MYSTERY & MEGATEMPLES

©2006 Orchid Land Publications

[20060204]

     A newspaper write-up about the late Coretta Scott King's funeral service being held in a Missionary Baptist temple that seats 10,000 people calls to mind instances of services at such places on the religious TV station of this island.

        (Non-Southerners may need to learn what "missionary Baptist" means; it     
        refers to the mainline Baptists, in contrast with the more sectarian (and
        sometimes foot-washing) predestinarian Calvinistic Baptists, who report-  
        edly regarded missions as unnecessary in view of the predestination of 
        every human.)
      In these gigantic buildings, attenders can hear sermons and stand up to sing as well as lift up their arms, but they evidently sit too close together to be able to kneel (as the old-time Methodists did), let alone prostrate themselves.  Waiting for a flight at an airport near Los Angeles several decades ago, I had time to visit a local RC megatemple.  The music was secular or Protestant, and the entire service was open to public view.  (There was of course no chancel or vêma ["sanctuary"]; the Altar was in clear view.)  As far as I could discern in this and other Latin and Protestant temples of recent construction, the sense of mystery that is physically felt in traditionalist Orthodox temples (not some of those bought from Western Christians and re-furbished) is lacking.  Finite perception of infinite Mystery would seem to depend on a degree of darkness (with light from lantern windows in the dome or the tower holding up the dome), on hiddenness, and on nworldly music—like that of the magnificent 100-voiced Ukraïnian Orthodox choir in the Chicago cathedral of the sixties.
     So questions arise:  
—Is mystery essential to religion . . . and/or to worship? Answers vary.
—If mystery (in the non-sacramental sense) is necessary, can it exist in a large modern temple?  
—If not, which one will you choose—a "spirituality" devoid of the mystery that pretty well excludes a mysterious sense of the Infinite in a megatemple?   We know the Western answers.
     What is perplexing (to at least the present writer) is how a negative answer can be given to the first of the preceding questions, at least for anyone that
is serious about the distance between the eternal (timeless) and infinite God and the finite, incarnate situation of every created thing except the Incarnate Jesus, no longer on earth physically among us except (what is excluded by Protestants except some Lutherans) in the Eucharist.  The Orthodox believe that the divine ESSENCE (rather than His uncreated Energies) is unknowable and imparticipable; it is through the uncreated Energies of God that the divine Trinity relates to Christians in the present eon following the Ascension of our Savior.
    Are there uncreated Energies (the Apostle Paul spoke of them almost 30 times); and if so, are they mysterious or only finite (bounded) and perceptible?  Many of today's Western Christians evidently believe either that mystery is not essential to religion and/or worship; or else that mystery is finitely apprehensible.
The latter alternative practically or effectively demysticizes Mystery to no more than a finite puzzle.  Whatever the answer, the choice of those who build and attend megatemples to demote mystery in favor of the laudable goal of reaching many persons with the aim of getting them to believe is evident—even if the conservative and physicalist-sacramentalist understanding has got to fall by the way.  
     Before a reader reacts negatively to what has just been stated, consider that worship is by definition directed and addressed to a divine Being, whereas sermons (and even missions) are humanward activities, activities not address to God, Who doesn't need them.  To call a sermon am act of worship (as some have done) is bizaree in logically entailing that humans (the object of sermons) are being worshiped.  What is given to GOD, on the otherhand,  is sacrifice, viz. offering,  return, a part of creation to the Creator.  In Christianity there is no adequate offering other than the only perfect part of creation—Christ's BODY and BLOOD; any would-be worship not revolving around THAT is quite inadequate . . . from this point of view, i.e. in this mysteric framework.  Since that is precisely ruled out by the Protestant part of Christianity, two things are resorted to which, for an Eastern Christian, remove the idea of "sacrifice" ever further away from the conservative (traditional) view:

—The permanence of Christ's Sacrifice on the Life-giving Cross, which makes

   all subsequent sacrifices unnecessary if we can "spiritually" or metaphorically   
   share in THAT, say by being spiritual or metaphorical members of Christ, Who 
   offered it. 
—The what is left of a "spiritual" (non-material—not part of created matter) 
    sacrifice is belief—nothing material or no more than "created."  Nothing is 
    left of sacrifice (unless a sermon is acrifice!) but spiritual praise of the 
    Sacrifice on the Cross.  The bread and wine are no more than "in memory"  
   of the Cross that they call to mind in some way or other.

     That kind of worship is possible in a megatemple or a room in one's house; and it seems to be sufficient to those attending the services in them.  In some Western paradigms, prayers for human needs and sermons replace the "bodily [read:  "non-spiritual"] acts" of kneeling and prostrating so much a part of  the conservative (traditional) understanding of worship (which was preserved in Anglicanism and early Methodism).  In brief, a spiritual (and no doubt loving) sacrifice of praise is all that Worship can or need be.  The praise that seems to be achieved in some temples filled with Black worshipers certainly qualifies.  No doubt this concept of worship is achieved in many (or all?) megatemples.  

    So we are left with the questions:

—Is the radical (non-traditionalist) view of Worship enough for you or me?

and/or 

—Are two other things necessary?

     (1) Mystery, which in a concrete sense is absent in many Western services.
     (2) Bodily actions of kneeling and prostrating.

The answer to (1) will be conditioned among those who reject a necessary rôle for matter (Mysteries or sacraments) and time (tradition) in Christianity—at least in the present era since God the Son's material Incarnation and (the central soterial rôle ? of) His bodily Resurrection—to settle for spiritual "sacrifice" in place of offering an acceptable part of creation to the Creator (Christ; John 1:1,3) aa doing what Worahip does:  acknowledging the Creator's ownership of and sovereignty over "all that has been made."  (This un-traditional view cannot be accepted by Orthodox traditionalists.)  The answer to (2) will be conditioned by a negative attitude toward body and therefore bodily resurraction to exclude material things from "spiritual" worship . . . or conversely if one is a conservative/traditionalist.  Mixed with Western juridicalism (especially the forensic or juridical view of Salvation among descendents of the Protestant Reformers and their emphasis on commandments to the practical exclusion of Mysteries/sacraments), the creation-rejecting point of view that the Crucifixion of Christ "satisfied divine [Wrath and] justice" suffices to accept a view of "worship" that is entirely verbal.   

     We have two different conceptual universes:  The mystery-rejecting megatemples relegate the idea of infinite reality and its worship to a s[iritual "elsewhere," not to what takes place in a temple.  On the other hand, holy Orthodoxy is never without a sense of what Jewish writers have called "the hiddenness of the face of God" in the Old Testament.  Mystery is more than a term for what is puzzling to the finite mind.  The Orthodox do not think that human praise, however devout but not centered on a sacrifice in time, is adequate Worship.  A well-known prayer in the Orthodoxy Liturgy intimates that the Eucharistic Sacrifice is Christ's offering (in His members) of Himself.  For the Orthodox, the only adequate return of the creation to the Creator is Christ's Offering (in His members) of His Body and Blood—around Which all other true worship (say the prayer Hours, akathists, etc.) has got to revolve.  For the Orthodox, the only true creation is Christ's Body and Blood, and only It or prayers evoking It are latreutically adequate.  Other prayers (e.g. for human needs) are important but are not latreutic.   From this point of view, all of the sermons, all of the belted-out hymns of merely human praise, lack the one thing necessary.  

     It is obvious that the two worlds are radically incompatible.  If one is in error, it is clear that error can be as sincere as a true view.  On a deeper level, however, how can there be an "ecumenical" middle ground?  Purely human worship is not too different from pagan worship from the traditionalist point of view, just as the Offering of Christ's true Body and Blood has been treated as pagan by Protestants.  The axioms of our frameworks or paradigms determine what can be true or not true for each of us, i.e. whether Christian Worship is really an Offering of Christ or offering prayers centered at other times on that Event . . . or sitting in a chair and singing a hymn or listening to a sermon. 

     The writer has been informed by more than one by Orthodox seminarian that the teaching on Worship they have received in seminary (one from an Orthodox seminary, one from a prestigious secular university divinity school) allows that human-directed sermons fall under the rubric of "worship."  How that could be, they are, not unexpectedly, unable to explain.

Hits on this website from 11981122 till 20040720:  272,377;
now more than doubled