The ancients appreciated that we are aesthetic beings, we are very much shaped by what we imagine and the imagination is a core faculty of the human person, but it also means we are embodied beings, we are material beings, our bodies are integral to our identity, which is why bodily rituals, to kneel when we confess our sins, to raise our hands in praise and thanksgiving, to receive a blessing with open hands, all of those physical acts are portals to the heart and so the way to the heart is through the body. Christian worship paints a picture of the beauty of the Lord, a vision he desires for creation in a way that captures our imagination, if we act toward what we long for and if we long for what has captured our imagination, then reformative Christian worship needs to capture our imagination, that means Christian worship needs to meet us as aesthetic creatures, who are moved more than we are convinced. Our imaginations are aesthetic organs, our hearts are like stringed instruments that are plucked by story, poetry, metaphor, images, we tap our existential feet to the rhythm of imaginative drums.Having looked at the definition of “religion,“ let’s look at the definition of “irreligious”.
Definition of IRRELIGIOUS
neglectful of religion : lacking religious emotions, doctrines, or practices; indicating lack of religion… See the full definitionwww.merriam-webster.com
”Religious” is a term applicable to Jesus, the apostles, and the followers of Jesus. “Irreligious” isn’t a term that is applicable to any of them.
Pure religion
- Thread starter Matthias
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An interesting read, from my X / Twitter “For you” feed today -
Liturgy and liturgies are practices, rituals, routines, they are something that you do, that do something to you. What makes liturgies religious, what makes rituals spiritual, is not that they just plant ideas in our heads, it’s that they are actually inscribing a desire in our heart for some certain end. These love shaping practices, then really get at the very core of who we are, because we are what we love. To use a metaphor, think of these liturgies as calibration technologies, they bend the needle of our hearts like a compass, but when such liturgies are disordered, aimed at rival kingdoms, they are pointing us away from our magnetic north in King Jesus. We don’t think our way through the world, we imagine our way in the world and if we are going to take seriously how our habits are formed, those habits are caught, rather than taught, which is why practices sort of shape us.
“… ‘liturgy’ refers to the order of a corporate worship service.
All churches from every denominational stripe have an order of worship.”
What Is a Liturgy?
What is liturgy? Jonathan Landry Cruse explains how biblical worship patterns reflect God's holiness, order, and purpose for the church
learn.ligonier.org
A particular ritual may be wrong but there is nothing inherently wrong with ritual.
When Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, in Luke chapter 11, the disciples come up to him and ask him and he gives them a model prayer that’s similar to this one in Matthew, but also different, it seems for Jesus, this model prayer could actually take a few different verbal forms, but the core importance was this sequence of ideas that could be expressed in a few different sets of words and it’s the template that Jesus wants to pass on, the same ideas, but slightly different wording, but the shortness is part of its meaning. The themes of the prayer are dripping with Hebrew Bible language and imagery, prayer in Judaism is about habit and repetition and ritual in the best senses of all those terms.“… ‘liturgy’ refers to the order of a corporate worship service.
All churches from every denominational stripe have an order of worship.”
What Is a Liturgy?
What is liturgy? Jonathan Landry Cruse explains how biblical worship patterns reflect God's holiness, order, and purpose for the church
A particular ritual may be wrong but there is nothing inherently wrong with ritual.
Prayer is something you do morning, middle, day and evening and you weave into the fabric of your life, reciting ancient prayers and making them your own. Jesus would have uttered this prayer hundreds of times throughout his life and his time with the disciples and that he would adapt the wording based off of whatever the needs of the day. There’s something about these sequence of six ideas, that the God of Jesus is my Father, that I am anticipating and waiting, yearning for the arrival of his Kingdom and his will, that his reputation is restored, I’m asking for just enough for each day, I’m recognizing and naming that I fail to live up to Jesus’ ideals, even my own and also that every day is going to present me with choices, that will test my faithfulness to God and to others, there’s something about that sequence that I need to remind myself of every day, multiple times a day to live in the story.“… ‘liturgy’ refers to the order of a corporate worship service.
All churches from every denominational stripe have an order of worship.”
What Is a Liturgy?
What is liturgy? Jonathan Landry Cruse explains how biblical worship patterns reflect God's holiness, order, and purpose for the church
A particular ritual may be wrong but there is nothing inherently wrong with ritual.
Jesus himself is not innovating with the idea of introducing a new prayer, if you’re forming a crew of disciples and you want to teach them what you’ve learned about how to be faithful to the covenant and to love God and love neighbor, teaching memorable prayers that would be memorized and recited by your students. Jesus is not just reflecting his own learnings and impressions from the Hebrews scriptures himself, but that he himself is a part of a tradition of Judaism in the time he grew up that he was formed by.“… ‘liturgy’ refers to the order of a corporate worship service.
All churches from every denominational stripe have an order of worship.”
What Is a Liturgy?
What is liturgy? Jonathan Landry Cruse explains how biblical worship patterns reflect God's holiness, order, and purpose for the church
A particular ritual may be wrong but there is nothing inherently wrong with ritual.
When Jesus teaches a prayer, it’s his own unique stamp, but also combining things that all of his neighbors were praying as he was growing up too. If our habits form us, then this is a tradition that has not forgotten that our physical body, movement, postures, rhythms, habits, shape our view of reality and that’s what this is all about, it’s a way of life that helps you sustain a certain way of seeing the world and a certain way of living in the world.“… ‘liturgy’ refers to the order of a corporate worship service.
All churches from every denominational stripe have an order of worship.”
What Is a Liturgy?
What is liturgy? Jonathan Landry Cruse explains how biblical worship patterns reflect God's holiness, order, and purpose for the church
A particular ritual may be wrong but there is nothing inherently wrong with ritual.
Rockerduck
Well-Known Member
Reading through the posts, I kept reading the reference to "Judaism" as a religion. I'll just point out that there is no such thing. It was Mosaic law to the Jews. Today, pure religion is the worship of God through our High Priest, Christ Jesus.
Formative, shaping experience of prayer is not in competition with other forms of prayer, it’s in addition, prayer is a many facet jewel in possession of the community of Jesus and it can do many things. Formative prayer that’s meant to shape us through repetition over a long period of time, because when Jesus says, when you pray, pray this way, what he’s assuming is, you pray three times a day, so add this into your daily prayer liturgy, this is what Jesus means when he says when you pray, pray this way. Creating slogans for yourself and goals, repeating things to yourself, that will shape your view of everything, wake up every day and say, our father in heaven, may your name be recognized as holy, it will shape a human life in a very particular way.
Jesus shows, the way he talks and acts, expresses the mindset of somebody who believes their identity is the unique seed of the women, the chosen son of Abraham, the chosen one of David and the son of man, the son of humanity from Daniel chapter 7. The Hebrew Bible makes a claim, that this is a being who originated and sustains every moment and when you speak of God as in Heaven, it’s a way of referring to the Creator not being limited to any place within creation, but the one who’s outside of and above. At the heart of the biblical portrait of this being named Elohim or God or Yahweh, is that it’s a being who simultaneously is the ground and cause of everything that is, at every moment, sustaining it, but also has allowed creation a certain degree of freedom and independence to run its course with the ideal that creation joins the Divine will in partnership in harmony, in oneness. This idea that there is a place where God is above all and in that high and Heavenly place, there’s this set of ideals where God’s purposes and his power and his will and his name, his reputation is all perfectly upheld in this beautiful ideal way, that is the transcendent space that is not in the system, it’s outside and above and beyond the system. God, who is overall and through all and in all, has created something that is genuinely other than God, namely creation and also as a part of creation a being, who is an image of this God, to whom God has given responsibility and a degree of freedom to carry out that responsibility and authority.
Rockerduck
Well-Known Member
You keep circling around words without scripture. Start using a scripture instead of applying word salad and rambling.
Matthew chapter 6, the Lords pray, this is a unique part of the heritage of what Jesus gave to us in this prayer, is that the unique status that he believed he had as the chosen one, the son of the father is an identity into which he invites his followers, so that my father becomes our father. Our father, so even that little beginning makes a statement that shapes you, it’s a identity shaping prayer, the father of all creation, the source and ground of all that is, that’s the one that Jesus is addressing.
the Old Testament is Israel against the nations and God against the other gods, things became adversarial. The Israelites themselves, the people of Yahweh who were specially created after the disinheritance of the nations, God’s own people begin to gravitate toward the worship of these other sons of God, of these other gods of the nations. And Deuteronomy 32 alludes to this, they worshiped demons and not God. Gods they had not known, gods that had not been allotted to them. And this is the thought that we see here in Acts chapter 7.
The ideal of what Eden is, is a place where Heaven and Earth are the same place, where the human images rule and live and work and steward creation in harmony and oneness with the Divine will. The exile of Adam and Eve from Eden, down the mountain into the low lands becomes this image of the human rulers charting an independent course, that they want to establish another type of Kingdom, but it’s contested space down here on the land, none of it would exist without God sustaining the whole thing by his Spirit. That’s the way that God is in all and through all, but at the same time he is also above all and that above place, he’s outside the system and there are a set of ideals that all creation will eventually participate in, God’s perfect will and reign is only realized in Heaven, not on the land. That’s the story in which Jesus sees himself, that’s the only story that makes sense of the Lords prayer, he sees himself within a story where life here on the land is contested space. Jesus sees himself within a story where God has a will and a purpose and ideal that is in the process of being realized on the land, but it’s a process that’s taking place through humans and particularly himself. Jesus claimed within the story around the sermon, that he was the human who was bringing, ushering in a new era of God’s Kingdom and will here on the land as it is in Heaven.
stevesonthebay
Active Member
So long as they are subject to the true worship of God in Christ. The problem I see is that we can look at any religion and find similar rituals and traditions that are not of God.
So rituals and traditions need to be grounded in Christ or otherwise they could represent any number of ideologies and false beliefs. Actually promoting false beliefs through idols and rituals.
You put that well.
Religion as non-pejorative and pejorative. That, in fact, is what this thread is about.
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