IS RELIGION BASICALLY A MATTER OF WORSHIP
OR SIMPLY A MATTER OF MORAL BEHAVIOR?
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A SERVICE AND WORSHIP
© 2006 Orchid Land Publications
(20061213 [prelinimary version])
Why should the question expressed in the main title even be asked, given that it is obvious that ethical systems can and do exist apart from religion? To make what could be a long, drawn-out matter as brief as the subject allows, consider that forms of Christianity exist in which not only the idea of sacrifice found in ancient Christianity and other forms of religion are absent in the prevailing concept of "worship" (the adjective for which is latreutic). Consider too the phrase, "worship service" that one hears on the media: What other kind of service (in the sense intended) is there? If there is a kind of service (in the sense intended) that is not a worship service─one in which there is even less worship than in many a "worship service"─what would it be?
Consider the import of the word service . . . in particular─as a point of reference─the conservative Eastern Orthodox divine Liturgy, where service is an alternative translation of Greek leitouryía . . . as well as the difference between this and a synagogue service, in which instruction prevails, along with praise, . . . but in which the ancient sacrifice is absent. Let's agree that a (latreutic) service is "rendering (giving back to) someone what is due to that person, what is that person's due." If that Person or Being is the Creator, then that which is due is worship. The chief form of traditional worship of the Creator is to return the best part of creation to Him as an acknowledgement of His divine ownership of all that is. This is commonly called sacrifice. There are also ancillary concepts such as the so-called sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.
With this small set of concepts established, it remains only to speak of energy, a term St. Paul used 26 times (not to count words for synergizing and nouns derived from energizing verbs), . . . evidently in the sense that those who spoke or wrote in Greek during the Hellenistic Age, the sense laid down by Aristotle when he invented the term, viz. that which makes a capacity or potential real, actual, and functional. Grace is uncreated Energy, Christ's divine Life that members of His Body share.
Sanctifying Grace is neither uncreated nor energetic for the Latins; is is not
The purest form of energy is light. Fire is another manifestation of energy in the thought world in which these terms are at home─New Testament Greek and the usage of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
Another remark will be useful. The religion of the Apostolic age was anything but individualistic. In addition, it is clear that Paul's paradigm was not simply the entirelynove invention of an inspired and gifted individual . . . but rather an inspired recombination of Hebrew sacramentalism, which remained the
MATTER of the Pauline paradigm with a new FORM different from Semitic volitionalism-juridicalism. This FORM was replaced with energy ontology─the result of the divine inspiration of Paul. No novel parameters were invented in this combining of Judaism with an ontic-energy cognitive form that stood in contradiction to the prevailing "spiritual" or anti-ontic Gnosticism of the age in thepagan rejection of the value of created materiality and time (evolution, progress, development) in religion. For Gnostics, time is spiraling down to ever worse, not yielding more complex and nobler entities as the Greek Fathers thought. The gnostic view that materiality was created by an evil god was naturally rejected out of hand in favor of highly valued Mysteries (sacrament[al]s; e.g. John 3:5, 6:53-54).
Paul thought of the Creator as God SOPHIA
("Wisdom"), which is not very
different from the Evangelist John's statement that God's LOGOS
("Reason")
created all that is. The Fathers reasoned that if the Creator was
Reason, the
created cosmos is logikos ("intelligible," amenable to reason).
A non-rational
religion contrary to reason (but not the same as a rationalistic
religion) was
unthinkable in this paradigm. As for words (rites) and actions
(ceremonies
like sacrificing),
both are abundant in traditional services. If the
object of a
Christian service is to worship the Trinity, it evidently
needs to be energized
by the uncreated Energies of Grace (not the same as some kinds of human
energy
manifested in some services!) . . . if it is to be authentic.
If there is some other sort of service than a worship service, say a quasi-synagogue service focused on instruction and/or exhortation─i.e. the instruction of humans and prayers for their needs─then of course, adding worship to the term service is not redundant. But from an Eastern point of view, instruction of humans is something entirely different from worshiping God; in some parishes, the sermon comes after the divine Liturgy has finished. Worship as such is at the other, God-oriented, pole from human-oriented activities. This is manifest in the mysteric quality of a service energized in the conservative manner.
If we inquire more deeply into the nature of worship─whose concrete actions have already been referred to─we need to consider the distance between the infinite and imparticipable divine Essence and worshipers along with the differ-ence between that Essence and the approachable divine Nature (cf. 2 Peter 1:4), Whose Energies worshipers can participate in and Whose Energies energize authentic worship. Given the difference between the infinite and the finite, whatever relationship exists between the twain is characterizable only by the term Mystery, a word that represents a material, created, and finite conveyance or vehicle of uncreated Energy. Worship without mystery is, from this point of view, inconceivable. Worship therefore can and does exist without instruction, exhortation, and certain kinds of prayers. The basic concept has nothing to do with morality (ethics) or other kinds of human behavior.
If a "religion" or a service is without worship in the traditional sense just described, it need not be religious. Indeed, there can be religions without a well-formed morality that rises about taboos. If a "religion" consists entirely of morality, it may differ from an academic ethical system only in believing in a divine source of such obedience as the moral system in question calls for. Such juridicality is the human-oriented side of the higher religions, not the divine or religious side. Instead of giving God a God-oriented Worship, i.e. giving something created as well as abstract praise to God, the moralistic kind of would-be religion that reduces services to ethics, instruction, and exhortation gives God obedience. Worship in such an outlook would offer God words, not material sacrifices; and, as for time, it would waste no time reading the Fathers, since revelation and understanding it is over and done with for such a framework. If a non-worship service exists, I would not be surprised, given the possiblity of naming a discussion group, a class on ethics, or the like as "service" in such an etiolated outlook. More common is a service in which there are expressions of respect and praise for God without their having the focus or possibly the primacy over what is mostly human-oriented─moral behavior and consolation of distraught human beings. When a service in this approach lacks the Mystery that goes with cognition of the distance between the divine and the human─it may even be mystical while being anti-mysteric . . . though not when Jesus is pictured as our buddy, even as One Who wants his followers to become rich, etc. There no mystery there! But if the service only briefly rises above instruction or exhortation without the divine energization that makes people fall on their knees or even their faces . . . where is worship?
From the ancient point of view, "religion" and "worship"
√ without the sense of Mystery;
√ without (materio-spiritiual) "Mysteries" energized by uncreated Energy;
√ without the Paul's and the ancient Christian writers' view of uncreated Energy
and divine Light and Fire,
is impossible, however sincerely practised. Nor can one discern much individualism or lack of communality in what is not Apostolic or even just not conservative. If the Hellenistic-Pauline paradigm is replaced by a modern outlook, many radical points of view are viable.
Without judging any group as gnostic or not, it will add to the perspective of what religion is about if we think of the rôles of materiality (sacraments ≡ Mysteries in Greek) and temporality (evolution in creation, tradition in revelation, and the traditional three phases of salvation) in traditional Christianity, as laid out by the Apostolic authors Paul, John, and Peter (in his first two Epistles). The Apostolic and Patristic view is that the Incarnation is the PROTOMYSTERY and that Divinization (with Resurrection) is the ULTIMATE MYSTERY of Salvation. (If you prefer, replace mystery with the juridical term sacrament, but hardly with ordinance.)
The energetic Divinization (théōsis) that 2 Peter 1:4 speaks of─partaking
of the (uncreated Energies of the) divine Nature is not to be confused with
a pagan Deification (apothéōsis), which is an essential marriage, one of human
essence and divine Essence. Anyone who has seen the Orthodox kiss their
crucifixes knows how highly the wooden Crucifixion is revered by the
Orthodox, even though it is not through the Crucifixion
per se or alone that
Salvation is understood in the East, where the "Life-giving"
Crucifixion was a
material and latreutic Sacrifice necessary for Resurrection
and Salvation, . . .
and has therefore been soterial in the dependent sense
of making the soterial
results of Christ's work, Resurrection and Divinization─Salvation─, realizable.
In Orthodoxy, the Incarnation (and with it the Mother of God's necessary
rôle
in It) and bodily Resurrection are essential and soterial Mysteries in the
sense of Mystery understood in Greek Christianity. None
of these (including
the Mother of God's rôle
in Salvation) is simply incidental to the Crucifixion's
taking place and reversing our inherited (h)amartía
(the state or condition of
being deprived of uncreated Grace and Divinization. For
guilt is not inher-
itable, even though a state or condition of deprivation
caused by an ancestor's
sin is inheritable.
What has been spoken of in the preceding is not a matter of individual inter-
pretation but something due to the collective sense of parts of Christianity con-cerning WHAT RELIGION AND WORSHIP ARE. The portrayal is very different from
that of most forms of Western Christianity. The religion and worship so depicted
has been paid for with the blood of sixty million Orthodox during the period of Stalinist Communism, not to speak of the martyrdom of several scores of thousands of clergy . . . let alone the Orthodox martyrs throughout history. It is anything but a negligible framework. What's more, it is, at its best, a supremely
beautiful outlook, . . . one whose sense of mystery and worship─as expressed by many Fathers but most cogently by St. Gregory Palamâs with respect to energy─is often lacking in Western "worship services," not least auditoriums (misnamed "sanctuaries") with SEATS for thousands in attendance who have no room to kneel or prostrate themselves on the material (ceremonial) side of worship of nearly all religions . . . at least if television provides a representative sampling. While one
defends the rights of other to believe and act according to their tenets and respects their sincere views─provided that they do not overstep the rights of others─it is nevertheless the concept is worship portrayed in the foregoing that is at variance with the ancient─and Apostolic─view, in whose language one of whose words for "worship" means "bending the knee." So the Calvinist view of worship as something that starts out with the Ten Commandments is at variance with the Orthodox service in which the Beatitudes are chanted. The Calvinist view was so juridical that the Lordsday or Resurrectionday of Eastern Christianity (where it is the highest of all Festivals) got replaced with a juridicalized Sabbath of don'ts.
It is not extremist to say that, where Mystery is absent in at least some of what has just been mentioned, Worship of the uncreated Source of all being is attenuated or even absent . . . "by (ancient) definition." Where the music is no different from secular music, the gulf between between that antitraditionalist kind of service is, from the viewpoint of a conservative-traditionalist point of view, not trivial. This is not to judge the sincere perpetrators of what is described; it's is merely to clarify the contrast between two points of view, one conservative, one radical and juridicalist.
♫
Some Western viewpoints are the consequence of a drift that
√ began with the first Western theologians─the
Carthaginian jurists, Tertullian,
Cyprian, and Augstine;
√ was further juridicalized when the Western Dark
Ages were ended as the resuslt
of access in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to the
juridicalized Greek
learning found in Arabic translations and commentaries by Muslims
and Arabic-
speaking Jews on ancient Greek learning;
and
√ was further infected, in different degrees, with
the tendencies of the quasi-
gnostic Neo-Platonist gnostic spiritualism of the Renaissance (most
of the
Protestant Reformers where what were called "humanist" scholars) . . .
although Luther himself was not a humanist but rather founded his novel paradigm on two modernisms of the early fifteenth century:
√ the pietist devotio moderna (the gnostic-leaning matter of his paradigm);
√ the Nominalist (Ockhamist) via moderna philosophy (the form of his paradigm).
Luther called himself a Nominalist; among the
volitional-juridical axioms of
this paradigm was a rejection of the traditional jussum
quia justum ("com-
manded because right, i.e. because of being in accord with,
i.e. promoting,
human nature) in favor of justum quia jussum
(right because commanded, i.e.
by God).
♫
To read documents of the past through the lens of a modern paradigm that is quite different from that of the authorship can only yield real ignorance of the past. Temporality and a sense of development can exist in the ABSENCE of such unfortunate (and generally unconscious) axioms often put forward like these:
√ Despite its comprehensive scope, religion must be simpl(istic);
√ A mistranslation due to the wrong paradigm is "the" Bible;
√ The Bible is to be translated and interpreted
in terms of a juridical, non-
sacramental paradigm;
When these axioms (which as such are neither
true nor false) are taken to be "truths," the road to error has already been
embarked on; there remains is no sense in thinking of such assumptions as
"facts" or "truths," although premises fence in
. . . for those who accept them . . what can be true, just as they fence out
what cannot be true.
If sense is ever to prevail in discussions of religion
and the role and kind of worship served (the Orthodox use the term serve
for carrying out a service, not conduct, perform, or celebrate)
in a religions service, it is necessary to understand where we and our
interlocutors are coming from.
