Much in Prayer
by S. M. Hutchens
One of the most common themes in the oracles of the Old Testament prophets is God’s utter disgust with religious exercises as substitutes for doing what the worshipers know to be right. The Prophet Amos speaks the word of God to Israel, saying,
I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings, I will not accept them, and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. (Amos 5:21–24)
Could this possibly be said more unmistakably and forcefully? God hates Religion, however formally correct, fervent, costly, and serious, apart from doing what is just and right. The exercises of worship, on one hand, and the pleasing of God by doing the good which he commands, on the other, are quite separable, so that a man might storm the heavens with mighty words and pray until he bleeds, but as long as he will not do what he knows the Lord requires of him by way of justice and righteousness, he will be ignored. Translate it this way similarly to offend modern ears:
I hate, I despise, all your church services and liturgies. Even though you celebrate any quantity of Masses or preach mighty, heart-moving, biblical sermons, you’re wasting your time and nauseating me. I can’t stand listening to your organs, guitars, choirs, your soloists and worship teams or whatever noises you have managed to devise in my name and putatively for my glory. I’ve made it plain to you in many ways what I require. Instead, you put on a show. You do not like these simple, uncomplicated requirements of mine and think you can evade them as though my God-ness obliged me to appreciate the rigamarole. It doesn’t. Do what you know you’re supposed to if you want me to pay any attention to your prayers or be with you in church.
Not Confined to Liberals
I was inspired to repair to Amos after viewing yet another graphic testimony to the enduring truth of his prophecy: an image of a cluster of clergy-persons rapt in prayer, as though seeking blessing and guidance for their cooperative rebellion from the Christian faith, still falsely identifying themselves as Christian pastors in their teaching the lie of the “radical inclusivity” of Jesus, as though they thought God would want to help them when he had already made it plain in Scripture that they were disobeying him and that what they needed to do for a divine audience was repent.
I know the type, and it is by no means confined to liberals. They tell people they have been “much in prayerful study” or the like, instead of simply finding ways of doing what they already know to be right. They fool fewer people than they think they might with this sort of thing, but they do discredit the churches that tolerate them and accept their pastoral guidance, even though their “prayerful study” usually results in a bulwark of reasons to do what they will and what their disobedient congregations in fact prefer.
Martin Luther King Jr. (from the Birmingham jail in particular) provided the most powerful example in recent memory of this situation in his accusation against professing Christians who, while mighty with religious noise and all the sounds of righteousness—churches that were “much in prayer”—were unjust to black people, for whom the Christian faith does not demand equality of political and social rights, but something infinitely greater: that black Christians be loved by other Christians and treated like brothers. (The movement for civil rights has always been in conflict with Christianity because it involves politics, which requires divisions that set man against man, whereas the Christian faith regards all believers as a fraternal unity from the beginning, and has the authority to command politics, not from the illusory platform of a radically inclusive Jesus—a Jesus that does not exist—but according to the sovereign commands of the Judge of all men.)
Acceptable Divine Worship
There is no word here against divine worship in its various expressions—the opposite, in fact: this is something in which the Lord may “take delight”—but only against the utter vanity of the work of every liturgist, architect, musician, and worshiper, when the supposed worship does not issue from the greater thing: the disposition and actions that must precede it if is to be accepted by God. For the prophet Micah likewise says:
Would the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I present my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:7–8)
And the first of the Christian apostles universalized this when he said,
I now truly understand that God does not show favoritism, but welcomes those from every nation who fear him and do what is right. (Acts 10:34–35)
This in execution of what his Lord said:
But the hour comes, and now is, when the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeks such to worship him. God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. (John 4:23–24)
This is the final word. Right worship is absolutized, not taken away, but the place and manner of worship are placed in the obedience of the worshipers to the Spirit of God. Where those who fear him and do what is right are, there is divine worship, acceptable to God.
Where the Difficulty Lies
All my life I have been warned away by the keepers of my temple from this understanding, whatever the Scriptures may say, as redolent of liberalism, works righteousness, and universalism, for accepting it renders them useless. They might be right if the Lord did not tell us what it is we should and should not do to worship him as he requires, as well as what we should believe, and that faith in him contains all these things. Liberalism, works righteousness in the Pauline sense, and universalism do not, but oppose the Word of the Lord. This is not difficult to understand, only to bear up under.
So I write such things as a form of catharsis from the putrid images of disobedience I am forced to encounter in my work, of religion in the service of all manner of lies and sexual perversion. These include the inevitable bright smiles, the open, welcoming arms for the rightly oriented, the embraces, the costumes and places of worship stolen by guile and deceit from false or unvigilant Christians. Hell, I am more often beginning to think, is the place where those insolent, mocking smiles will be wiped off the faces of Walpurgian religious merrymakers. As Elizabeth Bennet remarked with regard to Darcy and Wickham as though she might be commenting on the mixed field of Christendom, “One has got all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it.” Christus Victor: this will not last forever.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
31.6—November/December 2018
Victimhood Culture Scapegoats Its Very Source by Michael P. Foley
31.6—November/December 2018
on the Church's Response to the Anti-marriage Tide by Diane Woerner
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
