Book Review: Ancient-Future Worship, by Robert E. Webber
Review by Craig Thompson
Robert Webber’s Ancient-Future Worship is the final in his Ancient-Future series, which seeks to mine the wisdom of the Christian past for the contemporary church. It is “not an academic” book, written particularly for low church Protestants from an evangelical perspective informed by a deep knowledge of the church’s liturgical history.
Webber’s main purpose is recovering the notion that worship tells God’s story, remembering the past and anticipating the future. God’s engagement with his human creatures is one in which God “takes us into his story”. Worship recalls this incorporation in historical recitation and dramatic re-enactment, and tells it forward as the world’s future.
The first part of the book argues that Christian, scripturally, worship is about just such remembrance and anticipation, and portrays much contemporary worship in contrast with this. Reflecting on much protestant worship, Webber is concerned at tendencies to reduce worship to a program, show or entertainment. In place of remembrance in worship often comes a concern with therapy or inspiration. Important for any reflection on why we might change our practice is an awareness of how we have come to do what we do in the first place; Webber’s fourth chapter addresses the history of Christian worship, describing “How the fullness of God’s story became lost.” Like any family history, there are surprises and connections made here which make sense of what is mysterious about much contemporary worship.
The second part of the book moves from a scriptural analysis to a sketch of Christian worship in the early church as an instance of the remembrance-anticipation patter of worship. Successive chapters deal with the place of the Scriptural narrative in worship, the presence of God at the Eucharistic table, and the function of prayer as telling the story of God’s work in the world.
For the purposes of the Do This project, the chapter on the Eucharist is perhaps the weakest in the book. Nevertheless, basic argument is an important one: we must understand what worship properly is, why we happen to worship as we now do, and then reflect critically on the latter in terms of the former.
Ancient-Future Worship is an accessible introduction to the nature of Christian worship. It would serve the ministers, worship committees and study groups of “low church” congregations well should they desire to reflect on why they worship as they do, and how they might learn from the worship commitments of the wider church.