Conclusion: Defining and Imagining Gospel-Centered Worship in the Twenty-First Century
WE BEGAN OUR JOURNEY by drilling down to the bedrock of Paul’s theology. From there we traced upward through the layers of reception history, and back to the surface of Cranmer’s theology, navigating the thick jungles of his liturgical method while ever mindful of the bedrock into which its roots are sunk. To summarize it all: what we learn from Paul is that the gospel is clearly proclaimed when faith and works are distinguished; what we learn from Cranmer is how thoroughly and effectively this can function when applied to the form and content of worship services, including in our meaning of “content” the ceremonies, practices, architecture, and ritual tools. As we peered over the Archbishop’s shoulder we observed him, time and again, making editorial decisions that pointed to that chief evangelical concern. Cranmer’s method gave us a vision for how worship services can be shaped so that they are gospel-centered. We determined therefore that remaining faithful to the gospel in worship is not simply filling our content with the good news of Jesus Christ but also being “gospel-grammared” in the way that content is delivered.
With Paul’s vision, Cranmer teaches us that worship services need to operate like an evangelical gold-pan to sift faith from works so that only the pure gold of the gospel remains as faith alone remains. The gospel’s clarity is manifested in and by this sifting work. This critical filtering happens concretely for Cranmer as the “I” is negated and Christ is exalted in every aspect of worship—from its structure, to its words, ceremonies, aesthetics, devotional piety, and preaching. We now turn to the question of whether Cranmer’s method has anything of value to share with those of us who some five centuries later strive to plan and lead gospel-centered worship services. Certainly the answer is yes, but first let us pave the runway.
DEFINING CRANMER’S VISION FOR GOSPEL-CENTERED WORSHIP
We arrive at this admittedly narrow and somewhat technical definition of gospel-centered worship: Gospel-centered worship is worship that operates according to the grammatical rules of justification by faith alone in order that the good news of the finished work of Jesus Christ might be proclaimed as it is set apart from non-gospels. Sola fide does this work particularly through distinguishing faith from works and law from gospel. For this vision of gospel-centered worship to be thorough, these distinctions must be made on two levels: the liturgy’s form and the liturgy’s content. And with regard to the latter, we must recognize that liturgical content includes not only words, but their accompanying actions, assisting tools, aesthetic surroundings, and devotional piety.
In contrast to this definition’s narrowness, its application can be as broad and diverse as the church is broad and diverse. This is because gospel-centrality in this definition is less concerned with the expression of the form and content of worship and far more concerned with the grammar that norms how that form and content is conveyed. To be clear, as we have observed, the expressions of worship services (their aesthetics, ceremonies, rituals, tools, and words) are not neutral and are subject to the rules of the grammar insofar as what they communicate either clarifies or obscures the distinctions drawn by sola fide. But the application of the grammar’s rules in any culture need not flatten that culture’s expression. Therefore, this understanding of gospel-centered worship is culturally pliable even as it offers a transcultural liturgical logic for relating to God in corporate worship.
This exposes an irony particularly in the history of Anglican worship, which often has a reputation among Protestant expressions for being the most rigid and unchangeable in its language and accompanying liturgical forms and ceremonies. Thankfully, with Anglicanism’s globalization in the twentieth century along with the growth of its vitality and influence in non-Western contexts, enough pressure has been applied to the hardened layers of its form and expression that emerging fissures may indeed break open new life. But talks of inculturation can have the tendency to ignore, or worse come at the expense of, the centrality of the gospel’s transcultural liturgical logic. In fact, modern liturgical theologians who emphasize the need for Anglican liturgical inculturation often argue in such a way that makes the reader wonder whether there are any normative aspects of Anglican liturgy to be inculturated. There appears to be so much emphasis on theology as something locally created and “culturally constructed” and on the fact that “claims to universality [of Anglican liturgical theology] must be re-examined,” that one often struggles to find any universalities identifiable after such a process of deconstruction. This book has argued that the universal norm of liturgical theology requiring preservation and inculturation is the same universal norm of the Scriptures—the gospel of Jesus Christ. Again, this gospel is the liturgy’s transcultural, universal logic, and for this reason Cranmer’s labor and insights here apply well beyond the walls of Anglicanism and have implications for the worship of all of Christ’s holy, catholic, and apostolic church.
We have a powerful example of this logic at work (in a non-Western context and predating the English Reformation) right in the middle of the Scriptures in that famous showdown between Elijah and the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18:20-40). Though the setting is not a formal worship service, we have set before us two ways of approaching and appealing to God—indeed, two worship ceremonies offering two competing liturgical theologies. The prophets of Baal, on the one hand, offer exhaustingly long prayers, “from morning until noon” (v. 26), and progressively more urgent pleas of sincerity, culminating in cutting themselves to the point of shedding blood (v. 28). The idea here is not simply that the prophets serve a deaf god. The underlying logic of the way they approach Baal—the grammar—is a showcase of works-righteousness: “Baal, look how serious we are! Look how surrendered and sold out we are!” Not unlike some sectors of evangelical worship today, what we have is a picture of a community of faith believing that if they present themselves in all their mustered faithfulness, then god will act and “bring the fire down.” Elijah, on the other hand, offers a brief and simple prayer (vv. 36-37), going so far as to douse the sacrificial altar with water in order to clarify, “If the fire consumes this sacrifice, there’s no way of construing this as being caused by anything I’ve done.” In other words, Elijah verbally and ceremonially declares a firm, “not I.” Instead of proving himself to God, the prophet chooses to recount and remember God’s past deeds as the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel” (v. 36), appealing not to his own faith, but to God’s very promises and faithfulness. In short, Elijah approaches God by distinguishing faith and works, not allowing any question that the victory is the Lord’s alone.
Inspired by the free gift made possible by faith alone: this is what we are after in gospel-centered worship. It can be expressed as Elijah on a mountain, Israelites in a temple, medieval Londoners in a cathedral, or twenty-first-century Chinese Christians in a living room. Still, the above definition and the idea of “liturgical logic” are yet quite theoretical and abstract, as we have taken the vat of Cranmer’s work and boiled out its essence. But Cranmer’s labors offer us a way back into the concrete details of how to pursue gospel-centered worship in our own contexts in the twenty-first century.
APPLYING CRANMER’S VISION FOR GOSPEL-CENTERED WORSHIP
If we were to summarize Cranmer’s objective in a single sentence, it would be this: the Archbishop was attempting to create a liturgy whose chief objective was to create hearing aids for the gospel. To unpack this, we somewhat artificially broke down Cranmer’s comprehensive work into observable portions in order to make sense of the data and more systematically argue a cumulative case. We must admit that analysis through those discrete categories may be just as antiseptic and technical as the definition for gospel-centered worship offered above. It appears that Cranmer was operating far more out of an instinctive, subterranean grammar, and far less from a prefabricated agenda with overt strategies and objectives. Nevertheless, breaking down Cranmer’s moves allows us to employ similar analytical categories to apply constructively to worship today. Cranmer offers us five spheres in which to explore the gospel-centrality of our worship and therefore five ways we can evaluate how our services function as “hearing aids” for the gospel: (1) service-structures; (2) theological terminology; (3) rituals, actions, and architecture; (4) devotional piety; and (5) preaching.
1. Analyzing our service-structures. The grammar of sola fide presses us to think carefully about the ordering of content. Who God is and what he has done must precede and set the stage for any expression of self-offering. If we are serious about the clarity of the gospel, language of self-surrender, self-consecration, self-giving, self-sacrifice must most often be placed after language about how God has given himself in the person and work of Jesus Christ. It is not that there is nothing to say about “me” at the beginning of a worship service. On the contrary, justification by faith alone urges us that there is something very specific to say: “Not I.” Before the face of God Almighty, these are words we can pray: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” (Lk 18:13). Before the face of God Almighty, these are the things we can offer: our sinfulness, our brokenness, our need. Songs, prayers, and liturgies which construct this order of events—(a) God’s glory, attributes, and law; (b) our inadequacy, sin, and need; (c) God’s provision of Jesus’ life and death for sinners; (d) our grateful response of self-offering—whether they be in one liturgical arc or in cycles as Cranmer did it, can rightly be said to be “in step with the truth of the gospel” (Gal 2:14), charged with “the power of God” (Rom 1:16; 1 Cor 1:18), and “filled with the Spirit” as “the word of Christ dwells in you richly” (Eph 5:18; Col 3:16).
This is where we must reckon with contemporary attempts to encourage a reappropriation of the “gospel-story” or the “narrative of the gospel” in our worship services. Such voices, including my own, can give the perhaps unintended impression that merely enacting and retelling the story of redemptive history, in and of itself, will ensure the gospel-centrality of our worship services. Though this is a necessary step, Cranmer would urge us further. We must recognize within that broad shape the subtleties that may undercut the story’s clear proclamation of the gospel. It is one thing to tell and participate in the story of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation in the liturgy. It is another thing to hear the gospel for oneself and receive that Word by faith alone, apart from works. This is why Cranmer’s voice is so important in our contemporary attempts at liturgical retrieval. Merely reviving ancient liturgical forms and structures that are more gospel-shaped does not ensure that the gospel will be clearly proclaimed or that the gospel’s logic has been faithfully employed. These retrieved liturgies must speak the story by constructing its sentences according to the grammar of sola fide. If not, we may be in danger of utilizing gospel-shaped liturgies which take back with the left hand the very gospel that has been given with the right.
Here we can share a hopeful aspiration with the liturgical movement of the past century—namely, an achievable way forward for liturgical unity across ecumenical lines. The influence of Dix’s The Shape of the Liturgy gave positive momentum to the idea that adherence to the structure of the ancient eucharistic liturgy, despite variance in the actual verbiage, could be a richer way to give liturgical expression to the unity of the one holy catholic and apostolic church. Though Dix’s conclusion of what that structure actually is has been weighed and found wanting, the principle is sound: structural fidelity may be the most important path toward doxological unity. Where the argument of this book diverges from those in the liturgical movement is in the structure itself proposed. The liturgical movement chiefly values antiquity and consensus in practice, hence the ongoing quest for the oldest eucharistic forms and a tracing of their patterns of commonality across the centuries. This book argues that beneath those liturgies are the operations of the living and active Word, moving across church history by the power of the Holy Spirit to lead believers to worship the Father by Christ alone, by grace alone, through faith alone. And these operations necessitate and propel a structure more primal and fundamental than the iterations of any generation’s and culture’s liturgical expression. Cranmer’s vision offers a helpful way forward toward unity well beyond the mere borders of Anglicanism, which provides contextual freedom within the blessed boundaries of the gospel.
2. Analyzing our theological terminology. The grammar of sola fide creates in worship planners, worship leaders, songwriters, liturgists, and pastors a strong sensitivity to words and phrases and how their use may either promote or undermine the gospel. We become experts not just in vocabulary itself, but in the effects of words on hearers. Cranmer urges us to be sensitive to at least eight things in the words we employ in our singing, praying, preaching, and liturgical leadership. First, we become aware of the use of conditional language. We pay attention to how words like if are used in connection with statements or phrases about God’s grace and mercy. Paraphrasing one worship song I heard not long ago: “Your grace is mine, if I only believe.” In one sense, theologically, this is soundly biblical. The only “condition” of God’s grace is the non-work of faith to believe it is true. But even here, we are compelled by the gospel to think through what might be the possible effects of these words. Conditional phrases such as these could turn faith into a work. We are concerned to leave the grace of God unconditioned precisely because, as the grammar insists, it is in the gospel’s unconditionality that the good news is clearly proclaimed. A conditioned gospel is no gospel at all. We are aware of even how potentially unconditioned phrases might be heard as conditions, such as “Come to us, O Lord, as we put our faith in you.” One interpretation of this might certainly be that in the act of expressing God’s gift of faith, he comes to us. This is true enough. But this is not the only possible interpretation. Even if we do not change every word or phrase, the grammar makes us sensitive to both actual and potential conditionality.
Second, we would do well to take a cue from Cranmer by employing passive constructions in speaking about ourselves outside of our sinfulness. When we come to the point in our services where we are offering or committing ourselves to God in grateful response, even there, the grammar of sola fide might urge us to employ verbs in the passive form: “Make us to be holy,” “cause us to be committed,” “move us to keep your word,” “guide us to be faithful,” “turn our hearts to your Word,” “help us want to walk in your ways.” Whether these constructions are passive grammatically (“to be [adjective]”) or conceptually (“move us to [verb]”), they do the work of sola fide by insisting that the action is God’s alone to do. This is how the grammar of justification would urge us to construct prayers that pertain to our obedience, work, consecration, discipleship, offering, surrender, laying ourselves down, and following Jesus.
Third and similarly, even our active verbs and actions can be nestled in language of the work of God. We recall Cranmer’s liberal use of phrases like “through the merits of Jesus Christ.” Prepositional phrases are key tools for surrounding statements of our action with the work of God: “By the inspiration of your Holy Spirit,” “in your grace,” “by your power,” “in response to your work,” “in gratitude for your faithfulness,” “through your mercy.” Phrases of God’s activity that precede verbs of our action are likewise useful: “Fill us with your Spirit to [verb],” “strengthen us to [verb],” “empower us to [verb].”
Fourth, we can with Cranmer add even more clarity to our songs, prayers, and proclamation through the employment of terms which qualify actions—whether divine or human—in a categorically exclusive way. Cranmer here reminds us of powerful words like “alone” and adverbs like “only,” “solely,” “wholly,” and “completely.” These words can be added onto many of the kinds of phrases offered above: “By your power alone,” “only through your grace,” “as we trust in you alone,” “only as we rely on you,” “while we depend on you solely,” “wholly by your mercy,” “through your finished work completely.” Terms such as these add theologically emphatic punctuation to phrases already charged with the expression of sola fide.
Fifth, we are urged to apply language of our sin and weakness liberally throughout all points of the service. Whereas twentieth-century liturgical scholarship largely sought to erase from Cranmer’s liturgy all negative anthropology in order to highlight the dignity of humanity and not cast the whole of worship in too much of a “penitential” light, Cranmer would have us see statements of sin and weakness not as extreme but as a gospel-centered way of merely “calling a thing what it is.” To be committed to the grammar of sola fide means a perpetual acknowledgment that indwelling sin remains and self-righteousness is ever a threat for the Christian. Therefore, songs, prayers, and proclamation highlighting our frailty, unworthiness, weakness, need, and dependence throughout the service pave the gospel’s runway. Indeed, so-called penitential liturgies and expressions such as Cranmer’s should not be relegated to certain seasons of the church year which call for humility but should characterize every Christian gathering. As Luther’s first thesis of 1517 states: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’ (Matt 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” Worship planners and leaders serious about the clarity of the gospel help us to wear our sin on our sleeve, not for the purpose of morbid self-loathing or downplaying human dignity, but that the powerful grace of Christ might be on display in most vivid fashion, in unshared spotlight.
Sixth, we can transpose statements of our work for God into statements of Christ’s work for us. Taking some editorial cues from Cranmer, we can analyze our songs and prayers similarly to how he transposed the Collects. Such work can be useful both as an analytical tool for existing songs and prayers and as a grid to think through future songwriting and prayer composition. As an exercise, we could look at a transposition of a classic evangelical invitation hymn such as Judson W. Van de Venter’s “I Surrender All” (see 
I SURRENDER ALL
CHRIST SURRENDERED ALL
All to Jesus I surrender,
All to him I freely give;
I will ever love and trust him,
In his presence daily live.
All, Lord Jesus, you surrendered,
All to me you freely gave;
All my sin you bravely shouldered,
All for me, my life to save.
I surrender all, I surrender all;
All to thee, my blessed Savior,
I surrender all.
Christ surrendered all, Christ surrendered all;
All for me and my salvation,
Christ surrendered all.
All to Jesus I surrender,
Make me, Savior, wholly thine;
Let me feel thy Holy Spirit,
Truly know that thou art mine.
All, Lord Jesus, you surrendered,
All your rights you left behind;
Trading might for humble weakness;
For the good of all mankind.
All to Jesus I surrender,
Humbly at his feet I bow,
Worldly pleasures all forsaken;
Take me, Jesus, take me now.
All, Lord Jesus, you surrendered,
All for me, your enemy;
Worldly pleasures I was seeking,
Still, Lord, you were seeking me.
All your life is all my merit;
All Your death my ransom paid.
Now I feel no condemnation,
Just a love that cannot fade.
Figure 8.1. “I Surrender All” transposed
We could look at another common invitation hymn, “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus” (see
I HAVE DECIDED TO FOLLOW JESUS
GOD HAS DECIDED
I have decided to follow Jesus . . .
No turning back, no turning back.
God has decided to save my lost soul . . .
No turning back, no turning back
Though none go with me, I still will follow . . .
No turning back, no turning back.
Christ has decided to die in my place . . .
No turning back, no turning back.
The world behind me, the cross before me . . .
No turning back, no turning back.
The Holy Spirit now lives inside me . . .
No turning back, no turning back.
The love of God will forever hold me . . .
He won’t let go, he won’t let go;
No turning back, no turning back.
Figure 8.2. “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus” transposed
We should keep in mind that the above transpositions are not criticisms of the power or truthfulness of the original songs, or even of their appropriateness and value in certain liturgical moments. Nor are we saying that the transposed versions of the songs are necessarily better. Rather, they simply serve as examples of the kinds of creative work that can be done when we develop sensitivities along the lines of the grammar of sola fide. On the ground in local churches, transposition work of this sort might more often be of lines and phrases, rather than whole songs. The above examples can also guide us in new endeavors of song- and prayer-writing, which is almost certainly pastorally preferable to tinkering with songs (as I admittedly have done here) which may be imprinted deeply in a person’s nostalgia or significant past experience.
Seventh, in the moments of the proclamation of the gospel itself, we can employ the language of direct address to punctuate the certitude of the good news. Though “there is therefore now no condemnation” (Rom 8:1) is certainly a strong, bald declaration of the gospel, Cranmer would have us be aware that, in the liturgical moment, there is a clarifying power in employment of the second personal pronoun: “There is therefore now no condemnation for you”; “Your sins are forgiven”; “Take and eat this, in remembrance that Christ died for you”; “Drink this in remembrance that Christ’s blood was shed for you”; “May God have mercy on you, pardon and deliver you . . . confirm and strengthen you . . . and bring you to everlasting life.”
Eighth and finally, we might follow Cranmer’s lead regarding the sheer quantity of talk about “me” and what “I” do versus that of what God does in Christ. The grammar of sola fide insists that the power of faith, transformation, and growth lies in the yes about Jesus (“but Christ”) which follows the no about us (“not I”). If the power lies in that word about Christ, then frequency and emphasis really do matter. It would be a healthy exercise to quantify all talk of Christ and his finished work alongside the talk of our offerings, response, and obedience in order to see where the scales tip. Convinced that our good works will flow from the good news, we want to load our services, as Cranmer did, with the language of God’s love, grace, and mercy.
Some may view the analyses in this section as excessive, exaggerated, or splitting theological hairs—a hypercriticism of words and phrases. Turning our attention to the modern worship movement, however, Cranmer would urge us toward such critical reflection. Historians Lim Swee Hong and Lester Ruth have well outlined the liturgical theology embedded in the history of teaching and practice of the contemporary praise and worship movement. Coded into the DNA of modern worship is a particular theological orientation, the heart of which is built on an Old Testament sacrificial typology that emphasizes the worshiper’s ability to “produce or release the presence” of God through the fervent expression of their “sacrifice of praise,” which God would eventually “come and consume” when the praise reaches a certain level. Several early teachers would call this typological worship pattern the “divine order.” Needless to say, this ordo—this offering first a sacrifice of praise in order to release the powerful presence of God—does not speak the Christian faith according to the grammar of sola fide. And downstream from such an order, over the generational branching of successive tributaries of contemporary and modern worship, comes a steady flow of songwriting emphasizing the worshiper’s fervent action—surrender, sacrifice, laying down, wholeheartedness, commitment, zeal, decision. Of course all these concepts are biblical and in their isolation find linguistic parallels in the Psalms and elsewhere. But in practice along its reproductive history, as the family tree of contemporary praise and worship has branched out across regions, traditions, and denominations, such songwriting emphases remain coded with that early DNA, and the deep and complex formational power of such coding requires more than superficial analyses and solution-offering that are often put forward in response to the “problems” of modern worship. What we are exposing is that the grammar of sola fide may be helpful to frame conversations of reforming the lex orandi of modern worship, if indeed modern worship can take seriously its own liturgical-theological genealogy.
3. Analyzing our rituals, actions, and architecture. In the twenty-first century, it is mostly in sectors of Anglicanism (and other areas of mainline Protestantism) where we find issues regarding ritual, action, and architecture potentially obscuring the clarity of the gospel in a fashion similar to that of the sixteenth century. In those places, it just may be that Cranmer’s perspective needs no translation but can speak for itself just as well and as plainly as it did five hundred years ago. That said, there are a host of ways that Cranmer’s analysis of his time might speak into the evangelical present in North America and beyond. Let us explore five possible avenues of inquiry.
First, we might examine how many of the current rituals associated with modern worship produce a similar kind of congregational passivity that the rituals of medieval worship did. We remember that in the sixteenth century, the passive laity was contrasted with a ritualistically dense and performative spectacle “up front.” The job of the average worshiper was to remain silent, to pray and ponder in an individualistic manner, all the while staying in tune with what was happening front and center. Perhaps, then, with Cranmer, we can evaluate those elements of our modern worship services which may be prone to excluding or minimizing the participation of the people—everything from songs in singable keys, to downplaying “special music,” to minimizing the featuring of highly performative, virtuosic music, drama, and other art.
Closely related is a second observation about architecture. The goal in the sixteenth century was to minimize the distinction between the congregation and the “platform.” Sola fide causes us to step back and ask how today’s platforms, stages, and chancels elevate and separate a unique set of ministers for the work of worship. Similarly, as we think about modern worship space design, we become aware of the way that similar structures in concert venues naturally lend themselves to passive receptivity. We become sensitive to the ways people might walk into a space which looks like a concert venue—elevated stage, sophisticated sound system, multimedia production, stacked lighting—and understandably slip into dispositions that one would feel and engage if one were at a concert, whether rock, jazz, pop, or classical. Perhaps it is not that we must totally do away with these helpful aesthetic means, but we become sensitive to their liabilities. Here we are careful not to let bias cloud objectivity. Many traditionalists eschew the rock stylings of multicolored lights, haze, and droned ambient music, not recognizing that the church in generations past used similar means of stained glass, incense, and melismatic chant to excite the senses and turn people Godward. Sola fide encourages us to be less concerned with the aesthetic means in and of themselves and more aware of how they and the formational contexts they engender either strengthen or deter from the proclamation and apprehension of the gospel. I find helpful here David Taylor’s language about how “church architecture inescapably opens up and closes down possibilities for the formation of Christ’s body on earth.” Especially over time, certain kinds of spaces “open up” or “close down” people’s understanding of God, themselves, worship, mission, and more. For our purposes, we have observed that certain architecture carries that same potentiality, in a narrower sense, with regard to our apprehension of and formation in the gospel. Cranmer gives us cues to ask fresh questions about our spaces, especially when their “material fixity” may permanently send messages or direct formation away from a clear gospel.
Third, perhaps Cranmer’s work with liturgical nomenclature has something to say to us today. We might think specifically here about how the relatively new title of “worship leader” might not analogously raise similar concerns as “priest.” The term, though ubiquitous and probably here to stay, requires a caveat lest we begin to think that a worship leader is someone who mediates the presence of God for the people of God or somehow stands in the place of Jesus, who himself alone is given Scripture’s closest parallel to the title of worship leader—τῶν ἁγίων λειτουργὸς, “minister in the holy places,” or “liturgist in the sanctuary” (Heb 8:2). Similarly, certain sectors of evangelicalism are known to use the adjective anointed to describe leaders who appear to have a unique charisma in being able to guide groups of people into special encounters with God. The term, quite literally loaded with messianic overtones, might betray some of the ways we have allowed our leaders in worship to serve in mediatorial roles that obscure the access we have to the Father through Christ by the Spirit. Worship leader Jeremy Riddle reveals some of this problem when he writes:
Many times, I have sensed a strange, inappropriate relationship beginning to form between worship leaders and the people they’re leading. I’ve observed when people become increasingly pulled into the tractor beam of someone’s personal charisma, and when that leader begins to feed on that (I believe mostly unknowingly), they begin to lead people into intimacy with “themselves” instead of intimacy with [God].
Riddle is exposing an irony in Protestant modern worship leadership—there has been a circling back to medieval Christianity’s worship leadership as priestly mediation between God and his people.
Fourth, we might recognize that our evangelical “special ceremonies” are also in need of conformity to the gospel. We might think, for instance, of how for funerals in Cranmer’s day the liability existed in prayers for the dead and masses for souls in purgatory. Where are our liabilities? It tends to be commonplace today at funerals for people to spend considerable amounts of time eulogizing the deceased, which often involves recounting their virtues in sentimental and idealized ways. The question is not whether this practice is edifying or comforting to the bereaved family members—indeed, it can be. Such testimonies are therapeutic and full of comfort. The question is whether, in a public worship service, they serve the gospel of Christ’s righteousness. Especially in death, Cranmer would urge us to ask why we gather. If there is any time to attest to and proclaim the meritorious death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, it is at the hour of death. We might ask similarly about how other unbiblical national “ceremonies” have crept into our public services. For those in my country, could it be that the Hallmark calendar (Mother’s Day, Father’s Day) and the national holidays of the United States (the Sunday nearest Independence Day, Veterans Day) take our eyes off the international and adoptive family that Christ’s blood has ransomed us into, and of which we are “very members incorporate”?
Fifth, we might with Cranmer inquire into the “priestly ceremonial” of modern pastoral and worship leadership. Could our platforms and positioning front and center have similar (even if unintended) mediatorial messaging as a priest standing between the altar and the people? Could our musicianship as vocal leaders be so superb, could our vocal flourishes or instrumental stylings be so beautiful and virtuosic, that they shut the mouths of the singing congregation which instead stands in awe of the spectacle of the great performers up front, who are doing the work on behalf of the people? Though this draws an admittedly ambiguous and culturally relative line, perhaps those of us who lead people with our countenance and emotional expression could be more aware of the boundary between helpful emotional shepherding through example and overly intensified expressions of personal worship (however authentic they may be) which cause people to marvel at us rather than the Christ we are all worshiping. Similar to issues surrounding our title, worship leader, the grammatical rules of sola fide might have us pause over common bullet points in standard job descriptions for worship leaders, such as “able to usher the church into the presence of God.” Might there, too, be modern worship “sacramentals” as sacrosanct as the medieval church’s holy water? Of course, there is a fine line between a useful affective tool and a sacramental, but we could note here modern worship’s ubiquitous keyboard pad. If somehow our people are trained that the presence of the Holy Spirit is contained or governed by ambient synths or a strategically placed key change (the inquiry into which must be local, not universal), then perhaps we are due for another stripping of the altars, so that we might return to the only Word that can mediate between God and humanity. In fact, gospel-centrality would behoove us to question some sectors of modern worship which, in the sacramental vacuum of song-heavy services, attribute a sacramentality to music itself—that music, rather than the Word of God preached and proclaimed in sermon, the Lord’s Supper, and baptism, has become the locale of Christ’s presence through the power of the Spirit. It is important to be nuanced about this, because Scripture certainly affirms that God acts in special and powerful ways as the people of God engage together in singing, but perhaps we find the grammar of sola fide challenging not the music itself, but its excess as a substitute for other ordinary means of grace.
4. Analyzing our devotional piety. The grammar of sola fide likewise helps us to parse the way we approach and relate to God in our assumptions about devotional piety in worship. Certainly, for modern evangelicals, we are not likely to be praying to saints or praying for the dead, but could there be other ways our corporate piety is marred by works-righteousness? Perhaps just under the surface some of our expressions of worship is a kind of transactional piety that attempts to muster and signal a sincerity and wholeheartedness in worship that in turn prompts God to act and pour himself out powerfully. Repeated statements or emphatic singing about our fervency, our surrendered life, our given-over will, our single-mindedness, our faith—all of this can teeter on the brink of sounding like the worshipers of Baal who go to increasing lengths to display their sincerity that the fire might fall. God becomes a vending machine receiving the currency of our virtue: we put in our righteousness, and he gives us his presence. Justification by faith alone helps us to see this kind of piety as a not-gospel precisely because it forgets to say, “not I,” and fails to receive God’s presence as a gift through his Son (“but Christ”).
We also learn from Cranmer’s method about how the saturation of the service with Scripture creates a devotional context where we are offering to God his own words, not ours. There are several things here for modern worship leaders to practically assess. We might begin by asking how our song selections mirror the breadth and depth of the Psalms. We might even go further and ask how we can actually sing those Psalms more often. If we create our liturgies, we might do well to link those liturgical words and phrases to scriptural ones. If we pray extemporaneously, we might do well to memorize key scriptural passages which help frame various liturgical and theological moments. All this certainly urges worship leaders to take more seriously studying and meditating on Scripture. It is probably the case for Cranmer, as we observed above, that his new liturgical compositions were not necessarily done with a Bible and concordance, but rather the Scriptures simply flowed out of him because he was so saturated by them. Perhaps then for us worship leaders, if our lives were so steeped in the Scriptures, the verbiage of the Bible would pour out of our speech in both our preparation and our leadership, and we would also be more eager to place those words, rather than our own, on the lips of God’s people.
Along the same lines, we might ask even more basic questions of some Protestant worship expressions which hardly read any Scripture in their public gatherings apart from the preaching text. Others have pointed out this painful irony of the sola scriptura tradition. The Bible is studied in small groups, taught in Sunday school, and prized in core value statements: but where is it read and prayed in public worship, apart from quotations, allusions, and references in worship songs? Cranmer’s concern in the sixteenth century was how worship services had been crowded with the “traditions of men.” In many sectors of Protestantism today, though our traditions are hardly the same, they could still be crowding out the Word which leads us to Christ.
One final word of Cranmer’s might be given to traditions which tend to minimize either the significance or frequency of the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. Holy Communion is the God-ordained ritual which makes the preached word “heard” with our eyes, noses, hands, and mouths. If indeed the sacrament “putteth . . . Christ into our eyes, mouths, hands, and all our senses,” the Protestant traditions which come to the table infrequently might reconsider experiencing this potent gospel-encounter more regularly. Similarly, traditions which celebrate in a more casual or peripheral manner (e.g., “We’ve set up communion stations along the sides and back, and when you’re ready, feel free to receive on your own as we sing our next song”) may be challenged to make more central and corporate the ceremony and piety of Holy Communion, such that people receive together, exchange bread and wine from person to person, and partake in locations more visible to the whole congregation.
5. Analyzing our preaching. Finally, we with Cranmer might ask whether our preaching makes plain the proclamation of the gospel, with justification by faith alone operating as the principal measuring tool for homiletical assessment. It offers a word to the more therapeutic, lighthearted, and topical modes of preaching, and, perhaps surprising to some, it offers a word to some renderings of expository preaching. The grammar of sola fide asks of topical preaching which might lean toward being more practical or motivational whether its content engages in any meaningful diagnosis and deliverance of sinners. It presses encouraging words to ask the diagnostic question: does this thrust people back on themselves in a way that co-opts the “I” rather than negates it? If so, then such preaching is rightly parsed by the grammar as a not-gospel, devoid of the power of God unto salvation.
And yet on the other end of the spectrum we find a critique of those who advocate for some forms of expository sermons, dedicated to preaching through entire biblical texts, breaking them down into segments and series. One of the potential pitfalls of this homiletical model is that in sticking to the segment of the text we are to preach, we fail to bring to bear its contextualized whole. And we mean whole in two senses. First, we mean the whole of the biblical book itself, and, second, we mean the whole of the Scriptures. Christ himself exposited his own death and resurrection “beginning with Moses and all the prophets . . . in all the Scriptures” (Lk 24:26-27). The liability of this kind of expository model is that it can hermeneutically distance a passage from the singular communicative event that is the whole biblical book. Even more, segmented expository preaching can further distance that book from its context within that singular biblical “Communicative Event” of the death and resurrection of the Word made flesh. If we engage in an expositional walkthrough of biblical texts, we must still speak each text “justificationly,” understanding that for the gospel to be clearly proclaimed, and for any one exposition to avoid becoming a not-gospel, the text must be preached in a way that distinguishes faith from works and is sensitive to how the Word is working as law and gospel. In this sense, gospel-centered preaching is always zooming out from any given specific word to how that word is connected to the Bible’s double-revelation of our need and God’s provision in Christ.
THE FRUIT OF THE GOSPEL’S WORK: HEARTS ON FIRE
If in worship we were to take seriously Cranmer’s gospel-centered methodology, what can we expect will be its fruits? The Archbishop himself answers:
If the profession of our faith of the remission of our own sins enter within us into the deepness of our hearts, then it must needs kindle a warm fire of love in our hearts towards God, and towards all other for the love of God . . . a good will and mind to help every man and to do good unto them, . . . and, in summa, a firm intent and purpose to do all that is good, and leave all that is evil. This is the very right, pure, perfect, lively, Christian, hearty, and justifying “faith, which worketh by love,” as St Paul saith, and suffereth no venom or poison of sin to remain within the heart, fide Deus purificans corda (Acts 15:9).
There we have it. The proclaimed gospel births faith. Faith cleanses the heart. The cleansed heart is freed up for true love of God and love of neighbor. In other words, the clear proclamation of the gospel is the only means that can transform the individual human heart and therefore, from that transformed heart, transform the world. This is, in fact, Cranmer’s answer to modern liturgical theology’s goal of establishing in worship “the connection between Christian formation and ethics” while avoiding “shaping a people who think they can be close to God while remaining far from the everyday world, or who expect the arrival of [God’s] Reign to be only an interior event.”
If world-transformation is begotten of heart-transformation, this really does get to the core of all the worship issues that seem to occupy an endless circle of discussions about what it means to be a worshiping community faithful to the Scriptures. We might call these worship-and discussions: worship and mission, worship and justice, worship and diversity, worship and culture, worship and formation, worship and emotions, worship and theology, worship and ethics, worship and evangelism, and on and on. Nearly always in these discussions, we are looking for worship to produce a certain kind of person who is (insert Christian virtue here). And in our desire to see worship produce this kind of person we craft services which employ certain persuasive or formational content.
For instance, if we want worship to bridge the chasm between being a disciple of Jesus Christ and seeking justice in the world—a real gap in many regions of conservative evangelicalism—we often embark on emphasizing those themes in the content of our worship service: a sermon series from the prophets, readings and prayers that voice the lamentation of the marginalized, songs which intone the justice of God and our responsive activism. Cranmer’s work tells us that for there to be true transformation toward these good ends, we must differentiate in worship between the root and its fruits. The root, for Cranmer, is down at the level of the ever-repenting, ever-being-changed heart. The fruit of that changed heart is the resulting outflow of all good works, including compassion and advocacy toward justice in the world. Cranmer might therefore caution us through his vision of gospel-centered worship. In seeking to emphasize the fruit of the transformed life, we must be careful not to cut off the supply that waters the root of the transformed life—the gospel. The methodology of the grammar of sola fide gives us a way to analyze whether all our “fruit-addressing” in worship services is remaining connected to or deviating from those lifegiving headwaters.
Cranmer’s passion was for a “hearty” liturgy. Like “mercy,” the term “heart” appears in Cranmer’s rites far more often than is warranted by any of his liturgical sources. This is because, as we said in the introduction, he understood fruit of the gospel’s work to be that we would “be the more inflamed with the love of [God’s] true religion.” When Cranmer made the Collect for Purity a public prayer and set it as the opening words for the Holy Communion service, he was setting forth his liturgical theology in a single sentence: a worship service is nothing short of open heart surgery through the killing and resurrecting work of the Word of God. It is no mistake that this opening prayer alludes to the well-known statement from the epistle to the Hebrews on the “living and active” Word, which discerns “the thoughts and intentions of the heart,” and from which “no creature is hidden” (Heb 4:12-13). The liturgy exists so that, in the deepest sense, the Word of Christ—indeed, the Word which is Christ—might dwell in us richly (Col 3:16).