Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > Institutes of the Christian Religion (text only) Revised edition by J. Calvin,H. Beveridge > Status Update

(1) The reason why we should seek to know God truly and accurately is always and only so that we may worship Him rightly. Frigid speculation has no place when it comes to what is holy. Even ancient pagans, the better of them at least, recognized this truth, "Religion is vitiated and perverted whenever false opinions are introduced into it." And our God is a jealous God, Who will be a stern avenger if He is misrepresented or confounded with any false god. Superstition then seeks to cloak these betrayals, avoiding "the appearance of abandoning the supreme God." "It gives Him the highest place, but surrounds Him with a tribe of minor deities (like saints), among whom it portions out His peculiar offices."

Here again (2) we must consider the propriety of the douleia/latria distinction with which the papists insist they give all worship (latria) to God while only serving (douleia) others. "But no man doubts that to serve is something higher then to worship. For it were often a hard thing to serve him whom you would not refuse to reverence. It is, therefore, an unjust division to assign the greater to the saints and leave the less to God."

Let us examine this even further, (3) Paul writes to the Galatians that, before they came to the true knowledge of God they "did service (douleia) unto them which by nature are no gods" (Gal 4:8). "Because he does not say latria, was their superstition excusable?" Look at the examples of John before the angel (Rev 19:10; 22:8-9) or Cornelius before Peter (Acts 10:25), both men had made enough progress in piety by this point to confine worship to God alone, yet their prostrations both received the rebuke of sacrilege, "I am but a fellow creature! Worship God!"

My thoughts: Christianity today is infected with a gnostic dualism that disconnects the spiritual from the material, the soul from the body. We Reformed-types fully buy the same lie the Catholics do, but we take it in the other direction. While both wrongly believe true worship to be spiritually disconnected from physical posture, Catholics think that gives them license to prostrate themselves before icons while we think that gives us permission to stand rigidly with our hands in our pockets barely singing or outwardly participating in the Lord's Day service.

Despite what cultural norms will explicitly or implicitly tell you in conservative circles, it really does matter what you do with your body during worship. We should all physically kneel as a congregation to ready ourselves to enter into the presence of the Lord before the Call to Worship and then kneel again to humbly confess our sins before the Absolution. We should raise our hands together as we loudly sing the Doxology and the Gloria Patri or recite the Lord's Prayer. Finally, we should open our hands before us to receive the Benediction.

We are each created a psychosomatic union, not a frigid soul awaiting release from this mortal coil, and therefore, we need to actively involve all of ourselves, soul and body, in worshiping our Triune God. This reflects the truth of our salvation and the very nature of redemption, which is spiritual, material, and social in its cosmic scope (i.e., making atonement between God and man, reversing the Edenic curse so that blessings may flow instead, and healing the Babelic divide).

The Charismatic churches are our betters here in connecting the body with the heart. Yet, often Scripturally ungrounded, they tend to fly off into wanton excess that eschews the proper order and decorum appropriate for standing in the presence of God (1 Cor 14:33).