Our Bounden Duty: Worship,Justice,and the Moral Life in Anglican Theology

Abstract

This address delivered at the 2025 Anglican Theological Review Annual Meeting of Trustees argues that Christian worship is not merely formative of the moral life but constitutive of it. Against modern assumptions that treat worship as instrumental to ethical improvement, it retrieves the classical concept of religio as “justice toward God” in order to show that worship is itself a moral act, owed to God for God’s own sake. Drawing on patristic, scholastic, and Anglican sources, the essay traces how this understanding of worship persists within Anglican theology and liturgical practice, particularly in the language of The Book of Common Prayer. Through engagement with thinkers such as William Douglass, Evelyn Underhill, and Kenneth Kirk, it articulates a distinctively Anglican vision of the moral life in which worship is not ancillary to ethics but its ground and telos.