Paul gave directions for public worship in 1 Corinthians 14:6-19 to believers in an urban crossroads of trade, languages, religions, and ethnicities. He called for worship practices founded on shared comprehension, the ability of individual minds to apprehend the same truths. This ability was the key to loving one other and worshiping Christ in unity.
Barriers to cross-cultural sharing of worship remain today. But Western evangelicals have a distinct challenge. Western concepts of the human mind threaten the possibility of shared comprehension.
Influential philosophers in the West describe the human mind in terms of measurable physical, social, and psychological forces, only acknowledging meaning and spirituality as subjective. John Dewey (1859-1952), for example, denied “ready-made” rational faculties, arguing that the mind constructs its faculties socially from the raw materials of sense-stimuli. Meaning is not transcendent, but social and material. There is no truth to share, only cognitive skills.
Though Western evangelicals resist such accounts, we struggle to explain the mind’s relationship to spiritual meaning. How is unity in Christ constituted among individual minds? What does it mean to apprehend truth together? What is the status of symbolism and tradition in this unity? When spiritual meaning is locked away in an individual’s subjective world, Paul’s directions for public worship become nonsensical.
Western evangelicals cannot cease to be Western as we seek to share worship globally. But we can interrogate our philosophical traditions more deeply concerning the mind. There are other accounts of the mind’s relationship to meaning that might help us envision how to share worship as Paul taught.
American philosopher Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985) was driven to assert the dignity of human rationality against a reductive zeitgeist. She resisted the consensus that the mind could only be studied in material, measurable terms, calling such methods “the idols of the laboratory.” Her major contribution was Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967). She argued that feeling, “the constant, systematic, but private display” of our own consciousness, is central to understanding the mind. She further argued that our subjective worlds can participate in shared apprehension. Artists, who project feeling into objective images, offer “a naïve [pre-scientific] but intimate and expert knowledge of feeling.” Her account articulated a new status for symbolic meaning in modern philosophy.
Langer’s account of the mind challenged modernism in specific ways. Abstraction is the foundation, not the apex, of intellect. Subjective feeling is not separated from the objective world, much less a barrier to objectivity, but rather is the place where external and internal realities meet. Most importantly, Langer both respects the symbolic, immaterial nature of meaning and integrates it with rationality.
Sharing worship globally requires evangelicals to confront our Western view of the mind. We need not insist that other cultures become more rational by a modernist standard we do not fully embrace. Nor do we need to disavow objectivity. We need to articulate how subjectivity is part of human rationality.