It is no secret that the church in the Global North is struggling. For many, in this increasingly secular age, the church is an icon of religious irrelevance. This paper questions whether the root of many of our challenges is a misunderstanding of the nature of worship. Frequently in the Hebrew Bible, the Lord rejects … Read more
Many spoken prayers and church songs throughout the ages are addressed directly to Jesus. Formal liturgies dating back to the early centuries of the church include the Son in their addresses and sometimes even hail him singly. Even since the Reformation a significant number of hymns, whether “Rock of Ages” or “Thine Be the Glory,” … Read more
Co-author: Leonardo Godinho Nunes The Scriptures emphasize the importance of remaining faithful to God’s covenant by following its requirements and stipulations. 1 Peter 2:9a reverberates the Sinaitic covenant made with the Israelites in Exod 19:5–6, while 1Pet 2:9b, introduced by the telic conjunction ὅπως (“in order that”), expresses the implication of this covenant. This way, … Read more
Co-author: Malalasoa Daniel Andrianjafimbeloarijaona, PhD student, AIIAS Theological Seminary The Scriptures emphasize the importance of remaining faithful to God’s covenant by following its requirements and stipulations. 1 Peter 2:9a reverberates the Sinaitic covenant made with the Israelites in Exod 19:5–6, while 1Pet 2:9b, introduced by the telic conjunction ὅπως (“in order that”), expresses the implication … Read more
This presentation considers the benefits of the Lord’s Supper for a believer and proposes a paradigm for better understanding and promoting those benefits. It does so by situating two paradigms of influence—external and internal. The first paradigm, the Roman Catholic paradigm of ex opere operato, emphasizes the efficacious nature of the external elements upon the … Read more
Music and Morality: Contemporary Christian Music and the Referential Formalism of Kimberly Smith Although the “worship wars” surrounding the use of Contemporary Christian music first erupted within American evangelical circles in the 1960s, the points of view regarding the moral impact of music remain highly contested and relevant to the present day. Christian author Kimberly … Read more
In this paper, I explore what it means for us to “read” our worship and to “read” our lives in terms of locating “wonder” (drawing on Sophia Vasalou), that is, those places where God manifests himself to us through worship and life experience. We may read our worship through various means: texts (following philosopher and … Read more
In Paul’s letter to the church at Colossae, he instructs the believers there, and by proxy the church today, to teach each other the wisdom of the Lord and the words of Christ. The manner in which this is to be accomplished is through “singing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs” (Col 3:16, ESV) If this … Read more
The distinction between passions and affections, long blurred under the generic label emotions, needs to be restored not only for the sake of orthodoxy, but also for the refinement of Christian sanctification and worship. Recent evangelical theologies (e.g., Grudem, Erickson) have diminished the doctrine of divine impassibility in view of God’s manifest expression of feeling/emotion. … Read more
In his new book published in March 2024, Nijay Gupta said that many twentieth-century scholars of early Christian worship approached the topic with a “major methodological flaw” by assuming that modern categories of Christian worship were used in the first century. Gupta’s assessment aligns with the conclusions of my 2022 PhD dissertation, “Worship Service or … Read more