Worship

Worship in its broadest meaning is to ascribe honor, worth, excellence or authority to someone, whether a hero, sage, a magistrate, a ruler, or God, as being worthy of honor, respect, or dignity, even veneration. In the Latin language the varying degrees of intensity of worshipful respect are expressed as the terms dulia, hyperdulia, and latria, this last, latria, being the unconditional adoration due to God alone. Saint Paul in his Epistle to the Romans expressed it this way:

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Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those that resist will incur judgment.... Pay all of them their dues, taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due. —Romans 13:1-2, 7 (RSVCE)

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Saint Peter wrote:

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Be subject for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right. For it is God's will that by doing right you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish men. Live as free men, yet without using your freedom as a pretext for evil; but live as servants of God. Honor all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor. —1 Peter 2:13-17 (RSVCE).

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God commanded, "Honor your father and your mother" . Paul also wrote, "Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ...let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. Children obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right" . In human society, this is the proper worship of honor and respect according to human dignity (dulia), for God made man, male and female, in the image of God .

Worship in religion

In religion worship is the act of performing reverent activities of adoration (Latin, latria) dedicated to God (or other deities, depending on the religion), including praise, prayer, devotions, reading from the scriptures, liturgy, and hymns. Orthodox worship is expressed in the Orthodox Mysteries, Catholic worship in the Eucharist, the Mass. Their worship of God is never called a church service. A church service is often referred to as a worship service, or just a service. Worship can be done in a basilica, cathedral or shrine, in a group setting such as a church service in a church building or outdoor setting, in a small group setting such as a family, or individually. "Prayer without ceasing" is the worship of continuous love of God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength (latreia) and love of your fellow human beings as much as you love yourself (dulia). The worship of God includes the necessity of works of mercy toward other persons in need (dulia).

Degrees of Worship: Dulia, Hyperdulia, and Latreia

Many Protestants have been taught that Orthodox and Catholic Christians worship Mary as God or Goddess apart from or greater than Jesus Christ and above God the Father, and worship all the other saints as a pantheon of gods, and that they commit idolatry in reverently showing them respect by bowing to them, to their images and pictures and icons, and praying to them for their intercession. The Protestant teaching that this is all pagan idolatry is based on a misunderstanding of the meaning of the word "worship", which has been severely restricted and redefined by Protestant teachers and apologists since the Reformation as being strictly limited in meaning to "adoration" only, as has the word "prayer", which broadly meant simply "petition", but has become restricted by them to connoting solely the worship of God or a god, and the word "intercession" also being strictly limited and restricted by them to mean only "mediation", cases representing examples of semantic shift and a consequent narrowing of the modern semantic field of related terms in the 20th and 21st centuries. This is misleading.

The word "worship" has undergone a change in meaning in English. It comes from the Old English weorthscipe, which means the condition of being worthy of honor, respect, or dignity. To worship in this older, larger sense is to ascribe honor, worth, or excellence to someone, whether a sage, a magistrate, or God.

For many centuries, the term worship simply meant showing respect or honor (Latin, dulia), and an example of this usage survives in contemporary English. British subjects refer to their magistrates as "Your Worship," although Americans would say "Your Honor." This does not mean that British subjects worship their magistrates as gods (in fact, they may even despise a particular magistrate they are addressing), or that Americans give to their magistrates and Supreme Court justices honor due only to God. It means they are giving them the venerable dignity, honor and respect appropriate to their office (dulia "veneration"), not the honor appropriate to God (latreia, latria "adoration").

In the traditional Anglican Solemnization of Matrimony ceremony, found in the Book of Common Prayer, when the groom placed the ring on the bride's finger, he said to her: "With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow" (boldface emphasis added). Did he consider his wife a goddess? Was he committing idolatry? No, for he was using the word "worship" in its original sense of "honor" (dulia). This is the meaning of the words in the Book of Common Prayer.

The same goes for a quote from an old (obscure) official Catholic prayerbook entitled All for Jesus!:

"Holiest Virgin, with all my heart I worship thee above all the angels and saints in paradise... I consecrate my soul and all its powers...I worship thee the spouse of the Holy Ghost..." (boldface emphasis added)

This quote does not prove that Catholics offer Mary the divine worship of latreia. Note that the prayer says "I worship (honor) thee above all the angels and saints in paradise" (hyperdulia), not "I worship thee above God" or "equal to God", or "as my God" (latria). Catholics and Orthodox believe it is entirely appropriate that Mary, the mother of Jesus Our Lord and God, should receive a higher honor (hyperdulia) than any other mere creature, such as angels and saints, as God Himself honored her by his messenger Gabriel as "blessed among all women", but never equal to or greater than the supreme honor of unbounded adoration given to the Creator of all (latria), to Jesus who is not a creature but God. As the Catholic Answers tract "Saint Worship?" explains: Catholics understand according to the doctrine they have been taught that all the honor given to Mary (hyperdulia) and the saints (dulia) redounds to the greater honor and praise (latria) of their Creator and Savior, Jesus Christ! "And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified." Those who have actually read in full the more complete explanation of this Roman Catholic doctrine in the book by St. Alphonsus Ligouri, The Glories of Mary, 1852 (available in a variety of formats online), have been surprised at how much it has been quoted out of context, maligned and misrepresented.

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To say all in a few words: Almighty God, in order to glorify the mother of the Redeemer, has ordained that her great charity should intercede for all those for whom her divine Son offered and paid the superabundant ransom of his precious blood, in which alone is our salvation, life and resurrection. (italic emphases by the author) —from To the Reader, The Glories of Mary.

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Sola scriptura: Bibliolatry, Bible worship

Similar to the charge of Mariolatry, "Mary worship", is the charge of Bibliolatry, "Bible worship", ignorantly leveled against Protestants, in particular Fundamentalists, for whom the Bible itself, infallible, inerrant, and divinely inspired, is the very living Word of God, Spirit-breathed to mankind, in which is discerned and communicated the very Mind of God to the believer who reads its pages.

The term bibliolatry is from the Greek βιβλίον biblion, "a book", and λάτρία latreia, "worship".

Bible believers assert that they do not worship the Bible, but the God of the Bible, who has disclosed in its pages his divine nature, and will, and love for every human soul. The Bible itself is supremely reverenced (hyperdulia) with genuine honor and respect by them as the highest revelation of God to man after the ascension of Jesus to heaven and the death of the last of the Apostles of the Lord, because they have been taught to believe that it alone has all of the supernatural authority of the public divine revelation of God, and contains all that is necessary for the man of God:

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All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

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They believe that once the Bible was complete, from Genesis to Revelation, and the Bible was available to be placed in the hands of common Christians to finally read for themselves personally what it says, and be guided by its divine and holy counsel, the institutional hierarchical Church was no longer necessary to pastorally guide the children and disciples of God with any authority outside of the Bible alone.

After rejecting the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, those Protestant leaders who were discerned by their followers and disciples as capable of leading the individual communities of devout and like-minded believers—the pastors and leading counsellors, the collective chief body of the elders of the congregations, assumed to be guided by the Holy Spirit—because of their manifest intelligence, prudential wisdom, and knowledge of the Bible, used as their principal guidance the Five Solas, especially the principle of sola scriptura, the Bible alone, to guide them in guiding souls to salvation by faith alone in the one true God and in Jesus Christ alone as their only personal Lord and Savior, not Mary, not the saints, not the angels. For these the Bible itself is the Word of God and worthy of reverence second only to God Himself because it alone is inspired.

In accordance with the technical meaning of the Latin terms of dulia, hyperdulia, and latria, the Pastors and Elders of their churches are regarded as worthy of dulia, the Bible alone of all books and all things on earth is regarded as worthy of hyperdulia, and the "Lord of the spirits of all mankind" and "King of the Day of Judgment", Almighty God Himself, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is regarded as alone worthy of latraea, the divine worship of adoration due to God alone and no other in heaven or on earth. Those who charge true Bible believers with "bibliolatry" and with exalting the Bible alone as God above any Church are in error. They do not worship the Bible as God, but the God of the Bible.

All true Christians love the Bible, and deeply reverence it as the divinely inspired Word of God, whether Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Baptist, Protestant Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Independent, non-denominational, or individual believer without any particular creed or denominational orientation who believes in God and reads the Bible. Non-Catholic and non-Orthodox Protestant Christians honor and reverence the Bible as the sole rule of faith and practice for the Church as the local Body of Christ, and assert that they worship God alone, by faith alone, through the Spirit alone, according to the Bible alone. See Sola spiritu.

Hero worship

Hero worship commonly refers to disproportionate or excessive admiration for anyone who is regarded as a hero; for example, first responders, law enforcement, military, and sports figures, people who have unexpectedly manifested unusual courage, anyone culturally influential or famous for almost any reason in the public media, any individual who appears to the admirer to embody fascinating, extraordinary, and admirable qualities. The hero worshipper may adopt methods of identifying with the chosen hero, including imitation of clothing, hairstyles, and manners of speech and behavior. Americans have been accused of idealizing "frontier" violence, "larger-than-life" colorful outlaws who defy conventional standards of public morality, who "bend the rules", and shrewdly clever, intelligent criminal behavior in film and literature. Extremes of imitative hero worship can become obsessions, leading to vigilantism, gratuitous violence, and stalking of famous persons.

The term may refer to the Hero cult in ancient Greece which admired individuals who did extraordinary feats, good, bad, or unexpected, astonishing, and out-of-the-ordinary. Apotheosis is the raising of a person to the level of a deity, deification. The cult of personality almost always involves unrestrained emotional adulation of a public figure, often a preacher or evangelist, a pop culture media star, or a dynamically charismatic political figure, and is always a psychologically potent political weapon used mainly in dictatorships.

The Saints of the Lord as admirable Heroes of the Faith

While the Old and New Testaments of the Bible praise the faithful believers of the individual congregations of Israel and of the body of Christ as the saints of the Lord, the canonized saints, both men and women, especially the martyrs, are the heroes of the Christian faith worthy of reverent respect and admiration (dulia). They stand as the "standard", the "canon" of the measure of the man of God, who surround the faithful saints on earth as a "cloud of witnesses". Those Christians past and present who have done and even now are doing splendidly admirable works of good, especially to the poor and sick, to orphans and widows, to the violently persecuted, who defend the right, who protect the defenseless, and support just legislation on behalf of human life and dignity and freedom of conscience and of worship, are worthy of admiration and sincere imitation, who cause many to give thanks and praise to the one true God (latria). The Catholic and Orthodox "cult of the saints", properly understood, is promoted as a Christian form of hero-worship by them both (dulia), setting before the eyes of the faithful edifying examples of God-given faith, hope, charity and virtue to be ardently admired and sincerely imitated (dulia), inciting them, the faithful, to lift their hearts and minds to God (latria) and to the practice of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. Some of them have worked miracles, seen visions and dreamed dreams, and uttered true prophecies. The faithful are encouraged by Catholic and Orthodox leaders to join in their prayers together with them, with the saints (dulia), to ask for their assistance by their prayers of intercession to God who alone (latria) is the source of all grace and salvation, and who, as his friends, whom he has appointed as his own authorized ambassadors and patrons and ministers of virtue, are spiritual shepherds of the Church and encouragers and protectors together with the pastors on earth, the shepherds of the whole congregation of the faithful. In the Bible, God says through his prophet, "Those who honor me (latria) I will honor (dulia)."

See also

Connotation

Denotation

Semantics

Dynamic equivalence

Hermeneutics

Historical-critical method (Higher criticism)

Other gods

Idolatry

Intercession

Theotokos

Corporal and spiritual works of mercy

Misrepresentation

Polemic

Detraction

Calumny

Slander

Libel

Invincible ignorance

''The Two Babylons''

Great Apostasy

Five Solas

Cafeteria Christianity

King James Only

External links

worship, n. - Etymology Online (etymonline.com)

Semantic change (uni-due.de)

Semantic Field Definitions and Examples - ThoughtCo (thoughtco.com)

Catholic Answers Tract: Saint Worship? (catholic.com)

"Mariolatry"? (home.earthlink.net)

What is Bibliolatry? (gotquestions.org)

Idolatry of the Bible, by Avery Foley - Answers in Genesis (answersingenesis.org)

Worshipping the Bible is Idolatry, "Bibliolatry". Author: Scott J. Shifferd (godsbreath.net)

What Difference Does an Inerrant Bible Make? from R. C. Sproul - Ligonier Ministries (Ligonier.org) The author says, "The issue is not the sacrosanctity of a book, a ‘paper pope,’ or bibliolatry. The issue at stake is the integrity of the person and work of Jesus. He can save us only if He is sinless, and He is sinless only if all of His teaching—including what He teaches about Scripture—is true."