“All I know is I get tired of having to learn all new songs every year.“,
Well at least all of the songs have only three chords, so they’re not hard to follow. And most of them have about four lines so they’re not so taxing on the memory. The lyrics don’t say much so the vagueness is a big plus; songs that are definitively Christian in some way could offend the non-christian members of the Church.
And faddish? Sure. The Emerging Church thing is a passing fad. But it’s a fad that comes around every generation or so. In the 1930s and 40s we just called them liberals. They weren’t big on the veracity of scripture or the resurrection and such but they were great on social action and after church potlucks. I’m really fine with both, I just don’t see why I can’t keep orthodox Christianity and reserve the right to a nice lunch.
The music is always deeper and more intense in the generations when the theology is taken seriously and this translates into a vigorous artistic expression. That’s why Luther’s generation produced Bach and ours produces ‘oh what a friend we have in Jeeezus’. It’s a tepid age; we are the dishwater of the historic Church. The theological blood that makes for that kind of creative muscle doesn’t flow in our veins. An emptiness of head is always accompanied by an emptiness of heart. True passion is always preceded by truth itself.
That’s why when well meaning Christians speak of going back to singing the old hymns, because of their magnificence and holy gravity, I understand the sentiment and why they think going backward is a good answer. But we can’t forget that hymns were new at the time of the Reformation, and it was the glory of the thinking that served the fires of creation. The Hymns are not good because they are old, unless they were bad when they were new. It’s not the years that create their dignity, it’s their dignity that secured their age. We still need to write new songs. Every generation keeping that Reformation ideal of speaking to each people the same sacred truths in the culture in which they exist.
Calvin’s Church was lambasted by Romanists for congregational singing of bubbly numbers they derogatorily called, “Genevan jigs”, while Luther wrote “A Mighty Fortress” to the tune of a pub song, for a pub going audience. Zwingli favored an entire chamber orchestra, and if you visit John Knox’s Church from his exile in Geneva they still worship by chamber orchestra in his honor. Presbyterians, for reasons I haven’t been able to fathom, chose the Organ, and revised all the Psalms into metrics and four bar stanzas for greater singability, all the music for which was new and ‘trendy’ for the time. If you revise all the Psalms for an aesthetic purpose you can’t really claim exclusive Psalmnody anymore, can you? They’re all hymns now. Gregorian chant has that certain otherworldy, sort of spooky, medieval appeal to it but as the definitive style of Christian musical expression, really… you’ve got to be joking. Sometimes it’s closer to the “Ommmm” of the Buddhists than the emotion raking, ranting, angst driven temptations of Davidic psalmnody. The songs of today, because of the self imposed limitations upon style, don’t have the strength for the level on content (or commitment) that the Scriptures seem to imply that a song used in formal worship of the living God, must be sturdy enough to carry. It’s not a lode that every song can bear. That doesn’t mean that songs can’t be simple; it means that can’t be trite. The sin of the Reformed is usually musical triteness and lyrical mastery; the sin of the broader Evangelicalism, its opposite.
A church’s music doesn’t need to sound like ‘my’ music, but it does somehow need to sound like God’s. If you can’t imaging the Angels singing it while hiding their faces from the Glory, best to skip it. It must speak of Him with Holy fear while not abandoning familial acquaintance. That’s why 70s lite rock love songs to Jesus have ruined the aesthetic of an entire generation. They weren’t good when they were about mating, how much less when about the Lord of Glory.
But if we lose sight of the sacred truths themselves, the form loses its context. Music has meaning only within a hermeneutic of Divine grace and the glory of God. How much more music for worship? All music doesn’t have to be about God, but all of it speaks of Him at least by implication, so all of it is holy in a sense and should be treated accordingly. Does this have implications for what we should and should not be listening to? Probably, but I try to avoid the obviousness of that one.
And so as we lose the understanding, we eventually lose everything. Beauty has its appeal in relation to the ultimately beautiful and apart from God all things are mediocre. What is mediocre is degrading to the human nature as that thing created in the image of God. Only what is beautiful should touch us, because we are His, and we should offer Him nothing but the best that is in us. He can’t expect us to make something that’s really good enough for Him, but that’s no excuse for lethargy and waste. Perfection is unachievable, and greatness is difficult, but avoiding embarrassment is a moral duty, and not too hard at all. We can at least do that.
Christopher Neiswonger
Neiswonger
Doug
Josh Hicks
Clay
