Jesus Is My Girlfriend: On Imbalanced Worship, Part 6
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).
This split was institutionalized in Platonic thought, which hugely influenced monastic thought, which shaped to a certain extent, the way the Medievals viewed Reality, and, with the infusion of rediscovered dualistic Aristotelianism, resulted in a Late Medieval and Renaissance perspective which located emotion and instinct in a "religious" zone, while reason and normative life were seen as belonging to the "secular" sphere.
The Reformation was partially a reaction against that dualistic view, but when German Lutheranism became dead in it's orthodoxy, an experiential reactionary movement called Pietism arose which resurrected a dualistic perspective, and emphasized spiritual experience over intellectual and doctrinal knowledge of God, which they associated with the inferior "lower-level" secular realm. Pietism hugely influenced the Great Awakening (especially the Second Awakening), and all subsequent Evangelicalism.
The revivalism (eventually organized into a "methodology" to elicit an emotional "spiritual" response in revival attendees) shaped Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and virtually all subsequent Evangelical thought, so that a view was institutionalized which saw emotional experience as the highest expression of spirituality: as it's goal and evidence.
The revivalist perspective was so strong amongst most Evangelicals that the very shape of the worship services of their services was altered, as the goal of those services changed from the primary worship of God and the Biblical instruction of, and administration of the sacraments to Christians into services which, though they continued to teach the Word and worship God (and even, on occasion, to administer the sacraments), altered their aim from the edification of the saints and giving God glory to seeking converts from among the unsaved. The historic and Biblical worship of the Church was changed into revival services whose goal became the conversion of the lost, whose salvation was demonstrated by the emotional response of the converts.
This change in the goal of Evangelical worship resulted in a change in the function of the music utilized in the services. Although the hymns (many of which were originally conceived and written to be used in revival services) still ostensibly praised God, they did so as part of a larger effort to elicit conversion and/or to evoke the emotional experience associated with conversion.
This reorientation in goal recast the orientation of the new music of the Evangelicals from a largely objective perspective toward a largely subjective one, from telling and celebrating the Triune God Incarnate in Jesus for Who He is and What He has done for us all to primarily celebrating and telling God What He has done for me personally.
Now, as I've noted before, there was always a subjective strain in the worship of the Church, but prior to this, that strain was held in balance with two other emphases (a Trinitarian balance) which we'll investigate next in this series, Lord willing.
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