Jesus Is My Girlfriend, Part 12

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).

This split was institutionalized in Platonic thought, which hugely influenced monastic thought, which shaped to a certain extent the way the Medievals viewed Reality, resulting 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.

Christian reactions to the rationalism of the Enlightenment fused with Victorian and pietist viewpoints to produce a feminized, experientially-fixated Evangelicalism whose worship music institutionalized these attitudes for that branch of the Church.

This was all the easier because there is a legitimate strand of subjective and emotional aspects included in Biblical worship paradigms (for instance, in Ps 51, 56, 3, 6, etc.). 

We also saw, as well, that the Tri-Unity of God speaks to all aspects of the life of the Image-Bearers of God, humanity, including their worship of the Lord, which is to enact both objective and subjective thanksgiving, and to express both change and continuity as the Church gathers before her Maker and Redeemer.

There are further implications for worship in the Incarnation of the Lord Jesus, Who, as the Scriptures and the Creeds teach, was both Fully God and Fully Man simultaneously. Jesus in His Divine Nature was Eternal, Changeless, and Omniscient; in His Humanity He had matured and grown (e.g., experienced change), even in Wisdom (as Luke 1:80 and 2:40 tell us). Though He knows all things in His Divinity, His Humanity is capable only of knowing what a human can know (even an unFallen Human, who can know to the fullest amount possible for a human).

This because, of course, in a great Mystery, the Uncreated God has joined Himself in His Second Person to a created Human Nature as the Incarnate God-Man. Both before and after His Death, Resurrection, and Ascension, the Lord Jesus worshipped, during His Sojourn on earth in synagogues and the Temple, and in the Heavenly Liturgy at the Throne of God, where He presides over the Worship there (Rev 5; Heb 12:22-24). The Lord Jesus' Incarnation as God and Man (and He will be Incarnate forever) tells us several things of note for our worship.

First, since, in the Essence of His Divinity, Jesus is Changeless, while He has experienced Change in His Humanity, we should realize that our worship, which is offered to God through the Person of Christ (Heb 10:19-22), should reflect His One Person in both of His Natures, and thus contain both continuity (imaging His Changelessness) and change (imaging the post-Resurrection Mutability of His Human Nature). Thus, concerning music in worship, for instance, we should utilize older songs, hymns, forms which have long been used in Christian worship (an affirmation of the value of continuity) as well as new songs (to image change and growth) together.

Secondly, since, in His Divinity, Jesus is absolutely Objective concerning reality, yet at the same time experiences Subjectivity in His Humanity (albeit in unFallen and Perfect Form),  our worship should reflect both praise for what has been revealed to us that God has objectively done for His People (died for our sins, risen from the dead, created us in the first place, etc.) and what we know Him to have done subjectively for us (You have saved me, You have raised me with You, You have created me, etc.). In this way, our worship offers back to the Lord and attests before angels, men and the entire cosmos the Incarnate Christ's Two Natures in One Person, the nexus through which the New Heavens and Earth (the New Cosmos) is being realized.

There is yet another aspect of Jesus' Incarnation which should shape and inform our worship, and we will, Lord willing, examine that in the next week.

For additional teaching, visit my patreon page.

A helpful book on worship:

Worship Old and New

By Webber, Robert E.

Buy on Amazon

Jesus Is My Girlfriend, Part 11

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).

This split was institutionalized in Platonic thought, which hugely influenced monastic thought, which shaped to a certain extent the way the Medievals viewed Reality, resulting 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.

Christian reactions to the rationalism of the Enlightenment fused with Victorian and pietist viewpoints to produce a feminized, experientially-fixated Evangelicalism whose worship music institutionalized these attitudes for that branch of the Church.
This was all the easier because there is a legitimate strand of subjective and emotional aspects included in Biblical worship paradigms (for instance, in Ps 51, 56, 3, 6, etc.). 

We began in the last article to consider the ramifications of the Holy Trinity for worship (considering that we humans are created in the Image of the Triune God, and that all we do, including worship, should reflect that Image accurately), and saw that, just as God possesses a Unified Perspective common to His Three Persons in His Oneness, He also possesses Diversified, Differing Perspectives amongst His Persons in Their Diversity, and that our worship of this Unified, yet equally Diverse Trinity should also reflect, from our participation in that worship, both an objective (general) praise of What He has done and Who He is for us all, as well as a subjective (specific) praise for What He has done and Who He is for me (each of us individually). At this time, Evangelical worship is imbalanced with an overemphasis on the subjective, individualized aspect of worship, warping worship to reflect only a God of the subjective individual, rather than the Triune God Who is also the God of the objective and of us all.

We continue now in our consideration of the implications of God's Tri-Unity for worship, as we see how God's Three-Personed Attributes speak to the issue of continuity and change in worship. In God's Oneness of Essence is Absolute Undifferentiated Unity, as God shares among His Persons the Same Perspective and Experience. However, Each of the Divine Persons also enjoys a Unique Personal Perspective, which is Differentiated Each from the Other. 

As God is, in both His Unity and Diversity, Changeless (Malachi 3:6; Hebrews 13:8), we who live in the changeable, mutable Creation, subject to time's passage (with a created beginning, history, and end), cannot truly replicate the Lord's Changelessness in It's Essence. However, we can symbolically represent God's Changelessness within time's boundaries by enacting continuity across time, emphasizing the same across the changes in history, the things which are most changeless in humanity's experience. Change being constantly experienced by humanity, the contrast between change and the most changeless aspects of human life itself emphasizes the difference between them, as well as the shared enactment of those things in human existence. 

This has pertinence for our worship in that we should enact in our worship a Trinitarian balance of continuity and change, with elements that stay the same and elements that vary.
As for continuity in worship, we see in the Heavenly Worship a song endlessly repeated by the angelic Living Creatures, which is endlessly responded to by the twenty-four Elders (Rev 4: 8-11), and we also see the Song of Moses recorded in Exodus 15 and Deuteronomy 31 repeated in the Heavenly Liturgy in Revelation 15:3-4, which shows the utilization of a song across thousands of years of human history (and beyond...). These are elements of continuity in worship.

However, we also see elements of change in the Heavenly Worship, as Revelation 5:9-10 and Revelation 14:3 both record the introduction of new songs into the worship, of songs new to their employment in the worship in God's Presence.

Now, these respective worships of continuity and change are both present in the same worship service in Heaven: a Trinitarian balance in the worship revealed by God in His Word as a model for us who still worship on Earth. 

Today's Evangelical worship is obsessed with the novel, with the new, to the detriment of the element of continuity in worship, which is not only a (hopefully unintentional) assault on the representation of God's Tri-Unity (and thus a displeasure to the Lord), but also causes our worship to not fulfill God's Intended Ministry to the worshippers themselves, who also are created in God's Triune Image, and thus are to be ministered to on deep Trinitarian levels, on levels both of continuity and change in balanced fashion. If these elements are not both present in worship in a balanced fashion, there is a massive failure in worship's pleasing of, and fulfilling the Purposes of God, especially as they minister to God's Image-bearers, humanity.

More implications, this time of the Incarnation of Jesus, next article, Lord willing.

For additional teaching, visit my patreon page.

A helpful book on the relationship of the Trinity to history:

Trinity and Reality: An Introduction to the Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Christian Faith

By Smith, Ralph A

Buy on Amazon

Jesus Is My Girlfriend, Part 10

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).

This split was institutionalized in Platonic thought, which hugely influenced monastic thought, which shaped to a certain extent the way the Medievals viewed Reality, resulting 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.

 Christian reactions to the rationalism of the Enlightenment fused with Victorian and pietist viewpoints to produce a feminized, experientially-fixated Evangelicalism whose worship music institutionalized these attitudes for that branch of the Church.

This was all the easier because there is a legitimate strand of subjective and emotional aspects included in Biblical worship paradigms (for instance, in Psalms 51, 56, 3, 6, etc.). 

Now, before we look at some of the other places in Holy Writ where balanced worship is demonstrated, it would be good for us to get a bit of the sense of why God would desire a balance in this area. Thus, we will quickly consider some implications for worship of the central Biblical and Creedal doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation of God in Christ.

 As the Creeds (Apostles', Nicene, Definition of Chalcedon, and Athanasian, all sound summations of Scriptural teachings concerning the Nature and Works of God) tell us, the Triune God is both One (Unified in His Substance or Being) and Many (Diverse in His Three Persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). He is not more One than He is Many, nor is He more Many than He is One. These Attributes of God, as a theologian would say, are Equally Ultimate: They are in Perfect Balance.

This is important for worship for several reasons. First, since mankind are made In His Image, we humans, individually and together, reflect the Aspects of God on a creaturely level. We are like God as creatures created to reflect things about the One Whose Image we all bear. So, secondly, we humans will only achieve our full destiny as humans by accurately reflecting God in what we are and do (which is why the Fall in Eden was such a big deal, alienating God's Image-bearers from the One Whose Image they bear, necessitating the rescue, redemption, and re-orientation/sanctification of humanity by the Lord Jesus' Sacrifice of His Sinless Humanity to atone for our sin, restore our relationship to God, and begin to sanctify/reorient His People so they could begin to image the Triune God Whose Image they carry more accurately).  

Thus, thirdly, one of the things in which we are to image the Trinity is worship, which is also an enactment in which we are to fellowship with the Triune God directly. This means that, as in everything we are to do, our worship should accurately reflect God's Fundamental Tri-Unity if we are going to correctly worship as revelatory images of God.

Our worship (like all the things we are, do, and make) should bear the imprint of God's Image (just as all the things He has made, especially mankind, communicate truth about Who God Is in His Essence, Attributes, and Persons, cf. Rom 1:18-21). Therefore our worship is to be like Him in that it reflects What He is like, as well. So, just as God is One/Unified (in His Essence) and simultaneously and equally Many/Diverse (in His Persons), so must our worship be. What does that mean?

Something like this: In His Unified Essence (His Oneness), the Lord's Viewpoint/Experience is also Unified, Common to the Persons of the Trinity. However, in His Diverse Personhood (His Three Differing Persons [remember that the Father begets the Son, the Son is Eternally Begotten, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, all Differing Functions in the Economy of the Triune God]), the Lord's Viewpoint/Experience differs necessarily in the Inner Personhood of Each of the Persons. Yet both the Unified and Diverse Perspectives are Equally Important. In a sense impossible for us to comprehend fully (to do so we would have to be God), the Unified/Shared Perspective of God represents what we men call Objectivity (the general or commonly perceived perspective on things), while the Diverse/Unique Perspectives of the Persons represent what we call Subjectivity (though how these fit together and co-exist in the Depths of God's Unified Multi-Personhood is a great Mystery to us).

The upshot of all this is that our worship is to reflect those eternal truths (especially since we ourselves are created in the Image of the God from Whom those truths flow). Thus, our worship should embody equally objectivity and subjectivity (just as we find revealed to us in the Bible's worship examples).

In worship, we are to laud God by speaking of, being grateful for, praying in recognition of, and singing about Who God Is and What He Has Done both objectively and subjectively. We worship Him for Who He Is (Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer, Consummator, etc.) and for What He has done, both objectively  (You have created; You sustain; You have acted savingly; You will come again, etc.) and subjectively (You have created me; You have sustained me; You have saved me; etc.).

To overemphasize any of these expressions (to focus on the objective confession of Who God is, or What He has done, or on the subjective confession of His having been or done the things for me [the current imbalance amongst us Evangelicals]) is to present in worship a distorted view of Who the Lord is and What He has done, to foster a deformed view and experience of reality, and generally to fail in our task of worship as Image-bearers of the Triune Lord. Let's don't do that anymore.

Next issue, we'll look at other aspects of the implications of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation for balanced Biblical worship: Yet more fun and frolic in theology-ville.

For additional teaching, visit my Patreon page.

Jesus Is My Girlfriend, Part 9

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, there 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).

This split was institutionalized in Platonic thought, which hugely influenced monastic thought, which shaped to a certain extent, the way the Medievals viewed Reality, resulting 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.

Christian reactions to the rationalism of the Enlightenment fused with Victorian and pietist viewpoints to produce a feminized, experientially-fixated Evangelicalism whose worship music institutionalized these attitudes for that branch of the Church. This was all the easier because there is a legitimate strand of subjective and emotional aspects included in Biblical worship paradigms (for instance, in Psalms 51, 56, 3, 6, etc.). 

For instance, Psalm 6: 6-7 says: “I am weary with my groaning; All night I make my bed swim; I drench my couch with my tears. My eye wastes away because of grief; It grows old because of all my enemies.” You'll note that, just as a huge portion of today's worship lyrics are oriented to subjective "my," "me," and "I" perspectives, these verses in Psalm 6 are legitimately so oriented. There is even justification for engaging in romantic imagery to describe God's relationship with His People (as in the Song of Solomon or Is 62: 4-5; etc.). 

For instance, Isaiah 62: 4-5 reads: “You shall no longer be termed Forsaken, Nor shall your land any more be termed Desolate; But you shall be called Hephzibah, and your land Beulah; For the LORD delights in you, And your land shall be married. For [as] a young man marries a virgin, [So] shall your sons marry you; And [as] the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, [So] shall your God rejoice over you.

However, these aspects of worship are balanced in Scriptural presentations by objective, cognitive, doctrinal, historical, intellectual, and doxological components, such as are seen in Psalms 19, 1, 2, 147; Revelation chapters 4 and 5; Ezekiel 10; and Isaiah 6; etc.

Psalm 19: 10-11 tells us: “More to be desired [are they] than gold, Yea, than much fine gold; Sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb. Moreover by them Your servant is warned, [And] in keeping them [there is] great reward.”

And Psalm 147: 1-5 says: “Praise the LORD! For [it is] good to sing praises to our God; For [it is] pleasant, [and] praise is beautiful. The LORD builds up Jerusalem; He gathers together the outcasts of Israel. He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. He counts the number of the stars; He calls them all by name. Great [is] our Lord, and mighty in power; His understanding [is] infinite.”

These texts (especially the Psalms) are intended to be used in the public worship of God (as is all of Holy Writ), and, as has been noted, there is a balance in Scripture of these differing emphases. The intertwining of these disparate elements is present in many of the same worship passages. 

In Psalm 19, which we've already seen an example of it's largely doctrinal and doxological content, ends with an emotional and subjective plea (verses 12-14): “Who can understand [his] errors? Cleanse me from secret [faults]. Keep back Your servant also from presumptuous [sins]; Let them not have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless, And I shall be innocent of great transgression. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O LORD, my strength and my Redeemer.”

The Bible abounds with such instances of a worship balance, unlike our imbalanced contemporary approach. We will, Lord willing, consider the implications of this in the next issue.

 For additional teaching on topics such as this visit my Patreon page.

A Commentary on the Psalms: 42-89 (Kregel Exegetical Library)

By Ross, Allen

Buy on Amazon

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.

For additional teaching on worship, visit my Patreon.

A helpful book:

FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

By Douglas, Ann

Buy on Amazon

Jesus Is My Girlfriend: On Imbalanced Worship, Part 7

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.

Made In America: The Shaping of Modern American Evangelicalism

By Horton, Michael S.

Buy on Amazon

Jesus Is My Girlfriend: On Imbalanced Worship, Part 6

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).

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 it's 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 it's goal and evidence.

The revivalist perspective was so strong amongst most Evangelicals that the very shape of the worship services of their services was altered, as the goal of those services changed from the primary worship of God and the Biblical instruction of, and administration of the sacraments to Christians into services which, though they continued to teach the Word and worship God (and even, on occasion, to administer the sacraments), altered their aim from the edification of the saints and giving God glory to seeking converts from among the unsaved. The historic and Biblical worship of the Church was changed into revival services whose goal became the conversion of the lost, whose salvation was demonstrated by the emotional response of the converts.

This change in the goal of Evangelical worship resulted in a change in the function of the music utilized in the services. Although the hymns (many of which were originally conceived and written to be used in revival services) still ostensibly praised God, they did so as part of a larger effort to elicit conversion and/or to evoke the emotional experience associated with conversion.

This reorientation in goal recast the orientation of the new music of the Evangelicals from a largely objective perspective toward a largely subjective one, from telling and celebrating the Triune God Incarnate in Jesus for Who He is and What He has done for us all to primarily celebrating and telling God What He has done for me personally.

Now, as I've noted before, there was always a subjective strain in the worship of the Church, but prior to this, that strain was held in balance with two other emphases (a Trinitarian balance) which we'll investigate next in this series, Lord willing.

For additional teaching, visit my Patreon.

A helpful book:

Common Roots: The Original Call to an Ancient-Future Faith

By Webber, Robert E.

Buy on Amazon

Jesus Is My Girlfriend: On Imbalanced Worship, Part 5

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.

That imbalance was carried forward and institutionalized by educated converts in the Early Church, hugely influencing the monastic impulse within the Church, which captured the leadership in the same period, and informed the official view of the preferred and highest spiritual state of being, holding a dualistic view out as the substrate of a truly godly worldview.

The Late Middle Ages were further influenced by the transmission of lost Aristotelian writings, which only reinforced monastic dualism, and reinforced the separation of "the spiritual" realm from normal life.

The Renaissance, which was given impetus largely by the European rediscovery of Platonic (and thus dualistic) writings, further exacerbated this split between the spiritual and "normal" life (a sort of Nature/Grace split), and the Reformation was in part a corrective reaction against this unBiblical and anti-Incarnational viewpoint, and for a while (at least in the Protestant countries), doctrines espousing the priesthood of the believer militated against dualism, holding that every area of human life was inherently spiritual.

However, in some of those countries (such as Germany), a sort of cold orthodoxy set in and hardened, and by the late 1600's, a reactionary movement arose in Germany called Pietism, which, in an effort to counteract the perceived arid intellectualism of the religious status quo, the Pietists emphasized experience of God over intellectual or doctrinal knowledge of Him, associating the emotional aspect of experience with the realm of the spiritual, and reintroduced and reemphasized a dualistic split between spirituality and normal life, for the first time tying experiential emotionalism to an upper-level spiritual realm, considered to be superior to the rest of life.

Pietism promoted a number of Biblical emphases (experience and emotion areimportant aspects of Christian life), but unfortunately deemphasized other vital aspects of the balanced Biblical view of life, associating experiential emotion with a "superior" realm of faith. 

Pietism was very influential with the Wesley brothers (John & Charles) and George Whitfield, the instruments of the First Great Awakening in Britain and America (which lasted from about the 1730's until the 1750's) and in the resultant Evangelical movement which resulted from that revival. Another revival, the Second Great Awakening erupted in the late 1700's, lasting until the mid-1800's, which advocated emotional experience in an even more pronounced fashion, a theological innovation which has influenced mightily the revivalist perspective amongst Baptists, Methodists, Assemblies of God, and Presbyterians, etc., and which was reduced to a technique to bring "revival" by manipulating emotional response in the teaching of the very influential Charles Grandison Finney, a leader in the Second Awakening.

Revivalism has informed the Evangelical Church for over a century, institutionalizing a viewpoint that recognizes emotional experience as the highest expression of spirituality: the goal and evidence of a true spiritual encounter. We'll examine the impact of this perspective on contemporary Christian attitudes of worship in future articles, Lord willing.

For additional teaching, visit Patreon.

A helpful book:

Revival and Revivalism

By Iain H. Murray

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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.

For additional teaching, visit my Patreon.

Helpful book:

The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy

By Rousas John Rushdoony

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Jesus Is My Girlfriend: On Imbalanced Worship, Part 3

We have in the past two articles first seen that the current phenomena of the domination of contemporary worship music by experiential, sensual, subjective songs, and, second, that this is a departure from the historic worship of the Church, which, though in its reflection of Scripture included such songs, it also, like Scripture, held such worship content in balance with more objective doctrinal content.

We turn now to consider the question of how such a development occurred. What has caused the current imbalance in worship? To understand what has given the experiential and sensual the ascendance over the doctrinal, we must first understand how such a division came to be in the first place.

The impulse behind this imbalance is rooted in the Fall of mankind. Romans 1:18-32 tells us that everyone who has lived knows at least five things deep in their core being: (1) God exists; (2) God has created everything that exists; (3) God is Holy; (4) men are sinful and rebellious; (5) God is Angry about mankind's sin and rebellion.

Now, though Paul tells us that these things are known by every person (vv. 19-21), he also tells us that unregenerate men "suppress the truth" which has been revealed "in unrighteousness," but that, even though they suppress the truth revealed through Creation, they still know that truth on some level (vv. 20-21). The combination of inescapably knowing these five things while attempting to suppress this knowledge (as Fallen men attempt to manufacture their own meaning and be their own gods) leave men realizing that there is a real existential reality of guilt and shame which they experience.

Even though they know bone-deep that they are guilty and separated from God, they attempt to suppress the realization that it is the True Creator-God Whom they have sinned against by imagining that the God against Whom they have sinned is some god other than the True God, but who still represents a spiritual entity beyond humanity.

Even if it isn't clearly articulated (though it frequently is), Fallen man, who experiences real spiritual alienation, knows, on some deep level, that there has been a separation, an imbalance, a deep offense against a governing or more fundamental part of Reality, an offense against God (or what is understood as God by non-believers). 

It works like this: God (Whom the non-believer mixes with his distortions) is correctly perceived as being alienated from Fallen mankind by the sins of men, and, since God is spiritually separated from sinful mankind, and since God is a Spirit and men are physical, unregenerate men see the world as divided between spirit and matter (metaphysically divided in nature, rather than ethically and spiritually divided).

The spiritual state is seen as perfect and static (since the Holy God is there) and non-physical (since God is Spirit), and the physical state (the world) is seen as imperfect and changing, and the spiritual state, since God dwells there, Who is seen as not dwelling in the physical realm of the world, the spiritual world is seen as vastly superior to the impermanent, flawed, and finally worthless world.

Thus the realm of the human is seen as, at best, a necessary evil, something to be escaped from. Is this, though, a valid perspective Biblically? No.

 After all, as Scripture teaches God created a world, though physical, communicates the spiritual reality with which it is intertwined as Romans 1:18-20 and Psalm 19: 1-6 tell us. We are also taught by the Bible that the Incarnation of Christ is the Once-for-all Joining of the Eternal Word, the Second Person of the Spiritual Godhead with a Humanity He specifically created to be joined to, Two Natures in One Person, the Lord Jesus Christ Who is Both God the Spirit and a Human with a Body, Soul, and Spirit.

What we learn from this is that the world is a unity of matter and spirit, intended to be intertwined and unified, not divided, sundered, or split. A dualistic sundering between matter and spirit is a result of the Fall and human rebellion in refusing to see Reality as it is created to be and in refusing to accept God's Testimony concerning the purpose and state of His Creation as revealed in God's Word.

The Lord Jesus has died to reconcile the world He created back to God, as 2 Corinthians 5:17-19 tells us. Yet even Christians, who should know better because of what Scripture reveals, are still very influenced by a dualistic view of the world (the view that sees the world as split or sundered), and it is this pagan view which has informed, ultimately, the eventual split between subjective, experiential worship songs and objective, doctrinal worship songs as well as the ascendancy of the subjective songs over the objective in worship. In articles to come, we will (God willing) examine how, over time, this view produced today's unfortunate worship imbalance.    

For additional teaching on worship, visit Patreon to hear the “Windows to Glory” teaching series.

A helpful book on the Incarnation:

The Person of Christ (Contours of Christian Theology)

By Macleod, Donald

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