Sublime

Commenting on Kuyper’s proposals for liturgical reform, Wolterstorff observes that, for Kuyper, “various parts of the liturgy, and the liturgy as a whole, are to be seen as ‘an interaction between God and the congregation.’ Liturgy is action; and the actions are not just human actions and not just divine actions but ‘an interaction between God and

The starting-point of every motive in religion is God and not Man. Man is the instrument and means, God alone is here the goal, the point of departure and the point of arrival, the fountain, from which the waters flow, and at the same time, the ocean into which they finally return.

our God is a God of detail.

In other words, in much popular modern Christian thought we have made a three-layered mistake. We have Platonized our eschatology (substituting “souls going to heaven” for the promised new creation) and have therefore moralized our anthropology (substituting a qualifying examination of moral performance for the biblical notion of the human vocation

Psalm 8, David marvels at God’s creation and the fact that man is given dominion over it.

For a wise articulation of this point, see Michael Horton, Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014).

One way of understanding this has been proposed, on the basis of detailed study of comparative material in the ancient Near East, by John Walton in his remarkable book The Lost World of Genesis One. Walton insists that in that ancient world anyone reading about something being built by a god in six days or stages would know that it was basically a

Psalm 16 feels more accessible after we’ve walked closely with David.

Liturgy is the way we learn to “put on” Christ (Col. 3:12–16).