Worship and Life

Philip Kenneson has some helpful things to say about the relationship of worship and the rest of life in his contribution to the Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics. He challenges the notion that worship is a specifically religious activity, a view embodied in the modern assumption that the practices of worship "are routinely circumscribed not only physically by taking place in certain 'holy spaces,' but also intellectually and morally by finding their rightful place in the so-called 'religious sphere.' Thus, it is usually assumed that if the activity of worship is to have any bearing on life outside that place or sphere, it will need to be translated into the established discourses of those other spheres."

Kenneson appeals to the etymology of the English word "worship" ("to ascribe worth"), and notes that when worship is used in this sense all human gatherings have the character of worship: "Every human life is an embodied argument about what things are worth doing, who or what is worthy of attention, who or what is worthy of allegiance and sacrifice, and what projects or endeavors are worthy of human energies. In short, every human life is 'bent' toward something. Every human life is an act of worship."

Similarly, when human beings gather, they "inevitably presuppose and reinforce much about the shape, meaning, and purpose of the world that they understand themselves to inhabit. Indeed, all human gatherings are a kind of worship to the extent that they presuppose and reinforce certain ascriptions of worth. For this reason, human gatherings are inevitably formative, not least because such gatherings construct an imaginative landscape (a 'world') within which all future action and reflection upon it will take place. People come to haev a world as they gather together and shares stories about the shape and meaning of that world, as well as their place and role within it. People come to have a world as they gather together and engage in common practices that only 'make sense' within a world so understood. People come to have a world as the above activities presuppose, instill, and intensify certain desires and dispositions, and as certain virtues are cmmended and instilled by being requisite for flourishing in this kind of world. People come to have a world as the construct and maintain institutions that order and support ways of life that are congruent with the ways they understand the world and their place within it." A way of life in the sense Kenneson uses the phrase means "an entire way of rendering the world as a certain kind of inhabitable space in which people seek to dwell and flourish. For that reason, every way of life is inevitably a form of ascribing worth, a form of worship."

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, April 15, 2005 at 02:19 PM

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