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 (Romans 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 its 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 its goal and evidence.

Additionally, Victorian sensibilities (in some ways influenced by the rise of Pietism in English-speaking countries) were increasingly feminized, associating religious experience with emotionalism, which was considered the domain of women, a view which led many men to, at best, compartmentalize religion and, at worst, despise or ignore it altogether as "only for women," (a situation which led to repeated efforts in some Evangelical quarters to concerted attempts to present "masculine" or "manly" Christianity, utilizing soldiers or athletes to attempt to redress the feminized imbalance; a situation the Evangelical Church has inherited and is still dealing with to this day. Power-Lifters, anyone?)

Of course, the twin influences of Pietism and Victorian religious feminization led to a pressure to associate the Faith with an "upper-level" emotionalism and subjective experientialism rather than a "lower-level" rational and objective realism, a pressure and split that began to be assumed as a given reality in the Evangelical congregations. 

For a long while, the spiritual capital of a more balanced Scriptural and Trinitarian perspective tended to keep the assumption of subjective experientialism as the norm for worship and its attendant music at bay. However, as time went on, the emphasis on subjective experience progressively eroded the traditional and Biblical balance in the churches, resulting in less emphasis on objective Biblical doctrinal truth and more Christians' subjective experience of God's presence, an association colored both by Pietism and Victorian feminization in the minds and tradition of increasingly larger segments of the Evangelical Church.

All of this was helping not only to form the state of Evangelicalism, but also the shape of American society, a major influence in the America we have inherited today, due to the central influence of Evangelicalism in America's history (those interested in this important aspect of this situation will profit from a reading of Michael Scott Horton's Made In America and Ann Douglas' The Feminization of American Culture). 

We'll examine more on the erosion of Biblical and Trinitarian truth as a result of this dualistic bifurcation leading to the deformation of Evangelical worship songs next week, Lord willing.

For additional teaching, visit my Patreon.