The Defense of Contemporary Music
Seldom does anyone attempt to defend contemporary music as the best kind of ecclesiastical music that 21st-century Westerners can use. Normally it is just passively breathed in and out without much thought, its simple lite rock sounds providing easy familiarity and passive enjoyment to growing crowds of eager seekers.
Occasionally, though, some principled thinker gives it a shot. This is a refreshing break from the pragmatism that too often leads church leaders across evangelicalism to pick music on the basis of what their parishioners like to hear. Some of these courageous critics argue that one form of pop music or other is the heart language of our people, so we must play it. This argument rightly points out that music is inherently contextual, from which it follows naturally that we should play that music which is most idiomatic for us. Others argue that rock ‘n’ roll and its derivatives are inherently more authentic forms than any “classical” music could be, since rock connects with its hearers on a visceral, rather than a cerebral level. Thus we are able to express our primal, celebrative worship urges more faithfully, unobstructed by the harsh constraints of the hated “head knowledge” and the lifeless, hypocritical layers of civilization foisted upon us by Luther, Wesley, Watts, and their Pharisaical cohort.
Ask Uncle Cam
To understand the phrase “heart language,” we must recall a bit of historical missiology. In the 1917, a young missionary named William Cameron Townsend (“Uncle Cam” to later generations) was preaching and selling Spanish-language Bibles in Guatemala. He was quickly confronted with the imperialism of Spanish-only ministry through the challenge of a barely-bilingual Cakchiquel man who famously asked, “Mister, if your God is so great, why can’t he speak my language?” Over the next two decades, Townsend translated the bible into Cakchiquel, thereby creating an entirely new missiological paradigm which continues to dominate Protestant missions to this day. This paradigm recognizes that people see themselves according to ethnolinguistic boundaries, delineating between the seemingly incommensurate groups, “us” and “them,” by lines of common ancestry and common language. The language that “we” speak—the language one learns to speak as a child, regardless of what other languages must be spoken for economic, educational, or social purposes—is permanently imprinted on the human person as the language of default. It is the way one speaks when one is back home, or is not otherwise pressed to speak differently. This is the “heart language,” the tongue which comes most easily and is often exclusively used to communicate matters of the deepest personal import.
Calling adult contemporary pop our “heart language,” then, is a direct appeal to missiological categories. Cameron Townsend’s pioneering work (which resulted in the creation of the redoubtable Wycliff Bible Translators) showed us that we cannot rely on trade languages or the tongues of colonial rulers to communicate the Gospel. 
These are languages associated with outsiders, and are not the means people use to talk about things that really matter, so religious movements mediated by them are guaranteed not to go far. Can we legitimately put a genre of music into this category?
We cannot, not without giving away most of the contemporary farm. If music is truly doing any of the work of communicating of the kerygma to parishioners, then our choice of music will admit to the criticisms I have leveled in my discussion of form. If music is language, then music is necessarily mediating meaning, so we must be careful to choose a form of music that can do this well. Using adult contemporary pop for this purpose (to continue to pick on that easy target) would be like relying on a Pidgin translation of the Bible for serious study. Sure, you do some street evangelism with it in a pinch, but meaningful exegesis of the text will not happen when the target language has only one preposition. (What does “Martha sat long Jesus” mean?) Fortunately, since pidgin languages are by definition never native languages, this problem does not afflict modern Bible translation. Unlike much pop music, “heart” languages are always grammatically complete.
But wily defenders of contemporary music will not fall to this criticism, because they are not claiming that music is language. When we speak of “our music” in America, we are not speaking of a grammatically significant bearer of semantic content, but of an entertainment preference. It may be a strong preference with deep emotional and historical associations (think of the music that was on the radio when you were in high school), but the role it plays in this culture is most often that of our favorite background noise, which bears nothing like the weight of the language our mother used to sing us to sleep at night. (If you would object to the “background noise” claim, and want to tell me about your carefully considered, highly refined musical aesthetic, then the accusation probably doesn’t apply to you. You probably receive music differently than most of the people about whom it is claimed that pop music is their heart language.)
Rather than providing us with our ethnolinguistic identity, “our” music defines our demographic identity: the youth culture of the 1960s talked about their generation. Disaffected youth of the 1980s listened to New Wave. In the early 1990s, it was grunge. African-American youth have long listened to hip-hop. Many Baby Boomers gravitate towards adult contemporary pop. Admittedly, these examples indulge heinously in various stereotypes, but you can be sure that the politically sensitive creative directors of Madison Avenue drink these simplistic caricatures down like water—and are well compensated for their valuable services. That is, they are stereotypes that you can take to the bank.
Hippies, disaffected youths, and Baby Boomers all have a music that is understood and loved by “us” and hated and misunderstood by “them,” but are demographic boundaries really as hard to traverse as ethnolinguistic ones? Consider that you are probably already angrily thinking of several legitimate exceptions to the careless stereotypes I’ve thrown out. As I said, those stereotypes are not without a basis in reality—a basis which can be efficiently monetized by savvy marketers—but neither are they without ready exception. People develop strong commitments to new musical tastes all the time. It is precisely the ease which one can choose a new musical genre as “one’s own” that makes music unlike language in the manner claimed by defenders of the “heart language” argument. No one ever adopts a second, third, or fourth language as a mother tongue, but people can and do change their favorite music—the music of their heart—with relative ease.
There is no doubting that musical associations can contribute powerfully to people’s self-identity, but to apply the missiological categories pioneered by Uncle Cam is troublesome indeed. Musical taste is simply too fungible, too dissociated from the truly static aspects of human identity.
Celebrate Good Times
The claim that contemporary music is “more celebrative” or “more demonstrative” than traditional music is usually not articulated much more clearly than mere use of those two adjectives, or others like them. The idea is that contemporary music allows for a more authentic celebration of God’s work among his people, because it seems naturally to evoke more outward demonstrations of a joyful disposition. There may be a small kernel of truth lurking behind this claim, but I hope to show that the notions of celebration and its primitive demonstration are deeply problematic as employed in this debate.
There seems to be little possible dispute that celebration is a key component of Christian worship. Old Testament narratives are replete with rich celebrations of significant events in redemptive history, some of which are remembered in our own canonical worship music, the Psalms. Celebration seems to have divine sanction, and if God honored it in the older, lesser covenant, then there can be little reason to be permanently dour in the advent of the newer and better one. But advocates of contemporary worship seem to want to turn celebration into more than a mere part of worship. Too often they would make it the controlling paradigm.
The content of the Psalter would suggest this is a mistake. Yes, God’s redemptive work on behalf of his people is to be celebrated, but there is more to the human experience of God’s excellencies than mere celebration. Sin is to be earnestly repented-of. God is to be entreated for the expansion of his Kingdom and the defeat of his enemies. God’s sometimes bitter Providence is to be lamented doxologically. His being itself is to be extolled—a practice which might more naturally occasion a stunned silence than a loud rock concert. Celebration is clearly a term in the worship equation, but it is not the only term. Indeed, its coefficient may not even be that big.
An anecdote from personal experience is instructive. On September 9, 2001, I brought my family to my church’s contemporary worship service as I did every Sunday. The typical music was nowhere near the then-cutting-edge alt.worship styles, but it was as upbeat and sprightly as is typical of the pop-rock genre it emplohed. (I was still able to tolerate contemporary worship in fairly large doses in those days. I will note only that reflection since then on the current state of ecclesiastical music has not served to increase my options for finding a happy evangelical home.) By the following Sunday, the United States had suffered a devastating terrorist attack, leaving the country feeling angry, shocked, and violated, wondering what would come next and to where our innocent past had suddenly fled. What kind of music does such a people use to approach the throne of God? Do they put on a garment of joyful, celebrative praise, even though the idea of celebration has been temporarily (but legitimately) banished from their hearts? Is the New Covenant such cause for permanent celebration that when bereft of joy we should “fake it until we make it,” as the 12-step mavens would say?
I will not answer the question, except to say that there was no contemporary music played in my church on September 16, 2001. It was straight hymns for several weeks, to the enduring credit of the leadership.
I Want My Romantic Myth
There is something much more subtle to the emphasis on celebration that pervades contemporary worship, and particularly the kind of celebration it encourages. In his excellent book All God’s Children And Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture, author Kenneth Myers draws several connections between nineteenth century Romanticism and the musical paterfamilias of contemporary worship music: rock ‘n’ roll. Myers offers the uninitiated reader a concise description of Romanticism, tailored somewhat to the purposes of the discussion:
Romanticism…fostered an emphasis on instinct, a tendency toward irrationality, and a sympathy with pantheism. Out of these attributes, it is not surprising to discover two other characteristics of Romanticism: its celebration of youth and its belief that a return to the primitive was a means of recovering human integrity.1
Suppose upon this brief treatment you are willing to stipulate that this is a faithful capsule summary of Romanticism, and that rock is in some sense its musical heir. (This may be unlikely at this point, but bear with me.) Are rock musicians aware of this ethos? Are they all savvy, analytical, liberally educated cultural critics, aware of their position in history and their function in driving the zeitgeist? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Myers compares the intentionality of early British and American rock musicians in promoting this philosophical agenda (quoting author Simon Firth):
It was [the tradition of Romanticism as propagated by British art schools] that enabled the seminal English rock musicians to inflect “pop music with the ideology of ‘rock’—on the one hand a new art form, on the other a new community.”
Whatever Elvis Presley [as a type of American rock musicians] was, he was not a bohemian. A bohemian is someone who enjoys slumming because it involves making a statement about the authenticity of the primitive. Elvis Presley and many of the early rock musicians from the U.S. simply were primitive.2
And this tradition is surely preserved by some today. But it is not so much whether rock musicians since the 1950s have intended consciously to commend the broadly Romantic worldview for public acceptance; rather, it the degree to which the Romantic sensibility is necessarily tied up in the genre. Myers dubs this the “rock myth,” which he defines as the idea “that rock would offer a form of spiritual deliverance by providing a superior form of knowledge, a form that was immediate rather than reflective, physical rather than mental, and emotional rather than volitional.”3 Is such a “myth” present in rock? Myers adduces the timeless wisdom of Supertramp’s “The Logical Song” in defense of the proposition:
When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful,
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical…
But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible,
Logical, responsible, practical.
And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable,
Clinical, intellectual, cynical.4
Now, this is only one song, but ask yourself: does the sentiment expressed in it not seem as naturally right to you as drawing your next breath? Or, if by God’s grace you find reason to question it, is this sensibility not at least utterly native to the idiom we call “rock?” If you answered yes to either question, then you have acknowledged the connection I am trying to make. If you answered no to both questions, think again. Rock music clearly commends the integrity of primitive experience over against refinement and rationality.
I suspect few will be inclined to disagree, but more might be inclined to wonder what is so bad about this state of affairs. After all, don’t we want people to have “heart knowledge” of the Gospel, not mere “head knowledge?” To answer this in the affirmative—and to affirm this bizarre “head/heart” anthropology—is to cede the life of the Church in large part to Romanic assumptions. To avoid taxing the reader’s patience any more than I have already, I will simply assert that Romanticism is no friend of Christianity, and leave it to its would-be defenders to show otherwise.
But how far am I willing to take this? Am I saying that the houseplant test was right after all, that backmasked lyrics are really present (and perniciously influential) on every heavy metal CD, and that Jack Chick was right about it all? Is it a sin against God to play anything like rock music in our churches? Our homes? Our cars? Ever? Clearly, no. 
Indeed, few of Myers’ points are even conclusively proven; his arguments are mostly tenuous inferences and tentative parallels between seemingly related ideas. We should not be cocksure about our conclusions here.
And even if he is right, this no more forbids our careful enjoyment and even creation of rock music than it does our diligent reading of Shelley or Keats. Surely we need not ask Lord Byron into our hearts in order to enjoy his poetry, or to listen to music that has inherited his legacy. Indeed, there is even a valid (if small) place in human cultural life for the engagement of the primitive. While things like sophistication, complexity, reason, refinement, and reflection likely bring us into the most reliable contact with the truth most of the time, there may be parts of the divine-human interaction that may be most faithfully accessed through the immediate and the emotional. I would not exclude these categories from our lives entirely.
Neither, however, would I consider the primitive and the immediate a prudent part of the starting lineup when it comes time to reform our ailing liturgy. I would encourage the defenders of contemporary worship to show that the Biblical witness would recommend them as such. I am, of course, skeptical that such an argument can succeed.
Myers has given no open-and-shut case against rock here (for that let us be thankful!) but he has still done something important: he has shown that rock music is at least problematic as an unexamined cultural idiom. And if this is the case, then it is much more problematic as an art form employed in corporate worship.
The association of rock with Romanticism—or even more, the embedding of a natively Romantic sensibility in rock—does significant harm to rock’s awkward stepson, contemporary worship music. It doesn’t render the genre totally useless to us, but it does suggest that it should not be among the first musical styles we think of when considering how to sing to God.
Stick a Fork In It, Then?
There may be other positive defenses of contemporary music besides these that I have considered here. All of them taken cumulatively may muster a modicum of validity for occasional use of the beleaguered form. I do not propose that we jettison it all merely because it has serious strikes against it. Still, the arguments in favor of it are insufficiently weighty to grant it the ubiquitous, unproblematic position it enjoys in evangelicalism today. It is troublesome music with surprisingly little to recommend it.
1Myers, 141.
2Myers, 135.
3Myers, 137.
4Myers, 149.
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- Posted by Tim on Sunday, September 11, 2005 at 2:08:19 pm PDT
- Category: Theology
- Comment RSS Feed
23 Responses to “The Defense of Contemporary Music”
Hmmmmm…..celebration in any other context….
when your kid has a birthday party, do you just say, “Oh, let’s pull the saltines out of the cupboard, see if there’s a half a bag of oreos around anywhere and pour out the 2%! We’re going to have a PARTY!”?
Or, do you plan, go to some expense, put in some time baking/buying a cake, arranging things just so, etc.?
It seems the “natural” (haha) human way to celebrate actually involves deliberation and labor. When I was back in a tradition that used all the good old classic “sacred music” (now to be found almost exclusively among Anglicans) by golly, by the time we were done rehearsing that Handel, we were ready to CELEBRATE! (N.B., that was about the only good thing about where I came from, so that’s not meant to posit a general superiority.)
That’s not to say celebration can never be spontaneous, but who really thinks they’re honoring their parents as well as they could if they throw an anniversary party based on what’s on the cupboard and inviting people they bump into on the street that day?
I suppose all that “proves” is that no one really believes that true celebration is more authentic, the more spontaneous it is.
Comment Permalink | Posted on September 12th, 2005 at 9:37 am |I would say that is quite right, pentamom. Important celebrations are always planned and intentional.
BTW, did you actually read this whole tedious thing? If so, you deserve some kind of honor as a Featured TimBerglund.com Reader or something. Send me a head shot, and I’ll put together a post for you.
Comment Permalink | Posted on September 12th, 2005 at 9:43 am |Don’t start allocating the image space yet. I haven’t actually read it through word for word yet, though I do intend to.
Something that further occurred to me about that dessicated old tradition that I referred to is that people might be inclined to respond, “See? All that Handel, and it didn’t do you a bit of good, did it?” (Leaving aside the point that it was the traditional liturgy and music composed by faithful dead guys that pointed me toward the gospel in the midst of the babblings I heard from the pulpit and the woeful lack of reflection of “living witness” a la Paul’s epistles among the people of the church…I’ll continue the other point…) It seems annoyingly convenient to locate the problem with 1970’s style mainline liberalism in traditional worship forms, and then smugly posit that because we’ve left behind the old music, we’ve left behind the errors of the churches that succumbed to the spirit of the (19th century German) age. And yet that is what happens — if I point out that the old music I grew up with is that which more fully embodies the spirit of Christian worship, I’ll immediately be reminded that it was “that music” that exists in all those “old, dead” churches. (The fact that “that music” sustained those churches for about 250 years before the rot set in, a record not yet equalled by modern evangelicals, is yet another one I will leave aside for the moment.)
Yet no one ever seems disturbed that many of the contemporary forms of worship are used by faithful and heretic alike. The execrations of soundly taught evangelicals for guys like Joel Osteen does not then lead them to locate the source of Osteen’s problem in a contemporary worship style — yet these same folks will quickly, yea even gleefully, locate the source of mainline rot in a traditional worship style.
I won’t ask what gives, because any answer I could come up with would be speculative and not reflect well on my evangelical brethren, but I will note the irony.
Comment Permalink | Posted on September 13th, 2005 at 8:00 am |Tim,
I’m happy to have found your blog via Moodle (Metaphysics class is finally posted there!)
This post was of great interest to me. I did read it in its entirety. I could barely get through the
the ” Blue Suede Shoes” book without throwing it accross the room a few times. It drove me nuts…
I’d love to dialogue more and understand your point of view.
To begin,
A definition of “Rock Music” ?
See you in class!
Comment Permalink | Posted on September 22nd, 2005 at 7:31 am |-Susan
Susan:
Welcome to TimBerglund.com! I was actually wondering where you stood on some of this stuff. I would have asked you eventually, but now it seems I don’t have to. That’s the nice thing about publishing bilious screeds on the InterWeb: it’s like printing your opinions on tee-shirts, only it still works when the weather gets cold.
I suspect there are few lukewarm reactions to Myers’ book. Mine was the opposite: I received it as one finds a long-lost twin brother (“You mean other people are like this too?”), and it truly revolutionized the way I think about popular culture. Or perhaps more to the point: it enabled me to think about popular culture, giving me an historical and ideological framework in which to put it. I heart Ken Myers.
But to your question, and our discussion: first let me issue the important disclaimer that, despite trying to playing one on the internet, I am neither a musician nor a musicologist of any reputable stripe. Also, I think it is to a certain degree fair to say that you know rock music when you see it, it being a truly ubiquitous cultural idiom of ours. But after all, I’m the one who brought up the topic, and I think a good definition will help the discussion go where it otherwise couldn’t. Let’s see if we can agree on one.
Wikipedia suggests something fairly benign: “Rock is a form of popular music, usually featuring vocals (often with vocal harmony), electric guitars, and a strong back beat…” Author Herb Bowie gives us a longer list of characteristics which does not excerpt well, but tellingly includes the idea of “liberation” as its second point:
Before I get all down on freedom, you might rightly point out that Christians are all about liberation! It is, after all, for freedom that Christ has set us free. But I suspect that the kind of “freedom” that Mr. Bowie is talking about borrows much more from Romantic (or other) categories than Biblical ones. Later he says “The theme of rock music…is liberation: release from constraints of every kind.” Now, this guy could be totally wrong about this, but you can at least be sure that he doesn’t carry water for me or Kenneth Myers. This is the voice of another commentator coming to a similar conclusion—only thinking it’s a good thing, instead of a bad (or at least troublesome) thing.
It occurs to me that both of the definitions I’ve given are empirical in nature, listing properties which are true of music we call “rock” without actually defining what rock is in its essence (if such can even be done—sounds like we should study metaphysics to find out). This may not be entirely satisfactory, but I think it is adequate for purposes of this discussion. At least it gives us criteria by which we might say, “This song is rock,” or “That song is very closely related to rock,” and it gives us ways of thinking about the purposes, sensibilities, and semantics of rock as distinct from other kinds of music.
Comment Permalink | Posted on September 22nd, 2005 at 1:37 pm |Hi again,
Thanks for this further clarification of what you are accepting as a definition of “rock music.” That helps me understand the premises from which you are forming your conclusions.
I have read further one in your posts. I dig what Paul had to say and I would “ditto” much, if not all, of what he has posted in the comments on “Form…”
Regarding your Ale, have you tried wine or meade? You might have better luck and no grain to offend the digestive tract of your beloved. Beer at Home has been very helpful to me with the specifics of making meade, and I made wine from the concord grapes that grew in my backyard of my house in Littleton (Now, sadly, sold. I am living in Boulder now).
I have been working hard preparing for leading worship at a retreat this weekend so don’t have much time to thoughtfully prepare something to post in answer to your writings here on “Contemporary music,” “Rock music,” and “Worship music.” But I will try to do so next week and hope to talk to you a bit either before class or during the break. You have said many curious things on your blog …
peace of Christ,
Comment Permalink | Posted on September 23rd, 2005 at 7:20 am |Susan
Susan:
Kari doesn’t like mead, but I am very, very close to getting started with wine. This will be a good thing. Say, I think Denver Seminary needs a Zymurgy Club…
Please let us continue this dicussion in person as time allows at school. Prepare well for your retreat this weekend!
Tim
P.S. And don’t forget to read your Suarez.
Comment Permalink | Posted on September 23rd, 2005 at 7:57 am |Hi Tim,
I’m finally getting a few moments to jot down some thoughts I had as I read your post here. I’ll just quickly work my way through and make a few hopefully provocative : ) comments on some things you’ve said. This in hopes of further discussion.
“… the pragmatism that too often leads church leaders across evangelicalism to pick music on the basis of what their parishioners like to hear.”
Good observation if you remember this cuts both ways. There are leaders out there (though we don’t hear about them much) who are sticking with hymns and pipe organ because their parishioners are threatening to stop tithing if a drum kit is brought into the church. There are churches that are changing from one style of music to another because they believe it will “grow the church.”
If these are the reasons church leaders pick one kind of music over another, there is something deeper here to be examined. Choice of music should not be about profitable end-results whether those results be financial (better tithes), numerical (bigger churches), or emotional (people feel good about the music).
“rock connects with its hearers on a visceral, rather than a cerebral level. Thus we are able to express our primal, celebrative worship urges more faithfully, unobstructed by the harsh constraints of the hated “head knowledge” and the lifeless, hypocritical layers of civilization foisted upon us by Luther, Wesley, Watts, and their Pharisaical cohort.”
This is not only a false dichotomy but it is in no ways a helpful argument if one is trying to defend only one style of music. Visceral responses are not exclusive to those who attend rock concerts. I have been to some quite viscerally affective concerts at Boettcher…as well as at Red Rocks. And I’ve interacted with many parishioners who viscerally defend their Wesley and Watts with as little critical thinking about it as the most avid Matt Redman fan.
“Uncle Cam” and language… “heart language,”
I don’t follow where this is going. Music NOT a heart language? I’ve never heard such a thing! Music is art. Even if poorly done; it reflects the heart of the artist as well as anything can. This is why musicians do what they do. It is expression.
Now having said that, it follows that the question to ask is,
“WHAT is this music saying?” Not, “CAN this music say what it is saying?” - -
If the music is saying something unfitting, by all means do not use it. But if it clearly communicates truth, don’t chuck it out because you speak French and the musician speaks Italian. “I Love You” might sound sexy to an American when it’s spoken in French, but it has every bit the same meaning when said in Italian or German. It would be false, for example, to conclude that because French sounds sexy to the American ear, it cannot communicate anything scientific. Its the ear, not the language, that needs to adjust.
“ When we speak of “our music” in America, we are not speaking of a grammatically significant bearer of semantic content, but of an entertainment preference.”
Your point here about demographic identity is a good one. But it does not logically follow that because the music of people groups identifies them, and that they know this, music loses its ability to have meaningful content. The semantic nature of music is indelible. Again, the question to ask is “What is it saying?” Those Christians who insist “their music” is the only suitable music for praising God are confusing musical preference with musical excellence.
“The claim that contemporary music is “more celebrative” or “more demonstrative” than traditional music is usually not articulated much more clearly than mere use of those two adjectives, or others like them. The idea is that contemporary music allows for a more authentic celebration of God’s work among his people, because it seems naturally to evoke more outward demonstrations of a joyful disposition.”
Baloney! Was King David dancing to a 5 piece band blasting out Chris Tomlin’s “Holy is the Lord” ? Did he need a Cathedral and a pipe organ? A Steinway Grand? Tabernacle Choir? It didn’t matter. And it shouldn’t to the church today, anywhere in the world.
I could hardly stand Meyer’s book. His “reasoning” drove me nuts. Take this for example:
Presupposition: A single form of music intrinsically promotes a single world view.
Romanticism = X.
Many “Rock ‘n Roll” songs have lyrics that = X (his “evidence,” the “Logical Song” by SuperTramp. But “ it’s all Rock and Roll to” Meyers.)
Therefore
“Rock ‘n Roll” promotes Romanticism.
Romanticism is no friend to Christianity.
Therefore
“Rock ‘n Roll” is no friend to Christianity.
Good grief. I don’t mind at all that someone might want to tackle the abundance of nonsense communicated in any song, any where. But please, think clearly!
“Rock music clearly commends the integrity of primitive experience over against refinement and rationality.”
Clearly? You have not given any “clear” rationale. You’ve quoted one author and appealed to how something “seems”. Subjectivity doth not equal clarity.
“We should not be cocksure about our conclusions here.”
Amen to that!
One final note. There are several “camps” when it comes to how worship is “done.” A very general divide is that there are those who see a worship service as a SERVICE. Thus, the “Liturgy” (from Greek leitourgiā, public service). The idea is that we have to approach God in the right way with the right rituals or else He won’t receive us. This is an OT paradigm. On the other side are those who see worship as a gathering of the faithful to meet with God, together as a large group (the ekklesia). This large group would be less concerned with what impresses God (forms, rituals, do this dont do that)than they would be concerned with what is going on in the hearts of those gathered. This would be more NT. Worship in spirit and in truth. If you remember that story of the Samaritan woman at the well, she was concerned with the outward details (the right place to worship and the right forms, expecting the Messiah to come and teach them about these things)Jesus did teach her…that it was not about place or performance but about spirit and truth. These are inward, not outward conditions.
Comment Permalink | Posted on September 29th, 2005 at 7:58 am |Susan:
Glad you’re fully in the game now. It is for discussions like this that the typical structure of blog comment systems breaks down something fierce—I need multiple threads!—but I think we should be able to keep the multiple topics straight here. Bear with me…
The question is not whether people have visceral reactions to music—this cannot be helped, and is not even a bad thing—but whether a particular kind of music is especially geared to the visceral over, say, the cerebral. I am trying to argue that musical forms can have these biases, and that forms which are good for use in worship should have those biases to the same degree that we would want them to obtain in the people in our congregations. Should our people be all about the gut feeling? Then let’s have our music reinforce that priority. Should there be some careful balance between the visceral and the cerebral, probably weighted strongly toward the cerebral? Then let’s choose music that mediates those sensibilities to people. My concern is not what people’s guts tell them about music, but what music tells them about how much they should listen to their gut. Whether rock is guilty as I charge is the real question.
What I am getting at here is that the term “heart language,” with its missiological import, is inappropriate to use to describe music. Yes, music is very intimate. It can, as one worship pastor put it, “wedge truth into the heart” in a way that propositions affirmed in a sermon might not be able to do as well. However, saying that pop-rock is my “heart language,” and bringing all that missiological weight to bear on the assertion that I cannot worship God authentically but with pop-rock music, is wrong. Music may be no less intimate than language (I don’t really know, and won’t attempt to argue either way), but personally preferred forms of music are certainly a lot more fungible than native languages. In mission (and especially in Bible translation), the actual “heart” language matters a lot, but the concept cannot be applied to whatever other cultural form we choose, Bilezekian and Hybels notwithstanding.
No discussion on worship is complete without nude dancing! I have been thinking of adopting this as normative for New Covenant worship, but I might have to find a new church home if I do. Which, I mean, that wouldn’t be without its advantages.
But seriously, there seems to be little question that David was doing something spontaneous and quite visceral in the process of celebrating God’s mighty saving acts, and furthermore, that the author of the account makes it clear that it should not be thought of as a bad thing. Ignoring the several complications with this case, might we merely say that the spontaneous and the passionate should have nonzero priority in our corporate lives, but maybe not quite so much priority as dominant cultural assumptions would have us believe? (Emphasis mine.
)
I’d go for that suggestion, not surprisingly. I am not trying to restore an extremely cerebral, dead, 18th-century orthodoxy to the church. I am trying to question an extremely anti-cerebral, 19th-century reaction against that milieu, and I would argue that the priority we place on rock music in worship reinforces the dysfunctional weighting we give to the two extremes.
And sadly, I really can’t dance anyway, which shortcoming I don’t think would be significantly rehabilitated by losing the linen ephod, if you know what I mean.
I think your summary of Myers’ (and my) argument is a bit unfair. Yes, he only quotes one song as a representative sample, but this is just one chapter in a relatively short book that is about much more than rock music. More examples would likely be forthcoming in a longer and more specific volume. Moreover, he traces rock’s connection to Romanticism not just through Supertramp lyrics, but also through the analysis of rock critics who view Romantic assumptions favorably, and through the historical connection in rock’s beginnings. This is not a flimsy case. And after all of that, he still doesn’t identify rock with Romanticism; he only claims that rock is heavily pregnant with Romantic sensibilities and associations. And even this we don’t claim is fatal to the rock project! It is merely a decent (not overwhelming), tenuously inferential (not deductive and valid) argument that there is some kind of trouble here. The form has some strikes against it. We should have another look at it. A better form would have a cleaner pedigree. Maybe rock doesn’t deserve the undisputed position it has in much of evangelicalism. (And personally, I’d take away the maybe.)
Let me introduce a terrible example, which will probably confuse matters even more than a naked King David: celebrating Halloween. In my house, the kids keep the common Halloween observances of dressing up in fun costumes and going trick-or-treating, and we are even so brash as to call this celebration by its common name. This, as you know, is currently unfashionable in much of evangelicalism (certainly in my center-right circles). We’re supposed to eschew “Halloween,” then replicate all its trappings in a superficially baptized party in the All Purpose Room at church on that night. I reject that approach, instead choosing to take on a part of the problematic holiday and to integrate it into my family’s life. But I can’t do this all that thoroughly; it’s not like Halloween has a rich historical tradition that I can mine for ever more rewarding layers of significance. I kind of have to skim off the top of the Halloween Tradition for what I can properly get away with, then leave the irredeemably bad stuff at the bottom of the barrel. It is the same with rock music: plenty of fine stuff to be had there (as my own listening habits would seem to indicate I believe), but it gets worse the harder you look at it. This shallowness disadvantages rock as a worship form.
Now if only Myers had quoted Rush lyrics, surely that would have sufficed you.
Finally, I am planning a future post to address, in some superficial way, the “Old Covenant” vs. “New Covenant” questions about worship. I realize whole books can be written on the topic, but that won’t stop me from posting 1500 words on it as if they matter. There are literally ones of people out there who read this blog. THEY NEED TO KNOW WHAT I THINK!
Comment Permalink | Posted on September 29th, 2005 at 1:19 pm |Indeed no discussion of worship would be complete without including King David. But that has AS little to do with making his choice of wardrobe normative worship- attire (there go all the anonymous letters complaining about those scantily-clad women on the worship team, eh? ) as it does making his choice of expressive demonstration of joy that particular day(dancing) or his choice of accompanying instrumentation (was there any?)the norm for all worship in the church thereafter. The point of bringing David into any discussion of worship is to hold him up as the consumate Psalmist. Jam on what makes David a model worshipper and composer. The music of his day would probably not be anything close to the kind of music that makes you feel comfortable. But that’s not what it’s about, Alfie.
There indeed have been many books written on worship. Which ones have you read thus far? I have a pretty good library. Let me know if you’d like to do some more reading before you post on “Old vs New Covenant” as pertains to worship.
A very enlightening project is to read an arry of books written on worship in the church, but make sure none is written in the same decade. Make sure you read some on music and its relationship to the great revivals throughout history.
Comment Permalink | Posted on September 30th, 2005 at 7:17 am |This is the new blog: http://www.xanga.com/ThezeIllusionz So excitied! I know you are….
Comment Permalink | Posted on October 3rd, 2005 at 9:19 pm |I read the entire post, Tim. You can find my headshot on my Web site.
Comment Permalink | Posted on October 5th, 2005 at 11:59 am |Interesting discussion! The strong association of Rock music with Romanticism seems thin and in any event irrelevant to me. It ignores Rock’s roots in the Blues tradition, and the roots of the Blues tradition in the Negro Spiritual tradition. You could say that Rock as a musical form has deeply Christian roots if you examine the spirituals to blues to rock progression. We could make similar commments about Rock’s relationship to Jazz. Of course, you could examine the Negro spiritual tradition’s roots in African music … and on and on.
We could do the same for the “great hymns,” which find their roots in choral music that originally represented a break from the Gregorian Chant, in folk music, and in old German drinking songs — and we could then conclude that modern Western hymns (those written from the 19th Century on, which is most of them) are inappropriate for worship because of their association with othe forms of music born of a non-Christian worldview.
And why stop at music? We could examine spoken language as well, and excise all words and phrases that have their roots in a non-Christian worldview. Unfortunately, we’d then have to invent our own language, since our existing Western languages derive from Pagan cultures.
How about this instead: human expression is always embedded in a broader culture, and the broader culture is always to some extent at odds with God’s law precisely because of its humanness and to some extent reflective of God’s creative nature reflected in His image-bearer and manifest through His common Grace; and one of the purposes of the Holy Spirit working in and through the Church is to redeem and transform all forms of human expression. The roots of any form of expression, musical, prose, or otherwise, are useful and interesting to understand, but neither disqualify nor render suspect any particular form that is employed in the life of the Church.
Comment Permalink | Posted on October 11th, 2005 at 2:23 pm |Tim, don’t know how to get a hold of you apart from posting a comment. Frankly, I’m just too lazy to look for your email address. Email me. And attach a beer if that’s possible.
Comment Permalink | Posted on November 3rd, 2005 at 11:21 pm |Would it be too greedy to publicly express a wish of seeing both you and Discoshaman actively blogging at the same time?
Comment Permalink | Posted on November 21st, 2005 at 11:40 am |Disclaimer in really large letters: This isn’t intended as a substantive argument against contemporary worship music.
But it just struck me in a blinding flash two minutes ago that it’s really, really hilariously ironic that the musical style that for two generations was defended to Christian parents with the assertion, “I don’t listen to the words, I just like the music” is now defended as a worship form (in some quarters) by “As long as the words are good, the music doesn’t matter.” LOL
[The honorable pentamom’s comment was written in response to another comment which has now been removed at the request of the author. Her comment was not originally the non-sequitur it may now seem. Pentamom rocks. –ed.]
Comment Permalink | Posted on December 7th, 2005 at 1:52 pm |Oh, uh, er, Mr. Ed, I didn’t mean it apropos to anything in particular, actually! It just struck me as part of the larger discussion of contemporary music in the church. If that makes it a non sequitur, you’ll have to see my sequitary about it.
BTW, when are you going to edit the title of this post for spelling?
Comment Permalink | Posted on December 9th, 2005 at 9:38 am |Wow I am so powerful.
Comment Permalink | Posted on December 12th, 2005 at 9:36 am |I know Susan but haven’t had the pleasure of meeting you, Tim.
But I enjoyed reading your exchange.
Interesting that the New Testament ended up in Greek, though it tells the story of a Savior and a peopel to whom he came whose “heart language” was (probably) Aramic and whose Scriptures, the ones that pointed to Him, were written in Hebrew. And, as Susan noted, the music that they set David’s psalms to in the Temple may not have seemed to us or Handel much like music. The great hymns that popel liek to hold up as a preferred mucical form were, at one time, the “new’ music that was wrecking the church. John Wesley and his songwriting brother Charles, were the “contemporary worship” proponents of their day, and were roundly criticzed for trying to bring “life” to the “dead” and quickly emptying pews of the liturgically blessed Church of England. The detractors called it “enthusiasm,” a primitve, physical resonse which circumvented the mind. This argument is as old as the church. Every generation takes it up as if it was the first to consider it. Then the musical forms and the languages change anyway, the Prayer Books are revised, the Bible goes through yet another translation into the “language of the people” and … we have revival! Perhaps its God’s way of saying its really okay to speak about God and to God in the language(s) — verbal and muscial — of the people?
I’d like also to mention that the “comtemporary” worship team of which I am a part now spends a geat deal of time in preparation, musically and in prayer. More time, in fact, than most of the choirs I sang with in back in the “old days.” (I’m 56.) I was a folk/rock/R ‘n’ B, Blues/fusion/jazz/soul fanatic in my ’20s and, when I became a Christian (in a center-right church) I walked away from my heart musical languages for many years, thinking it was “bad” because the form was associated with a life I had not lived well. I even spent 6 years in a liturgical church, where all they did was complain about how the priest didn’t get the liturgicalk form right. I didn’t need someone’s book to tell me that the form is not the content. Rock, Handel, liturgy and prayers in the original Hebrew can be worshipful, or not, depending on the hearts fo those who induge in those forms. The thing about a heart language is that it can only please God if it comes from the heart. It’s the hearts of the worshippers, not their languages or musical forms, that matter. Its the heart that validates the form, not the other way around.
Comment Permalink | Posted on December 17th, 2005 at 3:32 pm |Blowing the dust off this thing (yet again). For various reasons I really, really haven’t felt like engaging the worship arguments for a while. I apologize for not interacting in a timely manner with those who have posted thoughtful comments, and I now repent:
Dopderbeck:
Perhaps the association between Rock and Romanticism seems thin to you, but you don’t advance your argument much by broadening of the net to include the whole complex web of interconnections that obtain for every single cultural artifact that we produce or engage. (I will not say “consume” for obvious reasons.) The question is not what historical relationships we might possibly find lurking under some cultural rock, but whether a particular form is sufficiently influenced by an undesirable worldview as to render it suspect for a particular ecclesiological use. Just because people cuss in English doesn’t mean you can’t preach in it, but it might be the case that Rock music is sufficiently “about” the wrong things that it’s just a bad choice for worship music. That’s what I’m arguing, not that Christmas trees are off-limits because some pagan got a candle near an evergreen once.
Remember, like I said up above, my kids dress up in costumes and go trick-or-treating at Halloween. I’m all for an “embrace and extend” cultural mandate, but only with wisdom and very careful discernment. The case for Rock music in church has simply not been made.
Mike:
Thanks for your comments. Let me say one more time that I am not opposed to worship in the vernacular; in fact, I am opposed to requiring worship forms that are not vernacular. We must continually revisit music, liturgy, Bible translations, and even systematic theology for each generation. The proper rate of change in our ecclesiastical life is a worthy matter for discussion—I doubt it ought to match the breakneck pace of cultural change we live with in the postmodern world—but change itself is a bare fact of human existence, and ought not to be considered a problem. Hence your examples of the once-rejected radicals of years past do little to convince me that I today’s reactionary. (Indeed, the implication that I am a reactionary is ironic. I would suggest that yesterday’s reactionary is tomorrow’s radical. Ask yourself which role you fill today as a defender of contemporary worship.) In any case, the question isn’t whether people accused Wesley of ruining the church with his music; the question is whether he actually was. I believe you and I would agree that he was not.
And mind you, I don’t mean to say that no one can possibly offer God-pleasing worship through the medium of pop-rock contemporary worship songs. It is not as though God is somehow deeply impressed with the craft of Handel and Bach, whereas Sonic Flood is far below his standards. This would be like saying that God in the Old Covenant was physically hungry, and needed the meat and grain offered by his worshippers then. All of our works are deeply flawed before him, and none of our craft is truly impressive to him as it might be to us. I affirm that he is in fact pleased with the sincere worship offered by the soul who is in Christ, and who sings a lame contemporary worship chorus song to him. He is pleased with this offering because it is found in Christ, not because it is somehow pure in itself.
However, this does not imply that “the heart validates the form.” We still need to examine the choices we make in our cultic life together, and whether our current practice is the best we can do. We needn’t obsess over whether God is pleased with us, and whether we’re getting every last jot and tittle perfect. But we do need to be able to exegete our culture competently and examine the choices of cultural forms that we press into ecclesiastical service. If we do this honestly, we have to be prepared for the conclusion that some things are just going to be ill-suited for our use, even things we might otherwise love.
Pentamom:
Yes, it would be too much to ask for me and Disco to blog at the same time. Apparently it’s too much to ask for me to blog at all!
And yes, you are powerful. So very powerful.
Michael:
I need to add you to my Patient People Hall of Fame, then. But you didn’t tell me what you thought of the post! Most people don’t seem to like it. Leave a comment, and in a quarter of a year I might get back to you.
Comment Permalink | Posted on January 6th, 2006 at 12:27 pm |And I keep claiming I’m not comfortable with this type of blog comment format…and at the risk of being shunned (LOL You never know and I’m getting used to it)…interesting post, Tim. I was at another blog and saw you at the friend’s list there and thought I’d see what you were up to. Then I scrolled down to the first post that looked like it might not go zooming five miles above my head.
Although I admit my very quick scan probably resulted in hasty judgement that way. Also, as a writer of both CCM and hymnody I was drawn to the subject.
One thought that comes to mind is the odd reluctance of many to own up to the degree that form limits and even controls content. Some things really don’t work together. Try singing “A Mighty Fortress” to the tune of “In Moments Like These” and ask yourself what is gained and what is lost. And try the reverse too! Set aside the awkwardness due merely to metrical mismatch. “A miiiiighty fortress/Is our Go—-d/A bulwark ne-ever Faaaaail-ing…” and “In moments like the-ese I sing out a song/I sing out a love song to Je-e-esuuus” True, I may have to some extent picked extremes of majesty and insipidity, respectively. But I think it’s genuinely illustrative.
And I REALLY need to FINALLY read AGCABSuedeShoes! I think I know some folks from whom I can borrow it. I’m borrowing their computer at the moment. No, not the library (as is the usual case). Tho they might have it too.
I’ll post this at my blog for verification purposes. - Dennis
http://www.xanga.com/theironhare (
Comment Permalink | Posted on April 7th, 2006 at 1:20 pm |Dennis:
Nice to hear from you! Thanks for stopping by.
Yeah, that metaphysics papers were not exactly of general interest, but hey, I had to post something.
I appreciate your willingness to recognize the power of form over content. As you say, many will defend to the death either the frank non-reality of this relationship or at least its vacuity. Obviously, I realize the shrewd CCM partisan will see it as strategic ground that he or she would not willingly cede, but still. It’s pretty obviously true. Just give up, man. Let the chips fall where they may. Then repent, and all of that.
And yeah, you should read Myers. It’s a very good book.
Tim
Comment Permalink | Posted on April 10th, 2006 at 6:15 am |Tim:
Thanks for the warm welcome! I read the book and, while it was indeed good reading, it somewhat depressed me. A little bit like The White Horse Inn radio show used to depress me years ago as it made me discover the poverty of my pop Christianity background. But I kept listening through the anguish! Reading the book certainly was notably less painful tho. Made myself read it in one night (glad it was short!).
I’ll paste this at the same blog post as the previous installment.
- Dennis
Comment Permalink | Posted on April 13th, 2006 at 11:14 am |