Should we raise our hands in worship to God?

[The Liturgist]

I think (or at least I interpreted it as) the OP means more along the lines of what one sees in charismatic churches during worship, the raising of hands and such. That could be included in prayers, and is often seen in the petitions as well, but not so much in the meaning or manner of the Orans position in a liturgical prayer - this is generally more "spontaneous". Many people see it as the "Spirit" leading them to do it, I don't agree with that position, but that is what it is.

Oh yes, I saw footage of a Korean man doing that while speaking in tongues at the Yoido Full Gospel Church in South Korea, which is a Pentecostal Church which is apparently the largest in the world, in the BBC documentary Around The World In 80 Faiths*. Extremely far removed from the sobriety of Reformed worship.

Correct me if I am wrong, but in the Reformed Churches the Charismatic movement has generally been more subdued, and more Reformed pastors have been opposed to Charismatic and Pentecostal worship than one encounters on average. There are Charismatic Reformed churches, but my understanding is only recently have they been mainstream, and my impression is that Charismatic worship remains largely frowned upon by traditional Reformed and Presbyterian ministers of the sort one will find in the PCUSA, OPC, the Christian Reformed Church and other conservative groups that left the United Reformed Church, and among the Reformed Baptists (such as the Reformed-leaning parishes in the SBC, and the Strict Baptists, Particular Baptists and Primitive Baptists) and the Reformed majority of traditionalist Congregational churches in the CCCC (I myself am a traditional Congregationalist minister but have generally always been on the fence between Calvin and Arminius, not unlike the early Methodists; of course I have always thought of myself as Wesleyan but also frequently have embraced Calvinism and during my time in a certain liberal mainline denomination was something of a Calvinist Wesleyan rebel, embracing both theological concepts that presented themselves as alternatives to the postmodernist theology, as I firmly believe, as did Calvin, that we should never put a comma where God intended a period, to parody one of the ridiculous ad campaigns that chagrined me during that era).

Further to this point, John MacArthur, a quintessential Reformed Baptist preacher, conducted the Strange Fire conference against Charismatic and Pentecostal worship, which I greatly admired him for doing (I would be a huge fan of his were it not for how he ended his friendship with Hank Haanegraaf). This conference I felt was an embodiment of the ardent belief of John Calvin that counterfeit worship, like the strange fire offered at the Tabernacle with lethal results, incites the wrath of God to a particularly great extent. This, which I comment on below, is interestingly enough a view shared by the Eastern churches (Calvin greatly disliked the Greek Orthodox church due to iconography but probably would have had some good things to say about the Church of the East, had he known about it beyond the vague awareness of a “Nestorian Church in the Orient” that was the limit of most Europeans’ awareness of the Assyrian Church until the late 17th century) and also historically, the Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Lutherans, the difference being one of opinion over what constituted pious genuine worship vs. superstitious counterfeit worship.

To this day the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, the Church of the East, the Traditional Latin Mass communities, traditional Anglicans who are members of the Prayer Book Societies, and traditional Calvinists in certain denominations such as the Covenanting Reformed Presbyterian Churches, the Primitive Baptists, and other Reformed denominations that strictly follow the Regulative Principle of Worship, and often embrace practices such as A Capella Exclusive Psalmody and Lining Out, are more dedicated to correct worship than any other denominations, and this is a credit to all of them in my opinion, because I, like CS Lewis, am a proponent of stability in worship, and an opponent of contemporary services that resemble popular music concerts.

*This documentary series is quite amazing as a pre-ISIS historical record now for its coverage of the Yazidis in Iraq and the Mevlevi Sufis, also known as whirling dervishes, in the now-destroyed Old City of Aleppo, Syria, where many historic churches were sadly obliterated. That said, the presenter, an Anglican Priest, Fr. Peter Owen-Jones, I think involved himself way too much in the religions he was visiting, both in this series and its predecessor, Extreme Pilgrim, where fortunately he concluded with a stay in the hermitage of the Coptic Anchorite Fr. Lazarus, an Australian immigrant to Egypt who is the only monk at the Monastery of St. Anthony, which appeared to correct the stresses inflicted by unwise attempts at learning meditation from Buddhists and attempting to sample the life of a Hindu Saddhu, practices which have caused many Christians to be spiritually shipwrecked, but in the case of Around the World in 80 Faiths he involved himself in the worship of 80 different religions, only a minority of which were Christian, and some of which were rather dubious forms of Christianity which may well have been cults, and was severely traumatized on camera on at least two occasions, once by ill-advised participation in a Voudon sacrificial ritual to the false god Thron in Benin (almost certainly a demon, verse 5 of the Septuagint version of the Psalm Cantate Domino (Psalm 95 LXX / Psalm 96 MT) reads “the gods of the gentiles are demons,” and on a second occasion in a bizarre demonic psuedo-exorcism ritual of a cult in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, which is a hotbed for cults rivaled by Sedona, Arizona, which he also visited, and Ojai, California, which he apparently skipped, but I am amazed he survived that. **

**This is the oldest Christian monastery in the world, and probably the oldest monastery in the world, in that cenobitic Buddhist monasticism as a concept appears to have been copied, along with some musical traditions and the idea of a hierarchy, albeit based on reincarnation rather than apostolic succession, from the Church of the East. Monasticism is not entirely foreign to Reformed Christianity; the founder of the Taize community who lived a monastic life was a Calvinist. However Calvin himself took a dim view of monasticism, especially the monasticism of the pre-Tridentine Roman Catholic Church, and he tended to regard monasticism as schismatic. Thus we have not seen the level of interest among Reformed churches in monasticism as we have seen from Lutherans, Anabaptists, Methodists and especially Anglicans. I should note I am only familiar with Calvin’s views on monasticism, which seemed primarily concerned with three aspects: vows, isolation from the larger community, and a fear that the spiritual failures of some monks as described by St. Augustine offset the successes of others. His opposition to vows was a part of his opposition to counterfeit worship, which he believed God was outraged by more than anything else. In this respect I feel like Calvin was, among Christian theologians, one of the most dedicated to discerning what constituted true orthodoxy (where orthodoxy is literally translated as “correct worship” or “correct glorification”) and among those most admirably committed to the doctrine of lex orandi, lex credendi.

***This church, which was in late antiquity headquartered in Seleucia-Cstesiphon (the successor to Babylon after the Euphrates shifted its course, and the predecessor to Baghdad, which is more or less on the same spot as Babylon, after the river shifter back), a cosmopolitan city also home to the compilers of the Babylonian Talmud and the foremost Islamic philosophers, once stretched from Asia Minor and the Yemen all the way across Asia to the Buddhist strongholds in Tibet, China and Mongolia and arrived in all probability at a time proximate to that of the Buddhists; all members of the Church of the East other than the Assyrians in Mesopotamia and the Mar Thoma Christians in Malankara, India, were exterminated in a genocide by the Muslim warlord Tamerlane, who is disturbingly revered as a national hero in Uzbekistan, in the 12th century, and other regional genocides inspired by Tamerlane, for example in Socotra, an island off the coast of Yemen historically ruled by the Yemenese which had a Christian population for centuries. Prior to this genocide the Church of the East was the largest in terms of geographical size and may have had more communicants than the Roman Catholic Church, but unfortunately it was an ethnic minority in every region where it existed, not unlike the Jews before the re-establishment of the State of Israel.

 

[RileyG]

Orthodox clergy use it at certain points during prayer, notably Syriac Orthodox priests during the Eucharistic Prayer, facing the altar. Syriac laity use it also. It is also a thing in the Novus Ordo Missae but I think it had been out of use for some time before, I am not sure. I do know there is an 2nd century icon showing a Christian praying in the Orans position, drawn with chalk on the wall of the Catacombs in Rome, indicating a probable location of a secret church meeting place.

A lot of Protestants and Pentecostals have adopted it in recent years but historically the Protestant position of prayer was with the hands folded, which is also a position priests and other divine ministers and altar servers hold their hands in during processions in the Traditional Latin Mass.

To my knowledge it was not historically used in Presbyterian or Reformed worship, where the bowed head and folded hands are very traditional.

Thanks for the information.

 

[RileyG]

I cannot speak for Reformed or Presbyterian Churches, but I noticed a Pentecostal woman doing it during worship. She tends to move her hands a lot. I think the Presbyterian and Reformed Churches would be more low church and not necessarily move their hands a lot. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[The Liturgist]

I cannot speak for Reformed or Presbyterian Churches, but I noticed a Pentecostal woman doing it during worship. She tends to move her hands a lot. I think the Presbyterian and Reformed Churches would be more low church and not necessarily move their hands a lot. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong.

Well moving the hands in the Pentecostal manner is neither low church or high church; low church vs. high church refers to how elaborate the worship service is, for example, an Anglican low church service would look like many Presbyterian services, whereas an Anglican high church service would in some respects resemble a Roman Catholic liturgy, with incense and so on.

The Reformed Tradition actually has high church worship, and even the Scoto-Catholic Movement analogous to the ultra high church Anglo-Catholic movement, but much smaller. I saw a Choral Evensong at a Church of Scotland High Kirk in Glasgow, which I assumed at first was the Scottish Episcopal Church and when I realized it was the Church of Scotland I was pretty surprised. If anyone here is familiar with Scoto-Catholicism or Mercersburg Theology I would love to hear from you.

 

[JM]

"I will therefore that men pray every where, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and doubting."

 

[Ceallaigh]

From my personal experience going back over 40 years, it's primarily a Pentecostal and similar thing. In my early days attending a Pentecostal church, I was told that one aspect of it is a sign of surrender to God.

I find it personally distracting keeping track of what my arms are doing while worshiping.

 

[The Liturgist]

From my personal experience going back over 40 years, it's primarily a Pentecostal and similar thing. In my early days attending a Pentecostal church, I was told that one aspect of it is a sign of surrender to God.

I find it personally distracting keeping track of what my arms are doing while worshiping.

As I mentioned earlier, Syriac Orthodox use the orans position specifically when praying the Lord’s Prayer, and in that context it is not distracting. The Syriac and Coptic churches are also the only churches which have retained the kiss of peace from antiquity. The way it works is you place your flat hands on the hands of your neighbor, and then raise your hands to your lip and kiss them, before passing the peace to your next neighbor. In the Syriac Orthodox Church, a pair of young Psaltis (who would be considered acolytes or altar servers in a Western church) proceed from the altar down the central aisle, granting the kiss of peace as described above to the closest person in each row or pew of worshippers. I have not found any of these practices to be distracting, probably because in any traditional liturgy, whether Anglican, Lutheran, Tridentine, Armenian, East Syriac, Byzantine, Coptic, or Syriac Orthodox, everything is done in a manner that is extremely dignified and orderly, with a minimum of distraction.

 

[Ceallaigh]

As I mentioned earlier, Syriac Orthodox use the orans position specifically when praying the Lord’s Prayer, and in that context it is not distracting. The Syriac and Coptic churches are also the only churches which have retained the kiss of peace from antiquity. The way it works is you place your flat hands on the hands of your neighbor, and then raise your hands to your lip and kiss them, before passing the peace to your next neighbor. In the Syriac Orthodox Church, a pair of young Psaltis (who would be considered acolytes or altar servers in a Western church) proceed from the altar down the central aisle, granting the kiss of peace as described above to the closest person in each row or pew of worshippers. I have not found any of these practices to be distracting, probably because in any traditional liturgy, whether Anglican, Lutheran, Tridentine, Armenian, East Syriac, Byzantine, Coptic, or Syriac Orthodox, everything is done in a manner that is extremely dignified and orderly, with a minimum of distraction.

I don't have any personal experience with that. Just American Pentacostal churches. And Baptist churches but to a lesser degree and with less emphasis.

 

[JM]

Wasn't there a tradition of stretching your arms out to the sides forming a cross when praying? I can't remember where I read that.

 

[The Liturgist]

Wasn't there a tradition of stretching your arms out to the sides forming a cross when praying? I can't remember where I read that.

There was, in the North African churches such as that of Hippo, where St. Augustine served as bishop, or Carthage, where St. Cyprian was bishop. Sadly these churches were wiped out by the Islamic caliphates, and consequently, we know very little about how they actually worshipped, but it is believed that they did make the sign of the cross by extending their arms all the way to the sides.