In This Issue: "Is Worship God’s Gift or Human Doing?: Insights from the Evolution of the Term ‘Revival’"
The issue of Liturgy entitled “Revival,” guest-edited by Melanie Ross, explores the meaning of Christian revival in the multiple forms that have used that term. This excerpt from Lester Ruth’s essay, “Is Worship God’s Gift or Human Doing?: Insights from the Evolution of the Term ‘Revival’” points to what he is examining in the theology of various Christian traditions. The question is: Whose agency is at work in worship? From Ruth’s Abstract: “A close examination of contemporaneous descriptions by these participants highlights recurring tensions, tendencies, and affirmations in how Western Christians have approached the wonder of worship generally. Investigating recent developments among Christian Nationalists shows some of the problems that can arise when a proper balance—and humility—in the mingling of agencies is not maintained.” –– Melinda Quivik
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Several years ago, when I was teaching in a program where I only had three and one-half days to review the entire history of Christian worship for students from a wide range of backgrounds, I settled upon a simple characterization of the different ways the Christian West and East have approached worship. Simply put, I would suggest to students that churches in the West (e.g., Europe and North America) tended to think of worship as a hammer while the East, a window. In other words, Western Christians tended to think about what gets accomplished in worship and how it gets accomplished whereas Easterners approached worship with an eye toward looking through it to a greater reality, the Kingdom of God. While an oversimplification—and subject to the caricatures with which oversimplifications tempt us—I nonetheless continued to use this characterization because it gave me a way to summarize key differences and to point to ways that different Christians thought about worship.
This metaphor of hammer does indeed point to a recurring feature of Western approaches to worship, namely, that Western discussions of worship (both Roman Catholic and Protestant) often stress a kind of instrumentality to worship: X happens to Y when done by Z in the proper way. In other words, Western Christians often expect something to be done to someone when they worship rightly. Consider, for example, the use of the term “means of grace” and the definition given to the same by the founder of Methodism, John Wesley: “By ‘means of grace’ I understand outward signs, words, or actions, ordained of God, and appointed for this end, to be the ordinary channels whereby he might convey to men [sic], preventing, justifying, or sanctifying grace.” Notice the instrumental-type language in words like “ordinary channels” and “convey.” In another context, we would expect such terms to be part of a manual about some machine, perhaps even a hammer. In a liturgical context, however, Wesley is only articulating the common Western assumption that God has given humans some things to use and handle in order to experience divine grace. . .
Indeed, by noting that Westerners approach worship like a hammer, I was only suggesting that they rely upon an interesting theological dynamic in worship that one liturgical scholar has named as the “mysterious mingling of divine and human agency.”. . .
Prayer, scripture, and Communion may all be “means of grace,” but prayer has to be said, scriptures have to be read, and Communion has to be offered and received by some human. And it is not as if people are the only “nails” for the liturgical hammer and God the only wielder of the hammer.
To investigate a good case of the “mysterious mingling’s” complexity, I propose in this article to look at the term “revival” in American church history, starting with the First Great Awakening
in the early eighteenth century.
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Lester Ruth is research professor of Christian worship at Duke Divinity School. Most of his publications deal historically with the worship of American evangelicals and Pentecostals.