Friday 13 September 2013

N.T. Wright on worldview formation through Psalm singing



N.T. Wright has a new book out that argues for the worldview forming power of singing Psalms in corporate worship.  Here are some samples of what Wright is on about:
"The Psalter is the prayer book Jesus made his own. We can see in the Gospels and in the early church that Jesus and his first followers were soaked in the Psalms, using them to express how they understood what God was doing. For us to distance ourselves from the Psalms inevitably means distancing ourselves from Jesus."
"Within the Jewish and Christian traditions, you get your worldview sorted out by worship. The Psalms are provided to guide that worship. When we continually pray and sing the Psalms, our worldview will actually reconfigure according to their values, theology, and modes of expression."
"...what is true today was true in the first century: There was a clash of worldviews. The early Christians discovered themselves drawn into the Psalter's ancient Jewish way of seeing God as both totally other than the world and radically present—dangerously present—within it. And of course, this very description of God is also the description of Jesus. The Psalms enabled the first generation of Christians to navigate the world of their day, a world not all that different from our own."
You can read the whole article here.

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