Worship, Revised and Expanded Edition: Reformed according to Scripture

by Hughes Oliphant Old

One can surely object that when the lectio continua is preached so slowly, one of the advantages of this approach to preaching is lost. One does not get the whole message of a particular biblical writer. This approach did nevertheless produce a remarkable faithfulness to Scripture, and in the pulpit of Thomas Manton it made for great preaching.

With the coming of eighteenth-century Pietism, the preaching of a considerable number of Protestant pastors took a very different direction. The Pietists continued to develop the Puritan concern for inward piety, but they developed it to the point where they began to lose interest in the text of Scripture in itself. One sometimes gets the impression that they were interested in Scripture primarily because it produced religious experience. This was particularly the case with German Pietism. At the beginning of the Pietist movement Philipp Spener (1635–1705) had advised the preacher not to waste too much time talking about the text of his sermon, but to move as quickly as possible to the discussion of religious experience.

What is abundantly clear at this point is that the theological foundation of prayer is the doctrine of the covenant.

The liturgy has these four parts: (1) song of lamentation in which the people cry to the Lord, (2) prayer of confession and supplication for mercy, (3) the divine oracle of forgiveness and assurance of redemption, and (4) the hymn of thanksgiving. This four-part prayer liturgy, as well as individual parts of it, we discover in a good number of the prayers of the book of Psalms.

At that time, the Amida was a form of prayer rather than a formula. The exact text was not set; however, the arrangement and themes of each of the eighteen parts of the prayer were clearly established. When a well-known rabbi or a particularly venerated holy man led the prayer, it was expected, however, that he would extemporize on the various themes. The prayer began with three benedictions of praise and thanksgiving. In the center of the prayer were six supplications or petitions of a more personal nature, followed by six intercessions for the well-being of the nation of Israel. The final three benedictions concluded the prayer with praise and thanksgiving and introduced the giving of the Aaronic benediction.

Jesus, in criticizing the Jewish practice of prayer, very specifically has in mind the way some of his fellow Jews prayed the Amida, for we read, “for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners” (Matt. 6:5). Amida means “standing,” that is, it is the prayer that is said standing. The point of Jesus’ criticism is that the truly devout should not make a show of their praying; aside from that, Jesus probably had in mind that the prayers which were said would not differ so very much from the traditional Amida. For the Amida itself, as a form of prayer, there is no criticism. Jesus will add to the content, as we shall see, but the basic form will pass into the prayer of the church. The practice of standing for prayer would be maintained in the church for many centuries.

In light of the concern of Jesus that the ministry of intercession reach out beyond the confines of Israel, the instructions of Paul to Timothy take on much greater clatity. Paul instructs Timothy to see that the prayers of the church include prayers for all peoples, for kings, even for the Gentile rulers of the world. Paul underlines this by stressing that God’s will is for the salvation of all peoples and that therefore we should pray to this end. The Amida never included prayers of this scope, and so Paul instucts Timothy in this way, lest the prayers of the church follow too closely the prayers of the synagogue.

From the earliest Strasbourg Psalters there is evidence that the evangelical pastors wanted to allow for the developing of the gift of some sort of free or extemporaneous prayer. At the same time they recognized that prayer forms were needed as well. What developed was that the two core prayers were used pretty much as they appeared in the printed text of the Psalter, but then there were other prayers in the service that were supposed to be formulated by the minister.

From Romans 8 they learned that prayer was a sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in their hearts. Learning to pray and growing in holiness went together.

While the Puritan pastor did not read his prayers from a prayer book or even write out his prayers beforehand and then read them at worship, he prepared them meditating on the subjects that needed to be treated for several days beforehand. This,

By the beginning of the eighteenth century Pietism began to shape the worship of Protestantism. Pietism had begun to appear in French Catholicism during the previous century as a reaction against the domination of religious life by the court of Louis XIV. Such figures as Blaise Pascal (1623–62) and Madame Guyon (1648–1717) emphasized the private dimensions of religious experience over against a secularized state religion. By the end of the century the movement began to appear in Germany under the leadership of Philipp Spener (1635–1705) and August Hermann Francke (1663–1727). Here Pietism took on a much more Protestant flavor. Characteristic of German Pietism was the development of small prayer groups. Not wanting to break with the official state church, the German Pietists developed little fellowships within each local church that met at people’s homes on Sunday afternoons or in the evening. These people shared their personal religious experiences, held informal Bible studies, sang hymns, and prayed about each other’s needs. This ecclesiola in ecclesia, or church within the church, was not supposed to conflict with the official church, but in fact it tended to become the center of religious life in such a way that the official Sunday morning celebration of worship in the established church was apt to be regarded as a dry formality. At the small-group prayer meetings the warmth of Christian fellowship was found, and the prayers of formal, public worship were looked upon as...

The prayers of the Pietist fellowship meetings were popular, intense, and spontaneous. Emphasizing Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, every member of the fellowship was encouraged to voice his or her own prayer concerns. The Puritan idea of conceived prayer was replaced by an emphasis on spontaneous prayer. It was the spontaneous prayer of the heart that was clearly sincere. Those who were really filled with the Holy Spirit did not have to prepare prayers. Unlike the Puritans, the Pietists saw no need for studying the Scriptures to learn what they were to pray about or to seek guidance in developing prayer disciplines. A formal ministry of intercession drawn from the teachings of Scripture interested them no more than reading the set prayers of the official liturgy. The Puritan insight that prayer was part of the prophetic dimension of the gospel ministry faded before the concern that every member of the fellowship should have a chance to participate. Psalm prayer tended to lose its place in Protestant worship, and with it the sense of awe and majesty of the experience. But if Pietism lost some of these important aspects of prayer, it did bring an intimacy and a fervor that democratized the prayer life of Protestantism.

There is quite a difference between regarding the prayer of thanksgiving at Communion as an appropriation of Christ’s atoning sacrifice on the cross for our salvation and regarding that thanksgiving as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sin. There is no evidence that the early church confounded the two in such a way that they regarded the Communion as a repetition of Christ’s sacrifice. Rather, the New Testament, in the clearest possible terms, speaks of Christ’s death on the cross as the unique sacrifice, which never needed to be repeated and which once and for all put away sin (Heb. 10:12–14).

Both John Chrysostom in the East and a bit later Augustine in the West began to admonish their congregations against the growing practice of watching the liturgy but not taking part in the holy meal. In vain they exhorted.

For the Reformers of classical Protestantism—Martin Luther (1483–1546), Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531), Martin Bucer (1491–1551), and John Calvin (1509–64)—there was agreement about the most pressing liturgical reforms needed in the celebration of the Communion service. The first thing was to translate the Communion prayers into the language of the people and for the celebrant to speak them in a loud and distinct voice. The second was to remove from the liturgy the sacrificial elements both in regard to the offertory prayers that were said when the bread and the wine were brought to the table and those prayers in the canon of the Mass in which the consecrated bread and wine were offered to God as a sacrifice. Third, the Reformers were agreed that when Communion was celebrated, all the faithful had to both eat the bread and drink the cup. It was not sufficient for the priest alone to commune, nor was it enough for the congregation to receive only the bread. No more was the Communion to be a show for worshipers who simply watched but did not participate. The first stage of the liturgical reform, then, was to translate the text, remove the prayers of sacrifice, and to emphasize the actual communing of the faithful.

Calvin’s writings on eucharistic theology always gave ample attention to this subject. He understood quite well how often in the Scriptures the sharing of a meal was the way an agreement was sealed. As Calvin understood it, the proclamation of the covenant promises at the celebration of Communion was an essential element of the service. Calvin reminds us of the teaching of Augustine that the sacraments are the visible words of God. The celebration should always include teaching, so that what is seen might be understood. It was important that the covenant promises be understood, because in the sharing of the bread and the cup the covenant promises were sealed. Calvin tells us that our Lord clearly had this in mind when he said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood” (1 Cor. 11:25). It is clear from this, Calvin tells us, that the signs of bread and wine are the signs of the covenant he has made with us.3 For Calvin, sharing in the Communion seals to us the promises proclaimed in the preaching of the Word.

Another feature of Vermigli’s sacramental theology is his profound appreciation of the biblical theology of thanksgiving. Vermigli liked to use the word eucharist in referring to the sacrament, because that word emphasized that the Lord’s Supper is a feast of praise and thanksgiving. As Vermigli understood it, one of the cardinal actions of the liturgy is the eucharistic prayer, in which the church gives thanks in joyful profusion for God’s mighty acts of creation and redemption. Vermigli, like the other Reformers, very much opposed making the sacrament into a sacrifice. To be sure, the sacrament is a memorial and a thanksgiving for Christ’s sacrifice. To be sure, Christians, having received the benefits of Christ’s sacrifice, owe to God the sacrifice of thanksgiving and the offering of their lives to his service, but it is by Christ’s sacrifice alone that our salvation has been won. Vermigli distinguished carefully between a propitiatory sacrifice that saves us from our sins and a eucharistic sacrifice that gives thanks to God for the salvation God has already granted us.

For Knox, as for the English Puritans, an important part of the sign was the actual breaking of the bread, the pouring out of the wine, and actually sitting about the table. In fact Scottish churches were often built in such a way that the congregation sat around three sides of the table. When the congregation had received the bread and wine, there was a prayer of thanksgiving for the sacrament in which the worshipers dedicated themselves to live in praise to God and love toward their neighbors. This was followed by singing a psalm of thanksgiving. Psalm 103 is specifically indicated. In the course of Scottish liturgical history the use of this psalm became almost invariable. The great emphasis Knox put on the eucharistic aspects of the service is clear. Knox was very conscious that the Gospels tell us that when Jesus took the bread and wine, he gave thanks.

Just as every Lord’s Day was understood as an anticipation of the eternal rest, so the Lord’s Supper was understood as a foretaste of the feast envisioned in the book of Revelation.

The service of daily prayer consisted of three parts: the repetition of a numbet of psalms, the saying of the Shema with its introductory and concluding prayers, and the Prayer of the Eighteen Benedictions. It is quite certain that Jesus and the apostles maintained this prayer discipline and that in the earliest Christian church daily prayer was maintained much as it was in the synagogue. In fact, when the apostle Paul tells us to pray continually or to pray without ceasing, he surely has in mind that we are to maintain the daily discipline of morning and evening prayer (Rom. 12:12; 1 Thess. 5:17; 1 Tim. 5:5).

Richard Baxter (1615–91) in his Christian Directory wrote at considerable length on how daily morning and evening prayer was to be conducted by the father of each family. Baxter insists that daily family prayer is one of the divinely ordained functions of the family. A family, Baxter tells us, is a little church. Family prayer should include the following things: the singing of one or more psalms, the reading of a chapter of Scripture, and a full and comprehensive prayer by the head of the house.

For classical Reformed spirituality, morning and evening family prayer was one of the foundations of piety. It was at the heart of the day-to-day exercising of Christian faith. This made sense to those for whom Covenant theology was so formative. The unity of the family was a significant feature of Covenant theology. With the coming of Pietism, daily family prayer was unfortunately replaced with private devotions. Pietism was very individualistic, and many of this persuasion had a hard time understanding why children should be baptized. There was no sacred unity in the family. Each single human being stood before God alone. With the demise of Pietism, private devotions began to develop atrophy. They finally became not much more than “five minutes a day.” Today, as we seek to recover a Reformed spirituality, we need to reach behind Pietism and recover the older classical Protestant discipline of daily morning and evening prayer.

So true. Christian life is more community driven than individual drive. Common prayer is thus highly needed

One often explains the name Reformed by the motto “reformed and always reforming.” That motto can be understood in more than one way. It can point to the fact that “Reformed” must always mean reformed according to Scripture. At best this motto points to the fact that our obedience cannot become a static matter that was worked out in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and never needs to be reconsidered; it means that our church doctrine and practice must always be set against the measure of Scripture. “Reformed and always reforming” can be understood in another way, as a sort of theological Trotskyism. It can mean submitting the worship of the church to perpetual revolution. Romanticism, we remember, had a tendency to glorify revolution. To call for perpetual revolution in liturgical matters, however, is to lose sight of the value of having a liturgy.

There are good reasons for having an established liturgy, and these reasons have often been recounted. In the first place, liturgical forms are a good means of teaching the essentials of the Christian faith. When familiar liturgical forms and texts are used again and again, it gives us the opportunity to meditate on them and to penetrate their meaning more deeply. When there are well-established procedures with which everyone is familiar, it makes it easier to concentrate on the content rather than the outward form. Any athlete understands the importance of mastering form. Such simple things as breathing must be done correctly. It takes a long time to get some of these simple techniques down, but this is essential so that eventually they can be done spontaneously, without effort, without thinking about them. The concentration must be on other things. Forms are a means to an end; if they are constantly changing, they obscure the end rather than lead to it.

Thomas Manton’s sermons on the epistle of James are to this day the most practical sort of instruction on the Christian life. Matthew Henry’s commentaries are as popular today as they were when they were first written.

Reformed theology has always made a very clear distinction between Scripture and tradition. Scripture has authority, and tradition has the value of witnessing to that authority.

The Reformers put new emphasis on the Communion itself, that is, on the sharing of the bread and wine by the whole church. They tried to make their celebration look like a real meal. They replaced altars with tables and used bread that looked like real bread. In many places they actually sat at the table. The Reformers recovered a covenantal understanding of the Lord’s Supper, and here is one of their most valuable contributions.