One reason why we Christians argue so much about which hymn to sing, which liturgy to follow, which way to worship is that the commandments teach us to believe that bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics. You begin by singing some sappy, sentimental hymn, then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know you have murdered your best friend. Stanley Hauerwas
What is the relationship between what we believe and our corporate worship?
Mostly, I think we would say that our church gatherings are given shape by what we believe. That is, we first decide what we believe, and then we decide what our meetings should be like. The priority is given to doctrine over liturgy.
In fact, the relationship is not as neat as that. If we think about it a little bit more carefully, we should notice that Christian doctrine is itself in fact an outworking of worship. What do I mean? I mean that we first believe - in the sense of responding in faith to the grace of God in Christ - before we believe in the sense of affirming the propositions of a creed or confession.
But that still isn’t quite right. We can’t believe in the first sense without believing something in the second sense - I need to assent to some truths about God before I can have faith in him. So what we have, in fact, is a recursive relationship between the two. We pray informed by doctrine which is in turn an outworking of our prayers.
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