But All of Life is Worship
 
Objection: Your book treats Sunday worship as something special and that is my fundamental problem with your approach. I believe that all of life is worship. We are called to worship God all week, not just on Sunday morning.
 
Answer: First, I understand and agree with the concern behind the slogan "all of life is worship." We don't just pray and read the Bible and practice the Christian faith on Sunday morning. The saying "all of life is worship" was coined to combat the segregation of worship and life. Confining your religious devotions to Sunday morning and then "living like hell" the rest of the week is double-minded disobedience. Jesus is Lord over all of life. If that's what the phrase means, I'm all for it.
 
Moreover, I would take this one step further. What we do in worship orients us to the rest of life outside of the sanctuary. We learn how to think and act in a distinctively Christian way by participating in the weekly rituals of worship. You can find more on this in my book.
 
But here's the rub: we don't do exactly the same thing during the week as we do on Sunday. Sunday is special. On the Lord's Day we are called together as the bride and body of Christ for corporate worship. You do things in the Sunday service that you don't do during the week.
 
And even if you do some of the same things on Monday through Saturday, they are not done continually. For example, you sing at church and you may sing during the week, too. But you don't do it all the time. You kneel and pray at church, which I trust you will do at home, too. But you don't do it all the time. At some point you must set down your hymnbook or get up off your knees and work.
 
The point is: work is not worship. All of life is worship only in a metaphorical (though real) sense. You can work with a worshipful attitude. That's fine. You can and should by faith work for the glory of God keeping his law! That's great, too. But working with that motivation, goal, and according to God's standard comes about as the result of proper Sunday corporate worship. Fixing a meal for the family is not corporate, body of Christ worship. Eating the Lord's Supper with your local body of Christ is. You learn how to eat gracefully at the Lord's Table. But eating dinner at your family table is different than eating at the Lord's Table with the church.
 
This is the point I was trying to make on p. 308 of the Lord's Service in my discussion of John 4:19-24
In that passage the Greek verb proskuneo (used 9 times in 6 verses in John 4:20-26) means “to bow down,” “to kneel,” or “prostrate oneself.” Even though my translation of this passage is awkward, I have tried to bring out the ritual dimensions of the conversation by consistently translating proskuneo as “bow down.”
 
  1. The [Samaritan] woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our Fathers bowed down [proskuneo] on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to bow down.”  Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will your people bow down to the Father. Your people bow down to what you do not know; we bow down to the one we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming and is now here, when true worshipers will bow down to the Father in Spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to bow down to Him. God is Spirit, and those who bow down to Him must bow down in Spirit and truth.” (Jn. 4:19-24)
 
One must remember the very concrete meaning of proskuneo in the ancient world. Doing “obeisance” means bending your body and placing yourself “under” another. When you proskuneo-ed before someone, you physically bowed down in their presence, even at their feet.
 
The English word “worship,” especially as it is used in modern times, is not a very helpful translation. One of the problems with our word “worship” is that it now refers to all sorts of activities, both physical and mental. In fact, a recent fad is to stress that all of life is “worship.” In some sense this is true, but only in a very loose sense. When used in this sense “worship” denotes a mental disposition. But this is not the sense in which this word proskuneo or “bowing down” is ordinarily used in the Scriptures.
 
If you want to say that all of life is “bowing down,” that is fine; but this can only be so in a very abstract or metaphorical way. If you are working hard on a carpentry job, for example, you may, indeed you should mentally give thanks and praise to God while you do so, but . . . you are not bowing down at that time with others who reverence the same God.
 
As an aside, let me make it clear that it is not my intention to belittle or diminish the importance of work and it's place in the kingdom of God. It's not that bowing down and/or kneeling is more important that hammering and typing. Both poles must be maintained. Nevertheless, what we do with the community in the special presence of God on Sunday is central to life in a way that hammering is not. My concern is with those who want to avoid the liturgical implications of corporate worship by slinging around the phrase "all of life is worship" without carefully thinking about what they are saying.
 
In John 4 the woman and Jesus are not talking about “worship” as a mental attitude or even as an act of private devotion. Jesus is addressing the question of where people should bow down to the Father. He is talking about the ritual act of bowing down or kneeling before God in order to honor him and express one's proper devotion. This woman asks in effect, “Where is the place, the location, where we should bow down to God?”
 
If we were to read on we would find that Jesus de-centralizes the place to bow down in the New Covenant, but for now simply attend to the kind of devotion in question. The activity in view here is what we might call “special” as opposed to “general” devotion. It is special in the sense that it happens at a known location and it involves the people of God in acts of ritual devotion before God. Furthermore, the bowing down in question has to do with corporate or public worship, not private worship.
 
Bowing down, then, is a kind of synecdoche for everything the people of God do when they gather together in corporate worship. It simply has to be this. Everyone, both Jews and Samaritans knew that one could pray and praise and petition God, one could even get down on one's knees anytime or place. Individual bowing down was never restricted to the Temple or Jerusalem or in Samaria, to Mt. Gerizim.
 
Please, pay careful attention to this point. The big point being made by Jesus in this passage cannot be that now in the New Testament individuals can bow down, pray to, or mentally worship God wherever they want. This has always been the case. The controversy here is about where the people of Samaria should gather to bow down in special corporate worship. All special, corporate worship in the Bible is external and bodily and involves the biblical ritual (among others) of kneeling or bowing down.
 
I will address the related issue of the specialness of corporate worship in the next post. I think that what people sometimes mean when they say "all of life is worship" is that corporate, Lord's Day worship is no more special than our everyday devotions during the week. That is not true.  Stay tuned.
Objections To Liturgical Worship #5
Monday, February 5, 2007