Recently the topic of contemporary worship has come up in real-life conversation a few times, so I thought I’d compile these posts I wrote a year and a half ago into one, easy-to-find place. After, why talk to friends when you can just give them a URL? Wait, don’t answer that.

Upon re-reading the posts I find some of the prose to be a bit overwrought at times, but then I have a tendency to do that when I’m excited. Apologies in advance.

People Seem To Like It: a facetious suggestion to use an online auction system to decide what kind of music to play in church. But hey, if we’re just trying to find out what people want, why not do it right?

Music Doesn’t Matter Much: except it does. This is a brief response to people who would defuse the music discussion debate by calling it unimportant.

Defining Some Terms: the terms “contemporary” and “traditional” are problematic, but we might as well stick with them for now.

Form, Not Content: a foundational argument in the music debate. If the kind of music matters as much as the words being sung, then contemporary worship music starts to look like a pretty bad idea.

The Defense of Contemporary Music: a critical look at a few arguments typically advanced in defense of contemporary worship music.

P.S. If the title of this post seems inflammatory, it’s not mean to be. It’s a play on a tradition in computer science literature.

Yesterday my family had the privilege of being publicly received into the membership of Skyview Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Highlands Ranch, CO. The children also received baptism, a game to which I could be accused of being a little bit late. (At your option you can read more on my extremely predictable conversion to paedobaptism. Also, for a limited time only, follow the riveting discussion of Presbyterian ecclesiology in the comments!)

Various grandmothers were in attendance. They had cameras and were not afraid to use them:

Both because I have not been blogging and because there are some things which one simply does not submit to Google for inclusion in the index, there is no linkable account of why this is such a big deal. But it is big. Big and good.

A few years ago I wrote that I was not really satisfied with anybody’s theology of baptism. The paedobaptists had a more cogent system, I thought—one that actually dealt with everybody in some orderly fashion, but was ultimately too inferential for me to jump on board. I left myself safely affirming the view most common among the people with whom I went to church. I was a fence-sitter, and changing views would have been expensive at the time, so I think I can be forgiven for not making a big change in theology. Besides, I’ve always thought that theological changes should be made slowly over time, like the way trees grow. Ever known anyone who was prone to grow theological weeds? It’s pretty bad for you.

It’s been three and a half years since I wrote that, and a few things have changed. Notably, I don’t go to a credobaptist church anymore: as of very recently, I am a member of the PCA. Now, far be it from me to suggest that I ought to change sacramentologies just because I’ve changed churches. Obviously the community in which I place myself has nothing to do with the truth or falsehood of any particular theological belief. What it does affect, though, is belief formation. If you’re a baptism fence-sitter hanging out with credobaptists, you’re much more likely to lean towards dunking teenagers and grown-ups. If instead you hang with paedobaptists, you’re more likely to want to sprinkle babies. To acknowledge that relationships and affections play a deep role in belief formation is to cede no ground to the postmodern epistemology. We might choose to lament that this is the case, wishing instead that everyone formed beliefs strictly on the basis of rational justification—and I would sympathize with such a lament—but in reality this is just not how people think. It is worth reminding ourselves that we are a lot more malleable than our best epistemologies might ask us to be, especially where the boundaries of knowledge get interesting and we have a hard time figuring out what is true. We would do well to remember this, and choose our company accordingly. Sometimes the beliefs in question are a lot more consequential than baptism.

But I didn’t decide to switch teams simply because I think Presbyterians are cool and like being in the majority in my local church. I actually did come up with a new way of looking at the arguments that I think adds something to the discussion. Before I explain it, let me give some background.

My problem had been that there is really a decent biblical argument to be made on both sides, as the baptism articles at Monergism.com can well attest. It never seemed to me that either side had a winning exegetical argument that could be made apart from significant theological assumptions. Baptists in particular like to deny this, usually thinking that they have the biblical upper hand, that they just Read The Bible without any prior assumptions about covenants or signs or families or individualism, and their valid credobaptistic conclusions just flow out the other end like so much purified baptismal water. I will not elaborate on this further, except to say that the conclusions we draw from the NT texts on baptism do depend rather sensitively on certain theological assumptions we bring to them, and none of these assumptions should assume a position of any particular privilege in advance of the discussion.

This seems an awkward position to be in with regard to such a fundamental doctrine of the faith. It poses no small apologetic burden for us to admit that Scripture is ultimately unclear on how we are to administer a sacrament that is agreed by all to be a key part of the life of the church. Maybe we could understand how we could end up arguing over lofty matters like the freedom of the will, but baptism? Can we look ourselves in the face and assert the perspicuity of Scripture while at the same time believing that the biblical evidence can go fundamentally different directions on this rather central little piece of theology? If a guy were honest, he might say no.

So how did we get here? Well, I have an idea.

In his book The Shape of Sola Scriptura, author Keith Mathison traces the development of the relationship between what we now call “Scripture” and “Tradition.” Mathison describes a continuum of possible Scripture/Tradition balances in which he locates contemporary Roman Catholics, contemporary evangelicals, and of course the Good and Right View which should be affirmed by all. He calls contemporary Rome “Tradition 2,” which elevates the authority of the church over, or at best alongside, Scripture. He calls the contemporary Evangelical view “Tradition 0,” which eliminates any authoritative interpretive tradition in favor of the authority of the individual reader. Tradition 1, which he commends to the reader as the best view to hold, strikes a more dynamic and, he argues, more ancient balance between the two.

Early in its life the church had access to very little NT Scripture, and instead functioned more or less under the direct authority of the Apostles. At this time, at least with regard to the direct teaching of the Gospel, there was no (or very little) “Scripture” to read, but only the oral message of the Apostolic kerygma. As the Apostles died and their inspired writings circulated, the church lost first-person access to the oral Apostolic teaching, but now had it in written form instead. Since the time of the Reformation we have painfully experienced a Church-rending dialectic between Scripture and Tradition, but early on there was no such tension. There was the orally transmitted kerygma as proclaimed by the Apostles, and there was the same thing written down in the growing collection of books believed to be Divine in origin. Mathison argues that this dynamic balance between Scripture and Tradition formed the hermeneutical context in which the church of the Fathers did its work, its leaders’ significant differences and broad diversity notwithstanding. Rather than pitting Scripture against Tradition, the “Tradition 1″ view would have us accept the ultimate authority of Scripture interpreted in light of the unbreakable tradition of the Apostolic kerygma. Rather than choosing Scripture or Tradition, this view would have us read Scripture within a lightweight but forceful Tradition.

How does this apply to baptism? Well, it can be argued fairly persuasively that infant baptism was the practice of the church starting somewhere between AD 200 and 250. Inferential arguments can be made from sources as much as a century earlier, but historical consensus does not firm up until the later date. After that there is no full-throated credobaptism in the church until the Radical Reformation in the early 1520s.¹ (Greg Johnson summarizes these arguments in his 1999 paper The Prevalence and Theology of Infant Baptism in the First Four Centuries, East and West. It is a tremendously helpful resource for understanding the basics of the historical argument. It is written with sympathy to paedobaptism.)¹ The credobaptist will of course seek to impugn these claims more and more strongly as the date gets earlier, and otherwise to argue that paedobaptism is a corrupt theological innovation when it finally does show up undeniably the sources, but the basic bookends of 200-250 and 1520 are in place without reasonable dispute.

It is the emergence (or re-emergence, if you please) of credobaptism in the hands of the Anabaptists that should first arouse our suspicions. Of course one need not be a radical Anabaptist to be a credobaptist—the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith is ample witness to this—but the “first” credobaptists inconveniently were Anabaptists. These were the innovators who first brought us Mathison’s “Tradition 0″ hermeneutic, in which all conceivable prior tradition or interpretive influence was shunned, often vigorously. To put it plainly: the first time credobaptism is positively known to thrive in church history, it does so in a hermeneutical context that is intentionally hostile to any kind of interpretive tradition—and one which will find few thoughtful sympathizers today.

Contrast this with the hermeneutic that Mathison argues was operative to some degree within the church of the Fathers. The Tradition 1 schema intentionally tries to harmonize its reading of Scripture with the unbroken (and early on in the Patristic period, orally transmitted) teaching of the Apostles. Now, the schema is not perfect for our purposes here: no advocate of Tradition 1 claims that the authoritative interpretive rule contains a commitment to paedobaptism, and neither do we claim that the rule was so expansive that it contained everything being taught by the Fathers at any time. It is a modest creedal standard by any measure. Still, the basic program of reading Scripture in the context of an unbroken tradition of some kind is instructive.

I began by claiming that the exegetical argument over baptism could reasonably be viewed as being at a standstill. I intend this as both a description of my own reasoning and as a conciliatory claim: it is not the case that either side in this debate has some slam-dunk Biblical argument to which the other side is just stubbornly and willfully blind. But if both positions actually do have decent Biblical arguments behind them, then we are obligated to look at the broader hermeneutical framework in which each position has thrived. If the Tradition 0 hermeneutic is to be rejected and Tradition 1 to be accepted in its place, then the historical argument in favor of paedobaptism gains quite a bit of currency. The recent history of credobaptism is obscured by the three centuries of good and decent Baptists behind us, but the observation nevertheless emerges that credobaptism only ever took root when planted in very suspicious hermeneutical soil indeed. While paedobaptism’s pedigree is hardly spotless—nothing Patristic is—it at least offers us the good chance of continuity with an unbroken Apostolic practice. Given a Biblical draw, the smart money is on baptizing babies.

These might be big “ifs,” and I doubt they’ll be persuasive to any committed credobaptists. However, if you’re an honest fence-sitter, I suspect you’ll feel the weight of the argument. And hanging out with Presbyterians won’t kill you either.

* * *

Postscript: One might point out that it’s awfully convenient for me to come to this decision after all of my children have professed faith. After all, what does one really need to accommodate oneself to in this situation? Pouring instead of immersion? Big deal! I will admit that I’d make a pretty poor celebrity convert on this account (notwithstanding my lack of celebrity), but in my defense I will say this: the plan for the ceremony in which we are received into our congregation requires that Kari and I take the membership oath, then have our children baptized, then have them take the oath. If you think about it, you’ll see that this is not a credobaptistic formula.

Am I a prig? Sure. But you know, if symbolic meaning doesn’t apply in church, where does it apply?

Another postscript: Parts of this post would be ever so much more useful if I had footnoted them. Sadly, that would require much more time than I have for blog-grade essays, so please just take this pots for what it is worth. If there is a claim that bothers you, let me know, and I’ll get you a source for it.

* * *

¹It is worth noting that there was a brief episode between about 330 AD and 365 AD in which infant baptisms—and, for that matter, convert baptisms—were often delayed until near the recipient’s death. This was due to a degenerate theology of baptism being embraced in some circles which held that sins committed after baptism might be harder to forgive than those committed beforehand. The practice was eventually abolished by fourth century thinkers who made appeals to the earlier practice of un-delayed infant baptism. This does not ultimately answer the question, but it is evidence that in the middle of the fourth century it was common to believe that infant baptism was the ancient and Apostolic practice.

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.

In the interminable evangelical debate over worship music, contemporary music often takes a beating for its insubstantial lyrics. Their faults are well-known: the words are highly repetitive. They are prosaic. They lack theological substance. When they do try to effect some substance, they traffic in abstract concepts, lacking any palpable metaphor by which we might sink our teeth into airy notions like salvation or lordship or transcendence. Too often they contain no content at all but incessant restatements either of the command that we now worship God, or the vehement indicative that we will (presumably very soon) worship him, and do it with an alacrity that we hope he will find very impressive. They are in this sense meta-worship songs, not worship music proper. They talk about worshipping without ever actually doing it.

This, of course, is shooting ducks in a pond. Beating on the lackluster lyrics of contemporary worship music is not sporting, not fun, and not worth much of our time.

And even if some bold poet came along and started writing poetically and theologically substantive lyrics to be sung as contemporary worship songs, I would still not necessarily be on board with the program. It would be an improvement, to be sure, and a crucial one: the content of the text is far and away the most semantically flexible and unambiguous component of a song, and for a creedal people, a song’s propositional message will naturally dominate, bringing text along with it. However, in all our obsession over content, form gets lost in the shuffle. I want to give it equal time.

A cultural form is a kind or type of cultural artifact, a general class of things produced by human beings as they go about the business of their religious, social, political, commercial, educational, aesthetic, family lives. Forms can be distinguished from one another by appealing to some kind of internal structure or set of characteristics of the form. A form describes a certain cultural practice, work product, or manner of cultural interaction. It need not describe a physical object like a painting or a piece of angle iron, but it may involve something more abstract, like a song or a handshake. A form is not a specific instance of cultural output (like a particular handshake between two actual people at a certain time), but a category into which many individual artifacts can be placed (like a social greeting ritual).

For example, nearly all people speak, but not all speech is of the same kind. Sermons are in some sense all alike, and lectures to disobedient children all sound something like one another, but sermons are not the same as dressings-down of busted kids (notwithstanding the amusement pastors may find at the comparison). Likewise, gossip whispered to friends tends to follow patterns that differ from those of political stump speeches. Each of these four instances of speech takes a particular form.

Or consider an artifact of high culture, like poetry. Poems come in many different forms, each characterized by attributes like meter and rhyme scheme. Some poetic forms, like the Petrarchan Sonnet, are highly structured and exacting in their requirements. Others, like free verse, are very open and seemingly opposed to structure—but still are characterized by the decisions they impose on the attributes of a poem. Even if a poet wishes to reject all known forms and invent an entirely new one, it will be conspicuous by its departure from known kinds of poetry. In the end, no matter how hard a poet tries to avoid it, each individual poem has no choice but to belong to some form.

Poetic or otherwise, forms exist, and their existence confers on human culture the charism of rationality. This gifting is caused by the fact that forms both carry and shape the semantic content (or “meaning”) of the artifacts belonging to them. More importantly, it often has the effect of rendering forms unable to be interchanged.

Since this is difficult material, let us consider some more examples. Of all possible musical forms (minuet, girl-pop song, cakewalk, rock ballad, etc.), dirges are never played at weddings. Of all possible forms of composition (sonnet, sermon, editorial, shaggy dog story, etc.), limerick is never used to deliver a eulogy. Do weddings eschew dirges merely because no one has died? Couldn’t some enterprising Goth couple write their own lyrics of love and optimism to be played to the music that has all the characteristics of “dirge,” thereby avoiding the impositions of the form? Do eulogies avoid limericks because the rhyme scheme is overly burdensome? If a clever family member used that meter and rhyme scheme to pay textually somber respects to the departed, remembering all that was noble and good about the one who has passed, wouldn’t the family have put off the cold shackles of form which I claim to be so indefeasible?

No, no, no. And no.

What these enterprising artists have done is to create irrational cultural artifacts; they have not transcended the dictates of the forms they have adopted. The rhythm, melody, and chord progression of the dirge (and any other attributes experts might care to point out—I am no musician) make it sound sad. The semantic content “sadness” is embedded in the music itself, and the text accompanied by the music will be interpreted by its hearers in a context of sorrow. Likewise, the musical lilt of the limerick lends itself to flippancy. Lightheartedness is communicated by the poem’s meter, totally apart from the words themselves—words which will inevitably be shaded by the form’s natural sense of trivial mirth.

Grafting joy onto sadness and solemnity onto banality might possibly have some use as an ironic device, but this would only succeed inasmuch as the form survives the union intact. (And seldom is irony our goal when celebrating a marriage or paying final respects to a loved one.) Any attempt to push aside the form’s semantic content in favor of the raw, unfiltered meaning of the text cannot succeed. Dirges are still sad, and limericks are still silly little poems.

It is at this point that my globally-minded interlocutor (who is otherwise feeling the heat) usually objects that these are only cultural associations which I am habituated to make; they are not universal attributes derived from some Platonic Dirge or Limerick floating abstractly in heaven. I only think dirges sound sad because I am used to that kind of music being played when someone has died, accompanied by words of mourning. I only think limericks address vulgar trivialities because the overwhelming majority of limericks are about the man from Madras, or one of his close cousins. The Noble Savage in Africa, untouched by Western Civilization, doesn’t know any of this, so he is free to pick and choose. And since he is unbound by our forms, surely we savvy postmoderns are also free to recast received forms to our heart’s content, happily playing with the shattered pieces of our civilization in order to make something more functional or more amusing than our Modernist parents’ constricting limits would have allowed.

I consider it to be an interesting question whether, say, a piece of music can have a universal effect on human beings, or whether we are born as cultural blank slates, ready to be programmed with knowledge of what to think and how to feel when we hear certain sounds. It might be that the Innocent Native thinks of an angry Sky God when he hears Night On Bald Mountain, rather than just wondering what these strange sounds are coming from the white man’s magic box. It should be clear that I suspect that the former is the case, but I don’t know for sure. And it doesn’t matter. Whether the semantic content of forms is universal or contextual or somewhere in between, the fact remains that we receive our forms within our cultural context. Even if you insist that their content is arbitrary and constructed, we are still faced with the problem of that content. It isn’t going away.

If you haven’t guessed already what this has to do with worship music, I’d better tell you before you quit reading.

All of this talk about form directly addresses the common refrain that God can be honored with an electric guitar and a fuzz box (or something else contemporary) just as well as with Bach and a pipe organ (or something else traditional). Now, I have said nothing to disprove this statement by itself, but I hope to have done serious damage to the statement that usually follows: that God can be honored with any kind of music at all, because musical style doesn’t matter. Of course musical style matters! This is not some indifferent choice made for bare, pragmatic reasons. The choice of musical form carries enormous semantic weight and profoundly shapes the meaning of worship music’s supporting texts. Any proposed form (Bluegrass, Grunge, camp meeting hymnody, etc.) must answer for the claims it makes on what kind of subject matter it addresses; how its singers should relate to that subject matter, to each other, and to the rest of the world; and what kind of occasion it is supposed to accompany.

If adult contemporary pop is to be our music form of choice when we sing to God, then we must be able to show that it excels on all these fronts. We cannot choose it because we like it, or because we believe it will increase attendance in our churches. Instead, we must show that it expects its subject matter is nothing less than the supreme object of value in the universe. It must be addressable to a Deity who is both intimately personal and terrifyingly other. It must be able to encompass the joyful celebration of God’s deliverance of his people as well as their careful reverence and awe before the one who is a consuming fire. It must move us from the vulgar routines our lives into a place where we do not dictate the terms of our own comfort, but instead are brought graciously to kneel before a Throne which will not much longer await the prostration of every human soul.

As much as any music can, it must be music whose character matches God’s character. Can contemporary music do this well? It takes a very well-educated person to answer this question, one who is trained in music, theology, literature, and broad intellectual history. Clearly, I am not he.

But I think you know what I suspect the answer to be.

In these occasional posts on the topic of worship, I am throwing a few loaded words around with relative abandon. Before I continue, I’d like to apologize and explain.

First of all, the terms “contemporary” and “traditional” are terrible ways of describing the two (or more) poles which define the present worship controversy. After all, “contemporary” really just means “recent;” it doesn’t address anything about musical genre, lyrical content, cultural interaction, or theological disposition. And “traditional” means only “received from the past,” which has little (but not nothing) to do with why we might accept or reject a piece of music for ecclesiastical use.

We might as well call the two camps “blue” and “red” or “up” and “down” or “Punch” and “Judy.” Any labels would do, and at least then the semantic baggage of the chosen labels wouldn’t confuse matters as it does with the terms I’m using. Nevertheless, I’m going to stick with these troubled adjectives. What I actually mean by them—as opposed to what the words themselves mean in everyday usage—will hopefully become clear by the time I’m done. Think of them as jargon: special-purpose words created to refer to concepts unique to this discussion.

Next is my very intentional use of the phrase “worship music” over the simpler and more common term, “worship.” While a theology of Worship qua Worship is a very important part of the discussion, I am focusing not on Worship Generally but on worship music in particular. Too often evangelicals mistake mere singing for worship; or, in particularly severe cases, watching people on the stage sing; or in the utterly decadent case, watching words bounce on a video screen while our minds are anesthetized by idyllic images. There is a hierarchy of iniquity here, which at no level is coextensive with “worship.” Forgetting for now the sense in which all of a believer’s life should be lived out with doxological intent (that is a separate and much harder topic) and concentrating only on our Lord’s Day gatherings-together, I would insist that worship involves not just singing, but also (at least) the Sacraments, the ministry of the Word, prayer, the public reading of Scripture, and giving. Whether we believe this and how we look at the other putative elements of worship will likely have a strong effect on how we look at worship music, but regardless, worship music is the primary area of my concern for now. I am not arguing for an Augustinian Sacramentology, or against topical preaching, or in support of the burgeoning ESV Only movement, or against the 10% tithe. For the time being, I am worried about music, so I will say worship music. We can talk about the rest of worship some other time.

As I famously said in my last post, evangelicals like to fight about what we loosely call “ecclesiastical music.” Every so often an earnest soul attempts to rise above the fray, pointing out that all of this acrimony is really unbecoming of Christ followers. Sometimes this is a legitimate exhortation, and the concerned party is right to remind us that we ought to be willing in humility to consider others better than ourselves. Other times, it is a dismissive canard intoned with no small amount of sanctimony, and is often closely coupled to an agenda of its own. In either case, the core of the assertion is that we shouldn’t get so upset about this stuff; after all, if our hearts are in the right place, will we be so concerned if “our music” is played or not? Does it really matter so much, as I have been asked, as long as God is worshipped?

This argument is, of course, self-defeating. If music doesn’t matter, then stop arguing with me and let me do what I want. I mean, you said it’s not important, right?

No one is likely to agree to these terms. Let us try to find others.

Pretend for a moment that musical genre is totally insignificant, and (following the concerns of ecclesiastical music) God is equally pleased will all forms of music used in worship, period. What kind of potential does this leave music as a means of communication? Very little. And what room does this leave for the musician qua artist? None. Musicians are reduced to mere instrument technicians, leaning how to breathe and move their fingers in such a way as to produce the right sounds. They cannot “play from the heart,” for the conduit into which they would pour their hearts cannot accommodate its passions. Ecclesiastical musicians cannot claim to be doing anything very different in church on Sunday morning than they might do in a bar on a Friday night (one which serves light beer and reeks of cheap cigars). The Gospel simply cannot fit in their music in any sense whatever. Music, in this dubious scheme, can’t hold content like that. Containers have shape and volume, and the music we would seek has neither.

Now, maybe no one is arguing that all musical genres are on equal footing. Maybe there are some outliers, like rap music and that weird atonal stuff your one friend did in grad school, that are beyond the pale. Maybe those are bad, but adult contemporary pop is all good, all the time. But if you grant me that, then the argument has already moved onto my turf. Now we are arguing what kinds of music are appropriate for what purposes, which is precisely what I want to argue—and precisely where I think contemporary Christian music will fall flat as a liturgical device. But there are more posts to go, and I am getting ahead of myself.

Apparently music matters. We want it to matter. We should be glad as God’s image-bearers that it matters to us. It is good that we are willing to expend significant amounts of energy commending, implementing, and re-implementing our views on the topic. Contrary to what some outsiders might conclude, we don’t enjoy bickering for the sake of bickering. We are a people deeply concerned about things like piety, truth, and mission. If music is at all wrapped up in these things, then it is, to put it bluntly, most certainly worth fighting over. So let us examine how it is we are prosecuting these Wars that we read so much about.

Hopefully you have someone in your life who believes very different things about ecclesiastical music than you do. If you can have a civil discussion with this person, and you’ve never had just this discussion before, ask that person why it matters to them that music is so darned Cool or so darned Old. Rather than attempt to respond to everything your friend says point-by-point, pay attention to the categories he is invoking. Let me guess some things you might hear:

“Contemporary music is so much more celebrative than traditional music.”

“I feel more worshipful when I’m singing hymns/choruses.” (pick one)

“Traditional music is stifling! I feel like I’m attending a Mass.”

“We should sing traditional church music, like Fanny Crosby and the Gaithers.”

“Young people will leave the church after they graduate high school if we don’t play their music for them.”

“God can be honored with an electric guitar and a fuzz box just as well as with Bach and a pipe organ. Musical style doesn’t matter.”

“Adult contemporary pop is my heart language.”

Any of this sound familiar? It does to me, because I’ve heard it all in one form or another. In the coming weeks, I hope to provide a means to inform the discussion of the songs we sing when we are gathered. This stuff is worth fighting about. Let’s fight well.

Here’s the final version of the draft I posted last week. I’ve posted it as a PDF, as it has 41 footnotes, and I don’t yet have a convenient means of translating Word footnotes to cross-browser HTML.

Again, we kick the title Puritan-style. Why? Because it’s more fun, that’s why.

Being A Brief Treatise on the Most Glorious Doctrine of Divine Providence, With Due Consideration Given to the Stark Contrast Between the So-Called Relational Theism of John Sanders and the Reformed, Orthodox, and Apostolic Teaching of Bruce Ware, With Most Careful and Earnest Exposition on the Implications of these Weighty Matters in the Life of the Covenant People of God

Back with more cheap (but fun) blogging. Here are a few more in the “I do not think it means what you think it means” category.

Dioecism, a plutonian philosophy, illustrates Christ as all divine only appearing as human…Aryanism views Christ as partly human and partly divine.

Let me try to paraphrase this rather complicated sentiment: “The dominant worldview of the Hellenistic netherworld—Pluto’s kingdom of dead souls—finds its roots in the notion that a given plant species has its male and female reproductive organs in separate plants. This, of course, leads one directly to the conclusion that Christ’s humanity was merely an illusion…In a similar vein, invaders of the Indus valley in the third millennium B.C. [unclear here: the writer could be employing a less technical use of the word and refer rather to Nazi usage wherein ‘Aryan’ assumes racist overtones. This could would significantly alter one’s understanding of this statement, and scholarly opinion remains mixed] looked ahead to a later Hebraic personage and preemptively broke with the Chalcedonian and Constantinian formulations.”

Jim Elliot, an infamous American missionary to the Auca Indians in South America, recorded these words.

Infamous?

Ah! Infamous is when you’re more than famous! This missionary Jim Elliot is not just famous, he’s IN-famous! Turns out that old Ms. Elizabeth hasn’t been telling us the whole story, now has she? Ol’ Jimmy could evidently whoop it up pretty good there in the rainforest.

I see the body, soul, and spirit as a triadic structure and not didactic.

It baffles me that some people see theology as a cold, logic-bound enterprise. Such individuals clearly don’t see the musical implications in human constitution. Let us be very clear on this point! Human beings are not simple monotones or complicated, angst-ridden 7th’s! And heaven knows we are NOT, in our very makeup, morally instructive.

Is election corporal?

Yes. Yes it is, actually.

Next time: new vistas in theology through typos!

Adeodatus

TH-501 has two major papers, which together comprise 45% of the grade. The paper of our interest tonight is the Theological Synopses, in which the student is directed to compare and contrast the views of three systematic theologians on the six major points of doctrine covered in the class: theology proper, creation/anthropology, God’s relation to creation (Providence, immanence, transcendence, etc.), revelation, scripture, and anthropology/hamartiology. (The topics in the paper do not all line up neatly with the major headings in the class. Just work with me here.) The paper is supposed to list and briefly comment on the relevant scriptures, summarize the view of each systematician, and present the author’s own theology, all in five paragraphs flat.

I chose to compare the works of Raymond Dunning (because I used to be a Nazarene), Stanley Grenz (because I wanted to see if he really was as crazy a pomo guy as his less favorable quotes make him sound), and Louis Berkhof (because I wanted a burly Reformed author in there to be right about some things).

This post contains only the synopsis of the theologies proper; the rest of the paper is due at the end of April. The text is the result of 300 pages of reading, and was supposed to fit in about 500 words. As always, brevity is at a premium. Enjoy/endure.
Read the rest of this entry »

If you read professional columnists with any regularity, you can pick up when they are about to leave on vacation or are spending most of their time repainting the rumpus room. There are a few tricks, you see, for knocking out this week’s column with minimum effort, and if you play your cards right, you will even have fodder to meet at least two more deadlines in the near future. First trick: write a “controversial column” where you skewer (either ruthlessly or apologetically) a touchy subject. Personal religious convictions are great for this, but only where they are at odds with your tradition’s leadership (”I am a committed Catholic, but I just can’t in good conscience give up my pro-condom, pro-abortion convictions”). This is guaranteed to generate plenty of e-mails and phone calls which will be quoted at length in future columns.

Another trick: quote egregious sources and briefly comment on them with an air of feigned disbelief or haughty disdain. This requires little creativity or ingenuity, and it is bound to put the writer in a good light. It is precisely to this gimmick that I now capitulate, and present to you the following.

In light of Tim’s present theological enterprises, I submit to you the following theological quotations. They have been gleaned from various teaching and grading duties and are submitted for your reading pleasure.

Part I: “I do not think it means what you think it means.”

God has chosen to reveal himself to us mainly through his Word, which we call general revelation. It is a revelation to all people.

Yessir. All people�who can read�or who have heard said Word rightly preached in their tongue. That’s pretty much ‘all people’. Maybe we should have a category for “Master Sergeant Revelation”, to bust open this artificial distinction between the officer’s revelation and the Word to the enlisted men.

Augustine taught that God knows all things that includes all future events. God can use his foreknowledge to know, and elect those who will have faith.

This would be the lesser-known, Arminian Augustine, a 17th century graduate of the Sorbonne Academy of Theology and Applied Pastor Studies. His surname also caused confusion: “of Hypo.” (History is unclear whether he was indeed diabetic and required insulin shots as documented in his rough autobiography, or if he obtained a false prescription for hypodermic needles from a distant uncle and suffered from daily injections of low-grade smack, which is suggested by the prolific amount and sketchy nature of his writings.)

A prophet or great man or woman of God was revered because God chose to speak to his people through them. For example, Balaam says, “But can I say just anything? I must speak only what God puts in my mouth.”

Maybe not the BEST example of a godly, revered prophet? In a related theological category, a great ass was revered because God chose to speak to his people through it. This made livestock auctions a bit more interesting in the ancient world, before modernism choked out the even the possibility of chatty, spiritually concerned asses. Thankfully, many have begun to question contemporary evangelicalism’s wholesale kowtowing to modernism, and again we are seeing livestock reintroduced into “spiritual community encounters” as young, progressive, spiritually open people bring livestock back into their worship experiences.

In both the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic tradition, creation is the object of our faith.

We suspected it all along, now didn’t we? All those fancy hats and robes barely mask those pagan underpinnings. Dan Brown’s Da Vinci is proved oh-so-very right yet again.

In Jude 4, Paul indicates that some people were “designated for this condemnation.”

Scholars are divided on this point. Did Paul of Tarsus just use “Jude” as a pen-name to avoid the notorious Bithynian paparazzi, or was this “Jude” simply a generic title for a sub-group of the Pauline school? We do know for certain that this short epistle shows evidence of serious redaction; for instance at least one early manuscript contains the addendum “the minute you let these underneath your skin, then you begin to make it better. [better..better�better. Nah. Nah. Nah. NahNaNahNaaaaaa]” at the end of verse 16.

More to come. Much, much more.

Adeodatus