UNDERSTANDING WORSHIP AND
THE GOSPEL OF SALVATION

© 1999. 2006 by Orchid Land Publications

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     The title of this piece stems from a Calvinist article lacking the second word in its title.   Where the Protestant concentrates on humans and their Salvation, the Orthodox concentrate first on worshiping the all-holy Trinity and then on Salvation.  

There is much confusion on some circles about what Worship is; it gets confused
with activities moving away from God toward human worshipers or believers.  Of course, there can only be one perfect Sacrifice—Christ's Body and Blood, the daily Sacrifice (except during the Great Fast) on which all other worship is centered and around which all other worship revolves.  A prayer in the Orthodox Liturgy speaks 
of Christ as {in His worshipers] the true Offerer of Himself.  
     THE ESSENCE OF WORSHIP IS THE GLORIFICATION OF GOD; the most perfect way of worship is through the offering of creation to the Creator in acknowledging His ownership of and dominion over all that is.  Offering ourselves is hardly a perfect Offering, given our limitations and imperfections, though its intent is good; the only perfect Offering is Christ's Body and Blood—offered by Him in His members.  It is all too obviously a solecism to call a human-addressed activity like preaching or even benefits like Sanctification "worship."  That is a misuse of language.  Let us now turn to this humanward size of divine Activity.

     Veneration (Greek douleía) is given to Saints and to the unembodied heavenly beings (Angels, Seraphima, Cherubim, etc.); it contrasts with the kind of adoration/glorification (Greek latreía) that is given to God alone. The all-holy Theotókos or Theomētōr ("God's Mother") receives what is technically termed hyperduly but more usually called proskínēsis.    (Efséveia "piety," thrēskeìa, and other words are used for English "religion.")  The reason the Theotókos receives such high honor is that she consented to be the mediating instrument through which the Incarnation—the first Mystery (Sacrament) of human Salvation—took place as it did..  (It would of course not have taken place as it did without some human woman's concurrence.)  Western theologians—who locate Salvation solely in the Crucifixion and not in the Incarnation or Crucifixion, which in the eyes of some on the Christian left are too materialistic [and sacramental]—think otherwise.  (The Incarnation is an incidental step to our Savior's teachings and to the Crucifixion; the Resurrection of Christ and a worshiper is to prove divine might; it is not soterial for the magisterial Latin theologian, Mgsr. Joseph Pohl SJ.)  So those who think systematically are divided into two kinds:

—If the Incarnation is soterial in itself, the first Mystery of Salvation, then the  

   Theotókos is to be accorded the high veneration of proskínēsis; but 
—If the Incarnation is not soterial in itself, i.e. what energizes all of the other saving    Mysteries, then of course her rôle is laudable but not praiseworthy—at least for    

  Protestants, who teach that Grace is God's goodwill toward a sinner and that   

  whatever praiseworthy good humans do is not as such soterial; (A few would say   

  that it is simply mechanically predestinated.)

     It is worth observing that, whereas it is God's Reason (LÓGOS in John 1:1,3) 

  and Wisdom (I Cor. 1:24) that created all that is in the original Greek New  

  Testament, it follows that worship is loyikē; a worshiper's bodily martyrdom is 

  a sacrifice [thysía] that is loyikē latreia ([Rom.12:1 "rational"—not "spiritual," as   

  in Protestant renderings) latreìa]!  But if it was a Word (as in Western  

  translations  of John 1:1,3 and even in ome early Eastern ones) that created all 
  that is, it follows that worship of the Creator is fundamentally (or even exclusively) 

  wordy.

      To understand the three forms of Christianity, one Eastern and two  Western—Orthodoxy, papal Christianity, and Denominationism—it is necessary to distinguish the content or matter from the conceptual form constituted by the axioms of each.  The content centers on the Bible—though the three groups do not accept the same canon—within Denominationism, Luther effectively decanonized several New Testament books (including Hebrews and James) and relegated them to a sort of appendix at the end of this translation of the Bible into German.   For details of the matter and form of the three Christian paradigms, CLICK HERE.  It is important to see that a given term will convey as widely different senses as the interpretative forms force it to mean.  A good example is GRACE (CLICK HERE). 
     Since the West believes that a "Word" created all that is, it has a tendency, at least in Denominationalism, of thinking that worship is wordy.  Readers who only read writings by authors of the same Faith as themselves lose the value of comparison.  Others find that comparisons and contrasts (the apophatic approach:  what something is not) make understanding any given Faith more intelligible.  Some readers concentrate on content—e.g. a list of Biblical verses—with no regard to the ways in which their premises about reality and religion mould and predetermine what the content means, no intimation of how the dots are connected . . . these are the positivists.  Others a more holistic interest in both form and content.  Some readers are Gnostic—accepting that materiality and time (tradition) play no rôle in religion, and that the Incarnation and Resurrection are only appendages to the juridical Crucifixion.  (If the Incarnation is incidental to some greater soterial event, then so is the all-holy Theotokos . . . and mutatis mutandis.)  Others accept reality as it is, while yet others (since the sixteenth century) invent virtual realities determined by a will's overruling what really IS.  And so on.  
     The very worst is the ideologue so locked into the box of his framework or paradigm that s/he is unable to compare it with others that may be better (or worse).  It is very hard for you, dear Reader, to move out of whatever paradigm in the foregoing classifications you fall into.  If you crave amazement, consider that (i) there are something approaching 28,000 forms of Denominationism that nearly all accept the Bible literally; (ii) that none of these interprets many parts of the Bible literally (including John 6:48-58); and (iii) those who stick "just to the Bible" are nevertheless often prone to innovate terminology unthinkable for the mind of a Christian living in the Greek-speaking Apostolic age--terms like dispensationalism, conditionalism, preteritism, theonomism, presuppositionalism, etc. (see below).
       To come back to the title, it is unintelligible to the traditionalist how religious people can put the pulpit ahead of the altar, i.e. letting preaching Salvation to humans oust offering the creation back to the Creator--the only perfect Worship the Bible knows.  Of course, the Old Testament recognizes that no creature is perfect enough to be offered to God more than as a token; but the Epistle to the Hebrews recognizes that this has changed since Jesus's Birth and Life.   To go a step further, no creature can offer a perfect creature even yet.  Only members of Christ can offer Christ the perfect Oblation as a perfect act of Worship.  This does not discredit the monastic Hour services or devotional services like Moliebens, Akathists, the Paraklesis, Trisagions, etc. so long as their authenticity is satellitic around the main Oblation.   Only where Worship is primary is attention to Salvation a proper Christian concern, given that God is more important than ordinary human beings (that is, humans other than Jesus).  It is important to note how a different paradigm, invented a dozen or fourteen centuries too late, can change people's priorities.   
     For readers willing to start with words and rise above them to their meanings--to discern what they must mean in a given framework--comparison of one's own beliefs with contrary, or at least very different, beliefs is a very rewarding pursuit.  That pursuit is exemplified on a number of pages on this website.   But an approach, different in a number of ways from the foregoing, is quasi-historical.  It concerns itself with how a conceptual framework, one that predetermines what the words it accepts will mean--has come to be.  We know that the Apostles and their successors lived and thought in a Greek-speaking framework.  One can hardly doubt that God chose the time and place for revealing the true Faith at that juncture in history when Hebrew Palestine was washed over with a tide of Greek-language culture.  (Tiberias, in whose neighborhood Jesus was brought up, was a Hellenistic center in Galilee.)  It is an anachronism to import ideas first developed in frameworks (i) that were invented in the late thirteenth and fourteen centuries and (ii) whose form (if not their Biblical provenience) was a third-hand Aristotelianism developed out of Latin translations of Muslim and Jewish commentators in Cordova (whose second-hand Aristotelianism was of course built on earlier work in Damaskos and elsewhere).  
     Negatively, the absence in Mediæval philosophy and theology of the Greek-language concept inherent in enéryeia and energoûn resulted in a different concept of being from the ancient concept--as different as today's view of matter, light, and life as energy is from the physical sciences of just a couple of centuries ago.  Positively, ideas that led to viewing the divine Essence as the nearest thing Latin had to energy--actus, operatio--resulted in ideas wholly different from those of the Apostolic world--say, the view of Salvation as ontological incorporation into Christ's Body and partaking of his Being.  What had been distinguished in His Being and all beings--Essence and Energy (as in Salvation's being a partaking of the uncreated Energy but not of the uncreated Essence of God) now got wedded.   The Energy that the Latins viewed the divine Essence as was and is esse or existence (with reason a close second); the Energy that the Reformers and their followers viewed the divine Essence as was and is will.  Orthodoxy went on appropriating (this is a technical term) Logos "Reason" and Sophia ("Wisdom" or practical reason) to God the Son in the New Testament manner; and will was not as strongly attributed to the Holy Spirit as in the Augustinian West--and is of course not superior to reason "logos," but dependent on it.  
      To see the force of paradigms or presuppositional frameworks, consider why the Reformers found some things in the Old Testament that the rabbis hadn't found there--  predestination and even anti-iconism (at the time of Philo and Jesus, synagogue walls had pictures on them--though of course not portrayals of pagan gods)--as well as things the rabbis and Muslims alike extolled--emphasis on will and on the word or Book as well as Law (Torah and halakhah; shari'ah among the Muslims).   Why did the Reformers find just those things that Islam agreed with Judaism on, as well as predestination--a tenet of Islam, which the rabbis didn't find in their Bible.  Was it because the Nominalist philosophers got their conceptual framework from Cordovan Muslims and Jews--which is its true origin?  We are speaking of the framework that the Reformers formulated their thoughts in.   The Latin scholastic got their Aristotelianism from the same source, but the Dominicans did not go as far down the road of Islamic theletism (volitionalism) as the Scotist-Ockhamists did.  Many of the distinctive ideas of either party would have been impossible in the first centuries of the Christian era.  The only element that was ancient in Reformation thinking was the Reformer's Gnostic abhorrence of matter and time.  
     Of course, the Muslims and Jews approved of sacrificial Worship in principle, but it was no longer central--or even existent in Judaism after the final destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem  (though it lingered on among the Samaritans).   The Reformers might have found a rôle for matter and time (tradition) in Worship and Salvation in the Bible, but their Gnostic leanings precluded that.   Not even the Incarnation--along with the Resurrection, the most anti-Gnostic events thinkable--could overrule the Gnostic leanings; so the Resurrection took second or third place to the juridical Crucifixion of our dear Savior, and the Incarnation became just a step toward the Crucifixion--or a most a revelatory breaking through with no ontological import.     
       The novel twist that Luther and Calvin came up with was virtual reality--reality by imputation, with will effacing being.   Luther taught that a true believer remains a sinner but is "viewed as if" s/he is really righteous, as the benign will of God now overrules being (ontology); this is Luther's simul justus simul peccator "at the same time righteous and a sinner."  Calvin "improved" on this virtual reality, much to Luther's dismay, with the idea that the Lord's Supper is not only not an act of Worship of God--as with Luther, it was reduced to the holy Communion of human believers--but that there is no ontological change in the gifts:  Believing communicants receive the "virtue" (dýnamis or potential, not energy) of Christ's Body as if they really had eaten His true Body.   Calvinists even went further to proclaim that a "sacrament" or "ordinance" (both juridical terms in origin) had no value in itself--its only value residing in the necessarily accompanying word (verbum vel sermo); in fact, the verbum vel sermo is sufficient without accompanying "material" (mysteric or sacramental) "illustrations," which continue to become ever less frequent among Denominationists other than among Campbellite groups and many Anglicans (who in America, now embrace a mutual acceptance, and apparently parity, of sacraments with the Lutherans).  Of course, the East viewed the Creator-LOGOS--not, as generally in the West, as a Verbum vel Sermo with capital letters--no longer the Reason and Wisdom of God, but--as the Rational Principle of order in the cosmos that makes it intelligible and investigable (rather than "wordy"--as is clear in the opening verses of St. John's Gospel--which uses the contemporary Philonic sense of LOGOS).   
     We have left the ancient Greek-language thought world far behind at this point.  It is unimaginable that either Philo (let alone Epictetos) or Jesus or John or Paul could have thought in the late-Mediæval frameworks of the Western forms of Christianity.  The verbal content of the Gospel has been remoulded and refashioned according to presuppositions and a conceptuology as foreign from the Apostolic world as you can imagine.   Today, in the non- or anti-theological culture of four-point Fundamentalism, we run across new terminology even more remote from early thinking--dispensationalism, conditionalism, preteritism, theonomism, presuppositionalism, and yet more exotic -isms which it would be shameful to write down--that are embraced by people who reject the omoioûsion of the Creed because it isn't "biblical"--people who baptize in the name of Jesus only and rarely mention the all-holy Trinity of the Apostolic Faith.
      That's were otherdox Christianity has come to, dear reader:  It's on the far left of Christianity, just as Oriental Orthodoxy is on the far right.  The papal faith, with all of its additions and supplements to traditional Orthodoxy, is based on a form of scholasticism derived from Cordova; the Denominationist faith, with all of its subtractions from traditional Biblical Christianity, is based on a form of scholasticism noticeably closer to Cordovan Islam that Thomism.   Neither really understands eneryeia and energoun in the New Testament (SEE HERE); the very words have been transmogrified in their translations--translations in which some Fundamentalists also render sarx ("flesh") as "sinful nature"--a 100% Gnostic concept.   Having lost the Apostolic bearings of Christianity and anachronistically transporting their latter-day ideas (e.g. words of Jesus that supposedly justify an indefeasible or at least indefectible and infallible papacy) back into the first-century Greek-speaking culture of the Apostolic New Testament (from which Luther rejected the books he didn't agree with, placing them in a sort of Appendix at the end of his translation of the New Testament), the gulf separating Orthodoxy from those Mediæval inventions is too vast to cross.   Given the unwillingness of Western Christians to return to the Faith of the Greek Scriptures and the Church of the seven ecumenical Synods, no union is, humanly speaking, foreseeable or thinkable.   Those who view the situation otherwise are deluding themselves.  The Church that Christ gave His promises to remains; those promises belong to patriarchate that broke off from the others with innovations nor to Reformers who made further innovations--all Mediæval inventions inconsistent with early Christianity.   But if Christianity is rent asunder, the Christian Faith is not; the Orthodox Church guards that Faith in its plenitude:  It is not rent; it is free of the heretical additions of the Latins and the subtractions (and additions) of the Denominationists.  

SEE HERE FOR MORE ON SALVATION

SEE ALSO HERE