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

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

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 (

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.

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.

BTW, when are you going to edit the title of this post for spelling?

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.]