Jesus Is My Girlfriend, Part 31

We have seen in this series that the Evangelical Church of today has fixated on sentimental, experiential, overly-romanticized worship songs, to the detriment of doctrinal and objective worship music. We have examined the historical and theological developments that have led to this imbalance in modern worship, tracing the rise of experiential emotionalism as the evidence of conversion, all tied to an escapist anti-Incarnational view which sees the spiritual and physical aspects of the world as being opposed to one another.

We've seen as well that the evangelistic techniques of the Second Great Awakening have largely displaced the Biblical Patterns of worship which aimed first at pleasing God, and secondarily at instructing and edifying believers, resulting in worship largely oriented around emotionally-manipulative experiential techniques, resulting in an impoverishment of content-oriented and objectively-grounded aspects of Evangelical worship experience.

This further had a deleterious effect on teaching in Sunday Schools, from the pulpits, even in seminaries, as the normativity of emotionalistic experience came to dominate Evangelical expectation and thought, resulting in theological expressions and sermons which deemphasized complex or unpopular doctrinal content (such as teaching about Hell, gender issues, maledictory prayer, etc.), all in the service of supposedly making the Gospel more attractive in evangelistic appeals and experiential worship. 

In point of fact, this perspective and practice has promoted a version of Christianity which has not only deformed the worship of the Evangelical Church, but has also divested Evangelicals of a fully-orbed theology which allows them to be Biblically-informed in the full spectrum of  human life, and has resulted in a presentation of the Faith which seems to non-believers to be only concerned with individualistic interior experience and eschatological escapism, with no solid answers for personal and societal problems, especially for the pressing social issues of the day.

We've seen as well that, in an effort to capture attendants, Evangelicals have adopted a strategy of attempting to ape the hipness of contemporary music forms and expressions to seem more relevant. We also saw, though, that lack of resources, understanding, and talent generally led to inferior and substandard versions of those contemporary musical expressions (a fact which many Evangelicals are willing to overlook and even defend, driven by their desperate urge to make the Gospel "relevant," or, hemmed in by their Pietism from listening to "secular" music, by relief at hearing anything musical which is not completely boring and restrictive or out-of-date, or by both motives...).

Such practices have, however, generally had the opposite effect sought by their practitioners, in that non-believing attendants to these practices have considered these musical products to be inferior propaganda pieces executed by those who had no real or deep connection with the cultural forms they are aping, and thus achieve the opposite effect intended, that is, they result in conclusions of even more irrelevance by the non-Christians at whom they're aimed (and, in point of fact, even leave the Christians in these services, who are satisfied with the efforts, under the delusion that they ARE achieving their goal of relevance of musical Gospel presentation).

We also found that Scripture (Rev 5:9-10; 7:9-10; Ps 89:6; etc.) reveals that, at history's end, the worship of God will be comprised of the languages, forms, and cultural expressions of all the nations and peoples of the Earth, sanctified over time as the Gospel converts the members of these nations and their cultural expressions to be added to the global worship of the Lord at the Eschaton.

In the last article, we began to look at the relationship of past human artifacts (such as music) to contemporary (and future) artifacts, and saw that our individual and corporate artifacts, though Fallen, are subject to the effects of God's Sanctification on their human makers, and are thus capable of being made more fully able to reflect God's Presence and Glory, just as are their makers in Christ.

The Sanctification of believers, wherein they are progressively are "being transformed into the Same Image" of the Glory of the Lord by His Spirit (2 Cor 3:18), occurs over the history of the individual; it takes time. We all personally experience this (hopefully), of course, and, in line with the extreme individualism of our culture (and Church), are not used to thinking of Sanctification in its corporate aspect (despite the fact that Paul, in the passage to which I just referred, 2 Cor 3:18, uses the plural "we'" rather than "I" or "you" or "y'all), yet Sanctification also takes place in the corporate sphere, and, as it does in the personal experience of a believer, that corporate Sanctification is effected over time. 

Whether personal or corporate, Sanctification is a progressive, gradual process, which means there are earlier and later stages to that process, in which, as the Spirit works in both individuals and the Church, there is development, change, progress in believers (and thus in their creation of artifacts) in which the later stages evince more progress in being formed into people (and things) which more fully reflect the Glory of the Lord.

Thus, as time goes on, and the Spirit works in His People as the Kingdom of God expands (1 Cor 15:20-27), there grows a continually larger and more developed body of artifacts which have been subjected to the Redemptive and Transforming Work of the Spirit through the Body of Christ. This body of artifacts (which, again, includes songs), to the extent that they have been submitted to the Sanctificational Work of the Spirit, provides the Church in increasingly broad and deeper cultural expressions in which to worship and glorify the Lord.

This is happening (as it has been for the last two millennia) in all the cultures and peoples in which the Church is present, and each of these streams of ongoing Sanctification contribute ultimately to the gathered global worship of God's People at (and after) Doomsday. These various sanctificational streams are normally called traditions, and their relationship, not only to each other, but to themselves, also relates to the question of past expressions to present and future ones, a question we will continue to explore, Lord willing, next.

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