Jeroboams' bulls

Dale Ralph Davis on Jeroboam (in 1 Kings) making two bulls to substitute for Yahweh worship. Davis' concern is that some Bible commentators excuse Jeroboam, by claiming that later 'editors' have altered the original text. This is something Davis will not have - here, nor anywhere else. In a strongly-worded footnote (not the first one in this book) he writes:

'The problem with my view is that I have taken the testimony of the text at face value. Obviously, this is not good, furrow-browed scholarship. Many would hold that i fail to understand that the viewpoint in the text comes from later Judean editors who held an extremely anti-Jeroboam bias - hence one cannot depend on such texts. I don't mind if they think such. If they do, they should be faithful agnostics, i.e., they should deny that they can know anything accurate about Jeroboam's cult since the evidence is tainted. This they do not do; they deny the reliability of the texts yet proceed to do plastic surgery on Jeroboam. If the texts are unreliable, they should shut up. Instead they proceed to reconstruction based upon (essentially) re-written texts. This yields both bad history and perverse theology.' (page 139)

Davis isn't consistently opposed to certain commentators: Ian Provan, who is criticized in an earlier footnote or two, gets a thumbs up in a footnote just prior to the one quoted; Brueggemann, however, seldom comes off with commendations. 

Two extracts from Imagining the Kingdom

Quite simply, there is no formation without repetition. There is no habituation without being immersed in a practice over and over again… So it is precisely our allergy to repetition in worship that has undercut the counterformative power of Christian worship—because all kinds of secular liturgies shamelessly affirm the good of repetition. We’ve let the devil, so to speak, have all the repetition. And we, as liturgical animals, are only too happy to find our rhythms in such repetition. Unless Christian worship eschews the cult of novelty and embraces the good of faithful repetition, we will constantly be ceding habituation to secular liturgies.  

and

We need stories like we need food and water: we're built for narrative, nourished by stories, not just as distractions or diversions or entertainments but because we constitute our world narratively. It is from stories that we receive our "character," and those stories in turn become part of our background, the horizons within which we constitute our world and engage in action. I cannot answer the question, what do I love? without (at least implicitly) answering the question what story do I believe? We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
James K.A. Smith, Imagining The Kingdom: How Worship Works

Worship

He demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration. Do we suppose that they can do Him any good, or fear, like the chorus in Milton, that human irreverence can bring about “His glory’s diminution”? A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word “darkness” on the walls of his cell.

But God wills our good, and our good is to love Him (with that responsive love proper to creatures) and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces. If we do not, that only shows that what we are trying to love is not yet God—though it may be the nearest approximation to God which our thought and fantasy can attain.

From The Problem of Pain by C S Lewis

Keeping us sane

More people are exploited and abused in the cause of religion than in any other way. Sex, money, and
power all take a backseat to religion as a source of evil. Religion is the most dangerous energy source known to humankind.
The moment a person (or government or religion or organization) is convinced that God is either ordering or sanctioning a cause or project, anything goes. The history, worldwide, of religion-fueled hate, killing, and oppression is staggering. The biblical prophets are in the front line of those doing something about it.
The biblical prophets continue to be the most powerful and effective voices ever heard on this earth for keeping religion honest, humble, and compassionate. Prophets sniff out injustice, especially injustice that is dressed up in religious garb. They sniff it out a mile away. Prophets see through hypocrisy, especially hypocrisy that assumes a religious pose. Prophets are not impressed by position or power or authority. They aren’t taken in by numbers, size, or appearances of success.
They pay little attention to what men and women say about God or do for God. They listen to God and rigorously test all human language and action against what they hear. Among these prophets, Amos towers as defender of the downtrodden poor and accuser of the powerful rich who use God’s name to legitimize their sin.
None of us can be trusted in this business. If we pray and worship God and associate with others who likewise pray and worship God, we absolutely must keep company with these biblical prophets. We are required to submit all our words and acts to their passionate scrutiny to prevent the perversion of our religion into something self-serving. A spiritual life that doesn’t give a large place to the prophet-articulated justice will end up making us worse instead of better, separating us from God’s ways instead of drawing us into them.

From The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language: introduction to the Book of Amos, by Eugene Peterson. 

To know him is to love him

[God] demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration. Do we suppose that they can do Him any good, or fear, like the chorus in Milton, that human irreverence can bring about “His glory’s diminution”? A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word “darkness” on the walls of his cell. But God wills our good, and our good is to love Him (with that responsive love proper to creatures) and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces. If we do not, that only shows that what we are trying to love is not yet God—though it may be the nearest approximation to God which our thought and fantasy can attain.

From The Problem of Pain by C S Lewis

Man is not God's chief end

The problems of the private life are often so intractable because they are not conceived in any but private relations; which is to judge the house from a sample brick. The manna so hoarded goes wrong. The soul’s lot lies in the eternal and universal counsel of God. And the first question still is man’s chief end, and the collective destiny of every soul there. The eternal does not begin on the other side of time; rather all time and space is the content of eternity. Faith is really faith in that eternal destiny as present, and then in our part and place therein by God’s grace. Immortality means living on in Eternity; it is Eternity living on in us. It is God thinking Himself, living Himself in us. But we are apt to treat God as if He were only a patron saint magnified, whom we expect to attend to our affairs if He is to retain our custom and receive our worship.

There is even what we might call a racial egoism, a self-engrossment of mankind with itself, a naive and tacit assumption that God were no God if He cared for anything more than He did for His creatures. We tend to think of God as if man were His chief end, as if He had no right to a supreme concern for His own holy name, as if His prodigals were more to Him than His only begotten Son in whom He made the worlds and has all His delight. We think and worship as if the only question was whether God loves us, instead of whether His love has absolute power to give itself eternal and righteous effect. Modern science is especially prone to remind us of this egoism latent in Christian faith, and is eager to prune it. Accordingly we are told of the infinities of space and time, amid which our earth and its history swim but as a mote in the air; and we are urged, with such knowledge, to moderate our ideas of a future, and our expectations of divine attention. Now, though science is wrong in asking us to suppress our soul or conscience before world on world of spacial or temporal existence (because the spiritual is not spacial), yet the advice is not without value. There are considerations which should quell a crude, racial egoism, and should lift mankind out of the self-absorption which blights and shrivels the individual. But they are not considerations of the Creation but of its Creator, not of a Universe but of a Sovereign God, who is so much to us because He is more to Himself, and whose love is infinite because it is holy, and must be hallowed, even if He spare not His Son. His Son spared not Himself in the hallowing of that name. It was the first function of His Cross. And so He was Saviour—because He loved God more than man, and glorified His name over all weal of ours. We have no final weal but our share in that worship and glory of the Father by the Son.  

 

P T Forsyth, in The Justification of God, pages 10-11

Holiness is the foundation

To bring sin home, and to bring grace home, we need that something else should come home which alone gives meaning to both - the holy. The grace of God cannot return to our preaching or to our faith till we recover what has almost clean gone from our general, familiar, and current religion, what liberalism has quite lost - I mean a due sense of the holiness of God. This sense has much gone from our public worship, with its frequent irreverence; from our sentimental piety, to which an ethical piety with its implicates is simply obscure; from our rational religion, which banishes the idea of God's wrath; from our public morals, to which the invasion of property is more dreadful than the damnation of men. If our Gospel be obscure it is obscure to them in whom the slack God of the period has blinded their minds, or a genial God unbraced them, and hidden the Holy One who inhabits eternity. 

 

This holiness of God is the real foundation of religion - it is certainly that ruling interest of the Christian religion. In front of all our prayer or work stands "Hallowed be Thy name." If we take the Lord's Prayer alone, God's holiness is the interest which all the rest of it serves. Neither love, grace, faith, nor sin have any but a passing meaning except as they rest on the holiness of God, except as they arise from it, and return to it, except as they satisfy it, show it forth, set it up, and secure it everywhere and forever. Love is but its outgoing; sin is but its defiance; grace is but its action on sin; the cross is but its victory; faith is but its worship. The preacher preaches to the divinest purpose only when his lips are touched with the red coal from the altar of the thrice holy in the innermost place. We must rise beyond social righteousness and universal justice to the holiness of an infinite God. What we on earth call righteousness among men, the saints in Heaven call holiness in him.

Have our Churches lost that seal? Are we producing reform, social or theological, faster than we are producing faith? Have we become more liberal than sure? Then we are putting all our religious capital into the extension of our business, and carrying nothing to reserve or insurance.  We are mortgaging and starving the future. We are not seeking first the Kingdom of God and His holiness, but only carrying on, with very expansive and noisy machinery, a "kingdom-of-God-industry." We are merely running the kingdom; and we are running it without the cross - with the cross perhaps on our sign, but not in our centre. We have the old trade mark, but what does that matter in a dry and thirsty land where no water is, if the artesian well on our premises is going dry?

From pages 22-24 P T Forsyth's The Cruciality of the Cross.

Newbigin's six views of the church 1

Newbigin's six views of what the church will be...

1...a community of praise. That is, perhaps, its most distinctive character. Praise is an activity which is almost totally absent from "modern" society. Here two distinct points can be made.

a. The dominant notes in the development of the specifically "modern" view of things has been (as we have noted earlier) the note of scepticism, of doubt. The "hermeneutic of suspicion" is only the most recent manifestation of the belief that one could be saved from error by the systematic exercise of doubt. It has followed that when any person, institution, or tradition has been held up as an object worthy of reverence, it has immediately attracted the attention of those who undertook to demonstrate that there was another side to the picture, that the golden image has feet of clay. I suppose that this is one manifestation of that "disenchantment" which Weber regarded as a key element in the development of "modern" society. Reverence, the attitude which looks up in admiration and love to one who is greater and better than oneself, is generally regarded as something unworthy of those who have "come of age" and who claim that equality is essential to human dignity. With such presuppositions, of course, the very idea of God is ruled out. The Christian congregation, by contrast, is a place where people find their true freedom, their true dignity, and their true equality in reverence to One who is worthy of all the praise that we can offer.

b. Then, too, the Church's praise includes thanksgiving. The Christian congregation meets as a community that acknowledges that it lives by the amazing grace of a boundless kindness. Contemporary society speaks much about "human rights." It is uncomfortable with "charity" as something which falls short of "justice," and connects the giving of thanks with an unacceptable subservience. In Christian worship the language of rights is out of place except when it serves to remind us of the rights of others. For ourselves we confess that we cannot speak of rights, for we have been given everything and forgiven everything and promised everything, so that (as Luther said) we lack nothing except faith to believe it. In Christian worship we acknowledge that if we had received justice instead of charity we would be on our way to perdition. A Christian congregation is thus a body of people with gratitude to spare, a gratitude that can spill over into care for the neighbor. And it is of the essence of the matter that this concern for the neighbor is the overflow of a great gift of grace and not, primarily, the expression of commitment to a moral crusade. There is a big difference between these two.

Lesslie Newbigin. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

Lifting up your hands

Verse. 48. Thy commandments. By commandments he understandeth the word of God, yet it is more powerful than so; it is not, I have loved thy word; but, I have loved that part of thy word that is thy "commandments," the mandatory part. There are some parts of the will and word of God that even ungodly men will be content to love. There is the promissory part; all men gather and catch at the promises, and show love to these. The reason is clear; there is pleasure, and profit, and gain, and advantage in the promises; but a pious soul doth not only look to the promises, but to the commands. Piety looks on Christ as a Lawgiver, as well as a Saviour, and not only on him as a Mediator, but as a Lord and Master; it doth not only live by faith, but it liveth by rule; it makes indeed the promises the stay and staff of a Christian's life, but it makes the commandments of God the level. A pious heart knows that some command is implied in the qualification and condition of every promise; it knows that as for the fulfilling of the promises, it belongs to God; but the fulfilling of the commands belongs to us. Therefore it looks so, upon the enjoying of that which is promised that it will first do that which is commanded. There is no hope of attaining comfort in the promise but in keeping of the precept; therefore he pitches the emphasis, "I have loved thy word," that is true, and all thy word, and this part, the mandatory part: "I have loved thy commandments."
Observe the number, "thy commandments"; it is plural, that is, all thy commandments without exception; otherwise even ungodly men will be content to love some commandments, if they may choose them for themselves.
Richard Holdsworth (1590-1649), in "The Valley of Vision."

From the additional notes to Charles Spurgeon's, The Treasury of David, on Psalm 119 - I will lift up my hands to your commandments, which I love.

Poetry religion

At first I steered clear of the church, having a sort of 'poetry religion,' but a Christian can't develop much on 'poetry religion.'  We all need the religion of ordinary people and the love of other converts.  That's why, in the end, I went back to church; to worship around people who don't like poetry.  It's a good discipline.  I can't put myself apart from them as someone very special.   As a convert I am just an odinary believer, worshipping the same Lord as they do.

Jack Clemo, in A Different Drummer, TV documentary, BBC 1980, quoted on page 122 of Imagine, by Steve Turner.

Worship as political action

Christians are engaged in political action just by being part of the church. Worship is the leading political activity of Christians. In worship, we sing Psalms that call on God to judge the wicked and defend the oppressed, and God hears our Psalms; we pray for rulers to rule in righteousness; we hear the word of God that lays out our alternative way of life, and we sit at the table where we who are many are formed into one body, an alternative Christian polis, by sharing in the one loaf. The problem is that in many churches those things don’t happen. Churches don’t sing Psalms, and especially don’t sing the hard Psalms that call on God to judge the wicked. More churches are having weekly Eucharist, but in evangelicalism that is still more the exception than the rule. The first political agenda for American Christians is to get worship more into line with Scriptural requirements.

from an interview with Peter Leithart

Edward J Farrell

We begin, sometimes without realizing it, to worship things, to relate to them as persons. And in the process, we inevitably relate to other persons as if they were things.

- Edward J. Farrell, from his book Gathering the Fragments