I Hate, I Despise Your Festivals: Christian Worship and the Divine Polemic
Matthew M. Boulton
Christian worship has always been a blend of sin and salvation, earnestly extolled by admirers, but as murky in practice as the rest of human life. Even at its best - and arguably, especially at its best - Christian worship is a study in theological ambiguity. In other words, though worship practices are highly exalted among Christians, there are good grounds for taking a much more critical, ambivalent view. These grounds are empirical, to be sure, since Christian hypocrisies are only too easy to find. But the grounds are also scriptural and theological.
For as it turns out, the trouble with Christian worship cannot simply be chalked up to human weakness, as if the root problem is our unfortunate failure to meet liturgy's impeccable standards. On the contrary, those standards themselves are open to question, and subjecting them to scriptural and theological lines of critique can be an illuminating, humbling, and ultimately liberating discipline for Christians today.