Our Bounden Duty: Worship,Justice,and the Moral Life in Anglican Theology

Introduction

What does it mean to serve God? In his 1784 Lectures on Ethics, Immanuel Kant offers the following answer:

The true service of God consists in a course of life that is purified by the true fear of God. So we are not going to serve God, when we go to church; we go there only to school ourselves, so that we may thereafter serve Him in our lives. On coming out of church, we have to practise what we have trained for inside it, and so serve God only in our lives. ¹

Why would an Anglican theologian take Kant as a starting point for reflecting on worship and ethics? I have become increasingly convinced that many Christians today are Kantians when they think about the purpose of worship. Some Christians, if they are not Kantians, hold a similar but more subtle view about the purpose of going to church and participating in worship. What I have in mind is the view that worship is an activity that falls exclusively in the category of “spirituality.” On this view, one might say that worship should inform the way we live in the world and the way we love our neighbors (on this much, they agree with Kant), but there is something important about the act of worship itself. But whatever that “something” is, it is best understood as spirituality. In other words, worship and ethics are apples and oranges. While they are perhaps mutually reinforcing, there is a strict conceptual divide between them. I believe the Kantian perspective and this more subtle, widespread perspective are both misguided.

In this essay, I offer an alternative account of the relationship between worship and ethics. I will begin by making some observations about these terms. The meaning of the term worship can of course be very broad. Paul Tillich spoke of worship in a way that potentially applies to everyone, by defining it as an orientation to one’s “ultimate concern.” ² This way of thinking about worship echoes the adage of Martin Luther: “a ‘god’ is the term for that to which we are to look for all good and in which we are to find refuge in all need.” ³ Christian worship, however, is not oriented toward a generic “ultimate concern” nor toward a generic sense of “goodness.” It is oriented toward the triune God. Christians worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the God who raised Jesus from the dead.

Even if we limit our conception of worship to this narrower, Christian sense, there are many fruitful approaches the topic of worship and ethics. Some theologians, for example, are interested in exploring ways in which Christian liturgy can serve as a catalyst for reconciliation within communities that have been torn apart by strife and dissension. Thinkers like Desmond Tutu and Emmanuel Katongole have made invaluable contributions on this front. ⁴ Theologians like Stanley Hauerwas, Samuel Wells, and James K. A. Smith have written much on the liturgical character of our daily lives and the ways in which liturgical worship shapes our mode of living in the world. ⁵ Other thinkers, like Lauren Winner, have artfully delineated the myriad ways that Christian practices can form—and malform—those who engage in them. ⁶

To be clear, my approach to the relationship between worship and ethics is complementary to the other approaches I have just described, but the questions it asks are of a different order. My aim is to articulate and defend an account of worship that is constitutive of the moral life. More precisely, I will argue that the act of worship is itself a moral act, and furthermore, any moral framework that claims to be authentically Christian must prioritize the act of worship as an end in itself. Worship is something Christians do for its own sake. In other words, human beings ought to worship the triune God, not because doing so will form them into good human beings or because it will generate morally good actions (although it may do this); but rather, human beings ought to worship the triune God because the triune God is the sort of God who is deserving of worship.

To claim that worship is a moral act is to indicate what kind of act worship is. For Christians, worship is a genus that includes acts of communal and private worship, such as prayer, composing and singing hymns, celebrating the Eucharist, and meditating on Scripture. Even if we want to say that these acts of worship are “spiritual” acts, or that worship describes a mode of religious experience, this does not preclude worship from being categorized as a moral act. If worship is a moral act, then it can be judged by a similar set of criteria that we would use to evaluate other acts that we classify according to their kinds and assign moral value. This includes morally bad actions such as slander and usury, and morally good actions such as almsgiving and advocating for racial justice. It means that we should use the same vocabulary we use when evaluating other kinds of moral acts: good, bad, right, wrong, virtue, obligation, justice.

I will also argue that this account of worship is distinctively Anglican and that it contributes to a distinctively Anglican vision of the moral life. As Colin Dunlop argues in his classic Anglican Public Worship, Anglican liturgical theology presupposes that worship is the creature’s rightful acknowledgment of God, not a pragmatic instrument for other goods: “[Worship] is an activity which is its own justification. Its principal value is in the actual doing of it, and not in such results as may be from time to time apparent.” ⁷ This conviction underwrites the entire Anglican approach to common prayer. Another rationale for describing this as an Anglican vision of the moral life is the fact that it finds its grounding in the insights of Anglican thinkers like William Douglass, Evelyn Underhill, and Kenneth Kirk. I do not argue that Anglicans have an exclusive claim on this vision, however. Anglicanism is a tradition that prioritizes worship as constitutive of the moral life; at the same time, Anglicanism is a tradition that (when it is honest) recognizes its own incompleteness and brokenness.

In the early twentieth century, an ecclesiology began to emerge within the Anglican Communion in which it came to understand itself as inherently ecumenical. I will say more about this toward the end of my remarks, but for now I simply note that Anglicanism is still coming to terms with this ecclesiology, and it serves as a scaffolding for the Anglican vision of the moral life I describe. The “true religion” that Anglicanism commends is not Anglicanism itself. In other words, Anglicans do not believe that Anglicanism is the one true Christian Church—or even the “best” form of Christianity. True religion is the right worship of God, and while Anglicans commend such worship, it is not their sole possession. Rather, Anglicans recognize that they need other Christians to help them worship God rightly.

“Religion” and worship

My analysis begins with a consideration of what it might mean to say that human beings owe God worship. This is a question that predates Christianity, and the ancient philosophers who considered it thought they were asking a question about the moral life. These philosophers assumed that if the gods (or a god) existed, then there ought to be appropriate and inappropriate ways to show honor to the gods. Such expressions of honor, they argued, fall under the description of justice, because justice is concerned with what is due to another.

On this account, worshipping the gods rightly was a feature of the virtuous life. The just person was a person who not only dealt justly with other human beings; the just person also worshipped the gods rightly. Ancient Romans used the term religio to describe the proper veneration of the gods, although this word was also used to describe a broad range of duties and social obligations toward one’s family members and civil rulers. Cicero was the first Roman philosopher to reflect systematically on religio, and he classified it as a moral virtue that was specifically concerned with the cultum deorum, or the proper performance of rites in veneration of the gods. ⁸ Contemporary authors writing in English translate the word religio as “religion,” but in what follows, I will leave the Latin term untranslated in order to underscore the difference in meaning from our contemporary usage of the term “religion,” which is typically used to describe a particular system of faith and worship with its own unique organizational structures. In contrast, religio identifies a moral virtue that is closely related to—but distinct from—the virtue of justice.

Many early Christian theologians, including Ambrose of Milan and Augustine of Hippo, appropriated the Ciceronian concept of religio for theological purposes. But they did not borrow this concept uncritically; in fact, it was almost always used to critique and subvert pagan culture. In Book II of The City of God, Augustine addresses the Romans who are lamenting their city’s former greatness: “Once upon a time, the adulation of the peoples was with you, but by the hidden judgment of divine providence the true religion [vera religio] was withheld from your choice. Awake, it is day!” ⁹ Augustine’s argument is that the religio the Romans took to be a pillar of civic virtue was, in fact, only self-serving idolatry.

Centuries later, the scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages began to consider how the right worship of God might be articulated as a constitutive feature of Christian virtue. They drew not only upon Augustine’s polemical use of the term religio, but also on the many instances of religio in the Latin Bible (which was the term used to translate the Greek word λατρεία in the New Testament and the Septuagint). In doing so, they endeavored to describe with greater precision what virtually every Christian who came before them had recognized, namely, that they had duties toward God that were distinct from their duties toward other human beings.

Thomas Aquinas, for example, considered the place of religio among the other moral virtues. Taking a cue from Cicero, he argues that, of the four cardinal virtues (justice, prudence, temperance, fortitude), it most closely relates to justice. Aquinas defines justice as a “a habit according to which a person, with a constant and perpetual will, renders to each that which is his or her right.” ¹⁰ But Aquinas’s theological commitments lead him to make a very un-Ciceronian move when considering the relationship between justice and religio. Given the fact that the relationship between God and humankind is intrinsically asymmetrical, he argues, it’s impossible for humans to render God what is due. God is infinitely good, and we are not. Justice is about establishing equity between two parties; there can be no equity, properly speaking, when it comes to the relationship between God and human beings.

Since the virtue of religio does not meet the formal criteria of justice, Aquinas classifies it as a virtue that is “annexed” to justice. It’s one of the several virtues he describes as being annexed to justice, alongside virtues such as truthfulness, friendship, and liberality. ¹¹ To the uninitiated, it may seem that an annexed virtue is something like a second-class virtue—important, perhaps, but not a “real” virtue like justice. This is not the case at all. The fact that religio is annexed to one of the cardinal virtues does not imply that it is of lesser importance. To the contrary, Aquinas states that “religio is preeminent [praecipua] among the moral virtues.” ¹² If we were to construct a hierarchical list of the moral virtues we find in Aquinas’s writings, the virtue of religio would be at the very top.

For Aquinas and the medieval scholastics, religio was specifically tied to the first table of the Decalogue. In one sense, this virtue could be ascribed to any human action. Aquinas explains, “Every deed, insofar as it is done in God’s honor, belongs to religio.” ¹³ But in its proper sense, it is the virtue by which we honor God in a manner that is distinct from the virtues by which we honor our neighbor. ¹⁴ The shortest and simplest definition of religio is “justice toward God.” As Aquinas explains, “the first three commandments are about acts of religio, which is the chief part of justice.” ¹⁵ It is the virtue that supplies what is needed to fulfill the first table of the Decalogue.

Many scholars who have written on the meaning of religio assume that systematic reflection on this concept peaked in the Middle Ages and then gradually faded away from the Christian imagination. I find this narrative unconvincing. In fact, as I have argued elsewhere, I believe the Enlightenment philosopher par excellence Immanuel Kant was very much interested in religio in its classical sense. He did not use this precise term, nor did he provide any historical exegesis of the meaning of religio, but he wrote a great deal about what we owe (and do not owe) God as constitutive of our moral duties.

Kant is sometimes described as if he were the Western thinker who finally severed the bond between religion and morality. On this account, he was the first philosopher to successfully describe the nature of our moral duties and obligations without appealing to divine authority, or without appealing to divine punishment or reward. For many people, he is the champion of atheistic morality. But the fact is that Kant was a profoundly religious thinker. It is true that he wrote scathing criticisms of the classical arguments for the existence of God, and he rejected some core doctrines of orthodox Christianity. He was also highly critical of the structures and practices of organized religion as he encountered them in eighteenth-century Europe. But he thought that belief in the existence of God could be justified on moral grounds, and he even went as far as to say that we should recognize all our moral duties as divine commands. ¹⁶

Kant attempted to construct a pure rational system of religion, by which other religious faiths (which he called “historical religions”) could be measured. The degree to which Kant’s pure rational system of religion is compatible with traditional Christianity is a matter of vigorous debate among Kant scholars, and it falls beyond the purview of this essay. But one thing is clear, namely, that Kant has a normative ideal of what religion ought to look like. Perhaps surprisingly, this ideal includes the existence of a church, which he argues is required for a flourishing moral life. ¹⁷ When we consider why Kant thinks that a church is necessary for the moral life, however, it becomes clear that there is no place for the Christian virtue of religio in Kant’s pure rational system of religion. The role of the church, in Kant’s religion, is to form an ethical community: “The true (visible) church is one that displays the (moral) kingdom of God on earth inasmuch as the latter can be realized through human beings.” ¹⁸ This is its singular and exclusive purpose.

What is missing from this description of the church’s activity, of course, is worship. Kant redefines the “veneration” of God as following the moral law and cultivating “good life-conduct.” ¹⁹ For Kant, this is the only human activity that can make a person pleasing to God:

Thus, “not they who say Lord! Lord! But they who do the will of God,” those, therefore, who seek to become well-pleasing to him, not through loud praises of him (or of his envoy, as a being of divine origin) according to revealed concepts which not every human being can have, but through a good life conduct regarding which everyone knows his will—these will be the ones who offer to him the true veneration that he desires. ²⁰

To be clear, according to Kant, it is not simply the case that worship is extraneous to the essence of the church, or that we have other duties directly toward God that might be exercised outside of the church. For Kant, there simply are no duties directed toward God. We do not owe God our worship. Kant explains, “There are no particular duties toward God in a universal religion; for God cannot receive anything from us; we cannot act on him or for him.” ²¹

Perhaps now we are in a better position to evaluate Kant’s remarks from the opening section of this essay:

The true service of God consists in a course of life that is purified by the true fear of God. So we are not going to serve God, when we go to church; we go there only to school ourselves, so that we may thereafter serve Him in our lives. On coming out of church, we have to practise what we have trained for inside it, and so serve God only in our lives. ²²

I conclude this brief survey of the of the virtue of religio with Kant, because Kant’s understanding of the role of worship in the moral life is in many ways antithetical to the moral vision I commend. Kant believes that worship can be indirectly or instrumentally conducive to morality, but it is not constitutive of the moral life itself. Worship, by forming and regulating our dispositions, may help us fulfil our obligations to other human beings, but it does not fulfil an obligation we owe to God. Indeed, to believe that worship itself is pleasing to God is, according to Kant, delusional and dangerous. For Kant, many acts of Christian worship are immoral and should be considered “counterfeit service” to God, “which sets back all the work leading to true religion.” ²³

Worship at the heart of the moral life

At this point, the reader might wonder, “Why should Anglicans care what Kant thinks about worship?” That is an entirely fair question. So, allow me to explain why I think this investigation is important. Kant’s understanding of “true religion” presents a strong challenge to anyone who believes that worship is essential to being a Christian. It asks the Christian believer to provide a defense of worship on moral grounds. My suspicion is that many Christians would be tempted to respond to Kant’s challenge on his own terms. In other words, many Christians would try to defend the practices of Christian worship—and the centrality of worship in their own lives—by arguing that worship is not something Christians do merely for its own sake. They might argue that worship also helps them to become better people, to be a force for good in the world, or to better serve the poor and the marginalized.

But responses like these are inadequate, for two reasons. First, the claim that worship produces better people is highly contestable. The empirical and theoretical support for the claim that Christian worship produces morally superior human beings is weak. As Dunlop observes, “If you go to church deliberately seeking edification and moral inspiration above all things, the chances are not in favour of success.” ²⁴ Not only is the link between worship and morality lacking any obvious positive correlation—many Christian worship practices, as Lauren Winner has argued, “carry with them their own deformations.” ²⁵ The history of Christian worship reveals that it is just as likely to form people who are xenophobic and self-serving as it is to form people who are holy and just.

The second reason this is an inadequate response to the Kantian challenge is because it is dishonest. Historically, Christians have worshiped God because Christians believe that God is worthy of worship and because God requires worship. Even if some might claim that worship makes them better human beings, the vast majority of Christians who have lived on this earth have believed that worship is something done for its own sake—it is something that has value in itself, apart from any other (potential) effects like making us more just in our human relationships. But this is precisely what Kant rejects. Kant does not believe that we have any particular duties toward God, and therefore, worship cannot have value in itself; to claim otherwise, according to Kant, is to misunderstand what kind of being God is and what kind of beings we are.

What I commend is a very different vision of the moral life—a specifically Anglican vision that puts worship at the center of the moral life. This vision presupposes that union with God is the end, or aim, of the moral life—the aim of human life. This is, I believe, the only way to defend the act of worship as something done for its own sake. Otherwise, it would seem that Kant must be right about worship.

The first major implication of this vision is that it clearly identifies worship as the fulfillment of a duty we have toward God. Many contemporary Christians do not like to think of worship in this way. In fact, many Christians do not like to use the word “duty” to describe our relationship with God at all. I will address this concern in the next section. The second major implication of this vision is that worship casts a distinct light on all other aspects of the moral life. When worship is at the center of the moral life, all other human acts can potentially become acts of worship, as well. On this account, worship is not only justified. It is not only something added to the moral life. It truly becomes the center of the moral life.

An Anglican understanding of “true religion”

What I aim to do next is to demonstrate that a robust and theologically rich understanding of religio lies at the foundation of this Anglican vision of the moral life. This understanding of religio is both implicit and explicit in the Anglican tradition. In other words, we can find it in Anglican worship itself, and we can find it in the writings of theologians who reflect systematically on Anglican worship.

I begin with the implicit recognition of religio in Anglican worship, and here I will cite just two examples. The first example can be found in the Eucharistic Canon of The Book of Common Prayer. There are, of course, many different editions of The Book of Common Prayer, but my remarks are applicable to virtually every edition, including the 1979 edition of the Episcopal Church. In fact, this first example applies to many traditions outside of Anglicanism, as well, because it has its origins in the earliest Christian liturgies, in both East and West. So, it is in no way unique to Anglicanism, but I begin with this example because it identifies an important principle at the heart of Christian worship, including Anglican worship. I have in mind the preface to the Eucharistic prayer known as the sursum corda. It is a brief, simple exchange between the priest and the people, and it will be familiar to many readers:

These words are a translation of the Latin text of the Roman Canon, and the final response is a rough attempt to capture, in poetic language, a very terse phrase in the Latin: Dignum et iustum est. In the current translation of the Novus Ordo used by American Catholics, the line is translated: “It is right and just.” ²⁷ The words dignum and iustum have a similar valence that can mean “proper” or “suitable,” but iustum additionally conveys a sense of “giving what is due.” Doing what is iustum is doing what is just. In the Greek liturgy of John Chrysostom, still used in many Orthodox churches, the response is Aξιον καί δίκαιον, which is basically identical in meaning to Dignum et iustum est. ²⁸

What is most striking about this phrase is its use of moral language. Worshiping God—specifically, giving thanks to God in a corporate, liturgical context—is something that is just. It is something that ought to be done, something that is owed to God. Dunlop writes, “hymns and praises are sung, not to convey moral lessons, or to produce an atmosphere, but because praise is God’s due, something we owe. [. . .] Worship is giving to God what belongs to Him: all our body, as wells as mind and spirit are his.” ²⁹ The sursum corda is articulating something that is due specifically to God, which is precisely the domain of religio, or “justice toward God.” Although our duties toward God and duties toward our neighbor can be distinguished, they are both ultimately grounded in a conception of justice that incorporates both dimensions.

There are many other examples of this understanding of religio throughout the history of Anglican worship, and we can also find it in Anglican sermons. Here I provide one example, from the Rev. William Douglass, who was one of the first Black priests in the Episcopal Church. He had previously been a Methodist preacher, but he was received into the Episcopal Church when he moved to Philadelphia in 1834. Douglass was the successor of Absalom Jones, who was the first rector of the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas. Douglass had been born to free parents, and he was never a slave, but he frequently preached against slavery from the pulpit, and he was active in abolitionist movements.

In Douglass’s sermons we find scathing critiques of Episcopalians’ complacency, both in the North and in the South, toward slavery. He unequivocally denounces slavery as a violation of God’s will. Like the prophets in the Hebrew scriptures, he delivers a message of judgment to his own people (Episcopalians), and he identifies their unjust actions and their failure to worship God rightly as a lack of rectitude in their souls. As he declares in a sermon:

God is just; but man is unjust. He is unjust to himself, as he fails to bestow the attention that is due to the paramount interests of his spiritual nature. This being the case, he cannot be otherwise than unconcerned about the spiritual and eternal concerns of his fellow-creatures. He is unjust towards God, in withholding that reverential fear and devout service to which he has an indisputable claim. ³⁰

It should be noted that Douglass isn’t making an argument based on cause and effect. He does not say, “If you would only worship God rightly, then you would certainly treat your fellow human beings justly.” Rather, he is making a more basic and fundamental claim, namely, that their failure to worship God rightly and their failure to live justly are both expressions of a singular failure: a lack of rectitude in the soul—a failure of religio.

Douglass does not use the term religio in his sermons, but his description of injustice toward God and his use of the term “true religion” indicates that he has something like this in mind. In the sense in which he is using it here, true religion does not refer to Anglicanism or even Christianity. True religion simply describes the worship of God, which, when rightly ordered and properly nourished, does overflow into our relationships with other human beings. As he explains in another sermon:

True religion expands the heart; it leads those who pay homage at her holy altar to devote a portion of their time and talents towards ameliorating the conditions of their fellow-men. [. . .] Its sincere and devout prayer is—“Thy Kingdom come: Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” ³¹

When we understand the significance of these terms, I believe that this phrase, “true religion expands the heart,” captures everything I want to say about worship and ethics. But to help us probe the depths of this phrase a bit more, I now turn our attention to the thought of two Anglican theologians who provide sustained reflection on the nature of religio: Evelyn Underhill and Kenneth Kirk.

The moral life as worship: Underhill and Kirk

Evelyn Underhill and Kenneth Kirk were contemporaries who spent most of their adult lives in the first half of the twentieth century, and both belonged to Church of England. ³² Underhill was a laywoman and a writer. Early in her career, she primarily wrote novels and poetry, and her nonfiction work was mostly dedicated to subjects related to Christian spirituality and mysticism. She was a committed pacifist and a highly sought-after spiritual director, and many of the talks she gave during her spiritual retreats were later published as popular devotional works. Kenneth Kirk was a priest and moral theologian who held the Regius Chair of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford, until he was appointed Bishop of Oxford in 1937. He was known primarily for his efforts to engage questions in Christian ethics from an ecumenical perspective and also for drawing connections between moral and ascetical theology.

A survey of these theologians’ writings reveals a remarkable convergence of ideas. Despite the fact that Underhill and Kirk were living and writing in England at the same time, they operated in different worlds, and while they knew of each other’s work, they referenced it only on very rare occasions. A few contemporary scholars, including Jane Shaw, have written on the deep theological affinity between these two thinkers, but for the most part, their work remains overlooked. ³³ In this section, I articulate three specific insights I have gleaned from the work of Underhill and Kirk. In doing so, my aim is to demonstrate how these three insights can further illuminate the virtue of religio and the relationship between worship and ethics.

The first insight they offer is that worship is simultaneously the fulfillment of our duty toward God and the fulfillment of our own humanity. Underhill defines Christian worship as “the total adoring response of man to the one Eternal God self-revealed in time,” and she identifies the vision of God as “the first cause of all worship.” ³⁴ Furthermore, she identifies worship as something that is done for its own sake, insofar as it seeks God alone, and she states that it is “the complete fulfilment of the First Commandment.” ³⁵ While worship may have ancillary purposes, its primary purpose is for the worshiper to glorify God and to draw closer to God.

Many Christians are uncomfortable with the claim that worship fulfills a duty that human beings have toward God. I assume that some Christians must think that speaking of worship in this way somehow undermines the idea that God loves us or inhibits our spontaneous response to God’s love. My first response to this concern is simply to note that Jesus himself said that the first and greatest commandment is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matt. 22:37 NRSV). This, along with the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself, is the summary of all the Law and the Prophets (22:40). The commandment to love is not antithetical to love itself; rather the commandment induces love. So, to reframe Underhill’s remarks: Whatever the complete fulfillment of this commandment is, that is what we call worship.

My second response to this concern draws on Kenneth Kirk’s claim that “We are born into a world where we cannot but worship.” ³⁶ Here we can see more clearly the theological anthropology undergirding Kirk’s approach:

[E]ven if we learn to worship the devil and his works, we shall still retain some trace of the worship of God to the very end. [. . .] If without self-scrutiny and self-torment a person can remain alive to the goodness in his environment, it will draw out all that is best in him, leading him nearer to the perfect goodness revealed in the Incarnate Lord ³⁷

In other words, to say that worship fulfills our duty toward God is simultaneously to recognize that it is a fulfillment of our own humanity. It is the purpose for which we were created. Worship is not an activity that is extrinsic to human nature, imposed arbitrarily by a divine being who needs human worship in order to exercise control or experience gratification. Insofar as worship is directed toward God, it is ultimately for the good of the human being.

The second insight Underhill and Kirk offer is that worship is ultimately corporate and other-regarding. What I mean by “other-regarding” is that worship includes a conscious awareness that it should be done with others and aimed at the others’ good. As Underhill writes, “The Christian as such cannot fulfil his spiritual obligations in solitude.” ³⁸ She explains,

Here the individual must lose his life to find it; the longing for personal expression, personal experience, safety, joy, must more and more be swallowed up in Charity. For the goal alike of Christian sanctification and Christian worship is the ceaseless self-offering of the Church, in and with Christ her head, to the increase of the glory of God. ³⁹

Kirk similarly affirms the corporate nature of worship:

To look towards God, and from that “look” to acquire insight both into the follies of one’s own heart and the needs of one’s neighbours [. . .]—this is something very remote from any quest for “religious experience” for its own sake. Yet this, and nothing else, is what the vision of God has meant in the fully developed thought of historic Christianity. ⁴⁰

For Underhill and Kirk, Christian worship is not an individualistic “mountaintop experience” removed from the troubles of life in present society. It is, rather, the activity of the Church done on behalf of the world.

The third insight of Underhill and Kirk is that the moral life is ultimately a life of worship. As noted earlier, Aquinas argues that the virtue of religio is properly about God and justice toward God, but he also explains that religio can describe any act that is done with God as its end. This is precisely what Evelyn Underhill means when she writes,

[The aim of worship] is the furtherance of His Kingdom and doing of His Will, by the production of a life which shall be ever more and more an act of charity. So the individual Christian is required to adore God, adhere to Him, and co-operate with Him in the sanctification of life [. . .] and in the interests of this great purpose to give the colour of worship to every human action and desire whether overtly religious or not. ⁴¹

Similarly, Kirk argues that, for Christians, the moral life is ultimately a life of worship. And whatever form this worship takes, it is formed by an encounter with the incarnate Lord. He writes,

The Church’s aim is to help men to see God, and God has already been seen on earth in the face of Jesus Christ. On that truth [. . .] depends the whole scheme of Christian ethics; we must answer our questions in the light of what the Church knows of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. ⁴²

For Evelyn Underhill and Kenneth Kirk, there is no worship and ethics. There is only worship as ethics.

Conclusion: true religion and the future of Anglicanism

I have only provided a brief sketch of this Anglican approach to worship and ethics, but I wish to say something about its broader implications. The first implication concerns Anglicanism and its ecumenical relations. Anglicanism, at its best, recognizes that Anglicans need other Christians to help them worship God rightly. As the former Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey once argued, Anglicanism is a tradition that acknowledges its own incompleteness. The Anglican Church, he writes, “[points] through its own history to something of which it is a fragment.” ⁴³ Anglicanism is “clumsy and untidy, it baffles neatness and logic. For it is sent not to commend itself as ‘the best type of Christianity,’ but by its very brokenness to point to the universal Church wherein all have died.” ⁴⁴ If Ramsey is right, then Anglicanism’s role in the twenty-first-century ecumenical church is not to promote what it perceives to be the best form of Christianity. Rather, its role is to invite the whole church—the entire body of Christ—to join in the pursuit of true religion, the right worship of God. True religion is not something that Anglicanism possesses or has a special claim on; it is an ideal that can only be pursued with the help of other Christians, following in the footsteps of Christ.

The second implication concerns the way we think about the formation of clergy. In a letter Evelyn Underhill sent to the Archbishop of Canterbury just before the 1930 Lambeth Conference, she writes,

I desire very humbly to suggest with bishops assembled at Lambeth that the greatest and most necessary work they could do at the present time for the spiritual renewal of the Anglican Church would be to call the clergy as a whole, solemnly and insistently to a greater interiority and cultivation of the personal life of prayer. ⁴⁵

She observes that the Church at that time seems more determined instead to produce “consecrated philanthropists” and humanitarians. She reminds the archbishop, “God is the interesting thing about religion, and people are hungry for God. But only a priest whose life is soaked in prayer, sacrifice, and love can, by his own spirit of adoring worship, help us to apprehend Him.” ⁴⁶ Clergy must understand that the primary purpose of worship is not to create a just community, to prepare us for mission, to love our neighbors, or even to enable us to serve God in our daily lives. The primary purpose of worship is to adore God and draw near to God. If Anglicanism eventually perishes from the face of the earth, I do not believe it will be a result of our debates over sexuality or ecclesiology. I believe it is more likely to result from Anglicanism’s failure to form leaders who know the importance of prayer. It will be because our clergy have forgotten (to borrow Underhill’s apt phrase) that God is the interesting thing about religion.

Critics will, of course, argue that I have created a false dichotomy. That is not my intention. I am not suggesting that we should ignore the current debates in our churches, or that prayer is somehow an alternative to the politics that inevitably shape our life together as Christians. But I do believe that prayer will be the first thing to go when we have fully bought into the lie that our problems can be solved through votes and the machinations of bureaucracy. If the moral life finds its center in the worship of God, then the renewal of the Church’s moral witness depends upon recovering what an earlier generation of Anglicans called true religion—the ordered and just worship of God for God’s own sake. Such worship is not merely instrumental to ethical formation, nor is it justified by its social or psychological effects. Rather, it is the constitutive act of a life directed toward God, the fulfillment of what human beings owe to their Creator.

In this light, the Anglican vision of the moral life may be understood as a sustained attempt to hold together the grammar of justice and the grammar of adoration, to affirm that worship is not ancillary to ethics but its ground and telos. To speak of worship as “our bounden duty and service” ⁴⁷ is thus to name the moral vocation of the Church itself: to render to God what is God’s, and in so doing, to discover anew what it means to live justly within the world God has made. ⁴⁸