Our Bounden Duty?
Sabbath-Keeping, the Virtue of Religion, and the Duty to Attend Public Worship
I have been travelling for the past few weeks out in the American West, primarily spending time in Rocky Mountain and Glacier National Parks (hence the long delay between posts - my apologies!). I found myself in Babb, MT, on the east side of Glacier National Park, a few Sundays ago. There was only one church around, a little Roman Catholic mission supported by the parish of the town about 45 minutes away. When I dutifully took the dirt road up the hill to the church that Sunday morning, I was surprised but pleased to find a few dozen people, almost all clearly vacationers, waiting for the priest to arrive from town and unlock the door. These people made the decision to spend their Sunday morning not enjoying the glorious mountains but in a little country church, surrounded by strangers, participating in a liturgy not marked by any particular distinction and sitting through a difficult-to-follow homily. The more I reflected on this, the more moving I found it. I don’t mean to exaggerate their accomplishment or mine; surely attending the Sunday service while on vacation is no great feat! But for all the Protestant polemics against Roman Catholic legalism, I appreciated that among my fellow worshippers, the old idea of the Sunday obligation still evidently held some power. They showed up to attend upon the public worship of God.
I worry that in many Protestant circles, both mainline and evangelical, we have lost any sense of public worship as a significant Christian duty, deforming our understanding of the Christian life. At the risk of trading in anecdotes, I could name a good number of Christians, including deeply devout and committed ones, who simply do not see Sunday worship as obligatory. This is true even among our clergy and those preparing for ordination. I was surprised during my time in seminary to find how many of my classmates did not attend a church on Sundays, and there are a number of clergy of my acquaintance who are quite open about not attending worship on Sundays off. The point is not to shame any of these people for laxity. Rather, it is to point out that these are Christians who take their faith seriously, and yet do not see Sunday worship as a Christian responsibility. How did this happen?
One rather telling sign of this deformation, I believe, comes in contemporary treatments of the place in the Bible where traditional Protestant catechesis located the obligation of public worship: the commandment to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. To fulfill this commandment, early modern Protestant catechisms and devotional manuals argued, required not only resting from labor but attending to the public worship of God and hearing God’s Word proclaimed. There were (and remain) significant differences in, say, Lutheran and Reformed understandings of the duties of Sabbath observance, and considerable divisions within the Church of England on the subject. But (to cite a few of the most important) Luther’s Catechisms, the Heidelberg and Westminster Catechisms, and Nowell’s Catechism all agree that keeping this commandment requires faithful, reverent attendance at public worship Sunday by Sunday. It’s difficult to exaggerate the ubiquity of this understanding of the commandment’s meaning, justified with careful exegetical work on the relationship between Christian and Jewish Sabbath observance. Protestant divinity was clear: the Ten Commandments, as applied to Christians, include a solemn obligation to attend public worship of God on Sundays.
Today, one still hears a great deal about the Sabbath and Sabbath-keeping in Christian circles. But in my experience, anyway, its meaning has been transformed. It is no longer primarily about active obligations of religion, neither attendance at public worship nor private devotion and good works. Rather, we hear a great deal about the need to rest, to cast aside external obligations and practice self-care. We need to be reminded, we are told (truly enough!), that our value does not rest in constant productivity. We were not made to be constantly working. God wishes us to delight in times of recreation. And thus God commands us to rest. Indeed, in some cases the Sabbath is dissociated with Sundays entirely, turned into an abstract commandment for God-ordained R&R. Ministers, for example, will often talk about taking a day of Sabbath other than Sundays, since Sundays are work days for them. This isn’t just a matter of clergy practice, either; the Saturday collect at Morning Prayer in the 1979 BCP seems to associate the sabbath with Saturday, a “day of rest” preceding “the service of [God’s] sanctuary” on Sunday. The Sabbath, on this contemporary account, is about our rest, whether on Sundays or not. In this commandment, God commands us to rest that we might be refreshed, and as a sign to the world that our hope is in God and not our own efforts. The commandment doesn’t seem to have much to do with public worship at all.
Now, this is not necessarily all bad. As Christians proclaiming a Gospel of grace in a culture addicted to associating value with productivity, we should indeed endorse and practice rest and recreation, including on Sundays! Indeed, I have written in defense of leisure, clerical and otherwise, in the second issue of The Hour. I have no desire to hold up a caricatured version of grey, joyless Reformed Sabbaths as the Christian ideal. But all the same, if you spend any time with premodern devotional manuals, the difference is quite striking. Even non-Puritan Anglicans who rejected strict Sabbatarianism were quite clear that Sunday, the Christian Sabbath, was primarily for public worship along with private devotion and good works; Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living provides one example among many. We have lost our forebears’ understanding of the meaning of keeping the Sabbath, and it seems to me that we have not fully reckoned with the consequences of that loss.
But this change is not only one in biblical exegesis. It is, I believe, also a loss of an understanding of worship as God’s due. This is to say, our conception of God, of the God-humanity relationship, and indeed of worship itself, no longer has room for worship as the obligatory human response to God. If you’ll permit me, a brief technical excursus into the thought of Thomas Aquinas will prove helpful in describing what I mean. In Thomas’ terms, what we have lost is a a thick conception of the virtue of religion (see ST II-ii 81). For Thomas, religion is the virtue which governs the relationship of the human being to God, falling under the category of justice. Justice in the broadest sense is rendering to others their due (ST II-ii 58); religion is the virtue by which we render to God the reverence we owe him. God is owed reverence by virtue of his creation, preservation, and redemption of his creatures, and this reverence is fittingly expressed in worship both private and public. Praise and worship are, for Thomas - as for so many others - what God is owed, not because God is vain and needs to be flattered but rather because of who God is, and who we are in relationship to him. The external practices of religion, including public worship, are not primarily for or about us, but enable us to exercise the virtue of religion, rightly relating ourselves as creatures to the creator, redeemed to the redeemer, servants to a master, children to a father, and so forth. Public worship is, simply put, a moral obligation owed to God.
Against Thomas’ account, then, we are too often accustomed to see gathering for worship as something that is primarily concerned with our benefit (community, feeling ‘fed’, receiving the Eucharist, etc.) rather than what we owe to God. The language of the old Anglican Eucharistic prayer, that worship and in particular the Holy Communion is “our bounden duty and service”, no longer makes much sense. In this framework, public worship is seen at best as fuel for the actual stuff of Christian discipleship, associated with what happens outside church doors. At worst, it is becomes another quasi-therapeutic exercise concerned above all with meeting the felt needs of congregants, or at least what ministers and worship leaders imagine those needs to be. I do not, of course, mean to suggest that public worship has nothing to do with meeting the felt needs of congregants or providing inspiration and comfort for the week ahead. Far from it! But if this becomes the primary motivation behind Christian worship gatherings, we have gone badly awry.
Of course, it is true that God does not need our worship. God, who rejoices in himself with a perfect joy for all eternity, does not lose a measure of felicity should you choose to sleep in on Sunday mornings. Given this, there is an important sense in which worship is indeed for us, public worship very much included. We need to hear the Word, to have forgiveness of sins proclaimed to us in Jesus’ name, to feast upon Christ’s Body and Blood in the Eucharist. And it is good for us to be together, to enjoy the benefits of Christian community, to be united in praise and prayer and song. Thomas himself is clear that we worship God “for our own sake, because by the very fact that we revere and honor God, our mind is subjected to Him; wherein its perfection consists” (ST II-ii 81.7). But as Derek Olsen notes in his excellent Inwardly Digest, if our (correct) understanding that worship functions to bring us to Christ leads us to see worship as primarily about formation and only secondarily about praise and adoration, something has gone terribly awry (see Chapter 1 - I’m working off a Kindle edition so cannot provide precise page numbers). And this, I fear, is exactly what has happened in too many of our communities. Public worship, understood as important primarily for its payoff in our lives rather than about what we owe God, becomes optional. On this account, if worship isn’t feeding you in a particular season, if finding a place to worship while away from your home congregation is stressful, if you simply need a break - well, why not skip? Indeed, on this understanding, skipping public worship in these circumstances makes perfect sense. And yet how far we are from Thomas here, or from any sense of worship being related to what we owe God!
The point of this little essay is not to make you feel bad for missing church. Nor is it to deny that there are good warrants for nonattendance in some situations or that contemporary life often makes regular churchgoing difficult. Indeed, it seems to me that a Christian critique of contemporary capitalism must attend to the ways that the arrangement of work makes it difficult for many people to exercise the virtue of religion and render God his due in Sunday worship (but that’s another post…). However, what I have sought to do is to describe some shifts in Biblical interpretation and in our conception of our relationship to God and the nature of worship which make the old idea of an obligation of public worship nigh-unintelligible. And while I cannot pretend to have offered an extensive defense of the traditional exegesis of the Decalogue or of Thomas’ account of religion, I hope I have presented both in sufficiently compelling a light to encourage further examination. Our forebears believed they had very good reasons indeed to see regular attendance at Sunday worship as a solemn religious obligation. We shouldn’t be so quick to write them off.