Book
David F. Ford and Daniel W. Hardy. Living in Praise. Revised and updated edition. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005. (First edition: Jubilate: Theology in Praise [DLT, 1984]).
Reviewer
Eleanor Kreider, AMBS, Elkhart, Indiana
Why is praise important? Why does God demand or deserve praise? Is it not just an archaic practice? Invoking Biblical tradition and quoting poets ancient and modern, Cambridge theologians David F. Ford and Daniel W. Hardy move these questions freely into our contemporary context. Baker offers this reissue, essentially unchanged except for a new introduction and epilogue, of Jubilate: Theology in Praise (1984). In a market filled with pep talks and how-to manuals for worship leaders, this book offers an orthodox, yet up-to-date, provocative theology in which to anchor Christian worship.
The authors suggest ways in which praise operates day to day in ordinary human life, and they show how that impulse may be redirected toward God. Praise, after all, is an everyday human experience. When people are in free relationships, mutual recognition, respect, and delight tend to overflow in thanks and praise. Similarly, our Creator God invites us into the freedom of relationship that follows the same movement from mutual respect through delight and thanksgiving, blessing and praise.
A catchword in the book is “overflow.” Praise of God is not “necessary”: it is an overflow, “a generous extravagance of response” (15); it is “an overflow of mutual blessing of God and humanity” (23).
At the heart of this study is the assertion that the primary characteristic of praise is that it directs all our human experiences to God. As we become more aware of the divine presence and activity in the world, we can only respond with praise. It is the quality that binds and integrates human life. The Psalms are filled with this perspective, as are NT hymns and the Gospels. George Herbert expresses it beautifully in a hymn of 1633: “Teach me, my God and King, in all things Thee to see, and what I do in anything, to do it all for Thee.”
Sometimes Mennonites are described as “praise-challenged”. We are more at home with the prophetic outburst or the compassionate intercession than with overflowing thanksgiving and praise. This book provides fresh ways to enter into praise – the integrating movement of faith. Two topics discussed in it illustrate areas where Mennonites need to grow: freedom of spirit in worship, and breaking free from a controlling stoicism in outlook. Here are provocative insights worthy of energetic debate.
In discussing the diversity of explicit acts of worship in various denominations, the authors describe four modes of praise in two pairs: word and sacrament; spontaneity and silence.
They assert that Christians whose worship is primarily encompassed in word or sacrament have become increasingly open to learning from one another. Though worship has always involved the second pair, these modes of praise have been individualized or marginalized altogether. This is the context in which the authors explore how silence has taken up residence in individual modes of spiritual disciplines. And they see Pentecostalism as a marginalized movement that can take up with great intensity both poles of word and sacrament.
In this position Pentecostalism may mediate between Catholic and Protestant worship. The authors suggest that “the primary significance of Pentecostalism is its recovery of the authentic Christian impetus of praise” (25). It does not offer just another pattern of worship; at its best it can use pattern and dispose of pattern. This is what the authors call “the jazz factor.” Can we imagine Mennonite worshipers learning to be jazz worshipers, playing familiar patterns of praise with exuberant freedom?
The book’s profoundly challenging chapter six deals with praise in the presence of evil, suffering, and death. The authors explore shame as an experience of evil that afflicts many. Among various ways of dealing with shame, theistic and atheistic, is a stoic response. Its salient mark is “the endurance of evil, suffering and death with dignity” (119). For ‘good’ people in our civilization stoicism “is perhaps the most attractive alternative to Christianity, especially in its realism about the negative side of life.”
But stoicism cuts the root of joy. Though admirable, orderly, and sensible, stoicism misses the reality of joyous overflow. It cannot be free in the spirit; it cannot accommodate resurrection. Sometimes a practicing Christian is exactly this kind of stoic. Stoicism, “though deeply in line with some Christian values, is often the ethical core left after living faith has gone” (120). How can a stoic enter into joyous praise?
The authors draw extensively on poetic vision through the ages: Psalms, prophets, wisdom literature, NT hymns, Dante, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Micheal O’Siadhail, and especially Patrick Kavanagh.
Though only 200 pages long, this is a big book. When pastors forget what worship is about, being so occupied with planning details of weekly services, they should reach for this book. They will find deep challenge and joyful perspective, and they can be led and fed by its insights.