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].”

How is it that the Bible seems to claim this? Don’t get me wrong, I really do believe in the Bible as the Word of God.

Spurgeon writes this morning:

Be wise and attend to the obeying, and let Christ manage the providing. Come and survey your Father’s storehouse, and ask whether he will let you starve while he has laid up so great an abundance in his garner? Look at his heart of mercy; see if that can ever prove unkind! Look at his inscrutable wisdom; see if that will ever be at fault. Above all, look up to Jesus Christ your Intercessor, and ask yourself, while he pleads, can your Father deal ungraciously with you? If he remembers even sparrows, will he forget one of the least of his poor children? “Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he will sustain thee. He will never suffer the righteous to be moved.”

Right. But, someone in Ethiopia in the 80s or someone else in the course of history must have been a devout follower of the Living God and still starved to death.

I do understand that these passages, the ones that can be “proven” wrong in some specific cases are not being said in a sense that it’s an unbreakable rule and way of God’s ruling of earth. It is, perhaps, the proverbial exception that proves the rule. Perhaps.

One of the things that I’ve been pondering recently is the threads of the Western Protestant tradition that, while on the whole good, are not part of the Church Universal. The main one being the assumption that the Bible is a book to be read and understood on a one-by-one personal level; really this is a generally new (renewed?) understanding to the Scriptures. I can’t help but accept that for most of history the peoples who have followed the God of Abraham, Issac, Jacob and Jesus have not had personal copies of the Scriptures to read and study in a personal way – they were read on the weekend at the Temple, Synagogue or Ecclesia.

While there is no question in my mind that much, if not all, of the Christian Bible has a personal application and message, it seems doubtful to me that that is the exclusive (or even the primary) audience. Deuteronomy was read to all of the Hebrews before the entered the promised land. Josiah read the Book of the Law to all of Jerusalem when it was recovered. Nehemiah read the Law before all of the people when they were dedicating the city again. The Epistles were mostly written to communities of Christians, with a very small portion written to individual people. The primary application and intention of much of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures seems to be to the community of the followers of God at large, with the individual application to follow close behind.

I guess that individual interpretation can’t be removed from the equation though. It seems dangerous to me to leave it exclusively up to the institution of the Church, whether it be a denomination or to local leaders – we have to look no further than the history of the Roman Catholic Church or to the Judaism of Christ’s time where the ecclesiastical leaders’ claim to executive interpretation led to the abuse and ignorance of the people of the laity. Even when it’s just a local gathering, when the pastor or teacher speaks authoritatively it needs to be taken, examined and “chewed through” by the congregation so that error can be confronted by the church on the whole and so that the teacher can be corrected by those who care for him or her.

Maybe I answered my own question. God does provide for the communities who follow him at large; there are exceptions, but He still doesn’t do anything capriciously and fully owns our sorrows and our pain when He allows them to occur.