The dynamics of worship

Abstract

Mediaeval liturgies embodied the understanding that the offering of worship became united with Christ’s perfect offering to the Father and was therefore deemed to be as acceptable to God as though it had been offered by Christ himself. It was an offering of worship that embraced the arts. Their beauty and the sense of transcendence that they created revealed the beauty and transcendence of the divine. This understanding of worship changed dramatically with the reformers of the mid-sixteenth century. They insisted that the incorporation of any human offering into Christ’s perfect and once-only offering illegitimately compromised the purpose and effect of his sacrificial death. Instead, the proper offering consisted of a thankful remembrance of Christ’s only perfect and acceptable offering. Moreover, this offering needed to be an offering, not of the body, being inherently corrupt, but of the spirit. Since there was now no prospect of incorporation with the divine, any idea of worship creating a sense of transcendence or of experiencing heaven on earth was futile. So there developed an intense opposition to any works of art whose purpose was to invest worship with the means of facilitating such a union of the human and the divine. These works were now dismissed as idolatrous and an impediment to true worship. From the early seventeenth century this position, so fervently embraced by the reformers, began to be significantly revised and developed, even allowing for a significant rehabilitation of the pre-reformed understanding.