Jesus Is My Girlfriend, Part 32

We have seen in this series of articles 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 has 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 had 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; Psalm 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.

Then 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.

Last article, we saw that the Holy Spirit sanctifies both individuals and the Church corporately over time, and that the results of that progressive Sanctification ideally produce artifacts increasingly better suited (cleansed and transformed) to be utilized for the worship and glorification of God. We recognized that the various streams of Sanctification which flow from sundry cultures, artistic developments, and people groups within the Church are called traditions, and that questions as to how to past artifacts relate to present and future ones.

These various traditions represent, then, developments over time of the sanctification of the emphases and artifacts of these streams of cultural expression, and the progress of these developments necessarily extends in two directions. The first has to do with the relationship of the artifacts (like music and songs) to the Christians in the culture that is producing them (and therefore to even the non-believers in that culture), since they can only understand cultural expressions (language, artistic forms, and so forth) that are comprised of elements drawn from their current time and culture. (For instance, the vast majority of the readers of this article would only with great difficulty understand it if I had written it in Old English/Anglo-Saxon, and with only slightly less difficulty had I written it in Middle English, even though Modern English has directly risen from these older forms of our current form of language.) 

The development of our current artistic and cultural forms of expression have likewise evolved from older ones accepted by our ancestors, and even though there is consequently some overlap in those forms (as there is between more ancient and current forms of our language), there is still much that would prove incomprehensible in, say, our current musical expressions to those who came before us in the past (such as jazz or punk), though, just as in our language, there is some overlap.

However, the living record of that cultural development is also a record of how those expressions have related to each generation of those who have come before us. Those cultural relationships form a chain of developments as the previous expressions influenced and gave rise to subsequent ones, and this is true as well of the development of the artifacts and forms utilized by the Christians within that culture over time, which would, of course be related in many ways to the artifacts and forms of the non-believers of that culture, and the differences between those artifacts and forms can tell us a lot about how God worked in that culture as it changed and the Kingdom expanded, giving us a record of how the Church was cultural salt and light  there, a record which can help instruct us as to how to proceed as Christians in relation to our culture in our time. 

Which brings up the other prong, briefly touched on above, that these traditions are a record of how the cultural forms engendered by the Church were adapted and developed, both in relation to the culture at large and, importantly, to the transformation of those expressions across time in relation to the advancement of the Sanctification of the Church. This prong teaches us the importance of knowing well the past expressions and artifacts of our past as believers, especially in relation to our current expressions and artifacts, an important insight in our consideration of the sorts of songs to employ in our worship today.

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