Corporate Worship

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:51 pm by Peter Leithart

Corporate Worship 2017-09-06T22:51:47+06:00 Peter Leithart

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A set of lecture notes for an upcoming lecture on the corporate character of worship. Some of this material has been posted previously on this site.

INTRODUCTION
Sometimes, Christians think that the transition from old to new is a transition from a corporate form of religion to a more individualistic form of religion. In fact, something like the opposite is the case. An Israelite would often bring an offering to the tabernacle or temple, and offer it as an individual act of worship ?Eto fulfill a vow, to offer thanks, as atonement for a particular sin. Certainly, there were festivals, and Israelites were to gather weekly in holy convocations (Leviticus 23:1-3). Yet, a good deal of an Israelite?s worship could be individual.

We almost never see this in the New Testament. Christian worship is corporate worship. Of course, Christians can praise God individually, and we are called to pray individually. But Christian converts in the New Testament are continually gathering to break bread together and to have communion with God and with one another (Acts 2:43-47). The cross of Jesus reconciles us to God, and also breaks down dividing walls between Jews and Gentiles, slaves and freemen. Christianity is not an ?individualistic?Ereligion, but a corporate one; the Christian life, and Christian worship, are worked out in the body of Christ.

In this lecture, I want to trace this out in three directions: the corporate or communal nature of reality; the unity-in-diversity of the church; and, finally, the corporate character of worship.

BEING IS COMMUNION
God is Triune, an eternal communion of love and fellowship among Father, Son and Spirit. Father, Son and Spirit are so intimately united that contact with one is inevitable contact with the others. The Father is in the Son through the Spirit, and the Son is in the Father through the Spirit, and both Father and Son are in the Spirit who is poured out upon us and dwells in us. Each of the Triune Persons indwells and participates in the others. For the Christian, the ultimate reality, the source of everything else that exists, the God who imprints His character on everything that He makes, is a Triune community.

This triune community is a harmony of difference. Those differences are irreducible. The Son can never be collapsed into the Father, nor the Spirit into the Son. The Son remains the Son even while He?s in the Father and the Father in Him, and the Spirit remains the Spirit even when He comes as the Spirit of the Son, even though Paul says that the ?Lord is Spirit?E(2 Corinthians 3:18). Though each Person knows the others exhaustively, each Person knows the others as others, as distinct Persons.

When this God created a world, He created a world where communion, participation, relationship is inevitable. Consider what happens when we investigate something in the inanimate universe. As Frans Jozef van Beeck has pointed out, even our knowledge of inanimate objects has the character of an encounter: ?I notice a handsome elm. Now I find myself looking at it, focusing on it by design. Slowly it comes alive. I ?decide?Eto let it happen. Now I am really seeing the tree: what was a living object (it still is, I suppose) has become a presence . . . . It appeals to me; it calls; it speaks. An encounter without words has begun. A little later I realize: for a few moments there I lost possession of myself. Touched to the quick by the tree?s presence to me, I extended my presence to it. I got ?interested?E?Eswept up into ?Ethis tree . . . . a tree has become, unbeknownst to itself, a treasured partner in my world.?E Van Beeck sees this as a direct challenge to the modern scientific view of the world, which treats the world as a mere ?object?Eto be dissected, analyzed, studied. He argues that scientific study takes place within a prior participation in the object being studied. Before I analyze something scientifically, after all, I have to turn my attention to it, get interested in it, be absorbed by it.

Our participation and communion with the non-human world is one-sided. The tree (so far as we know) doesn?t take interest in us. When we turn to consider the human world, we realize quickly that participation, communion, and communication is inescapable. Van Beeck writes, ?among human beings, mutual intentionality is an antecedent given, and a very compelling one to boot. Anybody who has traveled by train knows that the physical presence of even one human being is never a neutral, merely cosmic fact to us. Participation at the level of intentionality is simply part of being human. And like it or not, we invariably project a presence onto others, in a way things, plants, and even animals do not ?Enot even our pets and domesticated mammals, or our fellow-primates . . . . unlike animals, human beings also broadcast, simply in being around one another physically, tacit invitations (and indeed, insistent calls) for recognition, regard, and respect of the consciously undertaken kind . . . . On a train, if we do not wish to be bothered, we intuitively know that we do well to give fellow-passengers signals to that effect; only on this condition can we expect them to respect our desire, and in so doing to respect us.?E In short, in the presence of another human being, we are called to communion, and ?we cannot not-commmunicate with each other . . . . Inability to leave others alone is a defining human trait. By nature, we cannot not-participate.?E The being of human beings, made in the image of God, is invariably ?being-with-others.?E

If this is the case, if human beings are formed in the communal image of the community of the Trinity, then our worship will inevitably reflect that.

ONE BODY, MANY MEMBERS
Talk about the corporate, communal, participative character of human life inevitably raises fears and concerns for modern people, especially modern Christians. If we are defined by our relationships, defined by being-with others, naturally communicative, what happens to the individual? Don?t I get swallowed up in some corporate reality and lose my uniqueness and distinctiveness? If the church is a ?we,?Ewhat happens to ?me?E

The answer to these concerns is not to minimize the corporate character of Christianity, or to say that we need to find some ?balance?Eof individual and corporate. Rather, the answer to these questions is to grasp the character of the corporate, the body, that the New Testament describes. It will help to examine this in the light of alternative conceptions of community that existed in the Greco-Roman world of the New Testament.

Paul?s use of ?body?Eas an image for a community is not original with him. Paul’s description of the church as the body of Christ parallels in both its basic conception and in its details the social theory of ancient moralists. Seneca, for instance, wrote, “What if the hands should desire to harm the feet, or the eyes the hands? As all the members of the body are in harmony with one another because it is to the advantage of the whole that the individual members be unharmed, so mankind should spare the individual man, because all are born for a life of fellowship, and society can be kept unharmed only by the mutual protection and love of its parts” ( Anger 2.31.7). Livy ( History of Rome 2.32.7-33.1) records the parable of Menenius about the body’s rebellion against the belly (which was employed by Shakespeare in Coriolanus ). Epictetus asks “what is the profession of a citizen?” and answers “To treat nothing as a matter of private profit, not to plan anything as though he were a detached unit, but to act like the foot or the hand, which, if they had the faculty of reason to understand the constitution of nature, would never exercise choice or desire in any other way but by reference to the whole” ( Discourses 2.10.4-5). Examples could be multiplied. When Paul uses “body”

as a description of the church, then, he is assuming that the church is a functioning social entity to herself. She is a new “society” or new “city.”

But this new city functions in Paul differently than it does in other ancient writers. It is a genuinely new body. As Raymond Collins points out in his Sacra Pagina commentary on 1 Corinthians, “Paul attributes the diversity of the various members of the body and the order among them to God . . . rather than to nature.” Further, while many ancient writers used the image of the body to make a hierarchical point – the belly in Menenius’ parable represents the patrician classes who receive the firstfruits of Rome’s produce, and then mediate benefits to the rest of the body – Paul emphasizes (as some pagan writers did) the interdependence of all the members of the body. Finally, Paul “states that it is the supposedly weaker (and presumably less honorable) members of the body that are to be honored and that this is in accordance with the divine ordinance in arranging the body.” So, in one sense, the church is a social body like other social bodies; on the other hand, it is a social body that functions differently from other social bodies, in that it functions as a genuine body (or, at least, is called to do so).

We can make the point by returning to the Trinity. The Father and Son participate in and commune with each other, and this communion defines who they are. Yet, this communion does not endanger their particularity. On the contrary, precisely the Father?s distinctive character as Father comes about because He is defined in terms of the Son; the Spirit?s distinctive Personhood arises from His communion with the other Persons. So also in the church: The eye does not lose its eyeness by being part of the body; it has its importance and significance as an eye precisely because it is part of a body, and related in various ways to hands, ears, feet, and so on. When we oppose individuality and corporate participation, we set off on the wrong foot from the beginning. They are mutually defining.

CORPORATE WORSHIP
This helps us to understand the character of corporate worship. Corporate worship does not mean that we all do the same thing and have the same function and role in worship. It doesn?t mean that everyone in the church does exactly the same thing as everyone else. Rather, just as each member has a role in the body-life of the church, called to use his gifts for the edification of the whole body, so also in worship each member has a particular role to play. For example, the minister leads worship, and the rest of the congregation doesn?t. This is not a violation of the corporate character of worship, and it doesn?t undermine the notion that we are all priests and ministers in God?s house. We just minister differently, depending on the Spirit?Egifting and calling. Aquinas had it right: Baptism is a deputation of the baptized to a particular station in the cultus Dei . Each of the baptized has a role, but each has a unique role.

The Supper is central to Paul?s teaching about the corporate character of the church. In 1 Corinthians, Paul refers to both baptism and the Supper to challenge the divisiveness within the Corinthian church. Paul is teaching that the Supper provides a ?model?Eof how the body should work. This discussion occupies a good portion of two chapters (10-11), and these chapters are set in a larger discussion of meat sacrificed to idols (beginning in ch 8). Several conclusions can be drawn from Paul?s teaching here about the Eucharistic community of the church. First, the question of eating meat sacrificed to idols was both religious and political. Little meat was available except from temples, and so refusing to eat meat sacrificed to idols would have meant becoming a vegetarian. Further, one of the privileges of citizenship was participation in the feasts of the city, which were religious festivals involving pagan sacrifices. Refusing to eat meat sacrificed to idols meant renouncing one basic privilege of citizenship. Participating in the meal of the Lord means renouncing other meals. The Supper demands a separate people. Second, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10 that the bread that the church breaks together is a sign of their unity with Jesus and with one another. It is a sharing or communion in Christ, and makes them sharers in one another as well. Third, this point is reiterated in 1 Corinthians 11, where Paul uses the Supper (as he did baptism in ch. 1) as a criterion to judge the Corinthians?Econduct. They are belying the Supper by their divisions at the table. People have difference seats at the table, different roles in the Eucharistic rite. And that is a picture of the one-in-manyness that the church displays in all its body life.

It?s crucial, though, to realize that the whole service is also corporate. The Supper, being a meal, is an obviously corporate occasion, something done by the whole body, each member participating. Singing together is also corporate, as are the creeds, prayers, and responses that are part of many liturgies. What sometimes gets lost, however, is the fact that the reading and preaching of Scripture is also a corporate act. Calvin said that we are unified by the preaching of the Word in part because we all hear the same word from a single mouth. Everybody hears the same words at the same time, and so the public reading of the word helps to shape a people with ?one mind?E(Philippians 1:27), a single narrative and poetic imagination nurtured by exposure to the same story.

In some churches, the public reading of the word has been reduced to a minimum. Donald Juel has written, ?The whole interpretive enterprise suggests that public reading is unimportant to understanding the scriptures. The Bible is a mute companion whose access to the imagination is dramatically limited to the sense of sight. The Bible is strangely silent among its most devoted students.?E Even when Scripture is read in public worship, it is frequently not done as a corporate act. Instead, each member of the church keeps his nose in his own Bible and checks the reader?s reading against his own. In the corporate worship of the church, different members have different gifts and callings; when the word is read publicly, the calling of the minister is to read and the calling of the congregation is to hear. So, when the minister starts to read, remember your place, close your Bible, and listen.

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