From BSA here. Below is a thread with great insight from Charles Bledsoe, Mike Waddell, and others. Scroll down to Michael L Waddell, Apr 23 for a very interesting way of understanding worship that concludes that worship is saying thank you when you see a beautiful sunrise, sunset, or anything made by Yahweh God.
What’s Your Takeaway from the Bible About Why We Owe God Worship? Did the God of the Bible Simply Create Us for Nothing More than to Be Worshippers in “His” Cosmic Temple? Charles Bledsoe, Apr 22
In your reading what’s the word of the Bible on the question of why we should worship God? Is the Bible’s view, in the language of philosophy, deontological; the view that it’s simply our inherent, innate duty to worship an almighty being who created us? Is that all the sense that the Bible makes of our obligation to worship Yahweh? Or, is the Bible’s view consequentialist; the view that God wants us to practice worship for our own good; that the point of worship is the benefit we get out of being in right relationship with God?
Well, according to Walton’s reading of Genesis 1, the cosmic temple cosmogony that he finds there, Creation was created to be God’s metagalactic temple and abode; and human beings to be caretakers of, and worshippers in it. Worship is therefore our divinely intended and inherent raison d’etre. It’s as simple as that.
And of course throughout the scriptures a picture is painted of an authoritarian God who requires recognition of, and submission to his authority and sovereignty, and worship as a ritual form of demonstrating such recognition and respect. The biblical God seems to be largely modeled after ancient Near Eastern potentates who viewed themselves as entitled to, and who demanded absolute obeisance and obedience. This authoritarianism seem to profoundly inform the mentality of the Bible’s authors regarding worship. To such an extent that God often comes off as a worship and glorification hog; and a rather dangerous and lethal fellow when his need for worship isn’t being catered to, or other deities are being worshipped instead of him. Recall all of the bits in the Bible where people are punished and killed for not being faithful to “His” worship.
And although I usually avoid gendered pronouns for the divine, in this case they’re appropriate because, in addition to, and more fundamentally than the model of ancient Near Eastern rulers, this aspect of the Bible’s God arguably reflects patriarchy, and a male dominator culture (to use Riane Eisler’s language). The idea that worship is God’s natural due, and that “He’s” exceedingly keen on receiving it strikes me as a projection of the mindset of male dominators about their own lordly dignity and authority in a patriarchal society.
In the main then, the explanation of why we should worship God that the Bible seems to offer is that God is superior and powerful, and created us to be his fawning servants, and so it’s simply the natural order of things that we bow down before God, and give “Him” unceasing praise and homage.
As you might have gathered by now from my tone, none of this is to my liking. I take a very different view on the meaning of worship. From my relational theological perspective worship ideally functions to put us in mind of God’s existential importance; of our existential dependence (as Schleiermacher would say) upon, or, better, our existential interdependence with God. It nurtures a consciousness of, and a relationship based on appreciation of this interdependence. It recognizes that God’s being is relational, not wholly transcendent; and that our being is not wholly autonomous; that the human-God relation is a two-way street, that our being is for God and God’s being is for us. The point of worship then is not submission, but rather receptivity to God; not obedience to God’s authority, but rather alignment with God’s vision of human well-being and flourishing, of our best interests and possibilities.
Worship then is both for our benefit, and for God’s. And in this understanding of it, the best way of performing worship is not the performance of rituals, but rather to appreciate and be receptive to God’s benevolence; to follow God’s vision of human flourishing; and to realize the highest level of human well-being. This is because in the panentheistic view of God that it involves we’re not merely externally, but internally related to God, and so the output of our lives is input to God, contributes to God’s richness of experience; and the more flourishing we realize the more we contribute to, and thereby give care to God.
This concept of worship, what some theologians, such as Charles Harstshorne, have termed contributionism, is the one I subscribe to. But what do you think, fellow BSAers, is it at all biblical? Is there any validation for it in Scripture? Your feedback is very much welcome. Or do you have other thoughts about what the Bible says the meaning of worship is? I’m very interested in hearing them.
- “He has told you, O man, what is good;
And what does the LORD require of you
But to do justice, to love kindness,
And to walk humbly with your God?” – Micah 6:8 - Love your neighbor as yourself
- Some people just simply do not have the luxury of worshipping God
I think the first two are forms of worship and the third is just my own thought. I’m not sure this is what you were looking for and with me being so far behind everyone on this ‘path’ …I hesitate to post but I’ll never get better at this unless I start somewhere…lol
Pamela Flynn You make a very profound point. The old cliché is that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery; well, imitation of God’s loving nature is, in my view, the sincerest, or highest form of worship. However, embodying divine love, compassion, and forgiveness is indeed for most of us a luxury. Most of us haven’t lost a loved one to a murderer. Most of us haven’t been turned into a quadriplegic by a drunk driver. Most of us haven’t been sexually abused children. Most of us aren’t a survivor of anything like the Holocaust. And so it doesn’t take anything extraordinary for us to be loving and forgiving; we’re fortunate to have a relatively easy roe to hoe in attuning ourselves to God’s agape. Our ability to remain in that state of attunement is never challenged by an experience of real evil.
Some people do in fact successfully meet that challenge. I’m thinking of mothers of murder victims I’ve seen in the news over the years who’ve expressed forgiveness for the individuals who’ve taken their children from them. But that’s more than most of us are capable of. It’s probably, almost certainly, more than I would be capable of. And so I would argue that a person of faith should cultivate a devotional life that centers on honoring God by channeling divine love to the best of one’s ability, but with a humble consciousness of one’s own good fortune in not being tested and having the luxury of practicing that form of worship; and also with a mindfulness of not having walked in the shoes of victims of evil and therefore not being, as it were, qualified by life experience to stand in judgment of them if they fall short of emulating God’s unconditional love.
Thank you for stimulating these thoughts. And my apologies if I’ve gone off on a tangent that has nothing to do with the point you were trying to make.
Charles Bledsoe I think you expressed my point perfectly!!!….Thank you for sharing your thoughts and knowledge with me…I’m learning so much and I agree with so many of the concepts you subscribe to…all which fascinates me…!
Here’s how I look at it. And buckle up, because this will take some philosophical prep-work… but I think it’s worth it. I’ll try to be succinct.
Our brains amalgamate concepts; that’s how they work. When we talk about love or evil or Christmas or the housing shortage or any other concept, we aren’t referring to any specific thing in a specific location made of actual atoms. What are our brains doing when we say things like “Christmas is my favorite holiday”? Our brains immediately and effortlessly take all the different experiences of Christmases that we know of or expect to experience or just imagine, and we amalgamate that into the idea of “Christmas” that we can compare to other amalgamations of holidays. This is just how our brains work. (It’s the only way we know how to think.) I could talk about Plato and Kant and Hume, but you get the picture. “Selfishness” exists, not because it’s made of atoms, but because our brains construct an amalgamation of all interactions in the world that we label as selfish. Same with peace and love and the housing shortage. I’m not saying these things don’t exist; they do. But they exist as amalgamations, or mental structures, or social constructs, and are not somewhere out there in the world.
Okay, are you with me so far? If so, here’s the next step. I believe in consciousness. (How could I not?) I know as much as I know anything that I am a being having subjective experiences. But I also don’t understand consciousness, and I see it as miraculous. This collection of fats and proteins and water in my skull somehow create a subjective experience. If anyone says they understand that, they’re lying. So lets amalgamate all consciousness in the universe. And let’s specify that we’re strictly talking about being aware, separated from all judgment, which implies deep acceptance. Our judgments happen so immediately and seem so important that it’s hard to think of consciousness without them, but let’s try. Imagine any conscious being seeing and understanding and accepting another conscious being, without judgment, without wanting anything from them. I call that love, and I believe that on a deep level, the amalgamation of pure consciousness (when focused on another conscious entity) is identical to the amalgamation of all love. I call it God. And look what follows! God is love. God created the universe, not by doing anything, but by providing the miracle that any being could be conscious of the universe. (Before, it was formless and void.) God calls us to “love your neighbor as yourself”, simply because that’s what God is: the consciousness in another that you recognize as the same consciousness in yourself. “The god in me recognizes the god in you.” That’s how I understand God, and it’s as real as anything else that matters in this world. (I could go on, believe me.)
Okay, but what does this have to with our obligation to worship God? Okay, look, there’s no doubt that many of the Biblical authors saw this through the model of a powerful king that must be flattered lest he withdraw his protection, and that’s, well, rather diminished and sad. But there’s a better way to look at it. What if you amalgamate everything that’s worthy of worship, everything awe-inspiring or subjectively miraculous, every time you stop along a hike or stare up at the start and say “Oh my god, the majesty!” Is that the same as the amalgamation of all consciousness (God)? I honestly don’t know, but if not, there’s a lot of overlap. And if that’s the case, we worship God not because we should, not because he wants us to, and not because we need an overlord to flatter. Instead, we worship God because that’s what God is, because the only possible response to really experiencing the totality of all consciousness and love (or even a small part of that) is what we would call “worship”.
On a personal note, back when I was an atheist, one of the mental conflicts I would have is when I would see a beautiful sunrise or just feel the beauty of being alive, I would have this intense impulse to say “thank you”… but I had no one to thank. So I would sometimes mumble an awestruck “thank you” to no one. I was responding to what I now call God, without recognizing him. And that “thank you” is my worship.
Michael L Waddell Thank you for another reflective reply. I welcome your correction if I’m boiling it down incorrectly but it sounds to me like your theory is essentially that God is the reification and personification of our sense and recognition of the awesomeness and power of the universe, nature, ultimate reality. And worship is simply the natural and appropriate response to that recognition, and our attempt to beneficially engage with the form that its reification takes. In short, in your view God is an instance of what in process philosophy is called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. God is a concrete form that we mistakenly, naively give to our abstraction of qualities of the universe such as its majesty and wondrousness; and worship is our trying to align ourselves with it.
I subscribe to a somewhat different interpretation of the human sensus divinitatis. In my view God isn’t merely our mind’s reification of the power of the universe or ultimate reality, but rather an actual entity (to use the technical Whiteheadian term) that individualizes, individually actualizes the creative, experiential, relational, teleological, and axiologically purposive power and process at the base of all reality.
Our sense of God then is an awareness of this actuality, which is due to its immanence; an immanence that results from the relational nature of the metaphysical reality that it embodies. That is, God, like all entities, is not ontologically independent; i.e., not a substance, but rather interrelated and interconstituted with the rest of the entities that populate existence. The upshot of this is that panentheism is on the money; God is internally related to us, and we’re internally related to God, and consequently have an intuition of God’s reality.
Worship then is an attempt to engage not with a concretized abstraction, but rather with a supreme actuality, who more perfectly than any other entity embodies the metaphysically ultimate reality, the ultimate nature of nature. Reflecting their historical-cultural context, their embeddedness in patriarchy and authoritarian political systems, the minds of ordinary folk in antiquity tended to get stuck on the power aspect of God and ultimate reality, and consequently worship took the form of humbling oneself, submission, and propitiation; with an underlying conception of reciprocity, of giving a god his/her due to get something desired, such as a good harvest.
But although in my view no propitiation and quid pro quo is required; although God being an embodiment of creativity and relationality means that God is a force for the creative-relational good, i.e., a force for love, and seeks our well-being in any case, even if we’re atheists who deny God’s reality, nevertheless worship and piety still have value, as forms of behavior that help to heighten our sensus divinitatis, and make us more receptive to God’s efforts within our hearts and minds to guide us toward the best possibilities of our lives. And worship is also simply a way of showing care for God; and, if it takes the form of following God’s guidance and realizing higher levels of human flourishing and complexity, it’s a way of giving back to God, since a panentheistic God internalizes our experience, and the richer our experience, the richer our offering to God. To my mind this is what worship is fundamentally about, even though the Bible, and the world’s religions conceptualize it differently.
