Jesus Is My Girlfriend: On Imbalanced Worship, Part 8
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 held in balance by historical and Biblical worship models (such as the Psalms or the Book of Revelation) with their 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.
After the Reformation, German Pietism reacted against the perceived cold orthodoxy of Lutheranism, resulting in an emphasis on subjective, experiential faith, where emotion was considered the evidence of spiritual encounter, a perspective which influenced all subsequent Evangelicalism, interacting with Victorian feminization of the Faith in the English-speaking countries to further push concepts of Christianity as subjective, experiential, and highly emotional.
The institutionalization of this approach amongst Evangelical churches, especially after the Great Awakenings and subsequent revival movements such as the beginnings of the Charismatic Movement in the Azusa Street Revival and in Pentecostal sectors of the Church combined with a correspondent fear of inability of the Church to answer the challenges to the Faith from the scientific pretensions of Darwinism and other pseudo-scientific movements to drive the Church even further into subjective and emotional definitions of Christianity since these definitions seemed safe from the supposed depredations of modernistic assaults on Christianity's truths. (For the record, these retreats from intellectual challenges to the Faith were manifestly a failure of nerve on the part of the Church, and are rooted, in my estimation, on the fact the Evangelicalism had redefined its concept of faith to de-emphasize the objective, historical, and factual basis of Christianity.)
Actions inevitably have consequences, and the move to de-emphasize the objective, cognitive, historical, doctrinal, confessional, and intellectual aspects of Christian worship unavoidably began to produce an imbalanced Church which was unable to effectively envision a robust, fully-orbed Faith capable of answering and banishing the modernist objections to Christianity. We become like the things we worship, and the current emphasis on an emotional, feminized, tremulous God produces similar worshippers.
Again, the subjective and emotional aspects of worship are both Biblical and necessary, but they must be held and practiced in Biblical balance, or a distortion of worship (and worshippers) will occur. Too much emphasis on doctrine and historical aspects in worship produces a cold orthodoxy which leaves both the Church and the world around it cold. Too much emphasis on subjectivity and emotion, and escapist, inwardly-oriented, self-obsessed Christians who exist only for the next worship high result, leaving the Church exhausted (the price of ever-escalating attempts to recreate the last worship-gasm), and the world round about thinking the Faith irrelevant and devoid of answers for the real world (kind of like, hmmm, our situation in the country today).
It is always perilous to ignore the Biblical model, since we don't actually know better than our Creator and Redeemer what's best for us. Go figure! More next week, perhaps.
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A helpful book:
