Ancient-Future Worship (Ancient-Future): Proclaiming and Enacting God's Narrative

by Robert E. Webber

The point of presenting the theology of the ancient church is to show that worship does this theology. It sings, tells, and enacts God’s story, not my story.

“the Lord made advance preparation for his own suffering, in the patriarchs and in the prophets and in the whole people.”10 Thus the mystery of the Lord, prefigured from of old through the vision of type, is today fulfilled and has found faith.

There are many variations of it, but On the Apostolic Tradition is believed by liturgical scholars to be the sourcebook for both Eastern and Western liturgies prayed in the third century and beyond.

In the ancient church, the early Fathers, drawing on the book of Revelation (the worship book of the ancient church), regarded the earthly church as ascending into the heavens in the eucharistic prayer to offer thanks to God together with the angels, the archangels, and the whole heavenly host.

lex orandi; lex credendi; est. Strictly translated this phrase means, “The rule of prayer is the rule of faith.”

If how we worship shapes what we believe, then it is imperative that we pay attention to how we worship. If worship is shaped by culture, it will result in a culturally conditioned faith. If worship is shaped by narcissism, it will result in a me-oriented consumer faith.

though God is the subject of worship, acting among the people, it is the people of God who remember God’s story, not as an audience, but as true participants in the very story that tells the truth about the world and all of human existence.

So what then is the worship that the people of God do? We remember God’s saving deeds and anticipate his vision, his final rule over all creation.

One crisis of Scripture is that we stand over the Bible and read God’s narrative from the outside instead of standing within the narrative and reading Scripture as an insider.

The original meaning of the biblical narrative became lost as conservatives rushed to verify the Bible as a historical and scientific document.

We have put ourselves over the Bible, making ourselves the interpreters of the Bible, looking in the Bible for what we want to see to satisfy the primary issue we take to the Bible, whether history, science, myth, experience, therapy, or principles for successful living and work.

I have also conversed with those who have read the Bible looking for answers to their needs, such as therapy, business principles, or some such motivating factor. These people tell me the search for these principles generated a lot of interest at first. But then they lost interest in reading the Bible once their particular curiosity had been met.

The apostolic way of reading and preaching Scripture is to see Jesus Christ as the subject of the entire Bible, the subject of all history.

On the road to Emmaus Jesus responds to the despair of Cleopas and his companion by pointing to the Jesus hermeneutic of Scripture.

A figural reading of Scripture will read the Scripture as a whole.

If a text means whatever a reader thinks it means, it has no real meaning.

Instead of using our hermeneutical tools to verify the Bible, interpret the Bible, or cull from it the principles of living, we need to step into the Bible, put ourselves within the Scripture, and allow it to interpret all of life including our daily living and world history.

If we are going to stand within and under the Bible as the ancients did, we must turn our backs on the Greek insistence on intellectualizing, categorizing, and controlling the Bible. We must begin to read the Bible holistically, relationally, and passionately.

Reading Scripture from inside the story of God revolutionizes it from a mere factual story (to be proven or demythologized) to a commentary of God working in the world to accomplish his own vision.

in the ancient world, the Bible was to be committed to memory, and poetry lent itself to memory.

Hebrews never set forth arguments for the existence of God. They don’t debate the nature of God or view God as an abstract object to be analyzed. Rather, God is always visualized as the “God who acts.”

Put yourself into the ancient mind-set that allows for narrative, mystery, and typology.

Read and preach passionately—knowing that the Word is not mere fact but the spring of divine life interpreting our daily life and all of history.

Jesus told his disciples that there is a way to remember him (the force of anamnēsis is “to make me [Christ] present”).

there has been a failure among Christians shaped by Enlightenment rationalism to see any supernatural divine presence at Table worship. Instead, Table worship is almost always conceived as something I do.

By not affirming a complete supernaturalism in which God is always and everywhere present in creation, evangelicals are in danger of the eventual breakdown of all supernaturalism and possible retooling of the faith to not only look like the culture but even embrace a new form of secularized Christianity.

Evangelicals, like my student quoted earlier, do believe we live in a supernatural world, but they limit God’s disclosure to an inspired Bible, the incarnation, death, and resurrection, and the conversion experience.

Far from being a mere memorial or empty symbol, the ancient fathers saw bread and wine as a disclosure of Jesus Christ, through whom we see the reconciliation of God and man, of heaven and earth, and of all things.

The key to eucharistic thought in the writings of Ignatius is the embodied reality of the incarnation.

Just as the incarnation assures us that Jesus Christ our Savior was incarnate by God’s word and took flesh and blood for our salvation, so also we can be certain that “the food consecrated by the word of prayer” is the food from which our flesh

The statement “is the body and blood of Jesus” should not be interpreted as transubstantiation—a view that was not affirmed until the thirteenth century by the Roman Catholic Church. Rather, it would be more appropriate to describe the ancient view of God’s presence at bread and wine this way: an incarnational and supernatural dimension is attributed to bread and wine. When bread and wine are received in faith, we are transformed.

The ancient fathers taught that symbols participate in the reality they re-present.

when we come to the Table with the eyes of faith, we experience the burning conviction that we live in a supernatural world.

for one who affirms an ancient-future worship, the presence of Christ at bread and wine is a mystery situated in the larger mystery of the entire story of God’s relationship to the world.

Look at bread and wine not as common bread and drink but as the image of the union of the human and the divine, “For the sake of our salvation” (Nicene Creed), now disclosed in the common elements of bread and wine that sustain our life in this world and the next.

The one true fulfilled and meaningful life is not the life of acquisition, power, fame, sexual freedom, consumerism, or materialism but the cruciform life.

Table worship nourishes this commitment because it discloses the meaning of life as the act of giving up self in order to do the will of God for others.

Memory is not a mere recall, like we would remember a friend or a significant event in our life, but a remembrance that unfolds the whole meaning of life and of the cosmos.

Bread and wine disclose the union we have with Jesus, which is not a mere standing but a true and real participation lived out in this life as we become the story of God in this world individually in all our ways and corporately as the people of God.

The first and, I believe, most fundamental reason why worship is not seen as prayer is the failure to grasp that corporate prayer arises from the story of God.

second reason why worship is not seen as the prayer of God’s people for the world is because worship has been turned into a program.

the nature of worship has shifted from corporate prayer to platform presentational performance. Worship, instead of being a rehearsal of God’s saving actions in the world and for the world, is exchanged for making people feel comfortable, happy, and affirmed.

Contemplation does not proceed out of an inner language that we create in the depths of our own person, as if we have the capacity to form and establish our own personal contemplation detached from the prayer of the church.

I don’t think an ancient-future church or ancient-future worship is the next trend or that “cool” church over there. Ancient-future worship is not a gimmick or show or the latest adventure.

So if you want a definition of ancient-future worship, it is this: the common tradition of the church’s worship in Word, Table, and song, practiced faithfully and communicated clearly in every context of the world.

So if you want to do ancient-future worship, learn God’s story and do it in Word and Table and use hymns and songs for responses not only from the great treasury of the church through the centuries but also from music that is current.

creation–incarnation– re-creation.

creation–sin–redemption,

The exclusive preoccupation with the satisfaction theory of the cross has failed to adequately see the unity that exists between creation, the incarnation, and ultimately the restoration of all God’s creation. It fosters instead an individualistic form of Christianity.

In death Jesus defeats death. In his resurrection he begins a new act of creation that will ultimately be fulfilled in his second coming. In the meantime he ascended to the Father, where he now continually intercedes on behalf of the world and rules until all his enemies are under his feet.