God’s people must take care in how they worship God, for he has said, “Among those who are near me I will be sanctified, and before all the people I will be glorified” (Lev 10:3). May we be found faithful.

Communicators, especially those within the evangelical community, love to use alliteration. It can be a helpful literary tool for impressing the points of a sermon or other spoken or written work upon the minds of an audience. Then there are those times when forcing alliteration leads to some sticky messaging. Such is the case with the phrase “worship and the Word,” often used by church leaders to cleverly describe a gathering that contains music and preaching—“Join us this Sunday for worship and the Word!”
At least two things are problematic with this description. First, it creates a false dichotomy by equating worship with music, as if preaching is not worship. Second, such distinctions either elevate these items over all other elements of worship, or worse, limit worship to music and preaching, to the neglect of other biblically-ordained worship activities.
An appropriate understanding of these terms, however, does not create a dichotomy, but rather, unites worship with the Word. This union recognizes that the Word of God should regulate, provide, and inform the elements, shape, and substance of corporate worship.
The Word Regulates the Elements of Worship
The first step in exploring the marriage between worship and the Word is to determine exactly what elements should be included in corporate worship, which raises the question of whether God cares what we include or not. All can agree that what God forbids should be excluded, but much debate exists between including only that which God has commanded (the regulative principle of worship)1 or allowing anything that God has not forbidden (the normative principle of worship). Several arguments can be made for why the regulative principle is the most biblical conclusion. One such argument is found in the outcome of Nadab’s and Abihu’s attempts at worship in Leviticus 10:1–2:
Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it and laid incense on it and offered unauthorized fire before the Lord, which he had not commanded them. And fire came out from before the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord.
Previously, God had both initiated worship and commanded the instructions for worship, to which God’s people were obedient (Lev 8:1–4); yet here we see Nadab and Abihu initiating worship apart from God’s command. The error was not simply that they were worshiping in a way that God had forbidden, but that they had offered “unauthorized” worship, “which he had not commanded them.” In our worship, then, we should submit to only that which God has commanded or shown in his Word.
Because Christ’s sacrificial death fulfills old covenant worship practices, we specifically look to the New Testament for instruction in corporate worship. Here we find seven elements of worship:

Reading of Scripture (1 Tim 4:13)
Preaching (2 Tim 4:2)
Singing (Col 3:16; Eph 5:19)
Prayer (Matt 21:13; 1 Tim 2:1)
Giving (1 Cor 16:2)
Baptism (Matt 28:19)
The Lord’s Supper (1 Cor 11:26)

While we may have noble reasons for including other elements in worship, the best way we can be faithful to worshiping God as he desires is to limit our worship to that which he has revealed to us in his Word.
The Word Provides the Shape of Worship
Once we have determined what should be included in worship, we are then left with the task of putting the service in a particular order. Unlike the elements above, we do not have a biblically prescribed liturgy. However, we are instructed that our worship be orderly (1 Cor 14:26–40), and Scripture does reveal to us a common pattern, seen at a macro level (the whole of Scripture) and at micro levels (specific passages throughout Scripture). Consider Israel’s first service of worship:
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Written by R. Scott Clark |
Tuesday, August 24, 2021
How often do we all conduct our lives as if we lived in some sort of closed universe not actively upheld and sustained by the God who is, who spoke everything into being?

For a few months I have been thinking about a phrase I first encountered in 1995 when I was teaching an introductory course in theology at Wheaton. We were using Alister McGrath’s reader as the primary text for the class and he quoted Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45) as saying that, in Modernity, we must learn to live “etsi Deus non daretur” (as if God is not a given).
Bonhoeffer was trying to figure out how to be a Modern person and affirm Christianity in some sense.
Contra at least one recent evangelical rendering of Bonhoeffer, which follows a trend that has existed for some time of treating him as though he were educated in Moody Bible College rather than in the Universities of Tübingen and Berlin, Bonhoeffer did not hold the historic Christian faith. He was a Modernist, i.e., he accepted as a given the Enlightenment critique of the historic Christian faith and understanding of the world. What does that mean? It means, as one of my undergraduate profs said in 1979: “In the 18th century God went to the corner for a beer and never came back.”
Bonhoeffer, like Karl Barth and others, was trying to figure out how to be a Modern (Enlightened) person and affirm Christianity in some sense. As I understand him, Bonhoeffer was a dialectical theologian. He was proposing a kind of “death of God” theology and affirming a kind of belief in God simultaneously. This is the sort of thing dialectical theologians do.
Are Christians living “Etsi Deus Non Daretur” (As if God is Not a Given)?
The phrase etsi Deus non daretur comes to us from Hugo Grotius (1583–1645). He was a great Dutch polymath. He made contributions in biblical studies, legal theory, theology, and politics. He was one of the major figures in Dutch cultural and political life in the 17th century. His treatise, On The Law of War and Peace is still a basic text in international relations. He was also a Remonstrant and suspected of being a Socinian, i.e., a rationalist who rejected the essential Christian doctrines of the Trinity, the Deity of Christ, and the substitutionary atonement. This was perhaps because a number of Remonstrants did become Socinians so that the line between the two movements was blurred. It is also true, however, that Grotius wrote a treatise on the satisfaction of Christ to which the Socinian Crell responded. As I understand it, Grotius used the phrase etsi Deus non daretur to say that natural law would be in effect even if God were not assumed. Bonhoeffer took the phrase, mediated to him by German scholars such as Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) and put it to use in a rather different context (WWII and the Holocaust) and to a rather different end.
What has been troubling me about this phrase is the way it seems to describe so much of Modern and Late Modern life. How often do we Christians go about life as if we were practical agnostics, as if God were not a given? A major impetus of Modernity, i.e., the Enlightenment movements that swept across Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, was to reject the historic Christian understanding of the world, to assert the autonomy of the human intellect and will, and to relegate God to an unnecessary hypothesis. Evangelicals have adapted to Modernity (and Late Modernity) by adopting a God-of-the-gaps approach: whatever cannot be explained naturally they explain with the God hypothesis: the supposition that God exists.
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Peter Singer from Princeton argues that children up until the age of two do not possess full moral status, and parents would be able to choose to euthanize them.3 Michael Tooley, Professor Emeritus from Colorado University, pushes this to about five years old. Now that we have grown used to sacrificing the defenseless young, why not move on to the defenseless aged? The catchy new motto could be: Every grandma should be a wanted grandma! Culture has advanced itself back to infanticide and euthanasia. In Canada, euthanasia accounted for 3.3% of deaths in 2021, and they are currently wrestling with euthanasia for the mentally ill.

What are the signs of a culture advancing from basic survival mode to a developing culture? Is it an alphabet and written language? Is it farming and improved technologies for higher quality and more productive farming? Is it industrialization? Very likely, each of these or all these combined demonstrates advancement in culture. One of the things that never occurred to us as being an important sign of advancement was the practice of human sacrifice! That is until we read Study Points to Human Sacrifice in Europe. The article discusses strong evidence of human sacrifice in a period dated between 26,000 and 8,000 B.C., or what is called the Upper Paleolithic. The author, Heather Whipps, writes:
Investigating a collection of graves from the Upper Paleolithic (about 26,000 to 8,000 BC), archaeologists found several that contained pairs or even groups of people with rich burial offerings and decoration. Many of the remains were young or had deformities, such as dwarfism.
The diversity of the individuals buried together and the special treatment they received could be a sign of ritual killing, said Vincenzo Formicola of the University of Pisa, Italy.
What, then, do these findings indicate to Heather Whipps?
Human sacrifices have never been apparent in the archaeological record of Upper Paleolithic Europe, though they pop up much later among more complex ancient societies, such as the Egyptians. The Maya and the Aztec would also cut out hearts or toss victims from the tops of temples, historians say.
What sort of human beings were apparently being sacrificed? Well, it seems that a good portion of them were defenseless children and/or handicapped individuals and people with physical challenges or deformities. Some were pre-teens, and one of the allegedly sacrificed individuals had congenital dysplasia. Another adolescent was a dwarf. The common theme here is that these sacrifices involved children. Why were they sacrificed? The writer doesn’t really go into that and, incidentally, does not seem bothered overmuch by the findings. There was no horror reflected in the foregoing remarks. However, what is asserted is that the presence of human sacrifice indicates a more advanced society than the simple hunter/gatherer type society that was previously envisioned. The author conjectures:
The new findings could mean the hunter-gatherers were more advanced than once thought.
Even putting these two ideas “advanced civilization” and “child sacrifice” together is rather breathtaking in its callousness, is it not? Until quite recently at least, most of us would never have considered a society that practiced human sacrifice “advanced.” We would instead have called it barbaric.
If, however, child sacrifice does indicate an advanced civilization, then certainly Western culture has “advanced” quite rapidly in recent decades as it sheds the Christian worldview. It seems to us to be advancing ever more quickly today as godlessness holds increasing sway over our culture. Let’s take a quick look back and track our “advancement.”
American Feminist leader Victoria Woodhull, who in 1872 became the first woman to be nominated for president by a political party, stated:
Thus society, while expending millions in the care of incurables and imbeciles, takes little heed of or utterly ignores those laws by the study and obedience of which such human abortions might have been prevented from cumbering society with their useless and unwelcome presence. Grecian and Roman civilizations were, it is true, deficient in the gentler virtues, the excess of which in our day is hindering the progress of the race rather than helping or ennobling it. They, by crushing out the diseased and imperfect plants in the garden of humanity, attained to a vigor and physical development, which has never been equated since. And in so doing they were entirely in accord with nature, whose mandate is inexorable, that the “fittest” only shall be permitted to live and propagate. She is a very prodigal in her waste of individual life, in order that the species be without spot of blemish.
Not so our modern civilization, which rather pets its abortions and weaklings, and complacently permits them to procreate another race of fools and pigmies as inane and useless as themselves.1
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