The Liturgy Trap Quotes

“If we look at Buddhism and other pantheistic religions, we see that they celebrate sterility, fasting, celibacy, virginity, and other anorexic, world-rejecting practices. The same was true of the religions of the Mediterranean at the time Christianity was born. It is not surprising that such world-rejecting counterfeit spiritualities infected the Church. The Reformation wisely and rightly returned to the world-affirming, earthy, joyous, musical-instrument-worship, wine-drinking, cigar-smoking, pro-marital worldview of the Hebrew Scriptures. The Reformation was profoundly correct; Rome and Orthodoxy are profoundly wrong. (I mentioned fasting. In the Bible, the goal of fasting is to break the fast when the Bridegroom arrives, just as the purpose of virginity is to get rid of it with the bridegroom. In anorexic religions, fasting and virginity are prized statically for their own sakes.)”
― James B. Jordan, The Liturgy Trap: The Bible Versus Mere Tradition in Worship

“Biblical religion teaches that God is a person, and that our relationship with Him is personal. He speaks and we hear, mouth to ear. What He says we are to believe and do. This is very practical and mundane in a sense. Philosophy, by way of contrast, regards God as something to contemplate, discuss, and meditate on. Philosophy, thus, always moves away from words into mystical experience, away from laws and commands into feelings.”
― James B. Jordan, The Liturgy Trap: The Bible Versus Mere Tradition in Worship

“when God says to do or not do some physical thing with our bodies, it is important that we pay heed because this is one of His ways of dealing with us in a total fashion. It shows a very superficial understanding of human existence to say, “Well, what matters is my heart attitude, not the posture of my body.”
― James B. Jordan, The Liturgy Trap: The Bible Versus Mere Tradition in Worship

“I know that the Reformers spoke of the sacraments as “visible words,” but this was an unfortunate choice of words. The Lord’s Supper is not a visible word but an edible one. Baptism is not a visible word but a tangible one. The only “visible words” are human beings, the images of God made after the likeness of the Word of God Himself. In other words, the only thing to look at in worship is other people.”
― James B. Jordan, The Liturgy Trap: The Bible Versus Mere Tradition in Worship