, that insisting that only males preside in worship--and only single males, in the most popular liturgy in the world, that of Roman Catholicism--is problematic for many of us. And he feels free to state his preference for Calvin's understanding of what is happening in the Eucharist over against Trent's or Zwingli's.

Unlike the exegesis of Scripture, then, we're not dealing with revelation from God when we examine liturgies for theology. Still, like the creeds, the great liturgies have been used by many and thus ought to be given prima facie authority at least. Thus liturgical theology deserves a good look as an enrichment of the theological enterprise.

[Stephen Bedard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many churches use liturgies (ancient or modern) but what is the theology behind it? This book is an investigation into liturgical theology.

[Радостин Марчев]

Много свежа - бе значение далич овек е съгласен с нея или не.

[Robert D. Cornwall · Rating 5 out of 5]

What understanding of God is present in the liturgy? What vision of God is implicit in the words and actions that make up Christian worship? That is the question raised and explored by philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff. This is a work of liturgical theology, a form of the theology that he calls church-reflexive. He doesn't go into detail on the nature of this form of theology, but it's intriguing.

Central to this work of liturgical theology is the premise that God both listens and speaks. The works and actions in the liturgy, and he focuses on Episcopal, Reformed, and Orthodox liturgies because they are more standardized (as opposed to the free church forms of my own tradition). His goal is to make what is implicit explicit. Or as he notes in the conclusion of the book, it is something akin to what Alexander Schmemann calls decoding the theology as code embedded in the liturgy. By looking at the the way God is envisioned, especially the assumption present in the liturgy that God is both speaking (through scripture, preaching, etc.) and listening (prayers and hymns) -- with the Eucharist being that point where both speech and listening occur -- we begin to discover a new vision of theology.

What is interesting to note since Wolterstorff is a Reformed philosopher with an affinity for Calvin is that he recognizes that the idea of immutability of God is seriously challenged by the theology present in the liturgy. Thus, the power of church-reflexive theology.

It is a rather dense book at points, but as I moved toward the end I found it to be an important and engaging book. Perhaps I am drawn to it because I tend toward a more high church view of liturgy and worship. I believe that our worship should be theologically informed and reflect our vision of God. It can't be haphazard as is often the case in contemporary formulations.

If you're interested in making explicit the theology present implicitly in the liturgy then you will find this book extremely helpful. Thus, I recommend it highly.

[Liam Marsh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nicholas Wolterstroff offers a systematic look at the liturgical practices of the Anglican, Greek Orthodox, and some of the Reformed liturgies. As I read "The God We Worship" I noted three challenges for readers: A) to format a Systematic Theology around the liturgy (Worship) instead of using the traditional Systematic approach that St. Thomas Aquinas set in stone. I think Wolterstroff also offers a good critic of Divine Simplicity and immutability (especially in Ch. 3, "The God who is Vulnerable"). B) Along the same lines, I think this book offers a starting place to move from the acts of Worship to the Dogma of Theology; One element I wish was in the book was his discussions in "Faith Within the Bounds of Worship", as this would perhaps give more guidance to what Liturgical Theology may look like. C) Lastly, Wolterstroff offers a systematic way for believers to understand worship in the day to day rhythms. Every student of Theology should consider picking up "The God We Worship".

[Preston · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book in deciding liturgy--the code of theology.

[Drew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full review here: http://drewbmcintyre.com/2015/10/06/t...