Jesus Is My Girlfriend: On Imbalanced Worship, Part 4
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.
The pagan dualistic perspective was institutionalized philosophically in the Ancient Classical world in the school of thought known as Platonism (and its reactionary offshoot, Aristotelianism), which taught a radical disconnect between the pure spiritual realm and the polluted, changeable physical realm, and that a species of salvation was to be obtained by escaping the physical world into the spiritual realm, first by experiencing that escape while still in the body, and then escaping the physical forever after death.
This philosophy became the dominant model for understanding the world in the pagan Roman Empire, versions of which formed the backdrop for the instruction of every educated person of the period. When Christianity began to spread throughout the Empire (and for some centuries after), many of the educated converts (a number of whom ended up as theologians, bishops, priests, and abbots) carried with them into the Church a Platonic view of Reality, and began to read Scripture through that dualistic grid.
Because of their bias, many of these educated converts understood key words in the Bible dualistically, words like “flesh” (Greek sarx) (which was used in the Epistles to describe the old nature or “old man,” as Paul sometimes described it, in places like Rom 8:8-9; 9:8; 2 Cor 10:3; Gal 3:3; 5:24, etc.), which the dualistic converts took to mean “the physical body,” and identify the Fallen nature with the body and senses primarily. They also read “world” (Greek kosmos) in Scripture (which in the New Testament is frequently used to denote “the world-system,” that part of the cosmos, both physical and spiritual, which was under the dominion of Satan, as Paul did in 1 Cor 2:12; 11:32; Gal 1:4; 4:3; 6:14, etc., and as John did in 1 John 2: 15-17; 4:4; etc.) to mean the physical world, which was seen as the metaphysical locus of evil.
These Platonic converts understood these words in terms of a metaphysical separation and antithesis between the physical and spiritual (which is the opposite of the thrust of both Creation and Christ’s Incarnation), and brought into the theology and perspective of the Church pagan dualistic concepts which reinforced the distrust of the body and the Created order already so prevalent in the Classical world. This strand of thought in the Church helped justify and encourage monastic ideas of retreat from the physical world in pursuit of “spiritual” truth and fullness, which resulted in distrust of the sensual, the body, and of marriage as arenas of real spirituality.
Though Incarnational theology over the centuries chipped away at much of the effect of dualism in the Church and society, the Platonic dualism of the ancient pagans lived on in the theology of the monastics, who more and more came to dominate the leadership and infrastructure of the Church, and thus a Christianized dualism continued to coexist and conflict with Incarnational and full Biblical theology in the very bosom of the Body of Christ. This situation set the stage for the next step in the process which resulted in the prominence of the subjective over the objective in modern worship as we will, God willing, see next week.
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