Jesus Is My Girlfriend, Part 32

We have seen in this series of articles that the Evangelical Church of today has fixated on sentimental, experiential, overly-romanticized worship songs, to the detriment of doctrinal and objective worship music. We have examined the historical and theological developments that has led to this imbalance in modern worship, tracing the rise of experiential emotionalism as the evidence of conversion, all tied to an escapist anti-Incarnational view which sees the spiritual and physical aspects of the world as being opposed to one another.

We've seen as well that the evangelistic techniques of the Second Great Awakening have largely displaced the Biblical Patterns of worship which aimed first at pleasing God, and secondarily at instructing and edifying believers, resulting in worship largely oriented around emotionally-manipulative experiential techniques, resulting in an impoverishment of content-oriented and objectively-grounded aspects of Evangelical worship experience.

This further had a deleterious effect on teaching in Sunday Schools, from the pulpits, even in seminaries, as the normativity of emotionalistic experience came to dominate Evangelical expectation and thought, resulting in theological expressions and sermons which deemphasized complex or unpopular doctrinal content (such as teaching about Hell, gender issues, maledictory prayer, etc.), all in the service of supposedly making the Gospel more attractive in evangelistic appeals and experiential worship. 

In point of fact, this perspective and practice has promoted a version of Christianity which has not only deformed the worship of the Evangelical Church, but has also divested Evangelicals of a fully-orbed theology which allows them to be Biblically-informed in the full spectrum of  human life, and has resulted in a presentation of the Faith which seems to non-believers to be only concerned with individualistic interior experience and eschatological escapism, with no solid answers for personal and societal problems, especially for the pressing social issues of the day.

We've seen as well that, in an effort to capture attendants, Evangelicals had adopted a strategy of attempting to ape the hipness of contemporary music forms and expressions to seem more relevant. We also saw, though, that lack of resources, understanding, and talent generally led to inferior and substandard versions of those contemporary musical expressions (a fact which many Evangelicals are willing to overlook and even defend, driven by their desperate urge to make the Gospel "relevant," or, hemmed in by their Pietism from listening to "secular" music, by relief at hearing anything musical which is not completely boring and restrictive or out-of-date, or by both motives...).

Such practices have, however, generally had the opposite effect sought by their practitioners, in that non-believing attendants to these practices have considered these musical products to be inferior propaganda pieces executed by those who had no real or deep connection with the cultural forms they are aping, and thus achieve the opposite effect intended, that is, they result in conclusions of even more irrelevance by the non-Christians at whom they're aimed (and, in point of fact, even leave the Christians in these services, who are satisfied with the efforts, under the delusion that they ARE achieving their goal of relevance of musical Gospel presentation).

We also found that Scripture (Rev 5:9-10; 7: 9-10; Psalm 89:6; etc.) reveals that, at history's end, the worship of God will be comprised of the languages, forms, and cultural expressions of all the nations and peoples of the Earth, sanctified over time as the Gospel converts the members of these nations and their cultural expressions to be added to the global worship of the Lord at the Eschaton.

Then we began to look at the relationship of past human artifacts (such as music) to contemporary (and future) artifacts, and saw that our individual and corporate artifacts, though Fallen, are subject to the effects of God's Sanctification on their human makers, and are thus capable of being made more fully able to reflect God's Presence and Glory, just as are their makers in Christ.

Last article, we saw that the Holy Spirit sanctifies both individuals and the Church corporately over time, and that the results of that progressive Sanctification ideally produce artifacts increasingly better suited (cleansed and transformed) to be utilized for the worship and glorification of God. We recognized that the various streams of Sanctification which flow from sundry cultures, artistic developments, and people groups within the Church are called traditions, and that questions as to how to past artifacts relate to present and future ones.

These various traditions represent, then, developments over time of the sanctification of the emphases and artifacts of these streams of cultural expression, and the progress of these developments necessarily extends in two directions. The first has to do with the relationship of the artifacts (like music and songs) to the Christians in the culture that is producing them (and therefore to even the non-believers in that culture), since they can only understand cultural expressions (language, artistic forms, and so forth) that are comprised of elements drawn from their current time and culture. (For instance, the vast majority of the readers of this article would only with great difficulty understand it if I had written it in Old English/Anglo-Saxon, and with only slightly less difficulty had I written it in Middle English, even though Modern English has directly risen from these older forms of our current form of language.) 

The development of our current artistic and cultural forms of expression have likewise evolved from older ones accepted by our ancestors, and even though there is consequently some overlap in those forms (as there is between more ancient and current forms of our language), there is still much that would prove incomprehensible in, say, our current musical expressions to those who came before us in the past (such as jazz or punk), though, just as in our language, there is some overlap.

However, the living record of that cultural development is also a record of how those expressions have related to each generation of those who have come before us. Those cultural relationships form a chain of developments as the previous expressions influenced and gave rise to subsequent ones, and this is true as well of the development of the artifacts and forms utilized by the Christians within that culture over time, which would, of course be related in many ways to the artifacts and forms of the non-believers of that culture, and the differences between those artifacts and forms can tell us a lot about how God worked in that culture as it changed and the Kingdom expanded, giving us a record of how the Church was cultural salt and light  there, a record which can help instruct us as to how to proceed as Christians in relation to our culture in our time. 

Which brings up the other prong, briefly touched on above, that these traditions are a record of how the cultural forms engendered by the Church were adapted and developed, both in relation to the culture at large and, importantly, to the transformation of those expressions across time in relation to the advancement of the Sanctification of the Church. This prong teaches us the importance of knowing well the past expressions and artifacts of our past as believers, especially in relation to our current expressions and artifacts, an important insight in our consideration of the sorts of songs to employ in our worship today.

For more, visit my patreon page.

Jesus Is My Girlfriend, Part 31

We have seen in this series that the Evangelical Church of today has fixated on sentimental, experiential, overly-romanticized worship songs, to the detriment of doctrinal and objective worship music. We have examined the historical and theological developments that have led to this imbalance in modern worship, tracing the rise of experiential emotionalism as the evidence of conversion, all tied to an escapist anti-Incarnational view which sees the spiritual and physical aspects of the world as being opposed to one another.

We've seen as well that the evangelistic techniques of the Second Great Awakening have largely displaced the Biblical Patterns of worship which aimed first at pleasing God, and secondarily at instructing and edifying believers, resulting in worship largely oriented around emotionally-manipulative experiential techniques, resulting in an impoverishment of content-oriented and objectively-grounded aspects of Evangelical worship experience.

This further had a deleterious effect on teaching in Sunday Schools, from the pulpits, even in seminaries, as the normativity of emotionalistic experience came to dominate Evangelical expectation and thought, resulting in theological expressions and sermons which deemphasized complex or unpopular doctrinal content (such as teaching about Hell, gender issues, maledictory prayer, etc.), all in the service of supposedly making the Gospel more attractive in evangelistic appeals and experiential worship. 

In point of fact, this perspective and practice has promoted a version of Christianity which has not only deformed the worship of the Evangelical Church, but has also divested Evangelicals of a fully-orbed theology which allows them to be Biblically-informed in the full spectrum of  human life, and has resulted in a presentation of the Faith which seems to non-believers to be only concerned with individualistic interior experience and eschatological escapism, with no solid answers for personal and societal problems, especially for the pressing social issues of the day.

We've seen as well that, in an effort to capture attendants, Evangelicals have adopted a strategy of attempting to ape the hipness of contemporary music forms and expressions to seem more relevant. We also saw, though, that lack of resources, understanding, and talent generally led to inferior and substandard versions of those contemporary musical expressions (a fact which many Evangelicals are willing to overlook and even defend, driven by their desperate urge to make the Gospel "relevant," or, hemmed in by their Pietism from listening to "secular" music, by relief at hearing anything musical which is not completely boring and restrictive or out-of-date, or by both motives...).

Such practices have, however, generally had the opposite effect sought by their practitioners, in that non-believing attendants to these practices have considered these musical products to be inferior propaganda pieces executed by those who had no real or deep connection with the cultural forms they are aping, and thus achieve the opposite effect intended, that is, they result in conclusions of even more irrelevance by the non-Christians at whom they're aimed (and, in point of fact, even leave the Christians in these services, who are satisfied with the efforts, under the delusion that they ARE achieving their goal of relevance of musical Gospel presentation).

We also found that Scripture (Rev 5:9-10; 7:9-10; Ps 89:6; etc.) reveals that, at history's end, the worship of God will be comprised of the languages, forms, and cultural expressions of all the nations and peoples of the Earth, sanctified over time as the Gospel converts the members of these nations and their cultural expressions to be added to the global worship of the Lord at the Eschaton.

In the last article, we began to look at the relationship of past human artifacts (such as music) to contemporary (and future) artifacts, and saw that our individual and corporate artifacts, though Fallen, are subject to the effects of God's Sanctification on their human makers, and are thus capable of being made more fully able to reflect God's Presence and Glory, just as are their makers in Christ.

The Sanctification of believers, wherein they are progressively are "being transformed into the Same Image" of the Glory of the Lord by His Spirit (2 Cor 3:18), occurs over the history of the individual; it takes time. We all personally experience this (hopefully), of course, and, in line with the extreme individualism of our culture (and Church), are not used to thinking of Sanctification in its corporate aspect (despite the fact that Paul, in the passage to which I just referred, 2 Cor 3:18, uses the plural "we'" rather than "I" or "you" or "y'all), yet Sanctification also takes place in the corporate sphere, and, as it does in the personal experience of a believer, that corporate Sanctification is effected over time. 

Whether personal or corporate, Sanctification is a progressive, gradual process, which means there are earlier and later stages to that process, in which, as the Spirit works in both individuals and the Church, there is development, change, progress in believers (and thus in their creation of artifacts) in which the later stages evince more progress in being formed into people (and things) which more fully reflect the Glory of the Lord.

Thus, as time goes on, and the Spirit works in His People as the Kingdom of God expands (1 Cor 15:20-27), there grows a continually larger and more developed body of artifacts which have been subjected to the Redemptive and Transforming Work of the Spirit through the Body of Christ. This body of artifacts (which, again, includes songs), to the extent that they have been submitted to the Sanctificational Work of the Spirit, provides the Church in increasingly broad and deeper cultural expressions in which to worship and glorify the Lord.

This is happening (as it has been for the last two millennia) in all the cultures and peoples in which the Church is present, and each of these streams of ongoing Sanctification contribute ultimately to the gathered global worship of God's People at (and after) Doomsday. These various sanctificational streams are normally called traditions, and their relationship, not only to each other, but to themselves, also relates to the question of past expressions to present and future ones, a question we will continue to explore, Lord willing, next.

For more now, visit my patreon page.

Jesus Is My Girlfriend, Part 30

We have seen in this series of articles that the Evangelical Church of today has fixated on sentimental, experiential, overly-romanticized worship songs, to the detriment of doctrinal and objective worship music. We have examined the historical and theological developments that has led to this imbalance in modern worship, tracing the rise of experiential emotionalism as the evidence of conversion, all tied to an escapist anti-Incarnational view which sees the spiritual and physical aspects of the world as being opposed to one another.

We've seen as well that the evangelistic techniques of the Second Great Awakening have largely displaced the Biblical Patterns of worship which aimed first at pleasing God, and secondarily at instructing and edifying believers, resulting in worship largely oriented around emotionally-manipulative experiential techniques, resulting in an impoverishment of content-oriented and objectively-grounded aspects of Evangelical worship experience.

This further had a deleterious effect on teaching in Sunday Schools, from the pulpits, even in seminaries, as the normativity of emotionalistic experience came to dominate Evangelical expectation and thought, resulting in theological expressions and sermons which deemphasized complex or unpopular doctrinal content (such as teaching about Hell, gender issues, maledictory prayer, etc.), all in the service of supposedly making the Gospel more attractive in evangelistic appeals and experiential worship. 

In point of fact, this perspective and practice has promoted a version of Christianity which has not only deformed the worship of the Evangelical Church, but has also divested Evangelicals of a fully-orbed theology which allows them to be Biblically-informed in the full spectrum of  human life, and has resulted in a presentation of the Faith which seems to non-believers to be only concerned with individualistic interior experience and eschatological escapism, with no solid answers for personal and societal problems, especially for the pressing social issues of the day.

We've seen as well that, in an effort to capture attendants, Evangelicals had adopted a strategy of attempting to ape the hipness of contemporary music forms and expressions to seem more relevant. We also saw, though, that lack of resources, understanding, and talent generally led to inferior and substandard versions of those contemporary musical expressions (a fact which many Evangelicals are willing to overlook and even defend, driven by their desperate urge to make the Gospel "relevant," or , hemmed in by their Pietism from listening to "secular" music, by relief at hearing anything musical which is not completely boring and restrictive or out-of-date, or by both motives...).

Such practices have, however, generally had the opposite effect sought by their practitioners, in that non-believing attendants to these practices have considered these musical products to be inferior propaganda pieces executed by those who had no real or deep connection with the cultural forms they are aping, and thus achieve the opposite effect intended, that is, they result in conclusions of even more irrelevance by the non-Christians at whom they're aimed (and, in point of fact, even leave the Christians in these services, who are satisfied with the efforts, under the delusion that they ARE achieving their goal of relevance of musical Gospel presentation).

In the last article, we found that Scripture (Rev 5:9-10; 7: 9-10; Psalm 89:6; etc.) reveals that, at history's end, the worship of God will be comprised of the languages, forms, and cultural expressions of all the nations and peoples of the Earth, sanctified over time as the Gospel converts the members of these nations and their cultural expressions to be added to the global worship of the Lord at the Eschaton.

How can this be? What is the relationship of contemporary to past cultural expressions (including those of musical worship)? To understand this, we must look at the implications of some basic Biblical truths anew. 

Men are made in the Image of God (Gen 1:26-27), a truth which applies to humans both individually and corporately (which is a created reflection of the fact that the Triune God is both One in His Substance and Essence, and is thus Unified, (like an Individual), and is Simultaneously Many in His Three Persons, and is thus Diverse, (like a Society), and God's Image therefore is shown both in human individuality as well as in human society, since only both poles can show the Fullness of God to the extent possible on the created level.

Human artifacts (visual, musical, and literary expressions, architecture, even social structures and the like), having been made by humans, and reflect the image of humanity (much as humans, having been made by God, reflect His Image, though even non-human things mediate the Knowledge of God, cf. Rom 1:18-20). Humans, of course, alone bear God's Image.

Since humans, created to reflect God's Image, do so in part by themselves creating artifacts which also reflect God's Presence and Glory, all human expressions and artifacts exist on the scale of the Reflection of God, despite the fact that humanity and their artifacts (and the world men were created to have dominion over) are Fallen (Gen 1:28;3). Humans, the things they make, and the world in which they live, still reflect God inescapably, even in their Fallenness (Rom 1:18-20).

Of course, sin's infection distorts the fullness of that reflection, but Christ Jesus came to redeem the world (John 3:17) and the men who inhabit it (and thus, perforce, their artifacts), sanctifying His People by conforming them to the Lord Jesus, Who, in His Humanity, is Himself the Beginning of the New Creation (2 Cor 5:17; Col 1:18). This Sanctification, as believers are progressively cleansed and transformed by the Spirit's Power (2 Cor 3:18), results in artifacts which reflect the progressive Sanctification and Cleansing of their makers, artifacts which (just as do their human makers) more clearly and fully reflect the Revelation and Glory of God, and are thus more suitable for the Worship of God and the Fulfillment of His Will.

This basic realization forms the basis of beginning to answer the question of the relationship of past artifacts to contemporary (and future) ones, to be utilized in worship and elsewhere, a subject we will, Lord willing, address in the next article.

For additional teaching, visit my patreon page.

Jesus Is My Girlfriend, Part 29

We have seen in this series of articles that the Evangelical Church of today has fixated on sentimental, experiential, overly-romanticized worship songs, to the detriment of doctrinal and objective worship music. We have examined the historical and theological developments that has led to this imbalance in modern worship, tracing the rise of experiential emotionalism as the evidence of conversion, all tied to an escapist anti-Incarnational view which sees the spiritual and physical aspects of the world as being opposed to one another.

We've seen as well that the evangelistic techniques of the Second Great Awakening have largely displaced the Biblical Patterns of worship which aimed first at pleasing God, and secondarily at instructing and edifying believers, resulting in worship largely oriented around emotionally-manipulative experiential techniques,
resulting in an impoverishment of content-oriented and objectively-grounded aspects of Evangelical worship experience.

This further had a deleterious effect on teaching in Sunday Schools, from the pulpits, even in seminaries, as the normativity of emotionalistic experience came to dominate Evangelical expectation and thought, resulting in theological expressions and sermons which deemphasized complex or unpopular doctrinal content (such as teaching about Hell, gender issues, maledictory prayer, etc.), all in the service of supposedly making the Gospel more attractive in evangelistic appeals and experiential worship. 

In point of fact, this perspective and practice has promoted a version of Christianity which has not only deformed the worship of the Evangelical Church, but has also divested Evangelicals of a fully-orbed
theology which allows them to be Biblically-informed in the full spectrum of  human life, and has resulted in a presentation of the Faith which seems to non-believers to be only concerned with individualistic
interior experience and eschatological escapism, with no solid answers for personal and societal problems, especially for the pressing social issues of the day.

Last article, we saw that, in an effort to capture attendants, Evangelicals had adopted a strategy of attempting to ape the hipness of contemporary music forms and expressions to seem more relevant. We also
saw, though, that lack of resources, understanding, and talent generally led to inferior and substandard versions of those contemporary musical expressions (a fact which many Evangelicals are willing to overlook and even defend, driven by their desperate urge to make the Gospel "relevant," or, hemmed in by their Pietism from listening to "secular" music, driven by relief at hearing anything musical which is not completely
boring and restrictive or out-of-date, or by both motives...).

Such practices have, however, generally had the opposite effect sought by their practitioners, in that non-believing attendants to these practices have considered these musical products to be inferior
propaganda pieces executed by those who had no real or deep connection with the cultural forms they are aping, and thus achieve the opposite effect intended, that is, they result in conclusions of even more
irrelevance by the non-Christians at whom they're aimed (and, in point of fact, even leave the Christians in these services, who are satisfied with the efforts, under the delusion that they ARE achieving their goal
of relevance of musical Gospel presentation).

All this is not to say that contemporary musical forms and expressions should not be utilized in our worship today; in point of fact, they must be. How can I maintain this after what I've just maintained? Well, let us look for a moment at Revelation 5:9-10:
          
          And they sang a new song, saying: "You are worthy
          to take the scroll, And to open its seals; For You
          were slain, And have redeemed us to God by Your
          blood out of every tribe and tongue and people and
          nation."

Similarly, Revelation 7:9-10 says:

            After these things I looked, and behold, a great
            multitude which no one could number, of all
            nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing
            before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed
            with white robes, with palm branches in their
            hands, and crying out with a loud voice, saying, 
            "Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the
            throne, and to the Lamb!"

And Psalm 86:9 proclaims:

            All nations whom You have made shall come and
            worship before You, O Lord, and shall glorify Your Name.

These and other passages teach us that at some point in the future, all nations, tribes, peoples, and language groups will take part in the worship of God by the hosts of the Redeemed, so that, at time's end, there will be involved in His worship every culture of the history of the earth. This reality means that all cultural expressions,
including musical ones, will be brought into God's worship at the Eschaton (as Isaiah 60 prophesied), and thus not only the most contemporary aspects of those various cultural musical expressions (all of which proceeded from the previous parts of the spectrum of the development of those expressions), but likely even at least some of those previous aspects of those musical expressions would be part of those worship expressions as well.

However, the concatenation of styles (or the fusion of those styles) in the post-Eschaton combined worship would, by virtue of their utilization, be a summation of the contemporary musical expressions of the time, even if mixed with aspects of older portions of those expressions.

But as the Kingdom of God expands across the nations and peoples of the world (1 Cor 15:21-28), the cultures of those nations will progressively be brought under the cleansing and reorientation of Biblical influence, as the peoples are subjected to the Sanctification of the Saving Holy Spirit, and their musical expressions reclaimed for God's Originally-intended Purposes, just as the languages of the world, confused in Judgment at Babel (Gen 11:1-9), were reclaimed by the Spirit for their highest created purpose at His Outpouring on the Church at Pentecost (Acts 2).

We Christians are being transformed "from Glory to Glory" by the Holy Spirit (2 Cor 3:18) by being renewed day by day (2 Cor 4:16) according to the Image of our Creator (Col 3:10), a fact which means that our present and future lives are being sanctified by being conformed to Christ our Model.

In related manner, our artifacts, expressions, institutions, and relationships (e.g., our culture) will be affected and (re)shaped by our continuing and (hopefully) intensifying sanctification, a phenomenon only accelerated as larger numbers of the members of a shared culture are converted and subjected to sanctification.

Since this is so, the continuing process of sanctification is ultimately aimed at the end of the historical progression of expressions, including musical expressions, making the contemporary edge of these expressions vitally important as they are shaped toward their highest purposes intended by God. This sets the stage for a discussion of the relationship of the contemporary to the past, especially as it relates to the music of worship, a subject we will, Lord willing, address in the next article.

Jesus Is My Girlfriend, Part 28

We have seen in this series of articles that the Evangelical Church of today has fixated on sentimental, experiential, overly-romanticized worship songs, to the detriment of doctrinal and objective worship music. We have examined the historical and theological developments that has led to this imbalance in modern worship, tracing the rise of experiential emotionalism as the evidence of conversion, all tied to an escapist anti-Incarnational view which sees the spiritual and physical aspects of the world as being opposed to one another.

We've seen as well that the evangelistic techniques of the Second Great Awakening have largely displaced the Biblical Patterns of worship which aimed first at pleasing God, and secondarily at instructing and edifying believers, resulting in worship largely oriented around emotionally-manipulative experiential techniques, resulting in an impoverishment of content-oriented and objectively-grounded aspects of Evangelical worship experience.

This further had a deleterious effect on teaching in Sunday Schools, from the pulpits, even in seminaries, as the normativity of emotionalistic experience came to dominate Evangelical expectation and thought, resulting in theological expressions and sermons which deemphasized complex or unpopular doctrinal content (such as teaching about Hell, gender issues, maledictory prayer, etc.), all in the service of supposedly making the Gospel more attractive in evangelistic appeals and experiential worship. 

In point of fact, this perspective and practice has promoted a version of Christianity which has not only deformed the worship of the Evangelical Church, but has also divested Evangelicals of a fully-orbed theology which allows them to be 

Biblically-informed in the full spectrum of human life, and has resulted in a presentation of the Faith which seems to non-believers to be only concerned with individualistic interior experience and eschatological escapism, with no solid answers for personal and societal problems, especially for the pressing social issues of the day.

Rather than presenting a Biblical Faith of comprehensive content and wisdom for anything humans may ever face on any front, Evangelicals, as a direct consequence of departure from Biblical worship norms, have presented a version of Christianity which is (in many ways justly) deemed irrelevant by contemporary non-believers, an ironic consequence of an effort to adjust belief and worship to make Christianity seem relevant. 

This drive for relevance has concentrated on utilizing forms of worship (including, as we've seen in past articles of this series, hugely individualistic and romantic song-lyrics and musical forms conformed to popular entertainment forms) which are intended to compete with the entertainment forms which so dominate Americans in our day (at their most foolish, since the normal congregation doesn't possess the resources or talent to do so), seeking a "spectacular effect," to attract non-believers (or, sadly, other Christians from their own congregations, which I call the "Darwinian Proselytization effect), or to cause the worship of the church to conform closely to the entertainment forms of our society to theoretically make the Faith more attractive to non-believers (or Christians from other churches...), also embodying and replicating the individualistic, experiential thrust of our culture (which is the result of the Church's deformation originally, as Michael Scott Horton's Made in America clearly shows), in a clear attempt to pass these simplistic emphases off as the fullness of the Faith.

Now, of course, there are a couple of problems with this approach: in the first place, as I intimated earlier, the "Spectacular Effect," while it might on occasion attract a non-believer pressured by believers he knows to attend, churches cannot generally compete in any truly meaningful way with the entertainment media and events of the general culture as to entertainment excellence, and, to most pagans, this is a patently obvious truth. Pagans are, after all, just pagan; they're not stupid, and they live today surrounded by the most developed entertainment in the world's history, in the only consumer/entertainment culture that has ever existed. 

Contemporary worship in the Evangelical churches also, as I mentioned, has utilized modern entertainment forms to make the worship more palatable and attractive to the odd non-believer dragged to services, as well as to attract other believers ("hey, this is much hipper than my church's service") and in the hope that it will hold the interest and loyalty of the members of the congregation.

Two points about this last. First, for those who are drawn to join a church for its entertainment novelty, it is only novelty that will hold them there (a harsh and necessarily temporary mistress is novelty, which was the heart of Augustine's warning that the Church not overly wed itself to contemporary non-Christian ideas and practices, lest it find itself soon widowed...). This requires constant updating and frenetic "re-hipping," lest a more hip church steal away one's (tithing?) congregants.

Second, if the adoption of contemporary worship forms includes the individualistic experientialism endemic to our culture (in its content, form, and emphases), then only a truncated form of escapist, feel-good Christianity is being presented, which must compete with our society's other ubiquitous feel-good, escapist practices and beliefs, causing the Church to seem to be just another escapist head trip. 

Of course, such practices are the backbone of American mega-churches (which gives them the resources to imagine they can compete in our entertainment culture, though it never actually seems to happen for those exposed to entertainment at large...). Any number of readers of this article are likely to think that such practices are in fact a good and successful thing, since, after all, the mega-churches are full of people, and, though it is true that mega-churches are full of people, anyone who has long attended such a church knows that there is massive turnover involved in those who attend the church, as attendees cycle through in search of a hipper or more entertaining service elsewhere. Novelty is, again, a cruel mistress.

The real problem, though, with most mega-churches, is that the very thing that draws so many (at least temporarily) to attend keeps them generally superficial in their faith, and mostly ignorant of Scripture at any depth, which concerns are mostly lost in the drive to keep the congregants entertained and having an "experience," producing believers whose faith is, as it's sometimes said, a mile wide but only a few inches deep.

This is not a problem for church leaders whose vision of success is simply to attract a lot of people in the Name of Christ and build imposing buildings (and it certainly pays well), but if the goal is to build mature and serious disciples of Jesus, the mega-church approach generally fails.

All this is not to say that the Church is to eschew contemporary music forms (or emotion or experience), as we've seen in past articles. In fact, it is the responsibility of the Church to incorporate such things in her worship in balance with the full Biblical expression of the Faith, embedded in the worship patterns revealed in God's Word (as we've seen, and the responsibility of the Church to engage contemporary forms will be addressed in a future article).

We cannot sacrifice the fullness of Biblical faith and worship in a misguided effort to be more relevant than the content, emphases, and forms given us by God in His Word, lest (as is now so frequently the case) we make Christianity irrelevant in our overweening and misguided attempts to make it hyper-relevant. We can't out-hip God. More later, Lord willing.

If you would like to hear some of my teaching, visit my patreon page.

Jesus Is My Girlfriend, Part 27

We have seen in this series of articles that the Evangelical Church of today has fixated on sentimental, experiential, overly-romanticized worship songs, to the detriment of doctrinal and objective worship music. We have examined the historical and theological developments that has led to this imbalance in modern worship, tracing the rise of experiential emotionalism as the evidence of conversion, all tied to an escapist anti-Incarnational view which sees the spiritual and physical aspects of the world as being opposed to one another.

We've seen as well that the evangelistic techniques of the Second Great Awakening have largely displaced the Biblical Patterns of worship which aimed first at pleasing God, and secondarily at instructing and edifying believers, resulting in worship largely oriented around emotionally-manipulative experiential techniques, resulting in an impoverishment of content-oriented and objectively-grounded aspects of Evangelical worship experience.

This further had a deleterious effect on teaching in Sunday Schools, from the pulpits, even in seminaries, as the normativity of emotionalistic experience came to dominate Evangelical expectation and thought, resulting in theological expressions and sermons which deemphasized complex or unpopular doctrinal content (such as teaching about Hell, gender issues, maledictory prayer, etc.), all in the service of supposedly making the Gospel more attractive in evangelistic appeals and experiential worship.

In point of fact, this perspective and practice has promoted a version of Christianity which has not only deformed the worship of the Evangelical Church, but has also divested Evangelicals of a fully-orbed theology which allows them to be Biblically-informed in the full spectrum of  human life, and has resulted in a presentation of the Faith which seems to non-believers to be only concerned with individualistic interior experience and eschatological escapism, with no solid answers for personal and societal problems, especially for the pressing social issues of the day.

Rather than presenting a Biblical Faith of comprehensive content and wisdom for anything humans may ever face on any front, Evangelicals, as a direct consequence of departure from Biblical worship norms, have presented a version of Christianity which is (in many ways justly) deemed irrelevant by contemporary non-believers, an ironic consequence of an effort to adjust belief and worship to make Christianity seem relevant.

There is no real improvement possible on the basic norms and balanced content of Holy Scripture, and even though those are indeed capable of being expressed in terms which are understandable and relevant to any society or culture, we must never depart from the basic teachings and content of the Bible, nor should we lose the balance of Scriptural emphases within our faith and practice, including (and in many ways, especially) in our worship, which is so central to the formation of our Faith and in our faithful obedience to God's Will and Purposes. We must not imagine, in our belief or practice, that we are smarter (or, as the case may be, hipper) than our Creator and Lord.

The fix for this is to eschew our utilitarian approach to worship, and conform ourselves to the Biblically-revealed Patterns of worship, filling them with the full spectrum of Scriptural content and the natural cultural expressions (musical and otherwise) of our experience as settings for those Biblical worship patterns (what authentic other options do we have, if we are to be authentic in our worship? More on this in future...).

We must regain the Biblical balance in our teaching and worship emphases, embodying and addressing the full spectrum of human life and experience if we are to (1) truly equip believers to interact with life as the Lord wishes, and (2) consequently demonstrate to unbelievers a living context to testify to the truth of the Gospel, showing that God's Word provides real answers to all of life's problems and every situation humans may face. While emotion and experience are legitimate aspects of our lives and faith, they are aspects which must be seen and embraced as only a part of life and faith, intended to be experienced and expressed in balance with all of the other aspects of our humanity and of what the Bible presents as norms for us to live out. Otherwise, regardless of how relevant we think we are in our presentation, what we present is a caricature of the Faith, and it will not ring true to a discerning pagan.

Why, again, does this process need to be addressed in the Church's worship first? Because worship is the primary arena where we are corporately in the Presence of God (Matt 18:20; Heb 12:22-24), and it is there that we form our foundational concepts of God, ourselves, and the world. If our worship is deformed by being imbalanced in terms of an accurate expression of what Scripture teaches, so too will our views of God, ourselves, and the world be, resulting in imbalances in our teaching and actions outside of worship, exhibiting those imbalances in our lives and actions before the world at large, derailing our evangelistic appeals to those who do not believe. A balanced Biblical worship will result in a balanced and prepared people of God, a bright light in a darkened world.

Next time, Lord willing, we'll address the issue of relevancy in worship.

Or more now in the Worship series on patreon. 

Jesus Is My Girlfriend, Part 26

We have seen in this series of articles that the Evangelical Church of today has fixated on sentimental, experiential, overly-romanticized worship songs, to the detriment of doctrinal and objective worship music. We have examined the historical and theological developments that has led to this imbalance in modern worship, tracing the rise of experiential emotionalism as the evidence of conversion, all tied to an escapist anti-Incarnational view which sees the spiritual and physical aspects of the world as being opposed to one another.

We then spent some time considering the Implications of the central Biblical truths of the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation of Christ for our view and exercise of worship, Implications which emphasized the facts that our worship should be both physical as well as spiritual, embodying continuity as well as change, and recognizing that both past and future should equally dictate the parameters of the shape of how and why God wishes to be worshipped.

Recently, we began to examine the implications of the Bible's glimpses into the Heavenly Worship (Is 6; Ezek 1 and 10; Heb 12:22-24; Rev 4-5) and its interior logic for redressing the imbalance in today's Evangelical worship, seeing that the Church actually worships inHeaven spiritually, beyond (yet within) time and space through the Ascended Humanity of Christ, Who is seated at the Father's Right Hand.

The passages in Revelation all describe, as we've seen, the same Place also written of in Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Hebrews: the Courts of Heaven in the Throne-room of God, where the Heavenly Worship eternally takes place in His Presence. These Heavenly glimpses in the book of Revelation, which is one long vision of that worship, contain songs used to praise God by the angels, the elders, and the other redeemed saints, and, like everything else in Scripture, these songs have much to teach us, especially as to the focus and content of our worship.

We saw as well that the Holy Trinity provides a Triadic Model summed up in Jesus Himself (John 14:6), a Model intended by God to be fully represented in the Church's worship. The Patterns of Heavenly Worship revealed in Scripture are intended to provide the basic model for our worship, and, as all our study of this matter has shown, our worship is primarily for the Pleasure of God, and only secondarily (and derivatively) for the building up of the Church to do His Will in this world and beyond. our formal worship is not intended to be dominated by evangelistic outreach, but, as we've seen, oriented primarily to the adoration of God and resultant edification of the saints, with any evangelization to be a side-effect of the God-oriented worship and edificational instruction to the believers (this is why the Book of Acts shows evangelism as being largely conducted outside the precincts of formal worship).

However, we've seen that the evangelistic techniques of the Second Great Awakening have largely displaced the Biblical Patterns of worship which aimed first at pleasing God, and secondarily at instructing and edifying believers, resulting in worship largely oriented around emotionally-manipulative experiential techniques, resulting in an impoverishment of content-oriented and objectively-grounded aspects of Evangelical worship experience.

This further had a deleterious effect on teaching in Sunday Schools, from the pulpits, even in seminaries, as the normativity of emotionalistic experience came to dominate Evangelical expectation and thought, resulting in theological expressions and sermons which deemphasized complex or unpopular doctrinal content (such as teaching about Hell, gender issues, maledictory prayer, etc.), all in the service of supposedly making the Gospel more attractive in evangelistic appeals and experiential worship. 

In point of fact, this perspective and practice has promoted a version of Christianity which has not only deformed the worship of the Evangelical Church, but has also divested Evangelicals of a fully-orbed theology which allows them to be Biblically-informed in the full spectrum of  human life, and has resulted in a presentation of the Faith which seems to non-believers to be only concerned with individualistic interior experience and eschatological escapism, with no solid answers for personal and societal problems, especially for the pressing social issues of the day.

Rather than presenting a Biblical Faith of comprehensive content and wisdom for anything humans may ever face on any front, Evangelicals, as a direct consequence of departure from Biblical worship norms, have presented a version of Christianity which is (in many ways justly) deemed irrelevant by contemporary non-believers, an ironic consequence of an effort to adjust belief and worship to make Christianity seem relevant. 

There is no real improvement possible on the basic norms and balanced content of Holy Scripture, and even though those are indeed capable of being expressed in terms which are understandable and relevant to any society or culture, we must never depart from the basic teachings and content of the Bible, nor should we lose the balance of Scriptural emphases within our faith and practice, including (and in many ways, especially) in our worship, which is so central to the formation of our Faith and in our faithful obedience to God's Will and Purposes. We must not imagine, in our belief or practice, that we are smarter (or, as the case may be, hipper) than our Creator and Lord. More later.

Or more now on patreon.

Jesus Is My Girlfriend, Part 25

We have seen in this series of articles that the Evangelical Church of today has fixated on sentimental, experiential, overly-romanticized worship songs, to the detriment of doctrinal and objective worship music. We have examined the historical and theological developments that has led to this imbalance in modern worship, tracing the rise of experiential emotionalism as the evidence of conversion, all tied to an escapist anti-Incarnational view which sees the spiritual and physical aspects of the world as being opposed to one another. 

We then spent some time considering the Implications of the central Biblical truths of the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation of Christ for our view and exercise of worship, Implications which emphasized the facts that our worship should be both physical as well as spiritual, embodying continuity as well as change, and recognizing that both past and future should equally dictate the parameters of the shape of how and why God wishes to be worshipped. 

Recently, we began to examine the implications of the Bible's glimpses into the Heavenly Worship (Is 6; Ezek 1 and 10; Heb 12:22-24; Rev 4-5) and its interior logic for redressing the imbalance in today's Evangelical worship, seeing that the Church actually worships in Heaven spiritually, beyond (yet within) time and space through the Ascended Humanity of Christ, Who is seated at the Father's Right Hand. 

The passages in Revelation all describe, as we've seen, the same Place also written of in Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Hebrews: the Courts of Heaven in the Throne-room of God, where the Heavenly Worship eternally takes place in His Presence. These Heavenly glimpses in the book of Revelation, which is one long vision of that worship, contain songs used to praise God by the angels, the elders, and the other redeemed saints, and, like everything else in Scripture, these songs have much to teach us, especially as to the focus and content of our worship. 

In the last article, we saw that the Holy Trinity provides a Triadic Model summed up in Jesus Himself (John 14:6), a Model intended by God to be fully represented in the Church's worship.

Virtually everything we've seen in this series has pointed up the fact that worship is primarily for the Pleasure of God, and secondarily (and derivatively) for the building up of the Church to do His Will in this world and beyond. While evangelism is to be the result of such edification (even within our worship services, as the Early Church recognized, and practiced by allowing the unconverted into the first part of their services, only dismissing them after the readings, sermon, and Creed), our formal worship is not intended to be dominated by evangelistic outreach, but, as we've seen, oriented primarily to the adoration of God and resultant edification of the saints, with any evangelization to be a side-effect of the God-oriented worship and edificational instruction to the believers (this is why the Book of Acts shows evangelism as being largely conducted outside the precincts of formal worship).

As we've seen, since the Second Great Awakening, the techniques of eliciting an emotional conversion experience developed at that time have displaced not only the Patterns of a Heavenly Worship the Church takes part in through the Ascended Lord Jesus (Heb 12:22-24; 10:19-22), but also reoriented the assumptions of Evangelicals concerning formal worship, so that worship services were conceived of forthwith as mainly evangelistic thrusts, and reorganized from traditional Biblical Patterns accordingly. This has had unintended consequences which actually have worked against the evangelistic efforts of the Church in our time, as well as having contributed to the theological ignorance of the Church and the trivialization of Christianity in our culture.

Because worship services have become evangelistic thrusts, rather than being command performances before the Face of God which are also intended in that context to educate the Body of Christ as to how they are to view God and the world and inform them as to how they are to live (and impact the world), difficult or complex doctrines (such as the reality of Hell, Biblical teachings on gender issues, maledictory prayer, etc.) are simply not taught from the pulpit, since complicated or controversial teachings militate against, and interrupt in ways, the quest for evangelistic experience.

This simplified evangelistic thrust, with its experientialistic underpinnings, has become the norm for worship services in the Evangelical mind-set and practice. As a result, doctrinal teaching of any real depth is largely absent from current Evangelical worship. Now, some have thought that more in-depth teaching takes place in Sunday School's or Bible studies, and, perhaps, for a while, that was true. (It still is in some places...)

Yet the normativity of worship as emotionalistic evangelism has meant that, increasingly, worship, the central expression of the Faith, has become characterized in the mind of Evangelicals as an affair of the emotions rather than balanced between mind, body, and spirit, with resultant de-emphasis on doctrinal content. As Evangelicals have continued to see the Faith as centrally a quest for experience, there has developed a concomitant dumbing-down (doctrinal content-wise) of what is taught in Sunday Schools and Bible studies, as the Scriptures are seen primarily as a sort of contact-point for the experience of God, rather than as fully-orbed content addressing the entire spectrum of human experience. This attitude has even affected the approach of many seminaries, as the trickle-down effect of experientially-oriented evangelistic worship seeps into the thought and practice of the Evangelical Church. This is disastrous not only for the shape of the Faith, but also for the witness of the Church today, as we'll see next week, God willing.

For more of my teaching, visit patreon.

Jesus Is My Girlfriend, Part 24

We have seen in this series of articles that the Evangelical Church of today has fixated on sentimental, experiential, overly-romanticized worship songs, to the detriment of doctrinal and objective worship music. We have examined the historical and theological developments that has led to this imbalance in modern worship, tracing the rise of experiential emotionalism as the evidence of conversion, all tied to an escapist anti-Incarnational view which sees the spiritual and physical aspects of the world as being opposed to one another.

We then spent some time considering the Implications of the central Biblical truths of the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation of Christ for our view and exercise of worship, Implications which emphasized the facts that our worship should be both physical as well as spiritual, embodying continuity as well as change, and recognizing that both past and future should equally dictate the parameters of the shape of how and why God wishes to be worshipped.

Recently, we began to examine the implications of the Bible's glimpses into the Heavenly Worship (Isaiah 6; Ezekiel 1 and 10; Hebrews 12:22-24; Revelation 4-5) and it's interior logic for redressing the imbalance in today's Evangelical worship, seeing that the Church actually worships inHeaven spiritually, beyond (yet within) time and space through the Ascended Humanity of Christ, Who is seated at the Father's Right Hand.

The passages in Revelation all describe, as we've seen, the same Place also written of in Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Hebrews: the Courts of Heaven in the Throne-room of God, where the Heavenly Worship eternally takes place in His Presence. These Heavenly glimpses in the book of Revelation, which is one long vision of that worship, contain songs used to praise God by the angels, the elders, and the other redeemed saints, and, like everything else in Scripture, these songs have much to teach us, especially as to the focus and content of our worship.

Previously, we looked at three of the songs sung in the worship of God, the texts of Revelation 5:8-10, 14:1-3; and 15:2-4, noting that all of these, in balanced fashion, gratefully praised God for Who He is, by recounting the things He has done redemptively for His People, and by recounting what He has done subjectively for His People (i.e., what His action has effected from the perspective, and in the experience of, the Redeemed themselves). This last, of course, is what has dominated the perspective of modern contemporary worship to the near-exclusion of the other categories of worship demonstrated in the Heavenly Worship. This certainly demonstrates that, though these categories include songs from a subjectively thankful perspective, these must be balanced by those which thank God for both Who He is and what He has done objectively for believers. 

This is, at the least, an implication that only one-third of our song of worship are to be subjective, as well as demonstrating, as the songs in Revelation do, that the categories can meaningfully be intertwined (indeed, a danger of not including objective doctrinal elements in our music is that our experience of redemption becomes either dislodged from the very objective content that gives it meaning, and/or that it denigrates the importance of the Objective Acts of Redemption Which are the ground of our subjective experience in the first place, as we've seen in past articles in this series).

We also looked at Revelation 14:1-3, and began to consider the songs in Revelation that are not sung by all the worshippers present in the Heavenly Service, and concluded that that reality implied a justification of both what are generally thought of as performance pieces and instrumental pieces in Christian worship.

We saw as well that the multiple perspectives represented in the various songs sung by the Elders, the Cherubim, other angels, the Redeemed, and by various combinations of these groups in their diversity and their unity represent the Diverse yet Unified Perspective(s) of the Persons of the One Triune God.

Last time, we saw that the Holy Trinity provides a Triadic Model summed up in Jesus Himself (John 14:6), a Model intended by God to be fully represented in the Church's worship.

Virtually everything we've seen in this series has pointed up the fact that worship is primarily for the Pleasure of God, and secondarily (and derivatively) for the building up of the Church to do His Will in this world and beyond. While evangelism is to be the result of such edification (even within our worship services, as the Early Church recognized, and practiced by allowing the unconverted into the first part of their services, only dismissing them after the readings, sermon, and Creed), our formal worship is not intended to be dominated by evangelistic outreach, but, as we've seen, oriented primarily to the adoration of God and resultant edification of the saints, with any evangelization to be a side-effect of the God-oriented worship and edificational instruction to the believers (this is why the Book of Acts shows evangelism as being largely conducted outside the precincts of formal worship). 

As we've seen, since the Second Great Awakening, the techniques of eliciting an emotional conversion experience developed at that time have displaced not only the Patterns of a Heavenly Worship the Church takes part in through the Ascended Lord Jesus (Hebrews 12:22-24; 10:19-22), but also reoriented the assumptions of Evangelicals concerning formal worship, so that worship services were conceived of forthwith as mainly evangelistic thrusts, and reorganized from traditional Biblical Patterns accordingly. This has had unintended consequences which actually have worked against the evangelistic efforts of the Church in our time, as well as having contributed to the theological ignorance of the Church and the trivialization of Christianity in our culture, as we'll consider in the next article, Lord willing.

For additional teaching, visit my patreon page.

Jesus Is My Girlfriend, Part 23

We have seen in this series of articles that the Evangelical Church of today has fixated on sentimental, experiential, overly-romanticized worship songs, to the detriment of doctrinal and objective worship music. We have examined the historical and theological developments that has led to this imbalance in modern worship, tracing the rise of experiential emotionalism as the evidence of conversion, all tied to an escapist anti-Incarnational view which sees the spiritual and physical aspects of the world as being opposed to one another.

We then spent some time considering the Implications of the central Biblical truths of the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation of Christ for our view and exercise of worship, Implications which emphasized the facts that our worship should be both physical as well as spiritual, embodying continuity as well as change, and recognizing that both past and future should equally dictate the parameters of the shape of how and why God wishes to be worshipped.

Recently, we began to examine the implications of the Bible's glimpses into the Heavenly Worship (Is 6; Ezek 1 and 10; Heb 12:22-24; Rev 4-5) and its interior logic for redressing the imbalance in today's Evangelical worship, seeing that the Church actually worships in Heaven spiritually, beyond (yet within) time and space through the Ascended Humanity of Christ, Who is seated at the Father's Right Hand.

The passages in Revelation all describe, as we've seen, the same Place also written of in Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Hebrews: the Courts of Heaven in the Throne-room of God, where the Heavenly Worship eternally takes place in His Presence. These Heavenly glimpses in the book of Revelation, which is one long vision of that worship, contain songs used to praise God by the angels, the elders, and the other redeemed saints, and, like everything else in Scripture, these songs have much to teach us, especially as to the focus and content of our worship.

Last time, we looked at three of the songs sung in the worship of God, the texts of Revelation 5:8-10, 14:1-3; and 15:2-4, noting that all of these, in balanced fashion, gratefully praised God for Who He is, by recounting the things He has done redemptively for His People, and by recounting what He has done subjectively for His People (i.e., what His Action has effected from the perspective, and in the experience of, the Redeemed themselves). This last, of course, is what has dominated the perspective of modern contemporary worship to the near-exclusion of the other categories of worship demonstrated in the Heavenly Worship. This certainly demonstrates that, though these categories include songs from a subjectively thankful perspective, these must be balanced by those which thank God for both Who He is and what He has done objectively for believers. 

This is, at the least, an implication that only one-third of our songs of worship are to be subjective, as well as demonstrating, as the songs in Revelation do, that the categories can meaningfully be intertwined (indeed, a danger of not including objective doctrinal elements in our music is that our experience of redemption becomes either dislodged from the very objective content that gives it meaning, and/or that it denigrates the importance of the Objective Acts of Redemption Which are the ground of our subjective experience in the first place, as we've seen in past articles in this series).

We also looked at Revelation 14:1-3, and began to consider the songs in Revelation that are not sung by all the worshippers present in the Heavenly Service, and concluded that that reality implied a justification of both what are generally thought of as performance pieces and instrumental pieces in Christian worship.

In the last article, we saw that the multiple perspectives represented in the various songs sung by the Elders, the Cherubim, other angels, the Redeemed, and by various combinations of these groups in their diversity and their unity represent the Diverse yet Unified Perspective(s) of the Persons of the One Triune God.

We turn now to a continuance of the consideration of the impact of the Nature of the Triune God on our worship.  We've been, in this series, examining the imbalances which have resulted in the deformation of contemporary Evangelical worship toward extreme emotionalism and experientialism. We've seen as well that, though these are necessary elements to worship, they have essentially displaced doctrinal content and objective perspectives on our experience of God, especially in our music.

Since our worship (as we've seen in past articles) is to be reflective of the God Who is the Object of our worship, let's explore some of the Implications of the Triune God for such a consideration. The Holy Trinity, Who is One God in Essence or Substance, is also simultaneously Three in Person, balancing Unified and Diverse Perspectives simultaneously, as we've also seen. 

Yet the Three Divine Persons of the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) also represent aspects of a unified balance, even in the case of functional aspects of human persons and their expressions (which shouldn't surprise us, since mankind was created in the Image of the Triune God, as Gen 1:26-27 tells us). In this case, I'm considering that the Functions of the Three Persons correspond to three essential aspects of humanity (and thus, of the worship humans embody).  

Of course, such a reduction of the Multiply-Hued Persons of the Trinity in terms of Their Functions, Relationships, and everything else about Them, so the consideration of the Persons as representative of a single aspect of humans or anything else is always fraught with the danger of being overly reductionistic. Nonetheless, just as the Triune God is Both Diverse and Unified, it is true that, as God is Diverse in His Aspects, He is also Simple in His Characteristics (at the same time), so I'll proceed with the analogy.

The Lord Jesus described Himself in John 14:6 - "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life," a Self-description which, considering that Christ is both Fully God and Fully Man simultaneously, recapitulates in His Incarnate Person the Persons, Aspects, and Functions of the Holy Trinity. That Trinitarian Self-description also describes a Tripod of Characteristics Which describe the Tasks of the Trinity and the correspondent emphases of the worship of the Trinity. 

It works like this: Each of the Triune Persons' Functions correspond primarily to one leg of the Tripod of Way, Truth, and Life. Jesus Himself identified His Function in this Tripod in the latter part of John 14:6 - "No man comes to the Father except through Me." Thus Jesus, the Incarnation of the Son Who died to atone for the sins of men, and become the Only Pathway to God for Fallen Mankind, represents the Way to the Spiritual Realm of the Father. 

The Father, Who is considered to be the Arche, the Beginning-Point of the Endless Interrelationships of the Father Who Eternally Begets the Son, and Who with the Son spirates the Spirit Who proceeds from the Father and the Son, represents the Truth, the second leg of the Tripod, as the Father Who is the Relational Starting-Point of the Idea or Reason permeating the Triune Persons.

The Holy Spirit brings Life to men by applying the Sacrifice of Christ to believers, and sustaining the existence and life of the Creation by His Almighty Power, and thus represents Life, the final leg of the Tripod. 

The Lord Jesus, and the Holy Trinity embody the aspects or legs of the Tripod in balance. This is also to be true of the worship of the Trinity and the Incarnate Christ.  The Lord Jesus, the Son, corresponds in this construct to the Way of the Spirit (and thus to the spiritual aspect of humanity in worship). The Father corresponds here to the Truth, the Primal Mind (and thus to reason or the idealization aspect of humanity in worship). The Holy Spirit corresponds in this construct to the Source of Life (and thus to the experiential or emotional aspect [or even the soul] of humanity in worship).

Just as the aspects of the Way, Truth, and Life permeate the Incarnate Christ in balanced fashion, and these aspects correspond to the Functions of the Triune Persons in Perfect Balance and Order, so the correspondent analogues of reason/content, experience/emotion, and spiritual connection (or mind, body, and spirit) are to be balanced in worship, if our worship is to properly reflect the Holy Trinity, the Incarnate Lord Jesus, and meet the needs of, and shape the development of, worshipping humanity.

At present, our contemporary Evangelical worship is imbalanced toward the experiential/emotional leg of the Triad, to the detriment of the reason/content and spiritual legs of the Triad, and our music largely reflects this imbalance. Once again, of course, each of these emphases actually inescapably interpenetrate each other to some extent (just as the Persons of the Trinity interpenetrate One Another), so even now, in our current imbalanced worship, elements of each leg of the Triad still are present to some extent.

However, our overemphasis on the experiential and emotional nonetheless means that the other legs of the Triad are illegitimately devalued, to the detriment of the Church, and the dishonor of the Lord we worship. Regaining the balance reflective of the Incarnate Lord Jesus, and of the Triune God, is a burning necessity in our worship today.  

For additional teaching with doctrinal content, visit my patreon page.

For a balanced hymnal, consider Cantus Christi.