A Divine Masterpiece
Life is miraculous – undeniable.
Human life – a living soul and embodied spirit – is authored and created by God. God made us in His image, as complete vessels to worship and glorify Him, and He situated us in His wonderful creation. The creation account speaks of this:
And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.
As described in a previous blog post, phenomenal worship is much more than theory or over-intellectualising our faith and neglecting the rest of the body. It is also not over-emphasising physical actions while leaving theology behind. Rather Scripture calls us to an integrated worship of the LORD that embraces every part of who we are. This means engaging not only our minds in rich theology but also the rest of our bodies in reverent, joyful, and expressive worship of Him.
Note: some useful definitions!
To study the body, with all its magnificent facets, senses, and computations, is a gargantuan task and no detailed explanation would do it sufficient justice. Throughout all the ages, all the scientists, psychologists, theorists and professors combined have not adequately magnified the Lord regarding His magnificent creation. Architectural thinker Juhani Pallasmaa briefly summarises the processes of the body as “unconscious internalisation, identification and projection”.[1] But he is constrained by metaphor, as are all of us in fact: “Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”[2]
Who can adequately describe the majesty of God’s creation? Awestruck and humbled by this, perhaps we should resign to just phenomenally worship God, that is, with all our being, including all our faculties and senses. Even in our fallen state, human beings can affirm that we are wonderful and phenomenal handiworks of God, as the Psalmist magnified and worshipped the Lord in song by singing:
I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.
The Body and the World
God made human beings as living phenomena, part of His creation of all things, as accounted for in Genesis 1-2. The body is in an involved relationship with the world around us – the Lord even made man out of the dust of the ground, the very ground that He created! Although many never acknowledge the Creator, as it distinctly expresses in Scripture in Romans 1, the view that the body is interconnected with the world speaks to a deeper, universal truth about God’s creation shared by many.
This is evidenced in the writings of many philosophers and phenomenologists. Even with his secular understanding, this view of the body and the world being united entities was held by 20th century French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Christians would agree with this. While Merleau-Ponty’s writings on phenomenology did not directly address theological matters (he was certainly not persuaded of such), his view of the body and the world can be understood as compatible with a Christian’s understanding of creation reflective of God’s design. For example, unlike some of his predecessors in the discourse on phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty distinguished himself with the belief that the subject and the world are not separate entities but are always in a reciprocal relationship. To illustrate this, he once said, “the world is inseparable from the subject, but a subject who is nothing but a project of the world”.[3] In other words, the body is not just a physical object disconnected from its locus in the universe, but the subject through which we experience and engage with the world.
Merleau-Ponty focused on the body in the world with all its experiences. Merleau-Ponty was no theologian. Indeed, some might argue that his philosophical writings and Christian theology have no congruence whatsoever. However, although he never specifically wrote on theological applications, his philosophies on phenomenology, as derived from his antecedents like Martin Heidegger, have some relevance to phenomenal worship from a Christian’s perspective. On most things, believers should certainly part with the philosopher and “agree to disagree”. However, it can be universally acknowledged that the human body as God made it is the citadel of “perception, thought and consciousness, as well as…the significance of the senses in articulating, storing, and processing sensory responses and thoughts”.[4]
Our existence is God’s design. The reality of “being” is important to the Christian. God gave us consciousness and our conscience. Christians are living as regenerated embodied spirits in this present world. It is in this state that we are called to worship God in spirit and in truth, as the Lord Jesus Christ said in John 4:24. Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, as the Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians, in 1 Corinthians 6:19. There is also no illusion about it – we are here! We exist in this world, as servants of the King of kings. Indeed, if we are absent from the body, we have passed away from this life and are present with the LORD in heaven, as the Apostle Paul describes in his second letter to the Corinthians:
we are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.
Perception, Thought, and the Infinite Creator
Much like contemporary Christian discourse, historian and theorist Alberto Péréz-Gómez asserts that contemporary society is plagued by a synthetic and reductionist knowledge of the world. This is based on a lack of understanding of how our own bodies work. As neurologist Frank Wilson says, “we will never know how the brain works”[5] and communicates how the brain has “both sequential and simultaneous operations”.[6] The utter vastness of the workings of human beings has deep resonance with a Christian’s understanding of God. He is the revered and magnificent Author of human life. In view of this, Christians respond with much more than intellectual worship, but embodied and total adoration of God.
We might thoroughly study biology. However, a mere understanding of the physical locus of the brain in the head is not sufficient in grasping its scope in the world through its intangible qualities of thought, perception, consciousness, projection, imagination, and coordination with other members of the body. The brain is animated and not just ‘grey matter’ and, in a sense, it inhabits more than just the skull. Through associations the mind derives meaning.[7] Similarly, this logic applies to the locus of the eyes versus its animations and communications with the rest of the body. This understanding is based on studies by Alva Noë and Shaun Gallagher that evaluate the inter-modality of the senses and the synaesthetic crossovers between them.[8] Mankind is made in the image of an infinitely wise Creator and these findings only affirm His divine craftmanship.
The consensus among phenomenologists is that the environment around the body provokes responses from it. The experience of the body in space is active, “embedded in kinaesthesia”,[9] and full of perceptions on every level. French philosopher Gaston Bachelard once described it as a “polyphony of the senses”,[10] again alluding to the synaesthetic nature of sensory embodied perception. The Apostle Paul described this on Mars’ hill to the superstitious philosophers and poets of his day, referencing how the LORD made us:
for in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.
To experience the world is to engage with it. To engage with the world is to actively participate in it through actions. These actions are acquired, in some ways, and then recur through memory, familiarity, the subconscious and subtle adaptation. Merleau-Ponty framed this concept well when he said: “When I move about in my house, I know immediately and without any intervening discourse that to walk toward the bathroom involves passing close to the bedroom, or that to look out the window involves having the fireplace to my left. In this small world, each gesture or each perception is immediately situated in relation to a thousand virtual coordinates.”[11]
These are all consistent with the way God made us in His image to experience and engage all our senses in harmonic reply to our world. This is the embodied experience. We are participants in God’s creation, ordained and commanded to take dominion and be productive, all while totally worshipping and glorifying Him:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Dutybound to Worship God
To conclude, as living phenomena wonderfully made by God, we Christians need to live out our chief purpose. The Westminster Shorter Catechism says it this way:
Q1: What is the chief end of man?
Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.
The Psalmist said:
I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live: I will sing praise to my God while I have my being.
When we worship God in church assembly on the Lord’s Day, we partake in embodied acts to glorify Him. We ought to thoroughly delight in and enjoy Him too. Meditating on and listening to His Word, kneeling in reverence to Almighty God, singing in adoration of Him, serving Him through our love for others are all examples of ways we can fully glorify our Creator in worship.
Phenomenal worship – embodied acts that encompass bowing down and serving God – is our due honour to Him. We are to glorify Him, while we are alive, have our being, and are present in our bodies as living souls and embodied spirits. It goes beyond mere biology, theory, philosophy and even intellectual theology. Our entire fascinating constitution is a glorious testament of God’s infinite wisdom and magnificent craftsmanship. He is God that phenomenally made us and the world we live in.
Who can show us the perfect Way? It is only through our Phenomenal Saviour, Jesus Christ, that we Christians can ever truly, fully and intentionally worship God. Thankfully, His Holy Spirit lives in us, enabling us to worship God totally. Therefore, our acts of worship must not be passive, but rather wholly devoted to and fully aware of His Majesty. Through the Treasure we have in our earthen vessels, we can partake in phenomenal worship of the LORD.
Meditate
Pray
Heavenly Father, hallowed be Your name. I pray that You grant us the grace to always magnify Your name. LORD God our Creator, Your creation is wonderful. May we submit to You as our Maker and remember that we need Your wisdom, guidance and love in our daily walk, in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Reflect
The sheer number and depth of all our thoughts today are known and understood by God in heaven.
[1] Juhani Pallasmaa, The Embodied Image: Imagination and Imagery in Architecture, (West Sussex: Wiley, 2011), p 121.
[2] George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 3.; cited in Pallasmaa, The Embodied Image, p 120.
[3] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Donald A. Landes, Phenomenology of Perception, (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 454.
[4] Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, (West Sussex: Wiley, 2012), p. 14.
[5] Alberto Péréz-Gómez, Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science, (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2016), p 145.
[6] Ibid., p 145.
[7] Ibid., p 143.
[8] Ibid., p 143.
[9] Ibid., p 140.
[10] Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, p. 44.
[11] Merleau-Ponty, Landes, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 131.
Phenomenal Worship 
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