Music and emotions
Posted at 10:18 PM
…singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God (Colossians 3:16).
The duty of singing praises to God seems to be appointed wholly to excite and express religious affections. No other reason can be assigned why we should express ourselves to God in verse, rather than in prose, and do it with music but only, that such is our nature and frame, that these things have a tendency to move our affections. (Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections.)
In some parts of the church, people can give the impression that emotions while singing are bad. Given the hyper-emotionalism of some sections of the church, where music takes over completely from the words and gives a buzz completely separate from any spiritual convictions, one can perhaps sympathise with putting forward this view. To do so, however, is to go too far to the other extreme and to become unbiblical in another way. The Bible says we should emotionally respond to singing. Singing should be an emotional experience.
Think about it this way. When something good happens to us, we respond emotionally. When I got my A level results, I thought that meant I hadn’t got into Bristol, so when I checked online and they’d let me in anyway, I was ecstatic! If I’d just shrugged my shoulders and said “nyeh”, that would have been slightly strange. You would have to conclude that either I didn’t care about the outcome, or perhaps that I didn’t understand what had just happened.
The gospel is such good news that an uninterested response is evidence that we don’t understand it, don’t believe it, or aren’t listening. When we sing about God and his gospel as believers, an uninterested response is going to mean we’re not listening, or we’re not wanting to engage with it. If we’re listening, understanding and engaging with the words we’re singing, we should be responding emotionally to the truth we’re singing. The job of music is to help us do this. When we need reminding of the joy of the gospel, the music helps us respond to the words we’re singing so that we can respond rightly.
Music helps us to grasp the truths of the gospel better, but music also helps us express our emotions – we sing with “thankfulness in our hearts to God”. God’s gospel is a good gospel, and it’s worth singing about – not with dry formalism, but with joy and thankfulness!
And they sang a new song, saying,
“Worthy are you to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation,
and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God,
and they shall reign on the earth.” (Revelation 5:9-10)
How is it possible to sing words like that and not experience emotion?
So where’s the issue? The issue is what is exciting our emotions primarily. We have to find the line between music helping the words, and music eclipsing the words. Is it primarily the truth of the gospel that we’re responding to, or have we missed the truths we’re singing about and are reacting to the music more? Dave Bish writes: “Experience is essential but like faith the issue is what’s the object of it.” I’ll try and flesh out a little what the wrong focus might look like with the following questions.
Firstly, when are we most emotionally moved? Is it when we see the implications the gospel has for our lives? Is it when we sing “of the blood that never fails, of sins forgiven, of conscience cleansed, of death defeated and life without end”? Is it, perhaps, when we sing of an unspecific love (“your arms are the arms that surround me in a warm embrace”), speculation (“surrounded by your glory, what will my heart feel?”), or in vague truth with no depth (“it’s all about you, Jesus”). Is it in between songs when the guitar strums on, and we’re not thinking about anything much but it feels good?
I don’t mean to criticise individual songs here, but where the focus is not on gospel truth in all its fullness, and simply focused on subjective issues or vague niceties, it becomes very easy to become emotionally moved by the music not the words. I can sing “Awesome God” and respond to the truths of the gospel, but the words don’t remind me of specifics and my mind’s like a sieve – I forget stuff easily, so I can slip into focusing on the music more. That’s more of a tangent into song selection though – the issue here is whether we’re being more emotionally moved by the music or by the truth, and sometimes being aware of when we’re most emotionally engaged helps us to see this.
Secondly, is the music more important to us than the talk? When we sing, we’re singing truth to each other, but when we hear God’s word taught, it should be deeper, richer, more satisfying and more applied than our songs. You can’t encapsulate the wonder of the glory of the Father, or Christ’s substitutionary death, or the indwelling of the Spirit, in a few lines of song – though of course songwriters do their best! The songs should reinforce the detailed truth of the talk. Talks should also challenge us to live lives more like Christ. If we think the songs are more important, it seems to me we could be saying we want “lighter” truth and fewer challenges.
If there’s a series of songs just before the talk, and they finish, and we’re disappointed and want to carry on singing, we might be saying that the emotions from the music are more important to us than the emotions from the words. We’re moving on to look at God’s word! We should be as excited to hear God speak through the preacher as to hear our friends (and God) speak to us through the singing!
Thirdly, how long do the emotions last? Are we fired up emotionally on a Sunday night only to forget entirely about God Monday morning? Bish continues:
They don’t last any longer than the breath coming out of your mouth on a cold winter’s day. And affections that don’t last don’t change lives. The more conferences I’ve been too the more suspicious I’ve become of radical claims to change, by myself or others. It’s easy in the buzz of a conference, festival or meeting to feel deeply moved. Even with the very best of intentions. But, it’s only if this desire if rooted in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and consequently the transforming one-degree at a time work of the Holy Spirit that the change is going to last.
Is our emotional response to the singing a gospel-rooted, life-changing response, or is it a temporary buzz? Does the joy carry on beyond the meeting, or is it only there when we’re singing?
Fourthly, what happens if the music is bad? Maybe there’s only four people singing. Maybe you’re used to longer times of singing and there’s only one song. Maybe you’re used to traditional hymns and the songs are more contemporary in style – or vice versa. Maybe the singer can’t sing! What happens then? Do we give up all hope of engaging with God?
It’s possible that the music is now distracting us from the words in another way. If the singer is out of tune, it’s understandable for a sensitive ear to be distracted. If it’s just a style issue, though, are we letting that distract us from the things we’re singing? Are we making style the essential issue rather than the words?
Bad music isn’t good, but it’s not an insurmountable obstacle.
In all of this I don’t want to be misheard. The questions above are just things to get us thinking. There might be a perfectly good reason why the talk isn’t something you look forward to – the speaker might be rubbish, for example. I’m also not saying that there isn’t a place for the less specific truth of songs such as “Awesome God”, just that it’s easier to fall into the traps I’ve mentioned with them. Hopefully this will help us all get a right perspective on the place of emotion in our songs. (Please feel free to come back at me if you think I’ve got the balance wrong! I’m trying to work these things out myself, and input and correction is always welcomed.)
This is an area that I’ve got a bit of experience in, from both sides of the equation. In my church youth group, I was involved in leading music, and without thinking could end up doing it in an emotionally manipulative way, separate from the words we were singing. When I was being led in song, I would often work up an emotional high separate from the truths we were singing. Towards the end of my time in the youth group I saw the problems with what I was doing, and swung to the other extreme. Words were all that mattered; let’s cut back all the extra instruments and arrangements and just have piano, in case the music has an effect on anyone. I’m still naturally suspicious of people showing too much emotion when singing, particularly at musical high points where the words don’t suggest anything. But I’ve realised that both extremes are wrong. As Bish puts it:
I’m not sure whether cold-intellectualism or fluffy-emotionalism is the big issue of our day. Probably depends where you’re sitting and who you’re mixing with. Genuine deep-rooted gospel-driven affections would seem to be a way to avoid either extreme. The New Testament seems to talk a lot about the gospel and a lot about us having joy. Perhaps those things are connected…
Perhaps they are.
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