Once More: Is Worship ‘Biblical’?

In a recent article John Richardson has returned to the question raised ten years ago by Howard Marshall How Far Did the Early Christians Worship God? which, according to Richardson, has evoked interest but little action.1 Richardson has now taken up the cudgels to advance a more radical version of Marshall’s thesis, namely ‘there is no such thing as “worship” – or at least not as we know it’. In the first part of his paper he argues that the Hebrew and Greek words translated by ‘worship’ in our Bibles do not refer to what is generally meant by worship in church circles today.2 He notes that προσκυνειν, for example,refers to the oriental custom of prostration as an act of homage or respect, and concludes that it does not therefore necessarily refer to cultic activity, and that even where it does (e.g. Gen 22:5) it does not describe expressing a feeling about God or doing something for God but acknowledging a relationship with God.3 Similarly, even though Richardson cannot deny that ‘serving God’ in the Old Testament included sacrifices offered in the Temple, and praise and prayer, the basic idea of serving God is ethical behaviour worked out in all of life, rather than cultic activity. In the New Testament, of course, the Temple cult is wholly abandoned by Christians, while Christian gatherings are not described in cultic terms but rather in terms of their beneficial effects on those taking part. Hence Marshall’s original claim that the early Christians did not meet so much to worship God as to build one another up.

In the second part of the article Richardson claims that our misreading of the biblical evidence goes hand in hand with a wrong view of worship itself. The modern Christian, it is suggested, increasingly and wrongly sees worship as something we offer to God, as the way we receive from God, and as the locus of a mystical encounter with God apart from hearing his word. All of this is wrong: we cannot offer anything to God, nor can we ‘soften him up’by telling him how great he is, nor should we expect to receive grace apart from the word and sacraments. Modern ideas of worship feed the fallen human notion that God needs us,whereas ‘God is no worse off before our services and no better off after them’.4 They also divert our attention from serving God through ethical behaviour to cultic activity seen either as more important than obedience or at best as the essential ‘recharging’ to enable obedience to take place.5 His conclusion is that while we may continue singing and praying we should not call these activities ‘worship’, and ‘we should make it clear by our words and actions that the beneficiaries in our services are ourselves and not God’.6 The purpose of our meetings is meeting – one another!

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