The Incomprehensibility of God and Worship

One day I was having a kindly conversation with an elderly church lady. This particular woman went to a rather large suburban church which placed on emphasis on evangelism and on attracting a large number of people to the church. Our conversation turned to worship; she said she said her church decided to opt for a more informal worship style with praise songs because it made worship easier for those who were new to the church. "People who come in off the street simply don't understand the old hymns that churches are used to singing," she said. "They have words and ideas that are difficult for new Christians or non-Christians to understand, and their tone is so serious." Her sentiment is shared by many American Christians. Many Evangelicals, especially those who were raised according to the ethos of mass evangelism (which has become very popular since the 1950s), express a desire to be "seeker sensitive." Thus worship is dumbed down (I have honestly heard proponents of this view express it just like this) so that worship is "easier" for non or new Christians. Hence praise songs are substituted for theologically rich hymns (whether old or new), the sermon is exchanged for a message (which is made to be more "practical"), and the sanctuary is traded for a auditorium.

While the motivations of seeker-sensitive churches may be sincere, and their efforts on behalf of nonbelievers laudable, their understanding of what underpins worship is inherently flawed. The chief end of worship is never man but God. How we shape our worship services is dictated primarily by our understanding of who God is and how He wishes to be worshiped. Dialectically, how we worship God influences how we understand Him. Thus worship begins and ends with God. The desires of man concerning worship must never be allowed to trump those of God. If our worship is not guided by and aimed at the majestic and incomprehensible essence of God, it is not God we worship at all.

When considering who God is, we must always start with His incomprehensibility. God is infinitely more than we can ever grasp. We say that God is beautiful, and by seeing His beauty reflected in His creation we understand what God's attribute of beauty must be, but in all of our reflections on the beauty of nature we never fully comprehend God's beauty exhaustively. Beauty, as we understand it is only a glimpse of who God is. This is because God is an infinite being. Indeed, the concept of numerical infinity may be a useful analogy. No person (since we are all finite) at possibly grasp the idea of infinity. No doubt when we think of infinity we form analogies in our head; we may, for instance, think of double-arrowed line endlessly extending in both directions, such as we learned in geometry. Or we may think of an infinite set: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5…]. But no picture that we form in our head, though helpful and true, fully comprehends infinity. So it is with God. Another way of expressing this is by saying that God is transcendent and He is holy. He is perfection.

Our worship must reflect this. Worship, while using elements of the created world, such as sound waves, paper and ink, bread, and wine must point beyond those things. Worship lifts our minds to God and induces us to worship Him in spirit and in truth. Many people are under the impression that the elements of worship are neutral, and that it does not matter much how we worship God so long as we are sincere. This is an unfortunate misunderstanding. One of the  Greek philosopher who knew better famously said that if children could only be instructed in two courses, they should be gymnastics and music. He understood that music can have a profound affect on people. Some music can bring people to tears, while other music can drive people at a rock concert into a frenzy. In other words, music is formative. It determines the affective and pre-intellectual realm of dispositions, desires, and attitudes. The same is true of other forms of art and media of communication; everything communicates something to us, even if it does so subconsciously for the most part. Thus some forms of worship will communicate the idea of the majesty and transcendence of God and form within us a disposition of reverence towards God's transcendence and majesty. Other forms will not. It is important to remember here that those outside of the church do not love God. They come to church in order to learn to love God. Hence, it follows that since the heart of a non-Christian is set against God and the point of worship is to confront the non-Christian with the reality of the glory of the  God he is fleeing from, the non-Christian should not be the one influencing the form of worship. This is giving the fox the key to the hen house, so to speak.

True worship then is worship that confronts us with the reality of God's transcendence and holiness as communicated through various different elements. A good (yet controversial!) case study is music. It should go without saying that certain kinds music produce certain kind of effects within us. The music of Romanticist composers (e.g. Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner) produce an "epic" feeling within us. This is why this kind of music is often played during battle scenes or other climatic moments in movies and operas (for instance, think of how many movies you have watched where Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyrie s" is play during a dramatic scene ). Similarly, certain kinds of music convey a sense of transcendence, such as the Classical music of Bach or Mozart. This is why I tend to favor traditional hymns in worship; I believe that they convey the holiness of God more effectively than other forms (though I should stress "traditional" hymnody is not the only kind of music that communicates God's holiness; I do not want to enter into the debate between praise choruses and traditional hymns here). Likewise, the words in our music ought to do the incomprehensible majesty of God justice. Language that is poetic, thoughtful, and rich does this better than language that is shallow, relatively thoughtless, and cliché-ridden. If even our best language concerning God fails to due God's majesty justice, how much less does that which is poor and generally thoughtless? God's revelation of himself to us is a great gift and we must possess it with care. We must truthfully and faithfully represent the majesty of God.