Wolterstorff on worship and intention

In Acting Liturgically, Wolterstorff offers a necessary and sufficient condition for when someone “is performing acts of worship or just saying the words and making the gestures”:

if a participant performs some prescribed verbal or gestural action with the intention of not thereby performing whatever be the act of worship prescribed to be performed thereby, then he has not performed that act of worship; otherwise he has

In other words:

1. One worships with the action as the community does if and only if one does not intend to dissent from the community’s understanding of the action.

But both directions of the biconditional are false.

Case 1: Alice visits a foreign country where she does not know the language and enters an ornate religious building. She believes the building to be a pagan temple and, seeing people kneeling, she thinks them to be thereby worshiping some pagan deity. She feels an urge to pray to God, and she kneels with the dual intention of thereby worshiping God and of not doing what the local community is doing. Her worship is heartfelt and sincere. But unbeknownst to her, the building is a church and the people are worshiping God by kneeling.

Alice is worshiping God by kneeling. An intention to worship God by kneeling while acting in a heartfelt and sincere way is sufficient for the kneeling to constitute worship of God. But by Wolterstorff principle, because she also intends—perhaps in Wolterstorff’s own words (she might be a reader of his)—to “not thereby perform[…] whatever be the act of worship prescribed to be performed” by the kneeling, she is not performing “that act of worship”. But that act of worship—the one the community has prescribed the kneeling to constitute—is worship of God. So if Wolterstorff’s no-intended-dissent condition is necessary for worship, Alice doesn’t worship God. But she does. So the no-intended-dissent condition is not necessary.

Objection: Alice is not worshiping communally but individually. The community is worshiping communally. So, Alice does not perform what the community understands the action to be, namely communal worship.

Response: Add to the story that this particular church has a special meaning for “kneeling”: it’s not just worship, but individual worship.

Case 2: Bob visits a foreign country where he does not know the language and enters an ornate religious building. He believes the building to be a Christian church and, seeing people kneeling, he thinks them to be worshiping God. He intends to worship God, kneels and prays in a heartfelt and sincere way. The thought that there might be some pagans in this country does not even occur to him, since the country is known for being very Christian. He kneels with the intention of worshiping God. But unbeknownst to him, the building is a pagan temple and the people are worshiping a pagan deity by kneeling.

Since it doesn’t occur to Bob that the community’s kneeling might be worship of a pagan deity, he does not form any intention to dissent from the community’s understanding. Granted, his own explicit intention to worship God disagrees with the community’s understanding of what they are doing. But to have an intention that in fact disagrees with the community’s understanding of what they are doing is not the same as intending to do otherwise than the community understands. Compare: If an expert uses complicated verbage to deny the existence of life on Mars, and I misunderstand him to be saying there is life on Mars, and I say “Indeed, there is life on Mars”, I am not intending to say otherwise than the expert did—even though what I am intending to say is, as a matter of fact, otherwise than what the expert said.

It is tempting to say that explicit intentions about the meaning of the action trump implicit ones, and so both Alice and Bob are worshiping God, and neither is worshiping a pagan deity. But that’s not quite right. A religious person may intend for the community’s understanding of an action to trump at least certain aspects of their own understanding. For instance, when a Christian prays the Nicene Creed, they may have their own understanding of “consubstantial with the Father”, but they would do well to defer to the Church for what it really means. Thus, their explicit intention to worship the Son as X (where X is their understanding of consubstantiality with the Father) is overridden by their faithful intention to worship the Son under whatever description the Church means by these words.

So, probably, what we want to say is that the individual worshiper can have a complex of set of intentions with priorities between them. For instance, the faithful Christian who prays the Nicene Creed may have intentions where their understanding of “consubstantial” is subordinated to the community’s understanding, but only within some limits. If it were to turn out that what the community means by “consubstantial with the Father” is that the Father and the Son are finite deities with beards of equal bushiness, then the faithful Christian’s intention to worship an immaterial and infinite God trumps their intention to go with the community’s understanding. I suspect there is no good way to encapsulate the complex ways that the prioritization between intentions can go in a simple definition like Wolterstorff’s.

Could there be a grain of truth in Wolterstorff’s condition? I think one could say that one defaults to worshiping as the community does in the absence of overriding intentions. I am not sure I would agree with that, but it might be true.

I am grateful to Tyler Sharp and Juliana Kazemi for pointing me to Wolterstorff’s very interesting ideas on this, and for conversations on this. In a recent conference presentation, they gave an example that has a lot of similarity with Case 2.

Worshipping Apollo

Suppose Callicles worships Apollo. Callicles is doing something he shouldn’t do: he is worshipping a being that doesn’t exist. So one root of Callicles’ practical mistake is a mistake about the non-normative metaphysics of the world, which does not include Apollo.

But is that the only mistake Callicles is making? The western monotheistic tradition appears to criticize people like Callicles morally for their worship. One way to pose the question is this: Supposing Callicles were right about the existence of Apollo, would he be right to worship him?

The answer seems to me to be a clear negative. If we met an alien with Apollo’s intellectual ability, moral character and technological power, then being impressed might be called for, but clearly worship would not be.

Thus, Callicles is worshipping someone who wouldn’t be worthy of worship even if he existed. That’s a moral mistake.

Beliefless Christianity

A number of authors have claimed that it is possible to practice the Christian faith without assigning a high epistemic probability to central doctrines of Christianity. Here is an interesting problem with such a practice. A central part of Christian practice is to worship Jesus Christ as God. Now, Jesus Christ is uncontroversially a man. Christianity adds that he is also God. If that additional belief is false, then we who worship Jesus Christ as God are idolaters. But it is wrong to undertake a serious risk of idolatry. Thus, it is only permissible to practice the Christian faith if by one's lights the risk of idolatry is not serious. And the only way that can be is if one assigns a high epistemic probability to the doctrine that Jesus Christ is God. Thus, it seems, at least this central doctrine of the Incarnation needs to have a high epistemic probability if one is to be morally justified in practicing the Christian faith.

There is, however, a hole in the argument. Idolatry is only a great evil if God exists. Now imagine someone who assigns a high conditional probability to the Incarnation on the condition that God exists, but who assigns a low unconditional probability to both the Incarnation and the existence of God. Such a person can reason as follows. Either God exists or not. If God does not exist, there is not much evil in idolatry, and so not much harm in worshiping Jesus as God. If God does exist, however, then probably the Incarnation is true, and the value of worshiping Jesus outweighs the risks, since the risks are small.

So, what I think my overall argument shows is that it is wrong to practice the Christian faith without assigning a high epistemic probability to the doctrine of the Incarnation if one assigns a significantly higher epistemic probability to theism. Thus, someone who comes to be convinced that theism is true but assigns a low epistemic probability to Christianity should not practice Christianity.

Objection: Perhaps it is just as morally evil to fail to worship as God someone who is in fact God as it is to worship as God someone who is not. In that case, by not practicing Christianity, one also takes on a great moral risk, and perhaps the risks cancel out.

Response: I think it not just as morally evil to fail to worship as God someone who is in fact God. As far as we know, John the Baptist did not worship Jesus as God, but we have no reason to think that this was a great evil, on the par of idolatry.

Worship

The following argument is sound (given Christian doctrine), where possibility and necessity are metaphysical throughout:

1. It is possible to worship properly.
2. Necessarily, worship is not proper when it is not of a maximally great being.
3. Necessarily, worship is not proper when it is of a non-existent being.
4. Therefore, possibly, someone worships an existent maximally great being. (1-3)
5. Therefore, possibly, there is a maximally great being. (4)
6. Therefore, there is a maximally great being. (S5 and concept of a maximally great being, as in ontological argument)

Here is a subsidiary argument for (1):

7. All basic human forms of activity have proper functions.
8. Worship is a basic human form of activity.
9. Necessarily, when an activity fulfills its proper function it is being done properly.
10. Any basic human form of activity that has a proper function can have that proper function fulfilled.
11. Therefore, worship can have its proper function fulfilled.

A final comment. Dan Johnson has found a nice way to generate arguments like this one. You look for arguments whose premises are each either obvious or entailed by theism. This way, the arguments are guaranteed to be sound (if you think theism is true). However, nonetheless, there might be people who appropriately accept the arguments. Why? For one, maybe they have a left-over of a theistic conviction which they have irrationally rejected. For another, their sensus divinitatis might be telling them to accept premises like some of the ones about worship. Arguments like this will not appeal to a wide audience perhaps. They may appeal to a very narrow audience. But that is OK.

Colocationism and the Incarnation

According to abundant forms of colocationism, where I sit, there sit an infinity of other individuals. One of these individuals is a human-shaped mound of flesh and blood. Another is a philosopher. Yet another is something one might call a "rigid human figure" (which I will explain below). These individuals are all related to me in having the same matter. Their distinctness can be seen from the fact that they have different persistence conditions. Thus, the mound of flesh and blood can survive my death, while the philosopher came into existence significantly after I did. The rigid human figure does not survive changes in the orientation of bodily parts. According to sparser forms of colocationism, we may have a more limited number of individuals present here—only the objects that fulfill some philosophically explanatory role will be posited. Thus, the sparse colocationist will probably admit the human-shaped mound of flesh and blood, but probably will not admit the philosopher or the rigid human figure.

Colocationism, whether abundant or sparse, multiplies individuals where there is a multiplicity of what one might with significant propriety call "natures". This creates a prima facie problem for the Incarnation. For if such things as being a human and being a mound of flesh and blood count as individual-defining natures, surely so will being a human and being divine. But then the colocationism seems to imply that where Jesus is, there are two distinct individuals, one of whom is human and the other of whom is divine. This is Nestorianism. (We are used to formulations of Nestorianism that use the word "person" instead of "individual". But we could also have used "individual" as our gloss on "hupostasis"—the Greek does not have the personal implications of the Latin. In any case, both of the individuals will be persons, so there will be two persons.)

This is a prima facie problem for colocationism (I assume, of course, that the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation is true). Colocationism's multiplication of individuals seems to multiply Jesus into at least two individuals. One attempted solution to the problem might be to say that there is only one nature there, maybe "Godhumanhood". But that, of course, threatens monophysitism, unless one can argue that the sense of "nature" here is sufficiently different from that of the Council of Chalcedon. Maybe if one makes the right distinctions, one can get out of this problem. But it's going to be hard (every account of the Incarnation is hard, but here there seems to be an additional difficulty).

Abundant colocationism has a further problem. There will be an infinitude of individuals where Jesus is. A human, a teacher, a carpenter, the King of Israel, the Messiah, etc. Even if somehow we manage to collapse the human and the divine individuals into one—if not, we get Nestorianism—what do we say about all these other individuals? Are they, for instance, individuals worthy of our worship? Presumably not all—for only three individuals in existence are worthy of worship (in the sense of latria): the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The carpenter, the teacher, the King of Israel, the Messiah and the mound of flesh and blood all share the matter of the (incarnate) Son, but are distinct from the Son, and a fortiori from the Father and the Holy Spirit. But there is something more than a little odd about saying that the Messiah is not to be worshiped. Moreover, while this particular multiplication of individuals may not violate the letter of the Council of Ephesus, it seems to be very much in the Nestorian spirit. If it was bad to have two individuals, having an infinitude surely is also problematic. We want to be able to say that the individual that Jesus' disciples were taught by was the Son of God. But when Jesus' disciples were taught by the teacher (whom else do we attribute teaching to in the primary sense but the teacher?), then it seems they were taught by someone other than the Son of God on the colocationist view.

The sparse colocationist has less trouble, perhaps. She might only have the flesh and blood and the human being to deal with. To avoid literal Nestorianism, she will say that the human being is the same individual as the Logos. The mound of flesh and blood will still be problematic, though, in light of the fact that we are told by Scripture that the Logos became flesh. We do not want to leave the flesh and blood too far outside the bounds of the Incarnation.