Worship happens when “two or three” are gathered. A “testimony of two witnesses” is needed for this kind of worship. To be sure, we can worship privately and individually, but that is not the best and highest form of worship. For the worship in the Garden to be true and complete, Adam needs a liturgical helper.
Liturgical Distinctions between man and woman
Jim Jordan–as always–has a provocative thesis in his well-known article entitled Liturgical Man, Liturgical Woman. Jim’s thesis is that “the differences between men and women are, by creation design, fundamentally liturgical and only secondarily biological and psychological. To put it another way, my thesis is that the physical and psychological differences between men and women are grounded in their differing liturgical roles.”
James Jordan on Healing
It is important to understand that only the gospel gives men health. The labor of physicians is important, but only as a means of holding back the curse. Physicians cannot give men true health. Nor can eating “health foods ,” fasting, exercise, colonies, or any other feature of the Old Creation. The first creation is decaying. It is only the New Creation that can bring true health, through transfiguration. It is only in Christ, and in eating His Spiritual food, that healing can take place. —The Sociology of the Church
Book Review #4 Crisis, Opportunity, and the Christian Future
Incense and Worship
The incense of the tabernacle indicates that God desires a special smell in His worship. As James Jordan observes: “Incense teaches us that worship is a unique environment.” If the smell of the tabernacle is unique to the worship environment, what does that say about the uniqueness of music in the worship environment? God’s idea in the worship place is to be different from other places.
Crisis and Cycles…
James Jordan’s essay entitled Crisis, Opportunity, and the Christian Future is proof that the Bible provides its own framework to understand biblical structure and structures of civilizations. The Bible is its own best interpreter. It provides patterns and visions of what a biblical society must look like. It provides the “how nots”and the “how to’s” of a functioning society. The point is that only the biblical data serves as the foundation to any model of the future. Crises are not the defeat of a society, but rather the proper opportunity for a Christian future. New cycles refine old cycles and clean the gnostic, platonic remains of previous cycles.
A Fit Bride
…God is in the business of changing humanity into a fit Bride, and so God breaks down all attempts to freeze history.
–James B. Jordan in Crisis, Opportunity, and the Christian Future, p.29
James Jordan on the Church
To say that the root of our problems is religious is to say a great deal, but also to say rather little. Compared with the heredity and environmental reductionism popular in modern (and in ancient) thought, a confession that human nature and its problems are fundamentally religious is quite radical and immeasurably important. If, however, this confession only amounts to the notion that religious ideas underlie any given culture, then the affirmation is far less radical. For to discuss religion only in terms of ideas or doctrine is to reduce religion to an ideology. For the Christian there is an equal ultimacy of thought and practice, of saying and doing, of lip and life, of preaching and sacramental practice. As a result, any discussion of the restoration of Christian civilization may not simply consist of how Christian doctrine differs from its challenging counterfeits and antithetical adversaries in the areas of theology and understanding — be it dogmatics, economics, politics, or aesthetics; it must also include an examination of practice.
The practice of the Christian faith is most concentrated in the activity of the Church. This is for the obvious reason that it is in the Church that men devote themselves most rigorously to the practice of the faith. To put it another way, while men are to serve God in all of life, it is in the special activities of worship and charity that they are to devote attention exclusively to God and redemptive concerns.
source (page 7 of html version)
HT: Mark Horne
James Jordan on N.T. Wright
Recently the magazine Tabletalk published a series of essays against Calvinist theologian N. T. Wright. The black cover of this issue lets us know just how dangerous this man is…read the entire post.
Saturday Psalter
Restoring the Psalms by James B. Jordan
We’ve got to get the psalms back into the warp and woof of worship and life. But how do we do that, when nothing is readily available, and so many of us have never done it? Let me discuss first of all psalters for responsive reading, and then psalters for singing.