Tragic Worship

5/21/13 Article | First Things

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Tragic WorshipCarl R. TruemanJune/July 2013

The problem with much Christian worship in the contemporary world,Catholic and Protestant alike, is not that it is too entertaining but that it isnot entertaining enough. Worship characterized by upbeat rock music,stand-up comedy, beautiful people taking center stage, and a certainamount of Hallmark Channel sentimentality neglects one classic form ofentertainment, the one that tells us, to quote the Book of Common Prayer,that “in the midst of life we are in death.”

It neglects tragedy. Tragedy as a form of art and of entertainmenthighlighted death, and death is central to true Christian worship. The mostbasic liturgical elements of the faith, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, speakof death, of burial, of a covenant made in blood, of a body broken. Even thecry “Jesus is Lord!” assumes an understanding of lordship very differentthan Caesar’s. Christ’s lordship is established by his sacrifice upon thecross, Caesar’s by power.

Perhaps some might recoil at characterizing tragedy as entertainment, buttragedy has been a vital part of the artistic endeavors of the West sinceHomer told of Achilles, smarting from the death of his beloved Patroclus,reluctantly returning to the battlefields of Troy. Human beings have alwaysbeen drawn to tales of the tragic, as to those of the comic, when they havesought to be lifted out of the predictable routines of their daily lives—inother words, to be entertained.



From Aeschylus to Tennessee Williams, tragedians have thus enriched thetheater. Shakespeare’s greatest plays are his tragedies. Who would rankCharles Dickens over Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad? Tragedy hasabsorbed the attention of remarkable thinkers from Aristotle to Hegel toTerry Eagleton.

Christian worship should immerse people in the reality of the tragedy of thehuman fall and of all subsequent human life. It should provide us with alanguage that allows us to praise the God of resurrection while lamentingthe suffering and agony that is our lot in a world alienated from its creator,and it should thereby sharpen our longing for the only answer to the onegreat challenge we must all face sooner or later. Only those who accept thatthey are going to die can begin to look with any hope to the resurrection.

Yet today tragedy has, with few exceptions, dropped from popularentertainment. Whether it is the sentimentalism of the Hallmark Channel,the pyrotechnics of action movies, or the banal idiocy of reality TV, thetragic sensibility is all but lost. This is further compounded by the trivialway in which the language of tragedy is now used in popular parlance. Aswith defining moment and crisis, the words tragedy and tragic are nowexpected to perform Stakhanovite levels of linguistic labor. In a world whereeven sporting defeats can be described as tragedies, rarely do the termsspeak of the catastrophic moral crises and heroic falls that lie at the heart ofgreat tragic literature.

Yet human life is still truly tragic. Death remains a stubborn, omnipresent,and inevitable reality. For all of postmodern anti-essentialism, for all therepudiation of human nature, for all the rhetoric of self-creation, deatheventually comes to all, frustrates all, levels all. It is not simply a linguisticconstruct or a social convention. Yet despite this, Western culture has



slowly but surely pushed death, the one impressive inevitability of humanlife, to the very periphery of existence.

Pascal observed the problem in seventeenth-century France when he sawthe obsession with entertainment as the offspring of the fallen human desireto be distracted from any thought of mortality. “I have often said that thesole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietlyin his room,” he said. And: “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us formiseries, and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.”

Today the problem is even greater: Entertainment has apparently becomemany people’s primary purpose of existence. I doubt that it would surprisePascal that the world has increased the size, scope, and comprehensivenessof distraction. It would not puzzle him that death has been reduced to littlemore than a comic-book cartoon in countless action movies or into a meremomentary setback in soap operas and sitcoms. Indeed, he would not find itperplexing that the bleak spiritual violence of mortality leaves no lastingmark on the bereaved in the surreal yet seductive world of popularentertainment.

But he might well be taken aback that the churches have so enthusiasticallyendorsed this project of distraction and diversion. This is what much ofmodern worship amounts to: distraction and diversion. Praise bands andsongs of triumph seem designed in form and content to distract worshipersfrom life’s more difficult realities.

Even funerals, the one religious context where one might have assumed thereality of death would be unavoidable, have become the context for thatmost ghastly and incoherent of acts: the celebration of a life now ended. The



Twenty-Third Psalm and “Abide with Me” were funeral staples for manyyears but not so much today. References to the valley of the shadow of deathand the ebbing out of life’s little day, reminders both of our mortality and ofGod’s faithfulness even in the darkest of times, have been replaced asfuneral favorites by “Wind Beneath My Wings” and “My Way.” Thetrickledown economics of worship as entertainment has reached even thelast rites for the departed.

Yet tragedy is a vital part of entertainment. Aristotle in his Poetics famouslyargued for the personal and social benefits of tragic drama. The audience,swept up into the vertiginous moral crises, the magnificent flaws, and thecatastrophic falls of the heroes, enjoyed the experience of catharsis—running the gamut of relevant emotions—without being agents in the eventsdepicted on the stage. They left the theater cleansed by the experience andknowing more deeply what it means to be human. They were wiser, morethoughtful, and better prepared to face the reality of their own lives.

Of all places, the Church should surely be the most realistic. The Churchknows how far humanity has fallen, understands the cost of that fall in boththe incarnate death of Christ and the inevitable death of every singlebeliever. In the psalms of lament, the Church has a poetic language forgiving expression to the deepest longings of a humanity looking to find restnot in this world but the next. In the great liturgies of the Church, deathcasts a long, creative, cathartic shadow. Our worship should reflect therealities of a life that must face death before experiencing resurrection.

It is therefore an irony of the most perverse kind that churches have becomeplaces where Pascalian distraction and a notion of entertainment thateschews the tragic seem to dominate just as comprehensively as they do inthe wider world. I am sure that the separation of church buildings from



graveyards was not the intentional start of this process, but it certainlyhelped to lessen the presence of death. The present generation does nothave the inconvenience of passing by the graves of loved ones as it gathersfor worship. Nowadays, death has all but vanished from the inside ofchurches as well.

In my own tradition, the historic Scottish Presbyterian tradition, the sombertempos of the psalter, the haunting calls of lament, and the mortal frailty ofthe unaccompanied human voice helped to connect Sunday worship to therealities of life. There are indeed psalms of joy and triumph. The parentsrejoicing in the birth of a child could find words of gratitude to sing to theLord, but there are also psalms which allow bereaved parents to expresstheir grief and their sorrow in words of praise to their God.

The psalms as the staple of Christian worship, with their elements oflament, confusion, and the intrusion of death into life, have been too oftenreplaced not by songs that capture the same sensibilities—as the many greathymns of the past did so well—but by those that assert triumph over deathwhile never really giving death its due. The tomb is certainly empty; but weare not sure why it would ever have been occupied in the first place.

Only the dead can be resurrected. As the second thief on the cross saw soclearly, Christ’s kingdom is entered through death, not by escape from it.Traditional Protestantism saw this, connecting baptism not to washing somuch as to death and resurrection. Protestant liturgies made sure that thelaw was read each service in order to remind the people that death was thepenalty for their sin. Only then, after the law had pronounced the deathsentence, would the gospel be read, calling them from their graves to faithand to resurrection life in Christ. The congregants thereby became vicariousparticipants in the great drama of salvation.



There was surely catharsis in such worship: The congregants left each weekhaving faced the deepest reality of their own destinies. Perhaps it is ironic,but the church that confronts people with the reality of the shortness of lifelived under the shadow of death prepares them for resurrection better thanthe church that goes straight to resurrection triumphalism without thatawkward mortality bit.

Bonhoeffer once asked, “Why did it come about that the cinema really isoften more interesting, more exciting, more human and gripping than thechurch?” Why, indeed. Maybe the situation is even worse than I havedescribed; perhaps the churches are even more trivial than theentertainment industry. After all, in popular entertainment one doesoccasionally find the tragic clearly articulated, as in the movies of a Coppolaor a Scorsese.

A church with a less realistic view of life than one can find in a movietheater? For some, that might be an amusing, even entertaining, thought;for me, it is a tragedy.

Carl R. Trueman is Paul Woolley Professor of Church History atWestminster Theological Seminary.

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