Why We Don’t Need to Kneel Before God

Devotion to God in the Integral Christian Community
Part One

I have noticed that progressive Christians often have a bias toward devotion to the human community and away from devotion to God and other spiritual presences. This may be, in part, because many see the pressing concerns of the human community, such as justice and ecology as a missing piece in much of traditional Christianity.

Another factor may be a hesitation to move toward the personal presence of God or Jesus because of their association with conservative Christianity. Then there are the centuries of the abuses of sexism, homophobia, patriarchy, purity codes, false threats of hell, and shaming of multitudes of sincere Christians fostered by most Christian churches in the world.

We need to learn what to leave behind in traditional Christianity and what to keep. Richard Rohr addresses this, saying,

“I want to encourage the uncovering of what we mean by the word devotion. We have to somehow live a life that’s connected to the heart. Otherwise, we get into head ideology, righteousness, opinionatedness, and insisting on the right or wrong words. All are ways of avoiding the heart and staying in the head!

I have to admit that I’ve learned this kind of devotion from good old-time Catholics and healthy evangelicals. They’re invariably heart-based people who look out at reality with soft eyes. We can usually see it in their calm face or the natural smile on their lips before they even start talking. Trust that first impression, it is seldom wrong.”

One other aspect, often lurking in the background but seldom articulated, may give progressives something of an “ick” response to traditional worship. Devotion to God has traditionally been framed in the metaphors of the royal court. This left-over from ancient cultures may understandably be rejected as no longer adequate for us today. Yet often, nothing is offered to replace this with metaphors that resonate with postmodern and integral sensibilities.

Therefore, I invite my readers to consider their own devotion to God from what may be a different perspective. One that is more inviting, realistic, and viable. Let’s begin by exploring “royal court” Christianity.

Royal Court Christianity

Commands

Royal Court Christianity is filled with the commands of the Supreme Ruler and the trappings of kings and rulers who give those commands. The Bible, reflecting Jewish commandment culture, often pictures God and the prophets giving commands leading to many oughts and shoulds.

Modern and postmodern folks, and yes, also Christian ones, often don’t easily respond well to commands, even when they are framed as coming from God. “Shoulds” invite us to guilt and feelings of inadequacy. Knowing we “ought to” can move us into performance spirituality where we must achieve a certain level of doing before we can consider ourselves “spiritual.” Love, especially, does not respond to commands, rules, and shoulds.

Royal court metaphors

Medieval English bible translators were the first to use the word “Lord” for God to translate the Hebrew word Adonai and Greek word Kyrios, which is the equivalent of ruler or master in English today. It is a title of honor, just like king, taken from the English royal court.

The Old Testament is filled with courtly metaphors. A “court” in the Bible could be the enclosure of the Tabernacle ( Ex 27:9-19, 40:8), of the Temple ( 1 Kings 6:36 ), of a prison ( Neh 3:25 ), of a private house ( 2 Sam 17:18 ), and of a king’s palace ( 2 Kings 20:4 ). However, in reference to God, the imagery was closest to the Tabernacle and a king’s palace, mingling the two, as in: “They are planted in the house of the Lord; they flourish in the courts of our God” (Ps. 92:13).

When we come into the presence of the King, he must be offered gratitude and thanksgiving. “Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name” (Ps 100:4).

If you come from traditional Christianity, you may know that much of conventional Christian worship is symbolized by the royal court’s language, stories, and traditions. The royal palace was where the King lived. The Temple was where God lived. Jerusalem’s ancient temples were palaces of grandeur. The Temple in Jerusalem was framed as a royal court with the holy of holies where God, the monarch, lived, attended to by his priests.

This holy of holies was approached with rules and restrictions enforced with the threat of death from the hand of God if not carried out. “The Lord said to Moses: ‘Tell your brother Aaron not to come just at any time into the sanctuary inside the curtain before the mercy seat that is upon the ark, or he will die; for I appear in the cloud upon the mercy seat” (Lev 167:2).

Traditional worship is modeled on the royal court. Watch a movie about King Arthur or a newscast about entering the presence of the Queen of England. You can see how we have projected our treatment of human royalty onto God.

Andrew Prior, minister in the Australian Uniting Church Prior, puts it graphically:

“We approach the King with care. He holds our life in his hand. He is like God. Bow down to him; he is worthy of our time and attention. This is serious business we are about in the royal court.

Once in the right position, after the assuring him of our loyalty and love and apologizing for our abject failures, we listen to him. What is his mood today? What does the King want? Already we have been “sniffing the air of the court” as we have bowed and scraped, but what is he saying now? What is his word? We compliment him upon his Wisdom.

After hearing and seeing the actions of the King, we respond with our gifts and offerings. We promise our continued loyalty. Now that we understand his mood, we assess what we can ask for wisely and what we dare not ask. Then we leave the court, empowered by his blessing and assistance, clear on what he requires of us, and get on with life until we must come back. This symbolism, while perhaps a parody and perhaps not, does not usually sit well with progressive Christians. It rather dramatically frames why many of us are uncomfortable with some of the aspects of the traditional style of worship, be it evangelical or high church.”

Royal Court Body language

Bowing heads, as well as kneeling, are a part of the body language of much royal court church worship. In the cultures of the Bible, bowing and kneeling were valued symbols of worship and reverence toward God. Psalm 95:6 says, “Come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.” The Hebrew word for “worship” actually means “bow down.”

This carried over into the New Testament in such images as, “So that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil 2:9).

Jesus himself, “withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, and knelt down and prayed, saying, ‘Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.’” (Luke 22:41-42). For Jesus, we can see that taking a knee was a meaningful expression of whole-hearted surrender to God in his day and culture.

Kneeling probably derived from a core principle in mammalian nonverbal behavior: make the body smaller and look up to show respect, esteem, and deference. This is seen, for example, in dogs and chimps, who reduce their height to show submissiveness. Historically, kneeling to bow at the feet of another was common practice in the ancient world, a universal sign of submission, honor, and respect. For this reason, it was once expected that people would kneel in the presence of kings.

The ancient Israelites likely adopted kneeling as a religious posture from other Near Eastern peoples. Christians adopted kneeling from our Jewish roots. Roman Catholics have been kneeling for centuries. In 2002, the Vatican revised its instructions, allowing bishops to decide whether their flocks should get on their knees at some point in the Mass. Traditionalists see it as the ultimate posture of submission to and adoration of God; modernists view kneeling as the relic of a feudal past they would like to leave behind.

“Kneeling is more like a medieval custom that owes more to feudalism than primitive religious practice,” said Gordon Lathrop, a liturgy professor at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

The Bible demonstrates enough prayer that is not kneeling to show us that the biblical writers don’t require it. When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, Jesus did not say anything about physical posture.

Body language only means what it means to you

What is most crucial in one’s spiritual life is what your body language means to you.

In the traditional mythic context, unconditional submission to spiritual authority makes sense. In the postmodern and integral context, however, submitting your natural authority, your capacity to discriminate, and ultimately your right to be yourself makes no sense and will never work. In the long run, it will almost inevitably inhibit your innate, unique capacity to evolve and develop in your own way, in your own time. When you submit to conformity, important dimensions of your own mind and soul are subverted. You become infantilized, and your development is stunted, even by this kind of undiscerning submission to God.

It’s not the posture of the body but the attitude of the heart that is the most meaningful when we pray. Kneeling and bowing are immersed in Royal Court metaphors and the “I am a terrible sinner who deserves to go to hell” theology. The trauma-inducing shaming of evangelical and Catholic Christianity’s tactics of humiliating people into following Jesus by offering the only ticket out of hell is an embarrassment for those who know Jesus.

If kneeling and bowing are meaningful in a healthy, non-shaming way to you, representing your thoughtful giving yourself to God, then, by all means, use that language to express yourself. If kneeling and bowing are not meaningful or shaming to you, then, for God’s sake and your sake, do not participate in what feels to you to be a damaging activity.

However, Jesus still modeled for us the path of surrender to God in love and trust. Turning your life over to God is the most vital, subversive thing you can do in this world. “Your will, not mine be done” is a liberating letting go deep within us. If this is true, what symbols and metaphors communicate devotion and trust in God in non-shaming ways for us other than the royal court worship?

Jesus introduced three new paradigms of our relationship with God

Jesus used the Greek word for love, “agape,” when he said we should love God. However, he introduced three other powerful images for love where God’s love is described differently in addition to agape.

Family

The idea of God as King was fundamental to Judaism. Jesus often used the phrase “kingdom of God,” considered the central theme of his teaching. However, with Jesus, it was a kingdom, not with a King, but with a Father! He placed us into a new family of brothers and sisters with the same loving, fatherly, motherly God — not a remote ruler.

Jesus called God not just Father, but Abba, the intimate name both young children and adults used for their father in Jewish culture. He not only did not act as if God was a high and mighty ruler, but he acted as if God was his loving daddy.

We are called children of God throughout the New Testament. “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God. And that is what we are” (I John 3:1).

Friendship

Jesus said to his followers, I no longer call you servants (δοῦλος here literally means slaves) but friends. Jesus moved us into a community of friends, friends with God, and friends with one another. The Hebrew Scriptures say, “The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Ex 33:11). Abraham was called “a friend of God” (James 2:23). Jesus made these peripheral friendship references central in his relationship with God and his followers. Friends, to the degree of the depth of the friendship, are devoted to one another.

Lovers

In addition to family and friendship as the way God “feels” about us, there may be something surprising to our religious sensibilities. Lovers may be at the top of this metaphorical ascent of divine love’s dramatic manifestation in our inner lives. However, it is something that keeps getting buried by embarrassed theologians and preachers. God and Jesus consider us lovers with them. This deserves its own writing next week which I call “God Is in Love With You and Wants to Marry You.”

In an integral perspective, we can acknowledge that royal court worship metaphors and practices have meaning and value for some, perhaps many Christians. However, for many of us in the integral community, devotion to God is best expressed in these three metaphors of friendship, family, and lovers. This is devotion with closeness, touching, and intimacy, rather than the aloofness of royal court drama.

In addition, Integral Christian devotion incorporates loving others as well as the dimensions of nature, justice, the suffering of the world, and the cosmos.

We’ll explore all of these elements throughout this series in the coming weeks.

Practice: The Three Faces of God Invocation/Benediction

Catholics cross themselves. Charismatics lift their hands. Traditional Christians sit very still. Integral offers the devotion in motion practice of God in 3D. God in three dimensions is found in the three faces of God.

The threefold Faces of God Invocation/Benediction is a series of words and movements that recognize the multidimensional presence of God.

I have taught this brief movement and invocation to hundreds of folks in my former church and many more around the world: Three simple hand/arm movements are accompanied by words that portray the Infinite Face of God-Beyond-Us, the Intimate Face of God-Beside-Us, and the Inner Face of God-Being-Us.

First, we raise our hands and arms up as high and wide as we wish. The accompanying words are individual or plural, depending on whether you are offering this by yourself or with others. “Infinite God beyond me, in whom I live and move and have my being.”

Next, our hands are placed in prayer/namaste position in front of our heart while saying,

“Intimate God beside me; you are always with me.”

Finally, we place one hand on heart and one hand on gut (or both hands on tummy while saying, “Inner God being me; I am the light of the world.” ) In an older version both hearts were on our hearts.

Pause to let the movements and words sink in.

Words for individual use:

*Infinite God beyond me, in whom I live and move and have my being.*

*Inner God being me: I am the light of the world.*

Infinite God beyond me, in whom I live and move and have my being.
Intimate God beside me; you are always with me.
Inner God being me: I am the light of the world.

Words for group use:

*Infinite God beyond us, in whom we live and move and have our being.*

*Inner God being us; we are the light of the world.*

Infinite God beyond us, in whom we live and move and have our being.
Intimate God beside us; you are always with us.
Inner God being us; we are the light of the world.

Here is a link to God in Three Dimensions video

Sing along with it in your devotion time. Your group can sing along (everyone’s mute on, please) with my former church congregation in the video for a gathered integral “church service” experience. (You may notice that we are doing an older hand movement of God Being Us with our hands on our hearts. We had yet to learn that our spiritual womb is the primary source of our divine identity.) Here are the words to the new hymn.

GOD IN THREE DIMENSIONS

Music by Jean Sibelius (“Finlandia”)
Words by Wanda Heatwole
Concept by Paul Smith

Infinite God, beyond our comprehension

in whom we are, and live and move.

O Divine Mystery, O vast Creator,

Infinite God, we stand in awe of you.

O Divine Mystery, O vast Creator,

Infinite God, we stand in awe of you.

Intimate God, each day you’re always with us.

Emmanuel, a God who’s always there.

Jesus, our guide, our friend, and our model,

Intimate God, we offer praise to you.

Jesus, our guide, our friend, and our model,

Intimate God, we offer praise to you.

O Inner God, within us as our true self,

energy cosmic, light divine.

We are your shining light to the whole world.

O Inner God, we now give thanks to you.