In His Sanctuary
Recalling the Hope of Glory: Biblical Worship from the Garden to the New
Creation
by Allen P. Ross
Kregel, 2006
(591 pages, $35.99, hardcover)
reviewed by Peter J. Leithart
Now a professor of Old Testament at Beeson Divinity School, Allen P. Ross grew up in a German Baptist Church of which his father was pastor, but he has since made his way through Methodism and Presbyterianism, arriving finally in the Episcopal Church. This range of liturgical experience lends an appealing catholic breadth to this work, as he draws on the best of each of these traditions.
Ross emphasizes that worship must be an expression of devotion to God, but also that this expression takes ritualized forms. He can sound like a Baptist prophet denouncing the evils of hypocritical worship, yet he has also learned to talk Episcopalian: “The Eucharist, Communion, or the Lord’s Supper, is the central act of Christian worship.”
Ross’s main purpose in Recalling the Hope of Glory is to summarize what the Bible teaches about worship. In Scripture, worship is a response to the revelation of the Lord of glory, and this response takes concrete form in praise, prayer, rituals, meals, preaching, and teaching.
A Formal Response
As he moves from the Pentateuch and the prophets to the New Testament and the early patristic period, he shows the continuity of this motivation through all the changing forms. His title neatly captures the eschatological tension of Christian worship, which both responds to the incarnate glory already manifest and worships in hope of fuller glory to come.
Since the beginning of the last century, there has been no end of the making of books of liturgical history and theology. Liturgical scholars have examined the history of Christian worship in great detail, and are increasingly using sociological and anthropological methods to examine liturgy as a cultural phenomenon.
Surprisingly few liturgical scholars give much sustained attention to the wealth of material found in Scripture. When they do examine Scripture, they often focus on the New Testament to the virtual exclusion of the Old. By starting at Genesis and moving through the entire Bible, Ross’s volume fills a large portion of the gap.
No book of the Bible has more information about worship than the book of Leviticus. The first seven chapters provide detailed instructions for offering sacrifice, and another large section (chapters 11–15) deals with forms of uncleanness and rituals of purification. Leviticus is all about how sinners approach a holy God.
Peter J. Leithart is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and the president of Trinity House Institute for Biblical, Liturgical & Cultural Studies in Birmingham, Alabama. His many books include Defending Constantine (InterVarsity), Between Babel and Beast (Cascade), and, most recently, Gratitude: An Intellectual History (Baylor University Press). His weblog can be found at www.leithart.com. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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