Why Does God Want Us to Worship Him? Is God Vain?
Why does God want us to worship him? Because worship is our good: it is the creature turned toward the One it was made to know and enjoy. God is complete in Himself, so our praise adds nothing to Him, and the whole change that worship makes falls on the worshiper. Below we state the objection at full strength, give the four standard Christian answers their due, and show where the Many Beings series lands.
Key takeaways
- God is complete, so worship adds nothing to Him. Paul says God is not served "as if he needed anything," and Aquinas says no creature can add to His glory.
- The real objection is a dilemma. If God needs worship, He lacks something; if not, wanting it looks like vanity, as C. S. Lewis once felt.
- Each standard answer keeps half the truth. The classical answer guards God's self-sufficiency, the Reformed joins His glory to our joy, and the personalist and process answers guard His delight.
- Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) dissolves the dilemma. Where theistic personalism and process theism let worship give God something, FICT reads His "want" as one eternal willing of our good, with its whole effect in us.
Why does God want us to worship Him? Two questions in one
Worship is the honour a creature gives to God as God: praise, thanksgiving, adoration, sacrifice and the obedience that follows them.
The question carries two questions inside it. The first is whether God needs our worship. The second is why, if He does not, He asks for it at all, and Scripture asks for it insistently. The covenant at Sinai commands it: "Do not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God" (Exodus 34:14, NIV). Through Isaiah, God says, "I am the LORD; that is my name! I will not give my glory to another or my praise to idols" (Isaiah 42:8, NIV). And Jesus tells the woman at the well that the Father is looking for worshipers (John 4:23).
Scripture also answers the first question before we can ask it. In Psalm 50 God summons His people to judgment, and the charge is not neglect of the altar, for their burnt offerings are "ever before me." The charge is that they imagine He needs them:
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"If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is mine, and all that is in it. Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats? Sacrifice thank offerings to God, fulfill your vows to the Most High, and call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you will honor me." (Psalm 50:12-15, NIV)
The same psalm that denies the need gives the command, and the honour God receives comes after the deliverance He gives. That is the puzzle in miniature. If our worship supplied God with something, He would not be the self-existent God of aseity, who exists of Himself and depends on nothing, and the attributes of God would include a want that only creatures could fill. If it supplies Him nothing, we need to know why He asks.
Volume One of the Many Beings series, free to download, starts from the same doctrine of God.
Is God vain for wanting worship? The objection at its strongest
The sharpest statement of the objection came from inside the Church. C. S. Lewis confessed in Reflections on the Psalms (1958) that the demand for praise had once been a "stumbling block" to him. The demand seemed to make God "like a vain woman wanting compliments, or a vain author presenting his new books to people who have never met or heard of him." He could accept part of what Scripture asked: "Gratitude to God, reverence to Him, obedience to Him, I thought I could understand; not this perpetual eulogy." And he named the moral intuition behind his unease: "We all despise the man who demands continued assurance of his own virtue, intelligence or delightfulness."
Lewis was a believer reporting what the command felt like to him, and his report is the best evidence that the objection deserves a real answer.
Philosophers of religion have given the worry a name. Charles Taliaferro, in his chapter "Is God Vain?" in Questions About God (edited by Steven Cahn and David Shatz, Oxford, 2002), calls it the problem of divine vanity and finds it in three places: creation, worship and redemption. The chapter's abstract puts the charge in a single line: "God wants to be the talk of the town."
Put exactly, the objection is a dilemma. Either God needs our worship or He does not. If He needs it, He lacks something that creatures supply. Paul denies that when he says God is not served by human hands "as if he needed anything" (Acts 17:25, NIV), and the psalm denies it before him. If He does not need it, then His wanting it looks like wanting admiration for its own sake, which is exactly what vanity is in us. Stated as an argument: a perfect being lacks nothing and so wants nothing; the God of the Bible wants praise; so the God of the Bible is not a perfect being.
Both horns rest on one assumption, and it should be named before any answer is given. They assume that "want" means for God what it means for us: that to want is to lack, and that to receive what one wants is to gain. Every standard answer either accepts that assumption or works around it.
Why does God want worship? The standard Christian answers
If God lacks nothing, why does God want worship? The Christian tradition gives four serious answers, and each sees something the others miss.
The classical answer: worship is for our sake
Thomas Aquinas gave the answer the classical tradition has kept. In the Summa Theologiae he writes: "We pay God honor and reverence, not for His sake (because He is of Himself full of glory to which no creature can add anything), but for our own sake, because by the very fact that we revere and honor God, our mind is subjected to Him; wherein its perfection consists, since a thing is perfected by being subjected to its superior." A body is perfected by the soul that gives it life, and a mind by the God it honours.
Augustine had said the same about sacrifice. In The City of God he asks, "who is so foolish as to suppose that the things offered to God are needed by Him for some uses of His own?" and answers that "whatever right worship is paid to God profits not Him, but man." Our good, he says earlier in the same book, "is nothing else than to be united to God."
This is the Thomist answer, and its strength is that it keeps God's self-existence whole. Its strain lies in the Bible's other language: the Father seeks worshipers, and God rejoices over His people. Read carelessly, the classical answer turns such texts into a manner of speaking, and worship begins to look like a therapy God prescribes rather than a relationship He wants.
The Reformed answer: His glory and our joy are one
The Westminster Shorter Catechism opens with its most famous question: "What is the chief end of man? A. Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever." The two verbs are joined on purpose, and the same pairing took Lewis past his stumbling block. "I think we delight to praise what we enjoy," he wrote, "because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation." He concluded: "Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him." John Piper's ministry has taken the same thought as its motto: "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him."
Jonathan Edwards gave the doctrine its deepest form, God's glory as His fullness overflowing like a fountain, and the article on why God created sets it out. The strength of the Reformed answer is that it joins God's end and our good, as Scripture does, and keeps God at the centre of His own work, as His sovereignty requires. Its strain is that it still says God acts for His own glory as His end, and the critic replies that a being who seeks its own glory, however generously, is still seeking something. It also invites a darker question: does a God intent on displaying His glory need some to be lost?
Theistic personalism and open theism: God desires and receives
Theistic personalism, a term coined by Brian Davies, names the view that God is a person in much the way we are persons, only without our limits. On this view the Bible's language of desire needs no translating: God wants our worship as a father wants his children's love, and He is glad to receive it. Open theism develops the picture. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarises it, God "desires to be in relationship with the people He has created" and is "genuinely responsive to our concerns." Zephaniah speaks the same way:
"The LORD your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing." (Zephaniah 3:17, NIV)
The strength here is that God is no distant observer, and open theism takes the Bible's delight at its word, as any account of God's emotions must. The strain is the need horn. If our worship gives God a joy He would otherwise lack, God receives from creatures, and Psalm 50 and Acts 17 say He does not. A God who is a person in our sense, gladdened by our praise, is a God whose gladness waits on us.
Process theism: worship enriches God
Process theism goes further. In the Stanford Encyclopedia's account, "it is an essential attribute of God to be fully involved in and affected by temporal processes," and "the creatures contribute something to God." Charles Hartshorne, one of its leading figures, argued that only by "an eminent form of relativity" can the deity qualify as worshipful. The strength of the view is that worship matters to God. Its strain is that a God enriched by our praise was poorer without it, and that grants the vanity critic the very premise he needs.
Here the answers reach the standoff the creation debate reached. The classical side is accused of an indifferent God, the personalist and process side of a needy one. Each charge lands, because each side reads the other's words in its own frame.
The Many Beings series takes each of these positions seriously across seven volumes.
How Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answers why God wants us to worship Him
Frame-Indexed Classical Theism is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single error: one term carried across two frames as though it meant the same thing in each. On worship, theistic personalism and process theism let our praise give God something, while the classical answer, held without its reason, lets His wanting fade into metaphor. FICT keeps what each one saw, because the term that changes sense is the one the whole question turns on: want.
In our frame, to want is to lack and to reach for what we lack. The vain man needs the crowd because without its applause he is less, and Lewis was right to despise him. In God's own frame, His willing is one eternal act whose end is His own goodness, already possessed, and that act gives rather than acquires. The article on why God created traces this for creation, and Volume Four states the principle: God's aseity "entails that the world adds nothing to His perfection and answers no lack in Him." The same holds for the world's praise. So the sentence "God wants our worship" is true twice, in two senses, and neither sense is a figure of speech.
In our frame we meet a God who seeks, commands and delights. Jesus says so:
"Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth." (John 4:23-24, NIV)
Volume Four argues that this relationship is real on both sides, held in two modes: "God relating changelessly from His frame, the creature relating sequentially from its own, neither mode imposed upon the other." The Father's seeking is how His one eternal willing of our good is received by creatures who live in sequence. The personalist is right that the seeking is real. He goes wrong only in placing its newness in God.
Where, then, does worship's effect fall? Volume Four answers for every exchange between God and His creatures: "the sequence, the novelty, and the becoming are located entirely in the creature, the effect, and never in God, the Cause." Prayer is the book's worked example. A prayer is a real cause within God's one act, with "Real causal weight on the creature's side; zero change on God's side," which is why prayer matters without God having to change His mind. Worship works the same way: a real act whose whole effect is in us. The psalmist states the same principle from the other side, describing the makers of idols:
"Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them." (Psalm 115:8, NIV)
We become like what we worship. Aquinas's "a thing is perfected by being subjected to its superior" states the same principle for the true God, and FICT supplies the reason the classical answer left unstated. The Father's seeking is no figure of speech, because what He seeks is our being made right, which really takes place.
Now the dilemma dissolves. The need horn assumed that worship passes something to God, but it passes nothing, because the one act it answers was already full. The vanity horn assumed that wanting is gaining, but in God, wanting is giving. Vanity is a disorder of value in a creature who ranks itself above greater goods, as Edwards argued against the same charge. In God, to want to be known as He is, is to want us to see truly, and seeing truly is our good. Process theism is right that worship matters to God, and FICT keeps that without the enrichment. The Reformed unity of glory and joy stands too, now with the reason it is not self-seeking: the glorifying happens in us.
Volume Four names what the other picture costs the worshiper. The mood-god of the modern imagination, it says, "is exhausting to worship, because he must be managed. The God of this book cannot be managed and does not need to be." A God whose gladness waited on our praise, as open theism and process theism describe Him, would have to be kept happy. The simple and perfect God of classical theism can simply be enjoyed. The statement of FICT sets out the position in one place.
Volume Four, Resolving Immutability & Interaction, shows how a changeless God relates to His creatures.
Does God's glory need anyone to be lost? Testing the answer
We have run thousands of simulated attacks against Frame-Indexed Classical Theism, drawn from academic and peer-reviewed sources. One of them bears directly on the glory answer to this question: it comes from Augustinian universalism and is aimed at the Reformed claim that God acts to display His attributes.
If God acts to display His glory, must someone be damned to show His justice?
Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.
A long Reformed line, with Jonathan Edwards among its strongest voices, holds that God's decree aims to display all His attributes, mercy and justice alike, and on many readings that is why some are saved and others lost. Oliver Crisp, writing in the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion in 2003 ("Augustinian Universalism"), argues that this rationale runs two requirements together: that God's attributes be displayed at all, and that they be displayed in some particular group of human beings. Justice is fully displayed at the cross, where the penalty for sin falls on Christ. If a display in final judgment is still wanted, the fallen angels supply it. So the display of glory cannot explain why any human being is lost, and a God who sought His glory at that price would be the vain God of the objection after all. Volume Two speaks of "the manifold manifestation of His attributes," so the charge reaches it.
Volume Two does not offer display as the reason anyone is lost, and its sentence says what the display is: "This opens the way, according to His decree, for the manifold manifestation of His attributes. He has chosen to offer His grace to provide salvation through Jesus Christ, not under compulsion but freely, displaying His love without compromising His justice." The glory displayed is grace freely offered. The book agrees with Crisp about the cross: "Through Christ's atonement, divine justice is satisfied." It answers the question of the lost on different ground, by response, describing "an eternal state determined by one's response to Christ at the end of this finite duration," and it rejects universalism as the view that all are saved "irrespective of response." Crisp's closing question, why a world where every human is saved is not the actual one, assumes a God who could ensure every human's salvation, and the book's account of response denies that assumption.
The glory God seeks needs no victims to complete it. It is His goodness given, the same answer the worship question received. The posts on why God allows suffering and Volume Two take the question of the lost further.
Frequently asked questions
Does God need worship?
God is complete in Himself, and Scripture says He is not served by human hands "as if he needed anything" (Acts 17:25, NIV). Augustine put it bluntly: right worship "profits not Him, but man." God wants worship because it is good for us, and our praise adds nothing to a glory that is already full.
Is God narcissistic for wanting to be worshipped?
No. Narcissism is a craving for admiration that props up a fragile self, and it ranks the self above greater goods. God has no fragile self to prop up and no greater good to rank Himself above. To want to be known as He is, is to want us to see truly, and that is our good. Lewis, who once felt the objection keenly, concluded that "In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him."
Why is God called a jealous God?
Because He will not share His people with idols: "Do not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God" (Exodus 34:14, NIV). The command comes in the covenant at Sinai, beside the order to tear down the altars of Canaan's gods. Divine jealousy is covenant love guarding the beloved, and Psalm 115 names the danger it guards against: those who trust in idols "will be like them."
Why do we worship God if He does not need it?
Because we need it. Augustine wrote that our good "is nothing else than to be united to God," and worship is that union practised. The psalmist knew where joy is found:
"You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand." (Psalm 16:11, NIV)
Will we worship God forever in heaven?
Yes. In Revelation the twenty-four elders lay their crowns before the throne and say, "You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being" (Revelation 4:11, NIV). The catechism's "enjoy him forever" names the same end. Heaven's worship is the beatific vision, the sight of God in which the creature's joy is made complete.
Where to go from here
The question we usually bring to worship is what God gets out of it. The better question is what we are being made into. Psalm 115 says we become like what we worship. The God who needs nothing cannot be flattered by our praise, and our praise conforms us to Him. He wants our worship because what He wants from it is our good, and the One who is our good is Himself.
Volume One, free to download, is where the series' argument begins, and the books page lists every volume.
