The Organ of Meaning

Those of you who follow my blog relatively closely know that I’ve been reading (for close to a year now) a book called Christianity’s Dangerous Idea which is an account of the history of the Protestant branch of the church history. As I have read, I have at times found it encouraging and at other times found it painting a bleak picture of the history of this movement and wonder how much of it is completely tainted by that effect that humans have on everything we do.

Tonight, I found it amusing.

I am reading the section where the author (Alister McGrath) is walking through some of the major developments of worship style in the different branches of the Protestant Church – specifically music. To fill in some gaps, my first real contact with music related to worship that I have any real recollection of was within the (Plymouth) Brethren assemblies – almost always hymns with no instrumental accompaniment (other than at summer camp where we sang choruses and “contemporary” praise songs set to keyboard); I still love to sing those hymns (but I prefer them with some instrumentation). Now, I attend a church that does full on rock-styled “praise & worship” in the services and I love that too.

Over the past decade or so, I have had numerous conversations with people from a lot of different denominational family backgrounds who hold an issue with “Christian rock” music. They seem to think that because rock essentially stems from music that is steeped in rebellion and closely associated with certain lifestyles that it is inherently tainted, which is where the humor comes in; apparently, when hymns first started to come on the scene of worship just a few years after Luther there were similar concerns.

A brief synopsis of how it went down… before the Reformation the Catholics didn’t sing a lot, they might read a Psalm and reflect on it (or, more correctly, have it read to them, in a language they probably didn’t know and reflect on their guilt for not knowing it). In the early stages of the Reformation different branches started to set some Psalms word-for-word to chant-style music while others paraphrased it to make it more singable. Johann Christian Bach actually played a significant role in this by writing songs known as cantatas that were relatively close in musical form to Opera… *gasp!*

Pietism emphasized musical simplicity and had no place for anything other than unadorned motets and musically simple hymns… in particular, Pietist were implacably opposed to the cantata, which they regarded as modeled after opera, the most secular of all secular models. For the Pietists, the cantata represented the secularization, even desecration, of sacred music.

Holy crap! This is the same argument that I’ve heard from modern day legalists and tradition-ist Christians. That they are “implacable opposed to ‘praise & worship’ music, which is modeled after rock-and-roll, the most secular of all secular models; it is a secularization and a desecration of sacred music!”

We’ve come so far.

This is why I am glad that the Epistle to the Hebrews (New Testament) says this:

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

He never prescribed what kind of musical worship we should use… neither did Paul other than the list of “Psalms [check], hymns [check] and spiritual songs [praise & worship - check].”

From Christianity’s Dangerous Idea p. 94

Calvin’s greatest contribution to the Protestant church is the ability he demonstrated to be able to be build a solid basis of theology on the Bible…

It’s crazy to me that it was any other way at other post-canonical period of time! This just betrays the success of Calvin’s main and foundational idea.

I need to read Calvin’s Institutes.

[1/11/08]