Worshiping Like Catholics?
St. Peter’s Basilica has the tallest dome in the world. The Milan Cathedral has an intricately carved white stone exterior – and the view from the roof is breathtaking. The Florence Cathedral feels nearly as large, and it is a work of Renaissance wonder.
Each of these buildings is owned by the Roman Catholic Church. I had the opportunity to visit each of these buildings recently. It made me wonder – are Evangelicals worshiping like Catholics?
The interiors of Catholic church buildings are generally grandiose. They are designed to impress – and they do! They contain memorials to saints and illustrations of scenes from the Bible, or from church history.
It is easy to dismiss these things today, to say that they are unnecessary. But medieval Catholics had a very convincing reason why they created the buildings they did: illiteracy.
People didn’t read the Bible. They couldn’t read the Bible – not even in their own language, let alone Latin. They didn’t know how to read.
So how do you teach millions of people about God, if they can’t even read the story of Jonah, or the account of Joseph in Egypt? You illustrate it, don’t you? Tell the story and provide pictures to help them understand. If you can build a huge building to illustrate God’s grandeur, that might help as well.
That was the thinking. Of course, as Protestants, we understand that this sounds right, but it’s wrong. The Bible teaches that we worship God in spirit and in truth (John 4). So, as Protestants, we’ve removed these unnecessary worship ‘helps.’ Right?
Maybe not. Do you notice all the ways in which we are drifting back to Catholic worship?
No longer do we emphasize the Word of God, the Bible. No longer do we emphasize reading the Bible, or hearing it read, or hearing it preached. We’ve become captivated with the idea of visualizing the Bible. We visualize the Bible in TV documentaries. We ‘act out’ our worship in liturgical dance and drama. And, because we still wish to overwhelm the emotions like Catholics, our worship services are designed to overwhelm: smoke machines, pounding music, laser lights – you get the point.
Maybe we, too, are interested in the physical, the fleshly, the things that move us visually and aesthetically and overwhelm our senses. Maybe the form and style of grandeur has changed, but maybe we are still pursuing the ‘lust of the eyes’ that medieval worship pursued. Could it be that we are worshiping like Catholics?
