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Reasons for worship: a response to Bayne and Nagasawa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2007

BENJAMIN D. CROWE
BENJAMIN D. CROWE
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Utah, 260 S. Central Campus Drive, OSH 341 Salt Lake City, UT 84112
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Abstract

Worship is a topic that is rarely considered by philosophers of religion. In a recent paper, Tim Bayne and Yujin Nagasawa challenge this trend by offering an analysis of worship and by considering some difficulties attendant on the claim that worship is obligatory. I argue that their case for there being these difficulties is insufficiently supported. I offer two reasons that a theist might provide for the claim that worship is obligatory: (1) a divine command, and (2) the demands of justice with respect to God's redemption of humanity. I also challenge the soundness of some of the analogies they employ in their argument.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , December 2007 , pp. 465 - 474
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

Notes

1. An important recent exception to this rule is Robert M. Adams Finite and Infinite Goods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

2. Bayne, Tim and Nagasawa, Yujin ‘The grounds of worship’, Religious Studies, 42 (2006), 299–313CrossRefGoogle Scholar. All reference in the text are to this paper.

3. The two other possibilities considered by Bayne and Nagasawa are a ‘prudential-reasons’ account and the claim that the truth of OT is simply a brute fact. The latter appears undesirable, given the connection between reasons and obligations mentioned at the close of the first section of this paper. Bayne and Nagasawa raise excellent questions regarding the defensibility of the former, prudential account. I would also suggest that most perspicuous theists would shy away from such an account for their own reasons as well.

4. This position is implied by the view presented by Robert M. Adams in ‘A modified divine command theory of ethical wrongness’, in The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 97–122. Another careful presentation of the so-called ‘divine-command’ theory of ethics is in John E. Hare The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God's Assistance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

5. Thomas Aquinas Summa theologiae, IIaIIae, 58, 2. I have relied here upon Kevin D. O'Rourke OP (ed.) St Thomas Aquinas: Summa theologiae, vol. 39: Religion and Worship (London: Blackfriars, 1964).

6. Ibid., IIaIIae, 81, 7.

7. Ibid., IIaIIae, 81, 3.

8. Lancelot Andrewes Works, vol. 1:17, Sermons on the Nativity and 8 Sermons on Ash Wednesday (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 59.

9. It is important to notice that what is being asserted here is not that human beings become God through the Incarnation. Instead, human beings become more like God than they are at present, by sharing, as far as the limits of human nature allow, in divine attributes like moral goodness and immortality. One way of thinking about this is that the ‘image of God’ is restored in human beings. An ‘image’ is, of course, never identical to the original. For an excellent discussion of this tradition of Christian soteriology, see Norman Russell The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

10. Andrewes Works, vol. 1, 59.

11. Ibid., 60–62.

12. Andrewes Works, vol. 2:6, Sermons Preached in Lent, 3 Sermons on Good Friday, 13 Sermons on Easter-day, 182.

13. See Henry Bettenson (ed.) The Early Christian Fathers: A Selection from the Writings of the Father from St Clement of Rome to St Athanasius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 65–66.

14. Ibid., 104.

15. For an erudite and accessible discussion of the Cappadocians, see Jaroslav Pelikan Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1993).

16. Bettenson Fathers, 185.

17. Quoted in Pelikan Christianity and Classical Culture, 138.

18. Aquinas Summa theologiae, IIaIIae, 81, 4.

19. Special thanks are due to Peter Byrne, Tim Bayne, and Yujin Nagasawa for many pointed and helpful comments and criticisms on an early draft of this essay.