Jesus Is My Girlfriend: On Imbalanced Worship, Part 5
We’ve seen in this series that contemporary worship music has become dominated by songs modeled on romantic, experiential, subjective musical expressions. We’ve further seen that, though such songs are a legitimate stream of Biblical worship expression, they have been historical and Biblical worship models (such as the Psalms or the Book of Revelation) held in balance with objective, doctrinal song content.
We then began to investigate how and why such an imbalance has occurred in arriving at such an experiential overemphasis. We began by seeing that the deep alienation between God and mankind engendered by the Fall leads men to see the world dualistically, as split between the “pure” spiritual realm and the flawed and imperfect physical world, a view which is a result of the simultaneous and inescapable knowledge that men have rebelled against their Holy Creator while they attempt to suppress that inescapable knowledge (Rom 1:18-32).
The resultant spiritual schizophrenia of Fallen mankind leads men frequently to see the human condition as, at best, a necessary evil from which men need to escape. This conviction is held despite the fact that men know that God has created the cosmos as a physical/spiritual intertwined unity (though they try to suppress that knowledge; cf. Rom 1:18-20), and is a conviction frequently held as well by Christians (who should know better) despite the fact that Christ Jesus died and rose to reconcile the world to Himself (2 Cor 5: 17-19, etc.).
The world is not sundered between the physical and the spiritual, but is rather infected by sin, for which Jesus atoned by His Death. Nonetheless, the dualism which informs all pagan thought has dogged the Church’s thought and actions despite the Revealed Truth in Scripture that Christ has reconciled the world to Himself, and the dualistic pagan view has brought about, ultimately, the perceived split between the subjective and objective poles of faith and worship which informs the imbalance in worship music today.
That imbalance was carried forward and institutionalized by educated converts in the Early Church, hugely influencing the monastic impulse within the Church, which captured the leadership in the same period, and informed the official view of the preferred and highest spiritual state of being, holding a dualistic view out as the substrate of a truly godly worldview.
The Late Middle Ages were further influenced by the transmission of lost Aristotelian writings, which only reinforced monastic dualism, and reinforced the separation of "the spiritual" realm from normal life.
The Renaissance, which was given impetus largely by the European rediscovery of Platonic (and thus dualistic) writings, further exacerbated this split between the spiritual and "normal" life (a sort of Nature/Grace split), and the Reformation was in part a corrective reaction against this unBiblical and anti-Incarnational viewpoint, and for a while (at least in the Protestant countries), doctrines espousing the priesthood of the believer militated against dualism, holding that every area of human life was inherently spiritual.
However, in some of those countries (such as Germany), a sort of cold orthodoxy set in and hardened, and by the late 1600's, a reactionary movement arose in Germany called Pietism, which, in an effort to counteract the perceived arid intellectualism of the religious status quo, the Pietists emphasized experience of God over intellectual or doctrinal knowledge of Him, associating the emotional aspect of experience with the realm of the spiritual, and reintroduced and reemphasized a dualistic split between spirituality and normal life, for the first time tying experiential emotionalism to an upper-level spiritual realm, considered to be superior to the rest of life.
Pietism promoted a number of Biblical emphases (experience and emotion areimportant aspects of Christian life), but unfortunately deemphasized other vital aspects of the balanced Biblical view of life, associating experiential emotion with a "superior" realm of faith.
Pietism was very influential with the Wesley brothers (John & Charles) and George Whitfield, the instruments of the First Great Awakening in Britain and America (which lasted from about the 1730's until the 1750's) and in the resultant Evangelical movement which resulted from that revival. Another revival, the Second Great Awakening erupted in the late 1700's, lasting until the mid-1800's, which advocated emotional experience in an even more pronounced fashion, a theological innovation which has influenced mightily the revivalist perspective amongst Baptists, Methodists, Assemblies of God, and Presbyterians, etc., and which was reduced to a technique to bring "revival" by manipulating emotional response in the teaching of the very influential Charles Grandison Finney, a leader in the Second Awakening.
Revivalism has informed the Evangelical Church for over a century, institutionalizing a viewpoint that recognizes emotional experience as the highest expression of spirituality: the goal and evidence of a true spiritual encounter. We'll examine the impact of this perspective on contemporary Christian attitudes of worship in future articles, Lord willing.
For additional teaching, visit Patreon.
A helpful book:
