Sacred Games: A History of Christian Worship

by Bernhard Lang

When contemporary Christians worship―be they Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or Pentecostal―they engage in a variety of ritual acts whose diversity and complexity may at first puzzle the observer. A closer look reveals that worship incorporates a limited number of major components that when repeated form the backbone of the ceremonies Christians enact when they meet on Sundays. This book focuses on six essential ritual praise, prayer, sermon, sacrifice, sacrament, and spiritual ecstasy.

Bernhard Lang argues that the meaning of Christian ritual is embodied in these six elementary forms, all of which have their roots in ancient, pre-Christian ritual life. Each has its own constituents, dynamics, meaning, and distinct story. Accordingly, the book is divided into six interpretative sections that, using sources in French, German, and English and contrasting past experience with the present, European with American, and Catholic with Protestant, explain the meaning of each. Lang uncovers their ancient biblical roots and follows their course through history with special emphasis on biblical, historic, and contemporary forms.

This is a pioneering book and a major the first full-scale history and interpretation of a collective spiritual act fraught with meaning. Well illustrated, written in a readable style, and geared to the general reader as well as to students and scholars, it should become an indispensable addition to the broader study of Christianity.

542 pages, Hardcover

First published June 6, 1997

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 1 out of 5]

An idiosyncratic and very individualistic interpretation of the communal act of Christian worship. The title, Sacred Games: A History of Christian Worship, leads you to expect something playful and thoughtful, but the idea of worship as a game is hardly maintained throughtout the text and while scholarly, the author's thinking seems narrow and confined. Enamored of the idea of Jesus as Magician (he gives some warning of this in the introduction, but it just overwhelms all his discussion of the NT text - there are quite a few other viewpoints out there), Lang spends pages discussing a Jesus entirely foreign to the historical worship of the church. His handling of the Biblical text is arrogantly confident and dismissive in general, sure of both its difficulty and its distance from the history it purports to describe. I am interested in historical antecedants to Christian worship, but am not convinced Lang has found all that he has claimed. Moving to church history his selections are interesting, but not complete or close to representative. As a result, to call this a history of Christian worship is ludicrous (he gets at petitionary prayer via Aquinas, Schleiermacher, and a process theologian I have never heard of).

As to structure, the book is divided into six games: praise, prayer, sermon, sacrifice, sacrament and spiritual ecstasy. Praise and sermon had interesting organization and detail, prayer and sacrament were horrible travesties of magic, while spiritual ecstasy jumped from Paul to Pentecostalism without much stopping in between. Overall, glad this book has not been well received and has not found its way into seminary curriculum or popular reading. It is a horrible mess that offers little to one looking to understand and/or worship with the church.