Dr. Robert Webber

Robert Webber Speaks On Christianity And Worship

Dr. Robert Webber, William R. and Geraldyn B. Myers Professor of Ministry at Northern Seminary, Lombard, Illinois, spoke about his own spiritual crisis and where it led him at a joint convocation of Erskine College and Seminary today. "I was sick of answers, sick of information. I didn't want to talk about God – I wanted God," Webber said.

Webber thought he had answers for his students when he began teaching at Wheaton College, a bastion of evangelicalism, in 1968. "In about the third meeting of my Christian doctrine class, a student pointed out that I was working with the presupposition that God exists," Webber said. "He went on to say that he presupposed that God does not exist."

When the young professor asked for a show of hands, he found that a number in the class agreed with the skeptical student. "That experience put a crack in my 'evidence that demands a verdict'," Webber said.

Asked to speak in chapel at Wheaton in 1969, Webber prepared a talk on "Where We Need to Go as Evangelicals in the 1970s," but this precipitated a spiritual crisis for him. Looking at what he had written, Webber suddenly knew he could not honestly say all the things he had prepared to say.

"Did you ever write a paper and have the paper start talking to you?" Webber said. "My answers began to talk to me – they said,'You can't say me, or you'll be a phony.'

"I took the yellow sheet with all my answers on it, crumpled it up, threw it as hard as I could into the trash, fell back in my chair, and sobbed and sobbed," he said."In that moment I was met by an awful sense of the absence of God."

On the appointed day, Webber delivered a different sort of talk from the one he had discarded, ending with a desperate admission. "I thought I had all the answers for you," he told his Wheaton audience. "But all I know is that I'm hanging on the cross with Jesus, crying out with Jesus, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'"

Webber managed to make the assertion, "After the cross there is a resurrection," before he sat down, but recalls now, "That was the most traumatic experience spiritually that I've ever had."

The painful episode prompted Webber to think seriously about all the seminary knowledge he had absorbed in the course of his education. "I was at sea. It took me a couple of years to sort it out, and I am still recovering from it.

"But I'll tell you, if you can have one real good life-changing experience in your life you can count yourself fortunate." For Webber, misery and confusion opened the way to renewal of meaning through worship. "I was sick of answers, sick of information," Webber said. "I didn't want to talk about God – I wanted God."

A colleague had anointed Webber with oil and prayed for him at length, and though this did not seem to affect him at the time, he accepted an invitation to a church where he was assured a "man of the Spirit" was pastor, attending without his family for a short time, then taking them with him. In worship Webber found his way into a revived Christian commitment.

"Worship is a pillar of meaning," Webber said. "The whole church seems to be engulfed in silly battles over whether we sing choruses or hymns. We should be asking what worship is all about."

Looking closely at the Lord's Supper, a focus of worship sometimes neglected in Protestantism, Webber said, "What we do at the table of the Lord is in the context of a meal. When you want to get to know somebody, you want to eat with them.

"Jesus is our friend, our host – in eating with Jesus a relationship is established, repaired, transformed," Webber said.

Taking a prayer of Hippolytus, bishop and martyr, dating from about 215, as an example of the language of worship, Webber said it is important to note that the prayer is Trinitarian.

"We give praise to the Father in the language of mystery, joining with the angels in eternal worship," he said. "We give thanks to the Son in the language of story, and we invoke the presence of the Holy Spirit in the language of symbol.

"We have a story that goes from creation to fall to the mission of God to rescue and restore the world," Webber said. "Jesus is the victor over the power of evil. We need to let our lives get caught up in this 'meta narrative.'"

Webber said it is the Eucharist, or Lord's Supper, that brings us together. "The Christian faith is intelligible, but the way it is confirmed is through the experience of an encounter with Jesus in bread and wine."

Our hearts are often hardened by intellect, Webber said. "We need to invite God back into our hearts." He said one important way we can do this is by being intentional in worship – intend to sing, intend to listen.

"We need a new thing to happen in our lives. Our churches need to be renewed, and we need to be renewed."

Webber, the son of missionary parents, spent seven years of his childhood in the jungle of the Congo. "I went on safari with my father and went out with him to speak with the Pygmies about the faith," Webber said.

Speaking of his time in Africa, Webber said, "It put me in the position of having a distaste for the concrete city. I remember the mystery of the jungle – life is not simply the busy concrete city. So I've had a hard time being convinced by rationalism."

Webber said what he sees happening now in the churches is "a return to basics, the convergence of traditions, and an integration of all ministries of the church with worship." A renewal of interest in the Christian year, in which Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent and other observances mark the passage of time, can be good for the church, Webber said.

"The Christian year is a way of forming congregational spirituality. It's something the congregation does completely together."

Webber has great hope for the future of the church. "I see a new leadership emerging – people born after about 1976 or so. This is the next generation."

Webber taught for 32 years at Wheaton College, where he is now emeritus Professor of Theology. In 2000, he accepted his present appointment at Northern Seminary. A prolific writer, he says he writes wherever he happens to be during most of the year, and in the summer devotes himself completely to writing. "I was working on something at the Due West Café this morning," he said with a smile.

Known for his "Renew Your Worship!" workshops, Webber founded the Institute for Worship Studies in 1994 and is the author of a number of books, including Blended Worship, Worship is a Verb, and Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism in a Postmodern World. His latest book is The Prymer:Medieval Prayers for Contemporary Spirituality (Paraclete, 2000).