Sacred Games: A History of Christian Worship

You cannot understand a religion without understanding the meaning and intent of its rituals. Bernhard Lang delves into the origins of what he terms the six elementary forms of ritual acts in Christianity: praise, prayer, sermon, sacrifice, sacrament, and rapture or spiritual ecstasy. He explains the two kinds of prayers in Christian worship, the theories of sacrifice, the relationship of intellectual ritual to patterns of preaching, and the rebirth of Pentecostal worship in 20th-century America, among many other well-researched topics. His final chapter explores the two basic orientations toward God--as majestic and fearsome or as familiar and loving--as expressions of the human soul's dimensions.