Central to this perspective on congregational worship is the doctrine of the Hypostatic Union. In the Person of Christ we find the objective movement of God-to-man and the objective and vicarious responding movement of man-to-God. This double movement is united in the one Person of the Incarnate Son. Therefore, from the first moment of Christ’s earthly existence we have in the one Person of Christ the objective saving activity of God and the objective and vicarious responding activity of man. We must not look at the Hypostatic Union as merely the means of our salvation. Rather, we must recognize that it is actually the place where salvation was accomplished. T. F. Torrance writes:

The vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ…fulfills a representative and substitutionary role in all our relations with God…such as trusting and obeying, understanding and knowing, loving and worshipping…Jesus Christ…in and through His humanity took our place, acting in our name and on our behalf before God, freely offering in Himself what we could not offer and offering it in our stead, the perfect response of man to God in a holy life of faith and prayer and praise, the self-offering of the Beloved Son with whom the Father is well pleased” (God and Rationality, 145).

Moreover, the Epistle to the Hebrews makes it clear that Christ continues to be the place where God’s movement to man and man’s responding movement to God reside. It is because of this double movement, which was brought to its climax in the death and resurrection of Christ and continues as Christ ministers in the Holy Place (Hebrews 8:1-2), that we now have objective confidence to enter the Holy Place, to draw near to God with a true heart in full assurance of faith (Hebrews 10:19-22). This is why the writer of Hebrews closes his epistle by exhorting us to continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God through our High Priest, Jesus (Hebrews 13:15). T.F. Torrance writes:

Jesus Christ in his own self-oblation to the Father is our worship and prayer in an acutely personalized form, so that it is only through him and with him and in him that we may draw near to God with the hands of faith filled with no other offering but that which he has made on our behalf and in our place once and for all (T.F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 87).

If my understanding of the Hypostatic Union and its implications for corporate is correct, thinking of congregational worship, as I argued in my last post, simply in terms of what we are offering to God is worship that is not as gospel-centered as we might think. It is worship, it seems to me, that has lost sight of Christ’s vicarious life and continued priestly ministry. Therefore, I believe, pastors would do well not only to teach the congregation about these things but also to lead it in corporate worship in such a way that those present are consciously aware of the fact that “all our worship of the Father takes place properly within the circle of the life of Jesus Christ which he lived in our human nature in such a way that his whole life formed itself into worship, prayer and praise which he offered to the Father on our behalf” (T.F. Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 210-211).

*I often wonder what Christians are actually thinking about worship as they worship corporately through the singing of hymn texts, the giving of offerings, the responsive reading of Scripture, etc. If we could quietly pull aside a few people who are participating in these corporate expressions of worship to ask them what they think worship is, I wonder what they might say. I wonder if their answers would be more man-centered than God-centered. In A Passion for Christ: The Vision that Ignites Ministry, James B. Torrance thinks that more answers would come out on the man-centered side than would on the God-centered side. Torrance believes that there is one particular view of worship that seems to dominate the evangelical landscape, namely, that worship is primarly something which we do in response to who God is and what He’s done. Although this view appears God-centered at first look, when it’s really examined its true man-centered colors begin to show. He describes the thinking behind this way of understanding worship like this:

We go to Church, we sing our psalms to God, we intercede…, we listen to the sermon (too often simply an exhortation), we offer our money, time and talents to God. No doubt we need God’s grace to help us do it; we do it because Jesus taught us to do it and left us an example to show us how to do it. But worship is what WE do (36).

How many within evangelical churches would describe corporate worship in this way? Worship, after all, is a response to God, our response to God, is it not? In worship we offer to God that which He rightly deserves, correct? Torrance argues that this way of thinking “falls short of the New Testament understanding of participation through the Spirit in what Christ has done and in what Christ is doing for us in our humanity. It is human-centered.” (38).

He adds:

Its weakness is that it falls short of an adequate understanding of the role of the vicarious humanity of Christ (emphasis mine) and of the Spirit in our worship of the Father - of why Christ became man for us and our salvation (38).

(If you want to hear an entire sermon that considers the significance of the vicarious humanity of Christ for Christian living / worship, check out my audio sermon here.) Torrance is essentially arguing that the dominant view of worship fails to give the doctrine of Christ’s vicarious humanity its rightful place. It is a view that has lost sight , in many (most?) cases, not of Christ’s vicarious death but of His vicarious humanity, that is, of his vicarious life. Sure, our church may sing songs about Christ, corportately read biblical texts that explicitly reference Christ, and listen to sermons that speak of Christ, but if our understanding of corporate worship centers on what we do in response to what God has done, it may not be as gospel-centered as we think it is. Torrance writes:

Although [this view] stresses how God comes to meet us in Christ, the movement from us to God is still our movement, our faith, our response (emphasis mine)! This theology short-circuits the vicarious humanity of Christ and belittles union with Christ. While it seems to emphasize the vicarious work of Christ on the cross to bring forgiveness and make our faith a real human possibility, it fails to see the place of the High Priesthood of Christ as the One who leads our worship, bears our sorrows on his heart and intercedes for us, presenting us to the Father in himself as God’s dear children and uniting us with himself in his life in the Spirit.

To reduce worship to this two-dimensional thing (God and ourselves today) is to imply that God throws us back on ourselves to make our response, and to ignore the fact that God has already provided for us that Response which alone is acceptable to him - the Offering made for humankind in the life, obedience and passion of Jesus Christ. But is this not to lose the comfort and peace of the Gospel, as well as the secret of true Christian prayer as the gift of sharing in the intercessions of Christ, that we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit makes intercession for us? Whatever else our faith is, it is a response to a Response already made for us and continually being made for us in Christ (41).

Torrance is arguing that true Christian worship is worship that is swallowed up into what Christ has done in his vicarious life and death and what he continues to do as our Heavenly Intercessor. We may well be aware of Christ’s vicarious death as we gather to worship but we must not lose sight of his vicarious life and continued priestly ministry. Gospel-centered worship actively recognizes that God has not only provided us with His gracious movement toward us in Christ but also with our responding movement toward Him in Christ as well. God has not only provided that which we must respond to, namely, the gospel, but also our Response, Jesus. The Gospel teaches us that Christ is our acceptable response to the Father given to us by the Father. Christian worship is never simply something we do. It is both something that already has been done in the life and death of Jesus and something that Jesus is doing for us in his High Priestly ministry. As we worship we must be careful to understand Christian worship as participation in what Christ has done in His vicarious life and death and presently is doing as our heavenly High Priest. It is never simply a response to who God is and what He has done.

*This is an edited version of an article that was originally posted in August 2006.

I’ve been reading John Calvin the past few weeks. Here’s a great paragraph from his comments on 1 Corinthians 1:9:

“For this is the purpose of the gospel, that Christ may become ours, and that we may be engrafted into his body. When the Father gives him to us to possess, he also communicates himself to us in him, and thence flows participation in all good things. Paul’s argument is this: ‘Because you have been admitted by the gospel, which you received by faith, into communion with Christ, there is no reason for your to be frightened by the danger of death, since you have been made partakers of him who arose as victor over death.’”

John Piper writes:

The Ten Commandments are not central in Christian parenting. The gospel is.

The gospel is the rule and power by which we teach our children to live. The gospel is the culminating word of God that can break in on our children, who are born in sin, and by the power of the Holy Spirit bring about the new birth and forgiveness of sins and strength in suffering and biblical maturity.

Successful parenting is more than compliant kids. It is gospel-saturated living and teaching—a gospel is not just something that begins the Christian life but empowers it and shapes and sustains it.

Changed and sustained by the gospel, our children can rebel against the low expectations of adolescence and “do hard things” in a way that magnifies Jesus.

“Faith believes God to be true, hope awaits the time when his truth shall be manifested; faith believes that he is our Father, hope anticipates that he will ever show himself to be a Father toward us; faith believes that eternal life has been given to us, hope anticipates that it will some time be revealed; faith is the foundation upon which hope rests, hope nourishes and sustains faith” (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, III.2.42).

“Do any of us find decays in grace prevailing in us;—deadness, coldness, lukewarmness, a kind of spiritual stupidity and senselessness coming upon us? Do we find an unreadiness unto the exercise of grace in its proper season, and the vigorous acting of it in duties of communion with God? and would we have our souls recovered from these dangerous diseases? Let us assure ourselves there is no better way for our healing and deliverance, yea, no other way but this alone,—namely, the obtaining of a fresh view of the glory of Christ by faith, and a steady abiding therein. Constant contemplation of Christ and his glory, putting forth its transformation power unto the revival of all grace, is the only relief in this case” (The Works of John Owen, I, 395).

“A man may love another as his own soul, yet perhaps that love of his cannot help him. He may thereby pity him in prison, but not relieve him; bemoan him in misery, but not help him; suffer with him in trouble, but not ease him. We cannot love grace into a child, nor mercy into a friend; we cannot love them into heaven, though it may be the great desire of our soul. It was love that made Abraham cry, ‘O that Ishmael might live before thee!’ but it might not be. But now the love of Christ, being the love of God, is effectual and fruitful in producing all the good things which he willeth unto his beloved. He loves life, grace, and holiness into us; he loves us also into covenant, loves us into heaven. Love in him is properly to will good to any one: whatever good Christ by his love wills to any, that willing is operative of that good” (The Works of John Owen, II, 63).

“John Owen on Assurance” by Dr. Joel Beeke.

John Calvin on some implications of our union with Christ:

“Hence it follows, that we can confidenty assure ourselves, that eternal life, of which he himself is the heir, is ours, and that the kingdom of heaven, into which he has entered, can no more be taken from us than from him; on the other hand, that we cannot be condemned for our sins, from the guilt of which he absolves us, seeing he has been pleased that these should be imputed to himself as if they were his own. This is the wondrous exchange made by his boundless goodness. Having become with us the Son of Man, he has made us with himself sons of God…Having received our mortality, he has bestowed on us him immortality. Having undertaken our weakness, he has made us strong in his strength. Having submitted to our poverty, he has transferred to us his riches. Having taken upon himself the burden of unrighteousness with which we were oppressed, he has clothed us with his righteousness” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, IV.17.2).

I love my boys’ laughter.