The renewal of worship in our era is largely concerned with the restoration of a God-centered focus in Christian celebration. By its very nature, however, the psychology of worship tends to reverse this focus, redirecting our concern to the worshiper and his or her needs. A biblical psychology of worship places the individual within the context of corporate celebration and covenantal responsibility. Worship celebrates the victory of Christ over authorities that place people in bondage. In this setting, the gospel of Christ brings healing and liberation.
A common approach to the psychology of worship attacks the issue from the standpoint of the benefits to the individual worshiper. These benefits may include the awareness of intimacy with God, the affirmation and healing that come through the experience of grace, the sense of identity and fulfillment which is communicated to the worshiper, or some other value which he or she perceives as a benefit resulting from the act of worship. Pathology in worship is described in terms of the failure of the worshiper to receive these benefits. If he or she remains in a state of alienation or boredom, unable to respond at any level of depth to what is being presented, and locked into destructive behavior patterns which prevent a genuine meeting with God or with other worshipers, then the experience of worship has not been successful.
While this worshiper-centered approach to the psychological aspects of worship yields much that is valuable in terms of understanding the emotional needs and behavioral characteristics of worshipers, it is, in our view, ultimately counterproductive in contributing to the renewal of Christian worship. Genuine Christian worship is not worshiper-centered but God-centered. Worship that is based on the biblical perspective must by definition be directed away from the worshiper and towards the proper object of worship, the God who has involved himself in the history of a people and who comes to them as Creator, Savior, and Lord.
The foundation of biblical worship is the covenant graciously granted by the Lord to his servants, and worship in the biblical sense is the tribute the servants offer to the great King. When the psychology of worship is focused on whether or not the worshiper’s needs are being met, the whole purpose of worship is reversed. The King becomes the servant, and the worshiper takes the place of the sovereign, expecting to receive the tribute of the servant-God and frustrated when it is not forthcoming. Such a reversal has much in common with the pagan cults of the ancient Near East—a sharp contrast to biblical faith. In polytheistic religions, the worshiper’s constant aim is to propitiate a capricious and reluctant deity, wresting from him or her the benefits associated with the seasonal fertility cycle or some other response to human need. Biblical worship, in contrast, is a response to the holiness and majesty of God and to his initiative in creating a people to declare the excellence of his redeeming work (1 Pet. 2:9–10).
Since psychology, by definition, focuses on the human psyche or “soul” with its perceptions and needs, can a psychology of worship be constructed in which the focus should be not on the worshiper but upon the Lord who is the true object of worship?
Redefining Psychology in Biblical Terms
The term psyche is a Greek term found often in the New Testament (the Old Testament Hebrew equivalent is nefesh). It refers to an individual life, or what we today call a person. Biblically, the “soul” represents the totality of a person’s being—not only his or her emotional, mental, and spiritual side but also one’s physical well-being, family and property, and place and reputation in the community (see, for example, the exhaustive treatment of the Hebraic concept of the soul in Johannes Pedersen, Israel: Its Life and Culture, vol. 1[London: Oxford University Press, 1946]). Both the inward and outward aspects of an individual’s life are bound up with the soul. Hence psychology understood biblically, involves more than “personality” as we conceive of it; it has to do with a person’s external behavior, one’s speech and actions, and how the person is perceived within the context of the community of which he or she is a part.
It is noteworthy, in this connection, that the biblical narrative seldom probes into the inward “feelings” of the people involved; where we today would describe an incident in terms of how the participants felt about what was happening, the Scripture tends simply to record what they said and did. In 2 Kings 4 we find the account of a boy, taken ill, whom Elisha restores to life; whereas we would say the boy felt pain in his head and his father became alarmed, the text simply says that the boy said to his father, “My head! My head!” and the father said to the servant, “Carry him to his mother” (2 Kings 4:19). A classic example of this biblical reticence about inward emotions is the narrative of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac (Gen. 22:1–14), in which the feelings of father and son are never expressed but can only be inferred from such things as Isaac’s question about the lamb for the offering or the silence as “the two of them walked on together.” The Gospels record the passion of Christ with a similar restraint, rarely giving us a glimpse into his personal anguish in such expressions as “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death” (Mark 14:34). In the context of the sweep of salvation history and the working out of God’s plan of redemption, personal emotional “needs” appear to be largely irrelevant. In the Jewish culture of biblical times, they were certainly downplayed.
The biblical worshiper may testify to his or her longing or frustration, in such expressions as “My soul yearns, even faints for the courts of the Lord” (Ps. 84:2) or “My soul is downcast within me” (Ps. 42:6), but such outbursts are not the anguished cry of one for whom God has ceased to be a reality. Indeed, they are a pledge of loyalty on the part of a servant who, although surrounded by enemies, is determined to hold on to the one sure thing in his life: the Lord’s faithfulness to his covenant. The worshiper’s enemies are not inner hurts and dysfunctional personality patterns have warped his or her response to the worship of God, but other people, people unfaithful to the Lord, who are pressuring the worshiper in some way. Even Jeremiah’s complaint, “You deceived me, and I was deceived” (Jer. 20:7) is a response to the indifference of other people to the message that is “like a fire” in the prophet’s inner being (Jer. 20:9).
Set against Scripture, therefore, the psychology of worship must not remain focused subjectively on the worshiper and his or her needs. More is at stake here than our internal struggles. There is, or should be, objectivity to what occurs in Christian worship. Biblically informed worship is, in the first instance, an act through which God is establishing his dominion through the praises of his people (Ps. 22:3). Enthroning God means dethroning ourselves, like the worshiping elders in the Revelation of John, who lay their own crowns before the throne of God (Rev. 4:10). The growth of the kingdom of God, in our personal lives or in our social context, can occur only when God is on the throne, receiving the honor that is due him as sovereign Lord; otherwise, what is taking shape is a rival kingdom.
Worship is an act of spiritual warfare, the proclamation of Christ’s victory on the cross over spiritual forces that would hold the people of God in bondage to instruments of self-justification (Col. 2:14–15). Warfare requires the enlistment of soldiers, albeit wounded ones. Since the soul encompasses the whole person, not just the emotions, the psychology of Christian worship sees people in the totality of their being, with many strengths as well as weaknesses, with many gifts as well as defects. These gifts and strong points may still be used in the battle, even where hurts and faults persist.
Ultimately, the psychology of worship has to do not primarily with the worshiper’s interaction with himself but with his or her interaction with God. The psychology of worship thus involves how God benefits from worship as well as how the worshiper receives benefits and fulfillment of needs. In terms of biblical psychology, worship is the enlargement of the “soul” or life of God as his being reaches out to touch and envelop the “selves” of his worshipers. What else can be the meaning of the psalmist’s invitation, “O magnify [giddel, “make great”] the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together” (Ps. 34:3, nasb)? In worship we “bless [brekah] the Lord” (Pss. 103:1; 104:1, nasb), contributing to the welfare of his being. Granted, such expressions are poetic rather than ontological; nevertheless, in biblical worship we see the great King receiving the tribute of his covenant partners and benefiting therefrom.
Recovering the Primal Worship Experience
The primal experience of worship is the sense of awe in the presence of the holy, the one who is infinitely greater than ourselves and beyond all comprehension (see Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, [New York: Oxford University Press, 1946]). The encounter with the holy comes as something which grips the worshiper at the intuitive level, filling him or her with a sense of awe and mystery before the massive presence of the sacred. (The Hebrew word kavod, translated “glory” or “honor,” carries the basic meaning of “mass” or “weight.”) There is a wonder, dread, or trepidation in the presence of a reality that cannot be comprehended within the framework of finite existence; an awareness of creaturehood and immeasurable smallness in the face of the Creator who is all. A biblical record of such an encounter with the Holy is recorded in Isaiah 6; Jacob’s experience at Bethel (Gen. 28:10–22) and the appearance of the Lord on Mount Sinai (Exod. 19:16–25) are other important instances, together with the transfiguration of Christ (Mark 9:2–8 and parallels). In such an encounter we have no choice but to worship in the biblical sense of “bending the knee” (both the Hebrew and Greek words translated “worship” have this meaning), doing obeisance before the overwhelming majesty of the Creator, revealed as an absolute value.
The pathology of many contemporary worshipers is related to the loss of capacity for this intuitive response. The humanistic, technological thrust of western culture “flattens out” our worldview so that it has no depth, while the relativistic philosophy of our era destroys any sense of absolute values. This lack of depth and absolutes is the cultural source of alienation and dysfunctional behavior patterns since without a philosophical and spiritual anchor the human personality is cast adrift. Having lost all cosmic referents, a person has no choice but to become self-centered; the search for depth often becomes only a search within oneself—or into some allegedly transcendent realm which in reality is only a projection of the conscious or unconscious self, as in the “new age” philosophy. When self-centeredness becomes a cultural norm, and indeed a religious value (as has been well documented by writers like Paul Vitz, in Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1977]), it is easy to understand how the unrestrained self continually inflicts hurt upon others and receives damaging blows in return.
In such a state, the decision to turn to God for help may be futile, since (in evangelicalism especially) so much emphasis is placed on conversion as an act of individual choice, made in order to secure certain benefits for the self. What the alienated person needs—and all members of our culture partake of this alienation—is to be taken captive (to use the apostle Paul’s metaphor, Eph. 4:7), caught up in the grip of the sacred. Worship that focuses on meeting human needs will never break the destructive cycle of self-centeredness. Only worship that lifts up a transcendent God, calling people to commit themselves in his service and to abandon themselves in fascination with his glory, will break this cycle and bring healing.
Corporate Worship and Personal Identity
The prevailing psychology of worship focuses upon the aspects of worship that concern the individual. The main concern is the response of the individual worshiper to the worship experience itself. One issue addressed by the psychology of worship is the worshiper’s sense of identity. Loss of identity is less of a problem in traditional cultures, where strong family or tribal bonds exist. A person always knows who he or she is, along with the proper role to assume in a given situation. In a technological and mobile culture, in contrast, the forces of social change contribute to the breakdown of these steady relationships and to a sense of alienation. The personal response is often to search for identity within the self, to “be all you can be” or to “have it your way.” Another avenue of response may be seen in the contemporary stress on ethnicity—the search for identity in ethnic “roots.” The psychology of worship focuses upon the pathology created when the individual worshiper is struggling with the loss or fragmentation of identity. In some persons, the struggle may be so intense that worship is weakened or blocked altogether. Also, there can be a loss of identification with the other participants.
Loss of personal identity becomes an issue in worship as long as worship is viewed as an individual act. Worship in the biblical tradition, however, is never an individual act; it is always corporate worship, the celebration of the gathered assembly of the covenant community. The worship of Israel, the celebration of Yahweh’s mighty acts, was organized around annual festivals at the sanctuary “where the tribes go up” (Ps. 122:4) as a group. When an individual speaks in worship (as in the Psalms), he does so as the representative of a group, those faithful to the Lord; the individual’s offering of praise to the Lord and his testimony to answered prayer is set within the framework of the assembly (e.g., Ps. 22:25). The prophets of Israel were, even in times of rampant apostasy, representatives of a community of faithful worshipers of the Lord, epitomized by the “seven thousand in Israel—all whose knees have not bowed down to Baal” (1 Kings 19:18) of Elijah’s era. The prophets took their stand not upon some esoteric revelation from the Lord but upon the traditions of the covenant, declaring the judgments against apostasy and immorality inherent within the covenant structure (see “The Concept of Covenant in Biblical Worship” in volume 1). The ability to declare these judgments with force was their prophetic gift or “inspiration.”
The corporate nature of the church, the “body of Christ,” is a corollary of the biblical stress on covenant and is evident in Paul’s teaching concerning the Lord’s Supper, the basic act of Christian worship. The bread we break, he reminds the Corinthians, is a koinonia (“participation, sharing) in the body of Christ (1 Cor. 10:16–17); Christians are not to receive the Lord’s Supper as an individual exercise but are to recognize the body (1 Cor. 11:29) or worshiping community in this act.
Viewed in this perspective, concern with one’s individual identity is a side issue. Introspective focus upon one’s inner struggles is a diversion from the worshiper’s true calling. Christian worship offers a genuine and satisfying sense of identity, but one that comes from a commitment to the corporate identity of the people of God, a people called into being for the purpose of clarifying not who they are as individuals, but who he is and what he has done: “that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” In pledging themselves to the covenant, worshipers assume membership in a new family or “nation” from which their identity is derived: “Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God” (1 Pet. 2:9–10). In short, healing comes through the commitment of the self to a cause greater than the self. Deliverance from sickness and agitation within the soul begins to come when the worshiper confesses that struggle itself as sin and, laying it aside, takes up the proclamation of God’s greater glory in corporate celebration.
Worship and the Organizing Principle of Self
The question of the emotional needs of worshipers can be approached from the angle of the fragmentation of personality. This is perhaps another way of looking at the issue of identity. The anonymity of contemporary society makes it possible for people to act in one area of life in a manner inconsistent with the set of values they employ in another area. For example, a person who is a professing Christian may vote for a candidate for public office who opposes biblical principles or who may conduct himself in the home in a way he would never behave in church, at work, or in another public setting. People may go through life without being confronted with their own inconsistencies; because a person is really one psyche, however, internal dissonance may build up and may result in great emotional pain.
The search for an organizing principle of self that will silence the dissonance can be an agonizing one, especially if this search is undertaken with the premise that values are relative and that the answer must come from within each individual. “Self-esteem” has been viewed as such an organizing principle, enjoying wide popularity in our technological culture precisely because it avoids the introduction of absolutes. Even Christian thinking has co-opted the concept of self-esteem; we are told we have to love ourselves because Jesus said “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31). The issue of self-esteem is grist for the mill of the psychology of worship; lack of self-love has been seen as an impediment to worship, and the renewal of worship has been viewed in terms of how worshipers may be restored in self-esteem and released to express their “gifts.”
Clearly, biblically informed worship cannot pander to the worshiper’s perceived lack of self-esteem, for reasons that have been discussed above. Jesus’ iteration of the “great commandment” was not a recommendation of self-love; he (and Moses before him) assumed an adequate degree of “self-love,” in the sense of concern for one’s personal needs (cf. Eph. 5:29) and simply used it as an example of how to treat one’s fellow human beings. In actuality, the “neighbor” of whom Moses and Jesus were speaking is really one’s fellow member of the covenant with the Lord—a covenant which the New Testament views as expanding to embrace people of all ethnic and socioeconomic groups, people “from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev. 5:9). The organizing principle of “self” is the pledge of loyalty to God, a commitment that brings other loyalties—including loyalty to self—into proper perspective.
Worship and Personal Discipline
Christian worship is not the self-expression of an aggregate of individual worshipers, but the act of a redeemed people expressing honor to whom honor is due (cf. Rom. 13:7). Worship involves the subordination of individual concern to the larger concern that the name of the Lord should be lifted up. It is choreographed behavior that takes the spotlight off the worshiper and puts it on the Creator—yet, paradoxically, in so doing allows for the abundant release of individual gifts as worshipers move into the flow of praise in prophetic, musical, and artistic activity.
Participation in worship in the biblical tradition is an act of self-control; it involves the personal discipline of laying aside private concerns for the sake of the corporate witness to our sovereign Lord. Self-control, understood biblically, is submission to the will of God. As an act of self-control, worship is a vehicle for personal healing with self-control as the “bottom line” which anchors every fruit of the Spirit—joy, peace, and love itself (Gal. 5:22–23). Lack of self-control cuts us off from access to spiritual and psychological healing. To a Samaritan woman who evidently had some problems in this area, Jesus spoke of worship “in spirit and truth” (John 4:23), that is, spirited worship in the visible manifestation of self-abandonment before the Lord, and truthful worship in conformity to scriptural patterns. To worship the Lord as an act of obedience, regardless of personal “feelings” of the moment, is a therapeutic, restorative act because it is an act of sacrifice—what Scripture calls the “sacrifice of praise” (Heb. 13:15).
A biblical psychology of worship recognizes the need to maintain worship in the Spirit, to understand worship from God’s viewpoint—the tribute due him as the great King—and to view the worshiper’s role as the controlled abandonment of self-concern. It would be sad indeed if in worship, as in all aspects of the Christian life, having begun in the Spirit we should seek to complete it in the flesh (cf. Gal. 3:3). In the context of Paul’s warning, “the flesh” means the effort to justify oneself through the performance of the Mosaic law. Thus, “the flesh” is emblematic of all attempts to prove oneself, instead of to prove or demonstrate “what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will” (Rom. 12:2). As members of the body of Christ, the corporate assembly of the Lord’s worshiping people, we are not to indulge ourselves in the quest for self-pity or self-esteem; rather we are to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to satisfy its desires” (Rom. 13:14, RSV).
Worship and the “Performance Principle”
In the final analysis, that which lies at the root of most pathologies of personality in our culture is the replacement of unconditional familial love by the “performance principle”—the constant need to prove ourselves, to justify our right to exist. Millions live in this bondage, many perhaps outwardly self-assured, successful, and complacent but inwardly insecure and uncertain of their acceptance by others. The “self-esteem” movement largely ignores this cultural exchange. Our lives are constantly being measured by imposed or internalized standards: the values of peer groups, the pressures of economic expectations, the conventions of our various ethnic or ideological communities. To compound the problem, none of these perceived sources of value has any final arbiter who can certify that we have passed the test and validated ourselves; there is no mechanism by which we may receive the official stamp of approval. Having no definite finish line to cross, we can never know if we have won the race.
The “performance principle” of our industrial and technological age is simply the modern secular version of “the law of sin and death” (Rom. 8:2) from which Christ came to release us. However “holy, righteous and good” (Rom. 7:12), the Judeo-Christian law nevertheless pandered to “the flesh” in this respect: it set up an unattainable standard of behavior and so challenged the worshiper to commend himself or herself in relationship to its achievement. Under such a system, worship became simply one of many acts intended to make a statement about the worshiper: his or her faithfulness, righteousness, or spirituality. Within such a system there is no release from the inherent curse of judgment.
Against the background of the “performance principle,” the gospel proclaims: So also, when we were children, we were in slavery under the basic principles of the world. But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons. Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father” (Gal. 4:3–6).
In other words, redemption is effected through a change of family loyalty and status: from being slaves of the “performance principle” to being children of the Father, children who no longer need to perform in order to be accepted, but who are accepted in virtue of the relationship. The outcome is becoming a member of Christ the Son; to be “in Christ” is to be part of a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17). Christ in his death has borne the curse of judgment (Gal. 3:14–15); by union with him in his death (Rom. 6:3–5; Col. 2:12) we have “crossed over from death to life” (John 5:24; cf. 1 John 3:14).
This is the significance of the new (or renewed) covenant in Christ. The basic condition of the covenant—absolute loyalty to God—remains in force; but Jesus, our high priest, and intercessor, satisfies this condition in our behalf (Heb. 7–8), setting us free from the curse. Thus Paul could proclaim the gospel of Christus Victor:
When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature [Greek sarx, “flesh” or self-justifying behavior], God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross (Col. 2:13–15).
Christian worship is the celebration of Christus Victor, interpreted here as God’s act of redemption liberating us from the bondage of unrelenting self-justification. Christian worship is also our response to God’s act, as we bow the knee to renew our confession of covenant loyalty: “Jesus is Lord” (1 Cor. 12:3; cf. Phil. 2:10–11). In the setting of worship, our personal struggles are dwarfed by the victory of Christ over the forces of sin, death, and all that would enslave us to the constant need to prove ourselves, with all its accompanying pathology. In the setting of worship, barriers to communion with our Creator are broken down as God comes to dwell among his people, to wipe away every tear, and to make all things new (Rev. 21:3–5).