Given that I said this:

He has given us the water of baptism to show how we have passed over from death into life; He has given us the remembrance in the shared meal to remember how the blood of the lamb causes death to pass over us; He has given us a new day, which is not a sabbath but a celebration which looks forward to the day when we will sit at His table and have the wedding feast as the Bridegroom is united forever with his Bride.

I’m not sure how you can label me “gnostic”. What I am saying is that any high-church intimation that there ought to be some sort of utensils for the tabernacle (so to speak) overlooks a lot of incarnational theology and a lot of the implications that we as people are now a nation of priests.

I wouldn’t completely toss out your ideas about liturgy, but I wouldn’t call them a high-water mark, either. I’d say instead that if they lead you to see only one act, or one place, as holy, you have missed the point of Emmanuel – “God with us”.

And I would also underscore my skepticism toward most paedobaptist churches and their view of worship and liturgy. Overtly or covertly, they call high-church liturgy “dead forms”, but what they do is not any less dead, not any less formal, and not any closer to the mark of giving people over to Christ in worship so that they may in fact be blessed by Him and be a holy people for him.

You seem to indicate that Old Testament ideas of what the word Holy meant was supplanted and replaced by the Resurrection (which is how I take your veil torn in two remark). Now, in part, I’ve read that for example Levitical purity sacrifices are replaced by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, this makes sense. I have not read or heard exposition arguing that Christ’s incarnation means what is meant by Holiness becomes basically a gnostic concept.

Matt,
In part I was taking my conclusion that the Reformation and Enlightenment movement from exerior+interior to an emphasis on the interior from Charles Taylor’s Secular Age.

And in part the reformers had a perfectly valid point. One can, indeed, supplant and replace the interior life with a complete (Pharisaic?) emphasis on the exterior. But I think this goes both ways. An emphasis on the interior to supplant the exterior is very gnostic. It just struck me that what one calls Holy and how one treats with those things which are so called reflects this.

I do think that there is much to be learned from liturgical traditions of the importance of the forms in which we participate that “flesh-out” and embody the living Word of God, the Word which sustains not just our interior spiritual lives but the very created order itself.

In my view, though Mark Olson’s either/or interior/exterior dichotomy theoretically is not necessary in low-liturgical circles, in practice, sometimes I’m not so sure how much thought and care is given to how the gospel truth of the redemption of creation–which is public, material, relational, formal, structured, and orderly–impacts the shape of low-liturgical worship practices, music, architecture, and other forms.

Here’s where that “privatization” thing always takes me: the secular/sacred divide. When we say, for example, that the Holy thing is only “in Jerusalem” or “on the mountain” (cf. John 4) we miss that the true worshippers of God will seek Him in Spirit and in Truth. In another place, the NT tells us that the wall of enmity between Jew and Gentile is now removed by God — which is another way of saying that the boundaries of what is actually Holy have been changed or reconciled. In another place, Peter is told to go and seek out Cornelius the centuri0n because God is no respecter of persons, and that what was once unclean is now clean.

Now, I “get” that only 2 of the 3 examples I gave there are really about worship per se, but it seems to me that in our quest to somehow, for God’s sake, to make some things “Holy” we are in some sense erecting barriers that he Himself has torn down and doesn’t want us to get too worried about.

He has given us the water of baptism to show how we have passed over from death into life; He has given us the remembrance in the shared meal to remember how the blood of the lamb causes death to pass over us; He has given us a new day, which is not a sabbath but a celebration which looks forward to the day when we will sit at His table and have the wedding feast as the Bridegroom is united forever with his Bride.

And He has given us today, which is the day of salvation. So as a guy who is in love with the low-liturgy church, I think the move toward “privatization” comes when we disconnect today, and now, from the Holy.

I could be wrong.

Mark, I grew up evangelical but would no longer consider myself non-liturgical though I still think I’m evangelical, so I’m not sure whether I’m an outsider or not. Then again, we’re talking about evangelicalism so talk of “insider/outsider” is notoriously difficult, eh? :)

Anyway, my two cents are that this reminded me of a post by Peter Leithart, which I will copy from here:

What difference does the incarnation make? For Athanasius, it means (among other things, of course) that grace is worked from within humanity rather than being offered extrinsically from without, as grace was given to Adam.

Redemption history is a movement from extrinsic to intrinsic grace, as the Father raises Adam’s children into communion by the Son and Spirit.

Or (borrowing the light/radiance analogy from Athanasius): Adam is illumined by external light; those of the new Adam are glorified by radiance within.

As Frank Turk alluded, the incarnation–and I’d add Pentacost–are critical to understanding holiness in the church, for the Son is risen and has given us the Spirit of Holiness to dwell in us in a way that Moses did not experience. This newness should be reflected in our worship. Now, you might remind me that I admitted to being of a liturgical mind, but I don’t see how or why non-liturgical evangelicals could not also accept this understanding of the place of holiness in our local bodies.

Lastly, you’re right that the Enlightenment privatization of Christianity is connected with the emphasis, in contemporary non-liturgical circles, on interior spiritual experience, which makes sense of the de-emphasis (though certainly not complete rejection) of outward forms and liturgies since they are necessarily public in nature. This is, in my experience, rather well-known among thoughtful evangelicals; what is less known is how the private/public distinction is tied to non-liturgical evangelical alienation from creation and the created order, which is what Matthew Lee Anderson wrote about in the excellent post you cite.

I think genuine Pentecostalism puts people in touch with God in a real and meaningful way. Pentecostals believe God loves. They believe He wants to be involved in their lives (by their own free will). They believe He is a giver, a healer, and a redeemer. They are not content to have a relationship with the Bible. They want to know God through experience. I think those are good things.

Good question, but the premise is problematic: “One of the aspects of the enlightenment which is entwined with the Protestant separation is the de-emphasis of the liturgical expression in favor of or over and above the interior spiritual experience.”

Conflating the enlightenment with Protestantism is not what I would do . I think evangelicals are particularly susceptible to being co-opted by modernity, but for reasons not having to do with Protestantism per se. That is, it’s a bug, not a feature. The Lutheran tradition (and, really, aspects of the Reformed) both have strong liturgical aspects to them.

Matt

FWIW, I think that gives “us” too much credit — we non-liturgical types are really over-run with lazy a-theological slackers who just want 20 minutes of announcements, 20 minutes of songs and 20 minutes of motivational speaking.

So you get my optimism and pessimism both in perspective.

The holy is not to be found in material things, but in the saints.

The saints will not be found among relics and icons, but in the saved.

The saved will gather on Sunday to worship the Lord in order to hear from His Word.

His Word will cast out all false ideas of the holy, such as bread and wine, confront their sin, and will transform His people to be like Christ.

Christ will draw His own to hear His voice in the Word, and they will leave the pagan ideas of holiness such as expressed in your post to grow in holiness.