SITTING ON THE PROMISES?
Two of the more common gestural accompaniments of prayer and worship in Scripture are kneeling and the lifting of one’s hands.
In several places in the
Institutes and his commentaries, John Calvin reflects on the usefulness of such practices for Christian prayer and sketches an outline of what it is that God intends them to do; or, rather, what God intends to do by them (and the notion of
instrumentality will emerge as clearly having been of great significance for Calvin).
We tend, I think, in the Reformed world particularly, to assume that posture has very little to do with prayer, for a variety of reasons (e.g., an allergy to certain traditions with which we’d rather not be associated; an intellectualizing and cerebral impulse in worship that has as a frequent corollary, though not as a necessary consequence, a perhaps too easy alliance with forms that fall within our collective comfort zones;
1etc.). Others perhaps move in the opposition direction, believing that certain actions
must be done at certain times, and that a failure to perform these actions makes prayer less, well, prayerful.
For Calvin, both positions are errors because both misjudge the nature of externals and their relation to the worship of the heart–the former too easily dispensing with them and therefore too quickly leaving them to one side, the latter giving them more weight than is due to them. Worship of God without the heart is useless; but, at the same time, what we do with our bodies is closely bound up with what we do with our hearts, and not in a symbolic way merely. The posture of the body ought to be emblematic of the posture of the heart, yes. But, ideally, the posture of the body serves to
form the posture of the heart as well: posture, that is, has what we might call, in syntactical terms, both an indicative and a hortatory function. Kneeling is not just a sign of submission; kneeling aids in producing submission.
To approach more closely to what should be involved in thinking about this issue, let us look at some excerpts from Calvin, beginning with the
Institutes. (END QUOTE)
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Yours in the Lord,
jm