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The Webber Quote of the Week was established Thanksgiving 2007 in gratitude to God for the legacy of Robert E. Webber, and to extend the wisdom and inspiration that is stockpiled in his many books and writings to all who will read. The Webber Quote of the Week is a ministry of The Robert E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies. For information on the vision and work of Robert Webber go to the Robert Webber page on the Institute's Web site.
July 26, 2010 What if the principle of the early church was translated to form our day into a conscious Christian rhythm of daily devotion? By remembering the work of Christ on the cross at 9 am [he was nailed], noon [darkness], and 3 pm [he died], we would experience each day in the rhythm of the most central event of human history. Add to those hours the remembrance of creation on rising and an anticipation of the new heavens and the new earth at the coming again upon retiring and the rhythm of the day will express the contours of all history. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 180. July 19, 2010 While extraordinary time celebrates a specific saving event in the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Sundays of ordinary time celebrate the saving events of God in their entirety. Worship planners and preachers need to reflect on how each Sunday serves the whole story yet also teaches a particular theme arising from the story. A conscious, deliberate, and intentional reflection on the whole story and a part of the story, celebrated in the same service, impacts the worshipers’ spiritual formation. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 176.
July 12, 2010 Sundays of ordinary time are not so ordinary. They do truth. They do world history. They do the meaning of human existence. In this doing, we are spiritually formed and shaped by the story that is above all stories through the remembrance of God’s mighty acts of salvation, the experience of God’s presence through signs and symbols, and the anticipation of a good end to history. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 174.
July 5, 2010 God’s story has a happy ending. It is in fact the drama of human existence. It is not only the story of God who creates and of God who becomes involved in creation to rescue it through the life, death and resurrection of Christ, it is also the story of the end of history and the forever thereafter. . . . Sunday worship that is true to what the Christian faith is points to the hope of the world—the expectancy that Christ will come to deliver the ultimate blow to all the powers of evil, destroying them forever. He will establish the new heavens and new earth. He will reign forever over his redeemed creation. His shalom will rest over all he has made. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 173-174.
June 28, 2010 The presence of God is always manifested in visible and tangible signs. Our calling in worship is to be open and vulnerable to God’s presence so that it becomes embodied in our lives. . . . The first sign of [the Spirit’s] presence in Sunday worship is the assembled people. . . . God’s presence is known in the visible, tangible sign of the minister among us. . . . Through the Bible God takes up a visible and tangible presence among us. . . . God is also made present through the signs of water, of oil, and of bread and wine. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 172-173.
June 21, 2010 Worship does truth. It tells and enacts God’s story—how God rescues creatures and creation. . . . Sunday worship, every Sunday, is a celebration of God’s story. And the constant bathing of our worship in this story—songs, preaching, baptism, Eucharist, and the Christian-year celebrations—form and shape our conscious and unconscious living in this theatre of God’s glory! Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 171.
June 14, 2010 I am of the personal opinion that the true meaning of Sunday worship has been lost in many of our churches. . . . Historically Sunday worship expresses three truths: It remembers God’s saving action in history; it experiences God’s renewing presence; and it anticipates the consummation of God’s work in the new heavens and the new earth. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 169.
June 7, 2010 The early church fathers saw “relationship” written in large letters over baptism and the Eucharist. . . . Baptism is our marriage while Eucharist is the kiss of love. . . . We tend to see baptism and Eucharist as our signs of devotion to God. In the ancient church baptism was first God’s sign of our union with him and then our sign of embracing this union and its calling to live in the pattern of death and resurrection. Eucharist is also God’s sign—a kind of affirmation of Jesus’ death for us and his resurrection for us. . . . Through bread and wine [the Spirit] continually nourishes us in the pattern of death and resurrection spirituality first confirmed at our baptism. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 156-157. May 31, 2010 The Christian church . . . has always been committed to a triune experience and understanding of God, but most preachers seldom preach on this subject. The discipline of addressing the congregation once a year on the meaning of triune faith and worship is helpful and necessary. . . . Christians need to know . . . the spiritual understanding of the self made in the image of God and the significance of Christian community that mirrors the eternal, communal relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 175. May 24, 2010 Pentecost Sunday ends the extraordinary season that began on the first Sunday of Advent. In approximately six months the church has been carried through all the saving events of God—his incarnation, manifestation to the world, life, death, resurrection, and ascension as well as the coming of the Holy Spirit. All these crucial events form faith and the spiritual life. . . . In a clear, directed, and evangelical practice of the Christian year, there is no missing of the point. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 163. May 17, 2010 We now live in the final days, the time between the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the return of our Lord. Therefore, Pentecost is an essential moment in God’s saving time, the moment in which we now live, awaiting the return of our Lord. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 162. May 10, 2010 If Jesus ascended into heaven, has he left any signs of his presence among us? . . . If we wish to form congregational and personal spirituality, we will call attention to the ascended Lord who eternally intercedes for us and is always with us through the church and the signs of our identity with him (water) and of his continual nourishment (bread and wine). Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 160-161.
May 3, 2010 Worship is God’s doing. . . . It is performative. That is, it does something for those who do the work of proclaiming and enacting God’s work. It transforms them. . . . Every Sunday is a “little Easter.” Every Sunday of the year is a celebration of the Easter event. The work of the people in “doing the Christ event” through memory and hope is the source for personal and corporate formation into resurrection spirituality. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 152-153. April 26, 2010 In tribute to our founder and
friend, Bob Webber. Whatever thy hand findeth to do, In his resurrection [Jesus] conquered the results of sin—which is death—so that death is not the last word written over our life. Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 135.
April 19, 2010 Worship is the constant celebration of the Easter event. It is in worship that resurrection spirituality is learned and experienced. . . . Worship is a symbolization whereby we proclaim (yes, words are used), sing (no explanation needed), and enact (yes, dramatize) the original event that forms and shapes us into the pattern of his death and resurrection. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 151. April 12, 2010 The primary metaphor for the Easter season is the church as the resurrected people living a resurrected spirituality. Because of Easter we are in union with Christ and are called to live in our baptismal identity in his resurrection. This essential theme of Easter cannot be communicated in a day. It takes a season. . . . It is in worship that resurrection spirituality is learned and experienced. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 148-151. April 5, 2010 The biblical metaphor for Easter spirituality is found in baptism. The baptized life is a life that is lived in the pattern of death and resurrection. . . . The message of Easter is that the way of being in Jesus, the way of living the new resurrected life, is through participation. . . . We participate in Christ by living the life of our baptism into his death and resurrection. This is a daily, existential, moment-by-moment experience as we choose in this or that situation to die to the sins for which Christ died and choose the life of the Spirit for which Christ was raised to a new life. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 146-147. March 29, 2010 As I contemplated the spiritual journey of Holy Week . . . I knew this was not a week for shopping, vacation, parties, or hilarity. I sensed this was the week that above all weeks was to be set aside for the journey into death. I knew the worship of the church would take me by the hand and lead me step-by-step into the experience of death and rebirth, if I would allow it to do so. I resolved then and there to walk in the way of the cross. I purposed to make this the week God intended it to be for me, a week of intense spiritual struggle—and reward! Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 118-119. March 22, 2010 Lent is the time to identify a power working against us and crucify it with Christ and bury it in the tomb, never to be raised again. . . . [Fasting] controls the passion for food in order to deal with a passion of another sort that holds us in its grip. The purpose of the ascetical fast is to liberate us from the power that flesh holds over the spirit. . . . For example, a person may fast as a means to experience victory over jealousy, envy, anger, lust, lack of integrity. . . . God works in conjunction with our will. Consequently, the ascetical fast that deals with an issue of character development requires choice and intention on our part. We have to exercise the power of our own will over against the powers of evil that continually draw us into habits of life that are contrary to the gospel. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 114-115. March 15, 2010 There is no narrative that begins to compare with the Christian narrative—in which God enters our suffering to deliver us from sin and death, and to deliver the world from the domain of darkness. It doesn’t get any better than that! . . . Jesus is Lord! And this truth will make you free. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 137. March 8, 2010 Who gets to narrative the world? is not a mere academic question. If Christians are to witness to God’s mission to restore the world, to recover the Garden, to establish once again the communion of God’s creatures within the communion and fellowship of the triune God, then we must know the narrative, proclaim it and live it—to the death if necessary. Surely, this is the most pressing issue of our time. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 132-133. March 1, 2010 Pragmatism always asks, Does it work? Does it produce? Is it effective? Pragmatism has moved the church toward a business model. This follows, of course, the consumer approach to the faith. Jesus becomes the product marketed to people—the consumers—to satisfy their needs. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 132. February 22, 2010 Worship has become narcissistic, focusing on me and my praise of God; and spirituality has turned toward a preoccupation with my journey of faith and my spiritual condition and experience. . . . When we become narcissistic, the place of worship and spirituality in God’s narrative is lost and worship and spirituality become subject to the whims of culture. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 131. February 15, 2010 The church as a living witness to God’s narrative became the place where the consumer could buy a product that fulfilled his or her needs. Of course, the church does fulfill needs, but they must be placed within the cosmic narrative, thereby reducing the individual’s focus on self and turning his or her contemplation to God’s saving deeds, whereby the whole world is made right. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 131. February 8, 2010 Narrative thinking reverses the world’s way of doing things. . . . We must stop standing outside the narrative and judging it by human reason or any other intellectual discipline. Such an approach makes God and God’s narrative an object of investigation. We become the arbiter of its truthfulness. Instead, we must stand inside the narrative. God is not an object within the narrative. When we stand inside the narrative by faith, we stand under, not over, him, and we see the world through the narrative, not the other way around. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 129-130. February 1, 2010 God’s narrative is the one true story of the world. The church’s mission is to be a witness to God’s narrative of the world (missio Dei). Theology is the church’s corporate reflection on God’s narrative. Worship sings, proclaims and enacts God’s narrative to the glory of God. Individual spirituality is the personal embodiment of God’s narrative in all of life. Collective spirituality is the church’s embodied life in the world. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 124.
January 25, 2010 The church has become a business that sells Jesus—the culture of consumerism. Theology has become an analytical discipline that scientifically examines propositions—the culture of reason. Worship has become an entertaining program that presents Jesus in a winsome way—the culture of entertainment. Spirituality has become an experience of transcendence achieved through Christian technique—the New Age culture of generic spirituality. The church’s life in the world is to do good so people can see that Jesus is all about being nice and helpful—the culture of humanism. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 123-124.
January 18, 2010 Evangelicals [should] turn away from forms of worship that focus on God as a mere object of the intellect or that assert the self as the source of worship. Such worship has resulted in lecture-oriented, music-driven, performance-centered and program-controlled models that do not adequately proclaim God’s cosmic redemption. Therefore, we call evangelicals to recover the historic substance of worship of Word and Table and to attend to the Christian year, which marks time according to God’s saving acts. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 121.
January 11, 2010 My initial impetus toward relearning God’s narrative took shape as a response to the postmodern rejection of all universal narratives (or metanarratives). As I became more and more conscious of the rejection of metanarratives, I became more keenly aware that this is exactly what the Christian message is—a single, universal narrative of everything. . . . Christians must . . . return to the ancient way of approaching God’s truth as the narrative of the world. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 118.
January 4, 2010 For the past thirty years or so the church has been plagued by innovation . . . a philosophy that moves forward without regard for the past. . . . With an antihistorical attitude and the constant desire for what’s new, faith is reduced to style. . . . Eventually the overemphasis on style results in an underemphasis on substance, and then style overtakes substance. The words of the narrative—creation, fall, incarnation, death, resurrection, second coming—may continue to be used, but without the appropriate depth and cosmic substance. . . . We must recover the profound original interpretation of God’s narrative—that of the early church. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 116-117.
December 28, 2009 God’s purpose for us and for the world . . . is a loving invitation to fellowship and communion with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and to a purposeful life of making the world a habitation of his glory. However, we have failed and continue to fail to do God’s purpose. So God in Christ has accomplished what we could not do. And God invites us to enter into his narrative by faith and live out his vision of the world. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 116.
December 21, 2009 In almost every religion the quest is to find a way to transcend the pain and suffering of life, and get connected with the powers of the other world that will help us endure this world. Current magazines, movies and spiritual gurus pitch the supernatural. But in these religions we never hear that God himself has entered our history and our suffering to redeem us for life in the world. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 95.
December 14, 2009 God’s narrative stands on its own as the truth about the world. We don’t ask God to conform to our narrative, to our reason, scientific findings, philosophy or anthropology. No, God invites us to live in his narrative and to see all life from inside the lens of creation, incarnation and re-creation. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 87.
December 7, 2009 Historic Christianity is not a reflection on an individual’s narrative but a reflection on and contemplation of God’s mighty deeds of salvation for the life of the world. . . . However, . . . [a] shift to experience has led to the demise of the narrative of God. God rescues the entire created order, and those who know this rescue are to live collectively in the world and express God’s redemption in all of life. This narrative has been lost and replaced with a focus on “my journey.” Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 86.
November 30, 2009 Social action is an essential aspect of the church’s work in the world—peace and justice and caring for the poor, widows, orphans, the disenfranchised, and the marginalized arise from true faith. But these actions are to result from the embodiment of God’s full narrative, not from a Christianity accommodating itself to Western culture’s doctrine of progress and utopia. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 85.
November 23, 2009 The ancient church understood the impact of creation, incarnation and re-creation on all of creation, and that is why Christians were the leaders in the arts, in learning and in the sciences. The Christian faith narrates the world and gives shape to culture-making and to all of civilization. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 75-76.
November 16, 2009 The biblical and historical understanding of the incarnation is that God becomes creation. He takes into himself all the effects of fallen humanity spread throughout his creation. He assumes all of creation in the womb of Mary in order to reverse the effects of sin and “bring it into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom 8:21). The death and resurrection of God in Christ is . . . a second act of creation, the redemption of the whole created order. . . . God, in the incarnation, took up into himself the entire creation, so that the creation redeemed by God himself is now to be once again, as in the Garden, the theatre of his glory. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 75-76.
November 9, 2009 Why did the West, which was once so thoroughly influenced by the Christian faith, fall prey to secularization and privatism? . . . The key factor is the historical split between the secular and the sacred. This split occurred because the understanding of the incarnation was reduced from God who became the created order to God who stepped into the creation. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 74-75.
November 2, 2009 Christians must go back to the Garden of Eden and reclaim God’s original purposes for creatures and creation. We are the image-bearers of God, and we have been given the task of making this world the theatre of God’s glory. It is not only the inner chamber of the heart that should glow with the presence of God, but our culture too—our cities, our civilization, the whole of life. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 71.
October 26, 2009 One of the major problems the church faces today is that the Christian faith has been reduced from its public engagement of civilization to a private relationship with God. . . . There is more to Christianity than the personal side of the faith—there is the cosmic side, the claim of Jesus Christ to be Lord of the universe—Creator, Redeemer and Ruler of all. What I am asking of us all is to think through what it means to proclaim “Jesus is Lord.” Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 70.
October 19, 2009 Within God’s narrative the doctrine that has had the greatest influence on civilization is the incarnation. If God unites with his creation in order to re-create it himself, then there can be no distinction between the secular and the sacred. All creation is rendered holy by the incarnation. All creation is lifted through the humanity of Jesus to union with the divine. The center from which this doctrine should radiate in all the cities, towns and villages is the worship of the church. The church building, the liturgy itself, with all of its attending signs and symbols and especially the words of the Eucharistic prayer, clearly portray who gets to narrate the world. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 68.
October 12, 2009 Ancient Christianity was not the privatized faith it has become today. Today the influence of secularization has pushed the Christian narrative away from public matters. Christian faith, having become private and narcissistic, has very little influence in the university, the marketplace, law, politics and even ethics. It no longer plays a significant role in the foundational matters of Western civilization. . . . The western church has lost its divine narrative, turning toward a Christianity of cultural accommodation. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 67, 69.
October 5, 2009 Christians in the Roman world found themselves in a cultural setting of moral decadence, philosophical relativism and religious pluralism. However, they narrated the world in a new way. They did not accommodate the faith to culture but set forth the faith in a countercultural way. In a world that had no set beliefs they proclaimed, “We believe.” In a world that had no ethic, they proclaimed, “We behave.” In a world where there was no belonging, they declared, “We belong.” Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 51.
September 28, 2009 It is in Jesus’ life, the early Christians argued, that we see what humanity was created to be. For God in Christ, who became one of us for our salvation, also became one of us to model what true humanity looks like. Jesus himself is our ethic. We are to follow him, to do what he did. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 47.
September 21, 2009 The incarnation is the missing key in evangelical thought. The incarnate Word does not merely “step into history.” The Word becomes humanity, time, space, and history to rescue creatures and creation. . . . There is no story in all the universe comparable to the narrative of the biblical God who enters our suffering and death to overcome it and win back his creation. It is a story worth dying for. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 38.
September 14, 2009 We are also in a struggle for the soul of the church in America, a struggle between God’s narrative, with God at the center, and my narrative, with the self at the center. The narrative of American narcissism tells us that nothing is more important than the self. By contrast, God’s narrative tells us that we will only become what we are meant to be when we submit ourselves to his story. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 37.
September 7, 2009 [Jesus] demonstrated what life looks like for a human being who is in full communion with God. Yet he came to do more than show us this life. He came to be that very life, to lift humanity into his own humanity and do for us what we are unable to do for ourselves. . . . Nailed to the cross of his own creation, he took into his own body and into his divine being the suffering and alienation of all humanity, reconciling God to humanity and humanity to God. . . . On the hard wood of the cross he stretched forth his hands of love in a saving embrace of all. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 33.
August 31, 2009 God chooses to restore humanity not by a decree of reconciliation, not by a sentimental forgiveness, not by a soft love, but by entering into union with humanity. In Jesus, God comes in human skin to reverse the human condition and reconcile humanity to the Father. . . . In his humanity as Jesus, God took into himself the rebellion of the first Adam and the consequence of his sin, which was death for us all. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 32-33.
August 24, 2009 We are all part of the problem, but there is only one man who is the solution. His name is Jesus. . . . He is the one who reverses the entire human situation. The first Adam plunged the human race into rebellion against God. Humanity has made a mess of this world (not only human beings, but the whole world), so God became incarnate, uniting himself to humanity, so that God himself in perfect union with humanity could reverse the human plight caused by Adam and perpetuated by every one of us. So God in Christ not only rescues us, he rescues the whole creation. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 26-27.
August 17, 2009 The fullness of God’s story is captured in the three words—creation, incarnation, re-creation. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 26.
August 10, 2009 “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ” (2 Cor 5:19). What does this mean? It means that God’s story is cosmic; it has to do with the whole world and all of history. . . . This story even includes you. God, the divine narrator, is saying: I have a purpose for humanity and a purpose for creation and history. I am not asking for permission to join your narrative (although I do); I am asking you to join my narrative of the world, of human existence, and of all history. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 24-25.
August 3, 2009 I am convinced that the people of God, whose faith has been undermined by cultural accommodation, have not been adequately trained in the spiritual discipline of God’s narrative and the Christian heritage of the church. . . . The rediscovery of God’s narrative and its implications for ministry are the most pressing spiritual issues facing the church at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 19-20.
July 27, 2009 The consumer model has especially affected worship, which is the true measure of the church. Jesus has become a product to sell, and worship is the primary channel for sales. . . . The substance of worship—remembering God’s saving deeds in the past, culminating in Jesus Christ, and anticipating the overthrow of all evil at Christ’s coming—has been lost. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 18.
July 20, 2009 One of the major reasons why the church has fallen prey to a cultural accommodation is that it has become disconnected from its roots in Scripture, in the ancient church and in its heritage through the centuries. . . . If it is true that the road to the future lies in the past, it is also true that when the past has been lost or neglected there is no certain future. . . . When the past is lost, as it now is in our Western world, there is nothing left to focus on except the self. Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 16-17.
July 13, 2009 [In] preaching . . . we proclaim God’s story, remembering his mighty deeds of salvation. In the Eucharist we enact or dramatize God’s story and its anticipated future, and in doing so, we are actually ushered into God’s kingdom in a momentary, existential experience of the kingdom to come. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 177.
July 6, 2009 I once understood the gospel as God asking me to let him into my narrative, to find room for him in my heart and life. But now I realize that God bids me to find my place in his narrative. In God’s story, he, with his own two hands—the incarnate Word and the Holy Spirit—recapitulated and reversed the human situation so I can now live in him. Through him I can live in the expectation of a restored world without the presence of evil. Here and now, because God became incarnate and recapitulated all things, I live in him, in his narrative, and he lives in my life, which is to be a witness to his narrative for the world. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 174-175.
June 29, 2009 Our era has affinities with the Roman era. The issues we must deal with today include widespread war, the breakdown of morality, and pluralism of philosophy and religion (especially Gnosticism). Just as the [early church] fathers interacted with powers and principalities of their time, so also we must interact with the powers and principalities of our time. In order to confront the powers of our day, we would do well to recover the ancient framework of Scripture and restore the emphasis on Christus Victor. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 171.
June 22, 2009 The missing link in Western theology is a deep appreciation for the incarnation and subsequent Christus Victor theme of how God incarnate won a victory over sin and death. . . . Christus Victor was the primary atonement view of the early church fathers (this view does not in any way deny the sacrifice of Christ). Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 170.
June 15, 2009 If you want to do ancient-future worship, learn God's story and do it in Word and Table and use hymns and songs for responses not only from the great treasury of the church through the centuries but also from music that is current. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 168.
June 8, 2009 If you want a definition of ancient-future worship, it is this: the common tradition of the church’s worship in Word, Table, and song, practiced faithfully and communicated clearly in every context of the world. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 168.
June 1, 2009 The church and its theology are not to be reinvented every generation. The church may need to be inspired, perhaps contextualized, but never trashed to start again. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 167.
May 25, 2009 It is a paradigm shift to think and then to practice all of worship as a prayer in which we actually lift God’s own story up to him as a prayer. I don’t doubt that some congregations pray their songs. . . . For many of these congregations worship is described as singing. I have pointed out, however, that the ancient church saw all of worship, from beginning to end, as the lifting up to God his own story in praise and thanksgiving. This is the shift that requires a new or, rather, old way of worshiping. In worship we do God’s story as the prayer of God and his church for the whole world. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 165.
May 18, 2009 Because the church prays God’s story in the language of God’s voice, our contemplation is always anchored in the public voice of the church. Our personal contemplation is dependent on the faithfulness of the church to articulate for us what we can only say in a fumbling way. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 164. May 11, 2009 The public worship of the church is a prayer of praise and thanksgiving directed, not to people, but to God. This approach is a paradigm shift from the current presentational notion of worship. Today worship is frequently seen as a presentation made to the people. . . . But the ancient church did not design (a contemporary word) worship to reach people, to educate people, or to heal people. Yet in their worship, which was a prayer of praise and thanksgiving offered to God, people were indeed led into contemplation of God’s mighty acts of salvation and stimulated to live a life of participation in the life of God in the life of the world. The point is, of course, that how we pray shapes who we are. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 161-162. May 4, 2009 [A] review of the ancient prayers of worship strongly reveals that worship not only contains prayer but is the prayer of the church for the life of the world and for the welfare and salvation of all its inhabitants. God’s story, revealing the two hands of God through which the world is redeemed by Jesus and the Spirit, is the content and prayer of ancient worship. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 161. April 27, 2009
In tribute to our founder and
friend, Bob Webber.
Whatever thy hand findeth to do, In his resurrection [Jesus] conquered the results of sin—which is death—so that death is not the last word written over our life. Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 135.
April 20, 2009 Worship as public prayer may be described as follows: Public prayer lifts up all creation to the Father through Jesus Christ by the Spirit in praise and thanksgiving for the work of the Son, who has reconciled creatures and creation to God. . . . Worship prays God’s story. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 151.
April 13, 2009 The nature of worship has shifted from corporate prayer to platform presentational performance. Worship, instead of being a rehearsal of God’s saving actions in the world and for the world, is exchanged for making people feel comfortable, happy, and affirmed. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 151.
April 6, 2009 The celebration of bread and wine is no abstract object out there, no thing to be observed as an object of interest, no mere ritual to be taken in a perfunctory or mechanical way. No. We move from a delightful contemplation of all that bread and wine disclose to a participation in God’s story by continually affirming in bread and wine that Jesus is given anew and poured out again to the world through our individual lives and through the community of the people of God, the church, who manifest God’s purposes for the world in the worship of our lips and lives. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 147.
March 30, 2009 What nourishes and transforms us at bread and wine is the disclosure of the whole story of God—creation, incarnation, re-creation—which takes up residence inside of us as we take and eat, take and drink. For in this symbol a reality is present—the divine action of God redeeming his world through Jesus Christ. . . . We become what we eat—living witnesses to Christ who lives in us. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 146.
March 23, 2009 The one true fulfilled and meaningful life is not the life of acquisition, power, fame, sexual freedom, consumerism, or materialism but the cruciform life. The spiritual life is lived out of the crucifixion. It is a willing, voluntary choosing to give oneself to others, to endure suffering for the needs of others, even, if necessary, to the point of death. Table worship nourishes this commitment because it discloses the meaning of life as the act of giving up self in order to do the will of God for others. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 143-144.
March 16, 2009 While the Bible discloses the story of the world in words, the same story is enacted at bread and wine. Rationalism cannot embrace this, for it only sees bread as food that is eaten and wine as drink that is imbibed. But when we come to the Table with the eyes of faith, we experience the burning conviction that we live in a supernatural world. . . . At bread and wine we see creation, fall, incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension, church, the kingdom, and the promise of the new heavens and new earth and our own transfiguration accomplished through God’s union with us established through Jesus by the Spirit. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 141.
March 9, 2009 At bread and wine God discloses his whole story for those who know how to see. Yes, bread and wine are symbols, but they are not empty. The ancient fathers taught that symbols participate in the reality they re-present. . . . Bread and wine signify and perform God’s story and communicate the benefits of God’s story to us. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 141.
March 2, 2009 Enlightenment rationalism has succeeded in taking the focus off what God does at bread and wine and placing it on what I do at bread and wine. In rationalism, I must make Table worship a source of spiritual nourishment by what I do. I must remember. The more intense my remembrance, the more my spiritual life is nourished. . . . The early church fathers . . . approached bread and wine with a clear sense of the supernatural. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 137.
February 23, 2009 A study of contemporary worship songs demonstrates that the current view of worship is not situated in God’s supernatural story. Instead, worship is situated within the worshiper and is offered by the worshiper to God, who often remains unnamed in the song lyrics. . . . This divorce of worship and spirituality from God’s story of creation, incarnation, and re-creation has resulted in a new kind of Gnostic worship and spirituality. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 135.
February 16, 2009 How should we approach the crisis of evangelical doubt, the failure to affirm the communication of Christ at Table worship? The primary way to see the crisis at Table worship is to place it in the larger process of the desupernaturalization of the entire Christian story at the hands of Enlightenment rationalism. . . . By not affirming a complete supernaturalism in which God is always and everywhere present in creation, evangelicals are in danger of the eventual breakdown of all supernaturalism and possible retooling of the faith to not only look like the culture but even embrace a new form of secularized Christianity. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 134-135.
February 9, 2009 I believe music-centered worship has indeed become a common way of thinking about the presence of God. However, it is an extremely limited understanding of God’s presence. . . . The church has always believed not only that God is everywhere but also that he is made intensely present to his church at worship. God is there in the gathering of the assembly, in song, in Scripture reading, in prayer, and especially at bread and wine. Jesus told his disciples that there is a way to remember him (the force of anamnesis is “to make me [Christ] present”). He is right there at broken bread and poured-out wine. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 133-134.
February 2, 2009 The Bible reads me. . . . To read the Bible Christologically is to let it read us and the world. . . . Is it possible to pick up the Bible and say, “I’m going to read about myself and my world”? Is it possible to say, “I identify with this person; my world is like this”? . . . Can the Bible be read as our own story from Genesis to Revelation? . . . When we read and preach the Bible as a history present, we get inside of it, and it reads us and our world. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 130.
January 26, 2009 In the church God’s presence is in the assembled people, in their song, Scripture, water, bread, wine, and oil. God is not an absent, ethereal essence who sits in the sky and demands worship. God is the God who acts, who lives and moves and has his being in the world and among the people. Affirm that all of life, not just part of life, is sacred. Affirm that God is disclosed in every detail of human existence. Then, stand inside the Bible and God’s story and let it teach you to look out into the creation where God is signified everywhere yet particularized in Jesus, the ultimate icon of God. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 126.
January 19, 2009 As pastors of the Word, there is a strong need to soak ourselves in the Triune story of God with its detailed exposition of the central role of Christ in the greatest drama of human history—the drama of God who becomes one of us to rescue the world. This theme of God’s rescue of us all—not inspirational topics, motivational speakers, or massive therapy sermons—needs to be recovered as the central message of our church. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 121.
January 12, 2009 The apostolic way of reading and preaching Scripture is to see Jesus Christ as the subject of the entire Bible, the subject of all history. He is the single overarching story of all time. He is the meaning of the entire narrative of human history. He is seen everywhere. He is in every event. . . . The Bible nourishes us . . . because it reveals Jesus Christ . . . who now lives in us and calls us into the new humanity. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 119-120.
January 5, 2009 Ancient worship . . . does truth. All one has to do is to study the ancient liturgies to see that liturgies clearly do truth by their order and in their substance. This is why so many young people today are now adding ancient elements to their worship. . . . This recovery of ancient practices is not the mere restoration of ritual but a deep, profound, and passionate engagement with truth—truth that forms and shapes the spiritual life into a Christlikeness that issues forth in the call to a godly and holy life and into a deep commitment to justice and to the needs of the poor. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 109.
December 29, 2008 The biblical teaching that Jesus is our worship dispels all notions of self-generated worship. . . . Worship discloses the work of Jesus Christ. He himself is the eternal leiturgia (liturgy) of God. . . . Jesus Christ does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. As God incarnate, he is our obedience, he is our faith, he is our new life, and he is our eternal intercession before the Father. . . . So what then is the worship that the people of God do? We remember God’s saving deeds and anticipate his vision, his final rule over all creation. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 108-109.
December 22, 2008 The ancient order of worship was Word and Table. Worship is ordered by revelation and incarnation. God is first disclosed to the world through revelation. Then God becomes incarnate in the world in Jesus Christ, who accomplishes our salvation. This order of revelation-incarnation is not coincidental; it is fundamental to the outworking of God’s story. God’s story is proclaimed in Word and Table. We hear God’s story; we see God’s story. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 106.
December 15, 2008 Worship does truth. The ancient church captured how worship does truth in the phrase lex orandi; lex credendi; est. . . . [One] way to state the essence of this Latin phrase is to say, “Show me how you worship and I’ll show you what you believe.” If how we worship shapes what we believe, then it is imperative that we pay attention to how we worship. If worship is shaped by culture, it will result in a culturally conditioned faith. If worship is shaped by narcissism, it will result it a me-oriented consumer faith. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 104.
December 8, 2008 [Worship] sings, tells, and enacts God’s story, not my story. The primary focus of worship . . . is not me, the worshiper, but God, who redeems the world. Worship does God’s story, and God, who is the subject of worship, repeats, so to speak, his own story. God, through worship, works on me through his story to elicit praise on my lips and obedience in my living. When this happens, worship takes place. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 97-98.
December 1, 2008 Worship nourishes the spiritual life . . . because it discloses Christ as the one who does for me what I can’t do for myself and “compels” me to doxology on my lips and to live in the pattern of death and resurrection. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 94.
November 24, 2008 Worship is not that which I do, but that which is done in me. That is, worship, which reveals Christ, forms me by making me aware that Jesus is my spirituality and that worship is to form my spiritual life into the pattern of living into the death and resurrection of Jesus. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 93.
November 17, 2008 If it is acknowledged that the content of worship is remembrance and anticipation, it should be an easy step to take to see that the structure of worship serves the content of worship. The Word remembers and the Eucharist anticipates. . . . The style of doing Word and Table is a matter of making the content and structure of worship indigenous to the local setting. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 91.
November 10, 2008 Seeker-oriented contemporary churches argue that worship does not need to present the whole gospel. The purpose of worship, they say, is to get people in the door. Then, after they have gained a hearing, they present the gospel in small-group settings. This argument may be good marketing, but it fails to understand the biblical purpose of worship. Worship brings glory to God because it remembers God’s saving deeds in the past and anticipates God’s culmination of his saving deeds in the new heavens and new earth. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 85.
November 3, 2008 One does not need to become liturgical to become more biblical in worship. Remembrance of God’s actions in history to save the world can be effectively done in a spontaneous way as well. When planning worship ask, “Does the service connect creation with God’s involvement in the history of Israel, with his incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension, eternal intercession, and coming again to establish his rule over all creation?” If you can answer “Yes” to that question you are well on your way into worship that has the biblical content of remembrance and anticipation. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 70-71.
October 27, 2008 God’s vision for the world is remembered and anticipated in worship. Worship is all about how God, [who] with his own two hands—the incarnate Word and the Holy Spirit—has rescued the world. . . . The centerpiece of his saving action is the incarnation, death, and resurrection, where sin and death have been defeated and where the deliverance of creatures and creation, which will be consummated at the end of history, will begin. In the meantime, worship is the witness to this vision. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 66.
October 20, 2008 Holy living . . . is to be a direct outcome of worship and an anticipation of life in God’s eschatological domain. . . . The ethical life of the church is an eschatological witness to the world of how people should be living and how the world will be under the reign of God. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 65-66.
October 13, 2008 The purpose of the Genesis account of creation is doxology (right praise); it calls us to a posture of praise. Doxology is our response to God’s story. . . . Doxology is the way to momentarily experience the eternal kingdom of God’s perfection over all creation. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 60-61.
October 6, 2008 Worship should do God’s narrative and point to the future when creation, delivered from sin, will be restored to God’s original design. In this world there is always a witness to the restoration of the world, and you should be able to find it in the worship of the church. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 60.
September 29, 2008 Biblical remembering makes the power and the saving effect of the event present to the worshiping community. . . . God loves our worship when we remember his saving deeds in Jesus Christ. Our worship tells that old, old, story. That’s the story God gave the world, and that story is the content of worship. Through worship the world learns its own story. And how will others hear unless we do God’s story in worship, calling people to remember God’s story? . . . Forgetting brings death, but remembering brings life. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 43-44.
September 22, 2008 Here is what biblical worship does: It remembers God’s work in the past, anticipates God’s rule over all creation, and actualized both past and future in the present to transform persons, communities, and the world. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 43.
September 15, 2008 What does it mean to say, “Worship does God’s story?” It is this: Worship proclaims, enacts, and sings God’s story. Worship is not a program. Nor is worship about me. Worship is a narrative—God’s narrative of the world from its beginning to its end. How will the world know its own story unless we do that story in public worship? Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 39-40.
September 8, 2008 In the incarnation, God unites with our humanity in Jesus Christ. . . . Reflection on the incarnation and its connection to every aspect of God’s story is the missing link in today’s theological reflection and worship. The link is found in these words: God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. . . . God himself, the incarnate Word, takes up residence (unites) with our fallen self so that he, God, now as a man, can reverse the human condition. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 35-36.
September 1, 2008 I am concerned over how worship has become a program, a show, and entertainment. Once again the problem is a self-centered and presentational approach to worship. If we think worship is about me, or if we are trying to sell people on worship and lure them to receive Jesus into their lives, then I can see the value of all entertaining programs. But once again, presentational worship turns true worship on its head. If worship is truly doing God’s story and calling people to find their life and story by entering God’s story, then the style of worship is prayer. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 25.
August 25, 2008 In worship we remember God’s story in the past and anticipate God’s story in the future. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 23.
August 18, 2008 A dominant error of some Christians is to say, “I must bring God into my story.” The ancient understanding is that God joins the story of humanity to take us unto his story. There is a world of difference. One is narcissistic; the other is God-oriented. It will change your entire spiritual life when you realize that your life is joined to God’s story. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 23.
August 11, 2008 What should be the content of Table worship? We remember the death (Lord’s Supper); we celebrate the Resurrection (breaking of bread); we enter into intimate relationship with the resurrected Christ at his Table (communion); and we give thanks for the work of Christ (Eucharist). Robert E. Webber, Planning Blended Worship: the Creative Mixture of Old and New. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 131.
August 4, 2008 One of the main requirements of the worshiper is to seek connections in God’s Word. . . . This will require attentiveness. . . . In order for the Word to take up residence within the person, it is furthermore necessary to hear with an intent or resolve. Resolve is the will by which we choose to let God inform and form our lives. When God speaks, we not only hear God, we also act on what we hear. Robert E. Webber, Planning Blended Worship: the Creative Mixture of Old and New. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 89.
July 28, 2008 Any church’s worship is only a formal, empty ritual if the worshipers do not respond with intentionality. Intention in worship is achieved when the heart knows its need and becomes open and vulnerable to God’s action through a virtual abandonment. An abandoned spirit listens for God’s Word to speak into the individual’s own life. Robert E. Webber, Planning Blended Worship: the Creative Mixture of Old and New. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 46.
July 21, 2008 Worship leaders need to be guided by three central questions as they consider the content of worship: 1) How does this worship speak to God’s glory in heaven and God’s saving actions on earth? 2) How does this worship help people identify their dislocation? 3) How does this worship lead people into a relocation with God? Robert E. Webber, Planning Blended Worship: the Creative Mixture of Old and New. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 42.
July 14, 2008 The underlying conviction of Christian worship is that we are all in a state of dislocation. We are dislocated from God, from self, from neighbor, and from nature. But God has entered into our history in Jesus Christ to bring relocation. . . . In true worship our relationship to God is established, maintained, repaired, and transformed. Robert E. Webber, Planning Blended Worship: the Creative Mixture of Old and New. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 41, 45.
July 7, 2008 Worship is the center of the hourglass, the key to forming the inner life of the Church. Everything the Church does moves toward public worship, and all its ministries proceed from worship. Robert E. Webber, Planning Blended Worship: the Creative Mixture of Old and New. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 29.
June 30, 2008 In contemporary society the heart is reached through participation, and all approaches to worship—traditional, contemporary, or blended—need to relearn how to achieve services characterized by immersed participation. Robert E. Webber, Planning Blended Worship: the Creative Mixture of Old and New. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 29.
June 23, 2008 Congregations . . . should recognize the difficulty of leading contemporary worship. One cannot simply pick up a guitar, assemble contemporary instruments, pick out the right songs, and expect it to go well. Worship leading requires certain skills, a good grasp of how to accomplish the transitions from one phase to another, an ability to make the right connecting comments between songs, a strong bond with the congregation, and a heart in tune with the Spirit. Robert E. Webber, Worship Old and New: A Biblical, Historical, and Practical Introduction, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing, 2004), 160.
June 16, 2008 Me-oriented worship is the result of a culturally driven worship. When worship is situated in the culture and not in the story of God, worship becomes focused on the self. It becomes narcissistic. . . . Much of our worship has shifted from a focus on God and God’s story to a focus on me and my story (231). Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 231.
June 9, 2008 The true love of God and the true experience of God are not found in the languages of experience. . . . We do not contemplate our own experience of God or the romantic feelings we may experience. We contemplate the wonder, the marvel, the mystery, the glory of God creating and becoming incarnate to re-create the whole world and bring it back to himself. Worship is not measured by the depth of my feelings but the deep wonder of the God whose story is so marvelous that it does in fact create feelings of love and gratitude. Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 95. June 2, 2008 In the early church the public worship of the church was a prayer of praise and thanksgiving directed not to the people but to God. Seeing worship as prayer is a paradigm shift from the current presentational notion of worship. . . . Worship as prayer shapes who we are. Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 234-235. May 26, 2008 There really is no such thing as an empty symbol or empty language. Language and symbols perform. They say, they do, they act, they communicate, they express the language of the heart. . . . Baptism says what it does, and it does what it says. It discloses our union with Jesus Christ, an embrace that establishes a new identity and opens the window on God’s vision for our life in God’s world. Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 155. May 19, 2008 The spiritual life is a passionate participation in God imitating the one and only human being fully united to God, Jesus. . . . Since God has already accepted us in Christ, who lifted our humanity up into his, and by the Spirit has done everything necessary to make us acceptable to God, the spiritual life is a freedom to participate in God, not a duty. In Jesus we are born again to become fully human, to be what God created us to be in the first place. So the spiritual life, this marriage we have with God, is an embodied union with God and with his vision for the world revealed to us in Jesus by the Spirit. Our spiritual life, then, is not just a feeling, an idea, or a spiritual romance. No! It is an embodiment of God’s vision for humanity clearly spoken in the words of Jesus and visualized in concrete ways in his action. Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 174-175. May 12, 2008 Worship does God’s story. It proclaims God’s story in the reading and preaching of the Word; in prayer, the church prays for the world God has reclaimed; in the Eucharist, the church ascends into the heavens and experiences the consummation of God’s story in the new heavens and the new earth. Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 233. May 5, 2008 Biblical worship tells and enacts [God’s] story. Narcissistic worship, instead, names God as an object to whom we offer honor, praise, and homage. Narcissistic worship is situated in the worshiper, not in the action of God that the worshiper remembers through Word and table. Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 232-233. April 28, 2008 If God is the object of worship, then worship must proceed from me, the subject, to God, who is the object. . . . If God is understood, however, as the personal God who acts as subject in the world and in worship rather that the remote God who sits in the heavens, then worship is understood not as the acts of adoration God demands of me but as the disclosure of Jesus, who has done for me what I cannot do for myself. In this way worship is the doing of God’s story within me so that I live in the pattern of Jesus’s death and resurrection. Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 232. April 21, 2008 There is no story but God’s; no God but the Father, Son and Spirit; and no life but the baptized life. Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 243.
In tribute to our
founder and friend, Bob Webber
Whatever thy hand findeth to do, April 14, 2008 The church needs to be realigned to the intent of Christ, but it does not need to be reinvented. Reinventing the church is what we do when we allow the culture to shape the church. . . . Obviously the church must speak to the culture. It only speaks authentically and with integrity, however, when speaking out of the story of God. The moment the church capitulates to the culture and speaks out of one or more of the culture’s stories and not out of the story of God, the church loses its nature and mission and ceases to be salt and light to the world. Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 229. April 7, 2008 Christ is the embodied story of God, the one in whom God became human and showed us what humanity was intended to be. The faithful life is the life that seeks to live the Jesus way. [Such devotion] means you can count on me to be Jesus to you. And when I fail, which we all do, you can count on me to repent and return to my intent to be faithful to living in the pattern of death and resurrection. Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 205. March 31, 2008 Consumers want programs. . . . But nowhere in the Epistles do you find the apostolic writers urging the church to develop programs. Instead all the teaching is about a way of life, and that way of life is taught and caught in the church as it sees itself as the continuation of God’s story in the world. For example, in the spirit of Paul calling us to be imitators of Christ daily, one might ask, “Who am I discipling? Who is discipling me? Am I a disciple of Jesus Christ?” Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 228. March 24, 2008 The biblical metaphor for Easter spirituality is found in baptism. The baptized life is a life that is lived in the pattern of death and resurrection. . . . The message of Easter is that the way of being in Jesus, the way of living the new resurrected life is through participation. . . . We participate in Christ by living the life of our baptism into his death and resurrection. This is a daily, existential, moment-by-moment experience as we choose in this or that situation to die to the sins for which Christ died and choose the life of the Spirit for which Christ was raised to a new life. Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 146-147. March 17, 2008 Jesus Christ alone provides the solution for which the whole world groans. God defeats evil on the cross for us. He wins a great victory over evil for us. In his resurrection he conquered the results of sin—which is death—so that death is not the last word written over our life. “‘Death, has been swallowed up in victory.’ ‘Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’ The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 15:54-57). Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 135-6. March 10, 2008 Here then is Christian spirituality: We are spiritual because of God’s divine embrace of humanity and all creation. By his own two hands—the incarnate Word and the Spirit—God’s divine embrace has restored our union with himself for us. He has done for us what we cannot do for ourselves—re-establish the connection with God that we ourselves broke in our rebellion. Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 142.
March 3, 2008 Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 221-222.
February 25, 2008 Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 151. February 18, 2008 "Lent is the time to identify a power working against us and crucify it with Christ and bury it in the tomb, never to be raised again. . . . [Fasting] controls the passion for food in order to deal with a passion of another sort that holds us in its grip. The purpose of the ascetical fast is to liberate us from the power that flesh holds over the spirit. . . . For example, a person may fast as a means to experience victory over jealousy, envy, anger, lust, lack of integrity. . . . The ascetical fast that deals with an issue of character development requires choice and intention on our part. We have to exercise the power of our own will over against the powers of evil that continually draw us into habits of life that are contrary to the gospel." Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 114-115. February 11, 2008 “We are not spiritual because we practice the disciplines or use pious words but because we are united to Jesus who has restored our union with God. So our goal is never to become spiritual but to live out the spirituality we have in Jesus through the choices that spring forth from continually living in God’s embrace affirmed in baptism. Look at [the] disciplines . . . not as sources of spirituality but as disciplines that help us fulfill the spiritual life to which we have been called in Christ." Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 207. February 4, 2008 “Lent . . . calls us back to God, back to basics, back to the spiritual realities of life. It calls on us to put to death the sin and the indifference we have in our hearts toward God and our fellow persons. And it beckons us to enter once again into the joy of the Lord—the joy of a new life born out of a death to the old life. This is what Ash Wednesday is all about—the fundamental change of life required of those who would die with Jesus and be raised to a new life in him.” Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 99-100. January 28, 2008 “Christian spirituality is not a journey into self as if spirituality is found in the deep recesses of our nature, hidden inside of us, waiting for release. No, true Christian spirituality is the embrace of Jesus, who, united to God, restores our union with God that we lost because of sin. This is how the ancient church understood God’s embrace.” Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 127. January 21, 2008 When someone asks me the question, “Do you have a personal relationship with God?” I always answer, “You’re asking the wrong question. What is important here is not that I in and of myself achieve or create a personal relationship with God, but that God has a personal relationship with me through Jesus Christ, which I affirm and nourish.” Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 89. January 14, 2008 “We are the disciples whom Jesus has called . . . to turn away from self-love and self-service, to abandon a life lived for self-gratification or self-glory, and to serve God as an epiphany of the self-giving service of Jesus. True spirituality longs for, seeks for, and wills this abandonment of self so that Christ may become present through our work, our lives, and our relationships, manifesting his power. Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 88. January 7, 2008 “Between the wedding feast in Cana and the impending death of Jesus, a progressive unveiling of his glory will appear. The season of Epiphany . . . celebrates this progressive unveiling of God’s glory manifest in Jesus and invites us to order our spiritual journey around the Christ manifest in history, manifest in us. . . . Spirituality is Christ living his life in us and through us. The manifestation of the glory of God made present in Jesus is to continue in his followers.” Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 85-86. December 31, 2007 Bob recounts attending his first Epiphany service: “I realized that an epiphany was occurring for me right there in the service of worship. I was seeing the glory of God in Christ face-to-face. This manifestation, this epiphany, was not to be a thing of the past, something that happened two thousand years ago, but was to be an appearance now in the body of Christ assembled, an epiphany in me. I had been called from light to darkness, and now I was to be a manifestation of Christ. My part was to respond, to say yes to the calling, to commit my life to be a center through which the Epiphany could be extended beyond the crib to the world of my everyday experience." Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 79. December 24, 2007 “The incarnation is the starting point for our spirituality. . . . God united himself with humans in order for men and women to be united with God. The incarnation is not something unrelated to us; it has everything to do with our spirituality—for the incarnation not only brings God to human nature but brings human nature to God." Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 62. December 17, 2007 “Advent is the time when God breaks in on us with new surprises and touches us with a renewing and restoring power. . . . We should use the Advent season as a period to identify the matters from which we need to be redeemed. Identify whatever it is that seems to be holding you in its power. . . . Commit it to the one who comes to set the prisoners free, turn it over to Christ in prayer, and ask the one who has come into your life to take this problem up into himself." Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 38, 51. December 10, 2007 “God’s story is the brief interpretation of everything. It is . . . a true picture of the world and our place in it. And through this picture we hear the voice of God who says . . . “I opened the way for you to live in my embrace of you and the world. Through my Son Jesus and by my Spirit I have embraced you so that now, united with me, you may embrace me as a child learns to embrace a mother because the mother first embraced the child. Now go and live the spiritual life, embrace me and my purpose in creating you and putting you in this world to be the priests of my creation. Make your life and this world the theater of my glory” Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 142. December 3, 2007 "Experience in worship is not my immediate pleasure or even my immediate response. The focus of experience is not on my experience of God but on how God as the subject of worship forms me through word and sacrament and thereby changes my life. I have been in one too many worship services where the focus was cheerleading for Jesus. . . . Worshipers are not a cheering section for God. The problem with this kind of worship is not only that it is an accommodation to culture but that it is also a severe example of self-situated spirituality." Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 94-95. November 26, 2007 “The heart of biblical and ancient Christian spirituality is our mystical union with God accomplished by Jesus Christ through the Spirit. God unites with humanity in his saving incarnation, death, and resurrection. We unite with God as we receive his new life within us." Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 16. ___________________________________ |
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The Robert E. Webber
Institute for Worship Studies
151 Kingsley Avenue
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Orange Park, FL 32073 |
