Reforming Worship Music

This past August, I spent fifteen consecutive hours collecting ballots at a polling station. Along with me, there was a co-worker who had recently retired from a long teaching career at one of the larger schools in the California State University system. He had taught cognitive psychology and personality theory. In the slow moments of balloting–of which there were many–I tried to discover as much as I could about him and his teaching career. At one point, he lamented that he had watched a long and steady decline in the ability of students to think objectively, that he had been forced to abandon the most stimulating parts of the curriculum towards the end because it was just beyond the students' powers. I asked, of course, to what he attributed this demise. There was no hesitation in the answer: "The ascendancy of music."

Allen Bloom said:

Though students do not have books, they most emphatically do have music. Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music. Today, a very large proportion of young people between the ages of ten and twenty live for music. It is their passion; nothing else excites them as it does; they cannot take seriously anything alien to music. When they are in school and with their families, they are longing to plug themselves back into their music. (1)

Of course, Bloom is not talking about classical music. It is popular music that he has in mind. And popular music has had this sort of power since the sixties. Who could have anticipated the force of recording, playback, and transmission devices?

Within the Christian subculture, we have the same megashift from books to music. Indeed, contemporary Christian music is nothing more than popular culture for Christians. And this shift to the primacy of popular music should concern us, if for no other reason than that one of history's most extravagant heresies flourished under just such a condition. Thucydides said: "The thing that hath been is that which shall be." And our depravity is such that we should consider ourselves vulnerable to the same heretical yeast as that of the past.

Arius (c. AD 250, 336) maintained that "if the Father was God, then the Son was a creature of the Father." The Council of Alexandria (AD 321) condemned this assertion, burned Arius's writings, and banned him to Yugoslavia. No doubt they considered that orthodoxy had won the day. Wrong! On the fringes of the Roman Empire, Arius spent his time composing songs that could be sung by boys and girls, shopkeepers, longshoremen, and sailors, in short, people of all classes. (2) They were sea chanties and marching tunes. We would call them "choruses" or "praise songs." Their chief feature was that they were simple and singable.

We too live an ethos where simple is good, complex is bad. I think this has more to do with eastern religion or a back-to-nature spirit than it does with any biblical notion. We shrivel at the arcane nature of Wesley's words, "in vain the first-born seraph tries to plumb the depths of love divine." We hold our noses at the ornateness of Bach's music. In so doing, we expose ourselves to anyone who can make words rhyme and learn a handful of guitar chords. Today, there are many heresies and schisms waiting to burst into full bloom. Do we want to roll out the red carpet for them by tacit endorsement of populist tools?

On the face of it, this seems a bit mean-spirited. After all, doesn't the very essence of "congregational singing" encourage any and every sort of participation? Shouldn't we rejoice that our brothers and sisters are gaining even the humblest of musical skills and then using them to God's glory in corporate worship? Of course, we must be quick to commend all genuine efforts to glorify God.

The problem lies not in the humbleness of the means but rather in the pride of simplicity. "Simple" is not bad. However when "simple" is a virtue placed in rank above "biblical," then we are in trouble. What if simple means will not satisfy what we must textually accomplish? In that case, we have abrogated our responsibility to "teach and admonish one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs" merely by omission. When "simple" is a virtue placed in rank above "biblical," it is not long before we are writing a different gospel on the tablets of our hearts. After all, music is very powerful.

We are more likely to find ourselves humming the songs of this past Sunday than contemplating what the pastor said. The more a person is inclined to subjective thinking, the stronger music's influence will be on that person. As a culture, we are progressively devaluing objective reasoning while giving subjectivity higher and higher priority. This is well-documented in Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, Colson's Against the Night, (3) C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, and Bellah's Habits of the Heart. Kenneth A. Myers' All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes demonstrates the momentum of cultural relativism among us, even in the church.

During the new age, music may communicate more than preaching. As reformed believers, this specter should be sobering. We must meet the new age with music, not music that strengthens the hand of the new age, but rather with music that challenges it head-on.

Our [PCA] Book of Church Order, 53-6, says: "No person should be invited to preach in any of the churches under our care without the consent of the Session." And yet, we sing music in our congregations all the time without even a clue as to who the author of the text is and what his or her intent in the text might be.

"It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" is by Edmund Sears, a Unitarian. A careful reading of the text will yield the surprising evidence that references to God and Christ, are, at best, oblique. And what about the phrase, "from angels bending near the earth to touch their harps of gold"? Well, we would be livid with rage if our children came home from Sunday school with a story that Jonathan gave David a magic shield. And yet, can we characterize Sears' treatment of Holy Scripture as any less fanciful? Knowing that Sears was a Unitarian, what might we suspect would be his objectives in the text of "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear"?

When we come to contemporary Christian music, the literature is rife with inaccurate handling of Holy Scripture. Even more subtle is the pervasive neglect of a full-orbed treatment of God's attributes; for example, John Wimber's "Jesus, Sweet Jesus". Unlike the example of Edmund Sears, I do not believe that most writers of contemporary Christian music are devious. Still, by its very presence, something is often inculcated or "preached" that, as Reformed believers, we should resist. And we should resist it not with a frowning censure but with better music and better texts.

I am not advocating that we expunge all contemporary Christian music. The Council of Laodicea (AD 367) tried to do just such a thing in response to Arian choruses. The result was an end to congregational singing until the Reformation. However, we must closely scrutinize contemporary Christian music. As we do this, we often violate the chief feature and goal of contemporary Christian music, that is, to feel good. But as we find we are feeling good about something that is not biblical, then we must confess the rebellion of our emotions and then repent of it. Some contemporary Christian music will withstand the scrutiny. May God be praised! We should embrace this music.